Ridiculous Program Notes From Carnegie Hall's Website

[Sonataform]

The program notes for Brahms' Clarinet Quintet on Carnegie Hall's website is complete trash. I find it maddening that it would ever be accepted as program notes especially from a source as prestigious as Carnegie Hall. The author makes false claims about Brahms and his music in order to portray him as an old fashioned hack who just wanted to gain fame. He not only presents his claims as fact but he doesn't even site sources to back up his claims. 

 

What I find most upsetting about the article though is that it doesn't even credit the idiot who wrote it. All the better I assume because that individual should be fired. No serious historian would just make claims and spout them as truth in order to support his own agendas.

 

Here are the program notes, I've highlighted the parts I find particularly terrible. 

 

 

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Program Notes 

 

Brahms’s music often seems somehow nostalgic, even regressive. Eschewing the excesses of his Romantic contemporaries Liszt and Wagner, he sought refuge in the corseted Classical structures of Haydn and Mozart. When he realized that concert organizers had started to privilege the music of dead rather than living composers on their programs, Brahms began emulating the dead. He embraced such archaic musical genres as the motet and serenade, created a set of variations on a theme by Haydn, and rejected the fire and brimstone of grand opera for instrumental miniatures. The idea was to enter the pantheon of past masters even while still very much alive.

 

Critics of a Romantic mindset have been carried away by this idea, however, asserting that Brahms was nostalgic to the point of being melancholic, a condition defined by musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann as an “individual, albeit historically mediated state of mind and spirit.” Maybe this is true, or maybe Brahms consciously chose to manufacture this autumnal mood. Art is, after all, artificial. (What?!)

 

His Clarinet Quintet in B Minor of 1891, a late, post-retirement work dedicated to clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, is haunted from start to finish by the genial ghost of Mozart, whose own clarinet quintet from a century before was its obvious model. The four movements mimic Mozart’s formal structures while enriching his syntax. Had Mozart lived past the time of Wagner, Brahms seems to suggest, his music would have sounded like this. The most beautiful move in this meltingly beautiful composition comes in the agitated finale with the gradual reappearance of the main theme from the second-movement Adagio, followed by the main theme of the first-movement Allegro. The themes fade in, fade out, and then fade in again, as though unable or unwilling to say goodbye. Also significant is the narrow tonal range of the score: The second movement modulates from B major to B minor to B-flat minor and then to B major again. The palette is extremely refined, limited to shades of a single hue rather than distinctly different colors. It is as though Brahms wanted to inflect his musical materials instead of dramatizing them.

 

With this and his other late clarinet pieces, Brahms signed off and put down his quill. But in one respect, his Clarinet Quintet is less about the past than the future. The technique used to manipulate musical motifs—the thematic fragments that generate the forms—has much more in common with 20th- rather than 18th- or 19th-century composition. This technique is called “developing variation,” and it involves using musical themes less as stable melodies than repositories of motivic ideas to be explored throughout a movement or even an entire piece. For modern composers seeking a means to hold their works together outside of the major and minor key system, developing variation was crucial. The technique was codified by the arch-modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg in an essay called “Brahms the Progressive,” which generously portrays Brahms as a harbinger, not an anachronism.

 

 

You can find the program notes here: http://www.carnegiehall.org/Golden_Age_of_Music_Brahms_Clarinet_Quintet/

Edited August 15, 2014 by Sonataform

[danishali903]

Wow...I haven't EVER seen such overly opinionated notes for a program. Clearly the author has issues with Brahms...it is surprising Carnegie Hall decided to use this. To be fair, he does credit Brahms' use of developing variation and its influence on later composers.

[Sonataform]

He obviously doesn't like Brahms, but that isn't what bothers me (but let me just say for the record I love the music of Brahms). What bother's me is that a musicologist/historian should know better. It's like breaking an oath of conduct in the legal or medical field, his credibility is just thrown out the window. 

[Sojar Voglar]

It is indeed the most strange text about Brahms I ever read one. If I were a concert organizer, I would reject such text to be put in the concert paper.

[MuseScience]

Not that it's going to make much of a difference, but out of curiosity, I did look up how institutions usually outline a prepared set of program notes. Here's what I found: 

 

http://musiclibrary.peabody.jhu.edu/programnotes

 

After looking through more of the program notes for different composers on Carnegies' website, I found a tiny bit of bias and criticism for many of the greats, but not nearly as much as Brahms. Little disheartening because for Tchaikovsky and Sibelius they do ridicule a bit, but they offset that by immediately commenting on how they were good or innovative, which they should've done the same for Brahms if they were going to criticize at all (which, honestly, they should never do). I don't know, maybe they don't really read their program notes before putting it in, or just don't care. I'm sure that anybody who read those comments that actually cares enough about music to know it will think the same way you did. I've never known program notes to change minds haha. If they could, that'd be an easy way to take over the world. :P

Edited August 16, 2014 by MuseScience

[orchdork02]

Ugh, this idea that Brahms is this musical conservative who couldn't move past Beethoven (even Mozart in this article?) annoys me. It's even more irritating that it seems to be so widespread among the music community. Despite the fact that Brahms' harmonies were about as complex as any that were being written at the time, sometimes in a state of near constant modulation, this view also ignores probably his most important innovations, which were in his rhythms.

[Sonataform]

Ugh, this idea that Brahms is this musical conservative who couldn't move past Beethoven (even Mozart in this article?) annoys me. It's even more irritating that it seems to be so widespread among the music community. Despite the fact that Brahms' harmonies were about as complex as any that were being written at the time, sometimes in a state of near constant modulation, this view also ignores probably his most important innovations, which were in his rhythms.

 

Brahms' music doesn't need to be justified, he simply composed incredible music. If he had pandered to those who wanted something revolutionary his artistic voice would have been compromised. That alone is something I consider revolutionary. Yes you could make a case for his harmony, rhythm and developing variations, but Saint-Saen's, for example, also did crazy stuff with harmony and rhythm but most of his music is forgettable.

 

We need to realize that every composer has a voice unique to them. The simple choices and idiosyncrasies a composer makes with every note of every bar on the micro level is what creates the sum total on the macro level. We look at the basics: harmony, rhythm, orchestration, etc.... but it's those micro-idiosyncrasies, those incalculably minute choices a composers makes that actually ends up making a composers musical fingerprint. I don't love the music of Brahms for anything he did "revolutionary", I simply love the guy's compositional voice that was unique to him.