Can I persuade you to love this Dark Bitter Music?

this is a pint of guinness and like many of the best things in life it takes a bit of getting used to for your first pint or two it might taste strange and bitter no i don't really like it but if you persevere you may end up finding that very strangeness and bitterness is the thing you most love about it and the same is true of some music because music hits us at such an instinctive level it's very tempting to let our first reaction guide us and if something doesn't feel right just simply switch it off to survive beyond the switch-off phase you need some kind of motivation the planet mars is paradise when it came to guinness for me as a young impressionable student the motivation was a successful marketing campaign targeted perfectly at wannabe mavericks like me despite not really liking my first taste the ads gave me the motivation to persevere and a few weeks and several pints later i was hooked so yay capitalism me i sold up and moved to earth like guinness the piece of music i want to talk about today has a very bitter initial quality it's dark dense disturbing dystopian disconcerting and above all dissonant [Music] so if you don't think you can push past all that this video may not be for you no i don't really like it but if you're willing to give it a taste i will attempt to make this video the equivalent of those quirky guinness ads just maybe not quite so cool but a motivation to wait out your initial reaction in the service of something that eventually i hope will become a beautiful part of your life in fact maybe something even more beautiful than a pint of guinness because getting to know this piece might just make you a better person and that is a claim i wouldn't make about most pieces of music but we'll come on to that [Music] the piece is albernberg's votsec so it's an opera that may be another reason to put some of you off i mean a dissident atonal opera how many reasons do you need [Music] i'm going to start by talking about why it's so dissonant then i'll show you how surprisingly humorous it is as a piece how it has so many different layers that its influence has reached some really surprising places and finally i'll talk about the one thing that really puts this opera on an entirely different level by the way if you want to watch this fabulously grotesque production by oprah zurich head over to marquee tv who are this video's sponsor more about them later so firstly dissonance why would any composer want to use all these dissonant distorted sounds in the first place and the best comparison i can find is with movies and how visual distortion is used to unsettle the viewer and give the subconscious sense that something isn't right in the visual world of the cinema these distortions can be anything from strange lighting which distorts the actors face or casts oversized shadows on the wall behind them to the tilted camera trick known as the dutch angle which gives us an unusual perspective or just lets us know something is not quite as it should be to effects like the famous dolly zoom which distorts the image in ways the human eye can never match all of these effects distort reality and are particularly effective when they show us the perspective of a character whose own world view is distorted a particularly good example is the detox scene in train spotting where weird camera angles and distorted lenses take us into the mind of the protagonist as he tries to come off heroin and in votsec the music does something similar by distorting blurring and stretching the music as a way of showing us the world through the eyes of its main character in the story watsek has a pretty horrible life he's constantly abused by the comically grotesque authority figures of the captain and the doctor the latter of whom conducts dubious medical experiments on him like making him eat nothing but beans this all seems to have taken a toll on botsek's mental health and he seems to be losing the plot a bit votsec's only source of happiness is marie and their son and when even marie eventually betrays him fatsec finally snaps murders her and then seemingly losing his mind he drowns so pretty gloomy stuff but not a plot which would be out of place in countless successful films votic is the first true operatic anti-hero a precursor to film characters like travis bickle in taxi driver or even jack nicholson's character in the shining and the perfect character to embody this sense of a distorted reality so how does this distortion carry over into the music well i'm going to show you four ways although there are plenty more firstly what i'll call smearing the harmony let's look at the second scene where we first get a real sense of the scale of vortex derangement it's a brilliantly dramatic scene because we have two characters with very different outlooks voc is getting increasingly agitated with paranoid visions of nature out to get him a severed head and a hollow chasm beneath the ground [Applause] and his fellow soldier andres is meanwhile desperately trying to change the mood by singing hunting [Applause] [Music] but songs music sounds almost comically silly it's clear from the rest of the music that our emotional point of view is voltec's own and it's an unnerving place to be [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] the scene with vot second andres opens with these haunting chords [Music] they're already pretty distorted in themselves they're kind of tonal the left hand seems to imply c major then e flat minor than f major but if we look at the right hand they're like some very extended jazz harmony if you try labeling them you quickly get yourself in a bit of a pickle but then look at how bag gets back down from the f chord to the c chord i've put the notation but also the midi piano roll here so you can really see the contours of what's going on [Music] all the notes just sort of slide downwards independently like someone's smearing the harmony over the keyboard it's an oral distortion every bit as much as those lens tricks in the cinema are visual distortions [Music] another way beg distorts is by what we can call melodic blurring take a single line say a downward chromatic line like this [Music] add a quite chromatic chord moving in parallel with this line [Music] and then adding the same chord beneath but moving in contrary motion the result is a line with a very distinct sense of movement and progression but an incredibly dense dissonant and distorted harmony [Applause] [Music] when all the parts move like this in rhythmic unison but on different notes that's known as homophonic writing and it's typically found in church music like say bach corrales so it's quite fitting to see the same technique used to set the captain's phrase without the blessing of the church in reference to votsec's son being born out of wedlock the captain says the phrase once with an already strange harmony like a sort of distorted hymn tune [Music] but then on the repeat the wins play the phrase again but with an even more dissonant harmony like a huge nightmarish pipe organ [Music] mention of his son by the captain is clearly very triggering for votsec and through this distorted harmony it's almost as if we hear vortex rage reaching boiling [Music] point in this orchestral interlude shortly afterwards there's a similar deranged atmosphere we hear themes that we've heard in the previous scene overlap haphazardly and build up to a terrifying cacophony it gives us an incredibly vivid sense of the world closing in and overwhelming you [Applause] there are also distortions of other genres of music like military music or in the drunken tavern scene we hear lendl an old type of german waltz played by a pseudo-folk ensemble and full of distorted harmonies [Music] [Music] and finally i should mention the singing style in voltec which itself is sometimes a form of distortion begg pioneered the first operatic use of a vocal technique known as spreshdimmer invented by his teacher arnold schoenberg the idea of shrek stimmer is to sound like neither talking nor singing the notes and the rhythms are still written out but the pitch is something you only touch on briefly before falling away from it singer james cleverton at the royal opera house here demonstrates a line from votsec first sung normally [Music] [Applause] [Music] then with some stretch dimmer [Music] exaggerated [Music] and bag calls for the full range of options in voltec much of the music is sung traditionally but large parts of it use this quite weird alien means of expression which again gives you a sense of a world where everything is distorted and off balance so those are four types of distortion we could also talk about rhythmic distortion like this blurring of a laugh and i could do a whole video all about the incredible types of orchestration in this piece which itself i think distorts the way traditional orchestral instruments are used but i don't want this video to be all about distortion so that'll have to do for now so so far i've shown you how musical distortion unsettles us and helps portray this disturbed world view but i haven't said much yet about why we should care about this quite unpleasant world well the first thing to say is that it's not all dark there's a surprisingly large amount of humor here too here's one of my favorite scenes in the army barracks a sort of snoring chorus [Music] berg himself ended up in the army during the first world war and the snoring clearly made an impression on him he wrote to his wife this polyphonic breathing gasping and groaning is the most peculiar chorus i've ever heard it's like some primeval music that wells up from the abysses of the soul [Music] and what cracks me up in berg's chorus is this note way up on the muted double bass a high g sharp so this is a composer who has pretty much orchestrated the sound of a sleeping soldier's nasal hair and by the way i do think we need a more realistic polyphonic snoring chorus at some point there's another technique i want to draw comparison with also has a lot of humor in it it's a comparison that might raise a few eyebrows and yes i do know i have eyebrows thanks for reminding me look i've even got some eyebrow merch mickey mousing is a technique film composers use for music that follows every move of the action and imitates it so if the character is running up the stairs the music will have an upward scale and so on as the name suggests it's a technique that has its origins in the early cartoon music and is sometimes used in a derogatory sense to suggest music that doesn't have its own ideas it just follows along with the story it's probably not a technique you'd expect to be associated with one of 20th century modernism's most celebrated composers but bag uses something like a mickey mousing technique to make an almost sarcastic comment on the action particularly with more grotesque characters like say the captain so here's an example in the opening scene the captain asks spotsec what's the weather like he tells him it's windy the captain says the speed of the wind always makes him think of mice and then he teases botsec by saying the wind is blowing from south north bursting into laughter when votzek doesn't understand each of these individual ideas is mickey moused in the orchestra [Music] [Music] my [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] by the way that squeaking mouse is one of the effects which later influenced bernard hermann to create the famous glissandoing violins in the shower scene from psycho [Music] these are the kind of things that you might not take in on your first hearing but give you great joy to notice and discover later on votice is definitely a multi-layered work a feature i was surprised to hear being drawn attention to on last year's great british bake off chiggs isn't the only baker with a blood red theme to his slices my wife came up with a name it's called murder at the opera she tasted the beetroot i thought it was crazy but then really liked it i like the opera probably my most favorite is albernberg's watsek because it's multi-layered it has a lot of hidden things bit like my bigs one of the ways votsec is multi-layered is in bag's use of light motifs the idea of a light motif comes from wagner and is a way of tying a particular theme or idea to a character or perhaps to an emotion they're most familiar today in films like star wars where characters often have their own theme some of the light motifs in votsec operate in a similar way for example votsek's own theme is a paranoid little scurry you hear that most times botsec arrives on the scene but you also hear it turned upside down every time he leaves [Music] another one is a little three-note phrase that we hear every time votsec mentions or sometimes even thinks about marie other themes seem to offer a slightly stranger connection so for example this chord with a repeated f and b in the base of the heart is first heard when marie is waiting with her son for votec to return [Music] but then we hear it again later after marie has been murdered as if she'll now face a more eternal kind of waiting [Music] in fact this scene immediately after the murder shows you the way bag strings together a series of these little ideas first we have the orchestral strings with the armory phrase which now feels terribly poignant and then we have marie's waiting idea on the harp and then finally a little backwards scurry of voxek's theme as he hurries off [Applause] [Music] here's one more idea which is more abstract and definitely only for the aficionados but i'll mention it here just to give you some idea of how far down you can keep going in this opera back in the opening scene the captain is discussing his fear of eternity beg underlines the word eternity with a downward series of fourths part of what's known as the cycle of fifths berg seems to be connecting this idea of a cycle of notes that goes round and round endlessly with the idea of eternity [Music] [Applause] it's an idea that only a knowledgeable musician with a pretty good ear would be able to pick out but it's better nonetheless so it's humorous with a lot of hidden depths and an intense dramatic story but to me what really sets botsec apart as a piece of music is its compassion as a story it takes you deep into the mind of a poor confused soldier who eventually ends up committing a terrible crime but it makes you understand his life as being little more than a stick tossed around on the turbulent and violent currents of the wider world at the end of the opera we see votsex now orphaned son playing happily on his hobby horse oblivious to the fact that both his parents are now dead [Music] and the inescapable conclusion is this poor child will be just as buffeted by the storms of life as his father so although it never preaches and certainly doesn't offer any solutions the opera leaves you with an empathy for the downtrodden and a feeling that stays with you and leaves you a slightly nasty taste when you hear people later talking about how poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps what sex story tells us it's just not that simple so if i think back i do remember trying this opera for the first time and thinking oh that's a bit of a strong taste but as time has gone on the more i've realized it has everything it has some really beautiful moments it has some really funny moments it has some incredibly dark violent moments it just has so much and so many layers jurgen on bake off compared it to his multi-layered cake but for me and i think for dorian this opera will always be the guinness of opera cheers [Music] now if you're a regular here you'll know i don't do many sponsored videos because it's not easy to find a product that i'm comfortable promoting but there's no such issue with today's sponsor because it's a service i've used a lot myself marquee tv is a streaming service for the arts you can watch some of the absolute best productions from opera dance music and theater performances i'd seen clips of this particular votsec production that i've been showing you today and i really felt it was my kind of thing i love paired back sort of carnival style productions like that so i looked it up and marquee tv was the one place i was able to watch it in full they have a huge range of other contemporary operas including recently david t little's soldier songs with opera philadelphia but also classics like don giovanni at the royal opera house they also have an incredible range of contemporary dance i was watching some mark morris on there the other day and a range of orchestral concerts it's a real treasure trove for anyone interested in the arts and all for only 8.99 a month with 40 off if you're an arts professional and 50 off if you're a student so for most of you it's really the price of a couple of cups of coffee a month and it all comes with a seven day free trial so thank you very much marquee tv for sponsoring the video links to sign up in the description so do let me know in the comments if this did persuade you that vot tech might be something worth listening to i'd love to hear that i'd made some converts um thank you to all my patrons on patreon for supporting the channel and thanks to you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 72,240

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Id: e8V-x9CSPlA

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022