Swafford on historical instruments

A simply wonderful article appeared in Slate a week ago: Jan Swafford on the use of historically appropriate pianos for favorites of the 18th-, 19th-, and even early 20th-century piano repertoire. Complete with audio-sample comparisons of the excerpts by Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy, it’s an informative, subtle, and entertaining piece. It’s enormously to Slate‘s credit that they hold their readers in high enough esteem to publish this kind of material—not to mention a reminder that online media offer possibilities that go beyond what newspapers can do. Had this been published in the New York Times, they’d probably have posted the audio material online in a sidebar, but the article could not have been written so as to integrate it so nicely. Well done all around.

Of course, Jan Swafford is a musicologist, composer, and professor of music, not a journalist. Since he’s a fine writer, I don’t suppose this piece needed to be any more heavily edited than a staff journalist’s version would have been. But what if it had? All the evidence suggests that it’s easier to edit an expert’s piece into publishable shape for a popular publication than it is to give a professional journalist a clue. If I ran a general-interest publication of any kind, I know what sort of writers I would try to hire to write about topics like this.

So-so article on Bohlen-Pierce music

In a most welcome gesture, the Boston Globe published an article on Sunday by Carolyn Y. Johnson on Bohlen-Pierce music.

This should sum up the state of journalism relating to new music and/or musicology in general-interest media at the present time: Johnson’s article was approximately a thousand times better than one normally expects from writing on subjects like this in general-interest media, stopping just short of being a minimally adequate treatment of the matter at hand.

To give credit where due, here are some of the good things about the article:

• An entirely correct summary—as far as it goes—of what constitutes the Bohlen-Pierce scale (“The unusual scale she played ended on a high note that was triple, not double, the frequency of the low note, and the interval was divided into 13 equal steps.”)
• Timely mention of the Bohlen-Pierce Symposium, which began in Boston on the day the article appeared
• A fine choice of experts and non-experts to consult and quote in the article: (1) a new music clarinetist and Bohlen-Pierce enthusiast, Amy Advocat; (2) a composer and microtone enthusiast, Julia Werntz; (3) a musicologist and music theorist, Ross Duffin, author of the informative if annoyingly-not-to-mention-inaccurately-named How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care); (5) a neuroscientist who does research on brain activity in microtonal contexts, Psyche [!!] Loui; and (6) the composer Georg Hajdu
• Indispensably for an article like this, multimedia: a video of Advocat playing a little bit of Bohlen-Pierce music on her custom-built clarinet

But best of all—and really what makes this article stand out from ordinary newspaper writing on topics like this—Johnson infuses the article with absolutely none of the sneering-at-the-contemporary-music-weirdos that is seemingly the requirement for all journalistic treatments of new music that presents new or challenging sounds. Bohlen-Pierce music is presented as being at least potentially beautiful, interesting, and worthwhile, and the excitement surrounding it therefore justified. For that reason above all, the article clearly has its heart in the right place.

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But heartless curmudgeon that I am, I have to say a few words about what it would have taken for this article to really inform me. The article contains tons of language—too much, really—that does no more than insist that the Bohlen-Pierce scale is so new and different sounding. Johnson and the people she quotes describe the scale variously as “eerie,” “off-kilter,” “hard to predict,” “surreal,” “mysterious,” “odd,” “otherworldly,” “exotic,” “strange,” “going beyond,” “another musical reality,” and “alien.”

The article comes so close to explaining what accounts for the Bohlen-Pierce scale’s strangeness-yet-familiarity. And it would have taken no high-level music theory whatsoever to do so. Two minutes of web searching led me to The Bohlen-Pierce Site, where I learned the extremely simple fact that, although the interval between consecutive notes in the scale is different from that between consecutive notes of the 12-notes-per-octave scale we usually use, some other intervals between notes of the Bohlen-Pierce scale are the same (or nearly the same) as certain intervals in the 12-notes-per-octave scale. For example, if you move by three chromatic steps in conventional tuning, you get the interval of a minor third; the same interval (or close enough) appears if you move two Bohlen-Pierce chromatic steps. These kinds of similarities with conventional tuning are everywhere in B-P music theory.

Instead we’re told that “Bohlen-Pierce takes advantage of fundamental properties that make our own musical system work,” which sounds very complicated, even though the reality is simple; we’re told that people have maintained enough interest in B-P to write all kinds of music using it for some decades now; and we’re told that neuroscience suggests that people can learn some of the logic behind the system. All this is suggestive but mysterious.

Johnson goes to some length to tell us that the Bohlen-Pierce scale is not random—for example, I couldn’t just create equally viable scale systems by picking any large interval and dividing it into any number of steps. But the one or two sentences’ explanation of why that is was really what this article would have needed in order to do a minimally decent job of explaining Bohlen-Pierce music. That article would have been a pleasure to read.

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As a postscript, it would have been interesting to hear from some critics of Bohlen-Pierce music, of the aesthetic and cognitive positions that underlie the claim for its usefulness and validity. But frankly, I don’t trust any living journalist to write that article without lapsing into pathetic he-said/she-saidism—and indeed, without subtly favoring the conservative position (“these avant-garde freaks are all obviously crazy”). So I by no means wish Johnson had attempted anything like that, since the result surely would have been hideously awful. But it’s nice to imagine a media environment and general climate of public interest in such matters in which the result of some attempted nuance wouldn’t have been automatically horrible.