Essay in D: The Critic’s Cogitation About Titles

NYT
November 6, 2008
Music
Essay in D: The Critic’s Cogitation About Titles
By ALLAN KOZINN

During an interview segment of a Making Music concert at Zankel Hall last week the composer George Crumb was asked whether the titles of the first and last movements of his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” — “Vocalise (... for the Beginning of Time)” and “Sea-Nocturne (... for the End of Time)” — were meant to be as ominous as they sounded.

“They’re just poetic titles,” Mr. Crumb said, brushing off the question. “Sometimes people take composers’ titles too seriously.”

And whose fault is that? When listeners encounter these titles in their program books or on CD covers, it’s only natural that they conclude that the title is meant to tell them something about the nature of the work. But logical as that assumption is, it is often confounded these days.

A few weeks before the Crumb program, inapt titles were thick on the ground at a Da Capo Chamber Players concert. A shimmering but increasingly vehement work by Chen Yi seemed far too forceful to be called “Happy Rain on a Spring Night.” And “Cloud Forest” seemed far too misty a title for Conor Brown’s zesty, off-kilter work, with its strands of American and Turkish folk music.

At a recent concert by the Cassatt Quartet, Joan Tower offered some insight into how little a title can tell us about what a work actually means to a composer. She said that her first quartet was a struggle, and that she originally thought of calling it “Nightmare.” But thinking the title was too negative, she changed it to “Night Fields” and wrote a program note describing “a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon, with waves of fast moving colors rolling over the fields” to explain the fanciful new title. But the harmonically prickly writing at the work’s heart suggested that she had been right the first time.

Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward. Through much of classical music’s history, the titles of secular instrumental works were usually just formal descriptions (symphony, quartet, concerto), and when titles were affixed (“Moonlight,” for example) they were usually a publisher’s idea. Publishers understood that titles, and the imagery they evoked, could help move copies; composers were in it for the art.

Even so, Baroque composers sometimes used titles to tell listeners what their works were about, and in the case of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” four descriptive sonnets were translated into music phrase by phrase.

Early in the 19th century composers with wild imaginations, like Robert Schumann, weren’t shy about using titles that informed listeners about outlandish subtexts — battles between art-hating Philistines and artistic Davids for example — which the music’s impulses fully supported. By the late 19th century titles were plentiful. The vast majority of Liszt’s piano works have descriptive names (the B minor Sonata is an obvious exception), and few would dispute that the music of each section of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” lives up to its title, in some cases more vividly than the Victor Hartmann sketch that inspired it.

The French Impressionists, though harmonic revolutionaries, retained the notion that a title should tell listeners something about what’s going on in the piece. You can’t hear “Le Gibet” (“The Gallows”), the central movement of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit,” without conjuring the bleak image of a hanged man, slowly swinging as the sun sets and a bell tolls, and Debussy was a master of evocative work names.

To an extent composers began thinking differently about titles in the mid-20th century, when some modernist composers swept them away as remnants of the emotional and painterly excesses of Romanticism. For a time names became either mathematical or self-consciously blank: “Octagon,” “Synchronism,” “Groups” or “Polymorphia.”

But every now and then composers cottoned on to what 19th-century publishers knew: that titles sell. In 1960 the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an intense, thoroughly abstract work for 52 strings, which he unsentimentally called “8’37.” ” It wasn’t until he had heard the work performed that he came up with the title by which it is known today, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”

When Mr. Penderecki told me this, over lunch about a decade ago, I was stunned. I had always heard the work, with its searing, dissonant string clusters, as a cry of anguish, a composer’s contemplation of the devastation unleashed by the atomic bomb. But when I asked Mr. Penderecki how the title came to him, he first said, “I don’t know,” and then looked down at his paella.

“I was surrounded by propaganda against the American bomb,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Living at that time, you know. I did it. And because of the dedication to Hiroshima, certainly, people found this interesting. Because I have other pieces for strings that are not so well known.”

That the title was an opportunistic afterthought, not an indication of Mr. Penderecki’s feelings while writing the work, apparently doesn’t matter.

Two summers ago, when John Harbison’s “Abu Ghraib” had its premiere at Tanglewood, Mr. Harbison presided over a panel discussion about political works and cited the Penderecki as a predecessor. When I caught up with him during the intermission and told him about my conversation with Mr. Penderecki, Mr. Harbison said he had heard that too. Yet he still regarded “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as Exhibit A in a discussion of politically inspired works.

Younger composers are often more whimsical with their titles. Michael Torke seemingly mined a Crayola box for the titles of his most famous works and forestalled critical argument: Who is to say that “Ecstatic Orange” doesn’t sound like that? Caleb Burhans keeps a list of lines from films, television shows and advertisements, as well as random overheard phrases that catch his ear, pinned to the wall over his composing desk and has drawn titles like “Iceman Stole the Sun” and “You Could Hear It Touch the Viking” from it.

Then there’s my favorite: David Lang’s “Eating Living Monkeys,” a title that the music, thankfully, does not live up to.

But as amusing or provocative as titles can be, they inevitably create expectations. And those expectations enlist the listener as a participant in the performance. It’s hard not to do some mental gymnastics to square the titles with the music.

In theory a title ups the stakes by proposing an image that the composer must match with fresh, surprising music that avoids any clichés the title may suggest. So applying a title frivolously is cheating. If composers are going to bother with titles at all, they might as well be as serious about them as Schumann and Ravel were.