The Tasty Science

Here's something like a Scud missile in the world of controversy:

I have definitive musical proof that Shostakovich loved to play tennis.

That statement amuses me because it contains some properties that should make it a big hit out in the wide world. It is quite sure of itself, which is important when you want to stir up a lot of notoriety, and it is so bizarre that it ought to provoke curiosity.

On the other hand, it involves someone whom most people have never heard of (Shostakovich) and a game most people regard as dull; therefore it is pretty irrelevant, popularly speaking. Hence as an attempt at publicity it is about as effective as a scud missile, where said missile is the butt of American jokes because they belonged to our enemy, and were, apparently, less effective at killing people than our own. My apologies to the people who actually died from these projectiles.

But if you'd still like to know how I came to my doctrinaire thesis (which I've already saved my colleagues the trouble of discrediting, having proceeded directly to step two and done it myself) read on.

On our church organ currently sits a volume of music by Sweelinck. Notice the title: "Samtliche werke fur Tasteninstrument" which I've incompetently translated as "collected works for tasty instruments!"

Of course it means no such thing. But through the strange quirks of the evolution of language, the terms for touch and taste seem almost reversed. Here the term for keyboard instrument, which is something you touch to make sound, ("tasten") seems to refer to one sense in Dutch, and another in English. If you have nothing better to laugh at, it can be at least mildly amusing.

Personally, I would hate to have to deal with the ramifications of such a conclusion. A nine foot Steinway might provide food for several months, but it would be a horribly expensive way to dine.

When one is looking for connections, this is a reminder that there are many pitfalls. But connections are the very food of thought and so we press on.

Etymology is one of many fields which fascinate me but for which I have little time and will never be an expert. But languages like English aren't alone in containing "words" which have both subtle and obvious connections to other words. Music does as well. In the most obvious cases, composers have deliberately inserted groups of notes that serve as code for something. One popular form of these is the composer's name. Which is how we get tennis into all this. Don't you just love it?

Sorry.


Not really.

One of those musical names belongs to Dmitri Shostakovich, who used the notes D-Eb-C-B to spell his name in some of his compositions.

Wondering how that works? It helps if you are German (which he wasn't) because that gives you a little more flexibility in the musical spelling department.

D is for Dmitri, obviously. But the note Eb is pronounced "ess" in German, hence the start of his surname. Then, C (for C; duh!) and finally B natural, which is actually "H" in German (Bb is "B") thus, D. "S" C H--D. Shotakovich.

So imagine my excitement when I heard Shostakovich's name being used by someone else. That someone else is Erik Satie. It is heard twice, as the first four and next four notes of the last member of his "Sports and Recreations." I give you "Tennis."

Listen

Now right away I was thinking "come on, now, that connection's not possible." Shostakovich would have been too young to be known in France, and how the heck would Satie even know Shostakovich, who didn't travel outside Russia, never mind that he liked to play tennis. It's not like they could have played doubles on weekends (not that I wouldn't pay money to see that).

So, a mere week later, late one night, when I had nothing less important to do, I finally spent a whopping 30 seconds with the Wikipedia to debunk my excitable theory. Basically I looked at his dates: Shostakovich was only eight years old when Satie wrote "Sports and Recreations." He become known to the musical world first through his First Symphony, which premiered in 1926, the year after Satie died. Prognosis: a complete accident. Also the Shostakovich estate can't retroactively sue the Satie estate. (If he ripped off Marvin Gaye that would be different.)

It's too bad, now that I have no sensational paper to publish. But apparently there is still such a thing as coincidence; it just doesn't sell that well. So....did Satie know something about the leisure habits of a famous Russian composer yet to become known? And...how on earth did he know that? Or did he?

You decide.

It's not what it sounds like

Does this sound like an octopus to you?

listen

If you said yes, you may want to see a doctor. Or you are already familiar with Erik Satie's "Sports et Divertissments" for piano. In which case, your answer still should have been "no."

Last week, we examined some of the pieces from this collection that Satie wrote for such activities as "fishing" and "yachting" which, if you were given the title beforehand, and maybe in a rare case even if you weren't, you might get the impression captured the events musically. But I warned you, assuming a one to one relationship between a story, picture, or event, and a musical composition, is probably oversimplifying, and oversimplifying is certainly not something that applies to Erik Satie.

As with many a musicological argument, I've gotten there in the middle, but it seems that there are some folks who admire Mr. Satie for his tone-painting in this work. In particular, for the way his music relates to the illustrations that accompany each of the pieces. But in a blog I read recently, the author points out that Mr. Satie never actually saw any of the drawings that accompanied his music, and that he wrote the music first anyhow. That pretty much only leaves his music as a generalized portrait of the activity in question, which, given that they are Satie's own titles, is a fairly safe bet.

That is, it is a safe bet that he could have written his pieces with particular reference to the events of the title. Whether he chose to actually do so takes us into the world of Erik Satie.

Satie liked to work on different levels, and frequently allowed those levels to collide, or, most often, to have no relation at all to one another. In his scores he will often keep up a running dialogue with the performer. There is nothing unusual about a steady stream of tempo and expressive directions in a musical score, such as telling the performer to slow down in one spot or to play tenderly in another. But how does one play "like a nightingale with a toothache" or "very lost"? Those are just two of the endlessly descriptive, very funny, and possibly useless instructions to the performer so common to his pieces. Sometimes Satie will weave these instructions into a narrative as he does in the Sonata Bureaucratic. The running gag about a dull-witted office worker has apparently nothing at all to do with the music, which is itself a parody of a Clementi sonatina often massacred by students.

In the second movement of his collection "Dried Embryos" (yik!) Satie refers to a musical quotation. There it is a group of animals having a funeral, and the quotation is actually the famous funeral march by Chopin, only Satie tells us in the score that it is a quotation from a "famous mazurka by Schubert" who, incidentally never wrote a Mazurka, famous or otherwise. Is Satie pulling our leg?

This is why there is really nothing unusual about the instructions at the start of the movement "Yachting" from Sports and Recreations, except that it is impossible (and that hardly qualifies). Satie has clearly marked the left hand in quarter notes followed by quarter rests. Nevertheless, in the written instructions directly above this line of music he instructs to play "in half notes, the octaves of the bass" and then, to drive the point home, the quarter notes, disconnected by the intervening rests, are to be played "legato." It would be enough to drive a literal-minded, traditionally trained classical pianist to despair. After all, are we not taught that the composer's intentions must be respected to the last pen stroke? And here is something deliberately contradictory, and impossible to execute. It is either one, or the other. Satie knows this, and he knows we know, and he knows we know he knows, and....there it is. One set of instructions completely at odds with what is plain to see on the page.

Satie is also well known for never using bar lines or giving meter or key signatures, even though it is usually apparent from the music what these ought to be. Another bit of annoyance for our good re-creationist, the ever-conscientious concert pianist.

This is largely because Satie himself stood outside the establishment. He didn't get along with the pianists at the conservatory, nor they him, and his music was championed not by the respected artists of the time, but by the underground. He had friends among reputable musicians (Debussy, for one) but they didn't really take him seriously. Satie's "Sports" is subtitled "20 short pieces for piano" but there are actually 21. The set begins with an "un-frivolous" preface, called an "unappetizing chorale" which Satie has written "for those who don't like me." It is, he says, "a serious and proper chorale....I have put into it all I know about boredom."

So back to the octopus. Satie has written a little story about him. It is not to be read aloud. Satie would be piqued at violations of his edict, though it often happens in performances today. A recording available online has a narrator reading all of the comments aloud in French, while the pianist has to adopt a slow tempo and pause between gestures so she can get them all in.

The story concerns an octopus who swallows a crab and it goes down the wrong pipe. More absurdities follow. The music might mimic the rapidity of the octopus, but the repetitive, motoric gestures that dominate nearly every piece in the set sound much less evocative of nature, or people, and more like machines. There seems to be a mechanical obsession among French composers of the early 20th century, and that appears to be a reflection of the pace, and priorities, of the society around them. Short, repetitive bursts follow each other in hurried profusion which remind more of the speed of the silent movie, the dominant entertainment of the era, and which provides a key for our next installment.

The thrill of distraction and the agony of the absurd

Care for a game of tennis? How about a round of golf? Later, we could even go dancing, all in just a few minute's time, all set to music, courtesy of Erik Satie. Or is it?

In 1914, Satie was approached about a strange assignment to create a series of short piano pieces detailing various human activities: sports and recreations. The pieces were to be accompanied by illustrations of those activities, and the whole, beautifully bound and featuring not only the eye-catching illustrations but the composer's own impeccably attractive penmanship, would be sold as a kind of coffee table book to rich art lovers. What a plan! Stravinsky was asked to do it, and he turned it down, saying the fee was too low. Satie was then asked and thought the fee was too high. But he did it anyway.

Those are the bald facts, but they don't give one much insight into the music itself. It is just those insights that I'm trying to plumb away at; in fact, this will drive much of a concert I'm preparing to play later this spring. Are these pieces musical depictions of something, or not? And of what use is music if it is simply imitation of something which is fundamentally not musical, like a game of tennis?

Most writers on music don't seem particularly concerned with questions like these, in fact, I often get the frustrated impression that they aren't too curious about anything. When you ask,you'll get the bare facts about a composer's birth, death, and important musical contributions. They'll tell you about the structure of the music, sometimes in quite a bit of detail, but if a piece of music bears an unusual title, they don't seem concerned about where the composer may have gotten it. I've had that experience this week when learning a piece by Jean-Phillip Rameau, which is called "The Simpletons of Sologne." Now there's an odd little title; where did he get it? Nobody seems to know, or, in most cases, care.

Given that we know very little about Rameau's life to begin with, I could understand if we simply didn't know. And, frankly, when I began the search, I assumed that the prosaic reason for the title was that the composer was simply using a pre-existing folk tune with that same title, not that he was going out of his way to portray simpletons in music. But if he is, I haven't found anyone willing to tell me that. So far, I've only come up with one program writer who speculated that it had something to do with the wandering melody. This is not only a stretch, it is fairly weak as an insight, although I still admire her making the attempt, or at least her being curious about it in the first place.

Rameau did like programmatic titles. What can the musicologists tell us about this phenomenon? They can give you antecedents. Couperin did it too, and he got there first. Must be a chain of influence. No reason as to why, but we know who Rameau may have gotten the idea from. Sometimes I think musicologists and lawyers have a lot in common. They sure can quote precedent! But, for either gentleman, why? Was it just good advertising? A way to avoid having to call everything a sonata or a gavotte?

Back to Satie. Clearly there are extra-musical intentions being explored here. And it is just that very thing that embarrasses many writers on music, so that they ignore it. But in this case, apparently, some have extoled Mr. Satie for ably capturing these portraits in music. Does he?

I don't know about you, but this piece doesn't remind me at all of a game of tennis. On the other hand, if you told me that the previous piece was about fireworks, I'd buy that. You'd probably have to reveal the title first, but I can certainly hear things associated with fireworks: there are explosions, and I can definitely hear a rocket going off at the end, even if it does turn out to be a dud!

Satie's best match of music and program is probably in the water pieces. It's easy to hear someone going down the "water-chute" but I was thinking more about the piece entitled "fishing" which is a delightful little narrative beginning in stillness. Then a couple of fish swim up and have a conversation. "What's going on?" one fish wants to know. "It's a fisherman" says the other. "Thanks [for the warning]" says his friend, and they swim off, leaving the scene as serene as before.

Water is easy to suggest musically, which is one reason why you can really get into the waves in a piece like yachting, which follows the one with the fish. This is all very nice, and lets out imaginations image while we listen. But it's also a bit simple, and Erik Satie is one composer I'd never associate with the word simple. So let's muddy the waters a bit next week in part two.....

The music around here is clearly going downhill

Next week I intend to start discussing music I'm going to play this spring at a house concert in Champaign. But I'll let you get a jump on it by playing for you this very very short piece by a very interesting fellow named Erik Satie. We've gotten quite a bit of snow this weekend, the powdery kind, and it would be perfect for sledding, if Champaign were not exceedingly flat. A popular t-shirt here reads "Champaign, on the foothills of mount level."

Here is Mr. Satie's musical version of the activity of sledding. If you've got someplace to go, perfect. I promise this will only take 30 seconds. And when you've recovered, we can talk about it a little next week.

Satie: Le Traineau

100 years ago today

We interrupt our regularly scheduled series on composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk and pass up the opportunity to reflect on the 150th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg to offer up an anniversary of a different sort today. We'll get to Gettysburg on Wednesday. By the way, thank you to all of you who were at my concert yesterday.

It isn't often that a composer puts a date on their manuscript. Most don't--some, more recent, are pretty consistent about doing this, which will save future musicologists a lot of work, and torpedo their chances of constructing interesting theories about their chronology, for which I'd like to say on their behalf yeah, thanks a lot, guys!  

But some time ago, I happened to notice that a peculiar little set of three piano pieces by composer Erik Satie sports such dates. The first is dated June 30th. I was busy giving a completely unrelated concert yesterday. The second of the set proclaims its birth on "July 1, 1913," which happens to be a Monday, and thus conveniently lines up with our regular blog date, and the third took its good old time and appeared on July 4th. So I thought as an anniversary nod to these strange but fun pieces (one audience member after a concert of mine opined that the composer "must have been drunk when he wrote them!") I'd post the set for your listening edification. (By the way, I remember sight reading another piece in college and discovering at the end that it was dated a hundred years ago that very day! What a curious sensation that caused! I've forgotten know what piece is was. I think it was Russian.)

They are called Embryons Desseches, or "Dried Embryos" which is possibly Satie's way of poking fun at the question of compositional technique in music (it's a long story, but it usually has to do with his friend Debussy). The poetry which precedes each movement is also a bit absurd; each movement is titled after a different Crustacean (you read me right; this might be the only set of piano pieces in existence who movements are titled after Crustaceans.)

I have had some fun in the past asking people to draw pictures of said Crustaceans based on the way the music inspires them (without looking at the animals). Here is one my wife drew many years ago:

It is certainly more fun than the drawings I just saw on Wikipedia. There is an entire article there if you'd like more information on these pieces, though it is short on whimsy.

Satie certainly wasn't. Here is his poetry and the music that is attached to it:

Satie: Dried Embryos

I. The Holothurian
Ignorant people call it "sea cucumber."
The Holothurian usually climbs up rocks or blocks of stone.
Like the cat, this sea animal purrs; moreover, it spins dripping threads of silk.
The action of light seems to disturb it.
I observed a Holothurian in the Gulf of Saint-Malo.


II. The Edriopthalma
Shellfish with sessile eyes.
Very sad by nature, these sea-creatures live,
withdrawn from the world,
in holes drilled through cliffs.


III. The Podopthalma
Crustaceans with eyes placed on moveable stalks.
They are skillful and tireless hunters
They are found in all the oceans
The flesh of the Podopthalma is tasty food.


Happy listening. And happy birthday, you silly old pieces!

Secret Knowledge

Good morning. What if I told you I had an elixir to keep you young and vibrant for three easy installments of $29.95? Or that I'd throw in a couple of pills to regrow your hair and a garden hoe that doubled as a Swiss Army knife and had a built in Television and internet access? Now what would you pay for all that?

It isn't just physical objects that are subject to that sort of incredible sales pitch; we mortals can do the same thing with knowledge. In fact, what got me thinking about all that is a set of three curious little pieces by their even more curious creator, Erik Satie. They are called Gnossiennes, which was a title quite unheard of in the piano literature until Mr. Satie made it up. Can you imagine somebody just making up a word like that? (::cough:: Pianonoise)

Now there are two theories about what this word means. One is that it is a reference to a secret society known as the Gnostics. Originally an early form of Christianity which stressed being able to acquire a secret knowledge known only to its practitioners (and only after a period of study and earning the requisite privileges), it was considered heretical by the orthodox church, which tried to stamp it out, though it went underground. Some minds have always considered it attractive, which is why we find it again in 19th century France. Satie himself seems to have belonged to such a group at one point. Usually they clustered around a charismatic leader who knew things others didn't. The root Gnos- means knowledge.

The other theory is that it is actually a reference to an ancient city on the island of Crete (Knossos) which had been the site of several excavations shortly before the pieces were written.

Satie doesn't let us in on which theory is correct. In fact, he is pretty tight lipped about a lot of things, including how seriously to take what he's written, musical and otherwise. But, if you stick with me (the charismatic leader) I can tell you a few things that you probably don't know (secret knowledge) about these fascinating little pieces.

There are several interesting directions in the score. I'm not really supposed to tell you about those, but I think I'll let a few slip. While most composers have helpful hints about manners of expression or speed or dynamics, Satie's directions read like you are having a piano lesson with a Picasso painting. One of my favorite instructions from Mr. Satie is to play "like a nightingale with a toothache" (that's in another piece we'll get to some other time). At one point in the Gnossiennes the direction is to play a passage "very shiny," and in another place "with the tip of your thought." One passage in the last of the three pieces is to be played as though "very lost." I'll leave you to guess which one. .....

Then there are the tempo instructions. With most composers it would some variation on slow or fast or in between. And indeed, the first and third of the set are simply marked "slow." But the second one translates to "with astonishment." I wonder if that's the only piece that's ever been marked that way.

For some minds, this kind of approach only presents confusion, or is at best considered childish nonsense.  Give us some practical instruction! How loud? How Fast? Should I speed up, or slow down? Emphasize certain notes? ...Things I can get behind. But to "postulate within yourself"--how do you do that? And can any passage of music really be played "with great kindness?" Far from practical, many of these markings seem to inhabit a parallel universe, and could not possibly be carried out in any way that would affect the musical interpretation. Or can they?



Gnossienne 1
Gnossienne 2
Gnossienne 3