A couple of weeks ago, Salieri and I had something in common. We both wanted to bump off Mozart.
That's because I had managed, mainly by putting links on Facebook (via Twitter), to get over 100 people (each) to listen to about 8 of my Christmas postings--mainly piano improvisations on carols, and a few organ pieces of various mintings, and a little written piano music by my friend Marteau. I was hoping by the end of December to be able to look at my web stats and see all of the top ten as holiday selections. But that darned Mozart kept spoiling it. A few of you (very few, but's it's a very large file, so it packs a wallop) took it into your heads to listen to a set of variations on the tune popularly known as "Twinkle, twinkle" transcribed for organ (by myself) and it wouldn't leave the top ten. Even after Satie and Brahms and a few others had packed their bags and been replaced by Christmas fare, after nearly the entire list was clean of anything that was not Christmas, Herr Mozart's piece-out-of-season kept popping up. I continued putting up carols and other holiday fare, hoping it would go away. But it wouldn't leave. Then Beethoven got involved and I knew it was over.
I should mention at this point that web stats are pretty harmless. A few people I've mentioned web stats to in casual conversation get pretty freaked out about privacy and I should stress that I can't see you in your underwear. All I can tell about my listeners and lookers is how many pages they accessed, or files, or how much memory was taken up, and what the IP address of my most avid "fans" are. In most cases this is just a string of numbers that don't tell me anything. In a few cases, the cable company or the internet provider includes the names of the locality in the address so I know what city that anonymous user is from. "Oh, that's nice" I'll think. "A local." I can tell if somebody from Champaign, for example, listened to about a gigabyte worth of music (no telling what) yesterday. That's about it. And I can tell which pieces of music made the top ten in terms of number of requests, and how much memory was taken (i.e., whether most listeners listened to the whole thing or just a bit of it) but not who did the listening.
Are we good? ok.
As it happens, I count it as one of the successes of the season that so many people listened to so many of my pieces. I can't know if anyone enjoyed them, but at least I can tell they were listening. Thanks.
Showing posts with label listening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label listening. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2015
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Kill the Accompanist!
Last week I said that the most important thing about being an accompanist was being able to defer to an external source--for rhythm, for phrasing, and so on. Sure, you've got your internal metronome going, but the 2nd beat of the measure doesn't really come until the soloist, or the conductor, or your collaborator, or the orchestra, or the choir, says it does. You don't get to decide that. If you are trapped in your own little world, counting off in your head and not paying attention to the proceedings around you, you aren't going to be able to stay together even for a few measures. Anybody with any real musical sense is making constant adjustments to the way they feel the pulse, and the phrase, and you have to go with that.
The simplest apparent way of doing this is to look at your conductor or soloist for the visual cues they provide. But looking up every once in a while isn't nearly the half of it. In fact, it is considerably less than half. Most of it is listening.
There was a fellow in the Ken Burn's Baseball series who talked about umpiring. He mentioned that he never really thought of vision as the most important qualification for being an umpire. He went on to explain that a more accurate way to decide whether the base runner got to the bag first or the ball got to the first baseman's glove first was to listen to the distinctive percussive sounds each event made and determine which one came first. It made sense to me.
Nevertheless, most people would never have believed him--at least until he offered the explanation. What is the first thing people always yell at an umpire? "What are you, blind?!" Which is followed by the old classic, "Kill the ump!" We're a bloodthirsty species.
Several eons ago, when I was at the conservatory, someone noticed after a concert with my violinist partner and I that we never looked at each other. And yet we always managed to stay perfectly together. Odd, they thought.
I thought about it. The music was always in a different direction than the violinist, so I would have to swivel my head, and he would have to nearly turn around; nevertheless, that is how most duos keep ensemble. But I realized that I could hear the sound of his bow being raised, (and probably see it out of the corner of my eye, too, for that matter) and know just where the down-bow was going to come just by listening for it.
A few years later I was accompanying a church choir at the organ and the choir was between me and the conductor. I absolutely could not see the conductor's upbeat. And this was one of those anthems where the organ and choir begin exactly together. But we started just fine. How could I tell when to begin? I could hear the sound of two dozen people breathing in unison, taking their first breath a beat before the start. If that isn't enough, it takes a few fractions of a second for a choir to form their first consonant, which give you a little more time to be sure you have it right. By the time they've accelerated to the vowel, and the sound envelope of a group of singers has opened sufficiently, you've have at least a tenth of a second to think about it. That's enough time for a martini, practically.
I stress the importance of listening, and of knowing how to listen, even though it seems evident that music is all about sounds and listening to them. And yet, sight seems to be our primary sense and our first and sometimes only focus. I have never in my life heard anybody yell at an umpire, "What are you? deaf?" You expect, therefore, non-musicians to have a surprisingly unappreciative role for the ear in music, particularly if they haven't had much experience in using theirs. But musicians have the same difficulty. There's a world of breathing human beings out there rhythmically sucking in air, bows being drawn against strings, key actions making little clicking sounds, trucks driving by during recording sessions, conductors grunting, the sound of postures being reclaimed on hard-backed chairs, all of it leaving a signature. And cues. Listen for it.
The simplest apparent way of doing this is to look at your conductor or soloist for the visual cues they provide. But looking up every once in a while isn't nearly the half of it. In fact, it is considerably less than half. Most of it is listening.
There was a fellow in the Ken Burn's Baseball series who talked about umpiring. He mentioned that he never really thought of vision as the most important qualification for being an umpire. He went on to explain that a more accurate way to decide whether the base runner got to the bag first or the ball got to the first baseman's glove first was to listen to the distinctive percussive sounds each event made and determine which one came first. It made sense to me.
Nevertheless, most people would never have believed him--at least until he offered the explanation. What is the first thing people always yell at an umpire? "What are you, blind?!" Which is followed by the old classic, "Kill the ump!" We're a bloodthirsty species.
Several eons ago, when I was at the conservatory, someone noticed after a concert with my violinist partner and I that we never looked at each other. And yet we always managed to stay perfectly together. Odd, they thought.
I thought about it. The music was always in a different direction than the violinist, so I would have to swivel my head, and he would have to nearly turn around; nevertheless, that is how most duos keep ensemble. But I realized that I could hear the sound of his bow being raised, (and probably see it out of the corner of my eye, too, for that matter) and know just where the down-bow was going to come just by listening for it.
A few years later I was accompanying a church choir at the organ and the choir was between me and the conductor. I absolutely could not see the conductor's upbeat. And this was one of those anthems where the organ and choir begin exactly together. But we started just fine. How could I tell when to begin? I could hear the sound of two dozen people breathing in unison, taking their first breath a beat before the start. If that isn't enough, it takes a few fractions of a second for a choir to form their first consonant, which give you a little more time to be sure you have it right. By the time they've accelerated to the vowel, and the sound envelope of a group of singers has opened sufficiently, you've have at least a tenth of a second to think about it. That's enough time for a martini, practically.
I stress the importance of listening, and of knowing how to listen, even though it seems evident that music is all about sounds and listening to them. And yet, sight seems to be our primary sense and our first and sometimes only focus. I have never in my life heard anybody yell at an umpire, "What are you? deaf?" You expect, therefore, non-musicians to have a surprisingly unappreciative role for the ear in music, particularly if they haven't had much experience in using theirs. But musicians have the same difficulty. There's a world of breathing human beings out there rhythmically sucking in air, bows being drawn against strings, key actions making little clicking sounds, trucks driving by during recording sessions, conductors grunting, the sound of postures being reclaimed on hard-backed chairs, all of it leaving a signature. And cues. Listen for it.
Monday, January 13, 2014
New Year's Eve at the Virginia (part seven)
We now return to our regularly scheduled rag sonata, already in progress.
The last of the three movements of William Albright's "Grand Sonata in Rag" is modestly entitled "Ragtime Behemoth" and it is certainly a monster. Mr. Albright lets us know that right away, with this reference to Liszt's "Dante" Sonata. Dante's story of obsession obsessed 19th century composers, particularly the bit about making a pact with the devil (turns out to have been a bad idea; who knew?), and Liszt begins his sonata with a musical illustration based on the tritone, an interval so bizarre to Medieval minds they referred to it as "the devil in music."
[listen]
It gets the point across that something sinister is going to happen, doesn't it?
Now for Mr. Albright's version, which is simultaneously more diabolical and more fun at the same time:
[listen]
We can tell right away we are dealing with something a bit on the wild side. A Behemoth is not really a very nice animal, after all.
Then the composer takes us on a wild ride through something that sounds like it was made for the vaudeville stage. It starts out nicely enough; then it turns into this:
[listen]
Writing at least 75 years after ragtime began, Mr. Albright has the luxury of mixing, matching, and generally amplifying various influences and voices that we now know as ragtime, stride, jazz, novelty, even various references to Hollywoodish entertainment. I present for your inspection this little number from later in the piece, which somehow reminds me of the Dick van Dyke show:
[listen]
This is a long way from Scott Joplin's idea of dignified ragtime--clearly he's lost control, here! As entertaining as it is, The Monster seems to have won. This may be a "Ragtime" sonata, but ragtime purists will have started scratching their heads a long time ago.
But it isn't as if Bill Albright doesn't know his history--in fact, he's practically giving us a pellmell rundown on the whole thing in just a few minutes!
One of the trends in ragtime was for a pianist to take a well-known tune and "rag" it. Making even classical tunes, popular songs, whatever you could find, sound like ragtime. I recently demonstrated this at a party to general laughter when someone called out the tune for "Amazing Grace." Being able to do this on the spot was kind of a way of demonstrating your "chops." Another thing that ragtimers and popular entertainers ever since have done was to make fun of serious music by ragging it. And so, for the second time in the same evening (the first was when the writers of "The Girl in 14G" worked in a reference to "Tristan and Isolde") on the program was a bit of fun at Richard Wagner's expense. Richard Wagner was a composer so serious that even other serious composers like to make fun of him, which tells you something!
Anyhow, listen to this bit from Wagner's "Ring" cycle--an ethereal progression of just four chords, followed by an outburst of horribly uncouth ragtime:
[listen]
This happens three times, and the third time Mr. Wagner appears to be very upset!
[listen]
In the end, a fairly jaunty, Joplinesque tune has us heading for home, and we get there with a bang!
[listen]
One of the problems with writing a long series that runs well into January is you have to get on with the rest of the schedule. Which means this is the end of the line, even if it could have used a little more of a wrap up. Thank you for reading!
The last of the three movements of William Albright's "Grand Sonata in Rag" is modestly entitled "Ragtime Behemoth" and it is certainly a monster. Mr. Albright lets us know that right away, with this reference to Liszt's "Dante" Sonata. Dante's story of obsession obsessed 19th century composers, particularly the bit about making a pact with the devil (turns out to have been a bad idea; who knew?), and Liszt begins his sonata with a musical illustration based on the tritone, an interval so bizarre to Medieval minds they referred to it as "the devil in music."
[listen]
It gets the point across that something sinister is going to happen, doesn't it?
Now for Mr. Albright's version, which is simultaneously more diabolical and more fun at the same time:
[listen]
We can tell right away we are dealing with something a bit on the wild side. A Behemoth is not really a very nice animal, after all.
Then the composer takes us on a wild ride through something that sounds like it was made for the vaudeville stage. It starts out nicely enough; then it turns into this:
[listen]
Writing at least 75 years after ragtime began, Mr. Albright has the luxury of mixing, matching, and generally amplifying various influences and voices that we now know as ragtime, stride, jazz, novelty, even various references to Hollywoodish entertainment. I present for your inspection this little number from later in the piece, which somehow reminds me of the Dick van Dyke show:
[listen]
This is a long way from Scott Joplin's idea of dignified ragtime--clearly he's lost control, here! As entertaining as it is, The Monster seems to have won. This may be a "Ragtime" sonata, but ragtime purists will have started scratching their heads a long time ago.
But it isn't as if Bill Albright doesn't know his history--in fact, he's practically giving us a pellmell rundown on the whole thing in just a few minutes!
One of the trends in ragtime was for a pianist to take a well-known tune and "rag" it. Making even classical tunes, popular songs, whatever you could find, sound like ragtime. I recently demonstrated this at a party to general laughter when someone called out the tune for "Amazing Grace." Being able to do this on the spot was kind of a way of demonstrating your "chops." Another thing that ragtimers and popular entertainers ever since have done was to make fun of serious music by ragging it. And so, for the second time in the same evening (the first was when the writers of "The Girl in 14G" worked in a reference to "Tristan and Isolde") on the program was a bit of fun at Richard Wagner's expense. Richard Wagner was a composer so serious that even other serious composers like to make fun of him, which tells you something!
Anyhow, listen to this bit from Wagner's "Ring" cycle--an ethereal progression of just four chords, followed by an outburst of horribly uncouth ragtime:
[listen]
This happens three times, and the third time Mr. Wagner appears to be very upset!
[listen]
In the end, a fairly jaunty, Joplinesque tune has us heading for home, and we get there with a bang!
[listen]
One of the problems with writing a long series that runs well into January is you have to get on with the rest of the schedule. Which means this is the end of the line, even if it could have used a little more of a wrap up. Thank you for reading!
Monday, December 2, 2013
Silent Note
It looks like I won't have to write a sequel to "Silent Night" this year after all. That would have been a pretty tall order, considering how popular that carol is and how the sequel would be bound to disappoint.
You're familiar with the story of its nativity, right? I don't know how historically accurate it is, but the legend begins with the breakdown of the church organ, right on Christmas Eve. Suddenly the priest and the organist are out of a way to lead the music for a very important service, and they sit down and bang out "Silent Night," to be played on the guitar. It's a hit. The priest writes the words, the organist writes the music, and a Christmas Miracle happens.
About a decade ago at another church of mine the organ decided to manifest a small problem the day before Christmas Eve. I had also planned quite a bit of organ music for this special service. The trouble was that one of the notes wouldn't stop speaking when you drew any of several stops. It's known as a "blown primary" and it's not particularly good news. However, we got somebody to service it on Christmas Eve in the afternoon, and a few hours later we had our service!
This year's trouble also had something to do with the primary, but it was about a note that would not turn on. A "G" above middle C on the upper manual wouldn't sound on most of the stops. It was kind of inconvenient. I use that note a lot and it is hard to work around it when it affects most of the stops instead of just one or two.
At first it was inconsistently troublesome, and I put off calling our organ technicians because they are going to tune it this week anyhow (regular semi-annual tuning) but at last one afternoon the usual trick for getting the note to turn back on again, wherein you pull out stops that WILL play the note and tease the note back to life somehow, didn't work anymore. I gave up and called our guy and he said he'd come the next morning.
Of course, the note worked that morning. You were expecting that, right? And I managed to make the recording you are about to hear. It uses the note many, many times, including for that little repetition on the words "news! news!" about ten seconds in, which, although the piece is 12 years old now, makes that part seem like an inside joke. I'll play the piece for you, but first, here is what one of the passages sounds like with that note missing (it obliged me the day before):
[listen]
You've probably figured out that the piece is based on the melody "Good Christian Men, Rejoice." Also that the organ sounds like it is being constantly censored when probably the most important single note in the piece goes missing. By the way, I have no idea whose digital watch that is the background. People leave them around our church and they go off at various times of day.
Now of course the technician tried several things when I explained the problem, and thought perhaps he'd fixed it, which was hard to know since it sometimes worked and was currently fine. And then the minute he left--well, you know what happened. The first G I tried to play sounded like this:
So I called him and got him to turn his car around and come back. He fiddled with it some more, and now we are hopeful that it won't cut out on me in the middle of the service on Sunday. If it does, he says he plays at the church down the road and will come look at it again between services. That's dedication.
It's too early to rest easy, I suppose. We have all of Advent stretched out ahead of us to worry about. But it looks as though things are going to be fine with the organ, and if somehow they aren't, we'll just make it happen somehow. Besides, I know a guitar player....
Listen to "Invitation" by Marteau
You're familiar with the story of its nativity, right? I don't know how historically accurate it is, but the legend begins with the breakdown of the church organ, right on Christmas Eve. Suddenly the priest and the organist are out of a way to lead the music for a very important service, and they sit down and bang out "Silent Night," to be played on the guitar. It's a hit. The priest writes the words, the organist writes the music, and a Christmas Miracle happens.
About a decade ago at another church of mine the organ decided to manifest a small problem the day before Christmas Eve. I had also planned quite a bit of organ music for this special service. The trouble was that one of the notes wouldn't stop speaking when you drew any of several stops. It's known as a "blown primary" and it's not particularly good news. However, we got somebody to service it on Christmas Eve in the afternoon, and a few hours later we had our service!
This year's trouble also had something to do with the primary, but it was about a note that would not turn on. A "G" above middle C on the upper manual wouldn't sound on most of the stops. It was kind of inconvenient. I use that note a lot and it is hard to work around it when it affects most of the stops instead of just one or two.
At first it was inconsistently troublesome, and I put off calling our organ technicians because they are going to tune it this week anyhow (regular semi-annual tuning) but at last one afternoon the usual trick for getting the note to turn back on again, wherein you pull out stops that WILL play the note and tease the note back to life somehow, didn't work anymore. I gave up and called our guy and he said he'd come the next morning.
Of course, the note worked that morning. You were expecting that, right? And I managed to make the recording you are about to hear. It uses the note many, many times, including for that little repetition on the words "news! news!" about ten seconds in, which, although the piece is 12 years old now, makes that part seem like an inside joke. I'll play the piece for you, but first, here is what one of the passages sounds like with that note missing (it obliged me the day before):
[listen]
You've probably figured out that the piece is based on the melody "Good Christian Men, Rejoice." Also that the organ sounds like it is being constantly censored when probably the most important single note in the piece goes missing. By the way, I have no idea whose digital watch that is the background. People leave them around our church and they go off at various times of day.
Now of course the technician tried several things when I explained the problem, and thought perhaps he'd fixed it, which was hard to know since it sometimes worked and was currently fine. And then the minute he left--well, you know what happened. The first G I tried to play sounded like this:
So I called him and got him to turn his car around and come back. He fiddled with it some more, and now we are hopeful that it won't cut out on me in the middle of the service on Sunday. If it does, he says he plays at the church down the road and will come look at it again between services. That's dedication.
It's too early to rest easy, I suppose. We have all of Advent stretched out ahead of us to worry about. But it looks as though things are going to be fine with the organ, and if somehow they aren't, we'll just make it happen somehow. Besides, I know a guitar player....
Listen to "Invitation" by Marteau
Friday, November 1, 2013
Fun weekend
It's going to be an interesting weekend. The bishop is coming for a visit at Faith UMC this Sunday. We are having a single service and inviting the entire church to it. Normally we have four weekend services, of which I play for them all, so, in a way, it is like getting three quarters of a week off. Sort of. Of course that one service will be more elaborate and stressful and call on more of my resources than a regular service would have, but it will certainly not be a snooze. Fortunately, that gives it a bit of luster for me.
The rest of the weekend will be spent in rehearsal with The Chorale, a community choral organization with about 70 members who sing at least three concerts annually, the first of which is always the first weekend in November. This time we are welcoming back Dr. Craig Jessop, former conductor of The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, for a fifth time! In an unusual twist, there will be no 20-piece orchestra this time around. Instead, Dr. Jessop will lead the group in mostly a cappella numbers. As the group's accompanist, I'll play the piano a couple of times and the organ once, and largely sit back and enjoy the concert. After about 8 or 9 hours of rehearsal Fri, Sat and Sunday, I won't mind the break. Normally I spend Sunday afternoon becoming the orchestral pianist and sight reading a new part in which most of my favorite notes have been farmed out to the other instruments.
But it doesn't quite end there. Tenor Davion Williams, a former scholarship winner, will sing a few solo numbers, to which I'll supply the accompaniment. And I'll also be playing a handful of short solo piano and organ pieces. I thought I'd let you listen in to some recordings I made on Tuesday as part of the learning process (this gives me a chance to see how well I can play the pieces while nervous).
Since the concert consists entirely of hymns and spirituals, I'm playing pieces based on hymns (Davion is singing spirituals; didn't that work out nicely?). Here they are, as well as some short remarks I'm planning to make as an introduction to each one:
[I probably won't say anything about this one, although it takes its name from a very interesting image in the book of Deuteronomy. I can just see a kid drawing of God with really really long arms.]
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms
This hymn tune bears the attractive name "Pisgah." The jury is out on where the name came from--possibly it's named after a mountain peak. I first heard this tune when The Chorale sang it a couple of years ago in an Alice Parker arrangement to the words of the 23rd Psalm. So if any of it sounds like verdant pastures and flowing water, that may be why.
Pisgah
Before every concert I've attended or played in for the last 10 or 15 years you hear the same announcement: please, turn off your cell phones! This might be what would happen if you didn't turn off your cell phone before a church service:
Jesus Calls Us
The year of Jubilee is come! That's the refrain to the following hymn. In order to announce this Year of Jubilee, it was time to sound the ceremonial trumpet.
Blow ye the trumpet, blow
When this tune was originally published, it was in a minor key. "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand, and cast a watchful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land where my possessions lie." Only, a century later, as religious fashions came and went, people thought it sounded to solemn. So the tune was recast in a blithe, major key. Now just maybe it sounds as if we aren't standing on the stormy bank on the opposite side of the river at all, but we are already in the promised land. In any event, in this piece you'll hear both versions of the tune, alternately. I wonder which one will be left standing at the end....
Are We There yet?
If you happen to be in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, this weekend, perhaps I'll see you at 7 pm on Sunday at the First United Methodist Church in Urbana.
The rest of the weekend will be spent in rehearsal with The Chorale, a community choral organization with about 70 members who sing at least three concerts annually, the first of which is always the first weekend in November. This time we are welcoming back Dr. Craig Jessop, former conductor of The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, for a fifth time! In an unusual twist, there will be no 20-piece orchestra this time around. Instead, Dr. Jessop will lead the group in mostly a cappella numbers. As the group's accompanist, I'll play the piano a couple of times and the organ once, and largely sit back and enjoy the concert. After about 8 or 9 hours of rehearsal Fri, Sat and Sunday, I won't mind the break. Normally I spend Sunday afternoon becoming the orchestral pianist and sight reading a new part in which most of my favorite notes have been farmed out to the other instruments.
But it doesn't quite end there. Tenor Davion Williams, a former scholarship winner, will sing a few solo numbers, to which I'll supply the accompaniment. And I'll also be playing a handful of short solo piano and organ pieces. I thought I'd let you listen in to some recordings I made on Tuesday as part of the learning process (this gives me a chance to see how well I can play the pieces while nervous).
Since the concert consists entirely of hymns and spirituals, I'm playing pieces based on hymns (Davion is singing spirituals; didn't that work out nicely?). Here they are, as well as some short remarks I'm planning to make as an introduction to each one:
[I probably won't say anything about this one, although it takes its name from a very interesting image in the book of Deuteronomy. I can just see a kid drawing of God with really really long arms.]
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms
This hymn tune bears the attractive name "Pisgah." The jury is out on where the name came from--possibly it's named after a mountain peak. I first heard this tune when The Chorale sang it a couple of years ago in an Alice Parker arrangement to the words of the 23rd Psalm. So if any of it sounds like verdant pastures and flowing water, that may be why.
Pisgah
Before every concert I've attended or played in for the last 10 or 15 years you hear the same announcement: please, turn off your cell phones! This might be what would happen if you didn't turn off your cell phone before a church service:
Jesus Calls Us
The year of Jubilee is come! That's the refrain to the following hymn. In order to announce this Year of Jubilee, it was time to sound the ceremonial trumpet.
Blow ye the trumpet, blow
When this tune was originally published, it was in a minor key. "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand, and cast a watchful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land where my possessions lie." Only, a century later, as religious fashions came and went, people thought it sounded to solemn. So the tune was recast in a blithe, major key. Now just maybe it sounds as if we aren't standing on the stormy bank on the opposite side of the river at all, but we are already in the promised land. In any event, in this piece you'll hear both versions of the tune, alternately. I wonder which one will be left standing at the end....
Are We There yet?
If you happen to be in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, this weekend, perhaps I'll see you at 7 pm on Sunday at the First United Methodist Church in Urbana.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Bored, perhaps?
We now interrupt pianonoise's scheduled blogging for one of the great musical mysteries of all time.
(My mother thinks I could have been in advertising. If it turns out that this blog entry, on account of that opening, becomes the most popular post of all time, I will clearly have missed a calling. But I still won't be sorry. Also, you folks are too easy.)
Ok, maybe I'm the only one who has wondered about this. This concerns a curious little minuet that Mozart wrote late in his life. But first you have to understand a thing or two about the minuet.
It's a dance for the upper crust. Kings and princes, and so forth. And as a keyboard piece it also became quite popular with composers. Many a piano sonata from the classical period has a Minuet (or menuet, or menuetto) in it. It's a very civilized dance in 3/4 time. Not usually very far ranging, and, although it occasionally explores some dark territory, it doesn't stay there very long.
Mozart wrote a few of these when he was very young. I wrote an essay about it several years ago for pianonoise.com, for which I played what at one time was thought to be the first handful of pieces the young Mozart ever wrote, all of 4 or 5 years old. If you'd like to catch up on them, here they are. The first one is the longest, and the rest are less than a minute each. The third one is actually given the title "Allegro" (fast and/or happy) and the rest are Minuets.
Mozart: Five pieces
notice how tame and pretty they are. You may have heard one of them before if you or some little person you know has taken piano lessons. But I'll bet they didn't go around playing the one that you're going to hear next.
That's because, apparently, Mozart wrote this one as an adult, after a gap of perhaps a couple of decades. That's because the K number which catalogs each work by Mozart is much higher. K, or Koechel numbers (named after the fellow who did all the work) are supposed to be chronological, in the order Mozart wrote the pieces. They are, however, largely guesswork, and several attempts have been made to revise the catalog as more research is done and better guessing is possible.
Based on that supposition this is supposed to be a much later work. And it certainly is quite a bit different. Not only does it stick out from the rest of Mozart's piano minuets (which, besides the ones you just heard, contain only a couple of sonata movements, and miscellaneous pieces; the man was not exactly a minuet cranking out machine the way, say, Haydn was. Each of his early piano sonatas contains a Minuet movement)--not only is it very different from the earlier pieces he wrote, but it doesn't sound like anything else in the Minuet genre, either. It is filled with strange dissonances, phrases that don't end up where you think they are going and various other pleasant or unpleasant surprises. Have a listen.
Minuet
See what I mean? What's that all about? Was he tired of writing to form? Trying a bit of musical rebellion? Experimenting a little? Who knows.
By the way, the reason there are two different "K" numbers there are that the original catalog placed the piece's composition much earlier than a later revision. That way you could describe the piece as a kind of mid-life crisis (which for Mozart was in his early twenties) or a later attempt to break the mold, contemporary with his last piano sonata and paving the way for his last, sublime works.
Or maybe he was just having a little fun one afternoon or pulling somebody's leg. I'll give him one thing. You don't need your nose to play all the notes in this one.
But that's for another rainy day.
(My mother thinks I could have been in advertising. If it turns out that this blog entry, on account of that opening, becomes the most popular post of all time, I will clearly have missed a calling. But I still won't be sorry. Also, you folks are too easy.)
Ok, maybe I'm the only one who has wondered about this. This concerns a curious little minuet that Mozart wrote late in his life. But first you have to understand a thing or two about the minuet.
It's a dance for the upper crust. Kings and princes, and so forth. And as a keyboard piece it also became quite popular with composers. Many a piano sonata from the classical period has a Minuet (or menuet, or menuetto) in it. It's a very civilized dance in 3/4 time. Not usually very far ranging, and, although it occasionally explores some dark territory, it doesn't stay there very long.
Mozart wrote a few of these when he was very young. I wrote an essay about it several years ago for pianonoise.com, for which I played what at one time was thought to be the first handful of pieces the young Mozart ever wrote, all of 4 or 5 years old. If you'd like to catch up on them, here they are. The first one is the longest, and the rest are less than a minute each. The third one is actually given the title "Allegro" (fast and/or happy) and the rest are Minuets.
Mozart: Five pieces
notice how tame and pretty they are. You may have heard one of them before if you or some little person you know has taken piano lessons. But I'll bet they didn't go around playing the one that you're going to hear next.
That's because, apparently, Mozart wrote this one as an adult, after a gap of perhaps a couple of decades. That's because the K number which catalogs each work by Mozart is much higher. K, or Koechel numbers (named after the fellow who did all the work) are supposed to be chronological, in the order Mozart wrote the pieces. They are, however, largely guesswork, and several attempts have been made to revise the catalog as more research is done and better guessing is possible.
Based on that supposition this is supposed to be a much later work. And it certainly is quite a bit different. Not only does it stick out from the rest of Mozart's piano minuets (which, besides the ones you just heard, contain only a couple of sonata movements, and miscellaneous pieces; the man was not exactly a minuet cranking out machine the way, say, Haydn was. Each of his early piano sonatas contains a Minuet movement)--not only is it very different from the earlier pieces he wrote, but it doesn't sound like anything else in the Minuet genre, either. It is filled with strange dissonances, phrases that don't end up where you think they are going and various other pleasant or unpleasant surprises. Have a listen.
Minuet
See what I mean? What's that all about? Was he tired of writing to form? Trying a bit of musical rebellion? Experimenting a little? Who knows.
By the way, the reason there are two different "K" numbers there are that the original catalog placed the piece's composition much earlier than a later revision. That way you could describe the piece as a kind of mid-life crisis (which for Mozart was in his early twenties) or a later attempt to break the mold, contemporary with his last piano sonata and paving the way for his last, sublime works.
Or maybe he was just having a little fun one afternoon or pulling somebody's leg. I'll give him one thing. You don't need your nose to play all the notes in this one.
But that's for another rainy day.
Monday, October 7, 2013
The Big 3 - 0....0.
Johann Ludwig Krebs turns 300 years old sometime this week.
Are you wondering who that is? (Hey, if there's cake, don't ask....)
Mr. Krebs was a student of a fellow named Johann Sebastian Bach. If you haven't at least heard of Mr. Bach I assume you've been living in a cave or were raised by wolves or both. Or that the aliens just put you back. Krebs, on the other hand, appears to have had some difficulty in securing recognition in life, on his way to becoming a composer whose name I had seen before in my reading but whose music I had never played until a couple of weeks ago when fellow organist and blogger Vidas Pinkevicius mentioned the upcoming anniversary. So don't feel too bad if the name doesn't ring bells for you.
Besides, that means I can introduce you to something new. In the process of investigating Mr. Krebs' legacy I can currently share with you several pieces based on Lutheran Chorale melodies which one generally assumes were written in connection with Krebs' job as a church organist. Krebs himself had a good bit of difficulty getting such a job, according to The Wikipedia, which I shamefacedly confess has been my only source of research to this point. When he actually did get a job, he got paid only in food to feed his family, in lieu of an actual salary. (By the way, getting part of your salary in foodstuffs was actually quite common at the time, although there was generally also a reasonable amount of money involved as well.)
Since I myself am a church organist, and with better luck than Mr. Krebs, apparently, in that I have a job and it pays actual money, I've chosen to play a handful of these works in my church over the next couple of weeks. I've also done what might seem like an odd thing and gone and prepared these works to perform on the piano. Since Monday is generally a day for listening to piano music on this blog that makes it just about perfect.
But why the piano? The beast was only invented about 1700. That means that Krebs probably had heard of one, and may have seen one (his teacher, Bach, tested an early prototype, and later on became a kind of sales rep for an associate who built them), but it's not very likely that he had one at home or was thoroughly acquainted with this newfangled instrument. Besides, these pieces are liturgical in nature, probably meant for church, and that means the organ, because in Europe in the 18th century pianos certainly did not live in churches.
Well, about that....being the impatient type, and with a lot to do these days, I found some scores at everybody's favorite website, the International Score Library Project, printed them out, and, being at home at the time, promptly went to my piano to try them out rather than waiting until I got to church. The first thing I noticed is that they don't have a pedal part. And that they can be played rather easily on one keyboard, so they work very well on the piano. They also sound very nicely on a piano. I wondering if they would perhaps not sound so nicely on the organ. There are some rolled chords and other types of writing that make me wonder, even though I haven't tried them that way yet.
So I wonder, in my non professional-musicologist, not-completely-up-to-speed-on-all-the Krebs-literature way, whether they were in fact intended for the harpsichord, because in my mind's ear they would sound quite well on the that instrument, and also because if Mr. Krebs didn't hold a church position for a good portion of his life, that would mean he didn't have regular access to an organ, a predicament I have grown to appreciate through my wanderings on the web and the comments I have read therein. Did he have difficulty conceiving music that took advantage of this rather unique king of instruments, or did he want something he could play on instruments he had access to? (By the way, the rather secular-minded non-organist-virtuoso Telemann also did not seem too wrapped up in conceiving his chorale-based pieces for the organ, although they do steer clear of specifically non-organistic things; they simply have no pedal parts and are short and uninvolved.)
These speculations will lead me to a rather unpopular conclusion in another week or so when I discuss the provenance of a set of short Preludes and Fugues I'll be playing the last week of October. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, here are a few very nice pieces by that student of Bach. Notice the chorale tune doesn't figure prominently at all in some of them. In others, those that seem to have two parts (most of them actually have three parts in the score, but in some cases I am only playing the first, and in others the first two, parts) a solemn, quarter note melody comes in only in the second verse. In the third part, the hymn tune is played like it would be sung in church. I wonder why he did that. At any rate, you can enjoy the music without being steeped in the tunes.
Krebs: selections from the first part of his Klavier Ubung (Keyboard Notebook):
Sei Lob und Ehr dem hochsten Gut Praise and Honor be to the Most High
Vater unser im Himmelreich Our Father in Heaven
Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan What God does is done well
Jesu, meine Freude Jesus my Joy
Are you wondering who that is? (Hey, if there's cake, don't ask....)
Mr. Krebs was a student of a fellow named Johann Sebastian Bach. If you haven't at least heard of Mr. Bach I assume you've been living in a cave or were raised by wolves or both. Or that the aliens just put you back. Krebs, on the other hand, appears to have had some difficulty in securing recognition in life, on his way to becoming a composer whose name I had seen before in my reading but whose music I had never played until a couple of weeks ago when fellow organist and blogger Vidas Pinkevicius mentioned the upcoming anniversary. So don't feel too bad if the name doesn't ring bells for you.
Besides, that means I can introduce you to something new. In the process of investigating Mr. Krebs' legacy I can currently share with you several pieces based on Lutheran Chorale melodies which one generally assumes were written in connection with Krebs' job as a church organist. Krebs himself had a good bit of difficulty getting such a job, according to The Wikipedia, which I shamefacedly confess has been my only source of research to this point. When he actually did get a job, he got paid only in food to feed his family, in lieu of an actual salary. (By the way, getting part of your salary in foodstuffs was actually quite common at the time, although there was generally also a reasonable amount of money involved as well.)
Since I myself am a church organist, and with better luck than Mr. Krebs, apparently, in that I have a job and it pays actual money, I've chosen to play a handful of these works in my church over the next couple of weeks. I've also done what might seem like an odd thing and gone and prepared these works to perform on the piano. Since Monday is generally a day for listening to piano music on this blog that makes it just about perfect.
But why the piano? The beast was only invented about 1700. That means that Krebs probably had heard of one, and may have seen one (his teacher, Bach, tested an early prototype, and later on became a kind of sales rep for an associate who built them), but it's not very likely that he had one at home or was thoroughly acquainted with this newfangled instrument. Besides, these pieces are liturgical in nature, probably meant for church, and that means the organ, because in Europe in the 18th century pianos certainly did not live in churches.
Well, about that....being the impatient type, and with a lot to do these days, I found some scores at everybody's favorite website, the International Score Library Project, printed them out, and, being at home at the time, promptly went to my piano to try them out rather than waiting until I got to church. The first thing I noticed is that they don't have a pedal part. And that they can be played rather easily on one keyboard, so they work very well on the piano. They also sound very nicely on a piano. I wondering if they would perhaps not sound so nicely on the organ. There are some rolled chords and other types of writing that make me wonder, even though I haven't tried them that way yet.
So I wonder, in my non professional-musicologist, not-completely-up-to-speed-on-all-the Krebs-literature way, whether they were in fact intended for the harpsichord, because in my mind's ear they would sound quite well on the that instrument, and also because if Mr. Krebs didn't hold a church position for a good portion of his life, that would mean he didn't have regular access to an organ, a predicament I have grown to appreciate through my wanderings on the web and the comments I have read therein. Did he have difficulty conceiving music that took advantage of this rather unique king of instruments, or did he want something he could play on instruments he had access to? (By the way, the rather secular-minded non-organist-virtuoso Telemann also did not seem too wrapped up in conceiving his chorale-based pieces for the organ, although they do steer clear of specifically non-organistic things; they simply have no pedal parts and are short and uninvolved.)
These speculations will lead me to a rather unpopular conclusion in another week or so when I discuss the provenance of a set of short Preludes and Fugues I'll be playing the last week of October. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, here are a few very nice pieces by that student of Bach. Notice the chorale tune doesn't figure prominently at all in some of them. In others, those that seem to have two parts (most of them actually have three parts in the score, but in some cases I am only playing the first, and in others the first two, parts) a solemn, quarter note melody comes in only in the second verse. In the third part, the hymn tune is played like it would be sung in church. I wonder why he did that. At any rate, you can enjoy the music without being steeped in the tunes.
Krebs: selections from the first part of his Klavier Ubung (Keyboard Notebook):
Sei Lob und Ehr dem hochsten Gut Praise and Honor be to the Most High
Vater unser im Himmelreich Our Father in Heaven
Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan What God does is done well
Jesu, meine Freude Jesus my Joy
Monday, July 1, 2013
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!
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:
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!
Monday, May 20, 2013
My New Favorite Fugue
I had a teacher once who said that her favorite piece by x composer was whatever she was working on at the time. In that spirit, last week I developed a new favorite.
If you, as a devotee of classical music, feel the need to cultivate your silly side (and you probably could use it) this might help.
On the other hand, if you haven't listened to copious amounts of classical music and are not, say, a doctor of listenology, this could also be the very thing. Particularly because it's a fugue, and, because the composer cheats a little.
Fugues are not easy things to get your ears around. Several things are happening at once, and our ears aren't really designed for that. Most of our music is built on predictable patterns with a lot of repetition so that we really only have to absorb one important thing at a time. But, in classical music, and particularly in fugue, there are three, four, maybe five lines vying for our attention all at once.
But not in this case.
Dietrich Buxtehude (who had a very cool name) wrote a fugue with a very silly theme (or "subject," as we call it in the biz). This is the first thing worth mentioning. A fugue is often thought of as a very dignified sub-genre of a very dignified genre of a very dignified style of music. Very. Dignified.
And. This. Isn't.
To me it sounds like a bird call. Now these are very polite, Baroque birds, you understand. Not like the real life birds who got into a fight next to pipe room while I was getting ready to record this. Very civilized. Under those circumstances, you won't mind if I give you the birds for about four minutes.
Now a fugue likes to get going by introducing its subject matter in one voice at a time. First the one by itself, and then as each voice enters the others keep going. But not in this case. Mr. B. has written several rests in the middle of this theme, as you'll note.When the second voice comes in, it enters into a very civilized dialogue with the first one. Nobody is speaking at once; in fact, you have to really be paying attention to separate the new voice that is now carry the theme from the one which fills in all of the silent spaces in between each of those bird calls. It sounds like one voice with a lot to say, but it is really two alternating rapidly. Even when all of those voices are sounding at once, they aren't really sounding at once. Instead, Buxtehude sticks his "counter subject" materials in the gaps created by that stuttering bird.
[listen]
[listen]
The effect of all this is that, instead of actually multitasking, we can quickly shift our focus from one, solo voice to another group of voices and back. Which, I hope, will make this an easy fugue to listen to. All you have to keep track of is that silly bird call, and the little amen trio that follows it and you'll have at least half the material in your head already. And it's fun to listen to. Technically, I think he's cheating.
And with the mobile part for the feet, I got to dance around a bit, too, which was also quite a bit of fun. Sorry it's not on video. Just know that the lowest voice you hear (I used a medium length stop so it isn't really in the basement, it's just a light 8 foot flute) is being played in the pedals.
Enjoy your birds. The fugue portion begins at 2:26; I thought I'd include the prelude as well (no extra charge) which could well be an evocation of spring (note the written out acceleration around 1:33-:1:53)
Monday, May 6, 2013
Now and Again
In contrast to the last four Mondays on this blog, in which a little music furnished a lot of commentary (Schumann's "Of Strange Lands and People, which is about 90 seconds if you repeat both halves; the first blog was all about one chord), today I'm going to offer more music and say only a bit about it.
Gabriel Fauré wrote 13 beautiful Nocturnes for the piano, of which this is the fourth. I want you to pay particular attention to the simple tune at the beginning. Often, in classical music, the opening tune functions a bit like a topic sentence in an essay. It tells us what the piece is going to be about, and as the tune returns, it is transformed, re-imagined, varied. If you lose sight of that tune you miss a lot of what happens later. It can be like knowing the principal character in a play or novel; watching what happens to that person under different circumstances, and how they are able to cope, or not.
In this piece, except for some very subtle similarities, the opening tune really doesn't seem to play that much of a role in what follows. Instead we are treated to several different musical ideas, and the whole vast emotional arc of the piece unfolds in its absence.
But in the end, the tune returns. It is the same melody, and virtually the same accompaniment. Or is it?
My question to you is, after listening to all of what happens in the middle, does it still sound like the same tune? Does it feel the same?
Architecturally, the piece is balanced. What we hear at the beginning is what we hear at the end. But emotionally, does it go somewhere? Where?
I can't give you the definitive answer to this question, for two reasons: one is that everyone will hear this differently, and the other is that, as delicious an emotion as the return of the melody provides for me, I can't describe it.
Fauré: Nocturne no. 4 in Eb
Gabriel Fauré wrote 13 beautiful Nocturnes for the piano, of which this is the fourth. I want you to pay particular attention to the simple tune at the beginning. Often, in classical music, the opening tune functions a bit like a topic sentence in an essay. It tells us what the piece is going to be about, and as the tune returns, it is transformed, re-imagined, varied. If you lose sight of that tune you miss a lot of what happens later. It can be like knowing the principal character in a play or novel; watching what happens to that person under different circumstances, and how they are able to cope, or not.
In this piece, except for some very subtle similarities, the opening tune really doesn't seem to play that much of a role in what follows. Instead we are treated to several different musical ideas, and the whole vast emotional arc of the piece unfolds in its absence.
But in the end, the tune returns. It is the same melody, and virtually the same accompaniment. Or is it?
My question to you is, after listening to all of what happens in the middle, does it still sound like the same tune? Does it feel the same?
Architecturally, the piece is balanced. What we hear at the beginning is what we hear at the end. But emotionally, does it go somewhere? Where?
I can't give you the definitive answer to this question, for two reasons: one is that everyone will hear this differently, and the other is that, as delicious an emotion as the return of the melody provides for me, I can't describe it.
Fauré: Nocturne no. 4 in Eb
Monday, April 29, 2013
The Beauty of Interpretation
This is part four of a four part series, all concerned with Robert Schumann's
"Of Strange Lands and People" from "Scenes from Childhood." The first three parts can be accessed here, here, and here.
It's astonishing what one can discover in one short, simple piece of music. For the last three Mondays, that piece has been the first movement of Robert Schumann's "Scenes from Childhood." If you're getting a little tired of it, I promise we'll move on to something else next week! In fact, last week's third installment in what has become now a four part series was supposed to be the last one. But something odd happened last week while I was posting the last one and I had to talk about it.
Things didn't quite work out the way I had planned.
I ask people to use their ears on this blog, at least on Mondays (and sometimes Fridays) which is a dicey business. Some folks probably think they can't hear anything with their untrained ears, and, sure enough, as soon as they can't hear what I'm talking about it confirms them in their notions. Obviously all ears aren't created equal and it certainly takes practice to be able to hear well. That's point number one. Point B (as people like to continue) is that there are plenty of strengths and weaknesses in all of us: things we would be good at hearing and things we aren't. So if you can't follow the argument one week you can always stick around until either you get it, or I explain it better, or we go on to something you can pick up on with more ease, or just music you happen to like. Music is a mighty ocean, not a small pond.
And then there is the self-defeating example I posted last week. The point I was trying to make is that Mr. Schumann did something rather strange, even barbaric sounding, by omitting a particular note (the third of the chord) in one place. But when I listened to my own music example, I couldn't help thinking, well, that doesn't sound all that rude after all.
I have a busy schedule like all of you, and sometimes I record things weeks before I get them posted. And frequently, I make those recordings without taking the time I would like to to live with the music and interpret it in a way that convinces me, and hopefully you. Instead, I have to parse the musical contents on the fly. And apparently, what I decided to do in that spot, when I heard Schumann's "barbarism" was to soft pedal it. I made it as pretty as I could. I slowed down just a bit, and resolved the chord with as much finesse as I knew how. It worked rather well. Except it wasn't supposed to, not after I changed my mind about it!
This is the fascinating world of interpretation. A musician plays a passage the way it seems to him or her. And then the audience feels the passage the way the musician conceives it. Which might not be the way the composer felt it; for that matter, maybe the audience doesn't end up feeling it the same way, either. But the reason no two pianists play something exactly the same way has a lot to do with these myriads of tiny decisions that pianists make every moment about how every phrase contributes to the whole, and how it strikes them in the moment. Sure, the composer leaves plenty of instruction on the page, but they can't cover everything--not nearly.
So, in the moment, that rude chord (why did Schumann put it there?) became gentle just because I decided to be "musical" (which, I am afraid, is code for making everything sound pretty). I wonder if I betrayed the composer a little.
Leon Fleischer has a phrase, "support the composer," which means not to shortchange features in a composition: if anything, exaggerate them slightly (can you do that? Anyway, that unfortunate cataract of words is my own, not his). Don't cheat on the long notes, or the sudden dynamic changes--let everything have its full effect. Maybe I violated this rule.
Then there was the second musical example. I noticed afterward that I hadn't really put the fermata (that musical "full stop") in the right place. Schumann holds on to the pretty G major chord first, and only then pollutes it with an A that doesn't belong, on its way to a passing C that doesn't belong either. The effect might be one of poise and repose which is then slowly exploded, but just before it manages to get out of hand, order is restored in the next phrase. The question is, how messy is that moment?
That's an interesting question for me because I imagine a lot of pianists saw a lot of ugliness in many early 20th century compositions, and that glaring "modernism" (or were they just supporting the composers? :) might have helped audiences tag them as pieces they'd rather avoid from now on. And yet, some of those same ugly harmonies, when finessed by today's jazz pianists, don't sound that shocking at all. Obviously, interpretation has a lot to do with how one perceives a piece. And that gives the interpreter a lot of power.
Mr. Schumann also asked that the tempo be slowed down at that point so that whatever chaos has crept in can do it in slow motion, but, true to form, he never actually tells us when to resume the regular tempo. Is it because he assumes any idiot will know to get back into the regular tempo when the next phrase begins (standard practice, but most other composers put the "a tempo" in anyway at that point)? Or was he thinking something else. With Schumann, who knows?
(aside: Fleischer once dodged the issue when I asked him a question about some dynamic marks in a Schumann sonata by putting it to the whole class, rhetorically of course!)
Anyhow, by the time I get a chance to record the whole set later this spring I hope to spend enough time with it to come up with my own definitive (provisional) answers to some of these questions. Posting a bit of it untimely ripped helps in the process of figuring these things out. And now you know the kinds of things that keep some of us up nights.
Hey, whatever I can do to make you feel normal!
"Of Strange Lands and People" from "Scenes from Childhood." The first three parts can be accessed here, here, and here.
It's astonishing what one can discover in one short, simple piece of music. For the last three Mondays, that piece has been the first movement of Robert Schumann's "Scenes from Childhood." If you're getting a little tired of it, I promise we'll move on to something else next week! In fact, last week's third installment in what has become now a four part series was supposed to be the last one. But something odd happened last week while I was posting the last one and I had to talk about it.
Things didn't quite work out the way I had planned.
I ask people to use their ears on this blog, at least on Mondays (and sometimes Fridays) which is a dicey business. Some folks probably think they can't hear anything with their untrained ears, and, sure enough, as soon as they can't hear what I'm talking about it confirms them in their notions. Obviously all ears aren't created equal and it certainly takes practice to be able to hear well. That's point number one. Point B (as people like to continue) is that there are plenty of strengths and weaknesses in all of us: things we would be good at hearing and things we aren't. So if you can't follow the argument one week you can always stick around until either you get it, or I explain it better, or we go on to something you can pick up on with more ease, or just music you happen to like. Music is a mighty ocean, not a small pond.
And then there is the self-defeating example I posted last week. The point I was trying to make is that Mr. Schumann did something rather strange, even barbaric sounding, by omitting a particular note (the third of the chord) in one place. But when I listened to my own music example, I couldn't help thinking, well, that doesn't sound all that rude after all.
I have a busy schedule like all of you, and sometimes I record things weeks before I get them posted. And frequently, I make those recordings without taking the time I would like to to live with the music and interpret it in a way that convinces me, and hopefully you. Instead, I have to parse the musical contents on the fly. And apparently, what I decided to do in that spot, when I heard Schumann's "barbarism" was to soft pedal it. I made it as pretty as I could. I slowed down just a bit, and resolved the chord with as much finesse as I knew how. It worked rather well. Except it wasn't supposed to, not after I changed my mind about it!
This is the fascinating world of interpretation. A musician plays a passage the way it seems to him or her. And then the audience feels the passage the way the musician conceives it. Which might not be the way the composer felt it; for that matter, maybe the audience doesn't end up feeling it the same way, either. But the reason no two pianists play something exactly the same way has a lot to do with these myriads of tiny decisions that pianists make every moment about how every phrase contributes to the whole, and how it strikes them in the moment. Sure, the composer leaves plenty of instruction on the page, but they can't cover everything--not nearly.
So, in the moment, that rude chord (why did Schumann put it there?) became gentle just because I decided to be "musical" (which, I am afraid, is code for making everything sound pretty). I wonder if I betrayed the composer a little.
Leon Fleischer has a phrase, "support the composer," which means not to shortchange features in a composition: if anything, exaggerate them slightly (can you do that? Anyway, that unfortunate cataract of words is my own, not his). Don't cheat on the long notes, or the sudden dynamic changes--let everything have its full effect. Maybe I violated this rule.
Then there was the second musical example. I noticed afterward that I hadn't really put the fermata (that musical "full stop") in the right place. Schumann holds on to the pretty G major chord first, and only then pollutes it with an A that doesn't belong, on its way to a passing C that doesn't belong either. The effect might be one of poise and repose which is then slowly exploded, but just before it manages to get out of hand, order is restored in the next phrase. The question is, how messy is that moment?
That's an interesting question for me because I imagine a lot of pianists saw a lot of ugliness in many early 20th century compositions, and that glaring "modernism" (or were they just supporting the composers? :) might have helped audiences tag them as pieces they'd rather avoid from now on. And yet, some of those same ugly harmonies, when finessed by today's jazz pianists, don't sound that shocking at all. Obviously, interpretation has a lot to do with how one perceives a piece. And that gives the interpreter a lot of power.
Mr. Schumann also asked that the tempo be slowed down at that point so that whatever chaos has crept in can do it in slow motion, but, true to form, he never actually tells us when to resume the regular tempo. Is it because he assumes any idiot will know to get back into the regular tempo when the next phrase begins (standard practice, but most other composers put the "a tempo" in anyway at that point)? Or was he thinking something else. With Schumann, who knows?
(aside: Fleischer once dodged the issue when I asked him a question about some dynamic marks in a Schumann sonata by putting it to the whole class, rhetorically of course!)
Anyhow, by the time I get a chance to record the whole set later this spring I hope to spend enough time with it to come up with my own definitive (provisional) answers to some of these questions. Posting a bit of it untimely ripped helps in the process of figuring these things out. And now you know the kinds of things that keep some of us up nights.
Hey, whatever I can do to make you feel normal!
Monday, April 15, 2013
The power of the obvious
Famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger would tell her composition students, "Never strain to avoid the obvious."
I've always felt the key word there is strain. Despite getting bombarded daily with all the advice to keep things simple and to "just be yourself" (which might not be the same thing) and not to use 50 cent words when a penny word will do just as well because otherwise you are necessarily being pretentious, it seems to me a composer who only deals in the blatantly obvious ought to be writing greeting cards or making chitchat about the weather at parties, not stringing musical cliches together. We won't remember them anyhow.
But there is something effective about telling us what we already know, grounding us, reminding us of something obvious and important, if it is done well.
Last week I spent the entire blog post discussing the first movement of Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood. I noted how he took this melody and harmonized the first upward leap in an unusual and effective way. Schumann's fifty cent musical word turned out to rescue what would otherwise have been a serviceable but rather dull opening phrase, and instead turned it into a psychological portrait.
That is only half the story, however. Schumann managed to avoid harmonizing the high G with a plain old G major chord, but he didn't do it for long. The curious thing is that this short musical idea, with the opening leap to high G, occurs three times. The first two times the composers gives out that surprising diminished chord, full of tension. But the third time, he resorts to the perfectly obvious G major chord.
It is an odd strategy. You might expect a composer to do something obvious at first, and then save the musical surprise for later. Or if he starts with something we didn't see coming, to serve up something even more interesting once our ears had adjusted to the first wave. (Schumann builds the climax of the famous Träumerei, later in this set, on a chord that few composers would have even thought of.) Instead, just as the accumulated energy of three musical entreaties demands something really special, Schumann "settles" for the most obvious thing at hand, a garden variety tonic major chord.
It works. Here's why: the diminished chord Schumann uses the first two times is full of tension, such that the major chord on the third iteration comes as a glorious release. The other reason is that, as Theory 101 as that chord is, Schumann didn't actually use it the way it comes out of the box, with another G on the bottom. Instead he used a B, which means two things.
For one thing, he's dropped the bass lower, which means there is more distance between the top note and the bottom note. It is like a swimming pool getting deeper. The surface of the water stays at the same level; the bottom drops. The effect of this is a musical illusion: it sounds as if Schumann's melody note has gone higher, which is what you'd expect. If you are going to say something three times, ordinarily, on the third time, your upward leap will expand, not stay where it was. Schumann leaves it right where it was and moves the bass down instead. He hasn't moved the characters, he's moved the scenery!
The other thing that results from choosing a B in the bass is that it keeps the piece moving forward. Theory students learn about notes called "tendency tones" which set up musical incompleteness that needs to be fulfilled by moving to another note. It is as if I had said "I am going to the." The sentence isn't over. You expect a noun like "hospital" or "bodega" or "avocado farm" to complete the thought.
Schumann completes the thought by finally changing the melody, and giving us an important structural, load-bearing C major chord, which turns the phrase homeward and makes this little piece work so well.
Schumann may have experienced all of this as a flash of insight, but he wasn't unaware. The difference between genius and the ordinary isn't that one feels while the other thinks, as popular as that notion is, but that genius processes all of that decision making much faster. Unpacking it can take hours!
Next Monday we'll probably spend one more week with this fascinating little piece, and then I'll give you more music and less analysis for a while. It's not easy to slog through, I agree. But it does give us an idea of why some music is worth remembering long after the demise of its composer.
Schumann, Scenes from Childhood: Of Strange Lands and People
I've always felt the key word there is strain. Despite getting bombarded daily with all the advice to keep things simple and to "just be yourself" (which might not be the same thing) and not to use 50 cent words when a penny word will do just as well because otherwise you are necessarily being pretentious, it seems to me a composer who only deals in the blatantly obvious ought to be writing greeting cards or making chitchat about the weather at parties, not stringing musical cliches together. We won't remember them anyhow.
But there is something effective about telling us what we already know, grounding us, reminding us of something obvious and important, if it is done well.
Last week I spent the entire blog post discussing the first movement of Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood. I noted how he took this melody and harmonized the first upward leap in an unusual and effective way. Schumann's fifty cent musical word turned out to rescue what would otherwise have been a serviceable but rather dull opening phrase, and instead turned it into a psychological portrait.
That is only half the story, however. Schumann managed to avoid harmonizing the high G with a plain old G major chord, but he didn't do it for long. The curious thing is that this short musical idea, with the opening leap to high G, occurs three times. The first two times the composers gives out that surprising diminished chord, full of tension. But the third time, he resorts to the perfectly obvious G major chord.
It is an odd strategy. You might expect a composer to do something obvious at first, and then save the musical surprise for later. Or if he starts with something we didn't see coming, to serve up something even more interesting once our ears had adjusted to the first wave. (Schumann builds the climax of the famous Träumerei, later in this set, on a chord that few composers would have even thought of.) Instead, just as the accumulated energy of three musical entreaties demands something really special, Schumann "settles" for the most obvious thing at hand, a garden variety tonic major chord.
It works. Here's why: the diminished chord Schumann uses the first two times is full of tension, such that the major chord on the third iteration comes as a glorious release. The other reason is that, as Theory 101 as that chord is, Schumann didn't actually use it the way it comes out of the box, with another G on the bottom. Instead he used a B, which means two things.
For one thing, he's dropped the bass lower, which means there is more distance between the top note and the bottom note. It is like a swimming pool getting deeper. The surface of the water stays at the same level; the bottom drops. The effect of this is a musical illusion: it sounds as if Schumann's melody note has gone higher, which is what you'd expect. If you are going to say something three times, ordinarily, on the third time, your upward leap will expand, not stay where it was. Schumann leaves it right where it was and moves the bass down instead. He hasn't moved the characters, he's moved the scenery!
The other thing that results from choosing a B in the bass is that it keeps the piece moving forward. Theory students learn about notes called "tendency tones" which set up musical incompleteness that needs to be fulfilled by moving to another note. It is as if I had said "I am going to the." The sentence isn't over. You expect a noun like "hospital" or "bodega" or "avocado farm" to complete the thought.
Schumann completes the thought by finally changing the melody, and giving us an important structural, load-bearing C major chord, which turns the phrase homeward and makes this little piece work so well.
Schumann may have experienced all of this as a flash of insight, but he wasn't unaware. The difference between genius and the ordinary isn't that one feels while the other thinks, as popular as that notion is, but that genius processes all of that decision making much faster. Unpacking it can take hours!
Next Monday we'll probably spend one more week with this fascinating little piece, and then I'll give you more music and less analysis for a while. It's not easy to slog through, I agree. But it does give us an idea of why some music is worth remembering long after the demise of its composer.
Schumann, Scenes from Childhood: Of Strange Lands and People
Friday, April 12, 2013
A bit of listening for the C and E crowd
The other day while making sure my link for the most recent sound file posting worked, I stuck around and listened to the piece ahead of it in the catalog for old time's sake and had an idea.
The following links will allow you to listen to two organ pieces by Michael Praetorius, one of which was written for Christmas, and the other for Easter. Both come from a collection he published in 1609 of seven organ settings of hymns for the church year. They happen to be two of my favorite pieces of his, particularly the Christmas one. They might also be illuminating. If you aren't familiar with the organ works of Praetorius, listening to both of them might help you get some sense of the composer's musical personality. It's pleasing sometimes to be able to say, oh yes, that sounds just like him, the way you might say about an old friend.
But it isn't just Praetorius speaking through these pieces. In fact, back during the Renaissance, many a musicologist will tell you, individuality in composition wasn't so treasured as it is now, so much of what you are hearing has more to do with how everybody was doing it than just how he was doing it.
I wonder about that; I don't know vast quantities of music from the period myself, but he does seem to have his own musical methods. Maybe it's just me. Perception is an interesting thing.
Anyhow, Christmas and Easter are, by general acclaim, the two highlights of the church year. One curiosity you might notice about these selections is that they are both in a minor mode, and have a certain amount of solemnity about them. Not that all of that was the composer's choice.
Both of these are based on ancient hymns of the church. The hymns themselves occur in the bottom voice, and move more slowly than the parts up above, which is a good way not to really notice them (and get lots of complaints from clergy!). And they happen to be in minor themselves. Church holidays tended to be dignified affairs. Note that Christmas wasn't yet about Santa Claus and presents, and the Easter bunny wasn't hiding eggs.
Still, there is enough joy in the proceedings. Notice how Praetorius likes to shoot up and down the scale, particularly toward the end of both pieces. In true Renaissance fashion, they both tend to start with longer notes, and accelerate note values so that they save all of their rushing around for the finale. Praetorius doesn't tend to do this much in the remaining pieces in his hymn settings for the organ; these are particularly joyous occasions.
Happy Christmas and Merry Easter.
Summo Parenti Gloria
Vita Sanctorum
The following links will allow you to listen to two organ pieces by Michael Praetorius, one of which was written for Christmas, and the other for Easter. Both come from a collection he published in 1609 of seven organ settings of hymns for the church year. They happen to be two of my favorite pieces of his, particularly the Christmas one. They might also be illuminating. If you aren't familiar with the organ works of Praetorius, listening to both of them might help you get some sense of the composer's musical personality. It's pleasing sometimes to be able to say, oh yes, that sounds just like him, the way you might say about an old friend.
But it isn't just Praetorius speaking through these pieces. In fact, back during the Renaissance, many a musicologist will tell you, individuality in composition wasn't so treasured as it is now, so much of what you are hearing has more to do with how everybody was doing it than just how he was doing it.
I wonder about that; I don't know vast quantities of music from the period myself, but he does seem to have his own musical methods. Maybe it's just me. Perception is an interesting thing.
Anyhow, Christmas and Easter are, by general acclaim, the two highlights of the church year. One curiosity you might notice about these selections is that they are both in a minor mode, and have a certain amount of solemnity about them. Not that all of that was the composer's choice.
Both of these are based on ancient hymns of the church. The hymns themselves occur in the bottom voice, and move more slowly than the parts up above, which is a good way not to really notice them (and get lots of complaints from clergy!). And they happen to be in minor themselves. Church holidays tended to be dignified affairs. Note that Christmas wasn't yet about Santa Claus and presents, and the Easter bunny wasn't hiding eggs.
Still, there is enough joy in the proceedings. Notice how Praetorius likes to shoot up and down the scale, particularly toward the end of both pieces. In true Renaissance fashion, they both tend to start with longer notes, and accelerate note values so that they save all of their rushing around for the finale. Praetorius doesn't tend to do this much in the remaining pieces in his hymn settings for the organ; these are particularly joyous occasions.
Happy Christmas and Merry Easter.
Summo Parenti Gloria
Vita Sanctorum
Monday, April 8, 2013
The Sound of Nostalgia
Sometimes on Listening Mondays we listen to an entire piece and I only say a little about it. Other times, we hone in on just a few small details, rather than a broad concept, or try to trace one from the other. At times, it is the broad sweep of the piece, perhaps its overall scheme that interests us.
Today's installment is about a single chord.
Let's listen first to Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood, a collection of 13 short pieces. Today I'm going to play for you the first piece, sometimes translated as "of strange lands and people."
Listen
It's a lovely piece; kind of wispy, perhaps, maybe sentimental. I don't know how well it captures childhood--it may have a bit too much of the adult-trying-to-remember-what-it-was-like quality, or rather, that latterday romanticized view we have of those glory days when we were small after the fact. Well, this is music from the Romantic Period, after all!
But how you hear, and what you hear, depends quite a bit on a very hard to define but powerful thing: the psychological, or emotional impact it makes on you. And for me, one powerful ingredient in that is that second chord.
Schumann's melody is very expressive; particularly that upward leap between the first two notes.
Listen
But that isn't all of it. If Schumann had had all of the imagination of the average conservatory student in first year theory, he probably would have stuck a good old G major chord under that second melody note. It is, after all, a G, and the most obvious thing to do is to harmonize a G with a G chord.
Listen
But how wrong would that be! Gone is the tug at the heart, the happysad pull of a memory you can't get back but remember with fondness, and a bit of pain because you are now and forever outside of it. And he does this all with one diminished chord.
Listen
Diminished chords were rather popular during the 19th century. The tension they created, and the ambiguous nature of their component parts (you can make them go in several directions quite easily) made them almost the musical discovery of the time. Later on these ineffable harmonies were vulgarized and made to provide cheap melodrama whenever the heroine got tied to the train tracks in silent movies. Someone is always trying to overload the senses the easiest way possible.
But Schumann isn't trying to play with our pulse. Instead, with a simple musical brushstroke, he reminds us at once of a moment of pleasant reminiscence and of its attendant pain. You can't go back; but you can remember.
Today's installment is about a single chord.
Let's listen first to Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood, a collection of 13 short pieces. Today I'm going to play for you the first piece, sometimes translated as "of strange lands and people."
Listen
It's a lovely piece; kind of wispy, perhaps, maybe sentimental. I don't know how well it captures childhood--it may have a bit too much of the adult-trying-to-remember-what-it-was-like quality, or rather, that latterday romanticized view we have of those glory days when we were small after the fact. Well, this is music from the Romantic Period, after all!
But how you hear, and what you hear, depends quite a bit on a very hard to define but powerful thing: the psychological, or emotional impact it makes on you. And for me, one powerful ingredient in that is that second chord.
Schumann's melody is very expressive; particularly that upward leap between the first two notes.
Listen
But that isn't all of it. If Schumann had had all of the imagination of the average conservatory student in first year theory, he probably would have stuck a good old G major chord under that second melody note. It is, after all, a G, and the most obvious thing to do is to harmonize a G with a G chord.
Listen
But how wrong would that be! Gone is the tug at the heart, the happysad pull of a memory you can't get back but remember with fondness, and a bit of pain because you are now and forever outside of it. And he does this all with one diminished chord.
Listen
Diminished chords were rather popular during the 19th century. The tension they created, and the ambiguous nature of their component parts (you can make them go in several directions quite easily) made them almost the musical discovery of the time. Later on these ineffable harmonies were vulgarized and made to provide cheap melodrama whenever the heroine got tied to the train tracks in silent movies. Someone is always trying to overload the senses the easiest way possible.
But Schumann isn't trying to play with our pulse. Instead, with a simple musical brushstroke, he reminds us at once of a moment of pleasant reminiscence and of its attendant pain. You can't go back; but you can remember.
Monday, March 25, 2013
A Musical Mountain (conclusion)
This is the conclusion to a six-part series. If you're new here, you can catch up with the first five parts of the series here: one two three four five.
The idea has been to take us all through a large piece of music, a part at a time, discussing various aspects of the composition as we went. I suppose some of us would just rather listen to the piece itself without all the preliminary discussion: in that case, you'll like today's installment, in which I simply post a recording of the entire piece.
Why the build up? As I said at the beginning, a musician spends a great deal of time studying any piece of music he or she performs, particularly if it is of unusual artistic merit. There are always things to learn, secrets of uncover, ways of hearing things that we didn't notice before. But for non-musicians there is seldom time to do this, and rarely do people encourage this approach anyway. You are just supposed to listen and pick up whatever you can at the time. The odd thing about this is that it is upside down. The professional concert givers have spent all kinds of time listening to the music--why would we expect the amateur concert goer to be able to figure it all out on the fly?
It reminds me of a story an old pastor of mine told while I was growing up. His family had just hiked up a mountain trail and were enjoying the view. It seemed tremendous; not only an accomplishment to be at the summit, but also greatly rewarding with a spectacular view. Then another family drove up in a car. They got out, tired, bored, looked around for 30 seconds, got back in the car, still looking uninterested, and left. The journey had apparently made all the difference.
Similarly, you can hear things, and then you can hear things. A major part of the artist's job is to try to get people to notice things around them. Otherwise you can be surrounded by the greatest inheritance and not enjoy any of it. Just the way a musical climax can be the final link in a great struggle or a great story, or it can simply be a bunch of loud sounds which may (or may not) be thrilling nonetheless, to the senses, but maybe not the mind or the soul. And if the music goes on for very long you are more likely to start looking at your watch under those conditions.
So for whatever naivete or misguided remarks of which I am guilty, that was the plan--really being able to hear things in the music because you've heard some of the parts and you know they are there. And to experience the journey as we make our way through the whole thing, part by part. And now we stand on the summit. For me, the final two minutes of this epic piece cause a greater thrill because I know how we got there, and what we're hearing. Of course, this is just a broad outline of the piece. We could easily spend six more blogs on it, and maybe someday we will. But there are other pieces in the musical firmament, many of them written for the piano, and I promise to actually return to the piano literature now that this series is over.
Having said all that, here is the complete recording of Cesar Franck's Choral no. 3 in A Minor for organ, which I made last Thursday. I was pretty worn out already from a long series of Lenten music, and the piece is still new to me. Nevertheless, I think it turned out pretty well. Now, for the rest of my natural life I can continue to study this piece and come to new insights and achieve new levels of comfort and fluidity in the playing as well. Enjoy the last leg of the journey, and thank you for reading, and listening.
Franck: Choral no. 3 in A Minor
The idea has been to take us all through a large piece of music, a part at a time, discussing various aspects of the composition as we went. I suppose some of us would just rather listen to the piece itself without all the preliminary discussion: in that case, you'll like today's installment, in which I simply post a recording of the entire piece.
Why the build up? As I said at the beginning, a musician spends a great deal of time studying any piece of music he or she performs, particularly if it is of unusual artistic merit. There are always things to learn, secrets of uncover, ways of hearing things that we didn't notice before. But for non-musicians there is seldom time to do this, and rarely do people encourage this approach anyway. You are just supposed to listen and pick up whatever you can at the time. The odd thing about this is that it is upside down. The professional concert givers have spent all kinds of time listening to the music--why would we expect the amateur concert goer to be able to figure it all out on the fly?
It reminds me of a story an old pastor of mine told while I was growing up. His family had just hiked up a mountain trail and were enjoying the view. It seemed tremendous; not only an accomplishment to be at the summit, but also greatly rewarding with a spectacular view. Then another family drove up in a car. They got out, tired, bored, looked around for 30 seconds, got back in the car, still looking uninterested, and left. The journey had apparently made all the difference.
Similarly, you can hear things, and then you can hear things. A major part of the artist's job is to try to get people to notice things around them. Otherwise you can be surrounded by the greatest inheritance and not enjoy any of it. Just the way a musical climax can be the final link in a great struggle or a great story, or it can simply be a bunch of loud sounds which may (or may not) be thrilling nonetheless, to the senses, but maybe not the mind or the soul. And if the music goes on for very long you are more likely to start looking at your watch under those conditions.
So for whatever naivete or misguided remarks of which I am guilty, that was the plan--really being able to hear things in the music because you've heard some of the parts and you know they are there. And to experience the journey as we make our way through the whole thing, part by part. And now we stand on the summit. For me, the final two minutes of this epic piece cause a greater thrill because I know how we got there, and what we're hearing. Of course, this is just a broad outline of the piece. We could easily spend six more blogs on it, and maybe someday we will. But there are other pieces in the musical firmament, many of them written for the piano, and I promise to actually return to the piano literature now that this series is over.
Having said all that, here is the complete recording of Cesar Franck's Choral no. 3 in A Minor for organ, which I made last Thursday. I was pretty worn out already from a long series of Lenten music, and the piece is still new to me. Nevertheless, I think it turned out pretty well. Now, for the rest of my natural life I can continue to study this piece and come to new insights and achieve new levels of comfort and fluidity in the playing as well. Enjoy the last leg of the journey, and thank you for reading, and listening.
Franck: Choral no. 3 in A Minor
Friday, March 22, 2013
A Musical Mountain (part five)
This is the fifth of a six part series on Cesar Frank's Choral no. 3 in A Minor for organ. The first four parts can be accessed here: one two three four
After introducing the various ideas present in the piece in the first three parts, part four began an account of what happens as the piece unfolds. We are currently right in the middle of it!
And now the thrilling denoument....
after building to an awesome climax at the end of the "slow movement" Franck immediately lets the music die away on a single low E so that it can build again. When he starts the gradual ascent, it is to a transformed version of that restless figure from the very opening of the piece to which he turns:
listen
As in so much Romantic period music, this piece progresses in waves. Large ones, like the five minute section through which we've just passed, and now a series of small ones, getting progressively louder:
listen
And as that wave builds, Franck calls on something else. A first time listener might not notice this when it went by so I'm going to underline it. Do you remember that "sacrificial suffering" theme from way back at the beginning of this series? Now hints of it begin to become enmeshed in the musical fabric.
listen
Often, when two such themes, the restless, dramatic one, and the tragic, lyric one, are opposed to one another, twin sides of the same piece of music but with vastly different profiles, it is a question of the dramatic machinery as to which one will win. Which theme will be left standing at the end, triumphant over the other one. Who gets the last word? And yet here a curious, sensational thing happens:
listen
both! together! And from a purely musical (architectural) perspective, why not? One, a slowly moving melody, the other really no melody at all, rather an accompaniment figure. One with very little motion, the other all motion. One taking nearly a minute to unfold, the other a protean cell that goes by in a second and can be transformed into any harmonic guise with ease. Why not? And just like that, the dramatic worldly theme and the 'love of God' theme collide head on, and yet neither is obliterated. If anything the dramatic theme is made to fit the progression of the other so that the Lordly tune can sing out above all else.
And then the wrenching conclusion. Because this is not a triumph--at least, not yet. The "suffering" theme still suffers, even though it is now grand and majestic. As the last lights go out in our sanctuary, the music this year will be loud, and awful. And right at the end, as the struggle reaches it apotheosis right on the last chord--it is finished--, we will be engulfed in darkness.
But it will be a major chord.
on Monday, I'll post a recording of the entire work. See you then!
After introducing the various ideas present in the piece in the first three parts, part four began an account of what happens as the piece unfolds. We are currently right in the middle of it!
And now the thrilling denoument....
after building to an awesome climax at the end of the "slow movement" Franck immediately lets the music die away on a single low E so that it can build again. When he starts the gradual ascent, it is to a transformed version of that restless figure from the very opening of the piece to which he turns:
listen
As in so much Romantic period music, this piece progresses in waves. Large ones, like the five minute section through which we've just passed, and now a series of small ones, getting progressively louder:
listen
And as that wave builds, Franck calls on something else. A first time listener might not notice this when it went by so I'm going to underline it. Do you remember that "sacrificial suffering" theme from way back at the beginning of this series? Now hints of it begin to become enmeshed in the musical fabric.
listen
Often, when two such themes, the restless, dramatic one, and the tragic, lyric one, are opposed to one another, twin sides of the same piece of music but with vastly different profiles, it is a question of the dramatic machinery as to which one will win. Which theme will be left standing at the end, triumphant over the other one. Who gets the last word? And yet here a curious, sensational thing happens:
listen
both! together! And from a purely musical (architectural) perspective, why not? One, a slowly moving melody, the other really no melody at all, rather an accompaniment figure. One with very little motion, the other all motion. One taking nearly a minute to unfold, the other a protean cell that goes by in a second and can be transformed into any harmonic guise with ease. Why not? And just like that, the dramatic worldly theme and the 'love of God' theme collide head on, and yet neither is obliterated. If anything the dramatic theme is made to fit the progression of the other so that the Lordly tune can sing out above all else.
And then the wrenching conclusion. Because this is not a triumph--at least, not yet. The "suffering" theme still suffers, even though it is now grand and majestic. As the last lights go out in our sanctuary, the music this year will be loud, and awful. And right at the end, as the struggle reaches it apotheosis right on the last chord--it is finished--, we will be engulfed in darkness.
But it will be a major chord.
on Monday, I'll post a recording of the entire work. See you then!
Monday, March 18, 2013
A Musical Mountain (part four)
Now that the thematic "characters" of this symphonic drama have been introduced in parts one, two and three of our six part series on Cesar Franck's epic organ Choral no. 3 in A Minor, let's get to the musical structure itself:, as the narrative unfolds:
We begin with an agitated, busy (almost violently so) theme, which, as we've observed, culminated in a very organistic buildup of sound.
listen
The tense silence (it is one of the loudest silences in the music literature) is broken by a repeat of the same agitated material, in a new key, along with the same crescendo--this time there is a sudden release, an evocation of something far away, and gradually the music subsides. At this point the soprano notes are headed downward (while the pedal bass rises to meet it)--it is the sonic buildup in reverse, both in volume and in the direction of the notes. Keep this in mind--we will hear it again, much later.
listen
Now that that short section has ended, we hear, for the first time, a melodious theme which would likely have been a preexisting chorale (or "hymn") tune (the piece, after all, is called a "Choral(e)") had not Mr. Franck written it himself, an unusual move for a piece with this kind of title.
listen
It is a beautiful, haunting melody, but apparently it is not enough to tame the forces that gave rise to the first theme. Instead of moving to a new place, musically, we start the process over again. The same agitated theme from the beginning takes the floor. It builds again, but not to a climax. Instead we hear:
listen
It is the same pleading melody from before, which does what most of us do when we think no one is listening to us and we have something important to say. It says it louder. Last time the score was marked mezzo forte--this time it is forte.
Now we are going to get a taste of what is to come. The agitated, dramatic figure returns, but this time it seems more frenetic because it has another melodic line with it. That line is almost a slowed down version of the agitated figure itself. (listen)--at least, it has the same melodic profile: It rises and falls similarly, but it is like an echo of the first--late and slow. Mr. Franck has provided his own compositional reverberation.
With the cumulative weight of three large-scale repetitions of the agitated figure surrounding two iterations of the pleading Choral theme, it must be time to develop something new. And, indeed, this is heralded by three more of those grand sonic build-up gestures we discussed in part two. Now the music crescendos to something we hope will be really grand.
I've heard several musicians tell me that they can't stand an unresolved 7th chord. At the risk of seeming like a very bad child, let's see how you get along until Friday, when we discuss the piece's exciting conclusion.
on to part five
We begin with an agitated, busy (almost violently so) theme, which, as we've observed, culminated in a very organistic buildup of sound.
listen
The tense silence (it is one of the loudest silences in the music literature) is broken by a repeat of the same agitated material, in a new key, along with the same crescendo--this time there is a sudden release, an evocation of something far away, and gradually the music subsides. At this point the soprano notes are headed downward (while the pedal bass rises to meet it)--it is the sonic buildup in reverse, both in volume and in the direction of the notes. Keep this in mind--we will hear it again, much later.
listen
Now that that short section has ended, we hear, for the first time, a melodious theme which would likely have been a preexisting chorale (or "hymn") tune (the piece, after all, is called a "Choral(e)") had not Mr. Franck written it himself, an unusual move for a piece with this kind of title.
listen
It is a beautiful, haunting melody, but apparently it is not enough to tame the forces that gave rise to the first theme. Instead of moving to a new place, musically, we start the process over again. The same agitated theme from the beginning takes the floor. It builds again, but not to a climax. Instead we hear:
listen
It is the same pleading melody from before, which does what most of us do when we think no one is listening to us and we have something important to say. It says it louder. Last time the score was marked mezzo forte--this time it is forte.
Now we are going to get a taste of what is to come. The agitated, dramatic figure returns, but this time it seems more frenetic because it has another melodic line with it. That line is almost a slowed down version of the agitated figure itself. (listen)--at least, it has the same melodic profile: It rises and falls similarly, but it is like an echo of the first--late and slow. Mr. Franck has provided his own compositional reverberation.
With the cumulative weight of three large-scale repetitions of the agitated figure surrounding two iterations of the pleading Choral theme, it must be time to develop something new. And, indeed, this is heralded by three more of those grand sonic build-up gestures we discussed in part two. Now the music crescendos to something we hope will be really grand.
I've heard several musicians tell me that they can't stand an unresolved 7th chord. At the risk of seeming like a very bad child, let's see how you get along until Friday, when we discuss the piece's exciting conclusion.
on to part five
Friday, March 15, 2013
A Musical Mountain (part three)
This is part three of a six-part series. Here are parts one and two.
I said on Monday that we were going to take a music detour. That's because after introducing the dramatic, tense opening theme and the subdued, lyrical theme and having them hold the floor for about five minutes, Franck give us an entirely different melody, with a different character, as a tender interlude during the middle of the large piece before hurtling on toward the majestic conclusion as the two earlier themes continue their opposite aims. Which one will dominate, we will wonder, as the tension builds.
But for now, a respite. And a chance for theological reflection. In past years on Palm-Passion Sunday at the conclusion of the service, I have played Marcel Dupre's Crucifixion movement from the Symphonie-Passion. Given the programmatic name, it is not surprising that it is a hair-raising, dramatic piece with a single narrative arc and a terrifying climax, followed by a numbing conclusion. We leave the sanctuary in darkness and silence afterward and you can hear why.
Franck's piece comes from the same larger tradition but is cast in quite a different vein. We sing a piece of music in our church which contains a reference to the "wrath of God" which one of our pastors has changed to "love of God." This emphasis on God's love rather than God's wrath could be said to have its musical reflection in this year's selection. As the altar gets stripped and the sanctuary darkens it won't be simply dissonant, tense music that is heard, but also this:
listen
Much as I labelled the theme we encountered in part one of the series the "suffering" theme, I'm calling this one the "for God so loved the world" theme. It is actually contained within this broad, spacious middle episode, and after it leaves, we won't hear it again. Remember, we are using our homiletic imaginations here. It isn't that Franck actually specified that that was what he meant when he wrote this piece. Also, as we're labeling things this way we are also listening for the musical argument. One of the things that bothers many musicians is the thought that we'll be so busy hearing our own meanings in a piece of music we'll forget about the music itself.
About halfway through this long, luxurious episode come a few bars of something we've heard before:
listen
that something is our "sacrificial suffering" theme, the slow Choral-like tune we discussed back in the first blog, only now it has been transformed into a major key. Music's ability to make these transformations could prove fertile ground for theologians. You'll also want to keep your ears on what Mr. Franck does with that theme in the next two installments of this series.
The music swells, building on thematic scraps from the seemingly endless melody we heard at the start of the section. Grandly it sings out in a triumphant major key, and then suddenly shifts to minor where we get another glimpse of the "suffering" theme in the soprano....
listen
and finally, no longer much a "hint" and more of a baseball bat--the theme booms out in the pedals...
listen
before we are at last poised on the brink of what seems like a cosmic battle. Now the music reaches its loudest point yet--but that final chord isn't a final chord; it lurches us forward to meet the final struggle....
on to part four
I said on Monday that we were going to take a music detour. That's because after introducing the dramatic, tense opening theme and the subdued, lyrical theme and having them hold the floor for about five minutes, Franck give us an entirely different melody, with a different character, as a tender interlude during the middle of the large piece before hurtling on toward the majestic conclusion as the two earlier themes continue their opposite aims. Which one will dominate, we will wonder, as the tension builds.
But for now, a respite. And a chance for theological reflection. In past years on Palm-Passion Sunday at the conclusion of the service, I have played Marcel Dupre's Crucifixion movement from the Symphonie-Passion. Given the programmatic name, it is not surprising that it is a hair-raising, dramatic piece with a single narrative arc and a terrifying climax, followed by a numbing conclusion. We leave the sanctuary in darkness and silence afterward and you can hear why.
Franck's piece comes from the same larger tradition but is cast in quite a different vein. We sing a piece of music in our church which contains a reference to the "wrath of God" which one of our pastors has changed to "love of God." This emphasis on God's love rather than God's wrath could be said to have its musical reflection in this year's selection. As the altar gets stripped and the sanctuary darkens it won't be simply dissonant, tense music that is heard, but also this:
listen
Much as I labelled the theme we encountered in part one of the series the "suffering" theme, I'm calling this one the "for God so loved the world" theme. It is actually contained within this broad, spacious middle episode, and after it leaves, we won't hear it again. Remember, we are using our homiletic imaginations here. It isn't that Franck actually specified that that was what he meant when he wrote this piece. Also, as we're labeling things this way we are also listening for the musical argument. One of the things that bothers many musicians is the thought that we'll be so busy hearing our own meanings in a piece of music we'll forget about the music itself.
About halfway through this long, luxurious episode come a few bars of something we've heard before:
listen
that something is our "sacrificial suffering" theme, the slow Choral-like tune we discussed back in the first blog, only now it has been transformed into a major key. Music's ability to make these transformations could prove fertile ground for theologians. You'll also want to keep your ears on what Mr. Franck does with that theme in the next two installments of this series.
The music swells, building on thematic scraps from the seemingly endless melody we heard at the start of the section. Grandly it sings out in a triumphant major key, and then suddenly shifts to minor where we get another glimpse of the "suffering" theme in the soprano....
listen
and finally, no longer much a "hint" and more of a baseball bat--the theme booms out in the pedals...
listen
before we are at last poised on the brink of what seems like a cosmic battle. Now the music reaches its loudest point yet--but that final chord isn't a final chord; it lurches us forward to meet the final struggle....
on to part four
Monday, March 11, 2013
A Musical Mountain (part two)
On Mondays and Fridays I'm blogging a six-part series on one tremendous piece of music. This is part two. You can catch part one here.
On Friday we started to explore Cesar Franck's epic Choral no. 3 in A minor. I introduced you to the tragic, lyrical tune that is at the heart of this amazing piece. Today, we'll delve into the other strand of this Choral's thematic heritage:
Listen
It is actually the very first thing you will hear when the piece begins, and, like the tune from Friday, you will also hear it return in many guises. But I'd also like to comment on the theme's paternity. It reminds me of something:
Listen
That is the opening of a Prelude in A Minor by J. S. Bach. I've only played the opening of it because it's been a few years since the last time I played it and I don't have a recording. Besides, we don't want to get distracted. (Although, if you want to listen to it later, its catalog number is Bwv 543. James Kibbie has recorded the entire Bach catalog and put it online which is a good place to look for it.)
Now then, that opening salvo is followed immediately by this sonic buildup, which also reminds me of a little Bach:
Listen
That's from the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, again right near the opening. I bring this up because I want you to be aware of how frequently composers speak from within their traditions; conscious of the great contributions of the past, Franck seems to be almost quoting from it, though he will soon use the material in a new way.
Now that we've been introduced to the dramatis personae it is time to see how they interact to bring us this musical narrative. But first we need to take a little detour into one major episode that we haven't covered yet but will absorb our attention for nearly five minutes in the piece's middle. That's on Friday.
go to part three
On Friday we started to explore Cesar Franck's epic Choral no. 3 in A minor. I introduced you to the tragic, lyrical tune that is at the heart of this amazing piece. Today, we'll delve into the other strand of this Choral's thematic heritage:
Listen
It is actually the very first thing you will hear when the piece begins, and, like the tune from Friday, you will also hear it return in many guises. But I'd also like to comment on the theme's paternity. It reminds me of something:
Listen
That is the opening of a Prelude in A Minor by J. S. Bach. I've only played the opening of it because it's been a few years since the last time I played it and I don't have a recording. Besides, we don't want to get distracted. (Although, if you want to listen to it later, its catalog number is Bwv 543. James Kibbie has recorded the entire Bach catalog and put it online which is a good place to look for it.)
Now then, that opening salvo is followed immediately by this sonic buildup, which also reminds me of a little Bach:
Listen
That's from the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, again right near the opening. I bring this up because I want you to be aware of how frequently composers speak from within their traditions; conscious of the great contributions of the past, Franck seems to be almost quoting from it, though he will soon use the material in a new way.
Now that we've been introduced to the dramatis personae it is time to see how they interact to bring us this musical narrative. But first we need to take a little detour into one major episode that we haven't covered yet but will absorb our attention for nearly five minutes in the piece's middle. That's on Friday.
go to part three
Friday, March 8, 2013
A Musical Mountain (part one)
Last time I said we'd do a little mountain climbing. The peak I've got in mind is Cesar Franck's Choral no. 3 in A minor. It's one of the cornerstones of the organ literature and I'm playing it this year for Lent.
Often these musical riches go by in one sudden rush for the listener. While the performer has spent weeks, months, years, thinking about the music he or she is playing, the rest of us get one listen. And if you've never heard the piece before, that's a lot to absorb. So for the next six blogs, Monday and Friday (on Wednesdays I'm going to write about something else) I'm going to take you into the world of this incredible piece of music.
We'll start with a tune. Franck is considered by many to be the most important composer of organ music since Bach, which is interesting in that he only wrote a dozen pieces for the instrument. But what epics many of them are! The three Chorals (the French spelling of Chorale leaves off the E for some reason) are the last pieces he wrote. Unlike other pieces with the same title, these Chorals aren't based on pre-existing hymn (or Chorale) tunes. Franck wrote the tunes himself. I'll play what is perhaps the most important tune in this 3rd Choral without any supporting harmonies:
Listen
It is a haunting, beautiful melody. You will hear it several times over the course of the near 15-minute long piece. Because I'm going to be playing the piece in church as part of the passion I'm inviting us to use our homiletic imaginations. I've decided to call this tune the tune of 'sacrifice' or 'suffering'or perhaps 'sacrificial love.' You'll understand why in subsequent installments. For now, it is enough to get the tune in our heads.
Now for those of us sensitive to harmony Mr. Franck has an exquisite way of presenting this tune. I'll play it for you now with the supports underneath:
Listen
This is how we'll hear it the first time it is presented in the piece, about 45 seconds or so in.
Now as I mentioned a few posts ago in an observation about sonatas (the sonata principle) pieces like this usually have a musical foil, an opposite theme, running in a different direction. Just like in a good story, the antagonism between the two conflicting ideas often sets up drama and propels the story forward. Next time we'll meet the other side of this Choral's dual personality.
on to part two
Often these musical riches go by in one sudden rush for the listener. While the performer has spent weeks, months, years, thinking about the music he or she is playing, the rest of us get one listen. And if you've never heard the piece before, that's a lot to absorb. So for the next six blogs, Monday and Friday (on Wednesdays I'm going to write about something else) I'm going to take you into the world of this incredible piece of music.
We'll start with a tune. Franck is considered by many to be the most important composer of organ music since Bach, which is interesting in that he only wrote a dozen pieces for the instrument. But what epics many of them are! The three Chorals (the French spelling of Chorale leaves off the E for some reason) are the last pieces he wrote. Unlike other pieces with the same title, these Chorals aren't based on pre-existing hymn (or Chorale) tunes. Franck wrote the tunes himself. I'll play what is perhaps the most important tune in this 3rd Choral without any supporting harmonies:
Listen
It is a haunting, beautiful melody. You will hear it several times over the course of the near 15-minute long piece. Because I'm going to be playing the piece in church as part of the passion I'm inviting us to use our homiletic imaginations. I've decided to call this tune the tune of 'sacrifice' or 'suffering'or perhaps 'sacrificial love.' You'll understand why in subsequent installments. For now, it is enough to get the tune in our heads.
Now for those of us sensitive to harmony Mr. Franck has an exquisite way of presenting this tune. I'll play it for you now with the supports underneath:
Listen
This is how we'll hear it the first time it is presented in the piece, about 45 seconds or so in.
Now as I mentioned a few posts ago in an observation about sonatas (the sonata principle) pieces like this usually have a musical foil, an opposite theme, running in a different direction. Just like in a good story, the antagonism between the two conflicting ideas often sets up drama and propels the story forward. Next time we'll meet the other side of this Choral's dual personality.
on to part two
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)