"Scientists discover the nostalgia gene"

Schumann's "Kinderscenen" has its ups and downs, as does any piece of music. But They are particularly important here, and so I present one more way in which he establishes unity between the various pieces. This is the very first thing you hear in the opening piece:

[listen]

That phrase, a sudden yearning leap upward, followed by a slow descent, is almost identical to the opening phrase of the fourth piece in the series:

[listen]

Only the rhythm has been changed to protect the innocent (there's no dotted snap on the descent).

And, like Monday's example, there are lots of similar phrases throughout. By the time we get to "Frightening" the leap and its consequent descent have been shifted until rather late in the phrase:

[listen]

Or the leap up may be itself raised to new heights of grandeur, as in "dreaming":

[listen]

As if to apologize for the excess, Schumann turns, in the next piece, to a more Spartan, abbreviated form of the leap-descent idea:

[listen]

In this case the top of the leap is coincident with the first beat of the measure, which, hasn't happened before. (By the way, he repents of this in the following phrase)

All of these moments are connected. But what effect do they have on the listener?

It is often difficult to explain an emotional experience in words. Or a musical one. But I suspect it has something to do with a sense of wonder, mixed with pain, and sentiment. In other words, nostalgia. Or something in that neighborhood. If that family of emotions is too vague, let Schumann define it for us. After all, listen to the chord he puts under the first leap:

[listen]

And if that isn't enough, the final, out-of-time soliloquy should tell us what the composer himself feels about all this:

[listen]

You can say that again

One of the major problems we pointed to when it comes to music with a program is that it can sound like a lot of disconnected episodes. It might be good at establishing imaginative connections with the world outside the notes (depending on your imagination) but it lacks internal cohesion.

That isn't a problem for Robert Schumann. His "Kinderscenen" is a collection of 13 short pieces which, somehow, sound as if they really belong together.

Actually, that "somehow" is no mystery. Schumann has a mind that knows how to connect his ideas. Today I'll give you but one example. Take these four little notes:

[graphic]

This little musical idea shows up in at least 20 places. First we hear it near the beginning of the set, in the second half of the very first piece.

[listen]

It shows up again in the sixth piece, "important event" where it starts in the middle of the phrase, so it may be harder to hear. Schumann accents the four notes, however, and since I made this recording I've gotten less subtle about making sure those four notes can be heard:

[listen]

But we are far from finished. Near the end of the set, in the middle of a rhapsodic piece like "frightened" which changes moods and tempi like the weather, is this little comment (upside down!):

[listen]

It's those four notes again. And finally, in the second-to-last piece of the set, just as the child-hero of our musical story is falling asleep, we hear it again (It's in the right hand accompaniment, so don't be distracted by the melody in the left!):

[listen]

I said finally, but it is present in many other places as well. Beside the first four notes of the final piece, there are subtler versions of the motive in pieces like "knight of the hobby horse" and "suddenly too serious"--the first of these has additional notes interpolated, and the last is stuck in the middle of a long phrase so you aren't likely to notice it.

Once you start finding connections like these it is hard to stop. That's partly because there are so many of them. And, for the skeptics among us, the ones who raise their hands and ask "sure, but it's only four notes. Couldn't you almost stick it in there just by accident? Isn't it like making a big deal out of how many times a great novelist uses the word 'the?'"

Good point. But look at the motive again. It's not as simple as the musical version of good morning. You have to make some effort to use it. Also look at the number of strategic places in the music where Schumann gives it center stage. That's my test for intentional use of a motive.

As I said, Schumann had a gift for connectivity. And when you have that gift, there are times when it may indeed "happen by accident"--when you put it on the page first, and realize it afterwards. That is the role of inspiration, and the subconscious. But it doesn't happen to everybody, and it doesn't happen without some attempt to think that way in the first place. Just ask Frantisek Kotzwara.

A really tiny little blow for gender equality

A while back I was reviewing the pianonoise listening archive and noticed there were practically no compositions by women. This is not an easy bias to correct, however. Most of musical history has been dominated by men, as in every professional field. Until the last century there have really been only a handful of women given enough opportunity to make any sort of mark, and often their compositions are pretty slight.

This does not excuse the assertion of men that there could never be a female Beethoven because women just aren't up to it. That's nonsense. But it happens to require the talents of many individuals over a great deal of time and with the encouragement of the society around them to allow even one great musical mind to develop, and a mere fistful of persons allowed to practice in a field, and then only privately, or until they married, is not very promising as a condition to produce a great practitioner. Even so, there have been some notable women composers. Perhaps no great ones, but at least as gifted as the scores of lesser male talents who were contemporaries of the men who got busts made of them to adorn our pianos. And, once society is determined to stunt one gender's compositional growth so aggressively, can we really be sure that one of them couldn't have been great, given the chance?

By the 20th century, some of them were fighting for a chance. And here we see what prejudice is really made of. It's not rational, though that is exactly what it claims to be. One woman was finally given a chance to study at the prestigious Leipzig conservatory. Some of her works were shown to Brahms. Brahms was impressed. At the same time, he was quite sure that she couldn't have written them, because he was quite sure that no woman could write compositions of such quality. Then publishers refused to publish her because, after all, there wasn't much of a market for her works--obviously, no one was interested in her stuff. Did it occur to them that that wouldn't happen unless they published her music? she asked. I imagine she was rather irritated by this point, but if she had shown it, well, you know how that would have gone down. Just like a woman, all emotional and no head on her shoulders. yukyukyuk.

That woman's name was Ethel Smyth, and this week I'll be playing a chorale prelude of hers. It will join the pianonoise catalog next to the only other woman on the page, Evelyn Stell, an organist living in  Scotland.

This piece is fairly short, and I don't expect it to impress the average listener, but it shows she had a high command of counterpoint and compositional technique. Smyth's handful of chorale preludes for the organ are not flashy, but there is a good reason Brahms would have been impressed by them--they are not dissimilar, either in approach, or, frankly, in quality.

Smyth: Erscheinen ist der herrlich Tag   (The Glorious Day has Come)

Keep Going

This past Sunday was Easter Sunday, so, as a church organist let me just say

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It may be just me, but I rather imagine other organists reading this would have a similar experience. Sure, I am up and around this week, alive and well and practicing, but it does seem to take at least a week to really clear up the fog in my head after a major church holiday. It's not easy to pick up and keep on keeping on after an expenditure of energy like Easter. A couple of years ago I even blogged about a couple of famous organists who died right after major holidays and hoped dramatically that it would not be my lot. Sure, Marcel Dupre was already old when he kicked off Pentecost afternoon after the service, but Pierre Cochereau hadn't arrived at 60 when he died of a brain hemorrhage two days after Easter.

I've no plans to shuffle off this mortal coil, and by comparison I feel just fine, thanks. Just....really tired. But next week starts with a Sunday, too. And they come fast.

And to make it worse, few people will be in church. This past weekend Faith had nearly a thousand worshippers. This coming week, I'll bet it will be somewhere in the low 200s. (On an average Sunday we have around 400). After you've been to the mountaintop, it's hard to just pick up and do it again. It's hard not to want a little rest. And while many in our Faith family will be getting just that, sleeping in and what-not, I'll be back at the organ, and the piano, and the keyboard, doing what I do every week. Being consistent. Which is easier if you are consistently dull, or consistently simple, or consistently not conscientious. It is tougher when you've put the pedal to the floor one week, pulled out the stops, thrown a party, played twelve verses of Christ the Lord is Risen today to raise the roof and blasted the Widor Toccata twice at the end of a service filled with loud music and celebration. Gosh, how many notes did I play that morning? How many did I leave on the floor?

This may be "low Sunday" (as in "low attendance"--traditionally the least attended Sunday of the year) but it is not, at least in liturgical terms, unimportant. Easter just got started. It's a whole season. For that matter, it's a way of life. "I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly." (John 10:10).  In order to illustrate that point in music, I'll be playing this piece on Sunday. It is full of bumptious joy:

Marteau: "The Word"  from Pianomass

Fortunately, I recorded it before Easter, when I wasn't even sure when I'd be playing it. Now all I have to do is find enough energy to proclaim it to the congregation on Sunday. I sure don't feel like it right now. But it's only Wednesday.

scenes or impressions

When Robert Schumann was asked about the meaning of a particular piece he had written, he simply sat down and played it again. So the story goes. The music meant itself.

Like most slogans in a war, it is oversimplified, and admits very little variation. Or the truth.

After all, sometime either before or after the alleged incident, that same Mr. Schumann wrote several sets of pieces with titles suggesting that the music did point to something other than itself. Either the inspiration for, or the suggestion of, the music, was taken from life, and life, astonishingly, is not completely reducible to musical notes.

Take a poem. While reading it, several images, sensory perceptions, and narrative details may float through your mind, connections to other poems, which in turn conjure their own set of ideas and concepts. That doesn't mean that the words in the page make no matter, or that you should spend the entire poem daydreaming about that vacation you took to the beach in Florida whilst completely leaving the actual content of the poem itself behind in your reverie. The words themselves, the play of the sounds, the intriguing constructions, syllables, emphases, peculiar line breaks or word inversions, repetition of images, or consonants--all of that matters, just as the musical notes matter.  At the same time, they point to something else. That doesn't strike me as being unfathomable. But there was an ideological war on in 19th century Germany, so everyone had to take a side. Music-drama (as espoused by Wagner) or absolute music, with Schumann and later Brahms as hero. What a silly lot we are.

Next Friday I am including on my program Schumann's "Kinderscenen"--usually translated "Scenes from Childhood" though that isn't necessarily what the term means exactly (literally "child-scenes?"). Each of the pieces bears a title suggesting an image or activity one may have experienced in childhood "curious story," "important event," "knight of the hobby horse," "dreaming."

Our good Wikipedia says that the titles were actually put on the pieces after their composition, which is curious. It could tell us not to be too caught up in the imagery, since Schumann was apparently not thinking of the idea or image at the time of composition. On the other hand, if the pieces, when finished, suggested those ideas to the composer, then perhaps they ought to suggest those ideas to us as well. I should point out that it is just that "tyranny of ideas" that caused some people to protest against program music (Schumann included?).  Why can't I substitute my own ideas? Why do I have to imagine what the composer wants me to imagine?

But then why daydream at all? We've already experienced some of the worst of what happens when one reduces music to something else--cannon shots and trumpet calls, all impeccably labeled for those who couldn't figure it out on their own (see last week's installment). Is it better to be more subtle about it? One thinks of Debussy, who wished his printer to put the titles of the pieces after each prelude rather than at the top of the first page. Play the music, then I'll tell you what I was thinking.

Then there are the wide swaths of people who assure us that music is strongest and best at suggesting emotion. Thus, the impressions of, or emotions connected with something, rather than the thing itself. Not the story, but the way we should feel about the story. Think movie music. What is the function of the film score if not to direct you to feel a certain way about the events happening on screen, or at least to affirm them (after all, if you've been to a certain number of movies you know when to expect the heroic C major blast when the good guy finally breaks through and achieves victory).

Like Satie's pieces (a few weeks ago we discussed "Sports and Recreations") these pieces are short; little cameos with a lot to say. And they have an interesting compositional history.

Again from the almighty Wikipedia: evidently Mr. Schumann needed a couple of months to get these pieces written. This is frequently a surprise to people who think composers are somehow always operating in real time, and can't fathom how a piece 30 seconds long might take all day to write. It may also surprise persons who know Schumann's habit of sketching an entire symphony in just a few days.

What seems to have taken the longest was the ultimate order of the pieces, as well as their selection. It wasn't that Schumann had a problem with fecundity--he wrote some 30 pieces. But only 13 made the final cut. And listening to the set now, perfectly chiseled, and forming such a beautiful chain of continuity and variety, it is hard to notice any struggle at all, so well did he succeed.

Scenes from Childhood, op. 15
Of Strange Lands and People
Curious Story
Blind man's Bluff
Pleading Child
Happy Enough
Important Event
Dreams
By the Fireside
Knight of the Hobbyhorse
Almost too Serious
Frightening
Child Falling Asleep
The Author Speaks

On the Third Day

Well it's Holy Week, and I'm a church organist, so what do you suppose I've been doing all week. Preparing for Easter services?

You'd be wrong about that. Mostly.

I like to prepare pieces I'm going to play with plenty of lead time since it is time that allows from the greatest familiarity and comfort in performances. Therefore, I am likely to work the hardest on the piece or pieces I will be playing the following week, which is how I spent much of my time.

Oh, I sketched my improvised introduction to the opening hymn on Wednesday, and I also dusted off the Widor Toccata yesterday. That didn't take much time since I've been playing it for over a decade. I play it in church once a year, on Easter, and occasionally for weddings and funerals by request. I spent as much time setting the pistons (which thanks to the organ's new memory capacity I will never have to set again!) as playing the piece, the bulk of which turns out to still be memorized, which is handy if you have no limbs free to turn pages and don't wish to commandeer a page turner.

Knowing that I could probably pull these elements together in a short amount of time, I spent the first portion of the week learning something new. This is always uncomfortable at first. In the beginning I tended to miss a lot of pedal notes, since there was not only a fair amount of coordination between the limbs to be gotten used to, the pedal was largely on the far right of the pedal board so I was feeling a bit off balance. By the second day I was starting to feel less clumsy about the whole operation. And then on the third, a miracle happened.

Perhaps I ought not overstate this. But I do find it really interesting that nearly every piece I can remember starting, if it is either fairly short, or uncomplicated, or at least if it is not a major work for organ lasting tens of pages (in which case it may take a couple of weeks), seems to come together in three days.  Even back in college I remember the contents of pieces starting to rapidly affix themselves to my mind--become memorized, and familiar--on the third day of practice. It has happened so often now I look for it.

I wonder if the ancients didn't notice patterns of this sort. One semester in college I noticed it rained every Thursday for a couple of months and wondered if weather patterns often tend to cycle in six or seven day increments with any regularity. It has happened many times since then (it snowed every Sunday during Advent one year) though there may be many unnoted exceptions. But why seven? Or six? Did anyone have a five day week back then? Or eight?

That may seem to be the right length for a cycle of labor and leisure, but the number three has done far more duty. It is a magic number; it is a holy number; it is a convention in story telling, and it, too, sometimes has to be fudged.

You'll note that so far I've left out the biggest three of them all, the one that occurs this weekend in the Christian calendar. On the third day, he rose again from the dead.

The problem with that formulation is that people can't be counted on to preserve it exactly as stated. So it becomes, not "on the third day" but "in three days" or "three days later" which is not the same thing. That would have made Easter a Monday or Tuesday. Besides, picking a few nits, we observe that Christ died in the middle of the day on Friday, and rose before dawn on Sunday, which is really only a day and a half, which is considerably less than three. But three it is. As long as you include the day of death and count the day of resurrection, you can get three in there. Just like the sign of Jonah: "for as Jonah was three days in the belly of the whale, the son of man was three days in the belly of the earth." More or less. If you count it right.

There is a bit of abstraction in there, and a looking for patterns. Sometimes we find them because we look. I should point out that while the piece I am working on seems to have come together on the third day, it is hardly ready for prime time. It will need another day or two before it can be aired on the first try amidst distractions and nerves. This third day is partially a sudden awareness of comfortability and the fulfillment of the promise of the first two day's work, but not a sign of completion. It is there, and yet it is not there.

That is how mystical numbers and signs work anyhow. Part of it is given, and part of it is what we make of it.

He's kidding, right?

Today is the First of April, commonly known as April Fool's Day. It is also Rachmaninoff's birthday.

That is a total coincidence.

If you know anything about Rachmaninoff at all, you also realize how ironic it is. Of all the composers who never smiled, he smiled the least. It is hard to imagine him joking about anything, even if he did once look down upon a young Leon Fleisher who had expressed interest in a concert career and dead pan in his thick accent, "music----baaaaadd business." He may have been in total earnest, but at least it's funny the way Fleisher tells it.

There is, however, another composer who practically no one ever accuses of being funny, one Johann Sebastian Bach. This, however, may be a mistake. Sure, he's not smiling in the portrait, but apparently family gatherings in the Bach family could be quite raucous. Besides, if you know anything about the history of April Fool's, or human nature, you know that pranks are not always of the completely harmless variety, nor are they quite malicion-free. And that just might describe what is happening here, in the piece I'm going to play for you.

Why? Well, for starters the musical material ain't all that grand. Bach takes for his theme a simple scale, and this windy exercise drives the joke. Several times in the piece the two-voices chase each other around the scale like a pair of squirrels who can't figure out what direction to run in. The rest of the material is a slowly descending chromatic scale which does not sound very light-hearted at all. Some commentators have suggested that here Bach was responding to critics who were complaining that his music was too serious and did not have enough charm and crowd appeal. Taking light and flimsy materials with which to build the kind of artifice that they would not have appreciated in the least may have been a kind of musical back-handed slap.

And after you listen to it, you just might come away thinking that Mr. Bach, the man you thought was so serious and dignified, really is pulling your leg, showing you what happens when you take an intentionally silly and empty theme and try to make it sound like a banquet of musical riches. The whole thing may function as a lugubrious cautionary tale--it is in a minor key, after all, and it isn't nearly as lighthearted as its neighbor, the second duet in the series, which is just as silly, and all smiles and sunshine. This one may not be so obviously humorous as its cousin. Call it a bit of dark humor, or bitter humor, but humor nevertheless. And the scales....

If that isn't enough to convince you, I've chosen a particularly hollow organ registration to drive the point home. It is missing its middle--a so-called "gapped" registration, in which the shiny mixture stops aren't sufficiently grounded with a full chorus of foundations. So if it also sounds a little odd aurally, that's why.

Enjoy Bach's little joke.

Bach: Duetto no. 1 in e minor