“New” Music, Day 4 – A New Commandment by Thomas Tallis

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 4 – A New Commandment by Thomas Tallis

The music of England’s Common Practice Era was shaped by a peculiar feature: the composers most admired during much of the time that classical music was created on Continental Europe, were devoted in England to the admiration and imitation of an opportunistic expatriate, George Frideric Handel.  Because of this, England does not really have its own great Classical or Romantic composers; not until Elgar anyway.  The 18th and 19th centuries in Britain were largely dominated by Handel’s unstoppable legacy of English choral music, as typified by his oratorios, and all other composers who created music for British soil, domestic and otherwise (Felix Mendelssohn, for example, experienced notable fame in Great Britain, becoming close friends with Queen Victoria, largely because of his success in writing bilingual oratorios that fit the Handelian/British cast).

Wagner once expressed his frustration with the state of British music in his typically polemical way.  I’m paraphrasing here, but he described British subjects sitting in concert halls, listening to fugal chorus after fugal chorus in British oratorios and anthems, secure in their sense that they were most certainly doing their duty to God and country.  He would have been describing music in Mendelssohn’s style, but both Handel and Mendelssohn were Germans; and other critics have wondered how British music would have developed had it not been for the playing out of Handel’s life story.

England was not the only place something like this happened.  The story of French music is similarly shaped by an expatriate settling and steering the course of the natives.  In the 1630s the young Florentine Giovanni Battista Lulli went to France and proceeded to create French national opera and ballet, almost from scratch.  A darling of the great Sun King, Louis XIV, all of his successors were required to write almost exactly as Lully (the Gallicized name he assumed upon naturalization) had.  So an apt comparison can be made between Handel and Lully.  But Lully is not spoken of in the same way as Handel, with the dear Saxon sometimes being said to have stifled creative progress in England.  Lully seemed to save French music, providing a stable medium in which French text setting was able take root and fluorish.  Indeed, Lully’s works feel very “French”, and his successor Rameau’s even more so.  Berlioz is thoroughly French, not Italian, so Lully’s legacy does not seem to have suppressed whatever national spirit was waiting to speak in France.

And yes, perhaps it is would be interesting to play the historical “what-if” game with Handel and Great Britain: what if Handel had never gone to Great Britain?  What if he had merely visited and not settled?  To which influences would British musicians have looked to find their models?

By 1600 Great Britain boasted a rich and significant body of choral music.  Franco-Flemish polyphony (for more on Franco-Flemish polyphony see this post) in its early phase had reached the island in the figure of John Dunstable, a champion of the Burgundian School who lived and worked in the early 1400s.  His influence on British music, and on the development of Western harmony, is far-reaching.  He is often recognized to be among the first composers to favor 3rds over 4ths in his harmonic language, which really warms up the musical texture.  Compare this…

 

…to this…

 

 

Do you hear the difference?  There’s probably about 50 years of musical development between the two and the comparison can be seen as an indication of the transition between Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance, although Dunstable doesn’t quite make it that far, but he definitely sensed it on the horizon.  Most of Dunstable’s co-Burgundians were Flemish, and Dunstable’s music stands apart from theirs for a suavity, a rich and creamy character that, I think, finds its ultimate expression in the works of Britain’s greatest Renaissance polyphonist, Thomas Tallis.

This suave, serene character seems to pervade the music of the English polyphonists in a way that we don’t hear in the Flemish and the Italians.  It’s hard to put my finger on, but the music of John Taverner and Thomas Tallis just feels…different than Palestrina and di Lasso.  It breathes differently, moves through space and time differently.  It has a quirky, but wonderful kind of motion and breath.  It somehow exhibits a rougher, more down to Earth quality while also managing to be more ethereal.  Palestrina is so…perfect.  And as much as I delight in that perfection, it can be a little unimaginative and square at times.  The music of Tallis and Taverner is anything but – in their best works the unfolding gestures are constantly surprising and mystifying.  These are rather personal observations and, like so much of music, I think you really have to listen to it more to understand that, but it’s how I’ve always felt about listening to Tallis and Taverner.

Thomas Tallis worked during a time when Great Britain’s religious landscape, and the royal powers with which it intersected, were in a state of flux.  At times merely uncertain, and at other times violent, the governing faith of the land vacillated between Roman Catholicism and the Church of England in a disorienting tug-of-war carried out by monarchs and religious leaders which played out over the middle of the sixteenth century.  By the seventeenth the Anglican Communion had formed as sort of a balance between the two religious sensibilities, the rigidly Calvinist pilgrims had sailed off to the New World in protest of the “popish” practices the via media could be seen to embrace, and a bloody civil war broke out after the death of Queen Elizabeth (a stabilizing monarch) which unleashed pent-up religious and political unrest.

Thomas Tallis, though he remained a Catholic through this turbulent time of British history, was not exactly of the uncompromising stripe of  someone the likes of Thomas Moore.  He was more pragmatic like Queen Elizabeth, seemingly happy to contribute his talents to the music of whatever religious establishment was currently in power.  And so we have a variety of output from Thomas Tallis, including both solemn Latin-language works for Catholic services, and also English-language anthems for the Anglican episodes.  The anthem came to be a most significant form in Anglican church music and remains so in many denominations of Protestant worship to this day.  A short song in the vernacular to be placed somewhere in a church service, composers today turn out numerous anthems in every vernacular.  Here is one of Tallis’ best-known anthems, based on a text from the Gospel of John’s 13th chapter, “I give you a new commandment: love one another”.  It is for 4 parts and quite easily sung by amateur church choirs, as is its frequent companion piece, another anthem based on a text from the same gospel, “If ye love me”:

 

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“New” Music, Day 3 – The New Doll by Pyotr Iyich Tchaikovsky

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 3 – The New Doll by Pyotr Iyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is composer best known for his large-scale works scored for orchestra, most especially his ballets, symphonies and solo concertos.  Everyone can sing some part of The Nutcracker (ballet), possible Swan Lake (also a ballet), and maybe even Sleeping Beauty (still another ballet – the Waltz from that one became famous after it was used as the basis of the famous song in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty).  I bet most professional musicians have a favorite symphony of his – numbers 1, 2, & 3 are charming and numbers 4, 5, & 6 are undisputed masterworks – and there’s major respect for his first piano concerto and violin concerto too.

The operas are not as well-known as the ballets and symphonies, although his greatest opera, Eugene Onegin, is still staged in major opera houses.  I confess I am completely unfamiliar with any of Tchaikovsky’s operas; that’s actually rather unforgivable given how much of his time and effort went into creating them.  I guess I have a project ahead of me…

That his orchestral works are so famous is understandable and justified.  Anyone familiar with them is aware of the massive emotional impact of his orchestral writing, the depth of sonority, and the remarkable competence of his orchestration.  Playing violin in his Sixth Symphony in graduate school is an experience I won’t soon forget.  We were sitting in an unconventional arrangement: the 2nd violins were seated where the cellos are usually placed, and the violas and cellos were on the inside.

The usual arrangement of string sections in contemporary orchestral seating – imagine the second violins where the cellos and basses are and everything else pushed to the inside

 From what I understand this arrangement was more common a couple centuries ago, but gradually gave way to the standard arrangement we usually see today, with first violins and cellos on the outside, and second violins and violas on the inside.  Anyway, there were episodes of rehearsing and performing that symphony during which I was astonished by the color, presence, and magnitude of the sound that rose from the orchestra.  It really felt like Tchaikovsky had some penetrating insight into the way that orchestral instruments work and was able to use them in an optimal manner, a manner in which they intruments were not fighting to be heard, but rather worked and sounded together very easily.  This is a rare and wonderful gift.  I once read an interview with a composer in which he said a major priority for him was to constantly strive to understand how instruments physically work the best and so write so they were able to speak easily, according to their nature.  He said that in comparing Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky he could tell that Prokofiev did not really know how the instruments physically responded the best whereas Tchaikovsky did.  And that’s not to say that Prokofiev’s music is bad; indeed, it is at times astounding in its intricacy and momentous effect.  But after playing in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and experiencing how easily and constantly the air was filled with sounds of deep color and resonance, I understand what that interviewee was talking about.

While orchestration is Tchaikovsky’s undisputed strength (and there are many areas of strength in his music), one weakness that I see pointed out rather often is his deficiency of development.  Development refers to the manipulation of the materials set out at the beginning of any temporal work of art.  Good developers do a lot with a little.  Poor developers do a little with a lot.  Or maybe a little with a little.  Like good orchestration, good development is a rare skill.  The best developer in the history of music, most historians would say, was Beethoven.  It is inspiring how much mileage he could draw from very simple materials.  The first movement of his famous Fifth Symphony is a great example.

 

If you listen to the middle part of that piece, from 3:04 until 4:30 (a mere minute a half that feels as momentous as a half an hour – I simply can’t imagine how many times Beethoven must have reworked that stretch of the symphony), you will hear the uber-famous “bum-bum-bum-BUM” motive taken apart, rearranged, manipulated, and generally put through its paces in an unimaginable number of ways.  And it always sounds fresh and inventive, even though the transformations are always based on that very short little motive.  There is also a pervasive and continuous momentum that feels dramatic and constantly causes the movement to seem directed toward some destination, which is to say that it never feels aimless or lost.  And even the famous coda of this movement, which goes on and on, topping itself again and again, is like another development section – he just couldn’t stop developing that motive!  Beethoven was able to create those amazing development sections again and again in his music and all other composers are now measured against him as the gold standard of development.  Everyone stacks up on that scale to varying degrees of success.  As far as development goes, Tchaikovsky, most would admit, is on the weaker side.  His melodies, deeply Russian, lyrical, and highly emotional are top-notch, and deeply affecting.  But the melodies are not really developed all that much.  It was something he acknowledged himself and worked very hard improve.  But his ultimate solutions, those present in his later symphonies for example, more represent a reconciling of his forms to the nature of his material so that it felt alright to play the theme over and over again, but more in new clothing than, than achieving true skill at development.  Still, if you are willing to forgive this about Tchaikovsky’s great works, there is plenty to enjoy.

But, there is another sort of musical creation for which the handicap for development may be seen as an asset: the character piece.  Character pieces were a thoroughly Romantic invention: usually a set of short works that all sought to illustrate an extramusical idea, picture, or some other inspiration.  And usually for solo piano.  Tchaikovsky is not known for his solo piano music, but it’s there.  And there’s a few collections of these character pieces.  One such collection is his Opus 39 set, 24 Easy Pieces for Children.  It is written as a sort of homage to a similar set by Robert Schumann, which includes this one.  These are short, easy pieces for young pianists to play.  And the lack of development just ain’t a problem because once the beautiful theme is laid out, that’s all she wrote!  Here’s a great example, piece number 6, The New Doll:

 

 

Isn’t that charming?  A delightful, floating, balletic dance of a tune that perfectly encapsulates the delight of a young girl receiving a new doll.  It paints a brief picture and then stops, no development necessary.  Incidentally, there’s kind of a “doll trio” within those 24 pieces; number 7 is The Sick Doll, a plaintive lament, and number 8 is Doll’s Funeral, which is like a miniature, lighter version of the great funeral dirge from Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata:

 

 

Tchaikovsky was neurotic and often depressed; even in this benign little collection of children’s character pieces he has to kill and bury the doll after a debilitating illness!
The 24 Easy Pieces, Opus 39 were composed during the late 1870s, probably as a carefree diversion while he labored over his more significant masterworks of the time, including the Fourth Symphony (his first truly significant contribution to the symphonic tradition), the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and the opera Eugene Onegin.  And I’m certainly not suggesting that trifles like this be elevated to the artistic status of those towering works, but perhaps this delightful piece, and others like it, which benefit from so many of Tchaikovsky’s strengths with regard to melodic invention, has found a clever way to sidestep his weaknesses.

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“New” Music, Day 2 – Garrit Gallus by Philippe de Vitry

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 2 – Garrit Gallus by Philippe de Vitry

What is your favorite book by Doctor Seuss?  Is it The Cat In The Hat?  I’m not sure it’s my favorite, but it’s a good one, and I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s among his most famous stories.  If you need a refresher, you can listen to Justin Bieber read it here:

 

If you’d rather hear another narrator, there are many others on YouTube, so just search and take your pick.  Have you ever noticed the rhythmic nature of Dr. Seuss’ typical style of writing?  While it is often obscured by the expressive pacing and inflection of readers as they instinctively guide the dramatic curve of the text, Dr. Seuss is always highly rhythmic.  As a trained musician it is often most difficult for me to ignore, and when I read Dr. Seuss I tend to exaggerate the pronounced, lilty rhythms of poetry like that found in The Cat In The Hat.  It’s just hard for me not to and I derive a sort of satisfaction from imagining the rhythmic transcription as I do so.

You can quite easily transcribe the rhythm of The Cat In The Hat or any poetry that feels like it.  That lilty, rollicking feeling indicates that it is in what musicians call compound time, which means that the beat is divided into three equal parts.  Compound time signatures usually have a 6, a 9, or a 12 on the top.  I’m not going to go into all the theory of how time signatures are constructed, but if you’re interested there are plenty of resources available online.  Just search for “compound vs. simple time” and you should get on the right track.  One recent popular song written in a compound meter is A Thousand Years by Christina Perri.  It has two beats per measure, and so the top of the time signature would be 6, because 2 beats times 3 divisions equals 6:

Whenever I teach music theory to freshmen at universities I always find understanding compound time signatures to be the first major mental feat, and I sometimes use texts like the Dr. Seuss books to help them understand how it feels.  They are often amazed to see the rhythms we have been practicing pop up in those familiar children’s books.

I couldn’t find any formal musical training in Dr. Seuss’ biography.  He probably learned a bit about music at some point in his life, but however much that was, I very much doubt he would have been aware of embedding these compound rhythms into his poetry, at least not in those terms.  

I’m going to digress slightly at this point, but you’ll see how it fits in with Dr. Seuss pretty soon.  Young children have a way of asking questions that are far deeper than adults are equipped to handle, don’t they?  A little kid will, almost flippantly, ask for a simple answer in response to an enormously complex, and ultimately unanswerable, philosophical, moral, or cosmological question that the adult may have pondered for years without arriving at a pat conclusion.  As an example of this, I’ve had children of all ages ask me where music comes from.  And I really don’t know.  The history of humankind is far too extensive and obscured in its earliest times to really know.  But what I do tell them is that we can see commonalities between music and other things people do, like, for example, language.  Listen to this.  It is not even 4 minutes long, but will completely change the way you view music and language:

Nifty, right?  Maybe even mind-blowing?  Depends on whom you ask I suppose.  I never get tired of playing that for people and I wish I could have seen your reaction if you just experienced it for the first time.  Here’s a fun video of a fifth grade class having their first experience of this phenomenon, and they’re pretty cute:

So, what does this teach us?  Obviously music and and language spring from a similar source and are not always, and maybe never, separate entities in human experience.  Diana Deutsch’s demonstrations show us that we are constantly singing, and singing can be notated, and notation always has a meter.  But what we call meter in music goes by another name in poetry, prosody.  If you’ve studied prosody, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Seuss had done that, you are probably familiar with the different metric feet, which are basically rhythms, and scansion, which is basically the practice of notating those rhythms.  You can see musical meter as a formalized organization of poetic metric feet, which is, I imagine, related to how rhythmic notation began to evolve, way back in twelfth century Europe.  Listen to this:

This is one of the few sprawling 4-voice polyphonic masterworks to survive from the pen of a musician named Perotin, who lived and worked at Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame in the 1200s.  At this time composers like him were taking Gregorian Chants, slowing them waaaaaaaay down (the long notes on the bottom staff are the original notes of a teeny fragment of chant) and improvising or composing fantastic musical lines above them.  It wasn’t notated the way you see in the video – that is a modern transcription.  They thought about it poetically, in what were called “rhythmic modes”, which are very much like poetic feet.  The rhythmic modes of Notre Dame end up working pretty well in our contemporary compound meter, and a few of the modes were:

Medieval Mode Number	Modern Notation	Rhythmic Sound	Prosodic Sound
First Mode		Long – Short	Stressed – Unstressed	Trochee
Second Mode		Short – Long	Unstressed – Stressed	Iamb
Sixth Mode		Short – Short – Short	Unstressed – Unstressed – Unstressed	Tribarch

There are also other rhythmic modes which combined some of the shorter structures.  But can you hear them in Perotin’s music now?  A constant interplay of poetic metric feet that plays out over ten minutes.  I think it’s notable that you can basically notate The Cat In The Hat and poems like it in the milennium-old Notre Dame rhythmic modes.

In the late 1200s and early 1300s this way of thinking about rhythm was codified by music theorists like Franco of Cologne, who worked to clarify the notation and seemed to instinctively realize that greater flexibility in notation of rhythm was possible, but didn’t quite break out of the box the rhythmic modes had drawn.

 

 

But, around the same time, other musicians were trying to push it a little further.  Musicians like Philippe de Vitry.  With a life and career spanning the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Philippe de Vitry was a brilliant poet, composer, and cleric, was widely admired for his contributions to music and poetry, as well as his general intelligence and grasp of his contemporary sciences.  He also became the bishop of Meaux, France, from 1351 until his death a decade later, and occupied the chair of St. Etienne Cathedral:

 

 

That would probably inspire me too.  He is credited with writing a treatise on composition and notation called Ars Nova, which means “New Art”, although it is perhaps better translated as “New Technique”.  The “Old Technique” (Ars Antiqua) was anything that used the rhythmic modes like music of Perotin and Franco, and there was heated debate and pamphlet wars-a-plenty between devotees of the respective techniques as the Ars Nova began to flourish.  Maybe Franco was a bitter old fuddy-duddy, and it seems ridiculous to us now, but the work of de Vitry and his fellow “New Artists” took major leaps to break out of the rhythmic modes and explore new territories of freedom, flexibility, and expression.  Listen to this zesty piece by Philippe de Vitry in which you can hear remnants of the old rhythmic modes, but with a greater freedom and intricacy:

Does that music feel a bit cheeky to you?  If it does, you’re not mistaken, and this is for a couple reasons.  One is the very engaging performance; this kind of music and its history often occupies a central place in very sterile music history lectures, supplemented with even more sterile recordings.  Those are the kind of recordings I remember from my days covering this subject matter in music history classes and the recordings we listened to were not all that engaging.  But that is changing as committed performers seek to bring music like this beyond the dissection table and bring out the very human interest behind the structure.  What are they singing about?  It’s a dense allegory about corruption in the Church, not unlike the poetry of the Golliards that features in Carmina Burana (see this post for more about the Golliards and Carmina Burana).  These texts were written a little later than Carmina Burana and came to be collected in a volume called the Roman de Fauvel, which, like the earlier Golliardic poetry, was inspired by moral decay in the Church and greater society.  It is the source of a number of Philippe de Vitry’s surviving works and may be one of the reasons that Pope John XXII did not like the Ars Nova.

A page from an early manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel, featuring notation of works by Philippe de Vitry and others

While The Cat In the Hat and the Roman de Fauvel were separated by almost a millennium, and created to accomplish very different artistic goals, the characteristic rhythms that unify them are indicative of music’s deep connection to spoken language, evidence that they are both very much a part of our universal human heritage.

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“New” Music, Day 1 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 1 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

Jeannette Meyers Thurber had a dream.  

Jennette Meyers Thurber

Born in 1850 in a small New York town, she had studied music at the Paris Conservatory in her teens and then returned to the United States.  Her marriage to a wealthy grocery wholesaler endowed her with the resources, connections, and freedom necessary to champion the cause of creating a distinctive American music, a commodity she sensed to be lacking in the culture of the young but precocious nation.  This quest motivated her to found the National Conservatory of Music of America in 1884, intended to be a haven of education for gifted American music students.  She continually sought federal funding for this project so that the students could attend based on their artistic merits and not the depth of their pockets.  While the egalitarian vision was realized, it was not through federal funding, which Thurber was never able to secure, but the philanthropy of herself and other wealthy patrons who funded the school’s operating budget and instructor salaries.

There are several European cultures which boast incredibly rich and formidable musical legacies, legacies which nourish disproportionately large swaths of the world’s population in relation to the quantity of creative minds who worked within them.  These legacies vary in strength, but they resonate richly for both the efforts of their geniuses and also for the unique configurations of idiosyncratic cultural mannerisms that define them.  The German legacy, for instance, is rich with polyphonic rigor, formal clarity, and existential introspection.  The Italian legacy is recognizable for its dazzling sparkle, attractive flamboyance, and unabashed heart-on-sleeve emotion.  The French, British and Russian legacies are also strong, and there are other legacies that are perhaps a tier below those in significance (like Dvorak’s native Bohemian legacy).  But Jeannette Thurber began to worry that, at the rate they were going, America’s musicians may not have gotten around to solidifying a legacy of their own capable of competing upon the stage of world history without a little push, and she thought her Conservatory was just the force that was needed to provide it.

While Thurber founded and guided the National Conservatory, she did not participate in its daily operations.  For this, she needed instructors and a director.  The first director hired was the Belgian baritone singer Jacques Bouhy, who held the position from the Conservatory’s opening in 1885 until 1889.  Bouhy main claim to fame was his singing of the role of the toreador Camillo in the premiere production of Bizet’s Carmen 10 years before the Conservatory opened.  While the school grew and operated well under Bouhy’s directorship, Thurber understood that in order to realize her vision of catalyzing the creation of an American musical legacy, she may have greater success with a composer who had performed a similar feat himself in another culture, and so she found the Bohemian Antonin Dvorak to be the next director beginning in 1892.

The Italian and German musical legacies owe much of their strength to good timing, and also to strong patronage systems that fostered the generation of numerous works of art, musical and otherwise.  Both Italian and German artists were provided with continuous opportunities by courts and churches to produce prolifically, all the while steeped in the culture of the Renaissance which encouraged rigorous learning and mastery of skill.  The German and Italian musicians began their path of creating distinct national legacies as early as the 1500s, and, during the ensuing centuries in which the patronage system crystallized and provided a previously unheard of level of stability, their national musical cultures flourished to an unimaginable degree.  Not every culture in European history was so fortunate to experience this perfect storm.  Russia, for example, began to develop its musical legacy more than 300 years after the Renaissance of Central Europe.  For more about that process, read this post.  The scrappy and oft-occupied Bohemians were another such culture whose musical championship did not start until the mid 1800s.  The first notable composer to work in a distinctively Bohemian manner was Bedrich Smetana, inspired initially to create his works by revolutions against the occupying Austrian Empire.  Smetana was a child prodigy, gifted on the piano and violin.  He created lovely concert works and operas that seem to be inspired by the sounds and flavors of Bohemia.  It is thoroughly nationalistic music, never quite attaining to the glory and grandeur of the German tradition.

Bedrich Smetana

To make that leap required a genius the stature of Antonin Dvorak, who came a mere two decades after Smetana, but was somehow able to fuse his elder Bohemian’s sensibility with a German grandeur, creating works that operate on multiple levels and therefore have a greater claim to international interest and posterity.  And this was acknowledged by one German in particular, Johannes Brahms, who, after judging one of Dvorak’s symphonies in an Austrian competition, recognized his genius and quickly came to regard him as an artistic equal.  After that the two began a lifelong friendship, with Brahms helping to open some major doors in order for Dvorak’s career to take off.  Dvorak became steadily prolific, creating works that emanate a carefree Bohemian take on life, all the while clothed in the masterful orchestration and formal mastery of the German symphony.

This is exactly what Jeannette Thurber was looking for, and she enticed Dvorak to assume directorship of the American Conservatory with a generous salary and the promise of 4 months of vacation from teaching each year in which to pursue his own creative efforts.  Dvorak was fascinated by the American music he absorbed, although it is sometimes hard to tell exactly from which sources he would have consumed it.  But he and Thurber were united in their opinion that a robust American music would be best based upon the music of American Indians and Negro spirituals.  I’m not sure how much authentic American Indian music Dvorak could ever have been exposed to, but he did have a very direct and reliable source of Negro spirituals, his student Harry Burleigh.

Dvorak’s student Harry Burleigh, who taught him everything he knew about Negro spirituals

Harry Burleigh had stored a treasury of spirituals from his ancestors and sang them beautifully in his baritone voice.  He captivated Dvorak with his singing, and his collection of melodies helped to inspire Dvorak’s most successful and best-known work, the Ninth Symphony, “From the New World”, which was written during his time as the director of the American Conservatory.  Listen to the sweeping second movement Largo and pay especially close attention to the beautiful melody, first played by the english horn, which starts at about 50 seconds:

 

It could be a spiritual, couldn’t it?  But it isn’t.  It is an original tune written by Dvorak, very much based on the melodic style of the spirituals that he learned from Harry Burleigh.  Dvorak here demonstrates his knack, in common with Smetana, of assimilating a body of musical style and then expressing it in original music utterances.  Smetana breathed Bohemian folk music deeply, but never actually quoted it.  Here is Dvorak doing the same thing with Negro spirituals.  Perhaps you’ve sung this song?  It was recast by another one of his students, William Arms Fisher, who added words in the 1920s, turning it into the hymn “Goin’ Home”, which is still commonly sung in Christian worship today.
The National Conservatory of Music of America had its day, but didn’t really take hold.  It petered out in the early twentieth century and American musicians had to look elsewhere for their inspiration, with many traveling to France in order to drink from the fount of Nadia Boulanger’s phenomenal teaching, which pulled from all the great European music legacies and assisted many a modern composer in fitting their voices into those contexts.  As such, Jeannette Thurber’s goal of sparking an American musical legacy did not ultimately succeed, but not before Antonin Dvorak, already so successful in the same task regarding Bohemian music, could show the Americans how it might be done.

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Music About Snow, Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra, opus. 8, No. 4 “Winter” by Antonio Vivaldi

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra, opus. 8, No. 4 “Winter” by Antonio Vivaldi

There is no perfect climate for an asthmatic.  The pulmonary inflammation is easily triggered by both intense cold and oppressive humidity.  It is difficult to find anywhere that is not afflicted by one of those two extremes, particularly in the European continent.  You may find relief in certain tropical locales.  San Jose in Costa Rica, for example, has a near-constant 70 degree “eternal spring” that is most temperate.  But there are also more humid zones just a stone’s throw away.

There is some question as to the true nature of Vivaldi’s chronic ailment, which he described as “strettezza di petto” (tightness of the chest).  While some have speculated that this was angina pectoris, it is most commonly assumed to be asthma.  The ailment is most significant to Vivaldi’s story, most notably in that it all but solidified the direction of his career, which could have gone in two major directions.  He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, and remained in holy orders for his whole life, but, as the story goes, the condition, whatever it was, made it difficult for him to sustain the vocal stamina necessary to say mass, which, at that time would have been a litany of Latin prayers recited almost continuously without interaction from the congregation.  That changed a little more than two centuries after Vivaldi’s death with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.  Among other things, the mass came to be recited in the vernacular of the congregation and began to incorporate a responsorial nature, with the laity taking a great role in the service, much as it had been in Protestant services for going on five centuries by that point.  But I don’t know if even this would have saved Antonio Vivaldi’s priestly function from the ravages of his cardiopulmonary impediment.  Vivaldi received a dispensation from the hierarchy that allowed him to remain ordained but free of the repetitive and time-consuming duty of saying mass.

Was Vivaldi’s dispensation really health-related, or did he posses an ulterior motive for which his malady was a convenient excuse?  Some speculate that music was Vivaldi’s true passion, one in which he would rather have been active anyway.  Of course we’ll never know.  Not without unearthing one of Vivaldi’s diaries, if he even recorded such personal thoughts.  So without certain knowledge of his true motivation, we can credit Vivaldi’s asthma for shifting his career course to what, for him, would certainly turn out to more profitable, influential, and historically enriching.  I suppose it’s always possible he could have been elevated to the episcopate, but I very much doubt it.  He more likely would have performed his priestly duty and passed on, unsung, unremembered.  Even if he had risen through the ecclesiastical ranks, we probably would not know of him, and history is replete with bishops, cardinals and other clerics celebrated during their lifetimes, but whose names die almost as quickly as they do.  Because of his asthma, or angina, we speak of the great Antonio Vivaldi, the father of the  solo concerto.  It reminds me of that story about the Zen master and the little boy  (WARNING: Strong Language!):

Did Vivaldi regard his condition as a burden?  It allowed him to lessen his liturgical workload in favor of increasing his musical one, and accounts seem to indicate this was not entirely displeasing to him, so maybe he would not have put it exactly as the story of the Zen master and the little boy, but I think it still fits.

And if it was asthma, Vivaldi could have found himself in much less bearable climates than the Mediterranean weather patterns of Venice and, later, the mild winters of Central Europe.  But I bet the summers of Venice were the worst.  Heat and humidity can cause asthma to act up, and Venetian summers would have had plenty of both, especially the humidity.  If you’re like me, you enjoy the “moderate” seasons of spring and fall the most; I’ve never been overly fond of the extremes, although I do enjoy a brisk winter day, especially if it provides a setting for vigorous outdoor physical activity like skiing or snow-shoeing.  That’s the best.  But give me spring or fall and I’m quite content.  Summer, I don’t usually care for.  Vivaldi, in his ubiquitous greatest hit, Le Quattro Stagioni, better-known to English speakers as “The Four Seasons”, seems to share my evaluation of the seasons.  He enjoys spring and fall the most, as evidenced by the undeniably cheerful and content opening movements of both, winter after that, with summer coming in at a distant 4th place.  Have you ever heard the summer concerto?  It’s thoroughly unpleasant.  Vivaldi really seems to not like summer.  The stagnant heat is relentless, filled with haze and humidity, swarming insects, and, to add insult to injury, a finale depicting violent hailstorms that trample the crops.  I wonder if his asthma had anything to do with the highly personal and subjectively distasteful experience of summer that the concerto seems to illustrate.

Vivaldi’s feelings about winter are somewhere in between, right about in the middle if the musical depiction is to be believed.  The opening movement has some unpleasantness, being caught in the cold and stamping one’s feet for warmth, hurrying along to get to whatever warm room awaits at the end of the route.  The last movement is thoroughly exuberant fun, slipping and sliding on the ice, first tentatively, and then with great relish and intention as the subject finds his bearings.  And then there is the charming, inviting, and rapturous cantilena of the brief middle movement which paints the picture so many of us love to recreate on cold days: relaxing by the fire, covered in a warm blanket, reading or sipping our favorite hot drink, with no particular plans for the coming hours:

And Vivaldi writes, not snow, but rain for the temperate Mediterranean winter, which does not tend to see the solid form of precipitation.  In his later travels to Prague and Vienna, Vivaldi would have accumulated (so to speak) more experience with snow, but the Four Seasons come from an earlier time during which he was more familiar with the Venetian climate.

The plucking accompaniment is meant to portray the rain pattering on the roof.  The melodic line of the solo violin is pure contentment in response to the comforts of a roof and a warm fire to quell the unforgiving forces of nature outside.  I’ve heard many of Vivaldi’s numerous concertos, and I have to say there is something about this melody that stands out as  particularly well-crafted and just magical.  
In The Four Seasons Vivaldi reveals an evaluations of the year’s climate zones that is close to my heart.  I feel more or less exactly the same way as he, ranking spring and fall above winter, and winter above summer.  If I lived in a Mediterranean climate, perhaps I would feel even more strongly about it.  Our winters in Wisconsin do get awfully cold, but we can enjoy essentially the same images that Vivaldi did in his Venetian winters, just with snow instead of rain.

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Music About Snow, Day 4 – “Washington’s Birthday” from New England Holidays Symphony by Charles Ives

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 4 – “Washington’s Birthday” from New England Holidays Symphony by Charles Ives

There really isn’t anyone else with a story like Charles Ives.  Not that I can find anyway.  And I don’t think it’s a story anyone would think to write.  Growing up in late 19th century New England with all its hearty folk, his father George was firmly integrated within the established structures of the American military and Protestant religion, as band leader and Methodist church musician, respectively.  From George’s example Charles learned to respect and honor the cherished traditions of American civility, but with odd twists.  George may have inhabited contexts that valued proprietary and conservative expressions of artistry with the square, stodgy hymns and marches of his professional appointments, but he had a deeply eccentric streak that constantly threatened to bubble over, filling the corners of his family life with unpredictable yet exacting techniques, and inundating the young Charles with an abiding interest in coloring outside of the conventional lines.  Charles drank deeply from George’s encouragement to find the fun between the cracks of traditional music, harmonizing melodies in the wrong key, listening for quarter tones, putting different and contrasting musics together in cacophonous ways, and simply observing how music and other sounds behaved in their natural habitats, free of musical aesthetics overlaid in order to constrain their innate reactivity.

Charles took his father’s guidance to heart, and began to capture the quaint America that he knew in odd and original music that seems avant-garde to our ears, but is revealed to be sincerely American if we look a little closer.  It is not exactly right to label it as “avant-garde” as you might do with the music that was written simultaneously across the Atlantic Ocean; Ives’ music comes from a much different impulse, one that seeks to combine the lyrical American folk traditions he knew with a musicality that is simply unconstrained by traditional tonal boundaries.  And so, if you are able to hear past what sounds off-putting and difficult at first, you may find yourself unexpectedly rewarded by a sweet and unassuming voice that could come from the lad next door, taking you on a buggy ride through a village in New England, passing through picturesque snapshot after snapshot, each with its own kind of music, and all of them quaint and charming.  When we are out and about, hearing the sounds of our environment commingled into a cacophonous row it is not displeasing to us; Ives’ genius is that he takes this idea and works it into his music.  If you can hear that, his works become enjoyable, vivid, even entrancing.  You realize that what sounds harsh and assaulting at first as actually incredibly warm, inviting, and distinctly American in the best way.

Washington’s Birthday from the 4-movement Symphony of New England Holidays is a terrific example.  After getting to know this movement just a little bit, I find it surprisingly comforting, well-paced, inventive, and most enjoyable.  The first few minutes of the movement are made of cloudy, shifting harmonies and bleary orchestration.  Washington’s Birthday is on February 15th, always snowy in New England, and these first few minutes depict the slowly drifting snowy landscapes Ives would have trodden upon at this time of year.  I have to say he really captures something about a peaceful, if bitterly cold, snowy evening.  I can clearly picture the still drifts of snow, bathed in the dusty light of street lamps, with the occasional gust of wind which slightly changes their shape every so often.  As the cold intensifies and we tire of the walk, the nagging flute seeming to echo the discomfort of the cold, we eventually discover our destination: a festive barndance filled with fiddlers and Jews’ harp players.  In this section Ives, as he so often did, sought to illustrate multiple events in space, much like a musical 3-ring circus.  While you may think that anyone can layer different music together and call it a sonic experiment, the rhythmic vitality that pops out of the texture reveals Ives to be a masterful technician with solid craft.  Not just anyone could do this, even if you may think that 😉  Do you hear any songs you recognize?  It is a good exercise to listen for the different events that commingle into the cacophony and this helps to make it more enjoyable than you might think at first.  After an unexpectedly gorgeous and lyrical episode, “Good Night Ladies” eventually brings the dance to a close with the now somber revelers leaving the party.

While the sensibility that drove Ives to create his sonic adventures is not really like that of the European avant-garde, it resonated with them.  Schonberg, among others, greatly admired Ives’ imaginative, deeply personal and most uncompromising approach.  While this doesn’t surprise me, I think it is worth pointing out that Ives was responding to much different impulses than the European avant-garde musicians.  Musical invention for Ives seemed to be a game and challenge to constantly top his previous flights of fancy, all drawn from an eccentric and personal inner landscape.  It is not wrought with existential struggle or dread as I often note in the music of Schoenberg, Debussy, Hindemith, and their ilk.  Ives is always writing from a place of great optimism and good cheer.  And when he didn’t care who listened, it was not out of any indignant prophetic vision, but rather from a rugged, individualistic smugness.  Distinctly American, isn’t it?  Ives was not preaching doom on a street corner, urging repentance; he was encapsulating his America in a series of cheeky and affectionate puzzles that he worked through as a hobby on the weekends.

Had he been true blue avant-garde, writing out of apocalyptic philosophical convictions, he probably would have acted the part of the starving artist, forgoing the comforts of the good life in order to unleash his prophecy on humankind, no matter the cost.  But that was not Ives.  Instead, he made a fortune as president of the largest and most successful life insurance company in America, steadily producing his distinctly American music all the while.  He watched his work gain acceptance, praise, recognition and performances very gradually over the course of his life, but he was clearly not one so convicted to sacrifice the American Dream in protest of the public’s slow acceptance.  And it makes sense; his society did not demand an avant-garde.  It remained stable and optimistic well past the end of his life.  While we can listen to Schoenberg, Hindemith, or Shostakovich and have our souls darkened by existential angst, Ives may sonically affront us at first,but it does not take long to listen past the dissonances and hear the playful, optimistic American spirit at work just below the surface.

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Music About Snow, Day 3 – “Winter” from The Seasons by Alexander Glazunov

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 3 – “Winter” from The Seasons by Alexander Glazunov

The career of Alexander Glazunov was spent almost exactly halfway between the establishment of Russia’s first, highly nationalistic, school of composing, spearheaded by Balakirev’s “Mighty Five”, and the twentieth century Bolshevik period, which saw the efforts of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and their contemporaries as they struggled to exist peaceably and productively within Stalin’s oppressive regime (not often an easy task).  I wouldn’t exactly describe Glazunov as a transitional figure between the two, at least as far as musical style is concerned, since his music does not exactly link the nineteenth century Russian nationalism with abrasive quirkiness the Bolshevik composers.  Ironically his music links more closely to works by Stravinsky, who sought to imitate his symphonic style early on.  It is ironic because Stravinsky and Glazunov came to share a mutual distaste for one another.  But he was an important personal and chronological link, mentored by Rimsky-Korsakov and in turn mentoring the young Dmitri Shostakovich, even if the younger composer did not desire to follow in Glazunov’s stylistic footsteps.

By the time Glazunov had begun to mature the belligerence between the authentic Russians, as exemplified by Balakirev’s circle with their proud unevenness, celebration of folk traditions and open contempt for book learning, and the academics of the conservatory had abated and lost relevance.  The beginning of the end came in 1871 when Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, always the surest and steadiest craftsman of Balakirev’s Mighty Handful, accepted a professorship at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.  It was, in many ways, a direct affront to the philosophy of Balakirev’s circle, and Rimsky-Korsakov proceeded polish his craftsmanship to an even higher shine.  Would this have compromised the vital and red-blooded Russian character of his music?  Perhaps, but it is hard to say.  If any of Balakirev’s handful would become a professor it was Rimsky-Korsakov.  Through this transition away from the unkempt nationalism of the “Five” Rimsky-Korsakov also began to extend the proverbial olive branch to another notable Russian composer, Tchaikovsky.  Academy-trained while the “Mighty Handful” were busily pouring out their messy Russian souls, Tchaikovsky was always mistrustful of their inconsistency and emotionalism.  He also seemed to create a distinctly Russian music that was somehow more classic, elegant, of better breeding, and Rimsky-Korsakov began to resonate with this more and more after his university appointment.

Alexander Glazunov came under Rimsky-Korsakov’s mentorship around this time.  Something of a wunderkind, he was a precocious pianist and composer, with a stunning ear and musical memory.  He was able to orchestrate an overture from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor after hearing the composer play it at the piano once.  Glazunov grew up in the academy and assimilated the polished, Russian academic style of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.  Still full-bodied, thick, emotional and laden with folk influences, it is also dry, refined and restrained in a way that the music of, say, Mussorgsky is not.  Mussorgsky is the most extreme example of the roughness of Balakirev’s group, but the contrast is revealing.  Maybe one could say that Tchaikovsky is the best balance between Mussorgsky and Glazunov?  Maybe one could say the same about Rimsky-Korsakov, but in a different way?  However it is evaluated, Glazunov has lost the historical battle of orchestral programs to all of them.  His music is very elegant and well orchestrated, but not always very interesting I’m afraid.  Even the trained Tchaikovsky found ways to keep his music full of life and passion in ways that Glazunov did not.

But still, Glazunov had an important role in the history and flow of Russian music.  In spite of his receding legacy, he managed to successfully synthesize all the different streams of influence in Russian music while he was alive, extracting important elements from the “Five”, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and other composers active toward the end of the nineteenth century, and synthesize them into a highly polished and respectable voice that was able to stand out on the international stage.  He directed major conservatories in Russia and mentored young composers like Shostakovich, even if artists of this generation found his music too stiff and old fashioned to be worthy of imitation.  They still respected his accomplishments, his stature, and his reputation.  And, quite significantly, he was able to offer up the heart of Russian nationalism to the next generation, packaging it together with the rigor and work ethic of the academic mindset.  The Bolshevik composers were pure professionals, unlike the whimsical artists of Balakirev’s “Five” who tended to write when inspiration struck, just one of their tendencies that made Tchaikovsky skeptical of their potential.

Glazunov’s music may not be as stunning as the composers he drew from and influenced, but it is stable and sturdy.  Seamless, beautifully orchestrated, and precisely cast, it exudes a Romantic grandeur in which it is easy to become swept up.  All of these qualities are most evident in one of his most often performed works, his ballet The Seasons.  Composed in 1899 and premiered in 1900, shortly before he assumed the directorship of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, it comes from a particularly fertile time in his life during which he produced some of his most masterfully-written works.  The ballet was commissioned by the French choreographer Marius Petipa, who is quite possibly the most influential ballet master and choreographer in the history of music, responsible for the golden age of Russian ballet.  He settled in St. Petersburg at age 30, fleeing from the disastrous fallout of a romantic indiscretion, and proceeded to elevate Russian ballet to phenomenal levels of genius and beauty.  In addition to the great ballets of Tchaikovsky, Petipa commissioned and choreographed ballets by numerous other Russian composers, including three by Glazunov.

The Seasons is cast in 4 scenes, one for each season.  Winter is the opening scene, and features a succession of dances about water in its different frozen forms (frost, ice, hail and snow) before a couple of gnomes light a fire and melt everything.  The subtle differences between the different solid forms of water serve as a brilliant vehicle for Glazunov’s orchestral craftsmanship.  The frost feathers, the ice shines, the hail pelts and the snow floats.  Winter is ever transparent, detailed, and finely drawn in precise lines, echoing the summation of the Russian academic and folk traditions.  Perhaps it will remind you of restrained Tchaikovsky, but Glazunov’s polished voice breathes vivid life into Petipa’s choreographed winter more than a century after it was first danced.

 

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Music About Snow, Day 2 – “L’hiver qui nous tourmente” from Isis by Jean-Baptiste Lully

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 2 – “L’hiver qui nous tourmente” from Isis by Jean-Baptiste Lully

Of all the monarchs to grace Europe’s thrones, there was probably none so careful about his image as France’s Louis XIV, also known as “The Sun King”.  A megalomaniac who was not at all shy about wielding the arts in the service of promoting his pristine and grandiose image, he kept his artists busy, be they visual, architectural or musical.  The now famous palace at Versailles was transformed under his monarchy from a modest hunting lodge to a fully-functioning and highly-decorated royal complex, and remains to this day one of the most stunning royal palaces in existence.  And Louis XIV helped to establish the first distinctively national music of France with the help of a very important collaborator, an Italian, who would lay the foundations for a style of music that would allow French composers for generations after to set their native language with grace and clarity.

According to stories I’ve heard, a Florentine by the name of Giovanni Battista Lulli was putting on a show in a public square which incorporated music, dance and comedy sometime in the 1640s and attracted the attention of a French aristocrat named Roger of Lorraine, who imported the young Lulli to France as an Italian language tutor for his niece.  Over the course of the next decades Lulli gallicized his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully (Handel performed a similar conversion from German to English, but more on that some other day), which is what most people call him today.  Lully was ambitious and talented; he eventually ingratiated himself with the new monarch, Louis XIV, 6 years his junior, and took every opportunity to work as a musician, composer and dancer in the young Sung King’s service.  They shared a taste for dance, and the French national passion for ballet is largely a result of their friendship and artistic collaboration.  Louis was most taken with Lully’s artistry and soon granted him a monopoly on French dramatic music, to the delight of Lully and to the frustration of so many other musicians working in France who found themselves forced to imitate his style and constantly appeal to the monarchical bureaucracy in order to have their works performed.

From all accounts Jean-Baptiste Lully was a complex man, and, like so many influential artists, difficult to judge with any kind of easy ethical verdict.  But his efforts established a stable and robust school of musical style in a nation that had not yet found a musical voice capable of competing in the cultural bazaar of artistic ideas.  In spite of his Italian origins, Lully truly created a distinctively French manner of music making, original on every structural level, that came to be greatly admired and deeply influential internationally.  The intellectual protection granted by his pocket monarch afforded him the opportunities and creative space to develop a number of artistic forms, all of which combined music, drama, dance, and comedy to various degrees.  Louis XIV appreciated Lully and had the patience to see his efforts eventually grow into the grandest and most distinguished form of French musical drama, the tragedie lyrique, the first of which came exactly 20 years after the two of them had first danced together in a ballet.

Lully began writing tragedies lyrique to libretti penned by the dramatist Philippe Quinault in 1673 and proceeded to produce these grand and dignified efforts at the rate of one per year until the composer’s death in 1687, for a total of 13 (his death interrupted the completion of what would have been the 14th).  The tragedies lyrique represent the ultimate solution in combining all of Louis XIV’s desires for what the music of his monarchy ought to be.  The stories, based mostly on Greek and Roman mythology, are high-minded and noble, concerned with the competing pursuits of love and immortal glory that would have consumed a great monarch.  Each act has a dance break called a divertissement, sort of a show-within-a-show that is cleverly incorporated into the libretto, and afforded the opportunity to mix ballet into the drama (foreign operas staged in France were required to undergo this kind of treatment for centuries after Lully, with ballets forcefully inserted into the drama whether they fit or not).  And in the tragedies lyrique Lully finally cracked the French text-setting nut.  French, a much different language than Italian, demanded a different manner of music in setting it; it was simply overwhelmed by Italian-style music.  In these grand dramatic works Lully invented a way of setting the French language to music that was beautiful and elegant.  This style would serve French dramatic music for centuries.

And one other notable characteristic of the tragedies-lyrique: they were pretty serious.  This is by design, and also in great contrast to much of the other music that Lully had written for his monarch.  For example, try this on for size:

 

That’s an example of a scene from a comedie-ballet, and it’s one of the genres in which Lully worked during the two decades between meeting Louis XIV and producing his first tragedie-lyrique.  Lully’s partner in creating the comedies-ballet was the great Moliere.  These works are spoken plays with ballets and other musical interludes stirred in.  And, as you should be able to tell from that last clip, they often included some ridiculously silly scenes.  That particular scene, from a comedy called Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, depicts a madcap consultation of three doctors.

As the tragedies-lyriques were meant to represent the Sun King in all his resplendent, austere glory, Lully and Quinault were encouraged to dispense with the comedy, and for the most part they did.  Eventually.  The critical aesthetic minds of Louis XIV’s court put pressure on the artists representing him to craft serious and humorless depictions of the Sun King’s preponderance.  But it may have snuck into a couple of Quinault and Lully’s earlier works, at which point the recent comedies-ballets would still have been a fresh memory.  Here’s an example from Isis of 1677, which follows the story of the goddess Io as she endures the sharpest point of a love triangle between herself, Jupiter, and Juno, eventually transforming at the end into the Egyptian goddess, Isis.  In the fourth act Io finds herself punished by Juno for her romantic entanglement with Jupiter, chased by the furies from one unbearable locale to another.  At the beginning of the act she finds herself in a desolate, snow-covered plain.  For the divertissement a chorus of fellow tortured souls sing, in a most convincing and almost comical manner, about how cold they are.  See if you can sense their anguish, and see is Lully’s musical clever musical depiction of their shivering doesn’t put a smile on your face:

 

French text L’hiver qui nous tourmente S’obstine à nous geler: Nous ne saurions parler Qu’avec une voix tremblante: La neige et les glaçons Nous donnent de mortels frissons. Les frimas se répandent Sur nos corps languissants: Le froid transit nos sens, Les plus durs rochers se fendent: La neige et les glaçons Nous donnent de mortels frissons.

English translation [Since] Winter, our tormenter, persists in freezing us we hardly know how to speak but in trembling accents: the snow and ice give us deadly chills. The frosts spread over our languishing bodies, our senses are numbed by a rock-splitting freeze: the snow and ice gives us deadly chills.

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Music About Snow, Day 1 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

This post is dedicated to my friend Leigh-Ann Balthazor who loved Liszt (“Franzie”) as long as I knew her.  Leigh-Ann passed away before her time in September of 2015.

Music About Snow, Day 1 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

One of my favorite authors of recent years is Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist who wrote three great non-fiction books in the 2000s, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.

Gladwell has a knack for presenting theories about how the world works and developing them through statistics and anecdotes over the course of a couple hundred pages.  His stories are always intriguing and easy to read, and any of these books will have you looking at the world just a bit differently after you finish reading them.  And what I find in reflecting on the experience of reading Gladwell after a few years is that, while I don’t remember everything in those books, each of them has at least one major idea or observation about the world that has really stuck with me and continues to resonate with me as I make my way through life.  For Outliers it is the 10,000 hours theory, which states that anyone who masters any discipline ends up putting in around 10,000 hours of practice at some point.  For Blink it is the way that many of our decisions are made quickly and below the threshold of conscious awareness.  And for The Tipping Point it is the idea of the connector.

A connector is a kind of person.  By their very nature, it is almost assured that you know at least one of them.  They serve a very important role in society.  A connector is a person who, in a sense, “collects” acquaintances.  They have a way of making lots of somewhat shallow relationships with many, many people.  Do you know anyone who has in the neighborhood of 2,000 Facebook friends?  They just might be a connector.

Understand that when I say “shallow”, it’s not in a negative or judgemental way.  Connectors are simply operating out of their nature, which is to get to know a lot of people.  I love the connectors I know, and I think it’s just really neat the way they naturally become acquainted with so many different people.  I understand that my connector friends will never be the kind of people I get to know on a truly intimate level, and that’s okay.  They serve in important roles, bringing people together, catalyzing social progress, and encouraging everyone to do what they do best.  And part of what makes connectors what they are is a sense of affection and appreciation for all the people in their extensive networks.

I’ve come to suspect that the renowned Hungarian pianist and composer of the eighteenth century, Franz Liszt, was one of music history’s most important connectors.  I think Antonio Salieri may have been another, but that’s a story for another day (interestingly, Liszt and Salieri did know each other and worked together at a certain point in time).  Liszt was coming into his own just when the Romantic era of music history could have used a charismatic figure to link its early creators to its later ones, and he, with his tendency to want to meet people, appreciate them, and champion their music, seemed to fit that bill.

Often, when I read about Romantic musicians, I find that Franz Liszt was either a friend, an admirer, or both.  It really seems like he made a great and natural effort to get to know every prominent musician in Europe while he was alive and I hardly ever find accounts of him criticizing fellow composers.  I think everyone else must have done it at some time, but Liszt really seemed to love everyone, performing and programming musicians of the past, befriending musicians of the present, and encouraging musicians of the future.  He was just that kind of guy, and I wish I could have met him for the affection and encouragement!

One of his most important roles was as a conduit of the virtuoso tradition.  While he is known for his compositions that added significantly to symphonic repertoire, and even looked ahead to the unsettling harmonic languages of the twentieth century, he was best known during his lifetime as a pianist of astounding virtuosity.  In his 20s he had witnessed a performance by the great Italian violin virtuoso, Niccolo Paganini (for more on Paganini, see this post), and at that point resolved to become his equal on the piano, which he did.  Liszt and his contemporary piano virtuosi, headquartered in Paris during the 1830s, brought piano technique to unprecedented heights.

His compositions for the piano are an outgrowth of this new pianistic virtuosity.  The Transcendental Etudes were published in 1852 after having gone through a long period of development that had started in the 1820s.  What came to be known as the Transcendental Etudes were actually based on earlier, more difficult pieces, so perhaps Liszt was reducing their complexity in the interest of opening them up to a wider pool of performers.  Still, they are, as the title implies, transcendently challenging, sort of a cross between Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, with its systematic scheme of keys, and Paganini’s 24 Caprices (see this post) with their encyclopedic catalog of difficult violin techniques, applied to Liszt’s new pianism.  They constantly push the piano to its limits, and often paint highly poetic pictures in the while doing so.  

The last of the 12 Transcendental Etudes is nicknamed “Snow Drift” and its constant tremolos and sweeping scalar melodies, which constantly switch from hand to hand, and from within the tremolo texture to without, seem to depict a landscape being progressively covered in drifts of snow.  Toward the end a new element is added; the tremolos continue, but chromatic scales of very short note values begin to sweep through the texture like swirling winds upsetting the snowbanks.  The frenzied climax that follows takes the piece to even more dizzying heights of virtuosity as the wind grows stronger and finally abates.

From what I have heard this is among the most difficult, and also the most stunning of the Transcendental Etudes.  Like Paganini’s Caprices, these works that once seemed unplayable (and still do to many people) eventually came to be mastered by many subsequent virtuosos.  I have to imagine that Liszt would have taught and encouraged many of them himself, being the connector that he was.  Romantic musical Europe would have been a much different place without him in the mix, for his virtuosity, his creative mind, and his magnanimous sense of camaraderie, which he dispensed generously to the other musicians he encountered.  He was not content to keep the prestige to himself and clearly understood that the world of music would be a better place with him supporting his fellow musicians rather than suppressing them.  For this laudable quality, and others, I am thankful for the life and work of Franz Liszt.

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Falsetto Bros, Day 5 – “Hymn” from Akhnaten by Philip Glass

This week’s theme is…Falsetto Bros!  It’s good to be a man 🙂  Male singers possess a major difference in comparison to females: a falsetto range.  It’s like a magical third zone of vocal timbre that allows men to soar like chirpy birds above their more commonly used tenor and baritone registers.  I love to sing in my falsetto register.  I often experience an enchanting and lyrical freedom up there that I don’t experience in the lower tessituras.  Across the years, and in different musical cultures, many male singers have discovered the same thing, and have worked to cultivate performing voices through their falsetto ranges, often grappling in some way to reconcile their masculinity with the feminine associations of their chosen (or determined) voice.  This week we look at some such gentlemen.

Falsetto Bros, Day 5 – “Hymn” from Akhnaten by Philip Glass

The superstar castrati ruled the leading roles of Italian operas produced throughout Europe in the 1600s and 1700s.  They made their mark on opera from its very birth, which was around 1600 in Florence (with significant contributions from the astronomer Galileo’s father, Vincenzo).  The new art form caught on like wildfire and within a century had swept through every major city in Italy, assuming distinctive forms in each one, and then beyond its borders into other lands where creative musicians sought to imitate the Italian models.  It is more or less certain that every Italian opera penned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was written with a castrato in mind for the lead male role.  This is true of Handel’s 40 some, Vivaldi’s 80 or so, Scarlatti’s 50, and even a couple of Mozart’s, along with those of countless other lesser-known Baroque composers.  They were everywhere in Italy, and also heard frequently in the German lands.  Only the French showed a marked distaste for the castrati, electing instead to give their prime roles to haute-contres, a kind of high tenor singer.

As much as operatic audiences and ecclesiastical choirs loved their castrati, it was a conflicted industry, fraught with shady business practices, ongoing controversy, and a collective shame on the part of the Italians for regularly carrying out the painful and psychologically injurious mutilations necessary to produce these bizarre and wonderful creatures who brought to life such stunning vocal performances.  Between 1589, when Pope Sixtus V first permitted castrati to sing in Vatican choirs, and 1903, when Pope Pius X finally banned them from the papal chapel, the debate assumed theological dimensions within the Church as bishops pondered whether it was worse to castrate boys or have women violate biblical mandate and sing in church, ultimately ruling against the, by then, three centuries-old custom that struck so many along the way as a barbaric violation of nature.

But by then the castrati had made their mark on the nature of European dramatic music.  While it may seem counterintuitive to portray heroic leading men with a high singer, the range is more rugged and masculine than is often acknowledged (see this post for an exploration of that idea in a different style of music) and it’s actually easier to get used to male characters with female voices than you might think.  Anyone who studies the history of opera to a serious extent may develop a taste for it and find it easier and easier to imagine a heroic and reflective male lead with the voice of an alto or soprano.  One such opera enthusiast is Philip Glass, a titanic figure of the modern minimalist style of music.  For more on another minimalist master, see this post.  Between 1975 and 1983 he composed three operas, each about a man who changed the world: Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Pharaoh Amenhotep IV.  The operas are called Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten respectively.  Taken together they have come to be known as the “Portrait Trilogy”, as in portraits of the three men, and they came from a time in Glass’ career during which he was softening the austere sensibility of his early experimental music into a broader, more eclectic, and more audience-friendly style which he came to comfortably inhabit during the 1980s and beyond.  If you listen to those three operas in the chronological order of their composition you can hear that process play out over a decade’s worth of creative work (there were also other works in addition to the 3 portrait operas composed over the course of this decade).

Of the three operatic subjects my bet is you have heard of all except for pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who eventually changed his name to “Akhnaten”, hence the title of the opera.  Murky though the history is, Akhnaten is notable in that during his 17-year reign of the 1300s BC he attempted to steer Egyptian religion toward a form that resembles, or perhaps became, the monotheism of Judaism.  It is not quite like the Abrahamic monotheism we know today, but seems to anticipate it in many ways; Akhnaten shifted the focus of worship from the pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods to Aten, which refers to the disk of the sun, not exactly in line with the contemporary understanding of the deity who is apart from his creation, but it can be seen to represent progress along a continuum from paganism to monotheism.  Different theories circulate regarding the exact nature of his reforms and their historical relationship with ancient Judaism.  Pharaoh Akhnaten was ultimately unsuccessful in his effort as Egypt reverted to the worship of their traditional deities after his death.

Studying the story of Akhnaten clearly made a significant impression on Philip Glass to include him alongside Einstein and Gandhi in the trilogy of operas about great and influential men .  The music of Akhnaten is solemn and meditative, with a deep and inspiring gravitas.  And the title character of Akhnaten is sung by a countertenor, that is a male who trains his falsetto register and performs with clear and strong tone in the alto or mezzo-soprano tessitura.  After hearing Akhnaten’s Hymn to Aten right in the middle of the opera I completely understand why Glass made this choice.  The high, clear, watery timbre of the countertenor is ethereal and otherworldly.  It is somehow able to sing clearly into our souls from across millennia about a primordial holiness in a way that a tenor or baritone is not.  Akhnaten as a countertenor is a serene and timeless icon, unravaged by the hustle and bustle of daily existence.  Listen to this magnificent hymn and see if you don’t agree:

This long-breathed dramatization of religious devotion and awe is best consumed in a state of stillness and repose, so I recommend that you make the time to do so.  After Akhnaten’s stunning song of devotion climaxes at about 9 minutes, a celestial choir sings Psalm 104 in hushed Hebrew.  The countertenor of the lead is a sublime fit for the texture of entire episode, an unexpectedly imaginative application of the treble-range operatic male lead 400 years after the castrati began to guide the very first operas in that direction.

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