A Musical High, Day 1 – Music in the Shape of a Pear by Erik Satie

This week’s theme is…A Musical High!  Countless music lovers experience a “natural high” from listening to their favorite things.  Music’s ability to change the chemistry of our moods is renowned.  But musicians and other artists have long been associated with less natural highs, and the link between intoxication and creativity is strong, if somewhat ambiguous.  This week we explore music related to the theme of intoxication, or created by musicians who regularly induced that state upon themselves.  Disclaimer: The subject of intoxication as it relates to artistry is complex and ethically fraught; none of the writing on Smart and Soulful is meant to condone intoxication by any substance, legal or otherwise, in the pursuit of creative productivity.  Enjoy your music responsibly!

A Musical High, Day 1 – Music in the Shape of a Pear by Erik Satie

Some people just march to the beat of their own drum, don’t they?  I’m not sure who it is that gets to set the parameters of what is often labeled as “conventional”, but most of us would probably agree that it tends to look something like this:

1. Find steady employment that keeps you secure and work hard at it
2. Get married and have some kids
3. Cultivate your values quietly and assiduously (depending on your personality I suppose)
4. Involve yourself in your community through service and, perhaps, political action
5. Guard your reputation and become well-respected
6. Enter civic and religious organizations for the good of your family and society
7. Raise your children up to do essentially the same thing

Granted, that general blueprint will find as many expressions as individuals who execute it, but I would submit that, for most of us at least, that is the “convention”.  And we often find ourselves puzzled by and pondering the motivations of those who buck the trend in any significant way.  Are they just selfish?  Inspired by an opaque vision, the integrity of which will only be revealed by the historical longview?  Are they existential and depressed?  Or are they simply odd?

And we would probably find ourselves asking these kind of questions about many who inhabit the pantheon of great artists, musicians and writers.  We generally suspect that they must be animated by something most unconventional in order to succeed and contribute so originally in such an arena.  But, we can still look to most of them, even the most uncompromising vanguards and iconoclasts, for some semblance of the above outline, validated by material success, renown, respect, or some other element of civic motivation.  But certain rare individuals continue to stand out as exceptionally odd beyond even those criteria, and, for my money, the oddest of all is Erik Satie.

It would be easy to look at Satie and be baffled by his story and contributions.  One almost wonders if his bizarre personal configuration was engineered by some kind of mastermind working beneath it all to stimulate maximum impact on the art and culture of his time.  Or maybe his traits and behaviors were just part of his nature and there was enough compelling content in there to influence contemporaries and historians alike.  But he is an odd figure – exhibiting abundant tendencies that most would consider to be vices, often with seemingly little to redeem him, while at the same time winning champions for his music and counseling incredibly significant figures into changing their artistic course.

Satie is often described as lazy, eccentric, introverted to a fault, and banal in his musical expression.  None of this seems controversial among those who evaluate him.  If you were a real cynic you might suggest that Debussy maintained his friendship with Satie to put his own success in greater relief.  But that’s probably not fair, for it was Satie who ultimately broke Debussy of his early tendencies to idolize and internalize Wagner’s musical language and philosophy.  Debussy would not have yielded to a suggestion of that significance without a considerable weight of ideas supporting it.  Satie even claimed to have originated the thought that French music be modeled after the impressionist painters, implying in his account that the Gallic music be modeled on their visual approach, and naming specific painters.  This may be self-aggrandizement or apocrypha: Debussy is known to have identified more closely with the Symbolist writers than the Impressionist painters, and, if Satie’s account is indeed true, it suggests that Debussy ought to have more completely acknowledged the resemblance.  But it could be just as much a result of Debussy’ little man stubbornness, in the service of cultivating his uncompromising maverick imagine.  Either way, Satie was a man of ideas, and while his music certainly reflects them, one senses he was more interested in the idea than the detailed execution, unlike Debussy who was an orchestrator par excellence in every respect.  I suppose the two made an unlikely and effective team, but most would relate better to Debussy’s motivations than Satie’s.

There are other odd quirks: he seemed to lack a certain amount of professional ambition, settling a little too comfortably into the essential money-making enterprise of playing piano in cafes for a good deal of his life.  Indeed, the Six admired his almost renunciatory attitude toward material success.  Was this a purer artistry than, say Richard Strauss, who thought of musical excellence and material success in equal measure (for more about him, see this post)?  Well, I suppose opinions will vary; it was definitely a more philosophical artistry, bolstered by Satie’s precisely written words – always swimming in his own thoughts I imagine, and what music may come.

When he died even those closest to him were surprised to learn of the spartan idiosyncrasies of his living arrangements: a small, bare room, cluttered with papers (both affairs and compositions thought long lost), 12 identical grey velvet suits hanging neatly in his closet, and two pianos stacked, the top of which was hollowed out for storage.  It reminds me a little of accounts of Beethoven’s work space, but twice as eccentric and perhaps even nihilistic.  Satie was probably not an easy man to be, beholding the boundless ambition of his contemporaries, his own strengths better suited to odd thoughts that were intriguing every now and then.  I imagine he was prone to depression and existential despair, especially given his interest in the early Dada movement.  Might you expect a person like this to gravitate toward intoxication?  Well, he died of cirrhosis of the liver, having drank himself to death.  And he was also attracted to the Parisian hallucinogenic of choice, absinthe.  I find references to the mysterious “green fairy” in the stories of no other prominent Western composer.  Many say that the hallucinatory effects of absinthe are overblown, but did it fuel any of Satie’s philosophical musings?

From Satie we have a body of strangely evocative and placid music, clearly the antecedents of Impressionism, much closer to Debussy’s language than to Ravel’s, but less ambitiously realized.  And what he lacked in purely technical prowess he made up for with eccentricity, capturing the attention of the public and his fellow musicians from time to time, and creating Parisian scandals with the best of them.

For those with the patience, Satie’s detached little world of thought and sonic events is strangely rewarding, and in unexpected ways.  Something like the first conceptual composer, his music has influenced countless modern musicians who synthesize unconventional philosophy and music.  Again, it takes a special artist, one not motivated by conventional civic success, to create such movements.  Listen to one of the “fruits” of Satie’s way of thinking, his music In the Shape of a Pear:

 

—

Would you like Aaron to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Weekend Gems #4 – Trio Sonata in G major, Opus. 2 No. 12 by Arcangelo Corelli

Weekend Gems #4 – Trio Sonata in G major, Opus. 2 No. 12 by Arcangelo Corelli and Sonata No. 5 from Armonico Tributo by Georg Muffat

 

Arcangelo Corelli is probably the greatest violinist you’ve never heard of.  If you are not a string player or related to one, I would be rather surprised if you had heard of him.  But those who know and love him understand his importance and his gifts.  He has probably the greatest Italian violinist of the seventeenth century.  His fame was widespread and he influenced all violinists who lived during and after his life in some way.  Handel’s instrumental writing would be considerably different without the influence of Corelli’s music and playing.

As a composer he left a significant legacy, perfecting the solo violin sonata, concerto grosso, and trio sonatas, all of which are preserved in a small collection of flawless masterpieces which inspired European musicians with their grace and beauty (it is often said that he destroyed the less worthy works of his pen, so his actual output is certainly much greater than what survives – we have a total of only 60 works, a relatively small number for a composing musician of this time).

The trio sonatas form two thirds of his surviving output, opus 1, 2, 3 and 4 out of 6 (for more on the opus system, see this post).  All of them are cast in 4 short movements, slow-fast-slow-fast, except for one, the last sonata of opus 2.  It is a one-movement chaconne.  Corelli’s chaconne is a statement of incredible elegence and suavity, hallmarks of all his writing.  It cleverly contrasts a slow introduction with a concertante-like lively movement proper.  The variations are inspired and engaging from beginning to end and I am so thankful that Corelli deemed his only essay in continuous variation form worthy of bequeathing to posterity:

 

Incidentally, one of Corelli’s pupils, the Germanic Georg Muffat, born in present day France, of Scottish descent, also studied with Lully (see this post).  His mature works combine Corelli’s superhuman melodic elegance with Lully’s breadth and gravity.  Here is his passacaglia, written to Lullian scale, using Corelli’s concerto grosso concept.  I hope you can forgive the recording quality; it is by far my favorite recording of Muffat’s stately and joyful masterpiece:

 

I love to listen to music like this during lazy and contemplative afternoons.  You need time for it to unfold and reveal the delights of its overlying structure.  Enjoy!

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you love Mozart (and probably even if you don’t), then I’ll wager you’ve seen the film Amadeus.  And if you haven’t, you should.  I’ve written about many of the merits of the film in this post, so go ahead and read that one if you require further persuasion 🙂  The film dramatizes the years of his professional life, that is, the time during which he held a professional post in Salzburg and then freelanced in Vienna, roughly the second half.  Naturally, a life like Mozart’s, even as brief as it was, would have been filled with considerable detail that a story like Amadeus must boil down.  The scope of Amadeus is Mozart’s final 15 years, starting with his rather dramatic resignation from the service of the Salzburg prince-archbishop, and dramatizing the political machinations and artistic productivity of his remaining years, spent mostly in Vienna.  Of course much of the fun of Amadeus is that central story which features the mad plotting of court composer Antonio Salieri to thwart and eventually murder (whether he actually does this, or accidentally inspires him to work to death, is unclear in the film) the young and threatening composer out of jealousy, but this is considered by most historians to be a contrivance, even though Salieri apparently went mad later in life and admitted to the crime in his delirious state.

It was during his employment under the prince-archbishop in Salzburg that Mozart began to take his first strides toward composing mature music and he soon became restless with the provincial character of his hometown, especially since its economy could not support a stable venue of opera, to which he was drawn.  If you have seen Amadeus, then you know this, as the operas provide significant set pieces in the film’s production and benchmarks by which the plot is paced.  His Viennese drama begins with the Abduction From the Seraglio, proceeds through The Marriage of Figaro, takes a personal turn with Don Giovanni, and ends with the bizarre and mysterious Magic Flute.  This quartet gives a fine sampling indeed of Mozart’s best operas, covering as it does two German singspielen and two Italian comedies (although from the scene chosen to represent Don Giovanni, you could be forgiven for missing that opera’s generally comedic nature).  

But there’s another type of opera which Amadeus leaves out completely.  It is one that occupied Mozart’s operatic mind for significant periods of time, all throughout his life, and allowed him to develop major skills as he crafted them: Italian serious opera, also known as opera seria.  While it is true that you will today find Mozart’s opera seria produced much less frequently than the four which appear in Amadeus, there are two particularly fine examples from his years of maturity, and a handful from his formative years as well (check out Mitridate, King of Pontus and Ascanio in Alba, composed when he was 14 and 15 years old, respectively – they both contain much fine music).  From the end of his life, composed at the same time as The Magic Flute, is The Clemency of Titus, a rather dry and lofty, serious drama, which essentially holds to what can seem like an endless succession of recitative and arias.  If you’re into that kind of stuff, as I am, you can find plenty to like there.  But, if you find the stodgy, stiff opera seria formula boring (which is many people, I’m sure), you will probably do better to explore a rich and colorful serious Italian opera from right around the middle of Mozart’s life, Idomeneo, King of Crete.

Idomeneo does score a brief, passing reference in Amadeus.  As Emperor Joseph’s cabinet discusses the possibility of commissioning an opera from Mozart, Baron von Swieten speaks admiringly of having recently seen a performance of Idomeneo:

…to which Count Orsini-Rosenberg shoots back:

Or, if you want to see the exchange old school…

And so the rest of the film is essentially set up in this exchange, with Mozart’s champions and antagonists playing a human tug-of-war which ultimately batters and bruises him.  Incidentally, that last comment by Orsini-Rosenberg has become a rather famous encapsulation of the criticism of Mozart’s detractors as summarized by the film.  Do you think there may be any truth to their observation, or were they merely defensive?  It’s become something of a trope, even beyond Amadeus and you see it pop up in some unexpected places…

 

Whatever opinions of Idomeneo may have been, it is a notable opera in Mozart’s history, considered by pretty much anyone who knows his music to be his first mature opera.  And it is a splendid opera, alive with variety, vivid music, and spectacle.  It will always take a back seat to The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, simply because of the stiff artifice of its conventions, but Mozart works within them so creatively that it really stands out of its genre.

One tidbit about Mozart’s life that Amadeus leaves out is his visit to Paris, shortly before he left Salzburg for Vienna.  While in Paris, he surely would have taken in some of the recent and fashionable operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck.  Gluck was a Bohemian who found success in Vienna and Paris as an opera composer.  He is one of those figures that musicians learn about for his innovative spirit, a spirit which influenced scores of subsequent composers, but whom most non-musicians have probably not heard of.  Gluck managed to successfully take the operatic models which existed during his lifetime, synthesize the best parts of each, and distill the whole mix into a dramatic form of unprecedented focus and power.  The singing is basically Italian arias, with considerably less ostentatious ornamentation than was typical, a vice for which Italian singers were notorious, and the spectacle is French, but it serves the drama in a way that it never did in Lully’s operas (see this post).  The divertissements in Gluck’s operatic shows developed and deepened the story with magnificent force.  In addition to all of this, Gluck anticipated the spare, homophonic textures which would dominate European music in the coming years, relieving listeners from the busy counterpoint of Bach and Handel.

Gluck made his mark on music history, even though he is largely unknown outside of music history circles.  Idomeneo is clearly Gluckian in its structure, clarity, and power; Italian arias, French spectacle, and forceful dramatic clarity, but all done at Mozart’s level, which was a step beyond Gluck.  Gluck tends to be brilliant, but scrappy; Mozart is grace personified.  But there is obviously a congruence of spirit between Gluck’s reform operas and Mozart’s Idomeneo.  I bet Mozart saw Gluck’s Armide, written in 1777, when he was in Paris.  Gluck includes this bold, sparkling, and sharp-edged chaconne in the fifth act, as Armide’s minions dance for her bespelled lover, Renaud:

 

If you want to compare that to the passacaille Lully wrote for his setting of the same libretto almost a century prior, listen to this.  It is quite a different animal:

 

 

While it’s just one echo of Gluck’s operatic art in Idomeneo, Mozart included a chaconne of his own, and that’s notable because as far as I can tell it’s the only chaconne he ever wrote.  And it doesn’t quite sound like one either; I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was a chaconne if I didn’t know, but if you do, you can kind of hear it.  It has a triple meter propulsion and a succession of interesting gestures, woven together into a kind of variation form, all clothed in Mozart’s orchestral splendor:

 

By this time, the chaconne and passacaglia were losing favor.  Gluck probably represents the last generation of composers who would have used it without any irony or anachronism.  In Mozart it has the feeling of being almost a neo-chaconne, as if he was looking back and writing it with his own twist.  During the time of Mozart and his contemporaries, the chaconne would fall out of favor, making way for the theme and variations concept, which is found in so much of their instrumental music.  But it is intriguing that Mozart saw fit to leave his mark on the chaconne as only he could in the colorful and fascinating Idomeneo, which represents his summing up of all the different currents of serious opera in Europe, a fitting graduation piece to cap off his apprenticeship as he prepared to dive headlong into his maturity as a composer.

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 4 – Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 4 – Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms

In politics we often speak in terms of progressive and conservative.  While the words are always charged with moral dimensions of one kind or another, the policy positions to which they refer are fluid, depending on the time during which they are used.  All we can really boil their definitions down to, ultimately, is that progressives desire change beyond the status quo, and conservatives are either comfortable with the status quo or even desire to move back to a state which once was.  It is difficult to speak about this at all without embedding values into definitions!  For example, it would be easy to say that conservatives desire societal regression, but it’s not necessarily all that respectful of them or the positions they hold.  If you are beyond progressive, you may be labeled as either a radical, or perhaps even a revolutionary.  If you are beyond conservative you may be labeled as reactionary.  Again, all these definitions are fluid depending on their context, but generally those labels seem extreme and undesirable to most people.  But, again, who gets to decide the definition of “reasonable”?  I suppose we’re always flirting with the abyss of infinite regress…

While we generally apply those labels to political positions, they often have resonance in artistic contexts too.  Since styles shift and…develop (again, a value judgement), artistic currents can be seen to move in a forward direction, and various proponents and critics of different styles will exhibit various levels of comfort with this at any given time.  Some artists and critics will love new styles and trends, and so we would call them progressives, or even revolutionaries if they would like the styles to progress faster and more completely.  Other artists and critics will not like the change, preferring current or previous styles, and so they may be labeled conservatives or reactionaries, depending on the strength of their response.  In the simplest possible terms, we could call this the “damn kids!” effect.  Everyone hates their kids’ music, right?

We can observe this effect in all sorts of different ways throughout the history of Western music.  At many different times, critics and conservative composers could be found chafing against new, trendy stylistic currents through which more revolutionary musicians were attempting to infuse new life and interest into their creations.  It actually happens every hundred years or so, if you are content with a very general overview.  When opera came out, its monodic textures were quite progressive in comparison with the polyphony of the Renaissance.  Toward the end of the Baroque era, some composers persisted in created the thick, busy polyphony that characterized its peak style while many others started exploring the more fashionable homophonic textures and slower harmonic rhythm of the Rococo era, a brief bridge between the Baroque and Classical eras.  And in the early twentieth century many forward-looking composers began to write music that lacked a tonal center, resulting in sounds that, to many who first heard it, and many who now hear it, sound grating and difficult, while more conservative composers were still working in a late Romantic or post-Romantic tonal idiom, rich in lush chromatic harmony.

But this late Romantic idiom was once quite progressive, largely inspired by the musical language of Richard Wagner (for more about Wagner see this post).  Many listeners were drawn to his “music of the future”, while others were disgusted or left cold, preferring a quieter, saner music from a quainter time.  One such “reactionary” was Johannes Brahms, who always rode a current parallel to Wagner’s highly revolutionary vision.  Brahms seemed to look as far back as Wagner looked forward.  While Wagner worked in thick, cloudy, and continuous blankets of amorphous orchestral sonority which felt and sounded like nothing that had come before, Brahms preferred to stay within the clear forms and procedures handed down from the Germanic masters as old as Bach, but mixed with an equal measure of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn.  Where Wagner seemed to owe nothing to anyone, Brahms paid obvious homage to his inspirational forefathers as evidenced by his manner of composing original music, and also transcribing their music in a variety of different ways.

A handful of his works are sets of variations on themes by previous composers, including Schumann, Haydn, Paganini, and Handel.  And then there is the transcription of Bach’s great d minor Chaconne for solo violin.  At times Brahms was positively obsessed with it:

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Brahms was so enamored of Bach’s great Chaconne that he transcribed it for piano left hand:

 

Left hand is an interesting choice, considering that the original violin version is an octave higher, so the intuitive manner for a piano transcription would be, one might think, the right hand.  Apparently Brahms considered the dark, brooding quality of the left hand register to be congruent with the Chaconne’s voice.

Brahms was intrigued by this continuous variation form, so popular in the Baroque era, but unfashionable after that.  Only a pure traditionalist like Brahms would have put continuous variation form movements into his music at a time when the rest of Europe was drooling over Wagner’s progressive experiments.  And Brahms did it twice!  The noble finale of his Fourth Symphony is a very austere passacaglia.  But there is a lighter, more transparent passacaglia too, the final variation of an orchestral set he wrote on a theme by Haydn a little more than a decade prior to his final symphony.

The theme which forms the basis is Haydn’s St. Anthony Chorale:

 

Brahms puts this optimistic theme through its variation paces in an incredible variety of polyphonic and orchestrational ways, changing, it seems, as many different musical parameters between the variations as was humanly possible.  That is the craft of variation technique, after all.  You can listen to the complete 20 minute work here:

 

But, if you’re pressed for time (and who isn’t in this frenetic age?!) I recommend you get to know the finale.  I will disclaim that it is considerably more powerful and satisfying when it arrives at the end of the complete variations, but it’s good on its own too.  In a clever twist, Brahms includes, as the final variation, a rich passacaglia with a recurring 5-bar theme based on the St. Anthony Chorale which moves throughout the orchestra.  It’s a variation technique within a variation technique!

Talk about a conservative purist!  Wagner would never delight in such clever games for their own sake as Brahms does.  But it works musically too, doesn’t it?  The variations of the final passacaglia variation build seamlessly to a most satisfying orchestral climax which crowns both levels of variations:

“Conservative” and “Progressive” mean serious things in the moment, at any given time.  But with art, eventually the time passes and only the artifact remains, and in a way that political positions do not.  We can listen to Brahms and Wagner today, largely free of the labels they carried at their day of creation.  Now, we hear only Wagner’s intoxicating thickness and Brahms’ highly respectable clarity, each suited the satisfaction of different moods which may drive our listening tastes on any given day.

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST! Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST!  Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

Depending on where you look in the history Western music, “passacaglia”, or its frequently-encountered French version “passacaille”, may refer to an assortment of different but related musical phenomena.  In attempting to define the term, I long ago concluded that it is only really possible to list characteristic tendencies, and even then there are always exceptions.  But here are some things that tend to be true about passacaglias:

1. Like its close cousin, the chaconne, it is usually in triple meter, and usually a fast triple meter which feels almost like one beat per bar with a compound division.  If anything is nearly always true of movements labeled as passacaglias, it is this.  Oh, except for this one:

 

2. Passacaglias tend to be in minor keys, with a heavy character, often described as “ponderous”.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Even if passacaglias are not strictly tonal, especially in twentieth century examples, this is more or less true.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Well, maybe that’s subject to interpretation?  It certainly has a breadth and solemnity, even if it’s not exactly ponderous.

3. Passacaglias tend to be built by stringing together phrases, often called variations, of regular length, all built around some kind of repeating melodic figure.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Granted, you could say it’s more the chord progression that unifies the phrases of Handel’s example there, but usually when the unifying theme of the passacaglia variations is described it refers to a melody that is literally stated somewhere in the ensemble during each one, and it’s generally considered a mark of craftsmanship by critics to successfully pull that off.

It’s the third point that I most often find identified as the distinctive hallmark of the passacaglia, and it is that device which tends to help the best-known and most widely-respected examples of the genre stand out from the pack.

The earliest examples of this technique tend to see the recurring melodic phrase in the lowest voice, also known as the bass.  Sometimes this specific technique is known as a ground or ground bass.  One of the most famous examples of this can be found toward the end of Englishman Henry Purcell’s short opera Dido and Aeneas, written on an episode of Virgil’s Aeneid.  Shortly before Queen Dido expires out of heartsickness, she sings a plaintive lament about her death, a lyrical outpouring of drooping melody which is set above a recurring passacaglia-like bass ground:

 

The ground bass was a favorite technique of Purcell’s; his music is just peppered with repeating basslines of all styles and characters, and he was quite ingenious in composing nuanced and fascinating musical lines for the upper parts which leveraged the ground bass’ propulsive character while at the same time avoiding a slavish conformity to the phrase lengths happening below.

There is another famous passacaglia from the Baroque period which features this highly disciplined technique, although it twists the ground bass convention by moving the recurring phrase around within the texture; the repeating line is often in the bass, but frequently moves to the upper and middle voices also.  It is Bach’s great Passacaglia in c minor for organ:

 

Admired widely by fans of Bach’s music across all subsequent generations, I think it is probably Bach’s idea to moving the passacaglia ground around throughout the ensemble that enshrined the passacaglia within Western compositional technique as the rigorous, disciplined, and powerful exercise that it has come to be when written by subsequent composers.

Passacaglias largely fell out of favor during the Classical and Romantic eras, more or less replaced by the theme and variations technique, a comparable practice which better fit the virtuosic character of the musical sensibility that drove European art music during these periods, but as brainy composers began to delight more self-consciously in the intellectual rigor of past music, the passacaglia started to make a comeback.  Granted, you don’t hear them all the time, but many notable composers during the twentieth century have written at least one of them as part of a significant work, and when they appear they somehow manage to emanate antiquity and modern freshness in equal measure.

One example of which I am quite fond is the passacaglia from Paul Hindemith’s 1938 ballet about Saint Francis of Assisi, Nobilissima Visione.  In this movement, the finale of the ballet, Hindemith portrays the great holy man’s state of spiritual ecstasy, his sense of unity with God and all of creation, as the phrases of the passacaglia, written around the ever-present, stoic, 6-bar theme, build to a magnificently orchestrated climax.  In this work Hindemith really created an orchestral work which transcends the passacaglia discipline:

 

 

And so did Maurice Ravel, writing just before the onset of the First World War, for considerably different forces.  Ravel’s passacaglia is found in his Piano Trio, written for the standard instrumentation of violin, cello and piano, but shimmering with his unique and compelling approach to orchestration.  The third movement is built around a solemn, long-breathed 8-bar phrase, present somewhere in the texture during each variation, although Ravel does take liberties with it at certain points.  In customary passacaglia form we hear the triple meter subject (it is so slow that the meter seems ambiguous from just listening) in the lowest register of the piano.  It is then transferred from instrument to instrument in the succeeding variations, creating a pensive and reflective character throughout, cast in Ravel’s crystal clear and sensuously French orchestration and harmonies.  We even hear echoes of much more sentimental French voices like Chausson in some of the more thickly scored sections.  Like Hindemith’s monumental passacaglia from Nobilissima Vision, Ravel crafts a fluid musical movement which rises and recedes, cast in compelling and varied instrumental colors with each new iteration:

While the passacaglia seemed to suffer an identity crisis from its inception centuries ago, it proved immediately useful as an ideal vehicle for composers to cast a solemn, introspective spell over their listeners.  As musicians’ agreement of its textbook characteristics coalesced in more recent years, it has, and continues to, provide a challenging exercise in formal control and development of continuous variation, with the finest examples transcending the contrivances of their construction.

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 2 – Passacaglia by Anton Webern

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 2 – Passacaglia by Anton Webern

 

One subject which most aspiring musicians study during their time at academies and conservatories is called orchestration.  Even if you’re not a trained musician, I’m sure you’ve heard that word before, and probably in some non-musical contexts.  We often speak of orchestrating things, usually complicated events of some kind with many moving parts.  So, for example, you could say something like “The wedding planner orchestrated the entire day flawlessly!” and most people would take your meaning.  I’m not sure when the word began to find expression removed from its original musical context, but its use in other areas indicates how respectable and difficult a skill it is, just one of the myriad set of choices musicians must make as they construct or arrange music.

Orchestration refers to the way in which musical ideas sit upon the machines which speak them.  We call these machines musical instruments (the human voice is one such machine) and every single one is subject to physical forces like acoustics, engineering, operation in physical space, skill of the player, and more.  Orchestrating well means understanding the way musical instruments respond to being played in different ways and how they sound and feel together in different combinations.  Like most decisions in music, there are literally infinite ways to orchestrate any musical idea (or there may as well be).  But accomplished and prolific composers tend to develop a distinctive way of orchestrating that eventually feels as original as everything else they control, be it melody, harmony, form, etc.  And orchestration can be executed to varying levels of competence, so it is a serious craft which must be afforded diligent study, and so tends to be presented as its own set of courses and exercises within the regimen of any developing musician, and it is a set of skills which must be continually refined with conscious intention over the course of a musician’s career.

One way that developing musicians have often sharpened their orchestration skills is in the orchestration of existing music by other composers.  It is a common exercise in contemporary orchestration classes to take a piece written for piano and arrange it for symphony orchestra, or some other ensemble.  Again, the possibilities are limitless – you could arrange a piano piece for almost any other ensemble as long as it is thick enough to cover all the essential notes, and each ensemble will present its own challenges.

Sometimes composers publish their efforts in the study of orchestration, and these can be most revealing of the impact that their characteristic orchestration choices bear on their overall musical voice.  Here’s an odd and fascinating example.  It’s a free arrangement by the modern music maverick, Arnold Schoenberg, of a concerto for strings by his elder of about two centuries, George Frideric Handel.  Let’s listen to the original by Handel first.  It sounds like this:

It’s an appealing and vibrant example of the string concerto grosso created by the Italian violinist and composer, Arcangelo Corelli, in the early 1700s.  A few decades later Handel infused Corelli’s elegant and transparent models with a British heartiness and created works like this one, intended to be perforfmed as entracte entertainment between the acts of his oratorios (see this post and this one for more on that).  In 1933, Schoenberg saw fit to “freely adapt” Handel’s concerto for a modern concerto grosso ensemble of string quartet and symphony orchestra.  Here is the result:

 

Quite different, isn’t it?  While most of the pitches and rhythms in these first couple movements are identical to Handel’s original, the orchestration changes the impression dramatically, and suddenly we are within Schoenberg’s grotesque and sometimes terrifying imagination.  Granted there are liberties taken with Handel’s source material, especially the addition of those jagged cadenzas, but the orchestration has a striking effect on the sound of the original music.

You might think that adapting a piece as Schoenberg did with Handel’s concerto indicates a certain measure of respect to the original work and its creator, but it’s more of a backhanded compliment.  Here is what Schoenberg wrote of his critical evaluations of Handel’s artistry and his intentions in adapting his concerto grosso:

“I was mainly intent on removing the defects of the Handelian style. Just as Mozart did with Handel’s Messiah, I have had to get rid of whole handfuls of rosalias and sequences, replacing them with real substance. I also did my best to deal with the other main defect of the Handelian style, which is that the theme is always best when it first appears and grows steadily more insignificant and trivial in the course of the piece.”

Schoenberg’s student, Anton Webern, embarked on a somewhat comparable project just a couple years later, but with a rather different intention I suspect.  Where Schoenberg adapted Handel, Webern orchestrated Bach, and it was not an adaptation; all the notes are Bach’s.  The work is the ricercar, much like a fugue, in 6 voices from Bach’s cerebral Musical Offering, written near the end of his life (for more on A Musical Offering, see this post).  Here is Bach’s original version:

 

And here is Webern’s orchestration:

 

 

Again, the orchestration is an extraordinary effort, filled with choices which speak in Webern’s spare, expressive, and strident voice.

A quarter of a century earlier, after Webern had concluded his studies with Schoenberg, he composed the first work he saw worthy to label with an opus number (for more on opus numbers, see this post).  It is a massive passacaglia for symphony orchestra.  The choice of passacaglia is significant – by this time it was an old and archaic form, rarely used with regularity since the 1700s.  Webern was acknowledging his and Schoenberg’s mission to create continuity with the noble European tradition in their works, looking back at some times, and far ahead at others.  In the imposing Passacaglia we hear the first glimmers of Webern’s spare and expressionistic style, which comes through so clearly in his orchestration of Bach’s Ricercare, even though the notes are all Bach’s.  Orchestration is a most potent and powerful force.

In Webern’s Passacaglia the orchestra starts with a simple plucked bass line, and proceeds to spin anguish and longing which grows with each new variation, made plain and expressive by Webern’s piquant and ever shifting orchestrational colors:

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 1 – Les Elemens by Jean-Fery Rebel

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 1 – Les Elemens by Jean-Fery Rebel

If you don’t know the fascinating story of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s innovation and dominance in French music, you really should.  It’s interesting for its personal, political, aesthetic, and economic dimensions.  You can read about it here.  But to put it briefly, Lully was originally Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine musician, dancer, actor and comedian, who emigrated to France in the 1640s as part of the entourage of a French aristocrat.  But he was ambitious, and had within his sights a much larger fish, a king-sized fish in fact, the Sun King himself, Louis XIV.

Lully became the King’s friend and artistic collaborator, with the two dancing together in ballets he wrote to satisfy the monarch’s passion for dance, elevating the art to a national cultural icon for the French.  It is largely because of this that France and ballet came to be so closely associated.  The French passion for ballet would affect practically all music written there during Lully’s career and beyond.  Lully also solved a problem that the French had struggled with for about a half century.  The emerging art form known as opera, an extravagant and moving genre which set drama to music, had been steadily winning over Europeans of all stripes since its invention in 1600 at its epicenter, Florence.  It quickly spread its magic to all the major centres of Italy – Rome, Venice, Naples – developing distinctive characteristics in each, and the Italians exported their wonderful art to major cultural centers outside of Italy.  Antonio Cesti, for example, scored his greatest success with The Golden Apple, presented in Vienna (learn more in this post).  Europe loved the Italian operas, and the French were no exception.

But, the original operas were uniquely suited to the Italian language, and French is a different animal.  Italian, while lyrical, has a heartiness and a boldness.  French is dainty and slight, and the musical devices of Italian opera would have crushed the delicate strokes of French.  French composers had been searching for ways to successfully set dramas to music since shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, when Italian opera began to catch on, but no one had quite cracked the nut satisfactorily.  Until Lully.  Lully was the first composer in the history of France to convincingly create large-scale musical dramas entirely in French, which he called tragedies-lyrique.

It was a long road – the tragedie-lyrique was not born overnight.  Lully had worked in several related genres prior which had helped him to hone his skills and refine his sensibility in setting French text to music.  But steadily, starting in 1673, Lully dutifully turned out a new French opera each year until his death, 14 years later.  And in these magnificent and elegant masterpieces, Lully was actually resolving two other issues in addition to the setting of the French language: the use of opera as political allegory, and the melding of musical drama with ballet to satisfy the French hunger for dance spectacle.  The tragedies-lyrique are brilliant and complex cultural artifacts with beaucoups moving parts.

To turn every opera into a ballet show, Lully and his librettist Quinault settled on a regular structure for their dramas which cast the story in five brief acts, each about twenty minutes or so.  And then there was a prologue before the first act in which mythological characters sang praises to an allegorical hero (I’ll give you three guesses as to whom the hero was, and the first two don’t count!).  Each act moved the drama forward a little with a significant event central to the plot and, once that was done, presented a divertissement, which translates to something like “diversion” or “entertainment”.  Because, you know, entertainment is just not entertaining enough without some additional entertainment thrown into the entertainment.

Quinault eventually developed the knack for placing convincing opportunities for dancing and choral singing within each act.  So, for example, the protagonist Phaeton goes to see his god mom in a cloud and cry to her that he doesn’t get to drive his dad’s sun chariot across the sky.  God mom commiserates with Phaeton and “Hey, as long as you’re here, why not stay for lunch and a show?  My clouds will do a little song and dance number for you.”  It actually doesn’t tend to feel much different than that.  But, hey, opera is artificial anyway because, c’mon, people don’t walk around singing their feelings, right?  This is just a little more artificial than most.  As long as you know how it works it’s quite forgivable, and Lully was such a good craftsman that he makes it work quite well.  And, after all, if you’ve ever seen a Broadway musical, you’ve certainly seen similar phenomena.  That’s what a “show-stopper” is.  Lully and Quinault simply put a show-stopper in every act.  And this impacted French opera for the next few centuries.  In the 1800s Wagner was annoyed that he was expected to insert ballets into his operas in order to have them performed in Paris in accordance with French taste.  But he acquiesced, and the ballets aren’t half bad – the one in Tannhauser is actually pretty famous.

One of my favorite breed of divertissement in Lully’s operas are the massive and stately chaconnes and passacaglias.  Sometimes, the entire divertissement would consist of a 10-minute plus series of variations in triple meter, and they are just splendid.  You can find such massive, sprawling examples in Armide, Amadis, and Roland.  But sometimes they were shorter, and presented along with other small dances and a chorus or two.  Here is the intoxicating chaconne from Lully and Quinault’s first tragedie-lyrique, Cadmus et Hermione of 1673:

 

In their very first full-scale production, Lully had already fully engineered the tone of his great variation form dances.  All of the subsequent ones feel about like this one with their inspired succession of variations, accelerating and relaxing the tension, by turns tender and austere, and always graceful and charming.  I can listen to these great chaconnes and passacaglias of Lully all day. Their original audiences must have found them entrancing.

Subsequent French composers continued to create chaconnes and passacaglias in Lully’s vein, with his original formula largely untouched.  But sometimes they made changes.  Here’s one of my favorite chaconnes, written by Lully’s student, the violinist and composer Jean-Fery Rebel, from an eccentric ballet called The Elements.  This odd work depicts the creation of the world in rather platonic terms, with the elements rising out of a breathtakingly chaotic first movement, as dissonant as much twentieth century music.  Here are the second and third movements, a triple-meter loure called The earth and the water, which leads seamlessly into the chaconne, representing Fire.  One odd twist is that, unlike the conventional chaconnes, including Lully’s, which were unconditionally found in triple meter, this is, I think, the only chaconne I have encountered in quadruple meter.  But it’s still gorgeous and sublimely stately, one of the first chaconnes I ever got to know (before I even knew what a chaconne was!), and still one of my favorites:

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Music About Trees, Day 5 – Symphony No. 4 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 5 – Symphony No. 4 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky frequently found himself between a rock and a hard place.  The tension which haunted the awkward space he inhabited, for his whole career really, was the result of two incongruent drives that he constantly sought to satisfy, for he was tenacious, and thoroughly convinced there was a way to reconcile them both, in spite of his frequent bouts of depression and professional discouragement.  He must have been animated by some kind of inner drive to be true to both of these ill-fitting influences; had he not found it somewhere, he would most certainly have given up along the way, and before gracing the world’s ears with towering masterpieces which do, at least semi-successfully, reconcile the conflicting forces that he constantly channeled into his music.

These two streams, which merge in Tchaikovsky’s artistry as they do in no other Russian composer, are the usually parallel lines of the Russian folk tradition, which found a vibrant if messy expression in the works of Balakirev’s Mighty Five (see this post for more about that story) and the academic tradition that guided the sterile but perfect curricula of the young and proud music conservatories which had been recently planted in so many of Russia’s major cultural centers and proceeded to churn out rigorously trained composers who wrote dry but flawless music.  In grand academic tradition, many of these composers would succeed their professors, perpetuating the environments which had nurtured them and with which they had developed a high degree of comfort.  For a particularly good composer of this stripe, see this post.  Mostly their names, and music, are forgotten, but they served the function of infusing Russian musicianship with the rigor, discipline and precision of the great musical traditions from the Western continent, which tended to be lacking in the music of Balakirev’s Five (until Rimsky-Korsakov got all wrapped up in his professorship, but that’s another story).

So the two parallel lines proceeded across their seemingly endless paths in Russia, each holding important qualities which the other lacked.  Proponents of the respective lines were suspicious of the other, and so they did not truly cross until a somewhat tormented genius made it his mission to find their intersection, although he may not have expressed it in quite that way.  That is more or less what drove his artistry, and the process over which it played out was sometimes tortured, often discouraging, and also fruitful.  It was also almost successful, although many may question whether complete success is even possible.  Simply put, the genius is Tchaikovsky, and he came closer than anyone else to discovering the ideal point of intersection between the two lines.  Tchaikovsky’s most successful hybrids are a celebration of formal rigor and clear orchestration, but emanate an unmistakable Russian-ness that transcends the stuffy academics.

The clear development of Tchaikovsky’s ability to reconcile the academic sensibility with the nationalistic flavor of the Russian folk can be seen clearly in his six symphonies, composed over the course of about 30 years, roughly the second half of his life.  The first symphony was completed shortly after the young and budding composer accepted a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory, and the sixth symphony premiered just over a week before his untimely death.  The musical worlds of those outer poles are as distant as can be, and the terrain traversed between them can be seen to unfold gradually over the course of the middle four.  Tchaikovsky’s final three symphonies, numbers 4, 5 and 6, are seen to be his mature masterworks of the genre with the first three representing attractive, if youthful, essays in which vigorous Russian tunes meet a sometimes stiff textbook sonata form.  But the first three also express a naive vigour that was often praised by Mighty Five.  The delightful Second Symphony quotes a different Russian folk tune in every single movement.  None of Tchaikovsky’s other symphonies quote folk music to this extent, but the character and nature of the first three symphonies feels much more in line with this sensibility.  And the later symphonies sometimes quote folk songs too, but their scope is somehow different, steeped in an autiobiographical emotionalism that imbued the later symphonies with a tragic and compelling darkness.

The Fourth Symphony is a turning point.  Starting with this work, Tchaikovsky’s symphonic writing began to assume a new grandeur, significance and scale, and an emotional intensity simply not heard in the first three symphonies.  Many historians and critics look to the sprawling and powerful first movement as a monument of symphonic form, not only for Russian music, but for Western music in general.  It quotes no folk songs and develops its material with a passionate intensity that indicated a new level of Tchaikovsky’s powers.  And the slow, melancholy canzona that follows fits the opening movement well.  I must admit that I am less convinced by the final two movements.  I don’t think they match the gravity of the first two.  The pizzicato scherzo is entirely too plucky and optimistic to accompany the outpouring of personal tragedy which pervade the earlier movements.

The brassy finale, I think, is in between worlds.  It seeks to balance the grand symphonic struggle so effectively embodied in the first movement and the charming Russian folksy quality of his first three symphonies, and ends up doing neither exactly.  The bold first bars fire the opening salvo of an epic struggle, but quickly introduce a Russian folk song, the only one quoted in the symphony, “In the Meadow Stood a Little Birch Tree”, against the busy string texture derived from the opening.  Throughout the movement the Birch Tree is stated and developed in all sorts of different ways, constantly interworked and repeated alongside the heroic motive of the opening.  We even get a taste of the foreboding, fatalistic motive that opens the first movement at a particularly climactic moment.

I think the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is a final glimmering of the somewhat naive, folk-ish quality of the earlier three symphonies.  It almost struggles, it seems to me at least, to combine the sparkly Russian folk song quality that animated his earlier symphonies with the heroic struggle that guides the last three, and I’ve never been convinced that it does so entirely successfully.  Sure, it’s a rousing and, sometimes, satisfying conclusion to the symphony (I’ve found that this depends on who is playing and conducting), but it doesn’t quite seem to fit the gravity of the first and second movements.  It doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be.

That’s my take anyway, and I know there are others out there.  This symphony, and this finale, are beloved by many.  And I have nothing but admiration for Tchaikovsky’s struggle in collecting the musical influences of his motherland and seeking to balance all of them, academic, nationalistic, and autobiographical.  He was surely up to that task, and that is why we still listen, even if it was not entirely successful all of the time.  Listen to the glittering finale of the Fourth Symphony, which features the Russian folk song “In the Meadow Stood a Birch Tree”, here:

 

—

Would you like Aaron to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Music About Trees, Day 4 – The Flowers and the Trees by Camille Saint-Saens

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 4 – The Flowers and the Trees by Camille Saint-Saens

Maurice Ravel once said, “They tell me Saint-Saens announces to the avid crowd that during the war he has composed theatre music, songs, an elegy and a piece for trumpets.  If instead he had been servicing howitzers, his music might have been the better for it.”    The war he references would, at that time, have been called the Great War.  Today, we call it World War I.  Ravel had attempted to enlist in the air force himself, but was rejected for service due to his age and ailments.  He ended up transporting munitions by automobile instead, survived some close shaves (probably) and eventually left the front to convalesce from tuberculosis.  If you really consider all the ins and outs of Ravel’s assessment of Saint-Saens, it’s a rather astonishing thing to say.  Consider this: Ravel himself was considered too old for military service at age 40, and Saint-Saens was exactly 30 years his senior, which means that Ravel was speaking this way of a 70 year old man during a time when it was much less common for men to survive to age 70 than it is now.  And Ravel thought he should have been servicing howitzers at the Western Front?  I think his comment is loaded with implications about his, and others’, opinion of Saint-Saens.  I could not imagine Saint-Saens saying the same of Berlioz, as much Saint-Saens’ elder as Saint-Saens was Ravel’s.

Stravinsky once commended Ravel’s bravery in his military service, indicating that he need not have risked his life for country given his age and status.  Ravel felt duty-bound, but I don’t imagine he held everyone to the standards that he expressed about Saint-Saens.  And to be fair, Ravel expressed his opinion to the young Poulenc that Saint-Saens was a genius, at which the young, spunky composer scoffed.  Did Ravel truly feel that way?  I’m not sure.  It seems that most of his contemporaries did not, even if they respected and admired him, as many of them did.  But Saint-Saens, in spite of his prolific pen and lifelong success at piano and organ performance, seemed to have the ability to rub people the wrong way, sometimes making odd, puzzling blunders, and speaking his mind when it did not behoove him.  Combine this with his gruff, pessimistic manner, and the fact that he never quite seemed to fulfill the promise of his astounding prodigiousness as a child, composing excellent, if not brilliant music for his entire career, and Ravel’s assessment makes a bit more sense.  Saint-Saens can be seen as something of a tragic figure and, for many reasons, I do not envy his life, even if he seemed to make the best of it.  And you might say the qualities which caused him pain and hardship paradoxically equipped him to deal with that very pain and hardship.  It’s kind of mind-bending, actually.

Saint-Saens was an astounding child prodigy, probably the greatest in the history of music actually.  You’ve probably heard of Mozart’s prodigiousness (see this post for more on that), and maybe Mendelssohn’s (see this post for more on that).  Saint-Saens had them both beat, picking out tunes on the piano before age 3, composing at age 3.  He made his public debut as a pianist at age 10, performing concertos by both Mozart and Beethoven.  And, as an encore, he took requests…for any of the 32 Beethoven sonatas to be performed from memory.  Think of a 10-year old you know and imagine him doing that!  The thing about these prodigies, Mozart and Mendelssohn included, is that we tend to think of them as solitary talents, only considering their musical accomplishments since that is how they have come to be immortalized.  But all of them were boys of great learning, and widely-read.  Mendelssohn was a masterful visual artist, committing so many of the images he came across during his extensive travels to drawing and watercolor:

 

Saint-Saens could read Latin fluently at 7, and became learned in philosophy, geology, lepidopterology and astronomy, all during his childhood.  He wrote on philosophy throughout his life, in addition to poetry and plays.  He remained an avid amateur astronomer for his entire life, using the royalties from some of his published music to purchase a telescope in order to gaze at the heavens in place of the opera glasses that had poorly sufficed up to that point.  Simply put, Saint-Saens, like the notable prodigies before him, was a notable intellect.

So…why don’t we hear more of Saint-Saens?  It’s important to realize that Mozart was not just special for his prodigiousness.  He kept developing and, many would say, fulfilled his potential, or at least as much as he could during his brief life.  Mozart’s early works are kind of superficial, but notable for the age at which he wrote them; his late works are astounding in their depth and technique.  Neither Mendelssohn nor Saint-Saens developed along the same trajectory.  You can listen to those late Mozart works and hear new, astounding things every time, but not usually with the other two, as satisfying as their music can be.

And Saint-Saens was a fantastic composer and performer, his entire life through.  Franz Liszt, upon hearing him improvise in church, called him the greatest the organist in the world.  He once said that he lived in music as fish swim in water, and his music displays an ease of melodic invention and clarity of orchestration that is enviable.  He just may have made his colleagues jealous too.  But, if you’re going to hear music today, chances are it will be something by an undisputed genius.  Saint-Saens was probably not a genius, but he was very good, and he was a dynamic and active figure in the French musical landscape of the late nineteenth century, bridging the gap between Berlioz and Faure, even looking ahead to Ravel.

He occupied an interesting window between early Romanticism and Modernism.  Early in his life he was considered a progressive, championing Schumann and Mendelssohn, and admiring Wagner, but later became a reactionary, appalled by Debussy and Stravinsky.  In all he did, he was neo-classical, looking to Mozart for balance, clarity, and grace.  His musical language tends to be quite conventional, sticking to square phrases, accessible melodies, and unadventurous harmonies.  You can hear all of that, as well as a flawless sense of French text setting, no doubt sharpened by his literary mind and projects like editing Rameau’s complete works, in this charming choral song called The Flowers and the Trees, composed in his late 40s.  It has all the hallmarks of Saint-Saens: transparency, clarity, regular phrasing, an impeccable ear for sonority, utter facility, and an unmistakable Frenchness:

 

—

Would you like Aaron to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Music About Trees, Day 3 – Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 3 – Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi

If you know me at all then perhaps you also know that I have amassed a considerable collection of classical recordings over the past couple decades.  They’re all on compact disc, and they take up some space, but I don’t think I’d ever sell them because there’s just something different about possessing the tangible goods than there is about having a hard drive full of files.  Compact disc albums, like vinyl before them, have production value which yields an aesthetically satisfying physical product that accompanies the more metaphysical satisfaction of the music contained therein.  On a related note I once heard about someone who challenges people with questions like, “Would you bequeath your collection of books to your kids?  What about your Kindle?”  His point is that the thoughts provoked by that question indicate an obvious difference in most people’s minds as they consider the experience of inheriting an iPod versus a CD collection, and it is a difference I have long respected.  They may take up space, and I may not use them that often, preferring to click within my iTunes library to going through the process of finding an album and putting the disc in the player, but the cultural heritage the physical objects represent is invaluable.

I have taken the attitude of a collector since middle school, when I made the semi-conscious decision to begin my acquaintance with classical music.  It has been well worth the effort, and I have often found myself acquiring items that seem worthy of collection even if I do not end up listening to them for a long time.  Still, they are there to discover years later, waiting to be engaged with a knowledge base and maturity that were absent when they were acquired.

So it is with this album:

I probably ordered this when I was in high school, perhaps 20 years ago, and maybe listened to it once before today.  Seriously!  And what a treasure I discovered it to be.  A few months ago I played in a performance of Debussy’s La Mer (for more information about that incredible work, see this post).  I am happy to say I will no longer live unacquainted with La Mer.  I understand that to be a work to which I can return for my entire life for incredible satisfaction and inspiration.  And La Mer is a significant work; I’m fairly sure it impacted the way that much orchestral music was created in Europe after it gained popularity in the early twentieth century, within the few years after its turbulent premiere.  This album is a good case in point.  Take another look at the cover and see if you can digest the contents.  

You see 2 pieces by Ottorino Respighi, an Italian composer, active mostly during the early twentieth century, Pines of Rome and Fountains of Rome, and one by Claude Debussy, a French composer active just a little earlier than Respighi, but also very much at the same time, the aforementioned La Mer.  At some point a producer or programmer made the decision to create a program with those three pieces, and that is a significant fact.  Because from a cataloguing point of view it would have made more sense to program, not Debussy’s La Mer, but Respighi’s Festivals of Rome, which completes the “Roman Trilogy” that includes Fountains and Pines.  Now, Pines of Rome and Fountains of Rome are more commonly programmed and better-known than Roman Festivals, but I’m sure the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was up to it had they wanted to program the complete Roman Trilogy on this single disc.  So, why include Debussy’s La Mer instead?  And why does Debussy’s La Mer, which appears at the beginning of the disc, before the Respighi selections, seem to pair so easily with the Fountains and Pines of Rome?

I think it’s because Debussy’s approach to crafting orchestral music, often described as Impressionistic, like the paintings, was incredibly compelling and influential to many musicians who lived and worked during and after his lifetime.  Debussy’s uncompromising approach, which changed the face of all genres he touched, saw him regarding the symphony orchestra as a great palette of evocative colors which, when combined with an equally colorful palette of exotic-sounding scales, created music of unprecedented nuance of texture and gesture.  It is notable that very few of Debussy’s compositions fit the definition of “absolute music”.  I first encountered discussion of absolute music when I saw Disney’s Fantasia as a child.  The master of ceremonies, Deems Taylor, narrates extensively between the different selections, describing historical and aesthetic ideas which the filmmakers considered helpful for their audiences’ appreciation of the musical selections.  Incidentally, you can find much of Taylor’s narration transcribed here.  Taylor defines “absolute music” as:

“…music that exists simply for its own sake. Now, the number that opens our “Fantasia” program, the “Toccata and Fugue” [by J.S. Bach, orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski], is…what we call “absolute music”. Even the title has no meaning beyond a description of the form of the music. What you will see on the screen is a picture of the various abstract images that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. At first, you’re more or less conscious of the orchestra. So our picture opens with a series of impressions of the conductor and the players. Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They might be, oh, just masses of color or they may be cloud forms or great landscapes or vague shadows or geometrical objects floating in space. So now we present the “Toccata and Fugue In D Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach, interpreted in pictures by Walt Disney and his associates, and in music by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor, Leopold Stokowski.”

Most great classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is absolute music, although its opposite, programmatic music, became more popular in the nineteenth.  But once Debussy found his mature voice, he did not write all that much absolute music.  It seems that Debussy was always wielding his evocative colors and harmonies to paint pictures of some kind.  Every single one of his great orchestral works is labelled by some extra-musical association.  Here’s Leonard Bernstein describing his interpretation of one such movement, the astounding Festivals from Debussy’s Nocturnes.  You can skip to about 6:00.

 

This performance is part of a presentation about modes, which are a kind of scale that Debussy, and other musicians, used to create certain effects.  If you are interested in that you can of course watch the whole video and its three other parts (it’s pretty fun, but I’m into that kind of thing).  But did you notice the rather blurry and yet wonderfully vivid way that Debussy evokes images of the subjects Bernstein described?  Nothing had quite felt this way until Debussy, but many other composers, upon witnessing the fruits of his artistry, were inspired to create similarly evocative pieces that worked in much the same way, even if the melodic and orchestrational style were not precisely Impressionistic as Debussy’s was.

I think Respighi’s Roman pieces, composed a couple decades after Debussy’s great orchestral works, operate more or less in the same vein.  Even though their melodic edges tend to be clearer and sharper than Debussy’s, they evoke their pictures in much the same way.  See if you don’t agree in listening to the first two movements of Pines of Rome, which presents musical portraits of pine trees in various places in Rome.  It’s the activity around the pines that is significant to Respighi’s musical telling, and their descriptions feel much like Bernstein’s narration of Debussy’s Festivals.

The first movement portrays children playing by the pine trees in the Villa Borghese gardens. The great Villa Borghese is a monument to the patronage of the Borghese family, which dominated the city in the early seventeenth century. It is a sunny morning and the children sing nursery rhymes and play soldiers:

 

The second movement is a majestic dirge, conjuring up the picture of a solitary chapel in the deserted Campagna; open land, with a few pine trees silhouetted against the sky. A hymn is heard (specifically, the Kyrie ad libitum 1, Clemens Rector; and the Sanctus from Mass IX, Cum jubilo), the sound rising and sinking again into some sort of catacomb, the subterranean cavern in which the dead are immured. Lower orchestral instruments, plus the organ pedal at 16′ and 32′ pitch, suggest the subterranean nature of the catacombs, while the trombones and horns represent priests chanting.

 

You can listen to all four colorful movements of Pines of Rome here:

 

—

Would you like Aaron to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!