Mountains, Day 4 – Yea, cast me from Heights of the Mountains by Edward Elgar

This week’s theme is…Mountains! The stoic, majestic guardians of Earth’s geography, mountains have long inspired musicians with their monumental presence.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Mountains, Day 4 – Yea, cast me from Heights of the Mountains by Edward Elgar

Warning: This post contains some material that parents of young children may want to screen before showing.

It’s been a while, but I still remember how much fun it was to watch the show Glee on TV.

 I’ll bet you’ve seen at least a few episodes, and if not, then I’m sure you’re familiar with some of the musical arrangements, which became a cultural phenomenon all their own, even independently of the show.  I think I watched the first couple seasons or so around 2010, and found them captivating before I eventually decided to move on.  But during the seasons that I watched the show’s clever combination of high-school soap opera drama, overacting from attractive actors, and top-notch musical productions made for a delicious mix indeed.  It is self-consciously over the top, wearing heavy-handed melodrama upon its sleeve, and reveling in the obvious absurdity of high-schoolers creating performance after performance for approval of their teacher that would be impressive even when executed by professionals.  That high school should have been world-famous given the quality of its music program 🙂  But that’s part of the fun, of course.  Glee managed to be an addictive high school drama, serial musical, and bandstand showcase all rolled into one.

It was always intriguing to see which popular tunes of the past few decades the musical directors of the show would choose for their productions.  The selections ran the gamut, widely varied in both decade of origin and style.  And many songs found new life in the ecstatic and energetic covers by the cast of Glee.  Here’s one that stands out in my mind:

 

After watching that episode I remember hopping onto Amazon and ordering albums by Marky Mark, Parliament, and the Commodores, something I would never have thought to do otherwise.

I’m not sure how the show got its name, but I’ve always been struck by its inaccuracy.  It has a great ring to it, but the show would more precisely be called “Show Choir”, as that’s more or less what these performances are.  “Glee” refers to a very specific genre of music, and one that is never actually heard in Glee.  At least, not that I ever remember.

Henry Purcell was the greatest composer of England’s baroque era.  In his 36 years on Earth he wrote copious amounts of music in his very quirky and distinctive voice that has been recognized as the greatest work by a native Englishman until Edward Elgar, more than two centuries later.  If you hear Purcell on a concert, chances are it will be his noble opera Dido and Aeneas (see this post for an excerpt from that) or one of his massive odes for chorus and orchestra, suitable to be played at a royal court.  But, Purcell had another side as well; a very different side, and a side very much worth getting to know.  Henry Purcell, as Englishmen still do, enjoyed his time in the pub, drinking pints with his mates.  And there were no jukeboxes in 1680, so if you wanted some music with your bitter you needed to make it.  And so Purcell and many of his colleagues lent their considerable creative skills to the generation of very clever and very bawdy drinking songs, some of the finest crafted ribaldry in Western history.  Think Shakespearian insults, but in music.  Here’s a terrific example by Purcell’s surviving contemporary, John Isham, like Purcell a serious composer who also enjoyed his time in the ale house.  It’s called “Celia Learning on the Spinnet” and describes the title character’s lesson upon the instrument with her much older, male teacher.  I get the sense some of the words of the text have multiple meanings…

Cute?  I hope you are not too scandalized by that.  And it’s just one example of a host of such silly and licentious musical numbers penned to be sung by Englishmen letting their hair down together.  If you want to explore some more of these, try either of these albums:

 

 

This particular song is of a genre known as the catch, essentially a round at the unison with different entrances, often on bawdy texts.  A clever composer like Purcell or Isham could find ways to make the music serve the text effectively, just as in Ceclia where the gaps in the first verse allow a…certain phrase to ring through as successive voices are added.

Catches are great fun if you’re playin’ with the boys.

 

But what if you’re in mixed company?  Well, you would probably want a classier text, and this kind of song was the glee, also British.  Where catches are polyphonic, with multiple independent voices darting all over the place, glees tend to be homophonic, which means it sounds more like a church hymn, with multiple voices singing in more or less the same rhythm.  In the Romantic era, glee clubs sprang up all over Britain, and then emigrated to the United States.  You’ve probably heard of glee clubs at Ivy League schools, staffed by classy gentlemen singing charming and straight-laced love songs.  In movies their presence is often used, intentionally or not, to evoke feelings of tradition and social order, which makes a great deal of sense given that glees and glee clubs originated in a country that so prizes that kind of thing.

In the late nineteenth century the young British musician, Edward Elgar, was just beginning to make his presence felt, working in his father’s music shop, performing on the violin, accompanying, teaching lessons, and beginning to compose and arrange in Worcester.  He was also a member of the city’s glee club, which he was eventually to lead.  Elgar is today known for his quintessentially British-sounding orchestral and choral music, particularly his marches, concertos, symphonies and grand oratorios, which successfully meld Handelian and Wagnerian influences.  But the glees remained close to his heart, and he made his mark composing English part songs.  Here is a lovely example, the first of what is known as the Greek Anthology, Opus 45:

 

Elgar’s text setting is direct and clear, wielding the resources of his all-male choir with utmost efficiency.  These part songs demonstrate a composer’s skill in settings that feel considerably less “immortal” than the great symphonies and operas so fundamental to the history of music.  See examples of such lighter fare by other composers here and here.  It is often rewarding to lend our ears to the small, everyday works that so easily become lost in the cracks between the great monuments, but that exhibit skillful craftsmanship and impeccable artistry on smaller and much less ambitious scales.  This is the magic of genres like the glee and the catch, and has been for centuries.

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Mountains, Day 3 – Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain” by Alan Hovhannes

This week’s theme is…Mountains! The stoic, majestic guardians of Earth’s geography, mountains have long inspired musicians with their monumental presence.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Mountains, Day 3 – Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain” by Alan Hovhannes

I once had a composition teacher who told me, and his other students, to write a lot of music and to write it fast.  The philosophy behind that instruction is that you will make your mistakes quickly, learn from them, and move on to the next thing, where you will make more mistakes.  And so, your technique will be refined continually and you can expect to grow rapidly and perpetually.  This teacher tended to notice that many composers today do not write that quickly and so do not grow as much as they could since they don’t make mistakes fast enough.  I think that’s probably true, in some approaches at least, although certain commercial approaches necessitate writing quickly, particularly producing music for film and television scores.  The rate at which John Williams, for example, is able to turn out a new score is astounding, particularly given the quality of the music.

Because of the advice of this teacher it is perhaps true that I wrote more and faster than I would have otherwise, but I don’t think I really ever hit my stride, and I think many of the pieces I completed were too badly flawed to operate within the spirit of that advice.  I think he meant that, whatever you produce, you should do it often, quickly, and to a high level of perfection.  And it is true that it is easy for composers today to produce less than they are really capable of.  It seems to be a lost art to produce music at the rate and quality of the common practice masters.  But maybe not entirely.  Although it is surprising, it is still possible to find an extraordinarily prolific modern composer from time to time.  One such composer lived until 15 years ago, and his name was Alan Hovhaness.

I wish I could have met Alan Hovhannes, had coffee and cake with him at one of the little cafes where he liked to write.  He died just as I was starting my professional music career, beginning my undergraduate degree, and I doubt I would have known his name at the time.  But he left 434 opus numbers (for more about the opus system see this post) – I’ve never heard of a composer with that many numbered opuses – and 67 symphonies – I’ve never heard of anyone besides Haydn who even came close to that (for more about Haydn’s rate of symphonic production, see this post).  And the gentle, whimsical character that emanates from the films of him belies a ruthless self-criticism; whenever a formative teacher or mentor would criticize his craft he would destroy reams of previous scores.  So his actual production is speculated to be much closer to the 1,000 mark, much like Johann Sebastian Bach.  Like the masters of old, we must be content to live with the partial story of Alan Hovhaness’ working history, surrendering much of it to the fog of history.

Gustav Mahler once described Anton Bruckner as “half simpleton, half god”.  That description has always made me smile; given Bruckner’s music, and what I’ve read about him, it seems incredibly apt.  Bruckner, as I understand, came across personally as pious, timid and humble; but his music speaks with an awe-inspiring power at all levels, from the macro to the micro.  Hovahness, I think, cries for his own summary a la Mahler.  What what his halves be?  I would submit “half everyman, half mystic”.

Everyman for his soft-spoken, unassuming kindness, which often found him composing in diners sitting next to bemused truckers.  Everyman for his supreme approachability.  Everyman for his slight, tender meekness.  And mystic for his attraction to psychics and the spirit world.  Mystic for his odd, off putting comments about past lives and fantastic, surreal images.  Mystic for the connection to the angels he claimed to sense when he composed.

Hovhaness described his state while composing, which he did easily and fluidly while sitting at desks or tables with symphony after symphony gracefully issuing from his pen, almost as a form of communion with the spirit world, a delicate place of balance which could neither be forced nor left unattended.  And as long as he was there the music came.  It was a mystical music, warm and magical, radiating with the mysterious murmur of dreamscapes and myths.  Hovhannes’ music is so often soaked in blurred, hazy colors, animated by slow, circular melodies.  His ouevre seems to drift to listeners from beyond a foggy veil, creating a still, tranquil and ecstatic space.

And Hovhannes felt a deep connection to nature, particularly mountains.  They were his main inspiration and he moved from Boston to Seattle to be in their presence daily.  He described mountains as “pyramids, between two worlds, that of the earth and that of the gods”.  Images of mountains abound in Hovannes’ extensive catalog, dotting it like the peaks of a range, including his best-known work, the Second Symphony, Opus 132, subtitled Mysterious Mountain.

Although this was early in his output of symphonies, it remains Hovannes’ best-known and most often-performed work, still the best known of his more than sixty symphonies.  The title was almost an afterthought, encouraged by Leopold Stokowski to make it more marketable, but it fits the three-movement odyssey, which feels like a spiritual voyage upon the titular mountain.  The outer movement of the symphony glow with enchanting, placid colors.  The middle movement is a vigorous, busy fugue which starts out very much like a familiar hymn:

 

Hovhaness was American-born, but early in his life found himself drawn to the Armenian heritage of his father.  He used this influence with its exotic, modal melodies to craft music unlike any other American composer.  It is true that Copland and Gershwin have won the American music title, but Hovhannes has his devoted followers, and they know they beauty of his mystical atmosphere.  I suspect that one such Hovhannes fan was the prolific and masterful film composer Jerry Goldsmith.  If you listen to the final movement of Mysterious Mountain with its oddly-modulating chorales here…

 

…and then listen to this stunning excerpt from Goldsmith’s score for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier here…

 

…I bet you will note a resemblance.  Hovhannes is still with us, even if other American composers are more readily named before him.  This half-everyman, half-mystic left a bewitching legacy which still resonates deeply within the American subconscious.

 

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Mountains, Day 2 – “Lasciate i monti” from Orpheus by Claudio Monteverdi

This week’s theme is…Mountains! The stoic, majestic guardians of Earth’s geography, mountains have long inspired musicians with their monumental presence.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Mountains, Day 2 – “Lasciate i monti” from Orpheus by Claudio Monteverdi

Have you ever witnessed a major transition?  They often take a while, so you may not entirely realize it until it has happened.  But some people live through movements which cause elements of society and culture to be different at their time of death from their time of birth.  And some people jump into the fray and actively move the transition along, people like Claudio Monteverdi, who lived from 1567 to 1643.  Monteverdi achieved a stunningly luxurious life span of 76, a respectable age even by modern standards, but absolutely sprawling for a time when the average life expectancy was barely half of that.  He outlived his wife and some of his children, one of whom died in infancy.  Over the course of his life the primary vehicle of musical expression in Europe changed from the dense, largely sacred polyphony of the Renaissance, to the vibrant, bold, monodic, and very secular strokes of opera, which was born right around the middle of his years.  While the early experiments in opera were interesting in their concept, most listeners today would probably find them dry and sterile, compelling only in that they planted the historical seeds for truly interesting operas by much more capable composers.

And Monteverdi was one such composer, a master of his craft.  Weaned on the Renaissance-style polyphony referenced earlier (for more on a great proponent of that style, see this post), he was well-practiced in what more and more musicians of his day were coming to regard as an increasingly conservative and outdated discipline.  Renaissance polyphony had blossomed and reached its pinnacle of development in the glowing, perfect works of Palestrina, who died just before the seventeenth century.  Palestrina’s works are so flawless in their proportions and precise treatment of dissonance that they are still regarded as the supreme models of the style.  Where could polyphonic music go after his career?  There were still musicians who revered that style and sought to preserve its primacy in European music even after the turn of the century.  But others, Monteverdi included, sought to take what it offered and draw from more recent innovations as well, innovations like monody.

Monody was the result of a series of experiments carried out by a club of Humanist (in the sense of learned in the humanities and championing the arts of ancient Greece) aristocrats meeting in Florence right around the turn of the seventeenth century.  They sought to create musical dramas from which emanated the clarity and expression of ancient Greek drama, at least as they understood it.  Their early operas (they didn’t call them that – that label came about later) combined acting, staging, and sung music.  Monody refers to the musical texture of the vocal parts: a single vocal line accompanied by a bassline, and perhaps other instruments to fill out the texture.  But the essence of monodic texture is melody and bass.  The bass line is often called basso continuo and it is known for its practice of notating the harmonies in a kind of shorthand called figured bass, which looks like this:

A skilled keyboard or lute player of Monteverdi’s time (and beyond – some musicians can still read this figured bass at sight) could use the bass line and figures to improvise a full, thick accompaniment that was just a little different at every performance.  If you want to study the method a little, this table will probably prove helpful:

 

The primary interest in this practice is in the melody and the bass, which is quite different from the precise, fixed sonic arcs of the polyphony that Palestrina brought to perfection, which typically features no fewer than four and sometimes as many as eight simultaneous lines, all intricate, and all equally weighted for listener interest.  Here’s an example of how that sounded:

 

The mastery of this style, particularly by Palestrina, but by other musicians as well, still stands out to me as one of the intellectual and aesthetic triumphs in the entire history of human thought.  Anyone who has ever tried to write competently in this manner, myself included, has an idea of the rigor it takes to master it.  And its fluid, glowing nature wedded ideally with the austere sanctity of post-Tridentine ritual in the Catholic Church.  Monteverdi was well-trained by his mentors in this style and knew it well.  He also sensed, as did others around him, that the status quo could easily become worn and uninspired.  And so Monteverdi’s greatest contribution to Western music became his efforts to form a coherent transition between Palestrina and the new monody, which he called First Practice and Second Practice, respectively.  The work of no other composer from Monteverdi’s time demonstrates such a thoughtful and thorough working through of this transition.

Monteverdi left 9 books of madrigals, Italian songs based on secular lyrics, that span his entire career, and from these we can observe his mastery of both practices, including some fascinating and imaginative essays in the new monodic style, many of which feature very colorful orchestral accompaniment, a clear indication of how far he was stretching the predominantly vocal madrigal.  No study of Monteverdi’s life work is complete without delving into his madrigals, the proving grounds of his stylistic expansion.  But it is in his first surviving opera, and what has been recorded as the first notable opera in Western history, premiered in 1607, that we can observe a marvelous synthesis of the two practices that only Monteverdi could have executed.

The great opera is called L’Orfeo, or Orpheus in English, and it is the first of many operas composed on the subject of the Greeks’ unmatched, mythical musician.  Naturally the character of Orpheus was inspiring to musicians throughout history and they have reciprocated with equally inspired musical tellings of his story.  To date we have the pleasure of enjoying operatic expressions of the Orpheus myth by Haydn, Gluck, Offenbach, and others in addition to Monteverdi.  For the gentlemen of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, American’s largest music fraternity, Orpheus is also a central and inspiring figure, appearing prominently in their songs and stories.  It is a fortuitous and suitable subject for the first notable opera in Western history and its effective expression motivated Monteverdi to craft a musical drama of compelling integrity that is still able to captivate listeners who witness its staging four hundred years since its creation.  And part of what makes it so is Monteverdi’s skillful combination of polyphony and monody, his first and second practices.

Listen to these, a healthy slice of Orfeo’s first act:

 

 

You can hear the alternation of monody, sung by the shepherd and nymph, describing how happy everyone is that Orpheus has a found a mate in his beloved Euridice, with the effectively contrasted madrigal-like choruses in which the whole company sings similar sentiments.  Particularly infectious is the latter “Leave the Mountains, Leave the Fountains” in which all the mythical creatures of the ancient landscape are implored to drop what they are doing and dance in celebration.  Performed in certain contexts, you could easily mistake it for just another madrigal:

 

Throughout Monteverdi’s madrigals it is possible to hear monodic and polyphonic examples side by side, often within the same volume, and in L’Orfeo he makes efficient and effective use of this juxtaposition, crafting a polished, engaging drama that was renowned in its day and, after a period of neglect and revival, shares today’s stages with operatic masterworks from all across the intervening four centuries.  You can watch a terrific production of the whole opera, which follows the story of Euridice’s death and Orpheus’ thrilling rescue attempt in the underworld here:

 

Oh, and do you know what “Monteverdi” means?  And he wrote a chorus about mountains.  Sounds like an Xhibit meme to me…

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Mountains, Day 1 – An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss

This week’s theme is…Mountains! The stoic, majestic guardians of Earth’s geography, mountains have long inspired musicians with their monumental presence.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Mountains, Day 1 – An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss

Who doesn’t love a good story?

Music is a curious art form.  Capable of moving most human beings with extraordinary power, the way in which it does this remains fundamentally mysterious and poorly understood.  Oh sure, there are always more theories about it, but perhaps you agree that it’s most likely one of those metaphysical nuts of our oft-baffling universe that will never be entirely cracked.  And isn’t it ultimately better that way?  Why would anyone really want a complete materialistic understanding of music’s power?  Might that steal some of the magic?  Well, perhaps we’re verging on the debate of intuition vs. theoretical mastery now; you should hear some of the debates I have with my wife about this.  I’ll leave it to you to guess which side I ultimately land on there.  Still, of course there is always room for evocative and magical elements which ultimately defy tidy conceptual definition.

What makes music such an interesting form of art is that it communicates with exceptional clarity, but only in certain ways.  Music can instantly change the state of a listener, literally creating a feeling or mood.  Nothing besides music can do this.  A masterful composer can take you on a journey from elation to despair, hitting everything in between, with nothing but sound.  Here’s Gary Oldman’s Beethoven pontificating on this phenomenon, somewhat well:

 

Not great writing by any means, but that’s the general idea.

That’s what music can do.  But, there’s also something it just can’t do, and that’s to communicate conceptually.  What this means is that you cannot convey an idea to someone else with just music.  As marvelous as music can be, there is simply no way to say “I went to the store to buy some eggs” or “The girl, wearing a blue dress, stood in a field of lilies and gazed remorsefully at the oak tree”.  It’s impossible – music simply can’t do that.  You might write a story about the former, and perhaps paint a picture of the latter, or write a poem about either, but only words and images can convey those precise ideas.  With music you can weave a detailed tapestry of the motions, moods and feelings associated with either, but you cannot explicitly describe the scenes.  Here’s Leonard Bernstein playfully explaining this fact in one of his remarkable concert lectures for young people:

 

But, composers often work as though they can, and it is possible with a little help from our friends, the language arts.  If you want to communicate ideas with music, there are essentially two tools to help: text and program.  A text is a set of words that are sung or spoken to the music.  Every pop song you know has text.  So do operas.  And there are pieces like Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait which uses text in a somewhat unconventional way.  In all of these forms, the music and text work together to create a communicative synthesis that is rich and deep, combining the respective powers of music and words.

But many musicians have sought to evoke images and stories without the aid of text, and this is where the idea of the program enters.  A program is any words that describe the picture or story that guided the creation of a textless musical work, and the resulting music is called programmatic music or program music.  So, if I wrote music and handed you a sheet of paper with my description of going to the store for some eggs, or the girl standing among the lilies as the basis for my piece, it would be properly called programmatic and much of the fun of listening would be imagining the picture and trying to figure out how the musical features correspond to the features of the story.  But, just like Bernstein said, you wouldn’t form either of those images without being given the program first.  Like he says in the above video, it is literally impossible to communicate explicit images or ideas with music alone.

But program music is a very old practice – composers have been having fun with writing music to programs for centuries.  Probably the oldest famous example is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a set of violin concertos written to evoke images and feelings of each of the four seasons, as Vivaldi would have experienced them in his native Mediterranean climate.  For more about that, see this post.  But during Vivaldi’s time programmatic music was exceptional – extra musical associations were primarily delivered by texts in operas and sacred vocal music.

This changed in the nineteenth century when programmatic music exploded in popularity.  After the 1830s or so, it was rare to find a notable composer who had not written some kind of instrumental music with a program.  I think the two most important early proponents of program music were Hector Berlioz, with his seminal Symphonie Fantastique (see this post) and Felix Mendelssohn, who elevated the opera overture, already significantly lengthened by Beethoven and Rossini (see this post) and created what he called concert overtures, symphonic works of moderate length, all of which compressed the drama of a symphony into about 10 minutes, and all of which were guided by an explicit program.  For more about one of Mendelssohn’s concert overtures, see this post.

Mendelssohn’s concert overture concept found vivid new life a few decades later in the colorful and energetic symphonic poems of the pianist and composer, Franz Liszt, a bombastic and flamboyant virtuoso who wrote symphonic music to match.  During his tenure as “kapellmeister extraordinaire” leading the orchestra in Weimar, a post that he held for two decades in the mid 1800s, Liszt created more than a dozen symphonic poems on legendary, poetic and picturesque topics that were bolder, louder, and also a little less nuanced than Mendelssohn’s comparable overtures of just a little bit earlier.  And it was Liszt’s symphonic poems that created a clear genre which his contemporaries imitated and propagated.  

Just a few decades after that Richard Strauss, arguably the greatest composer of symphonic poems in history, made his contributions to the genre, making a splash with Don Juan in his mid twenties, and, over the course of the next thirty years, composing seven other notable examples which have stayed in the repertoire of today’s finest and most virtuosic symphony orchestras (they are all very challenging to perform).  In Strauss we see Liszt’s symphonic poems subject to the formal expansion that marked all of the late German Romantic composers.  Strauss’ Don Juan, written in 1888, is barely fifteen minutes long, much like most of Liszt’s.  His last tone poem, An Alpine Symphony, composed in 1915, is almost an hour.  This expansion reflects a similar pattern in the symphonies of the same time, with specimens by his contemporaries, Mahler and Bruckner (see this post), reaching unprecedented lengths.

Strauss probably felt that the length of An Alpine Symphony warranted the title of “symphony”, but it is really a tone poem at heart, made of short little episodes that coalesce into a brilliant drama that happens to be an hour in length, rather than reflecting the structure of a true symphony.  The program covers a very busy day in the Alps, watching the sunrise, frolicking in meadows with cows, wandering by streams and waterfalls, being caught in storms, and at the central climax, reaching the summit!  Could you do all that in a day in the Alps?  Never having been there, I couldn’t tell you.  But Strauss condenses this journey into a very colorful and evocative hour of music that is surprisingly captivating – it doesn’t feel like an hour.  Here is Strauss’ illustration of the summit, which may remind you of another Strauss favorite, the sunrise at the beginning of the tone poem Thus Spake Zoroaster, best-known today as the music from 2001, A Space Odyssey:

But, the summit really feels best in the context of the whole tone poem, which you can watch here:

It may not be truly possible for musicians to convey specific ideas and concepts through their chosen medium, but that hasn’t stopped many very capable ones from brilliantly illustrating the moods and feelings of many a compelling story in their programmatic music.  Thankfully, there are so many terrific ways for music and words to cooperate that we needn’t be forced to make a choice between the two.

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Classic Haikus, Day 5 – Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

Classic Haikus, Day 5 – Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 by Ludwig van Beethoven

He couldn’t hear his

simple hymn to brotherhood.

Naive but belov’d.

 

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Classic Haikus, Day 4 – Symphony No. 94, “Surprise” by Franz Joseph Haydn

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

 

Classic Haikus, Day 4 – Symphony No. 94, “Surprise” by Franz Joseph Haydn

Polite little tune,

Cadential tutti, forte.

Britons a-titter.

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Classic Haikus, Day 3 – Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

Classic Haikus, Day 3 – Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah by George Frideric Handel

Overcome by awe,

George rose out of reverence?

No, to stretch his legs.

 

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

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Classic Haikus, Day 2 – Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo by Johann Pachelbel

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

Classic Haikus, Day 2 – Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo by Johann Pachelbel

For Christoph’s Wedding,

A South German procession.

The bane of cellists.

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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

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Classic Haikus, Day 1 – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

 

Classic Haikus, Day 1 – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

Did Wolfie re’lize

this fluffy serenade would

be his best-known tune?

 

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

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Stormy Scherzi, Day 5 – Symphony No. 10 by Dmitri Shostakovich

This week’s theme is…Stormy Scherzi!  A scherzo is traditionally defined as a “musical joke”, that is, a light-hearted movement that lacks the weight of a good sonata form essay.  And often that’s how they feel.  But, have you ever listened to a “scherzo” that seemed to fit the description of a musical joke, but darkly?  Some scherzi paradoxically combine lightness with intensely determined feelings, sometimes even bordering on malice and despair.  This week we examine some such examples.

Stormy Scherzi, Day 5 – Symphony No. 10 by Dmitri Shostakovich

There is a universal law that has recently been revealed to humankind.  Perhaps it has always existed, but simply could not be expressed meaningfully or intelligibly until the past few decades due to the medium that it governs.  Whereas the second law of thermodynamics, say,  governs matter and energy that have been around for considerably longer than the minds who formulated the law, the subject of Godwin’s law is the internet, and specifically the internet as it provides a forum for moral and philosophical dialogue, a comparatively recent phenomenon.  What amateur philosopher doesn’t love to wax over coffee?  Certainly this one does, and the coffee shop has been, since the Enlightenment, a fertile arena of erudition and pretension.  Some historians even speculate that the rise of the coffee house throughout eighteenth century Europe catalyzed the spread of Enlightenment philosophy and allowed it affect the social order so profoundly (for more about that phenomenon and some related musical manifestations, see this post and this one).

But today not even a coffee shop is necessary, thanks to the internet, as countless blogs, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, Reddits, discussion forums, chat rooms, and numerous other devices not even yet in existence provide all the stimulation that philosophical debaters need to spew, er, I mean, state, their points of view.  Of course, the state of the art does have its cons, the foremost of which is probably anonymity.  I guess it depends on how you look at it, but most internet debaters would probably tell you that anonymity is an issue because it’s much easier to unleash insensitive vitriol onto a faceless computer, which is essentially what an online debater feels like, than it is a living, breathing, flesh and blood person.  So, if you debate in a coffee shop, you will have a modicum of respect and decency, no matter how ardently you disagree with your partner.  But on the internet, in many of the places previously mentioned, all bets are off.

And based on his observations regarding the rather predictable “life of their own” that these debates tended to take on, even as early as 1990, an American attorney named Mike Godwin devised his law which states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”.  I’m sure you’ve noticed this in the comment sections and probably avoid them because of this.

But it makes me wonder – why Hitler and not Stalin?  Of course we all know what a monster Hitler was, which is why Godwin’s law is about him.  Hitler is the textbook example of unchecked totalitarianism yielding unspeakable evil and destruction.  But have you ever read a comparison of the two?  In many ways, Stalin was worse.  He actually murdered more of his people in his purges than Hitler did in the Holocaust.  And both dictators presided over terrifying and brutal regimes which probed into every aspect of the lives of their citizenry, albeit with different styles of governance.  And sure, you could say that Hitler comes out ahead because of the war he started, but it’s a worthy debate, if you don’t find the whole thing futile and irrelevant because after all, tragedy is tragedy and evil is evil.  Does it really matter who was “worse” in the end?

In addition to the tragic murders and genocides, both dictators and regimes made their presence deeply felt in the art and music of their nation’s creative class.  Again, the styles of the respective regimes, while both indicative of totalitarian tactics, were different.  In Nazi Germany artists and musicians were required to join the Reich Culture Chamber or risk being branded “degenerate”.  Degenerate artists were not permitted to publish their works and either repressed their authentic voices or exiled themselves to nations of greater freedom in order to express their uninhibited artistic statements.  See this post and this one for examples of composers who responded to this in different ways.

In Russia the approach was different.  There was no official club to join.  Artists and musicians had to work in public, never knowing when the time bomb of government denunciation would be triggered by some vague and unexpected criticism.  Whereas the artistic critics of the Third Reich were more or less transparent and forthright about the styles and practices that were forbidden under the regime, and its artists and musicians could count on staying safe as long as they toed the party line, the capricious and unpredictable Russian regime, in imitation of its terrifying leader, controlled its artisans by doing the opposite, never asserting clear guidelines, but occasionally pouncing upon terrified artists for an ill-defined crime called “formalism”.  Since the components of formalism were never exactly laid out for musicians, it was impossible to avoid, and this ambiguity gave Stalin’s cultural police the unmitigated freedom to strike whenever they saw fit to make an example of their musicians.  And no musician was made a bigger example than Dmitri Shostakovich (for more about that, see this post).

In Nazi Germany you could expect to stay safe provided you belonged to the right group, and their treatment of artists, with the Culture Chamber, reflected this.  Stalin’s primary tactic was to control his entire populace through fear of retribution that seemed unexpected and inevitable.  As the most gifted and also the most prominent composer in Soviet Russia, Shostakovich’s treatment at the hands of the Stalinist authorities necessarily reflected this approach.  Shostakovich was denounced unexpectedly for various works and summarily sought to backpedal in order to make amends with the regime.  This happened several times over the course of his career during Stalin’s reign and it must have intensely wearying to Shostakovich to spend so much of his life living in fear of consequences that never came, both for his life and that of his family.

But the secret is that Stalin never intended to actually punish Shostakovich.  The composer was worth more to the dictator as an example than as a victim.  And so, he dutifully worked through his career, pivoting and apologizing when necessary, as did many other Russian composers, and somehow managing to generate an impressive body of work that breathes the spirit of Stalinist Russia.  His friend and colleague, Sergei Prokofiev died on the exact same day as Stalin – he did not have the opportunity to live in a post-Stalinist age – but Shostakovich survived him by more than two decades.  After the dictator’s death Shostakovich felt greater freedom in making musical statements that he suspected would have been deemed contrary to the regime’s accepted standards, nebulous as they were.  One of the best-known examples is the furious scherzo of his 10th Symphony.  I have long admired this compact, concentrated, and explosive movement.  It is said to be a musical portrait of Joseph Stalin; capricious, blustery, horrifying, infernal, maddeningly unpredictable, and unremittingly intense, even in its most reserved passages:

 

Can you imagine living for so many years under the oppressive and whimsical grip of a tyrant such as this?  Shostakovich did, and managed to survive.  Would it be worse ultimately to have arbitrary and bigoted standards clearly established and then be forced to remain silent for fear of violating them, or to work steadily with a knife suspended overhead, never knowing which stroke of your pen will release it to pierce your tender skull?  Maybe for discussions of aesthetics and censorship, Godwin’s law would do better to chart the inevitability of evoking Stalin.

 

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

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