More Syndication, Day 4 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

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

More Syndication, Day 4 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More Syndication, Day 3 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 3 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

Jeannette Meyers Thurber had a dream.  

Jennette Meyers Thurber

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

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

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

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

Bedrich Smetana

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

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

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

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

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

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More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

Listen to this:

Now listen to this:

Does anything strike you about the two?  They are actually the same.  The two pieces were written by the German composer Paul Hindemith in 1942 and they represent a deliberate choice which reflects a certain way of thinking about musical composition.  But to understand how we got here, it would be good to go back a couple hundred years.

It was impossible for any musician working within the German legacy (a legacy which still informs the classical training of today very deeply) to escape the incredible gravity of Johann Sebastian Bach.  You hear his name all the time in musical studies, don’t you?  You’re never that far away from hearing Bach’s name if you are involved with music in any way.  I find his admirers far-flung across diverse musical styles and modes of expression.  It seems that musicians simply cannot help but to admire Bach’s musicianship.  Why is this?  The answer is deep and complex, but I’m going to try to sum it up for you.

Like any young musician, as a child I had known of Bach.  I had even listened to much of his music.  I knew his name was regarded with an almost sacred reverence by my musical mentors, but I couldn’t have exactly told you why.  Once I started college and began to mature a little more, the attitudes I had encountered, and continued to, regarding the musical contributions of the great Bach began to come a bit more clearly into focus.  I started to have the experience I understood my mentors to have in listening to Bach.  It’s hard to explain, probably impossible, but the more you study, listen, and appreciate, the deeper you are drawn into his mystical world.  Events are…charged, and with a kind of energy that seems to draw its momentum from the fabric of the universe.  The decisions that placed the abundant notes in those pieces seem at once inevitable and astounding, as if there’s only one route to perfection and a human actually found it.  The music is constantly alive with a potency you would expect from that combination.  So much of Bach’s music feels this way, and shortly after his death other musicians began to sense this superhuman aura that was somehow largely neglected during his lifetime (see this post for a story about that).

In studying his life and personality one is struck with the sense that, while on one level Bach was a very practical and successful professional, on another, parallel, level he truly sensed he was writing for the source of all universal ideals, and that he knew it.  I think it’s the only way to explain his sensibility that guided his life, which exudes the quality of never needing to justify himself.  However the people he encountered reacted to him and his artistry, he always seemed so supremely convicted of his proper path, but never boastful.  And what results from this sensibility is a body of aural work that is always flawless in principle, never needlessly flamboyant, and frequently clever to an astonishing degree.  Bach is almost supreme in his powers of summation, like a god (but a recreative one, not a creator) who is able to see inside the entire flawed universe, warts and all, and reorder it to resonate with utter divine harmony.  He absorbed everything around him, spake it fresh, and then proceeded to catalog every possible chemical reaction in the universe through his encyclopedic contrapuntal works which are still peerless in their completion and craftsmanship.  Does that seem lofty?  Many musicians find themselves contending with Bach’s legacy, and that’s my best attempt at summing it up in 2015.  Try me again in a decade and it will probably be a bit clearer.

All subsequent musicians within the German legacy, and many outside of it, had no choice but to recon with the force of Bach’s will, and they did it in various ways.  But in Paul Hindemith I see a German musician who exhibited a sensibility with many points of confluence to Bach’s.  His language was rather different, owing to the stylistic development of two intervening centuries and the curious, perhaps prophetic place, he and some of his like-minded contemporaries found themselves during a most turbulent and menacing time in history.  But so much of what I described in Bach’s legacy seems to fit Hindemith as well, although we are still too close to his lifetime to judge his legacy.  Additionally, Hindemith’s output is…plagued…by the departure from pure tonal grammar which makes so much modern music difficult to evaluate as objectively as Common Practice music often is.

Hindemith, like Bach, seemed to be aware of all the musical currents around him, was able to quickly digest them, and then created theories to unify them.  He saw inside music in a way that was acutely insightful, and in his prolific works he reordered the musical universe as he saw fit, and unapologetically.  I sense it was difficult to keep up with him, so fluent was he in his analytical and creative technique.  But you feel that his composition choices were always guided by some deep conviction, much like Bach’s, in that you always sense a deep integrity underwriting everything and determining the best possible order for all of it, even if it doesn’t always make sense on the surface (which is probably a result of the style as much as anything).  Do his theories hold water?  Are his orderings of the chromatic scale and intervals really based on anything real and true beyond his own opinion?  It’s hard to say, but his strong principles and unwavering integrity will always convince me that it is worth another look, even if I may not quite see it yet.  

Hindemith ordered the tones of the chromatic scale and and all the intervals in his own way as he felt their gravity

And, also like Bach, he never felt the need to justify his sensibility.  Richard Strauss said to him: “Why do you write like that?  You have talent!” to which the young Hindemith replied “You write your music, maestro, and I’ll write mine!”  To Hindemith there were no sacred cows, and he exhibited a brusque confidence in the face of stuffy decorum.  But if he admired something it was undoubtedly genuine admiration.  His music is often filled with the digested fragments of other styles, from Debussy to ragtime, but always refracted through the his musically-cubist prism.  He took it all in, and perhaps, like Bach, whether he liked it is not the right question, but rather whether he found it worthy of his study.

I’m sure the music of Bach played prominently into shaping Hindemith’s aesthetics and philosophy.  He probably would have acknowledged this.  And sometimes his music does so explicitly.  Very famous is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which arranges crafty preludes and fugues in every single key.  Less well-known is Hindemith’s equivalent work, composed two centuries later, according to a similar scheme, Ludus Tonalis, which translates roughly to “Play of Tones”.  Written for solo keyboard, like Bach’s monumental collection, Ludus Tonalis arranges fugues and interludes according to Hindemith’s version of the chromatic scale.  It’s not a precise analogue to the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it shouldn’t be, because it is Hindemith’s piece, and not Bach’s.  The fugues and interludes traverse a vast array of different styles and characters, an affective and introspective journey over the course of an hour.

And then there’s the prelude and postlude which respectively draw us in and release us from the world of Ludus Tonalis.  As a pair, the prelude and postlude are also a nod to J.S. Bach; a different work, but just as encyclopedic, A Musical Offering, which develops every possible canonic and fugal expression of an angular theme given to Bach as a challenge by Frederick the Great.  In this great contrapuntal game, Bach delights in looking at the theme from all angles, backwards, upside down, inside out, and creates clever music for every arrangement.  See this post for more about that.  Hindemith follows suit, and the prelude and postlude of the Ludus Tonalis are precise retrograde inversions of one another.  What this means is that the postlude is the prelude note for note, but backwards and upside down.  And it makes music spoken by Hindemith’s uncompromising voice in both directions.
With this bold and clever stroke Hindemith secures his inheritance of Bach’s breathtaking intellectual musicianship.  Hindemith is not Bach; they lived in very different times and cultures and so were inevitably shaped by different forces, but their sensibilities clearly resonate with similar aims and outlooks.

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More Syndication, Day 1 – Ablassen by Gottfried Reiche

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 1 – Ablassen by Gottfried Reiche

Here’s a crisp little number to get you going:

Great singing by Natalie Dessay, tight string playing by l’Concert d’Astree, and terrific trumpeting by Neil Brough in the outer sections.  It’s the peppy opening movement from Bach’s Cantata 51, and here’s what she is singing:

“Exult in God in every land!

Whatever creatures are contained

by heaven and earth

must raise up this praise,

and now we shall likewise

bring an offering to our God,

since He has stood with us

at all times during suffering and necessity.”

It has a very certain character, doesn’t it?  While you will find trumpet parts in every single one of Beethoven’s nine symphonies (though not, perhaps in every single movement), it is something of a rarity to find them in music by Bach.  Of the 250 or so cantatas Bach wrote during his time in Leipzig, a mere handful, probably less than 10, feature trumpet parts.  Of the 6 very colorful concertos known as the Brandenburgs – I’m sure you’ve heard at least one of them, probably this one…

…only the second concerto features a part for trumpet.  In short, Bach didn’t apply the trumpet all that often, only in very special conditions, conditions in which it was just the right affective tool.

Affect, or the German version affekt, refers to the way music makes you feel.  Music has long been renowned for its mysterious ability to transform the psychic states of its listeners, especially given its elusive and invisible nature.  Surely you’ve noticed this.  The next time you hear music, any music at all, sit back and notice the effect it exerts on your state.  Does it make you more content?  Enraged?  Peaceful?  Animated?  Depressed?  While we can often relate to the feelings of the subjects we see in painting and drama, it is only music that can change the feelings of its audience to the degree that it does.  During the time that Bach was working, musicians developed highly rigorous and systematized theories and practical guidelines about how to wield the affects of the music they created.  One common and pervasive guideline was that musical movements should be brief and completely unified in the primary affect they communicated.  For this reason, you will rarely find individual movements from Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, or their contemporaries, that exceed five minutes in length, and many are even shorter.  In addition to that, the feeling of the movement will be more or less the same from beginning to end.  Some movements are longer, but they tend to feature multiple sections with different, contrasting feelings.

Orchestration, too, was subject to the guidelines of affective practice in Baroque music.  Imagine a trumpet.  Would you use it to produce a calm, peaceful feeling?  Probably not.  How about sad or pathetic?  Again, probably not the first choice.  I would probaby opt for a flute to illustrate that.  But how about haughty, strong or confident?  That’s perfect for a trumpet, isn’t it?  Well, Bach would have agreed with you, and the movements in which he employed the trumpet tended to illustrate strong, extroverted feelings like pride, confidence and celebration.  Read the text from Cantata 51 again, and you can see that the trumpet fits that bill.

Whenever Bach had a trumpet part to blare he relied on an extraordinary bugler named Gottfried Reiche, about 20 years Bach’s senior, who had also settled in Leipzig.  He hailed from a smaller town just a few kilometers southwest of Leipzig, Weißenfels, a veritable trumpeter factory.  Reiche became Leipzig’s Stadtpfeifer, “town piper”, and kept busy providing music for all the civic and religious events in the town.  The town piper was a municipal position, which guaranteed an income provided the piper was willing to play whatever was necessary whenever it was necessary, and this required them to keep up with all the latest sacred and social music trends, as well as to accept apprentices and, or course, to stay sharp.  I suspect that Reiche, a most accomplished piper, was one of the few musical equals Bach ever found, judginging by the florid and virtuosic nature of the trumpet parts he wrote.  Reich was Bach’s first choice to realize all his first trumpet parts.

One peculiar kind of concert that German town pipers sometimes gave involved what was called turmmusik, or “tower music”.  This was anything written to be performed, usually by wind and brass bands, by broadcasting from the tower of a church or town hall.  When I visited Munich a little more than ten years ago I ascended one such tower on St. Peter’s Church in Munich:

The view was spectacular and I’m sure it would create a still more spectacular atmosphere to hear a choir of brass piping from above.  Take a look at this, the most famous portrait of Gottfried Reiche:

Do you see the notation he is holding?  It is thought to be a fanfare, and a piece of tower music.  You may have heard it before in association with a certain television show.  Here is its debut episode:

Did you ever watch CBS Sunday morning?  My parents sometimes did as I was growing up and its pervasive sunrise imagery made a strong impression on me.  The opening sequence is so centering and optimistic, and Reiche’s fanfare provides a most uplifting aural counterpoint to the bright, florid imagery, just as it must have done to greet sunrises or announce events from the spires of Leipzig in the early 1700s.

Reiche is said to have died shortly after playing Bach, specifically this cantata:

He collapsed while walking home the night following a performance and is thought to have had a stroke, perhaps from blowing so hard on the natural horn on which he would have played those trumpet parts (the valved models prevalent today were still a century away).

Most of his music is lost, but this particular ablassen is preserved, largely due to the great painting.  It is called an ablassen, which means “exhalation”, indicating that it was meant to be played entirely in one breath.  What a piper Reiche must have been!  It’s a little like an eighteenth century bugle tune, isn’t it?  Like the kind of thing you would hear an army bugler play, but florid with Baroque scales and sequential figuration.  What’s really astounding is that Reich would have played that on a natural trumpet, not much different than a bugle, navigating entirely from overtone to overtone with just his embouchure.
This ablassen is just a molecule of musical life in Leipzig.  While we know the heavier elements that were Bach’s great works, we often miss the full context in which those would have existed.  Reiche must have produced countless of these little pieces, all with pleasing the structure, shape, and proportion of this one, a brilliant way to fill a fraction of a minute.  Bach would have heard these in the morning, resounding from the towers of Leipzig.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

The official classification of any musical instrument which relies on one or more vibrating strings to produce its sound in organology, the scholarly study of musical instruments, is called a chordophone.  Organology at times seems built upon the premise of reduction to absurd levels, but it is always trying to get at the essence of what musical instruments ultimately are, which is surprisingly simple.  In the early twentieth century two musicologists, the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel and the German Curt Sachs boiled all of the musical instruments they could think of down to four broad categories of sonic mechanism.  The four categories are:

1. Idiophones, in which sound is created by a hard object struck or shaken
2. Aerophones, in which sound is created by moving air
3. Membranophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating surface
4. The aforementioned chordophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating string, fixed between two points

It’s fun to go through all the musical instruments you can think of and attempt to classify them.  Some take a little bit of thought, and seem to be counterintuitive.  And the presence of a piano-style keyboard can add to this ambiguity.  It’s really just an input system that can cause an instrument to work in any of the 4 categories.  An organ or accordion, for example, is an aerophone.  Whereas a piano is technically a chordophone, even though its manner of playing seems more idiophone-like and it is often classified as a percussion instrument.  Most instruments, however, are pretty straightforward, and their conventional families break down along even lines, percussion and keyboards aside.  Brass instruments are aerophones, as are woodwinds.

Within chordophones, there seem to be two large families within the canon of Western music, which developed respectively over the course of centuries in largely parallel lines, although there is at least one interesting incident of their convergence in nineteenth century Vienna.  The two families are the primarily plucked guitar family and the primarily bowed violin family.  They are all chordophones, relying as they do upon the vibration of strings to make their music, but they have developed distinctive idioms and contexts during their intervening years of development.

As long as humans have kept records, it seems, the families have remained separate.  There are ancient instruments which were plucked and others that were bowed.  Both of these lines flowered into the instruments we know and love around the same time in European cultures.  The violin’s cultural cradle was Italy, and the guitar’s Spain, although we would not have the modern 6-string guitar as it is without important advancements made by guitar makers in Italy and France.  The guitar is actually a much more continental phenomenon than you might expect given its stereotypes.  And don’t get the wrong idea – the guitar has always been a mainstay of Latin cultures, but it was much more popular in the cultural centers of European art music than you often hear.

Everyone knows that the violin was and is a major workhorse in the art music of Europe’s common practice.  But the guitar was there too, just working outside of the canonical tradition somewhat.  Everyone was aware of it, and many composers loved it, but there was a sense that it was somewhat different, and suitable only for composer-performers.  A revealing artifact to this effect is Hector Berlioz’ statement about the guitar from his great treatise on orchestration in which he writes that it is essentially impossible to write effectively for the guitar without knowing how to play it.  He continued on to say that when non-guitarists did attempt to write for the instrument, they ended up yielding music of trivial effect.  This may the reason that it did not serve the classical canon as its bowed cousins did.

But its was present to the European culture of classical music.  Virtuosi of the guitar performed in Paris, Vienna and major centers of Italy.  Luthiers built them and improved upon them.  Publishers released accessible music and method books about the instrument.  The Italian violin virtuoso and composer Niccolo Paganini (see this post) played the guitar as well and wrote prolifically for the instrument.  So Europe certainly loved the guitar, but due to its idiomatic nature it was never quite assimilated into the classical manner.  Interestingly, there is one story in which it almost did, albeit in a somewhat unexpected and unconventional way…

The finest guitar maker in Vienna during the nineteenth century was Johann Georg Stauffer.  He built guitars and improved their design.  He was actually commissioned by the empire to do this, and one of his major innovations is the invention of the “machine head” with which the strings of guitars and double basses are often tuned to this day:

 

 

This, along with a couple other modifications, went into the design of the distinctive headstock that still bears his name, both beautiful and functional, much imitated during his day:

 

Stauffer, like many luthiers, was also something of an inventor and experimenter.  He toyed with new musical instruments related to both the guitar and violin families throughout his career.  One of Stauffer’s best-known inventions, and one that had a considerable, if short-lived, run of success, is a synthesis of both families, the arpeggione.  The arpeggione has some features of the guitar and others of the violin family.  It has six strings tuned in the same manner as the guitar and a fretted fingerboard.  But it is shaped like a cello, held between the legs, and played with a bow.

 

 

For novelty alone, the arpeggione was successful after its creation, but perhaps it was novelty only as they are not made in great quantities anymore.  Still, the instrument managed to capture the attention and adoration of European audiences just long enough to inspire the composition of one masterpiece, a sonata by Franz Schubert.  It is thought to have been commissioned by his friend Vincenz Schuster, a virtuoso of the arpeggione, quite possibly the only one in history.  The work is still performed today, but usually transcribed for cello or viola.  Still, you can catch a performance on its intended instrument here and there and it is fascinating.  You’ve never seen an instrument that looks or sounds quite like this before:

 

Musical instrument makers can be crafty folks.  They are often looking to improve what they have inherited, and sometimes their imaginations dream up interesting things.  Sometimes they just want to have I little fun, I suspect.  Stauffer had his fun, marrying the disparate clans of bowed and plucked.  While the fruit of their union has not stayed with us, life is just a little more colorful for forays of fancy such as these.  Oh, and if you are playing 7 Degrees of Anton Diabelli at home (see this post), here’s another first degree: Diabelli published what is probably the only tutorial on the arpeggione in history, its author, Vincenz Schuster.

 

 

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 4 – Turangalila Symphony by Olivier Messiaen

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 4 – Turangalila Symphony by Olivier Messiaen

Do you know the difference between analog and digital?  I remember learning about it when compact disc technology changed the way that we transport and listen to portable music.  Before that the primary mode of quality audio reproduction was the vinyl LP (sure, 8-tracks and cassettes were in there somewhere too, but most audiophiles don’t take the magnetic tape format as seriously as either of the discs).  Records are analog and compact discs are digital.  What does this mean exactly?  The simplest I can put it is that digital is like integers, whereas analog is like EVERYTHING.  Do you remember learning about integers in elementary school?  It’s a subset of real numbers which includes whole numbers but not fractions/decimals.  The concept can bend students’ minds in elementary school because it is often introduced along with their first taste of negative numbers.  Integers include negative numbers because they can be whole values.  So, a digital signal is going to be a bit like a number line.  You’re either at that number or you’re not.  You’re on or you’re off.  We call our fingers and toes “digits” because they are discrete, unambiguous units.  We either count a finger or we don’t.  There’s really no halfway in digital.  With analog on the other hand, we cover every single point in between the integers.  And since you can’t really speak of “every single point between the integers”, we sum that up as essentially infinite.  Think about the difference between digital and analog clocks: digital clocks will display a precise reading at any moment, but will essentially freeze into that reading for moments at a time.  It’s either reading 3:47:45 or 3:47:46, but there’s no possible reading in between the two.  If you think about the second hand sweeping around the face an analog clock, the concept is different: it literally hits every single possible position that it can, essentially an infinite number of them.  When we read an analog clock we are always approximating simply because the hands, and the gears that drive them, are always in motion, working to cover every single possible position within their ranges.

A comparison between records and compact discs exhibit this principle too: the needle on a record player will inhabit the groove etched into the surface of an analog vinyl disc at an infinite number of points between the beginning and end of the record, whereas the digital signal encoded onto a compact disc contains a finite number of discrete data points.  Granted it is a large number (the audio on a compact disc is sampled at a rate of 44,100 times per second, which means that an hour of music on compact disc will contain more than 150 million samples), but it is a finite one.

So, which one is truer to our life experience?  Well it’s a perplexing synthesis when you come down to it.  Real life seems seamless, continuous, and analog.  But our minds constantly parse reality into concepts, discrete objects, memorable moments.  Actually, real life is digital if you want to get really picky.  If everything is made of atoms, then we can reduce everything to discrete particles.  But we don’t tend to think of it that way, even though our sensory equipment is essentially digital – rods and cones give our eyes a level of resolution on par with today’s megapixel cameras, and the nerve impulses which emanate from our inner ear mechanisms do so in discrete electric bursts – our minds reconstruct all of this in an essentially analog experience, but our brains are hard at work overlaying on often digital cognitive map upon this.

The nature of our musical instruments reflects this tussle between digital and analog perception in the manner that different pitches are accessed and controlled by the musician.  Pitch is essentially a musical interpretation of the acoustic concept of frequency, which is simply how quickly something is vibrating.  A rate of vibration is analog – there are infinite frequencies at which a string, column of air, block of wood, etc. can vibrate.  But our minds don’t do very well with all of this possibility, and for millennia music theorists have been chopping up the infinite spectrum of vibrating frequency into discrete musical pitches that we tend to regard in our minds as digital entities.  The standard concept in most of the music made today is to chop each octave into twelve equal parts called half steps.  99.9% of the music you hear on a daily basis can be played effectively with the resulting pitches.  It is this concept which guides the design of keyboards such as those found on pianos, organs and marimbas.  If you are playing one of those instruments you are either playing C or C#, but you simply cannot access the infinite space between them.  The advantage to this is that you can never play out of tune, but the disadvantage is that you cannot use the space in between notes for expressive devices like vibrato or portamento.  There are also instruments which treat pitch in an analog manner, not the least of which is the human voice.  Any fretless string instrument works this way too – the player has access the infinite spectrum of frequencies.  The advantage is that the player may use the expressive techniques which rely on the subtle adjustments of frequency like vibrato and portamento; the disadvantage is that intonation becomes incredibly exacting and is therefore a primary area of discipline in learning the instrument.

Some instruments fall somewhere between the extremes of analog and digital – woodwind and brass instruments (to my limited knowledge) have digital components which must be tuned like analog ones.  And some instruments, like fretted guitars, turn analog instruments into digital ones.  But, is it possible to create an instrument that very deliberately combines the best qualities of both?  A French cellist named Maurice Martenot thought so, and he built one in the 1920s, devoting the remainder of his life to perfecting and promoting the instrument, which has come to be called the ondes Martenot.  The ondes Martenot uses the power of electronic circuitry, still revolutionary at its time of invention, to make techniques available to the performer which borrow from both analog and digital conceptions of musical instrument construction.  It is one of the first electronic instruments and still one of the most compelling and fascinating.  Watch this video to get a sense of what it can do and how it is operated:

 

 

Through the magic of electronics Martenot was able to devise a unique musical instrument that is able to operate in both the analog and digital realms.  The keyboard is clearly a digital method of input, picking discrete frequencies from the sweep of the infinite spectrum, while the ring allows for navigation through its entirety.  A clever touch – Martenot allows the player to add vibrato to the notes played on the keyboard in the ultimate melding of analog and digital that electronic music makes possible.  Composers found that the ondes Martenot effectively imitates the ultimate analog musical instrument, the human voice, but with eerie resonances.  Some of the greatest music of the twentieth century, for example Olivier Messiaen’s sprawling and colorful Turangalila Symphony, composed in the late 1940s, makes use of the stunning instrument:

 

You can hear the whole symphony and see the ondes Martenot in action here:

 

 

Our minds instinctively overlay digital structures upon an analog world.  Traditionally, designers of musical instruments have had to choose between the two approaches regarding the manner in which the pitches are selected by the performer.  Thanks to the magic of electronics, however, designers of more recent instruments, the ondes Martenot especially, have taken the opportunity to think outside the box, yielding results which synthesize the two cognitive approaches in arresting and effective ways.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

While it is not the most controversial or significant debate raging within the circles of musical academia, there is some question as to who authored this 5-movement string quartet:

 

It’s an odd, quirky, spirited little piece, and full of bizarre features.  While it has been arranged for more typical performance practice, the original concept of this quartet is to be played entirely upon open strings in scordatura tuning, which means that the string instruments have been tuned unconventionally.  Some notable essays in scordatura exist from composers like Saint-Saens (see this post), J.S. Bach, and Gustav Mahler.  Usually, it is applied in order to add some kind of novel and evocative color to a composition.  But in this quartet the application of scordatura seems to have a different aim – it is essentially a gimmick in order to facilitate a clever performance challenge.  The open strings of the instruments are tuned to cover all of the notes of the F major scale, some in multiple octaves, so that all of the content of the score may be played on only open strings, no left hand fingering necessary.  Performing this quartet then must feel akin to playing in a handbell choir in which players work carefully with their neighbors to construct melodic lines, pieced together between all of them  Given this understanding, the stilted, quirky nature of the piece becomes more understandable.

So, who wrote this piece, and why the debate?  The primary confusion arises due to the many scores in existence throughout Europe.  Most of them don’t agree on the authorship.  Some attribute the work to Haydn, some to Pleyel, still others to Ferrandini (of whom I had not heard before learning of this).  And then there is the oldest extant copy which attributes its composition to someone we’ve all heard of, but probably wouldn’t expect to hear of in this context, Benjamin Franklin.  Some speculate that during Franklin’s travels to Paris, where this copy of the score was discovered, he might have come up with this clever novelty to shake things up in the salons there.  The problem is that it is not written in his hand.  Not a deal breaker by any means, but a copy in Franklin’s hand would be much more of a smoking gun.

Still, based on what I know (so take it for what it’s worth) I find the hypothesis that Franklin is the composer to be convincing.  First, the quartet is written for the rather unconventional ensemble of 3 violins and cello, as opposed to the much more typical ensemble of 2 violins, viola and cello which serve as the configuration for all of Haydn’s quartets.  The only other piece I know of for this ensemble is the Canon and Gigue by Johann Pachelbel (see this post).  While Haydn was known for his clever tricks (see this post), his execution tended to be more artful and less self conscious.  And the quartet breathes with a rough, earthy quality that I often associate with the hymn singing and professional composers of early America.  The quartet has an odd quality to its intonation, familiar to anyone who has spent time listening to certain a capella styles.  All of these signs, in my estimation, point to Franklin who had printed several collections of hymns during his career as a printer.  I also suspect that a quartet like this would have been Franklin’s ideal solution in order to engage in the sophisticated musical culture of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment.  An enthusiastic dilettante, he knew he could not compete in purely musical terms, and so he set out to create a puzzle and solve it, thereby gaining credibility within the European salons.  That’s my best guess anyway.

Benjamin Franklin is the kind of polymath about whose resume it is possible to learn more and more and never exhaust its resources.  The quirky string quartet is not the only way in which he engaged with the art of music.  The other one, and his primary claim to fame among musicians, is as the designer and builder of a musical instrument.  During a visit to London in the early 1760s, Franklin had heard a virtuoso playing crystal wine glasses, filled with different amounts of water to create a spectrum of musical pitches.  Fascinated, Franklin decided to apply his genius for invention to the creation of a sturdier and more efficient system for musical glass players to use.  The result, known variously as the glass harmonica or armonica, arranges glass bowls on an axle, ordered from lowest to highest somewhat like a piano keyboard, spun by a foot pedal like that of a sewing machine, so that the player’s fingers may remain stationary and stimulate multiple simultaneous notes more easily than they can with a set of wine glasses.  Later models featured a water trough which kept the glasses moist.

The first virtuoso of the glass harmonica was Franklin’s English friend Marianne Davies, a multi-instrumentalist.  She and her sister, soprano Cecilia, toured Europe and helped Franklin’s instrument to gain notoriety, with composers everywhere contributing scores.  There exist works for the glass harmonica from Beethoven, Donizetti, Saint-Saens and Richard Strauss, among others.  As the Davies sisters performed in Vienna they introduced the glass harmonica to another musical family, the Mozarts, and the most famous of them would become the first notable composer to leave a notable work for the instrument.  It’s actually one of his last, a slow, sublime, haunting movement and companion rondo for an unconventional chamber ensemble of glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello.  Composed during his last year of life, the writing demonstrates Mozart’s breathtaking command of orchestral color.  The instrumentation is revealed to be far from accidental, with the timbres of the carefully-chosen soloists complementing the eerie aura of the glass harmonica with astounding precision and imagination:

 

 

The glass harmonica had something of a heyday, and then faded into obscurity.  I think the reason for this is its lack of versatility.  The composers of Europe, while fascinated by its strengths, seemed to understand that it could only ever achieve status as an impressive novelty, and that it is poorly suited for the demands placed upon a first-class soloistic instrument.  The glass harmonica is really only capable of producing one kind of sound, and there is little possibility of varying attacks, which severely limits its expressive variety.  Still, the glass harmonica lives on as an impressive testament to Benjamin Franklin’s polymath accomplishments, revealing the heart and soul of one of America’s most important founding fathers.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 2 – Ballet music for Cavalli’s “Xerse” by Giovanni Battista Lulli

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 2 – Ballet music for Cavalli’s “Xerse” by Giovanni Battista Lulli

 

When Wagner took the opportunity to have his opera Tannhauser staged in Paris in 1861, he knew he would have to bite the bullet and make a concession that he wasn’t crazy about.  But the opportunity was too valuable to pass up.  By this time the composer of the The Ring of the Nibelungen and Tristan and Isolde had fought long and hard to be recognized for the genius that he was.  And now his labors were finally paying off, but maybe he could never have anything quite on his own terms.  The Bayreuth Festival, which would premiere 15 years after the Paris version of Tannhauser, while representing the ultimate realization of Wagner’s vision, was never entirely free from financial or logistical complications in his lifetime (see this post).  And even though Wagner was invited to stage Tannhauser in Paris, a city whose adulation he had worked so hard to win decades earlier, by Napoleon III no less, this was subject to conventions the French expected, conventions that Wagner, the champion of “total artwork”, which eschewed any trace of artifice or contrivance, would have considered trite, stiff, and synthetic.  But in this case the usually iconoclastic Wagner knew it would be foolish to stand too firmly on principle – even a personality of his strength could not win against centuries of firmly-rooted convention – and so he composed a ballet for Tannhauser (among a large handful of other changes which changed the structure of the opera), thus making it acceptable for the ultra tradition-minded French.  

He still managed to make it somewhat on his own terms though.  Whereas it had been the standard practice to insert the ballet in the second act, Wagner chose instead to place it immediately after the overture, as sort of a prelude to the first act.  Ever concerned with dramatic integrity (he had, after all, completed the first music dramas which would seal his legacy by this time), he simply couldn’t justify tarnishing the flow of the drama any more than necessary simply for the sake of silly traditions.  Whereas French writers had been accustomed to placing ample opportunities within their opera libretti for almost 200 years (see this post to see how that all started), Wagner, one of the first opera composers to write all of his own libretti, was simply not working from that sensibility.  As far as he could see, the ballet would serve Tannhauser best by extending the sensuous orgy implied at the very beginning of the opera, which finds the title character ensnared within the hedonistic delights continuously transpiring within the realm of the goddess Venus.  Sirens, nymphs, naiads, Bacchantes, all of the most Dionysian supporting characters of mythology make an appearance here.  Wagner extended this first scene into a stunning bacchanale, effectively injecting an opulent style of writing informed by his mature operas into this earlier one:

 

I have to figure that a 25 year-old Camille Saint-Saens, already a supporter of Wagner at this age, even if he was not himself a Wagnerian, attended this performance and channeled the inspiration he experienced from the ballet into the famous bacchanale of his own opera, Samson and Delilah, which bears some similarities to Wagner’s, sixteen years later:

 

Wagner couldn’t escape the gravity of France’s considerable operatic tradition.  It had been that way for centuries.  From the beginning of French opera, namely those composed by Lully, ballet had been an inextricable gene , completely integrated within its organic structure.  The newly naturalized Lully (he was actually Italian) began to generate his mature French operas in the 1670s, with Cadmus and Hermione premiering in 1673, but an incident a decade prior to that, and almost exactly two centuries prior to Wagner’s Parisian Tannhauser substantially foreshadowed the features that would be present in fully-developed French opera.

The new music dramatic form now called opera was invented around the year 1600 and rose to prominence, due in large part to its masterful treatment by a masterful musician, Claudio Monteverdi (see this post and this one).  Without Monteverdi’s very imaginative and practical essays in the genre, which demonstrated to European audiences its great potential for both entertainment and political promotion, opera would have remained a good idea and quickly died.  All the best early operas come from his imagination.  His death in the 1640s left the artform in the hands of his successors, including Italian musicians like Antonio Cesti and his student Francesco Cavalli.  Both Cavalli and Cesti were instrumental in exporting the very Italian art of opera beyond the borders of its homeland.  Cesti’s greatest triumph was an opera called The Golden Apple, presented in Vienna (see this post).  In 1660 Cavalli was invited to Paris, a peculiar polyglot culture at the time.

Cardinal Mazarin, an Italian, was ruling by proxy as the young Louis XIV was not yet ready, and the native French did not always like him or his sensibilities.  But he did his best to acculturate the French with Italian art, hence his invitation to Cavalli.  At the same time, however, another Italian named Lulli was already working the Parisian scenes, and already doing as the Romans.  He had made friends with the young monarch; they both shared a strong taste for the lyrical dance which came to be known as ballet, with Lulli providing ample amounts of music for them to dance together in performance frequently.  As Cavalli entered the Parisian arena Lulli was poised to oppose him as a potential rival, and there is considerable speculation that he and his allies sabotaged Cavalli’s efforts through various machinations of court intrigue.  Cavalli was frustrated by much of his experience in Paris, but he did manage to stage one of his operas, called Xerse (for more about that, see this post).  Like Wagner’s Tannhauser two centuries hence, it was restructured in various ways to make it palatable to the French, including the addition of ballets.  Where Wagner composed his own ballet, however, the ballets for Xerse were composed by the soon-to-be naturalized Lulli.  The whole presentation was massive (accounts report anywhere between 6 and 9 hours, either way, beyond Wagnerian) and the French were bored and confused by the Italian opera, preferring Lulli’s episodes, danced by a troupe which included the young king.  It must have been a frustrating and humiliating experience for Cavalli.

Today, it is just a little more common to encounter the ballet music of Lulli than the Italian vocal music of Cavalli’s creation.  Lulli’s stately, elegant music is able to stand apart from the opera.  And it is colorful – Lulli included movements with instruments that are today exotic and forgotten, such as the tromba marina.  An odd one-stringed instrument, the player bows the single string and uses the fingers of his other hand to travel throughout the harmonic series of the fundamental, much like an unvalved brass instrument, hence its namesake.  The sound strikes us as rough, even harsh today, but it as an evocative sound:

 

The instrument’s inclusion in a sumptuous orchestral texture gives the dance of the sailors a raw earthiness that is more felt than heard on account of the thickness of the orchestra:

 

Cavalli felt the brutal force of a foreign culture; perhaps familiar with stories such as these, Wagner acquiesced and scored a much more graceful success.  Even over the course of 200 intervening years, little had changed in the way of French decorum and national taste; if anything, it had crystallized more.  In the decades following Cavalli’s unfortunate Parisian visit, Lulli, now Lully, had formulated a distinctive recipe for composing operas to serve to French audiences based on his considerable experience working in their midst.  The resulting tragedies lyrique were aimed precisely to their tastes, always featuring a generous helping of ballet dancing that was skillfully integrated into the plot by French librettists like Philippe Quinault, who supplied the libretti for most of Lully’s operas.  This tradition dominated France for centuries, and Wagner understood that when in Rome, he must please the Romans.  Cavalli’s earlier trouble perhaps stemmed from his failure to acknowledge that, although it could be argued that it was less clear to him what the Romans wanted anyway.  Still, the collaboration between Cavalli and Lulli, as tense as it may have been, is a fascinating story in cultures first clashing, and then synthesizing to form an alloy that endured.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 1 – Journey to the Center of the Earth by Bernard Herrmann

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 1 – Journey to the Center of the Earth by Bernard Herrmann

 

Music is a mysterious and wonderful thing, isn’t it?  If you don’t believe me, spend some time contemplating where the definition of music begins and ends.  This is the domain of philosophers and aestheticians who of course study and ponder these matters in a disciplined and systematic way, but most of us come up against these questions at least occasionally in some form over the course of our day-to-day thoughts and judgments.  I might boil the question down to a spectrum that looks like this:

 

NOISE ——————–MUSIC ——————– SPEECH

 

This is a bit simplistic, but it will move us in the direction of considering music’s nature.  If sound is disorganized and without clear intention, we tend to call it “noise”.  When a critic calls music mere noise, it is because he has not discerned enough organization to cross the threshold between them (whether the failure is on the part of the listener or the musician remains a matter of spirited and sometimes heated philosophical debate).  You can read more about a musician who delighted in blurring the definition of this threshold in this post.  On the other side of the spectrum we encounter the question of which characteristics distinguish music from speech.  Have you ever considered this?  Here are a couple items to show you how blurry that distinction can be:

 

You may also wish to see this post.  So, obviously speech and language are very intimately connected, and a discrete point of difference is probably not really possible to discern.  You can further muddy these waters by considering tonal languages, of which Chinese is probably the most famous example.  In Chinese, you can change the meanings of words and syllables by speaking them at different pitches.  How could you possibly point to a clear separation between speech and music in light of that?  Still, philosophers of music try, and everyone acts as such a philosopher at some point.  It is probably a valuable exercise simply to stimulate deeper thought about art, its possibilities, applications, and techniques.

What is clear is that music (however it is defined), like speech, is a human birthright.  I haven’t done exhaustive research to this end, but I would speculate that in at least 9 out of 10 cultures (if not 10 out of 10) you would discover an original musical tradition of some sort, that is a form of organized sound that is clearly distinct in some way from their manner of speech.  In most of these cultures you will also find tools designed to create elements of this music.  We call these tools “musical instruments”.  The word instrument is probably used in this context more than all of its others, to the point that the musical ones are those which most people think of first upon hearing that word, even though there exist instruments for a wide variety of technical purposes, from surgery, to flight, to carpentry, to food preparation.  An instrument is simply a refined and delicate tool designed for the purpose of executing a task to a high level of precision.  Musical instruments are such tools that allow humans’ innate musicality to be expressed through a variety of timbres and approaches.  We can blur the distinction between “musical instrument” and “human body” in considering the sonic capabilities of our larynxes, hands, feet, tongues, lips, fingers, and parts.

Due to our acculturation we tend to think of musical instruments as a firmly set palette of colors, shapes, and mechanical operations – ask anyone in the West to name some musical instruments and they will almost automatically list some of the instruments associated with our traditions of rock or classical music: violins, pianos, drums, clarinets, trumpets, guitars, etc.  But a musical instrument, itself, is an incredibly broad category with essentially infinite potential for variety.  Those that have crystallized and remained in common use, such as those in the previous list, have demonstrated an extraordinary combination of ease of operation, ergonomics, effective projection, flexibility of musical expression, pleasing timbre, and technological innovation.  Musical instruments are always being created, innovated, improved, refined, and retired.  There will always be new musical instruments, and improvements to existing ones, and it is the job of performers and composers to stay abreast of these changes in order to apply them to their work.

The scholarly study of musical instruments is called organology.  It is not the most widely-known discipline outside of the academy, but it is illuminating and often fun to engage with.  It reveals to its students the inherent flexibility and infinite variety within the medium.  Musical instruments are really just some combination of acoustic stimulus, amplification and (sometimes) pitch control.  That’s an almost absurd reduction, and of course it’s the nuances and details that make individual instruments interesting enduring, but when you come right down to it, that’s the essence of a musical instrument.  We tend to think of them in those neat, tidy categories given the families of the Western symphony orchestra, but it has not always been so cut-and-dry, and we can probably expect some kind of shift again in the near future.  

There are brass instruments, made of shiny metal, and using a solid, detachable, cup or cone-shaped mouthpiece into which the player buzzes their lips to stimulate the sound.  The pitch is controlled by the embouchure which kicks the pitch up through the harmonic series of the tube’s fundamental frequency, and also through a system of valves which changes the length of the tube and, consequently, its fundamental frequency.  And then there are woodwind instruments, played (usually) by a vibrating reed or two, thereby exciting a column of air within a wooden tube, the harmonics of which are filtered via a system of holes and keys.

We tend to think of those two families of instruments as discrete and separate, but there have been instruments which hybridize the two systems and which seem strange to our sensibilities, shaped, by decades of orchestral standardization.  A notable example is called the serpent.  Developed in the late 1500s to bolster the volume of monks’ chanting, the curious serpent quite resembles its name, with a curved tube that snakes to and fro.

 

Visually and aurally, it may strike us as a musical platypus, neither fish nor fowl.  One could say that it is half brass, given its brass-like mouthpiece, and half woodwind, given the wood that forms its tube and the system of holes and keys with which the player controls the pitch.  Sonically as well it exhibits elements of both families, like a cross between the trombone and bassoon (and maybe a little shofar thrown in, if you know what that is):

 

The mid-low range of much of the orchestral music that we know from the eighteenth and nineteenth century was once played on instruments like the serpent, although it is no longer.  But some recent composers have enjoyed unearthing and employing sonic resources like the serpent from the recesses of the distant past.  A great example is Bernard Hermann’s colorful and evocative score from “Journey to the Center of the Earth” of 1959.  Hermann mixes the raw, earthy color of the serpent in with the lower palette of this score, yielding some hair-raising orchestral sonorities:

 

 
Like speech, music is a human birthright.  And mankind has shown a propensity to make music with objects of all kinds.  We can’t help it because it seems to be our very nature.  The study of musical instruments reveals a never-ending set of possibilities to this end, limited only by human imagination and ingenuity.  While we tend to think of musical instruments in highly segmented categories from our current 21st century vantage point, deeply informed by the dominance of the symphony orchestra and rock band, there are fascinating colors to be found and fascinating music to be made between the largely arbitrary boundaries of these categories.  The serpent, now mostly forgotten, is an example of this, ripe with otherworldly colors ideal for invoking the colors of other worlds.

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Syndication, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Syndication!  Enjoy some of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Syndication, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

Have you ever played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”?  It’s a modern American “parlour game”, that is a group game that can be played indoors to pass the time.  In the Kevin Bacon game the challenge is to link a given actor to Kevin Bacon through their co-stars in 6 movies or less.  

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is something I have always take  for granted.  I don’t know when I first heard of it, but it’s one of those things that I’ve just always had in my construct of the world, and so I never really gave much thought to how old it is or how it originated, even though it must have had a beginning, and couldn’t be that old.  It’s actually newer than I thought, and has a very precise story of origin.  It was invented by a few bored and clever college students in Pennsylvania in 1994, and began to go viral just as I was going through high school, which explains why it has been a part of my consciousness throughout my entire adult life.  Notably, it was also invented just as another human invention based on the idea of unlimited connectivity was taking off: the internet.  Is it a coincidence?  Maybe, but the internet and the Kevin Bacon game share some notable parallels in the way they reflect the nature of our human network.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is, of course, based a theory called “six degrees of separation”, which postulates that we are connected by acquaintance no more than six degrees from any other person on the face of the Earth.  Have you ever thought about that?  On one hand it seems impossible given the abundance of essentially anonymous people which seem to populate the earth, at least to our subjective view, but intuitively I imagine that most of us suspect there is some truth to this, and we find our limited degrees of separation springing up in the most surprising of places.

And in addition to that, the degrees of separation get much smaller if you impose a limitation on the data set, like restricting the geographical area, interest, or profession.  I often suspect that, worldwide, professional musicians are separated by no more than 3 degrees, and…maybe…only 2.  I’m fairly certain I could link practically any other professional musician through one mutual acquaintance most of the time, and a maximum of two in other cases.  Of course, as you go back in time the chain grows, but I bet it still wouldn’t be all that much.

If you impose two or more limitations the connectedness skyrockets.  As an example of this, I am a professional musician in Central Wisconsin.  If I postulated about the degrees of separation within that community, my guess is it would be no more than one, and, as often as not, zero.  What this means is that I either know every other professional musician in Central Wisconsin or know them through no more than one other person.

What fascinates me about the Kevin Bacon game is that, in spite of the restrictions placed on that data set (Hollywood Actors), sometimes it is still not easy to link him to others without expanding to fourth and fifth degrees.  If you want to play with this a little bit, this website is fun:

https://oracleofbacon.org/help.php

Kevin Bacon used to be offended by the game, suspecting he was the butt of a malicious joke, but has since embraced it for the cultural enrichment it provides.  It also works only because he has been so prolific.  He has even leveraged its popularity to launch philanthropic organizations and speaks touchingly of his history with the game in this interesting and enjoyable TED Talk:

And, he eventually became comfortable enough with Six Degrees to make this amusing commercial, which I remember seeing on television:

Anyway, I bring up Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon because it reminds me of something I came across doing research for the featured music of this post, Beethoven’s Farewell Piano Sonata.  Bear with me here…

Have you ever watched the film JFK?  It’s Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Based largely on the controversial work of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who ended up making a considerable investigation into people and events which he suspected were related to a conspiracy centered in his jurisdiction, the movie is correspondingly controversial.

I was fascinated by the film when I first saw it in college, and it’s still a film I can watch with pleasure.  I don’t tend to sit around and think about conspiracy theories that much, but the film usually manages to convince me there may be something to the various theories about Kennedy’s death.  As a film it boasts many merits, however you feel about the implications of its content.  It’s the kind of movie that you sit down to start and end up glued to the couch for the entire 3-hour running time because it’s so absorbing and compelling.  Siskel and Ebert agreed at its time of release, and I still remember seeing the articles in the Newsweek magazines that were delivered to our house, analyzing its veracity:

Part of what makes the film fun to watch is that it is essentially an ensemble cast, packed from beginning to end with colorful cameos brought to life by notable Hollywood figures.  Kevin Costner plays Garrison, and he is certainly the protagonist who holds the film together, but as his investigation unfolds he meets one colorful lowlife after another, and Stone’s casting reflects the color of the characters.  You just don’t know who will fill the screen next.  I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t seen it, because I recommend that you do.  But I will tell you that one of the cameos is played by none other than…Kevin Bacon.  It is for this reason that one of my friends, in discussing JFK, once called it “solid gold for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.  I might even go so far as to say that you could understandably disqualify it from the pool if you were playing a serious game.

In researching the history of classical music I have been struck by how small of a world it really was.  It seems that all the great composers and performers knew each other, and crossed paths often,with very few degrees of separation between them.  Everyone studied with someone, taught someone, met someone, encouraged someone, criticized someone, collaborated with someone, heard someone in performance, danced with someone, etc. etc. etc.  This is a truth I had not fully grasped before, even loving classical music as much as I have for so much of my life.  It was an incredibly small and tightly-knit world, and reading the stories of Western composers drives this point home.  And, ladies and gentlemen, I believe I have discerned classical music’s JFK.  It is the Diabelli Variations, published in the 1820s.  And here is the story behind that…

Anton Diabelli was a priest until Bavaria closed its monasteries in 1803, and then he went into music publishing.  He and his Italian business partner, Pietro Cappi, created a very successful music publishing company in Vienna.  Part of what made it work so well was Diabelli’s keen sense of promotion and providing music to the public that he knew would go over well.  It is this sensibility that motivated him to extend a commision to 50 of the most notable composers of the day, requesting variations composed on a little waltz that he wrote.  

The submitted variations were published together as a collection.  Well, actually two collections, since Beethoven went above and beyond the call of duty, generating more than 30 himself.  This collection is often performed and recorded all on its own under the title of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and considered one of the strongest masterpieces of variation technique.

Variations were submitted by these folks, among others: Beethoven, Czerny, Schubert, Hummel, Moscheles, Gelinek, Kalkbrenner.  If you’ve read at all about Beethoven’s time you probably recognize a bunch of those names.  Most have been lost to history, but you can see the complete list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaterl%C3%A4ndischer_K%C3%BCnstlerverein

Three other composers are notable:

1. Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, son of Wolfgang Amadeus, submitted one.

2. An 11 year-old Franz Liszt submitted one.  Liszt almost singlehandedly formed a hub around which all the Romantic composers of Europe orbited.  If you played Six Degrees of Franz Liszt, you could probably do everything at zero or one degree.  He was a true connector – read more about that here.

3. “S.R.D.”, a mysterious composer who has been identified as the cardinal archduke Rudolf of Austria.  Here’s his variation:

Well done isn’t it?  It reminds me of a cross between Bach and Beethoven.  And that makes sense, because Beethoven taught him piano and composition for many years.  They became close friends and remained so for decades, which I imagine was somewhat rare for Beethoven.  In Archduke Rudolf Beethoven found a companion and champion who used his power and influence to stand up for and help the composer in spite of his unorthodox disregard for decorum, helping to arrange important opportunities and financial support for the brilliant and often socially misfit musical genius.  In return, Beethoven dedicated 14 of his compositions to the Archduke, including the great Missa Solemnis.

One such dedication goes beyond the conventional framework of the dedication process, bordering on the territory of a personal letter.  It is the Piano Sonata in E flat major, opus 81a (for more on the opus numbering system, especially as it relates to Beethoven, see this post).  Cast in three movements, the sonata is thought to summarize Beethoven’s feelings regarding the Archduke leaving Vienna in response to Napoleon’s attack.  In an uncharacteristically transparent expression of inner landscape, Beethoven actually wrote “Le-be-wohl” over the first three chords of the sonata.  

Beethoven must have sympathized with the misfortunes of his patron, adding to his already conflicted feelings about Napoleon Bonaparte (for more on that story, see this post).
In a fascinating little corner of music history, Beethoven and his patron, Archduke Rudolf, share a connection in the pages of Diabelli’s clever commission, and connections with so many other musical luminaries as well, making their colorful cameos in the pages of the publication.  If you wanted to play six degrees of separation with classical composers, you would never be all that far away from anyone else.  But the Diabelli Variations would be solid gold for anyone seeking to reduce the magnitude of degrees.  Like JFK in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, savvy players may find it fair to disqualify it from their game.

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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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