Get Your Exercise, Day 5 – Etude in E Major, Op. 10 No. 3 by Frederic Chopin

This week’s theme is…Get Your Exercise!  If you want to get stronger, you’ll go to a gym and work out.  But musicians can get stronger too, and to get their exercise, they practice might practice an etude, which is a French word for a piece of music written to strengthen a particular skill.  Etudes run the gamut from dry technique builders to stunning, complete musical statements that are worth hearing beyond their use to improve musicians’ aptitude.  This week look at some such examples.

Get Your Exercise, Day 5 – Etude in E Major, Op. 10 No. 3 by Frederic Chopin

DISCLAIMER: This post contains content that some readers may find objectionable.  Be sure to screen it if you intend to share it with your younger music appreciators!

I’m not sure whence it comes, but I sometimes encounter the sense that cartoons are for kids.  I guess it’s understandable, with the cartoon-heavy programming of Saturday morning network television, the Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon.  Kids love cartoons and are often drawn like a magnet to cartoon images, whether they are appropriate for their consumption or not.  I remember that before a certain age I myself was attracted only to cartoons and not to live action film.  I think that started to change around age 7 or so.

But most of us know that it’s not so cut-and-dry.  While cartoons are largely a child-friendly medium, there are plenty of significant cartoons made just for adults.  This is as old as the Sunday funnies, which were cartoon drawings intended largely for adult consumption.  But animated shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons certainly walked quite close to the middle of the line which divided children’s audiences from adults.  In my lifetime the entertainment industry underwent a renaissance of animated shows designed for mature audiences, from the Cartoon Network’s constantly revolving Adult Swim collection, to MTV’s iconic Beavis and Butthead to the phenomenal success of pop culture titans like The Simpsons and South Park, and everything in between.  It is clear that cartoons are not just for kids anymore, if they ever were, and even if they are attracted to the images, parents must be more careful than ever to screen and approve animation for the young, innocent eyes in their care.

There are many animated shows I have enjoyed as an adult.  The first, and the granddaddy of them all, is The Simpsons, which started during my early elementary school days.  It was a delight to see that show grow up over the course of my childhood.  As many audience members would probably admit, it has overstayed its welcome and probably should have bowed out over a decade ago, but its heyday was absolutely fantastic.  All other adult animated shows owe a great debt of concept to The Simpsons.  I watched a fair amount of South Park as well which, during that time, grew up from a homemade shock-jock potty-mouth show to shock-jock potty-mouth show produced with considerable resources of finance, talent and technology, and capable of commenting on societal issues of all stripes with impressive precision and topicality.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone burned the midnight oil on that show, and the work ethic and impeccable sense of controversial comedy demonstrated through South Park launched them to bigger and better things, like The Book of Mormon.  If you enjoy their work at all, you should watch the documentary 6 Days to Air which chronicles the creative process of a South Park episode and reveals the considerable stress that it puts on its creators.  Be warned, the episode is one of the more explicit ones in concept.  Here’s an excerpt from that:

 

But if I had to watch only one mature animated show for the rest of my life it wouldn’t take me long to choose Futurama over all the rest.  

Futurama has a fascinating history.  In concept it is terrific: smart writing, funny jokes, and slick animation from the creators of The Simpsons, all set in a ridiculously flexible notion of the future of humanity that is packed to the brim with clever gags.  What’s not to like?  For some reason, it just didn’t land all that well in its first iteration, the first four seasons of which aired on Fox in the early 2000s.  The tepid response stopped production with the existing episodes entering syndication on the Cartoon Network and Comedy Central.  I remember catching episodes here and there and always enjoying them.  But once, probably in 2005, I was visiting a friend and he was about to put on an episode of Family Guy, another mature animated show that I had already enjoyed and tired of.  I noticed he also owned boxed sets of complete seasons of Futurama and requested that instead, since I didn’t know it that well.  Stunned by the clever writing and general polish of the show, I was instantly hooked and have been a big fan ever since.  To my delight, I watched as Fox decided to give the show another chance based on its considerable cult following, commissioning three more seasons, and ending the show gracefully at the end of the Seventh Season.  Unlike The Simpsons, Futurama would not overstay its welcome.

Futurama is as close to comedic perfection as an intelligent viewer could want.  Its creators have somehow crafted an environment in which lowbrow jokes can coexist harmoniously with gags that could only have been designed by writers holding advanced degrees in physics, always completely congruent with the zany, anachronism-filled future universe in which it is set.  The cast of egregiously but affectionately flawed characters wins our empathy in every episode and the next gag is always just around the corner, hiding in a cranny we could never expect.  The stories are always surprising, incredibly imaginative and clever in their twists and turns, and often exploiting logical and scientific paradoxes in the process that exercise our thinking muscles.

But what really makes me love Futurama is the variety of tones and themes it is able to explore without feeling forced or awkward.  Futurama is the only show of its kind that can convincingly and hilariously joke about the excretions of robots, and then turn around and ask big questions of existence and philosophy.  It is the only show of its kind which can juxtapose exaggeratedly farcical hijinks with the unexpected sincerity of the most human side of love and loss.  There are several episodes I could suggest to illustrate this, but as good as any is the final episode, called Meanwhile.  If you are unfamiliar with Futurama, I suggest you don’t watch this episode first as it provides the emotional closure for the love story between the two central characters, Fry and Lela, drawn out over the course of the series, and incredibly satisfying to those of us who watched the often frustrating and convoluted romantic machinations which brought them to that point.  At the end of the episode the writers use a contrivance of theoretical physics to give Fry and Leela a lifetime together which is touchingly summarized by a bittersweet montage of their aging and experience of the frozen world, accompanied by a piece of music that could only work in Futurama, Chopin’s sublimely touching Etude Op. 10, No. 3 in E major, a work he himself recognized as exceptionally beautiful, even among his illustrious output (see this post).  Chopin’s Etude is an exercise in sustaining polyphonic textures within a cantabile feeling, a technique at which he excelled, and one that was crucially important in advancing his revolutionary approach toward pianism to European audiences and pianists of his day.  The beloved and tender melody gently accompanies Fry and Lela through their marriage, enjoying the respite of the world’s stillness.  If you want to watch the episode, you can stream it on Netflix.  But this video will give you a sense of what it is like:

And Futurama is a comedy of course, so it refuses to leave on such a sincere note.  Here is the final scene of the episode, season, and series.  Spoiler alert, but not really, so go ahead and take a look:

None of the other animated shows could place this perfect work of Chopin within their storytelling as appropriately as Futurama did.  It’s just one of the reasons that I will always love Futurama more than its colleagues, and it is probably the biggest.  Even during its limited run, shorter than those of the other mature animated shows, Futurama managed to traverse a wider range of intellectual and emotional territory than the rest.  It is the only show of its kind that is able to pivot from intelligence to absurdity, and finally to rare moments of deep, sentiment-free humanity so seamlessly and gracefully.  For this reason it will always stand out in a class of its own.

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Music for Going to Sleep, Day 2 – Berceuse by Frederic Chopin

This week’s theme is…Music for going to sleep!  We undergo the nearly mystical process of going to sleep every single day, even though we never truly understand the experience.  In spite of recent scientific methods of illuminating the activity it remains incomprehensible to us.  This has made fertile ground for musicians who attempt to represent or otherwise comment on the mysterious transformation from waking to sleep.  This week we explore some of these works by composers who saw fit to represent our daily, universal journey across the veil of consciousness.

Music for Going to Sleep, Day 2 – Berceuse by Frederic Chopin

Classical Music, specifically, is a more or less German phenomenon, mastered by the likes of Haydn and Mozart, writing in sharp lines with clear harmonies and strong, solid forms.  It was preceded by German composers like Bach and Handel, who took the straight and logical music from their native German lands, mixed it with Italian fire, and served it up as a legacy for all that followed them.  And Classical Music was ushered out by a German, Beethoven, composing within many of the same clear outlines as his predecessors, but on a much grander scale with regard to both length and feeling.  While the German romantics followed in Beethoven’s footsteps and carried forth in his manner with clear, strong harmonies, square formal layouts, and grave world-weariness, Romantic music in general exploded with variety in a way that Baroque and Classical music never did.  Much less centralized was the thought that seemed to guide the creative impulses of the Romantics, and suddenly there were countless national musics on the European stage, and just as many virtuosos.  The pantheon of Romantic-era composers is dense with names in a way that the Baroque and Classical era equivalents are not.  Look at this timeline and notice how many names are in peach (Romantic) as compared with green (Baroque) and especially yellow (Classical):

The center of musical activity shifted from Vienna to Paris, although Vienna still held its own, but Paris was the thriving hive of a new breed of virtuoso that was taking musical Europe by storm.

The sharp, logical outlines of the Germanic process that had dominated the first two centuries of Common Practice music was still very much present, but was also considerably diluted by nationalistic schools which began to pop up, particularly in the eastern continent, which recast the hallowed forms on their own breezy, spontaneous terms, prioritizing zesty ethnic characters and distinctive melodic styles over the transcendent integrity of the fuddy-duddy academics.  All of these currents coalesce into Frederic Chopin, neither fish nor fowl, an unignorable platypus who managed to achieve immortality before his death, well artistic immortality, anyway.  He was certainly no German, never bound by rigorous formal outlines was he, although he had as much admiration for Bach and Mozart as the next musician.  Was he a nationalist?  Much of his music certainly emanates the strong flavor of his native Poland, but he was so quick to leave, and his music is so much richer and more significant than the unapologetic and sometimes myopic nationally-oriented musics that came out of that movement in places like Russia and Bohemia.  Chopin is more flavored by Poland than dyed in the wool.  

He was certainly a virtuoso, but with such delicacy and restraint, not nearly as flamboyant or vapid as a Liszt or a Paganini could be, and this forced him to forge a most distinctive and striking musical voice, immediately and almost universally feted, even during his lifetime.  It was a voice that consistently pulled an exquisite and ever-varied palette of colors and textures from an instrument that can be so grey and dull beneath more ordinary hands.  Chopin painted the entire rainbow with his piano for 25 years.  It was his orchestra and his choir, and no other composer has managed to focus his creative energy so completely upon just one instrument and still achieve the preeminence that Chopin did.

Much of Chopin’s genius, still acknowledged by pianists everywhere, is to be found in his combination of the piano’s lyrical versatility with a sort of gossamer virtuosity, and all of it super-ideally suited to his chosen instrument.  Chopin’s music constantly balances these, well, not exactly opposing forces, although they can seem that way.  In almost any of his works you will hear some passages of striking melodic charm which radiate warmth, intimacy, poetry; and others, contrasting with the first, alive with agility, albeit a soft-footed kind of agility, that spin a silky, translucent, and thoroughly enchanting web over the listener.  At times this combination could be unleashed with unexpected power and force like “…a cannon buried in flowers”, in the words of Robert Schumann.  Chopin balances and mixes these two modes of pianism in as many ways as he created discrete works; the interplay between the two is the constant animating force that drives his music.  Sometimes they manage to be one and the same, especially in his shorter pieces, the tiny Preludes, for example.  Sometimes they are channeled into different sections, as in this beloved Etude, often nicknamed “Tristesse”, or “sadness”:

 

Do you hear the marked contrast between the two primary sections of that piece?  I must admit that I am not always convinced of their cohesion in every performance; I am still waiting for just the right performer to convince me that the driving, even eruptive, middle section belongs with the sublime outer ones.  In many of Chopin’s other works I find the two forces much more fully integrated, but I love the first section of that one so much that I am usually able to forgive the excesses of the middle.

To explore the interplay between his two pianistic manners Chopin created a repertory unlike any other in the history of Western music, prior or hence.  Aside from the few concertos and sonatas, he chose to play out his pianistic textures entirely through single movements: preludes, etudes, nocturnes, waltzes, the Polish mazurkas.  And then there is one berceuse, a lullaby, composed less than half a decade before his death.

I find it odd for many reasons.  No composer before him had written a work in this genre, although a couple did after him.  Formally it is remarkable, and an ideal vehicle for Chopin’s pianism.

 

I suspect no composer other than Chopin could have created that as convincingly as he.  The left hand lilts the baby to sleep, never straying from its repeating 1-measure triplet figure (of which there are actually two subtly different versions).  If the line between Chopin’s composition and improvisation was often blurred, it was almost completely so in his Berceuse with its episodic written improvisation endlessly spinning out over the left hand ground bass.  You sense that Chopin could have written fifty different versions of this, all different and yet the same.  It is like a great chaconne with variatons cast in Chopin’s deft, crystalline threads.  Secure in the confidence of his mature artistry, it casts its sleepy and enchanting spell.
Chopin was Polish, and while it occasionally colored his music, the national character is, I think, hard to pin down.  He anticipated Impressionistic French textures almost a century before their time, but was assured and harmonically daring enough to earn the respect of great German musicians over the course of the entire nineteenth century.  Pianism, as it became during the Romantic age, was unthinkable without the inspiration of Chopin’s unique take on texture, harmony, color and formal design.

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