Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapuntus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapunctus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

 

Do you have an “elevator speech” prepared?  An elevator speech refers to a pithy sales pitch or description of services that is brief enough to deliver to a captive audience during a short elevator ride, but substantive enough to give a complete impression of doing business with you and persuasive enough to move a prospect toward closing a sale or referring someone else to do the same.  Business professionals of all stripes are encouraged to prepare such elevator speeches with the aim of turning any short meeting into closed business.  You can think of an elevator speech as a personal abstract, a concise summary of what you are about that gives the broadest overview as clearly as possible.  A good elevator speech should provide a vivid image of what working with you is like, but leave enough to the imagination that the prospect is intrigued to take further steps to making this a reality and filling in the outlines it draws.

Sometimes when I read articles about notable composers in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the gold standard for general research about practically any topic in Western art music, I note that the authors are, in many ways, creating elevator speeches for them.  Actually, they are not so much about the composers themselves as their legacies.  If you had met Handel on the street his description of services would be somewhat different than the way we have come to describe the legacy left by his life and body of work.  When the Grove’s authors write their introductions they are essentially summarizing why we value these musicians and the benefits acquaintance with their work can offer to us, even after multiple centuries.  While the gigantic articles about significant composers are packed with interesting biographical and artistic detail, I often find the little abstracts which precede them to be the most clever and carefully written parts of the article.  And I think my favorite abstract in the Grove’s, one to which I return again and again out of admiration, is that about Johann Sebastian Bach.  His article warrants 55 pages, and its author, Christoph Wolff, summarizes the old master’s legacy thus:

His genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. 

While it was in the former capacity, as a virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that have earned him a unique historical position.  His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, styles and general achievements of his own and earlier generations which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.

It is densely written and requires considerable study to unpack and appreciate.  But it is also very effectively summarizes what we value about Bach.  Can you imagine him walking around with business cards on which are printed:

Johann Sebastian Bach, organist and composer

My genius combines outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative posers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced

Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous!  Like I said, that’s his legacy.  But let’s take that apart:

Outstanding performing musicianship – I think what this means is that for Bach there was little distinction between performing, improvising, and composing.  As a performer and composer, he was constantly inventive and completely at home, going between them with ease and grace.

Supreme creative powers – That’s a strong word, even a superlative one.  What Wolff is saying here is that no one in the history of music was more creative than Bach, who could create quickly and consistently, and with astounding inspiration, any time any place.

Forceful, originally inventiveness – If you have listened to any amount of Bach and paid attention, perhaps you have been struck by the cascade of remarkably vigorous and finely-wrought musical ideas which are always distinctive, but always speaking clearly in Bach’s voice.  It never ends, nor does the strength with which they are asserted.

Intellectual control – Bach is still heralded as the most intelligent musician ever to live.  Had he been a mathematician or physicist, he would have rivaled Newton and Einstein.  As an author he would have contended with Shakespeare.  Once you know a little bit of how music works it is simply mind-boggling how controlled Bach’s music is on every single level, and consistently so.

Do you get the picture?  It is easy to divinize Bach, but the image I often carry of his music is like that of a god (or a demigod at least), creation full of beauty, detail and inner consistency springing from his mighty finger (see this post).  Bach’s music really does feel like some kind of eternal stream flowing from the source of the very forces that bind the universe.  I think that is what Wolff is saying in his summary.

But Bach was not a god; he was mortal.  And in one particular piece we hear his god-like stream of creation come to a very human halt.  At the end of his life Bach created a collection of fugues and canons all on the same subject, something of a catalog of contrapuntal techniques.  The resulting Art of Fugue, if not necessarily loved, is respected by musicians for the feat of superlative craftsmanship and invention that it is.  Bach did not live to complete his vision.  He came very close, but the final fugue, which promised to work upon four different subjects, evokes the image of Bach’s life force finally and completely ceasing:

 

Can you hear all the elements of Wolff’s description, working in full-bodied force, and suddenly stopping?  From this it seems that Bach’s musicianship sprang complete from his spirit with no necessary refinement by his ears or external editor of any kind.  In a way it is almost a blessing for this to stay unfinished, a fitting image of the valve that closed when Bach died and stopped the flow of the consistent eternal creative force which he had learned to channel.
I’m not sure what Bach’s elevator speech would have been during his lifetime, but I think Christoph Wolff came up with a pretty good one for his legacy.  The qualities Wolff describes are constantly present in every single bar of music composed by the mature Bach.  I once played a chamber piece by Bach, coached by a university professor.  I was astounded by the constant inventiveness of the music and he noticed this.  He said something like “Yeah, there’s just constantly amazing things happening.  The guy was from another planet!”  He wasn’t, but it can often seem that way.  He was mortal after all, and the final fugue of the Art of Fugue shows us this plainly, if tragically, placing the god-like Bach in real space and time.

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More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

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

More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

 

Do you recognize these guys?

You may have seen them like this…

…or, this…

I’m positive that almost anyone reading this will have come across Tweedledee and Tweedledum, most likely in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories about Alice.  But these characters in Carroll’s stories are references, derived from nursery rhymes and other epigrams that circulated through the British culture of his time.  Here’s a common version of one of their rhymes:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

   Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

   Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

   As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

   They quite forgot their quarrel.”

Carroll, with his penchant for the absurd and whimsical, took great delight in incorporating such ridiculous and quasi-nonsensical characters and situations into his stories and poems.  And I suspect that he usually had some kind of good reason or commentary behind his sublimely strange choices.  Have you ever felt like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so fixated on your agitation and itch for a fight that you may have forgotten to think straight?  Or maybe you know someone else like that…  It seems to me that Carroll was probably commenting on people who so love to perpetuate drama that they will fight and argue about the silliest things.  That’s more or less what Tweedledee and Tweedledum represent, isn’t it?

Here’s another, most fascinating poem about the silly, cantankerous twins:

“Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!”

Unexpected, no?  Some people just love to have something to argue about (but not me!).  And if you are fortunate enough to currently be occupied with the middle or upper levels of Maslow’s insightful hierarchy, then you may see fit to use your abundant free time to argue about books, movies, music, or some other accouterments of comfy life.  And so, the London opera-going folk of the eighteenth century just couldn’t let you go without expressing their allegiance.  Some preferred Handel’s art, and others, that of Giovanni Bononcini.

I probably don’t have to tell you which of those composers posterity has come to favor.  Simply ask yourself which of those names you have heard before, or most often if the answer is both.  And of course history is lived in the moment; you never see the future until it happens, so the Handelian Tweedle-dees never got their chance to gloat!  Too bad.  But not knowing how things turn out is part of the fun of life.  Well, you are probably happier if you think so anyway.

The reasons for Handel’s dominance in posterity over Bononcini are both historical and artistic.  Handel and Bononcini were similarly cosmopolitan, moving between major cities in Europe to make their careers, albeit different ones.  But once Handel made it to London in the 1710s he was able to stay there, becoming the darling of the British, and pivoting from Italian opera to English oratorio, which the English ADORED after the imported art form fell out of favor.  For more about that process see this post and this one.  Bononcini was a very accomplished opera composer, and met with similar success as Handel in London (he even has the dubious distinction of having written the opera during which a long-standing rivalry between competing superstar sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni came to blows on stage, a cat fight of cat fights, in 1727).  But his Catholicism and resulting Jacobite acquaintances somewhat stigmatized him from the London public and he eventually found it difficult to be hired to write operas, even by companies with which he had earlier scored major financial and critical successes.  Handel’s uncomplicated and uncontroversial Protestantism certainly helped to facilitate his social cohesion with the British and allowed him to more sensitively tailor the oratorios to their national and religious tastes.

But most historians acknowledge Handel to be the stronger composer also, more capable of filling the lengthening arias of their day with complex and propulsive musical textures.  Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to compare the artistry of Handel and Bononcini in a very direct way.  There survive from both composers settings of a libretto called Xerxes, or Serse or Xerse at is is also sometimes spelled.  It was written by Nicolo Minato and first set by the Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi’s most notable pupil, in 1654.  Through the magic of YouTube we can compare all three versions: Cavalli, Bononcini, and Handel:

Here is Cavalli:

What really impresses me about Cavalli’s setting is the superhuman grace and lyricism that pervades the texture.  It just flows and never stops.  You can hear the proto-tonality, almost fully developed in Cavalli’s language, but still with some remnants of the Renaissance harmonic language, which is almost a little exotic at times.  It does not quite fit our musical grammatical expectations, calibrated by the music of more than three intervening centuries, but it is lovely, isn’t it?  You can read about a contemporary of Cavalli’s with a similar style here. Cavalli is earlier than both Bononcini and Handel, is therefor a little hard to compare with either of them.  

So, on to Bononcini:

Also lovely, and fully tonal.  This one completely satisfies our musical grammatical expectations.  It is charming and melodic, and fits the language quite well.

And here is Handel:

And that’s one of classical music’s greatest hits, famous as “Handel’s Largo”, played in countless instrumental combinations, even though the actual tempo marking is “Larghetto”.  But whatever.  Do you hear how much depth, propulsion and focus Handel’s setting brings?  It’s qualities like this, in addition to his historical serendipity, that have helped his music endure through history, overtaking composers like Bononcini, and so many of their now lesser-known contemporaries.

And Handel’s Serse was not well-received at the time of its premiere.  It is often surprising to modern day listeners, but that glowing, lyrical aria is actually a comic statement.  It features the noble, practically immortal Persian emperor in a moment of personal reflection, singing a heroic love song to a tree that has sheltered him after a wearisome battle.  It’s a bizarre, almost surreal image, and it fit better into Cavalli’s style of opera, in which comedy and tragedy were more or less equally mixed.  For more on another opera in which that was true, see this post.  By Handel’s time, the practice was to separate comedy and drama into completely different channels.  Touches like this, which happen often in Handel’s Serse, made the opera confusing and difficult for its first audiences to comprehend, even though most modern listeners acknowledge it for the masterwork of operatic characterization and pacing that it is.
It’s just another example of our human difficulty in comprehending the sweep of history while we are wrapped up in it, the same difficulty that caused a wry wit to write a few lines of satirical verse about the absurd nature of the argument between supporters of Handel and Bononcini, comparing them to ridiculous and childish characters in equally ridiculous and childish contemporary nursery rhymes.  The author probably thought the argument was just silly, but from our historically advantaged perspective we can see that fashion often obscures our perception of true artistic quality.  And so we’ll always have arguments like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and necessarily defer to future historians to see the truth clearly.

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Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 1 – Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni (and Remo Giazotto)

This week’s theme is…Pin the Tail on the Donkey!  Like many music lovers I boast an extensive and comprehensive record collection.  For this week, I closed my eyes and selected 5 different albums.  Here’s what I picked…

Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 1 – Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni (and Remo Giazotto)

When I was growing up a fun movie was released called “That Thing You Do”, which starred Tom Hanks and Liv Tyler (I don’t think there was anyone else all that famous in the cast).  

The movie follows the short story of a Beatles-like American band in the 1960s, called The Wonders.  The symbolism of their name is by no means subtle – they become a one-hit wonder, the titular song rocketing them to a quick and dazzling stardom from which they fall just as quickly.  The movie also works as an entertaining period piece filled with details about the music industry of that time and place.  The Wonders’ hit song, which shares its title with the movie, is a clever essay by alternative rock bassist Adam Schlesinger in the idioms of the 1960s pop tune, containing all the features necessary to get you tapping your toes and humming the chorus long after its final bars have subsided:

 

The movie itself is something on a commentary of the phenomenon of one-hit wonderdom and inspires the question of whether it is better to be a one-hit wonder or nothing at all.  I’m not sure myself, but there will always be more of them.  It is such a cultural trope that there is a Wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder

Interestingly, there is a section of that article about one-hit wonderdom in Classical music.  The list is as follows:

1. Johann Pachelbel – Canon in D
2. Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings
3. attrib. Tomaso Albinoni – Adagio in G minor (this was actually written by Remo Giazotto and contains no Albinoni material)
4. Jean-Joseph Mouret – Fanfare-Rondeau from Symphonies and Fanfares for the King’s Supper (theme to Masterpiece, formerly Masterpiece Theatre)
5. Luigi Boccherini – minuet from String Quintet in E
6. Jeremiah Clarke – “Trumpet Voluntary”, more properly known as “Prince of Denmark’s March“
7. Jules Massenet – Meditation from his opera Thais
8. Pietro Mascagni – “Cavalleria rusticana“
9. Léo Delibes – “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé
10. Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov – “Caucasian Sketches“
11. Amilcare Ponchielli – “Dance of the Hours” from the opera La Gioconda
12. Charles-Marie Widor – Toccata from Symphony for Organ No. 5
13. Aram Khachaturian – “Sabre Dance” from the ballet Gayane, although Khachaturian’s “Masquerade Suite” is also well known
14. Marc-Antoine Charpentier – Te Deum
15. Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska – Maiden’s Prayer

I’ve often considered this in classical music – some composers really do end up fitting this description, although I think it’s worthy to point out that with classical composers it’s actually their legacy that ends up being the one-hit wonder (for more about legacy, see this post) and not the composer himself.  Rock bands tend not to leave lasting legacies (not most of them anyway, and it may be too early to make statements like that) – their cycle of one-hit wonderdom plays out during their careers, as they live.  But when we talk about a composer who is a one-hit wonder we are referring to a severely minuscule slice of what, in most cases, was a very robust and busy career that has remained in our popular memory.  It’s hard to know why this happens, and it is fortunate for the musicians in question that their one-hit wonderdom develops posthumously, so they don’t have to face it as the survivors of the similar condition in popular music do.  Still, it’s enough to make anyone spin in their grave.

If any classical composer has the right to spin in his grave over this condition I think it is Tomaso Albinoni.  His career is sorely misrepresented by a single “greatest hit” that isn’t really even written by him.  Today, if you hear music by Albinoni, it is probably the Adagio in g minor.  It is a lovely and haunting movement for strings and organ, placid and sorrowful:

 

Like any classical one-hit wonder, it has been adapted by countless musicians to fit their unique styles.  I’ll happily listen to the “Albinoni Adagio”, but the tragedy here is that it does not in any way give us a good or even fair sense of Albinoni’s musical speaking voice or significance.  Remo Giazotto, a Roman-born musicologist who lived squarely within the boundaries of the twentieth century, and a scholar of Albinoni and his contemporaries, claimed to have discovered the figured bassline and fragment of melody which he fleshed out to create the ubiquitous Adagio.  So it’s very difficult to know which parts of all of that are Albinoni and which are Giazotto.  Fortunately, music can be a very collaborative art, and so we can enjoy the synthesis.  Also fortunate for us is the fact that Albinoni’s music is by no means obscure – plenty of it survives and so we have ample opportunity to experience his unique and delightful voice.

Albinoni’s near-contemporary Antonio Vivaldi is without question the most famous and significant composer of Italian instrumental music of this time – his hundreds of concertos took European performers and audiences by storm and inspired the composition of countless others (see this post).  Vivaldi was also a prolific opera composer (see this post).  But Italy was full of composers who were writing copious amounts of instrumental music around this time.  Another important figure is Arcangelo Corelli (see this post), just a little older than Vivaldi and Albinoni – his music is all sun and soft breeze, not like the hard, clear edges of Vivaldi.  I think Albinoni somewhat melds Corelli and Vivaldi – we hear the rhythmic vitality and clarity of form prevalent in Vivaldi but with a soft, busy texture that brings Corelli to mind.  You can hear this in the cheerful, charming opening movement of his most important set of concertos, his Opus 12 (for more about the opus system see this post):

 

Albinoni was feted during his lifetime as a composer of both instrumental music (his concertos and sonatas) and also operas, of which he boasted 80.  He had the enviable ability to follow his musical passions without the necessity of securing a position in court or church due to the residual income from his family’s paper business, so he experienced a remarkable freedom known to few musicians then or now.
Today, after all this, and in spite of his impressive output, we know of him primarily from Giazotto’s single-movement reconstruction.  Again, nothing against it.  It is lovely and deeply moving; sometimes exactly the right thing to hear.  But Albinoni deserves to be more than a one-hit wonder.  This vibrant and successful composer who served as a bridge between the busyness of Baroque and the clarity of Classical left charming and tuneful music which could populate the concerts and libraries of so many listeners today.  Don’t confuse Albinoni with the one-hit wonders of popular music – they are different phenomena and it is something of an injustice to be at the mercy of historical currents.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  You can become Albinoni’s newest fan.

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Music About Fireworks, Day 5 – Music for the Royal Fireworks by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 5 – Music for the Royal Fireworks by George Frideric Handel

Here’s a video that you may find rather interesting:

 

For the last thousand years the political borders of European nations have changed at a rate that most of us find hard to believe.  If you watch that video carefully you will notice that during most years of the past millennium at least one border changed, and during some years many of them did.  The peace and stability on the continent during the last couple decades have been the exception rather than the rule.  Would you find it disorienting to live through times such as these?  How would it feel not to know which political entity you would be a part of during any given year, who would be ruling over you, whose military you would support?  For centuries, that was the condition of many Europeans.

I am writing this several days after the “Brexit” was chosen, just barely, by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  In the aftermath of that vote, the Scottish prime minister announced her people’s displeasure with that decision, implying that the northern country may break away from the southern ones soon.  The future of that is still very much up in the air with new developments reported almost hourly, for now anyway, but I am struck by just how much this all feels like another frame in that video.  It makes me appreciate the stability of the American political borders, at least during my lifetime.  But perhaps this is an illusion caused by a limited view of time.  The borders of the United States have expanded steadily over the course of its brief lifetime, stabbing westward as the expression goes, and redrawing the political borders of Indian tribes (if political borders are even the right way to express that) and Latin American nations.  Also, the American map was almost redrawn in the conflict that led to the war between the states in the 1860s; had that turned out differently (see this post) a YouTube video of North America would look a bit more like that of Europe, and perhaps much more.

It is easy to forget that 100% of Western Classical music was written within the scope of that video of Europe’s ever-morphing borders.  It was all written in Europe and it was all written within the boundaries just a few centuries of the centuries covered.  If you expand into the past (still part of that video) you can include the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Sometimes it baffles my mind that artists like those working in Europe were able to refine their craft so beautifully even as such turmoil and uncertainty roiled about them.  But they did, and I don’t think any of the great composers were really immune to or insulated from the political conflicts, struggles for succession, religious wars or imperial expansion that characterized so much of the history of the European continent.  They all found their own ways to engage with these struggles.  Some served.  Others provided music for the homefront, often enriching festivities related to military victories or treaties with their superbly crafted music, much of which survives to please our ears today.

Toward the end of his life, having put down his roots in England decades earlier, Handel found his music conscripted into the service of the King George II of the House of Hanover who ruled Britannia from 1727 to 1760.  Handel’s music shares several points of confluence with his Majesty’s political agenda.  Most of them deal with the Jacobite uprising, which culminated in the Battle of Culloden, and the War of Austrian Succession.  The war was a much larger conflict, with the Jacobite uprising playing out simultaneously but on a much smaller scale.  As Britain entered the continent-wide War of Austrian Succession it scored an early victory over enemies France and Prussia at Dettingen.  For that occasion Handel composed choral works, the Dettingen Te Deum and the lovely anthem The King Shall Rejoice:

 

 

As the 1740s played out with Handel busily composing oratorios (see this post), the Jacobite rebellion erupted in the north.  The latest in a series of such uprisings, all of which sought to overturn the House of Hanover from the British throne, replacing it with rulers from the Catholic House of Stuart, this short conflict elicited several notable, and sometimes interesting, works from Handel’s pen.  The first is a short, jingoistic song, “Stand Round My Brave Boys”, subtitled A song made for the Gentlemen Volunteers of the City of London, which must have inspired national pride in all who heard it performed on Drury Lane:

 

When the Jacobites were thoroughly routed less than a year later, in spite of help from Scottish Highlanders, and largely because the French failed to assist as they had promised, at the Battle of Culloden, Handel celebrated by writing what may be his second most famous oratorio (after Messiah), Judas Maccabaeus, with its famous chorus, “See the conquering hero comes”:

 

And when the War of Austrian Succession finally ended in 1748, with the House of Hanover on the winning team, Handel contributed one of his most enduring hits to the celebration, the Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The road to that premiere was anything but straight.  A great pavilion had begun to be constructed in London at the time of the treaty’s signing in October of 1748 as the site of a great pyrotechnic display.  It was completed half a year later, ready to be deployed in April of 1749.  During its construction Handel was contracted by the royal house to compose a suite of festive music to accompany the display.  He went back and forth with King George a number of times in an effort to agree on the orchestration (the king did not want any “fidles”).  Eventually a compromise was reached with a heavy battery of horns and trumpets, woodwinds, and a few string players.  The result is a forceful and colorful score, rich in wind and brass sonority, but also exhibiting the grace and charm that only strings can provide.  

The performance was attended by 12,000 Londoners, and perhaps you have heard that the great pavilion caught fire?  Fortunately, no one was hurt, except for all those who died in the War of Austrian Succession, of course.  I have long admired the overture of the suite; Handel really nails it – the slow, solemn opening heralds the grandeur of the event and it is so natural to imagine the fireworks popping off with kinetic abandon during the fast section that follows.  Handel was an occasional composer par excellence.  That very year also saw the premiere of Handel’s superb oratorio Solomon, an allegory for the satisfied Hanover King (see this post).
I can’t relate to the times which incubated Europe’s great music, times during which one could count on the surrounding political borders to change every year, and not on the neighboring village to remain intact until then.  Amazingly, the greatest art comes from this time, in spite of the uncertainty which pervaded everything.  Indeed, so much of this art was created in response to the very conflicts that changed the borders every year.  We lose out on much of the meaning of this art without understanding its motivation, for the lows become lower and the highs dizzying with the jubilation of victory, as Handel demonstrated in the scores he produced to bolster nationalistic and imperial pride during the 1740s.  Times may have been uncertain, but Handel seemed to understand that it was his job to ease this and celebrate the victories of the monarch which supported him.

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Music About Fireworks, Day 4 – Overture from Acante and Cephise by Jean-Philippe Rameau

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 4 – Overture from Acante and Cephise by Jean-Philippe Rameau

The primary export of Jean-Baptiste Lully was the French overture.  No other element of his overly formal, even stiff, conservative operas (see this post) designed to glorify the French monarchy, and its monarch Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, were able to travel outside of France so well.  Collaborating with Philippe Quinault, one of the nation’s finest dramatists, during the 1670s and 1680s, Lully forged an unbending mold which guided the shape and content of his operas and those of his successors for a half century following his death.  In an opera by Lully you can count on exactly the same features again and again, allowing listeners who come to know them to predict the sound and dramatic flow of specimens they have not even heard.  Lully was inventive enough to vary them somewhat, but his 14 tragedies lyrique are cut from precisely the same unyielding cloth.

Every one of Lully’s operas develops over the course of 5 acts an episode based on a lofty mythological subject derived from the Greeks, Romans, or Christian epics in which a central hero must reconcile his competing desires for love and glory – this is always a thinly veiled allegory indicating the impeccable character of the Sun King.  Less thinly veiled was the text of the prologue in which other mythological characters, often personified virtues, sung the literal praise of their “hero”, again the Sun King.  Flanking the Prologue on either side was one of Lully’s hallmarks, a distinctive brand of overture which opened the show and marked the boundary between the prologue and the drama proper.  Lully’s model of the overture came to represent the entire nation and culture, eventually branded as the “French overture” and Europeans everywhere loved them.  It is hard to imagine a more effective composition to announce the pomp and splendor of Lully’s allegorical operas which glorified the French Monarchy.  Here’s how they work…

Every French overture has two major sections.  The first section is typically ponderous and homophonic with heavily dotted rhythms, the overall effect of which is dramatic and even imposing.  After a minute or two of that a quicker section follows with busy counterpoint passing between the numerous independent voices; the typical feeling of this section is severe in minor keys and splendorous in major keys, an effective illustration of the virtues of an imposing monarchy.  After the quick, busy section the slow dotted music returns to close the movement.  Lully’s French overtures are dramatically effective and well-wrought, if somewhat dry and formulaic.  Still, it is worth becoming acquainted with at least one or two.  Here is a major key example, from Lully’s Phaeton of 1683 (a little less than two centuries later Camille Saint-Saens would compose a Lisztian symphonic poem on the same story; see this post):

And here is the overture from Atys of 1676:

These overtures, composed to convey a very specific impression on their audiences, did the job for which they were designed, and also effectively framed the prologues, signaling the main drama.  It is also significant to note that they did not pertain specifically to the dramas that followed.  While Lully’s overtures are associated with specific dramas, and at times they even feel unified with them in terms of mood and tone, they are essentially interchangeable.

Lully’s French overture format became widely imitated during his lifetime and beyond.  Germanic composers like Bach and Handel loved them and wrote their own personally distinctive essays in the genre.  Bach opened every one of his four surviving Orchestral Suites with French on a grand, sweeping scale, easily five times the length of Lully’s.  Handel wrote a French overture to raise the curtain before each of his 40 operas, as well as many of his oratorios.  His end up being just a little longer than Lully’s and exhibit his well-wrought and sturdy contrapuntal writing.  His most famous French overture is found at the beginning of his most famous work, Messiah of 1742, composed a little more than half a century after Lully’s works:

 

Like Lully’s overtures, Handel’s are interchangeable, bearing no specific relation to the ensuing drama.

It was a near contemporary of Handel’s who finally advanced the state of French opera beyond the stagnant dominance of Lully’s strong legacy.  Beginning in the 1730s Jean-Philippe Rameau, the second great composer of French operas, began to create dramatic works with a personal flair and adventurous harmonic palette.  He flirted with controversy as he began to do this, inviting conservative factions in French society to criticize his advancements (see this post).  But once the kerfuffle calmed French audiences of all types began to acknowledge the beauty, dramatic power, and graceful, if sometimes radical, music of Rameau’s operas.

The overtures of Rameau’s early operas are very Lullian, albeit not without their distinctive character.  Here is the overture from Hippolyte and Aricie, Rameau’s very first opera.  Notice how close it is to Lully’s concept:

 

Gradually, though, Rameau began to make his overtures colorful and innovative.  He was one of the first composers to make overtures specific to the drama, often treating them like dramatic summaries.  The overture from Zoroaster works this way; it begins with the groans of people oppressed by a tyrant and gives way to the benevolent rule of the title character:

 

Sometimes Rameau’s overture would lead directly into the drama, as it does in his final opera, The Descendants of Boreas.  The overture, one of the first orchestral compositions to feature clarinets (they really fit Rameau’s orchestral color palette like a glove) concludes with a musical hunt which is essentially the first number in the drama:

 

This technique was copied by Gluck decades later, and I have to figure that this particular overture served as inspiration for Berlioz when he composed a hunt in his operatic masterpiece (see this post).

One of the most colorful and entertaining overtures by Rameau is that from Acante and Cephise.  Composed in 1751 for the occasion of the birth of Louis Joseph Xavier, a duke of the House of Bourbon and elder brother of the ill-fated future King Louis XVI (Duke Louis died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 9).  Rameau’s inventive overture features a fireworks display right in the middle!  In the third and final section fanfares prompt instrumental statements of “Vive les Roi!”  Can you hear it all?  No one could have composed a royal festival in the gallant style as well as Rameau:

 

Lully’s legacy was of crucial importance to the cultural establishment of France.  But perhaps it overstayed its welcome.  I can’t think of any musical style that hasn’t advanced or faded away of its own accord after just a decade or two, so for the conservative enforcers of France to have kept the style static for 50 years must have seemed stifling.  Fortunately Rameau balanced his strength of conviction with tact and moved just fast enough to prompt change, but also slowly enough to ease the transition and keep important feathers unruffled (as much as possible, anyway).  The overtures of his operas remain inventive and entertaining microcosms of the greater stylistic changes he prompted.  They contain wonderful music, abundant with very clever touches.

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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 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 About Animals, Day 2 – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Frogs” by Georg Philipp Telemann

This week’s theme is…Music About Animals!  Our animated companions on Earth, animals have been our friends, food, foes, and fascination.  They constantly populate the art of humans, from literature to sculpture, poetry to music.  This week we listen to music inspired in some way by animals.

Music About Animals, Day 2 – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Frogs” by Georg Philipp Telemann

To me, Telemann stands out a bit from the other luminous figures of the high Baroque.  He’s not quite as well known as the the others, although most would acknowledge that he deserves to be uttered in the same breath as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi.  His music just feels a little…different.  Where Bach and Handel are stocky and solid, Telemann’s light, airy music floats on the breeze, all the time.  Where Vivaldi is vigorous and busy, Telemann seems relaxed and carefree.  And he essentially spoke the same language as the others.  He could write Germanic polyphony with utmost facility – Handel once said that Telemann could sit down and write a composition in 8 voices as quickly and easily as others could write letters.  But his counterpoint is creamy, soothing, fragile and delicate in contrast to Bach and Handel’s well-hewn brickwork.  He wrote figuration a la Vivaldi, but whereas that of Vivaldi is propulsive, driven and incessantly goal-oriented, Telemann’s good-natured figuration meanders sunnily and takes its time to smell the flowers.  And don’t take these comparisons as criticism – Telemann’s music is delightfully transparent and uplifting; he was extraordinarily well-respected in his day (see this post).  Handel, upon hearing rumors of Telemann’s death, expressed to him in a letter his delight at his discovery that they were in error, and sent him some fine flowers for his garden on the next available ship.

But Telemann’s music seems to be crafted according to somewhat different principles than his great contemporaries.  Where Bach, Handel and Vivaldi left finely-tuned contraptions, Telemann wrote like perfume in the air (cue Debussy…)

 

As such, Telemann anticipated many trends of the upcoming Rococo and Classical styles which prized orchestral transparency, melodic breadth, slower harmonic rhythm, and an often sweet and dainty character.  Bach had nothing to do with Rococo textures, but his sons ate it up, making a deliberate stylistic break from their stodgy old man.  Handel and Vivaldi, too, did not quite dip their toes into the light, clear, Rococo waters (although some of their later works almost touch the surface), but Telemann was ahead of his time, anticipating these stylistic hallmarks.  Perhaps that is why he was so feted in his day, enjoying success in so many places, and winning priority over Bach in the estimation of the German folk.  As such, Telemann wrote musical statements that would seem strange in the hands of the others, but which work surprisingly well in his.

While Telemann was prolific, his total number owing a great deal to the unbelievable production of German church cantatas (more than 1,000!) and his impressive production of orchestral overtures (600), his solo concerto production ain’t got nothing on Vivaldi (see this post).  Vivaldi, the father of the concerto, wrote more than 500 for all different kinds of soloists and concertino groups – discovering their variety is truly a delight – but Telemann barely wrote 100.  Still, his concertos touch on an impressive array of instruments, ensembles and orchestral colors, and there is something in there for everyone.  His concertos breathe differently than Vivaldi’s, wandering with slow, nuanced footwork where Vivaldi’s enthusiastically run.  But that’s part of the fun.  Like Vivaldi, Telemann sometimes evoked extra musical associations in his pieces, although the overtures provide a much more comprehensive sampling of this tendency.  But there is this quirky concerto:

 

Do the sounds of that concerto remind you of anything?  Telemann is the only one who could have written this, so odd and cheeky are its features.  I get the sense he didn’t take himself quite so seriously as the rest, even Handel who was known so often to have roared with laughter.  The concerto is about frogs, and the solo part with its raspy croak, created by playing the open A string along with a fingered A on the D string for a strong blast of A, is jolly good fun.  The solo part practically twangs like a fiddle, evoking the joys of the country, perhaps the location of the frogs.  Do you hear how long the solo episodes go on, ringing out the same notes?  You would never hear that in Bach, Handel or Vivaldi – everything in their music is so ever-active, propelling from one harmony to the next.  Only Telemann would sit so long on the notes as his frogs croaked away.  The solo parts of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi are so densely packed with complex and florid figuration, designed for the fulfillment of the virtuoso ego (mostly), but Telemann’s solo part in the Frog Concerto sounds almost minimalistic, like Philip Glass centuries before his time (see this post).  What ambitious violinist would seek out a bizarre and static solo part like this to flex his virtuoso muscles?  You would have to be pretty comfortable telling the music’s story and renounce the personal glory of showing off.  Not that Bach’s concertos afford abundant opportunities of this, but the solo parts are certainly more soloistic.

Telemann, something of a prophet, predicted the sound of Europe’s music several decades before it arrived.  He soon fell out of favor as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi overtook his prominent place in the public’s ear.  In fact, they still overshadow him, but for many musicians, Telemann is a reliable source of pleasing, accessible music that is fun to play, easy to put together, and worthy of study for its detailed craftsmanship.  He spoke something of a different language than his prominent contemporaries, and thankfully so, for there is no one else quite like him, possessing all those qualities.  Telemann’s music runs alongside that of the mainstays of the high Baroque, dancing on the air as the others tramp firmly upon the ground out of their solid construction.  He makes us look up, even if our bodies are firmly rooted on the ground, broadening our perspective, and reminding us that there is more to life than where our feet make contact.

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Them’s fightin’ words!, Day 2 – The combat between Tancredi and Clorinda by Claudio Monteverdi

This week’s theme is…Them’s fightin’ words!  Since time immemorial humans have found reasons to fight one another.  The images of combat and war fill our stories, our art, and yes, our music.  This week we listen to music colored by the din of combat.

Them’s fightin’ words!, Day 2 – The combat between Tancredi and Clorinda by Claudio Monteverdi

How are you at keeping up with the times?  It’s sometimes challenging isn’t it?  But some professions absolutely demand it, even expecting their practitioners to have something of a sixth sense in anticipating the next hot trends.  Take marketing, for example.  What was it like 150 years ago?  Well, mostly print I would assume.  Newspapers, billboards, fliers.  Maybe there were magazines, probably catalogs.  Within the next century, bold new channels were opening up, including the telephone, radio and television.  Can you imagine what that must have been like for folks in advertising and marketing?  How many saw it coming, and how many persisted in looking the other way as the new delivery systems steamrolled over everything?  How many glanced at the emerging media and dismissed them as inconsequential, critically mispredicting the impending direction of the industry, media, and the world?  What was it like to be able to sell over the phone, as if the person 500 miles away was standing next to you, as opposed to relying on print which must travel over land and sea?  Can you image how powerfully the telephone compressed the process of booking concerts in faraway lands?

Now think about the past fifty years, which saw the birth, growth, and eventual dominance of online media in all of its varied, detailed, and powerful forms.  Who saw it coming?  How many saw it, but dismissed the emerging trends as inconsequential or ephemeral, with no real transformative power on commerce or culture?  In marketing services myself I have seen a rapid progression just within the past decade.  A little more than a decade ago, it was essential to have a presence in the Yellow Pages; now, while people still use it, who does not turn to Google for a quick fix in finding a company to meet his needs?  About 10 years ago, it was finally more or less universally acknowledged that a website is absolutely essential in marketing products or services.  Today it is undisputed, and probably the cheapest and easiest way to start getting one’s name out into the ether, with easy and effective website builders like Weebly and Squarespace helping those of us with minimal coding knowledge to design clear websites in minimal time.  In the last 5 years or so the game has changed again and a website is no longer sufficient; now marketers must know the ins and outs of pay-per-click advertising and Facebook marketing.  It just never stops, and the next big thing is out there somewhere.  But do you know where to look?  Some people seem to have a knack for it, and they are the ones that become successful consultants and marketing coaches, helping others to see the writing on the wall and direct their efforts and resources in the best directions.

Nothing stands still.  While the essence of successful marketing has never changed (“Would you like your life to be easier or more enjoyable?  I can help, and I can do it better/cheaper than they can”) it is the delivery systems that do.  Has the essence of music changed?  That question is a little knottier, but I think most of us can agree that it really hasn’t (“That sounds great!/That makes me want to dance!/That really soothes my soul!/Wow, he can really play!/I can’t believe how much the music is helping me to empathize with the protagonist of that drama!”) and it is merely the genres that change over time.  But the genres become very fashionable and can dull listeners’ sense of the essence present in the old ones.  Like master marketing consultants, musicians who can see the writing on the wall, and not become stuck in the old ways of doing things, stand to become very successful, both in terms of personal prosperity and historical legacy, if they can sell the emerging trends convincingly.

One composer who was very good at this is Claudio Monteverdi.  He lived and worked in Italy, spending almost equal amounts of time in the sixteenth century and the seventeenth.  He was present and engaged during an astounding shift of musical delivery systems, convincingly filling both old forms and new with a wonderful music essence.  While Monteverdi respected the old forms revered by the previous generation and worked with them well, he was progressive and clear-eyed enough to continually stay on top of the revolutionary fashions that were emerging and to create convincingly in those too, effectively selling them to his own generation and those that followed.  It is arguable that without Monteverdi’s masterful cultivation of emerging practices, they may never have caught on as they did.

By way of summary, Monteverdi began his career when Palestrina’s polyphonic perfection was Europe’s thing, all over really, and he mastered that style, as is evident from listening to this passionate early madrigal from 1590:

 

Dawn had not yet risen,

nor had birds stretched their wings

to the new sun,

but the loving star was still alight

when the two fair and graceful lovers,

whom a merry night had joined together

in as many twists and turns as an Acanthus,

were separated by the new light; sweet cries

in the final embraces

mixed with kisses and sighs,

a thousand burning thoughts, a thousand yearnings.

A thousand unfulfilled desires

did find each loving soul

in the other’s beautiful eyes.

 

And one said, sighing with languid words:

«Good-bye, my soul».

And the other answered: «My life, good-bye.»

«Good-bye, no, stay!» And they would not leave

before the new sun.

And before dawn, which rose in the sky,

each saw

the most beautiful roses

pale on loving lips,

and eyes shimmer like small flames.

And their parting was that of souls

which are cut up and uprooted:

«Good-bye, for I leave, and die.»

Sweet languor, and melancholic departure

 

Granted, the comparison to Palestrina is not direct, especially given the strength of feeling present in the secular text (Palestrina was quite pious and did not tend to set texts such as these; a little ironic since is was actually Monteverdi who was the priest!), but the fluid, imitative nature of the polyphony is clearly cut from Palestrina’s cloth.  During Monteverdi’s lifetime three significant stylistic transformations swept through the music of Europe and changed his manner of writing.  They were: the rise of opera, the practice of basso continuo, and concertato.  Let’s listen to a madrigal from about 30 years later which illustrates some of these reforms:

 

 

Golden tresses, oh so precious,

you bind me in a thousand ways

whether coiled or flowing freely.

 

Small, white matching pearls,

when the roses that conceal you

reveal you, you wound me.

 

Bright stars that shine

with such beauty and charm,

when you laugh you torture me.

 

Precious, seductive

coral lips I love,

when you speak I am blessed.

 

Oh dear bonds in which I take delight!

Oh fair mortality!

Oh welcome wound!

 

Again, the secular text is saucy and suggestive.  But the musical manner is completely different than a few decades prior.  We notice immediately that instead of purely vocal writing, Monteverdi brings the text to life through alternating considerably pared down vocal forces (2 female singers as opposed to 5 voices in his earlier madrigals) with lively instrumental episodes.  This alternation is known as concertato, and the variety of colors and textures that became possible were crucial in making Baroque music what it was, so rich and varied are the resources used by composers like Bach and Handel.  We can also hear the solid, foundation of the bassline constantly supporting the harmonic structure, a technique known as basso continuo, another practice that made Baroque music what it was.

Monteverdi’s mastery of opera bled into some of his madrigals, essentially yielding musical dramas in miniature.  The best known of these is the massive madrigal The Combat Between Tancredi and Clorinda, written in the 1620s, based on an episode from a very fantastic epic poem about the First Crusade called Jerusalem Delivered by the sixteenth century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, which served as a source of TONS of operatic plots.  In one episode of Tasso’s poem the Muslim warrioress Clorinda is mistakenly engaged in battle by her lover, Tancredi, and she is killed, but not before converting to Christianity.  Monteverdi expands this episode into a sprawling drama with sung parts for Tancredi, Clorinda, and a narrator, richly accompanied by a small string orchestra.  Can this even be called a madrigal?  Monteverdi labelled it as such, but it seems a stretch considering how far it has departed from the original Renaissance concept.  Still, it is a fascinating work, a great unveiling of a style called concitato, that is the “agitated” style, packed with dramatic repeated notes, tremolos, pizzicato, and galloping horses to illustrate the heat of battle.  The agitated style was another element of the early baroque musical palette refined by Monteverdi which made Baroque music what it was, contributing an unparalleled way to illustrate conflict in music.

 

Monteverdi probably exhibited the knack for seeing future trends better than any other notable composer in the history of Western music.  It is difficult to calculate just how much influence this ability exerted over the music that was to follow, but it is incredibly significant.  Monteverdi was the difference between good ideas that might have died, and good ideas that found their ideal expression and served as models for the next musicians.  Without Monteverdi the music of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven even, would have been unimaginably different.  This gift is rare and wonderful, in all fields of human production, and it is always richly rewarded, either with prosperity or a historical legacy.  Monteverdi’s output is a fascinating patchwork, reconciling old and new in unexpected and imaginative ways (see this post for another example of this).  The tragic combat between Tancredi and Clorinda is just one example, perhaps the most interesting, and a compelling representative of Monteverdi’s approach to music and culture as a whole.

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Thunder and Lightning, Day 1 – Concerto for violin in E major, Opus 12, No. 1 “Spring” by Antonio Vivaldi

This week’s theme is…Thunder and Lightning!  The awesome and wonderful phenomena of lightning and thunder, always companions in the natural world, has mystified, terrified, and amazed human observers as long as they have inhabited the Earth.  As our scientific understanding of the universe has sharpened our understanding of lighting and thunder has improved, but they still inspire vivid depictions in art and music.  This week we explore examples of this.

Thunder and Lightning, Day 1 – Concerto for violin in E major, Opus 12, No. 1 “Spring” by Antonio Vivaldi

If you hear the name “Antonio Vivaldi” you probably think “concerto” (if you think “The Four Seasons” you are also thinking of concertos  – it is a set of four violin concertos) and you would certainly be right to do so.  For more about Vivaldi’s concertos see this post.  Vivaldi made his deepest and most enduring mark upon the face of music history with his hundreds of concertos (conservative estimates put the total number at 500, more liberal ones at 700).  At one point his contract with the Venetian orphanage where he directed music required his composing of 2 concertos per month intended for performance by the girls in his care.  That’s 24 concertos per year; at that rate he would write 100 in 4 years, and that doesn’t count the others that he wrote at the same time for other patrons.  If a career lasts 40 years and you maintain that rate of production, the grand total would end up at almost 1000, so even the more generous estimates may come up short.  Actually, Vivaldi did not quite fulfill his entire promise to the orphanage, with its records showing evidence of 140 concertos composed over the course of 10 years, an average of just over 1 per month.  Either he did not deliver fully on his promise or the records are incomplete.  But still, the man was prolific.

What surprises many people, even devoted fans of Vivaldi’s music, is his production of other genres besides concertos.  Vivaldi was also prolific as a composer of church music and operas.  For quite a long stretch of his life, more than two decades out of his 63 years, or a full third of his life, Vivaldi was heavily involved in composing and producing operas.  Other of his opera composing contemporaries became more successful than him, but he had a good run and profited considerably from his operatic ventures.  In one letter he refers to an astounding 94 operas that came from his pen!  It may be an exaggeration, and he may have been counting operas by other composers which he produced, but even the 50 or so that make the list on Wikipedia…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operas_by_Antonio_Vivaldi

…is impressive – just a few more than Handel who is better known as an opera composer (for more about Handel’s operas see this post).

Bottom line, Vivaldi was prolific, writing new music all the time, and establishing himself as an expert in multiple genres.  And not just writing new music, but writing new music that is well-crafted, precisely wrought with regard to harmony and counterpoint, attractive, and fun to listen to and play.  In spite of his breathtaking composing speed, you will never encounter a passage in a work by Vivaldi that seems to have wrong notes, awkward proportions or clumsy phrasing.  Speed is not the same as haste.  And he wasn’t the only one.  Bach, Handel, Telemann, Mozart, Haydn – all the significant artists of this time, and many less significant ones as well, understood their job to be essentially this.  And so the amount of original musical ideas that animate their works is astounding.  But if you were operating at this rate of production, do you think you might ever be tempted to take a shortcut?  Here’s what I mean.  Listen to this opera, Giustino, by Vivaldi, and scroll to just before the 20:00 mark and listen for a couple minutes:

 

Do you hear it?  Just after a slow lyrical mezzo-soprano aria we hear a jaunty orchestral sinfonia, in this case accompanying the entrance of a the character Fortune, present to turn the title character’s luck around.  But it sounds a little familiar doesn’t it?  If you’ve heard that theme before, I bet it was in this much more famous context:

 

Isn’t it nifty the way Vivaldi is able to create two completely different pieces out of the same material?  In the opera it’s a short binary orchestral piece that lasts a few phrases, gives the listener a few interesting twists and turns, and then promptly ends to keep the drama moving forward.  Sinfonias in Baroque operas were never very long because the singing was the central selling point.  But in the violin concerto it is considerably more fully developed, featuring numerous solo episodes with ample opportunity for soloistic display, and proceeding to illustrate a variety of colorful situations that Vivaldi associated with nature’s spring clothing.  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a collection of four violin concertos published as part of his Opus 8 collection, are among the first notable examples of program music.  Program music is music based on an external story or idea (for more about program music see this post).  All the movements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons feature accompanying “sonnets” which either describe or inspire the musical events (chicken or egg?  It’s not clear whether the words or the music came first).  The first movement of Spring illustrates, most convincingly, singing birds, babbling brooks, gentle breezes, thunder and lightning.  Vivaldi was clever for packing such dense programmatic material into the brief, concentrated form of one of his concerto movements, and more clever still for giving that theme the double duty of operating within a completely different context in his opera Giustino.  Both the opera and the concertos were written around the same time, the early 1720s.

While there are other examples of this “borrowing” technique in Vivaldi’s oeuvre, he was not the only composer to take advantage of this kind of shortcut.  His contemporary Handel practically made a cottage industry of it.  Anyone who becomes familiar with Handel’s body of work will begin to hear much of the same material coming back again and again.  Like the Vivaldi example above, the artistry is in adapting the material to work in different contexts carried by different orchestral forces.  Here’s one of my favorite examples in Handel’s output.  The first is a movement from a sonata for solo violin, and the second is a chorus from the oratorio Solomon (for more on Handel’s oratorios, see this post).  The ensembles could hardly be more different, but listen to how masterfully Handel works with the peppy theme in each case:

 

 

While it is considerably more rare to find this kind of borrowing in the works of J.S. Bach, there do exist a couple notable examples, such as this one:

 

 

And even after the furious daily-work churn of the Baroque composers had subsided as the patronage system faded out of existence, Romantic composers sometimes adapted material of previous works into different contexts.  One famous example is the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler, several movements of which quote directly from a song cycle composed earlier called “Songs of a Wayfarer”, but what might be better translated as “Songs of a Spurned Lover”.  If you listen to this song:

 

And then listen to this movement – scroll to 3:50 and you will hear the resemblance:

 

 

There are several such quotations of the song cycle throughout the symphony.

While later composers such as Mahler were still apt to quote their previous work, borrowing was an essential shortcut in the toolkit of the eighteenth century composer, under constant pressure to produce high quality work after high quality work as he was, and even the very best of them kept it close at hand.  It is understandable that even the most resourceful of them would be tempted to dip into their previous efforts in order to adapt dependable material into new statements.  In the hands of a composer with the skill of Bach, Handel or Vivaldi, the result is a pair of solid works based on the same material, the resonance of which can delight us each time.

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