Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 2 – Second Sontata by Pierre Boulez

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 2 – Second Sontata by Pierre Boulez

What does the word progress mean to you?  In all to which it is applied, there must be assumed some kind of teleology, a fancy word for an ultimate purpose.  Any action or influence which moves in the direction of that purpose is called progress, anything which moves against is called regress, and anything which does neither (moving laterally or not at all) could be called neutral.  In many situations the notion of progress is self-evident.  Of course we have to know what is good or desirable but, again, most of us can agree that this is self-evident most of the time.  So, if you have a troubled relationship of some kind and you seek harmony, anything that seeks to mend the underlying cause of the turmoil creates progress, and anything that adds to the turmoil is regress.  If you have a goal, anything that gets you closer to achieving it is progress, and anything that holds you back is regression.  Concerning goals I daresay it is difficult to find a neutral action: you are either working toward it or not; even if you are doing something else that does not necessarily sabotage your goal you are still delaying its achievement, which can be seen as a kind of regression, especially considering that goals are usually time-bound.  But we don’t have to get into that.

Many narratives of the human experience are described in terms of progress, as though there is an assumed good or goal at the heart of our collective striving and reflection.  We speak of progress in science and technology, the unspoken assumption being that any act which strengthens our level of knowledge and predictive power of the forces of nature and the application of that knowledge in order making our lives easier and more enjoyable is good.  We speak of progress in medicine, the assumption being that anything which prolongs life, repairs biological systems or reduces pain is a good thing.  We speak of societal progress in which peaceful coexistence, beautification of habitat, security and prosperity are good.  Sometimes the good of progress is a little more difficult to discern or causes contradictions.  For example, we may speak of progress concerning tactics and weaponry of war, but our moral sense ought to cause hesitation as we are tempted to call armaments and strategies which cause greater and swifter destruction good.  Still, if we grant that complete and decisive victory (which all human societies ultimately crave in battle) is good, then it makes more sense.  There is one area of human experience in which progress is sometimes described, but becomes confusing when truly considered, and that area is art.  Different people at different times have spoken of progress in art.  But what does this mean?  How does one progress in art?

In order to define progress in art, we first need to define what it means for art to be or to do good.  Have you ever thought about this?  What does it mean for a piece of art to be good?  There are so many possible answers, all motivated by a different estimation of music’s function and goal.  Typically creators of music are working from some such assumption, even if it is a subconscious one.  In tracing the history of music, Western music especially, it is easy to begin to regard the development of musical style through time in a teleological manner.  Indeed, I caught myself typing “progression” in that last sentence and made the conscious choice to replace it with “development”, itself not entirely free of teleological connotations :-O  Western music begins with Gregorian Chant, beautiful but simple, and lacking in harmonic dimension.  But is it?  Maybe it was perfect for its intended context, the ultimate good.  But then we imply that it was sure a good thing that organum, and later polyphony (see this post) came along so that we could get all that beautiful Baroque music and the masterpieces of Handel and Bach.  But, again, maybe they were just responding to the aesthetic needs of their times, no more or less advanced than Gregorian Chant.  But again we “advance” and Beethoven brings us to new expressive levels, after which Wagner deepens harmony, and finally Schoenberg dissolves it.  So, would that be progression or regression?  Or, does it depend on how you look at it, and what Schoenberg was responding to with his music?

Artistry is artistry, no matter when it happens, or in what style.  Still, it easy to fall into the trap of overlaying teleological sense upon the history of Western music, and the history of harmonic materials can easily play into that trap, especially the way it is presented in contemporary music history curricula.  According to a quick and dirty survey of music theory, harmony starts modally, becomes largely diatonic, then increasingly chromatic, finally dissolves altogether, finally becoming systematically controlled in its dissolution.  This “final” step, known as total serialization, prevailed in European music during 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the primary harmonic language of Western art music following the Second World War.  Its technique, which treats musical elements like data to be rigorously ordered through mathematical processes that baffles many listeners as extremely unmusical, inevitably yields a style of music that can seem harsh, unyielding and almost entirely lacking in human sensitivity by those not initiated.  One masterpiece of serialism is the Second Piano Sonata by the French composer Pierre Boulez.  Though it may strike you as harsh and barbaric, the work invites comparisons to Beethoven for connoisseurs of this style:

 

Why did Boulez write in this way?  Amazingly, it seems to be for 2 reasons which paradoxically sought to connect with and dissociate from the past.  The path of harmony had become knottier and knottier, accumulating more and more chromatic inflections.  In the music of Wagner and his followers harmony became so chromatic as to almost lose its tonal center.  From there it was a short trip to losing it altogether, and eventually systematizing pitch choice with a technique that departed from traditional tonal grammar.  That is part of what made Boulez and the serialists tick.  But the other is that the lushness of late Romanticism, the style that directly preceded serialism, came to be associated with the horrors of European totalitarianism, conscripted as it often was by the Nazi propaganda machine.  Boulez and his fellow serialists sought to create a music that bore as little resemblance to the ecstasy-inducing lushness of Wagner, Strauss and their ilk as possible.  If this seems ascetic, you would not be the only one to have that thought.  Boulez himself seemed to view this as a teleologic progression.  I wonder if it ever struck his as coincidental that tonality dissolved right in time with the ancient European social order.

Can we call this music good?  Boulez was certainly a craftsman – this is difficult to deny.  Again, we must ask for the objective in order to evaluate it.  Is it progress?  Again, that implies some kind of aim.  Boulez seemed to think so given unambiguous statements he made to that effect.  For him, it seemed that the history of music, and perhaps the history of Europe too, was pointing to what must have felt inevitable to him and his fellow serialists: society needed to start over, and now that tonality had finally dissolved, reaching beyond its point of culmination in the music that would come to represent the lowest depths to which a people could sink, they could pick up the pieces of the shattered tonal system and begin to make a new manner of art which could accompany the rebuilding of shattered societies and peoples.  Framed in this way, the teleology becomes inordinately depressing, and Boulez’ artistic outlook paradoxically less so.  Still, it is difficult to escape thinking this way as we trace the music of Europe from its origins to its ultimate “destination”, wherever that may be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 32 in c minor, Opus 111, movement II Arietta by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Triple Compound Toe Tappers!  4/4 time is so prevalent in music of all styles that it has a nickname, “common time”.  If you say “common time” to a musician, you can bet they will understand that you intend each measure to have four beats, and each beat to divide in half.  Given its nickname, you may sometimes find a letter “C” written at the beginning of a musical score to indicate this.  There is another meter that I am tempted to nickname “rare time” and may start representing it with a letter  “R”.  It is compound triple, meaning there are three beats per measure and each beat is divided into 3.  Always written with a 9 on top of the time signature, the super lilty compound triple, like a waltz within a waltz, is, in my experience, the rarest of all of the meter types.  But there’s enough notable examples to fill a week with great music, so enjoy!

Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 5 – Piano Sonata No. 32 in c minor, Opus 111, movement II Arietta by Ludwig van Beethoven

 

I can’t even imagine it, and I don’t know how he did it.  A painter going blind, a chef losing his sense of taste and smell, a fashion designer losing his sense of touch.  Ludwig van Beethoven, the greatest musician in Europe during his lifetime, lost his hearing.  He could hear none of the music he wrote beyond age 40, and the process began more than a decade prior to that.  He realized the episodes of faintness and tinnitus he was experiencing more and more often were not flukes and would not go away.  Naturally, he despaired.  He poured out his sorrow in a letter to his brothers written in 1802 called the Heiligenstadt Testament, named for the town where he penned it, and he contemplated suicide, most certainly on numerous occasions.  Beethoven sensed his destiny and he found the will to persevere in spite of what seemed to be the most devastating possible handicap, given his ambitions.

It undoubtedly would have seemed that the universe was playing a cruel trick on poor Beethoven, but in retrospect perhaps it was the only path to growth.  Many people may tell you that they feel Beethoven’s deafness forced a level of introspection and inner conviction, obvious in his final works, that he simply would not have realized aside from his complete deafness.  His years of total deafness correspond rather tidily with those of his final stylistic period.  Beethoven’s mature music is usually grouped into three style periods.  The earliest phase, called “imitation” consists of the music he wrote based on the models of Haydn and Mozart.  The middle phase, called “externalization”, consists of the music he created as he dramatically expanded its forms and deepened its emotional impact, all the while grappling with his worsening deafness.  And the final phase, called “introspection” consists of the extraordinarily personal music composed during his last years, when he was totally deaf and cut off from the world around him.

The music of Beethoven’s late period is amazing, bizarre, astounding, incomparable to any other music.  Comparisons are sometimes made to the music of the twentieth century, but even that does not quite capture it.  Commentators use words like “transcendent”, and it spans a spectrum of otherworldly images from sublimity, to deep gratitude, to astonishing majesty.  Harold Schoenberg puts it well when he writes:

“Here we are on a rarefied plane of music.  Nothing like it has been composed, nothing like it can ever again be.  It is the music of a man who has seen all and experienced all, a man drawn into his silent, suffering world, no longer writing to please anybody else but writing to justify his artistic and intellectual existence.  Faced with this music, the temptation is to read things into it in some sort of metaphysical exegesis.  The music is not pretty or even attractive.  It is merely sublime.  At this state of his career, Beethoven seemed to be dealing as much in concepts and symbols as in notes.”

The Ninth Symphony, with its famous Ode to Joy finale (see this post) is the best known work from this time, with its uncompromising legacy, but others include the Solemn Mass for chorus, soloists and orchestra, the late string quartets (see this post), including the Great Fugue, and the late piano sonatas.  All of these are cherished; the Ninth Symphony and the Solemn Mass for their awesome grandeur, the string quartets for their subtle intimacy, and the piano sonatas for their grace and remarkably varied palette of colors.  I can’t recommend highly enough that you become acquainted with his last three piano sonatas; they so exquisitely balance the challenging abstraction of Beethoven’s late sensibility with a beguiling mass appeal which stems from their surprising tunefulness.  But there are mysterious and unexpected places to be discovered.

One of the most unusual movements Beethoven ever composed is the second and final movement of his final piano sonata, No. 32, Opus 111 (for more about the opus system, see this post).  The fact that the sonata has only two movements is unusual enough.  Beethoven begins the sonata with drama in his preferred key for turbulence, c minor, shared with the great Fifth Symphony.  After the stormy first movement, the second movement, a patchwork of joys and reflections, sprawls, or rather expands into space, for almost twenty minutes.  But Beethoven fills it with plenty that is worth hearing.

 

The arietta, the theme upon which the variations are based, is an almost intentionally naive chorale cast in the parallel major, C.  Many intermediate pianists could play this after just a few hours of practice, although the delicate touch it demands requires great maturity.  The time signature is either a joke, a hipster move, or a very deliberate artistic decision.  Triple compound meters are rare enough, and when you do find them you will see an “8” or a “4” on the bottom at least 90% of the time.  Beethoven almost writes this theme in miniature, putting “16” on the bottom so that the dotted eighth note gets the beat.  It reminds me a little of Telemann’s play with time signatures in his clever Gulliver Suite, using both diminutive and enormous rhythmic values to illustrate the races Gulliver encounters, a little joke known to the performer alone and not evident from listening (for more about Telemann, see this post):

 

Excerpts from Teleman’s Gulliver Suite, showing pages from the Lilliput Chaconne in 3/32 time and the Brobdingnag Gigue in 24/1 time

 

While the arietta begins simply enough, the movement certainly doesn’t stay there, with some very exacting rhythmic sophistication.  As the complexity gradually ramps up, Beethoven uses other strange time signatures, first going through 6/16, the duple version of 9/16, for an variation that is unexpectedly rousing yet gentle, written in an almost swing-like style.  What follows is truly extraordinary – a variation that feels almost like ragtime or boogie-woogie – cast in an even stranger diminutive time signature, the quadruple compound signature of 12/32!  This highly unconventional time signature ensures panic in anyone reading the score for the first time, so black with beams.  This is most certainly emblematic of the strange but wonderful places that Beethoven was only able to access upon losing his hearing and becoming forced inside as he was.  And we are not finished with the extraordinary exploration of Beethoven’s psyche.  After the jazzy variations, Beethoven returns to the original time signature of 9/16 for the final variations, expansive, and murmuring with wonder and retrospection.  The glow surrounding the end of this movement has been described as an “aura”.  Beethoven, constantly wrapped up deep in his inner journey, was the only one who could have unlocked this spellbinding and captivating color from the piano’s palette.
Beethoven’s final piano sonata is a rich summary of the bizarre and wonderful places he unwittingly traversed as his deafness forced him to find his music within.  How many of us have similar places that we do not touch simply because we are not forced to?  While Beethoven was pushed to his limits by this experience, it is fortunate for us that he was given the unequaled levels of introspective and metaphysical art that he found in the process.  All of the forms he touched in his final years are alive with this mysterious and quiet energy, but the piano sonatas speak it with the most mellifluous poetry of all.

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Musical Farewells, Day 3 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Musical Farewells! Parting is such sweet sorrow, but it’s always inevitable.  Musicians have explored the rich feelings of saying goodbye for as long as there has been music.  This week we examine examples of this from all across history.

Musical Farewells, Day 3 – Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat, Opus 81a by Ludwig van Beethoven

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://oracleofbacon.org/help.php

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Three other composers are notable:

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Music about Poultry, Day 1 – Sonata Representativa by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 1 – Sonata Representativa by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber

This is one of my favorite scenes from the Simpsons:

I think it sums up the difference between learning history out of a textbook and really understanding it in a mature way.  But, textbook learning, in spite of its inevitable dearth of nuance and real-world understanding, is so often an important way for students to start learning.  So, as much as I despise dividing music history into the neat and tidy style periods typically taught in music history classes, it is often useful to establish these points of reference, even if much is lost in drawing lines that cleanly.  The world is a nuanced and fluid place, after all, and anyone who has lived a few decades regards history as a completely different subject than a school student who is memorizing names, dates and places for the next exam.  The basic style periods (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern) go a certain distance in helping students to get their heads around it all, but you lose so much nuance in doing so, and it is easy for certain figures to be eclipsed simply because they don’t fit comfortably into one of the cut-and-dried divisions.  The older I get the more I enjoy looking into those spaces that don’t comfortably fit and understanding what they were all about.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber is a great example.  Living from 1644 to 1704, I guess you would technically call him a “Baroque” composer, but it hardly does him justice.  While the Baroque era lasted from 1700 – 1750 (so nice and round, right?!) most of the music that we have come to associate with that period’s typical style actually comes from the last 50 years or so, maybe even less.  This period of time, from approximately 1700 – 1750, is often referred to as the “high baroque” to distinguish it from the music of up to a century beforehand, which had not quite developed into the clean forms and pristine tonal harmony that characterized the high baroque.  But do you suppose anyone ever regards himself as a “transitional figure” during his lifetime?  It’s kind of absurd.  Stuff happens in the moment, and everyone is more or less trying to make their way through life, no matter how “developed” historians consider their work to be.  So I’m content to call Biber a Bohemian violin virtuoso of the late seventeenth century who successfully navigated the various and often intermingled structures of civil and ecclesiastical power, contributing in equal measure to virtuoso instrumental and sacred vocal music, both of which he could create with ease.  I’ve read that you could consider Biber’s style to be the finest example of a brand of violin virtuosity and composition that was overshadowed by that of Corelli, which arose about half a generation later, and would prove to be more historically “significant” and impactful to later musicians, but let’s let that go for now.  Listen to this, and try to imagine that you have never heard of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, that you are living in Austria of 1669, and hearing this with fresh ears:

It must have been really dazzling to see Biber play that in person.  Can you tell how virtuosic and eccentric he must have been to create and perform something like that?  What was that anyway?  What was with those weird, not-always-terribly-musical-sounds throughout?  Glad you asked!  It is the Sonata Representativa, which I would translate roughly as “Sonata in which a handful of animals are imitated”.  This fun, showy 10 minute piece is actually made of 9 teeny tiny little movements.  Some, like the first and last movements, are what you might label as “conventional seventeenth century virtuoso concert music”, if such a thing exists.  The sonata opens with an fantasia-overture and ends with a dance.  Everything in between those conventional outer movements you might label as “eccentric and highly imaginative sonic experiments regarding the violin’s ability to imitate various small animals to the pleasure of a patron Count who enjoyed such things”.  All the middle movements are written in imitation of some kind of small animal and I think they are variously successful, but always entertaining, if only for the odd sounds you get to hear.  Watch this video and follow the score.  You can also see in the description what each movement seeks to imitate:

You may have caught the cat before following along like that, but I bet that was the only one.  That’s the nature of programmatic music – even when music is imitating or representing something concrete the listener usually has to be told, and then it all makes sense.  But it really all makes sense now, right?  I think Biber captured some of them better than others.  I’m particularly impressed by the cat, which really meows and pads along like a cat, and the cock and hen.  We have chickens on our property right now and I would say that Biber really got their motions and mannerisms.  The intervals kind of magically evoke their range of motion as they look forward and then to the ground, forward and then to the ground, and those pattering repeated notes make it seem like they’re rooting and pecking about.  There’s even that presto episode in which they seem to be spooked and running madly.  I think that’s a great little movement!  The quail I’m not sure about, not having much experience with them.  How about you?  Do you know what quail are like?  Here’s a video:

What do you think?

Heinrich Biber made his interesting and inventive mark on the history of violin virtuosity, although it’s not known as well as Corelli, who dwarfed him just a little later.  But exploring his violin repertoire is a fascinating study.  He was a little like a mad scientist, pushing the limits of the instrument, and able to do it because of his supreme command of violin technique.  Biber’s imaginative experiments are a constant source of intrigue and delight.  His violin output reflects the merged ecclesiastical and temporal authorities to which he answered, constantly mixing sacred themes with the secular genre of the sonata (he wrote plenty of “straight” sacred music too; his masses are gorgeous and quite inventive specimens in the manner of Heinrich Schutz).  His Rosary Sonatas are one continuous essay in scordatura, intentionally changing the conventional tuning of a string instruments (and a maddening thing for anyone playing that way for the first time!).  For Biber this kind of exploration was commonplace, comfortable, and enriched with deep symbolism.  Each sonata in the Rosary set is written for a different violin tuning, and the different scordatura tunings allowed him to express the qualities and character of the various Rosary episodes, even going so far as to visually create a cross on the instrument for the Resurrection sonata as the D and A strings are routed to endpoints on different sides from when they begin:

Virtuosity and experimentation could be a source of deep and resonant mystery for Biber.  He must never have ceased inventing manners of musical expression that were at once clever, profound and technically marvelous.  The Sonata Representativa represents a lighter, more entertaining manifestation of that sensibility that flourished in this little-known corner of Baroque instrumental virtuosity.

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