MMmusing

It Rite As Well Be Spring

2013-05-29T21:47:00.001-04:00

But wait, there's more! I thought that previous post was all I had to say about The Rite of Spring on its 100th birthday, but my brain wouldn't stop generating puns and pretty soon "It Rite As Well Be Spring" ambled by. Well, just as the words "Rite of Appalachian Spring" once inspired this mashup, I suddenly realized that Vivaldi's iconic Spring concerto is a PERFECT match for Stravinsky's iconic spring chords. I don't really see any reason to say anything else:

It's Gonna Be All Rite

2013-05-29T19:20:00.004-04:00

Today marks the 100th birthday of the work about which I've blogged more than anything else, so it wouldn't be rite not to post something. I have a little something in the works for next week, but here's a quick recap of my Rite writings to date:

Or, if you prefer, most of those links can be found within this festive little collage map from 2012:

Happy Rite Day. Hope you have a riotous time!

The Leafs' Lament

2013-05-14T23:08:00.001-04:00

Yesterday on Twitter I boldly proclaimed:

My blogging sabbatical (heretofore unannounced since I just decided to call it that) ends tonight! Or tomorrow. Can you feel the excitement?!

But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. I'd planned to finish up a post-in-progress after dinner, but then remembered that the Boston Bruins were playing the winner-take-all Game 7 of their first-round hockey playoff series. I'm not a particularly big hockey fan, but hockey Game 7's have a dramatic potential that has to be experienced to be understood. (If only Verdi had known, he might've really been successful. Imagine Rigoaletto!) Laptop in lap, I naively thought I'd be able to write while watching, which I suppose is like planning to cook dinner while riding in a car whipping blindly around curves at 90mph. The action is virtually non-stop and you have no idea when the big moment is going to happen, so coordinated multi-tasking just doesn't work.

Don't panic, this hasn't morphed into a sports blog (yet), although sometimes I wonder if "classical music sports blogger" isn't the perfect niche for me. I have written before about the aesthetics of hockey in one of my all-time favorite posts, Atonality on Ice, where I proposed that the wild, hard-to-process back-and-forth of hockey action is analogous to the way in which atonal music often leaves the ears in the virtual dark. One often does better to live in the moment than try to discern clear patterns that might suggest what will happen next. Goals are constantly being turned away - and yet the promise of meaning is ever-present.

The truth is, I've probably watched at most about ten such Game 7's, but it turns out there's never been a Game 7 like this one. (Meaning in sports has a lot to do with the tantalizing possibility of improbability.) The hometown Bruins took a brief 1-0 lead on the upstart Toronto Maple Leafs (more on that name in a bit), but had fallen behind 2-1 entering the final period. At this point, my family took an active role in the events that unfolded as my wife decided to sit and watch with me. In short order, the Leafs added two quick goals to build up a virtually insurmountable 4-1 lead. No hockey team had ever come back from three goals down in the final period of a Game 7. Wife of MMmusing wandered off, idly noting that she was clearly bringing the Bruins bad luck. Not long after she'd left, Boston scored a goal and when the love of my life appeared again to see how things were going, I had to tell her she was banned from the room. True superstitious soul-mate that she is, she understood perfectly and only learned of the events that followed via primal screams from your normally mild-mannered correspondent.

That's right, the Bruins scored twice in the final 90 seconds of regulation and then finished the miracle 5 minutes into Sudden Death overtime. Like a ridiculously over-the-top movie plot (or Verdi opera). In the meantime, the only use I'd managed to make of my "writing instrument" was to fire off a few tweets like the following:

My dear wife watched Leafs score twice to go up 4-1 and then missed 1st Bruins comeback goal. She's been banned from room since then...

Although I can type a typo with the best of them, typing out "Leafs" kept feeling strange to me, even if it is correct. Once the once-in-a-lifetime outcome was settled, I found myself thinking about how horrible it must be to be on the wrong side of such an ending, but the mischievous part of me thought it would be fun to express this in a way that had fun with leaves being leafs. I'll spare you the rest of this process (which continued into today as I wordsmithed while overseeing the final final exam of the year) and just show you the final version of my tweeted Leafs' Lament.

Disbeliefing fans grief fallen Leafs,
reliefed of playoff lifes by Bruin thiefs.

It's silly, of course, but the iambic pentameter and all those explosive f's (10 if you make the most of "of") have an old-school, Beowulf-ian kind of flavor that captures the raw, gripping, historical nature of the moment. And, if you "correctly" pronounce "lifes" so that it sounds just like "leafs," you'll find the "leaf" sound appearing four times within the nineteen syllables. Like so:

So with that, my long blogging silence is ended. Ironically, the silence is framed by strange poems inspired by the unexpected (see 12/30/12). And perhaps soon enough I'll finish that post-in-progress which also has to do with unexpected inspiration. It's actually about music.* Stay tuned...

* UPDATE: Of course, this post is also about music in a broad sense, as I find this kind of poetry is at least as much about sound and rhythm as it is about whatever the words might mean. As it happens, the recording above is also an example of a musical transposition. The anonymous "singer's" recording has been transposed up a major third to protect the innocent.

Words to Leave Behind in 2013

2012-12-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

So Lake Superior State University, which clearly has a superiority complex, has published its annual list of words that need to be banned from our collective vocabularies. Honestly, the list could and should be a lot longer, but that's not my problem. What is my problem is that some Twitter acquaintances (not sure I should call them friends anymore) began suggesting that someone such as I might want to do something creative with these words. From that point on, I'm not really responsible for my actions as I simply cannot resist this sort of challenge.

Here then, first of all, are the newly banned words/phrases:

Amazing
Baby Bump
Shared Sacrifice
Occupy
Blowback
Man Cave
The New Normal
Pet Parent
Win The Future
Trickeration
Ginormous
Thank You In Advance

And here is my Pavlovian response:

Hear this amazing sonnet, formal
poetic blowback ‘gainst the bleat
of words which think they’re the new normal,
which occupy our discourse street.
Must I take refuge in my man cave?
No, through shared sacrifice I can save
mankind and win the future now.
I’ll use these words and show us how
this trickeration’s so aberrant.
So drop this lingo, baby, bump
these words into the verbal dump.
For just as any wise pet parent
rebukes, I this ginormous stance
must take and thank you in advance.

It is, of course, an Onegin stanza, following in the tradition of previous MM musings:

Happy New Year!

UPDATE: OK, I now see that this is last year's list. If you want to write a new sonnet, here's the freshly published 2013 list. The 2012 list is now archived here.

Christmas Time is Here (?)

2012-12-22T21:24:00.001-05:00

Wow, at the risk of sounding trite and old, Christmas has come up really fast this year. So, instead of my half-planned series of clever posts recapping favorite creations from Christmas Past, let's just toss them all into one fruitcake-syle post.

First, though, I must acknowledge a video that is new to me and that I'm very disappointed I didn't think to create myself: The Twelve Tones of Christmas.

It is of course an elaborate realization of a silly pun - which is enough to make me love it - but there's actually something quite charming about this arrangement. The ocarina + harpsichord scoring helps a lot; this sounds like the kind of thing that would be playing if Captain Kirk showed up on a planet ruled by some sort of eccentric aristocrat. It has cheered me many times this past week.

Of course, my own "Twelve Composers of Christmas" features an authentic 12-tone row for Day 12:

Here's the whole thing if you've somehow missed it:

If you're in a sentimental mood, you might enjoy this little multi-tracked "choir" featuring my then 6-year old daughter singing a Peanuts classic. (It was created for a little Christmas movie my sister made last year.)

I've already plugged the "Vertical Christmas Medley," which I actually discovered to be excellent white noise background while I graded exams yesterday. Click the pianist to see how many tunes you can pick out:

And speaking of mashups, we have:

...and...

...and, something I'd never bothered to post on the blog before because it's not very good, but whatever:

On a slightly more sentimental, but still rather silly note, here is a version of A Christmas Carol I "directed" back in 2000 featuring a wide array of adorable nieces and nephews and some cheesy synth cues on the soundtrack.

...and with that, I think the Christmas cupboard is now bare. God bless us, every one!

The Holly and the Ives

2012-12-18T13:42:00.000-05:00

Slow times here at MMmusing, and with a lot of exams, papers, and projects still to be graded, 2012 will likely end quietly here. However, I will continue the tradition of bringing back some old seasonal chestnuts.

Before I even had a blog, way back in Aught Five or so, I created a little online greeting card titled "Merry Christmas from the Ives Family" which effectively reduced Charles Ives to the idea of throwing a bunch of tunes together in chaotic simultaneity. By the time it debuted on my blog, I was just calling it "The Vertical Christmas Medley" - seven of the best-known seasonal tunes in glorious harmony. You can sample this feast (and try to pick out the individual tunes from the mire) by clicking on the hard-working pianist below:

So, there's that. But recently, Ives has surprised me with a couple of unexpected Christmas hints of his own, both surely unintentional. Some time last spring, a coaching student brought in a song I'd never run across before with the merry title, "Like a Sick Eagle." It begins like so, and as I began playing it and hearing it for the first time, a familiar tune caught my ear amidst the dissonant intro (there's a special sort of fun in being surprised by something one is playing!):

That's right, sing along with me: "Oh'the....wea'ther....out-....side....is....fright'ful..." It is a very normal tonal pattern (sol-SOL-fa-mi-re-do-sol), albeit in a non-tonal context, so the connection to the 1945 Cahn/Styne song is surely just an accident, but it jumped right out at me last spring (when the weather was not at all frightful), and then again this fall when I re-opened the music, having completely forgotten everything I just suggested above, and immediately heard/felt the same thing. Musical déjà vu on multiple levels. You can hear the Ives for yourself here, although I suppose I've already prejudiced you to "hear what I hear":

But Santa Ives wasn't done with me yet. (It's worth noting that Ives has popped enough vernacular tunes into unexpected places that one starts to expect the unexpected.) Just a couple of weeks ago, the same singer handed me another Ives song. This time it took a little while in before the Christmas spirit took hold. Do you hear what I hear here at the 0:58 mark?

In this case, it's only the first four notes, but the addition of the syncopated fifth note (alas, a third too low) suggests 1950's Frosty, the Snowman. At least, that's the way I heard it in early December of 2012.

More and more, this kind of connection-making seems to be a big part of what listening to music is for me. I don't know, maybe I'm doing it wrong but, to quote a great lyricist, how can it be wrong when it feels so right?

In fact, although I penned most of this post last night, I just read the following celebration of connecting in a Jeremy Denk appreciation of the great Charles Rosen:

At the end of the corridor was the nerve center: a piano stacked with music, a desk stuffed with papers, a threadbare couch, and a book-covered coffee table. It was desperately unhip. But it was affecting and intense, the accumulation of things, of ideas, and Charles’s shuffle. You felt a kind of slow frenzy at his place—connections mounting upon connections, understanding upon understanding. Erosion in reverse.

One could argue (as I have before) that the musical experience is largely about connections, and though Rosen's specialty was connecting the dots of the past, there's no reason new, coincidental connections can't be just as meaningfully a part of that experience. I would guess even Rosen found meaning in a few connections that weren't really connections until he made them so.

More Christmas specials and kooky connections in the days ahead...

Choose your own soundtrack

2012-11-25T08:51:00.000-05:00

There's an old saying that's worth repeating: "There's humor in repetition." It's hard to say if this is more or less true depending on how humorous the source material is. For example, the quoted statement above isn't particularly funny, but it can become meta-humorous if repeated. There's humor in repetition.

Philosophies of humor aside, there was a play in the Thanksgiving Day Patriots-Jets game that was hysterically funny, and as far as I can tell, it just gets funnier with each viewing. (It might help that I'm a Patriots fan.) Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez was trying to make the best of a broken play and boldly careened towards the line of scrimmage, hoping to follow his linemen to daylight. Instead, one of his blockers got pushed backwards directly into Sanchez and the rest...well, you can view it as many times as you like below. (If you didn't see the game, it's worth noting that the collision caused Sanchez to fumble, which led directly to a Patriots return for a touchdown, one of three such scores in a dazzling 52 seconds of game time.)

As enjoyable as it is to watch the play, it only seemed natural to add a soundtrack. But what to add? Well, this being a very lowbrow vacation weekend project, I didn't expend too much energy on the question, and opted instead to offer a series of possibilities. Here you go (music changes at 0:58, 1:50, 2:03, 2:36, 3:20, 3:33, and 3:36; I started out with a couple of soundtrack warhorses, then got a little more creative).

I think they all work pretty well, although I'm sure there are many other excellent possibilities. As ever with these kinds of semi-random mashups, the delight is in seeing unintended synchronizations between the music and the video. Even synchronization with silence (as at 3:27) can seem right. It's the perfect ballet.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Differently Similar

2012-10-23T14:57:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time, I devoted a lot of blogging energy to charting notable examples of "tune theft." Although it's fun to suggest that composers are lazy plagiarists, I don't really believe that's what's usually going on when tunes align across the centuries, and what's really more interesting is how a similar set of pitches can sound so different according to context. (This point is beautifully made in Leonard Bernstein's wonderful "How Dry I Am" lecture, a.k.a. "The Infinite Variety of Music.")

A tune connection I noticed just yesterday has captured my attention because there's so little similarity of actual pitches, to the point that these really aren't close to being the same tune - but, at a slightly higher structural level, they are closely related. It's a gestalt thing. And, as is always most interesting, it's not a connection that came to me because I looked for it (I'm too lazy to do research), but rather that dawned on me slowly and, at first, subconsciously. This theme from the finale of Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, ambled by...

...and as I listened, I kept thinking that those staccato 8th notes in the 2nd half of the phrase reminded me of...something. Eventually, the theme from the finale of Brahms' Clarinet Sonata No.1 (the piano part of which I've played many times) raised its hand in some corner of my mind (here transposed from F to C to make comparisons easier).

Of course, neither phrase is particularly unusual in terms of phrase construction - each begins with two upbeats, then longer notes and a slow-ish harmonic rhythm followed by harmonic acceleration towards a half cadence. It's definitely those pairs of staccato 8ths notes that connect the two tunes, even though Mozart goes up where Brahms goes down. The openings of the two phrases don't share so much in common other than a general twisty-ness, but each leads into the staccato 8ths with the same melodic pattern (see circled notes below): three 8ths descending stepwise, then a drop of a 3rd to introduce the "paired staccato motif" which jumps up a 4th heading into the next bar. It's striking to me how similar the tunes sound even as they then head in opposite directions; and, because the circled sequences below begin a 4th apart, the parting of ways leads each to arrive on D at the same time.

So, that's really about it. The two good-natured tunes are clearly quite different, but what makes each memorable (to me, at least) are those bouncy 8th notes. I don't know if Brahms was somehow inspired by Mozart, but I love hearing this kind of kinship. As I've said many times before, there's an obvious analogy to puns and other types of linguistic references, and just as I can't seem to avoid looking for wordplay possibilities when words are in play, my listening ear loves to play pattern-matching games. Surely, on some level, listening to music is basically about pattern-matching, although no one wants to think about that too much.

By the way, since we're on the subject, my favorite moment in this Mozart movement comes a bit later in an exquisitely Schubertian chromatic mediant modulation. The music has been cruising along in the Dominant key, G Major, and the first violinist seems to get stuck/lost in a maze of 16th notes; abandoned by the other instruments, the violin tentatively hangs onto a D (Dominant of G) and then suddenly the violin sneaks up a half-step as we drop by a third into the distant key of E-flat Major. The lovely scoring for violins in octaves somehow complements this shape-shifting perfectly as they music gradually finds its way back, but as ever, it's the searching that we (I) remember.

Passages like this one fascinate me because when I'm listening to a piece like this, I've found that much of my pleasure comes from anticipating and then enjoying these very small moments; much of the rest of such a movement will often strike me (dodging lightning bolt) as rather formulaic. It may not be fair to Mozart to say this (quantifying pleasure is risky business), but I if I'm honest, it's as if 50% of my interest in this piece takes place within about 5% of its discourse. But that's a difficult topic for another day... (I have written about it before, with passing reference to the famously "dissonant" introduction to this same quartet.)

Random Acts of Mindness

2012-10-19T13:45:00.000-04:00

It's been said (right here in this post, to be precise) that "random" is literally the most oft misused word in the English language. Let's see what I can do to contribute further to the problem. If this lengthy blog post seems unappealing to you, why not spin the "MM's Multimedia Musing Machine" wheel over there in the right margin? It's just been updated with more than 50 new possible outcomes.

.................

I'm going through one of my Shuffle phases on iTunes, partly because I only recently discovered that one can now automatically re-download all past purchases, which spurred me to realize there were literally days of music that had never made it to my laptop from iTunes, from Amazon, from eMusic, from ripped CDs. My digital music collection has always been split/shared awkwardly across two or three computers and an iPod. The iPod died last year and since then I’ve mainly just been using iTunes in class, often wondering why I couldn't find this or that – until now.

Once I'd gone to the trouble of collecting most of my digital music into one place, it seemed like a good idea to start shuffling through it to see what I'd been missing. A couple of points about that: 1) I've made a habit of excluding the following from shuffle lists: just about anything with short recitative tracks, such as operas, oratories, cantatas, etc. I just find 31 seconds of random recitative to be more annoying than enticing. So, the list skews pretty strongly towards the instrumental side. 2) I still have a yet bigger collection of music on an ancient medium known as the "compact disc." (Let’s not even talk about the 500 or so LP’s in my basement.) Although I'm sure I've forgotten about many potentially interesting CDs that I own, I think the bulk of that collection is bread-and-butter repertoire that I've known for a long time. But, the digital downloads tend to feature music I don't know as well - impulse buys from the likes of eMusic and Amazon inspired by thoughts like "I really should get to know more of [Composer X]'s music."

So, shuffling through myTunes is a great way to start realizing those oft-forgotten goals. I’m not sure how unusual I am in this respect, but I find I tend to listen more openly when music comes to me this way – unbidden, unexpected and seemingly destined to be heard. It's almost like being seduced. Almost. That’s quite irrational, but I’m not sure there’s much about listening to music that’s rational anyway. My experience is that if I consciously "put on" those new [Composer X] downloads, I'm likely to begin with all sorts of prejudices or even false hopes about what I'm about to hear and how I'm about to hear it. Whether the music is unexpectedly lovely or strange or disturbing, there's something about the "name that tune" context that makes me listen more curiously and less judgmentally. Maybe I have issues.

Nevertheless, I often find this the most pleasurable way to listen to music - kind of like listening to the radio, except there's no banter, the selections are stacked in my favor, and I can skip ahead at will. Perhaps it's the anxiety of choice that otherwise gets in the way. I don't mind admitting that I love watching Frasier re-runs many evenings to usher me off to sleep. Frasier is a great show at its best, but it's often not at its best, so I could easily go to Netflix and choose the best episodes each night, but I prefer just letting the Hallmark Channel (!) do the choosing. This really makes no sense; not only am I stuck with whatever episode happens to be on, but there are inevitably little cuts in syndicated showings, cuts needed to make room for all those commercials for Hallmark programs and Hallmark-oriented products that have no appeal. (I've probably seen at least 50 promos for Hallmark movies and have never watched one.) Nonetheless, when a truly great episode comes on, it always seems more special that it "just comes on" without me doing the choosing. Maybe I have issues.

My iTunes "Super Shuffle" playlist has 15+ days worth of music at the ready, and yet anyone who's ever dealt with shuffling knows how often the resulting playlist seems less than random. Here are a few recent tweets on the subject:

My iTunes Super Shuffle playlist has 4452 tracks, 411 from Haydn symphonies. Yet, I'm getting Haydn symphonies about 35% of time. Weird.

Well, my spooky iTunes Super Shuffle playlist just picked 4 Bach tunes in a row. Would be stranger if 4 Blochs in a row, but still...

OK, now iTunes Shuffle is really going hipster (after so much Haydn and Bach a few days ago): Boulez - Cage - Webern.

Yes, it always seems as if there's something intentional going on...except, when it doesn't:

I've been tweeting fun iTunes shufflings, but I can now tell you that mvt 5 of Bartok's 4th Quartet does NOT work following Siegfried Idyll.

...oh I see, iTunes shuffle; from Wagner to Bartok to Vivaldi, huh? Anyone who thinks all classical music is the same should walk this path.

My experiences updating Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator and the Multimedia Musing Machine have just confirmed how un-random random processes can seem. The Musing Machine now has more than 200 options, but I've seen the same result show up 3 times within about 10 chances. So, it stands to reason that I'll be getting Haydn 35% of the time and then not at all for hours, even though this seems unreasonable. Why should we expect randomness to be reasonable?

Shuffling also leads to all sorts of surprising encounters, of course. I blogged several years ago about realizing that Strauss's early and flashy Don Juan segues perfectly into his late and mellow Metamorphosen, a discovery brought to me by iTunes. Or, I once found that some Stravinsky cadenced perfectly into a Beatles song. This morning, while working on a syllabus, I heard something shuffle by that I instantly recognized as Bach/Stokowski, but Stokowski's romanticization was so complete I failed for almost a minute to realize that this:

is this:

even thought I teach the latter piece twice a year and love it. Not sure I would ever have selected that Stokowski track on my own, but I'm glad it was handed to me.

Followers of this blog will know that I love a good mashup, partly because there's always an element of randomness involved in smashing two separate entities together. This morning, while testing out the newest version of the Musing Machine, I stumbled on a marvelous synchronicity between an unknown song, brought to me via shuffling, and a pre-existing mashup that had started up unexpectedly. That's confusing, huh? So, iTunes had chosen a single-voice a cappella song from a collection of Shaker Songs that I never get around to listening to when the Musing Machine fired up this pairing of a Britten oboe piece with some random marimba piece. (That pairing first debuted in a music class where I asked two students to play their two pieces simultaneously.) So, if you're keeping score, we now have: solo Shaker song, solo Britten oboe, solo marimba, all joining together, for a moment at least, as if they belonged together:

...or maybe you disagree. But for me, that intersection doesn't seem at all random (especially the way the oboe seems to echo the singer). Pretty random, huh?

Anyway, if you have a taste for random, perhaps you've noticed that I keep mentioning my newly updated "Musing Machine" in this post. I continue to be proud of this distinctive feature, which escorts you to an MM multimedia creation of its choice; I don't know of another blog that has anything like it, and I'm not sure there's another blog that could have anything like it, although that's not necessarily a good thing.

Still, why not give it a spin or two?

NOTE: There are more than
200 possible outcomes.

Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator 2.0 - Now With More Random!

2012-10-18T22:28:00.000-04:00

For what it's worth, I've fiddled around with one of my stranger creations, Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator. I'm afraid it's not much less strange, but 1) I think the recordings sound better now, 2) there are more "random" options, and 3) the audio doesn't cut out so abruptly at the end of 8 bars. (You can sample the previous version here. Read more about it here and here.)

As before, those patient enough to try out enough patterns will be treated to a couple of surprises, although I'm not trying to encourage hours spent idly refreshing the page. Minutes, perhaps...

I will admit that the accent patterns aren't truly random. I "designed" each potential outcome, though I intentionally went about this quickly and tried not to "compose" too much. However, with many of them, I would find myself tinkering here and there to get things to sound more "right," whatever that might mean. Certainly Stravinsky's version sounds the most "right," though it doesn't hurt that I've heard it approximately 4,637 times.

So that got me to thinking about the possibility of generating a truly random sprinkling of accents, and I thus managed to create a little spreadsheet formula that accomplishes this task handily. I decided that since Stravinsky's original (see above; hear here) only accents 6 of the 32 chords, it made sense to average something like 6/32 rather than just go 50/50 on each chord, so each chord basically has an 18.75% chance of being accented. Here are some of the first patterns I generated this way (with 1's standing in for accents).

0100 0000 0100 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000

0000 0001 0000 1000 0000 1010 1000 0000

1000 0010 0000 0000 0000 0010 1011 0101

0000 0000 1000 0011 0000 0110 0001 0000

0010 1000 0100 1010 0100 0100 1000 0000

1000 0100 0000 0000 0100 1000 0001 0000

0100 0000 0000 1010 0100 0001 0000 0010

1000 0000 0001 1000 0110 0001 0100 1000

0100 1101 1000 1000 0000 0000 0010 0101

0010 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0100 0000

0000 0010 0000 0000 1001 0000 0000 0001

0100 0000 0010 0001 0000 0000 1000 0000

[I'll wait while you clap through them.] I especially like the third one from the end. Of course, I understand that Stravinsky's accents are not necessarily intended to sound random, though they are supposed to be unpredictable (random ≠ unpredictable). Still, it's kind of interesting to see the different ways in which this process can unfold.

If you're interested in investigating further, I've uploaded my little spreadsheet to Google Docs, with the added attraction that accents are added directly over the chords right in the spreadsheet. (Doesn't perform it though.) To use the document, you need to sign in to Google Docs, open this document, then choose "Make a Copy" from the file menu. Once you've got your own copy, you can give yourself an infinite supply of clapping exercises.

(Or, I suppose, you could just go here.)

More random-y stuff coming tomorrow on the blog, including an update of "MM's Magical Multimedia Musing Machine."

A Splendid Sunrise

2012-10-09T23:19:00.001-04:00

I've gone on record before as not being the biggest fan of Haydn, but it's certainly not that I don't appreciate his genius. I've also gone on record as not being a big fan of Haydn's widely adored creation, The Creation, but I do love some things about it, including the beautiful recitative passage that precedes the work's most famous chorus, "The Heavens are Telling." (Notice I'm not saying what I think of that chorus, although this, this, and this might provide some evidence.)

So I've come not to bury Haydn, but to praise him. Just the other day in Music History, I was playing the orchestral intro to this beautiful recitative passage for my class and realized something that should've been obvious to me before: it's just a D major scale! Well, it's just a D Major scale that is harmonized and orchestrated exquisitely. This rising scale in the most brilliant of keys is appropriate for a passage that celebrates the first rising of the sun: "In splendour bright is rising now the sun and darts his rays; an am’rous joyful happy spouse, a giant proud and glad, to run his measur’d course." (We're just not going to discuss this poetry now, OK?)

So, a D Major scale (plus two extra notes for free):

But here's what Haydn does with it:

As is so often the case with Haydn, I could only wish this passage were longer. I've written before about how both Haydn and Mozart will often "save their best stuff for first." Still, I think it's even better than that other famous sunrise passage. (No, not this one.) So, while sitting in a dentist's chair today, I had this idea of visualizing the way the music rises from the orchestra, and there you go (although I'd like to make the animation look smoother).

I could write at length about the amazing seventh bar, when we hear E, F#, G, B, and C# simultaneously. (The B and G are just suspensions over a V7/vi chord, but they are wonderful.) But, I think the remarkable fact that this is beautiful even when "played" by the synthesized orchestra inside my computer is saying enough. Listen to how different that D Major scale sounds when it radiates outward this way.

If you'd like to hear what comes next (performed by humans, no less (although the sun was created before humans)), go to 2:50 of this video:

The part about the moon rising is perhaps even more beautiful, by the way...

In splendour bright is rising now the sun and darts his rays; an am’rous joyful happy spouse, a giant proud and glad, to run his measur’d course. With softer beams and milder light steps on the silver moon through silent night. The space immense of th’ azure sky innum’rous host of diant orbs adorns. And the sons of God announced the fourth day in song divine, proclaiming thus his power: The heavens are telling the glory of God...

Willkommen, Bienvenue...

2012-10-01T21:19:00.000-04:00

I've found myself drawn into the orbit of New York City's enterprising operamission several times before, first when I helped tweet the opening evening of "Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required" back in the summer of 2010, and one year later when I was inspired to create this kooky Schoenberg/Stravinsky mashup. For 2012, the debut of a new "cabaret song" competition seemed but a curiosity to me at first - until the fateful moment when I thought about writing some cabaret lyrics.

I suppose it's as simple as that: I'd never thought about writing cabaret lyrics, so I'd never done it, but once the thought popped up, I couldn't see a way out. To be precise, the overly clever idea that first trapped me had to do with the word "cabaret" itself. I've enjoyed creating "mad gabs" for some time, as I wrote in this 2008 post. (My own favorite do-it-yourself madgab creation is "Dew Witch Horse Elf.") It's a natural extension of a general interest in wordplay - seeing how one set of sounds can sound much like an otherwise unrelated set of sounds. Like, I inadvertently thought to myself: "cabaret" and "cap hooray." And, thus, a song was born:

I drowned myself in Cabernet,
then went to hail a cab away,
but though I waved my cap-beret
I could not tempt the cab array.

The subway riders gab their way
through sunken post-nightcap soiree;
when exiting, "mind the gap," they say,
but without you, I can't bear the day.

REFRAIN:
So all I do is mind the gap and pray
and hope and wish that you'll come back to stay
until you do I'll live my way without a sky or sober day,
you've left me nothing but the night – and cabaret.

Verse 2: yes, my vocab's OK,
inspired by bottlecaps astray.
The critic tips his cap, "Hooray,"
when I lament in cabaret.

You came along and captiva-
ted all of me; a captive may
be freed and yet still capsized stay;
I might as well recap this way:

REFRAIN

Perhaps I got too caught up in this attempt to sound out something close to "cabaret" as many times as possible. Perhaps I should've written "chic beret" instead of the awkwardly constructed "cap-beret." Perhaps we should all be grateful I didn't go full-meta and try to shoehorn "mad gab array" into these verses. Actually, I'm more bothered by the mundane refrain, but it's growing on me. I enjoy the transition from "mind the gap" as cautionary subway message to cautionary metaphor for lost love. At least, I think that's what this is about.

What will become of these lyrics? Well, I might just try to set them myself, although interested composers are welcome to inquire about a collaboration. Just as composers sometimes work with a "dummy lyric" to compose a tune, I'll admit that I used Britten's "Tell Me the Truth About Love" as a "dummy tune" for the verses, and imagine them to be similarly talk-y, with a more lyrical refrain. Various quasi-tunes have wandered teasingly through my mind. We'll see if I can catch one.

Meanwhile, I happened to notice not long after finishing the above that the contest specifies "for solo voice and piano (or voice and harpsichord)." Since we've been talking quite a bit about Historically Informed Performance Practice (HIPP) in my Music History class, I quickly found myself pulled down the following rabbit hole. What it lacks in the former's geeky phonetic wordplay it makes up for in geeky references to obscure musicological concerns. But I like it. Seems it should be written for harpsichord accompaniment, with a dramatic modulation down a half-step for the first transition to the refrain. (Often, Baroque performance practice calls for A to be tuned to 415Hz instead of the standard 440Hz, which results in music pitched about one half-step lower than usual.)

I used to vibrate night and day
and tighten up my bow
to make it easier to play
with steely strings in tow.

I loved a chorus hundreds strong
for Bach’s and Handel’s scene,
until one day you came along
and tuned to Four..Fif..Teen…

REFRAIN:
HIPP-HIPP Hooray for Historically Informed Performance,
It's not too late to be an early-music gal.
My playing's up to date, whether 1698
or a 19th century musical locale.
I've learned the ways of the days that came before us,
from tired traditions I have been set free.
What once was old is new, and now I'm telling you
the past is where the future lies with me.

I sold my Steinway late last year
cause I prefer to drive
a double-manual clavier:
It makes me feel alive!

I improvise and ornament
and realize figured bass,
and realize I’ve been heaven-sent
back to that time and place.

REFRAIN

I can't count the countertenors
I've had over to my place.
I can't deal with all those sinners
who think wobbling equals grace.

Don't believe that propaganda
the Romantics left behind.
A theorbo or da gamba
is romantic in my mind.

REFRAIN

Notes inégales are just my style
My rhythms fairly dance
I would’ve been so versatile
In 17th century France.

We’ve tuned our hearts authentically
to temperaments just and mean;
and now I know that every key
sounds best at 415.

Yep.

Teachable Moments

2012-09-22T13:06:00.000-04:00

First of all, my recital has come and gone, as things do. It was, I think, a big success in a lot of ways (the program booklet was widely admired), although it's hard for me not to remember the moments that got away (minor, but still...), and it's also something of a letdown to be done. What happened? Where did all that practice and preparation go?

As I get older, I find myself reflecting more on space/time issues - sometimes even in the middle of a performance! At some point in the middle of the 30-minute Brahms "Handel" Variations, I remember thinking that I felt kind of like a prisoner of space and time. I was tired, physically and mentally, and though things were going well enough and I was mostly focused on the music, I found myself reflecting on something rather obvious: I had no choice in that moment but to keep playing this difficult music with pinpoint focus (a focus not helped by my focusing on the need to be focused). I couldn't just stop, perhaps say something to the audience, go get a drink of water, recite a sonnet, or even take an unmusical breath. Yes, to some degree this is true of any situation where one has a job to do, but a musical work like this is particularly unforgiving.

Of course, riding a musical wave is also one of the joys of musical performance, so I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. Anyway, although I have much to learn from this experience (including that I wish I'd worked in a few "days off" leading up to the event since I played through the Chopin four days after the recital and it felt so much easier!), I have more lighthearted teachable moments to share today. In fact, they're lighthearted enough that I've already shared them in that frothy land of Twitter, but now they're getting the blog seal of approval.

The first moment of good teaching fortune occurred on September 5th as I had just exited my office on the way to music history. (I should probably capitalize "Music History," but I like the idea of "being on the way to music history.") We were in the midst of several Bach classes (alas, now passed/past) and that day's main course would be the Chaconne in D Minor, which is only perhaps the greatest example of human creativity ever. I've taught this piece many times, but still can feel at loss for words to describe it, as evidenced by the lame sentence preceding. As it happened, only steps from my office door, I heard none other than the Chaconne in D Minor coming from a practice room nearby. I correctly guessed who the violinist was, and knew her to be an enthusiastic student from the previous year's class, so I knocked on the door and asked if she might want to come play in our little cinderblock classroom. She graciously agreed, and suddenly everything about teaching it was easier because there's just nothing like live performance, right?

There's just nothing like live performance. Of course, we musicians say this all the time in a desperate attempt to maintain a sense of relevance performing music that has been recorded over and over. It's pretty much true, too (I hope) - otherwise, why would I have spent so much time learning music for my recital? Getting back to that space-time thing, there's no question that Chopin's 4th ballade is widely available in recordings and widely performed in recitals, but I still knew that every time I played it (even in a practice room), there was something distinctive about "holding" "it" in my hands in that moment of time. Not the score of course; I barely looked at it in the past month (which is probably bad, by the way, but that's a subject for another day). I mean that having the notes shaped in my hands feels like a "thing," elusive as its thing-ness is. (Are the notes in my hands negative space? No, let's not go there...*)

But back to Bach: because the Chaconne is written for solo violin and the violin-writing often verges on (or crosses over to) harshness, "it" struggles even more than the average musical work to communicate via recording. Violins are notoriously difficult to record. I read somewhere** that the heavy use of vibrato we now take for granted is partly an evolutionary adaptation prompted by the fact that early recording technology made straight-tone violin playing particularly unappealing. Add to this the fact that my cinderblock classroom has a pretty subpar set of speakers, and it reminds me of something I often forget: Recordings of the Chaconne sound pretty bad in this classroom.

Why do I forget that? Because I already know how the piece sounds for real, so I can easily hear the real "thing" through the imperfections. This also explains why opera buffs can enjoy historical recordings that often sound like desperate screeching to me. Once you've heard the real thing enough, you can filter out the limits of technology and hear what's not there. I wrote about this at some length in this post from 2007.

This is really one of the central challenges of teaching and talking about music. When you don't have the real thing there and the students haven't experienced it, words in a textbook/anthology and even recordings can ring as hollow as...well, a violin on a CD. Having this gracious student play extended excerpts for the class made the whole teaching experience so much easier. Plus, the human element of seeing the violinist battling the fiddle is a nice visual/social aid. The students clearly got this music in a way I haven't seen them get it before. So, the lesson is: always bring a real violinist with you to teach the Bach Chaconne. (I have done this before in a more planful way, by the way.)

[A couple of side notes. When I tweeted "Was heading to class to talk about Bach Chaconne; heard student violinist practicing it; she agreed to demo much of it (beautifully). Nice!", a clever follower tweeted back, "Talking about the Bach Chaconne. And next week, dancing about the Parthenon." He, of course, was alluding to the famous saying that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. I mention all this to boast about the newly invented aphorism this inspired from me: "tweeting about music is like twitching about architecture."]

[Side Note #2: Speaking of Bach, the Chaconne, and a failure to communicate, back when the "Joshua Bell in the subway" story was all the rage, I wrote a couple of sonnets to summarize the tale. I can sense that you're not about to follow that link, so let me tempt you with these couplets: "...to mention that a subway station / is really not the best location / for Bach's Chaconne (which I adore / -it's just not made for train decor.)"]

Now to teachable moment #2. For my afternoon "Survey of Musical Masterworks," a one-semester music history class for mostly non-majors, I like to have music playing the five minutes or so before we begin. For example, before yesterday's class introducing opera as the new dramatic kid on the block of the Baroque, I played this hyperdramatic music from Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie. (Skip to 1:20 if you like, and try to stay to the end.)

Well, later on that very same fortuitous Chaconne day, I got distracted by some computer-related issue and forgot to start anything up for my surveyors. Just as I was about to apologize for this oversight, I remembered that Sept 5 of 2012 happened to be the 100th birthday of John Cage, so the four-plus minutes of silence I'd played were the perfect music for that day.

And I have nothing more to say about that...

P.S. But, I did have one other felicitous teaching moment recently. I was discussing issues of Historically Informed Performance Practice with students, and the topic of unreliable metronome markings arose. As I talked about the problems of pendulum imprecision and veered off course to mention Ligeti's symphony for metronomes, a student actually speculated out loud that one might be able to synchronize pendulum metronomes if they were on the right kind of surface. I don't think he did this to set me up for what followed, but THIS, of course, is what followed.

P.P.S. Notice I didn't include an audio link for the great Chaconne, for what should be obvious reasons. Go see if you can find a live performance in a practice room near you...

See also: Augmented Sixth Day

* that's a joke. sort of.

** just realized (20 hours later), via a helpful Twitter follower, that I first read about this violin/vibrato adaptation in Chapter 3 of Alex Ross's Listen to This where he, in turn, cites Mark Katz's Capturing Sound. And, to continue with the coincidence theme of this post, it just so happens that Chapter 3 of Ross's book is assigned for one of my classes for this coming Friday. (I last read the chapter a year ago, and thus the violin/vibrato information had lost its moorings in my mind.)

Final Postscript: It will be some time before I'll feel ready to listen to all of the recital recording (especially the solo stuff), but here are two samples from the second half that featured our new family trio, Montrieau (with my 13-yr old daughter on violin, my child psychiatrist wife on cello, and me doing my Piano Hero thing (meaning I didn't practice it enough!) on piano).

Dvorak: "Dumky" Trio, 1st movement
Encore: "Hector the Hero," an old Scottish tune in Cape Breton style.

MMrecital - the Program Booklet

2012-09-14T10:54:00.001-04:00

My recital is tomorrow night, so no long-winded blog post for this week, but I thought I'd post the recital booklet I just completed yesterday. (Having a program ready more than 48 hours ahead of the concert must be some kind of record for me.) It continues the whimsical Simpson-y theme I stumbled into for my poster (which just kind of grew out of years of using Simpsonized me as my avatar), which meant: 1) I could be as informal as I like, 2) use catchy titles for each piece, an idea I'd already been thinking about, 3) and use the much-derided Comic Sans font in what I think is its most appropriate context.

It's designed to be printed in a booklet format, so you can better see how the facing pages are supposed to work (sort of) here.

Because I plan to talk to the audience as well, it freed me up not to write too much about each piece. You'll notice I didn't even list the movement titles for the Dvorak, which is maybe a mistake, but since each of the six movements has multiple tempo changes, I think it just invites confusion. I'd rather listeners just go with the "Dumky" flow. On the other hand, I provide a very detailed outline of the twenty-five Brahms variations, partly because I think an audience member can easily follow those, if they so choose. (I'll assure those in attendance that there's no obligation to follow along. I hate for a recital to feel like class.)

Otherwise, although I was rushed as usual, I think this booklet accomplishes most of what I want it to do: set an informal, friendly tone (even though, to be honest, the music is mostly pretty serious), and provide some basic ways to think about what each piece expresses. The central tension for me is that, though the music is often serious in tone, I don't want the recital experience to feel solemn or ritualistic - the seriousness, I hope, is in the depth of the musical expression (though the Brahms and Dvorak pieces each have many humorous, lighthearted passages as well), not in the idea that this music is important. (You see, it's important, of course, but not important.)

No Danny Elfman on This Recital

2012-09-08T15:48:00.005-04:00

It's a good thing it's a Saturday, so I don't have pesky classes and meetings to deter me from practicing for my recital which is due to happen in just over 1 week. (See here or here, or read lots of words about it here.) Yet, somehow I found time to do this:

[click pic to view larger]

I never thought it would go this far when I first Simpsonized myself and Stravinsky back in 2007 (I don't even watch The Simpsons much anymore, though I own seasons 1-8 on DVD), but I feel my identity is slowly merging with that avatar. And at least it hasn't aged in five years.

Also, you'll note that I've given our family trio a pretentious name. If it doesn't quite make sense to you, here's the progression:

monroe

montrio

montrioe

montrieau

(I thought of going as far as "montrieault" since my wife's surname ends in "-eault," but that would just be going too far. I do love playing in mon trio, by the way.)

And now...yes, more practicing.

Time-traveling

2012-08-30T20:18:00.010-04:00

First of all, I'd better get around to mentioning that I'm giving a faculty recital in just two weeks and two days. This Facebook thing is as far as I've made it with an event page so far, although I hope to update it soon. The program, in case you don't feel like following that link, is:

Bach: "Allemande" from Partita No. 4 in D Major
Chopin: Ballade No. 4 in F Minor
Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel
----------
Dvorak: "Dumky" Trio (with my cellist wife & violinist daughter)

[The recital is on Saturday, September 15 at 7pm in Phillips Recital Hall, Gordon College, Wenham, MA.]

It's a program both conventional and quirky, conventional in its "standard rep"-iness, quirky in its juxtaposition of pieces. There's no real theme other than "these are some pieces I want to play." I suggested in a March blog post that there is something inherently selfish about devoting oneself to this kind of endeavor, no matter how much energy we musicians invest in saying we're all about giving, giving, giving. One can be selfish and giving at the same time, after all. At an rate, I don't mind admitting that I'm doing this partly for my own satisfaction, and since I don't find the opportunity to do solo recitals that often, I'm going to play what I want to play.

It's funny, because I think my reputation among students is as an advocate of the unconventional (I'm always talking mash-ups, trying to get an In C thing going every year, etc.), but I've never been shy about the fact that I have pretty old-fashioned tastes. See my list of "Favorite Music" to confirm. There's nothing on there later than Shostakovich or Britten. There are voices in my head telling me I should be playing something from own century, or at least the one in which I was born - but, again with the selfish thing. (I'm a little surprised no Scriabin made it on the program; there's a wonderful portrait of Scriabin that a student painted for me a few years ago after I told her he's a personal favorite. Every time I look up and see him staring down at my piano, I feel guilty...)

Still, I was a little surprised at how this program came together. I first assumed I'd be reprising Schumann's Kreisleriana from a recital I gave in 2003; that may be my single favorite piano work. But as I reviewed the CD from that recital, on came the Brahms "Handel" Variations, and I suddenly felt "I have to play this again." It was as simple as that. Sometimes the music just tells you what to do. I even considered repeating the entire 2003 recital, but eventually Kreisleriana drifted away, partly due to fear that I wouldn't have time to re-learn it and Brahms-Handel.

I devoted a Spring Break blog series (sort of) to my decision to re-learn the Chopin ballade in a week; I didn't quite finish getting it memorized in those seven days, and then completely dropped it until mid-summer when I thought the thirty minutes of Kreisleriana were seeming like too much. These eleven minutes of Chopin scare me to death, and it's odd to put them side by side with the Brahms since each piece is kind of a closer, but I think it's Chopin's greatest work and there's really nothing quite like it. I want to play it. Whereas the Brahms is a highly ordered, though expansive, structure, the Chopin evolves tentatively and mysteriously, but in compact fashion, so they make for an interesting contrast.

Still, the Chopin is too intense to begin a recital. For a while, I figured the Chopin and Brahms would fall on different halves. Then, early one summer Sunday, as I was doing my fake-organist thing and getting ready to play the morning service, I was looking for a D Major prelude (to go with the opening hymn) and flipped upon the allemande from Bach's D Major Partita. It's a piece I remember well from Jeremy Denk's remarkable 7-part blog series from 2007. Bach wrote many, many allemandes, of course, but none at all like this extended, meandering meditation. I quickly realized it didn't belong on the organ, but was irresistibly drawn to it, so I ended up playing the prelude from the piano that morning. Quite a few parishioners remarked at how beautiful it was, and after dismissing the thought that this was just relief at hearing me not play the organ, I decided the special-ness of this piece would translate to audiences more easily than I'd have thought.

The initial dilemma: "Do I now learn the whole Partita?" which would mean learning six other pieces. The easy answer came back, "No, this piece stands on its own." It's kind of like the Chaconne from the D Minor Violin Partita in that respect. If both repeats are observed, this "allemande like no other" can easily last ten minutes or more. I fear its beauty might be less appreciated in the broader suite context, and I'm of the opinion that Bach's suites are fairly loose connections of pieces - but, let's be honest: I also didn't feel like learning all that Bach. So here we are.

This allemande is also no conventional curtain-raiser, but it's gotten me to thinking about why we so often begin with "loud and fast." Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I hope there's something about this piece which will serve to consecrate the space, calm me down, and usher in a world in which time seems like less of a concern - to prepare us all for this counter-cultural thing we call a piano recital. In fact, this allemande is probably the closest thing Bach ever wrote to a Chopin nocturne, even if it sounds nothing like Chopin; it does feel like a nice way to set up the ballade, which in a more conventional program might be preceded by a nocturne.

Although I'm basically a "collaborative pianist" these days, it's important to me to get a chance to revisit solo repertoire, memorization, and all that. But, it's also a joy to be playing as a family in the second half. As a matter of fact, the "Dumky" Trio is the piece that introduced me to my wife-to-be (we were assigned to the same trio at a summer festival), so it means a lot to us to be playing it with our oldest daughter. I'm feeling a bit guilty about that decision because I'm realizing the violin part is the hardest to bring off in this trio; the cello gets almost all the good tunes, while Dvorak makes the poor violinist play awkward, accompanimental double-stops again and again. But, Daughter of MMmusing is a trooper and she's got chops, so I think we'll get there.

Each of the last two paragraphs referred to ways in which music interacts with time: the way a Bach allemande can seem to make time stop, and the way the Dumky Trio can connect our family's present with its past. One of my Spring Break "Ballade" posts also touched on this, how re-learning the Chopin ballade brought back vivid memories (or something even more present than memories) of learning the same piece as an undergrad twenty-plus years before.

In the last couple of days, I've had another strange music-time experience. Because memorization is such a scary thing, so vulnerable to changes of mental state, I've been revisiting an old trick: playing through these pieces backwards. OK, not literally note-by-note (or sound wave by sound wave!), but more or less phrase by phrase. The Brahms is a pretty easy piece to chunk since it divides up into a theme and 25 variations, each of which has two repeated halves of four bars each. (The fugue is more complicated and less symmetrical, but still pretty easy to break up into groups.) So, after backmasking through the fugue, it's on to part B of variation 25 (with repeat), part A of Variation 25, part B of Variation 24, part A of Variation 24, etc. In some cases, the repeats are varied repetitions, so I try to play the variants first as well.

It's a great mental exercise and makes it so that I feel quite comfortable starting at more than 60 spots within the 30-minute opus. (It also keeps my mind from wandering while I practice ... sometimes.) Hopefully this will be less about giving me a place to start if I fall off the horse, and more about the constant sense that, "oh, yes, I can visualize precisely what's coming up in four bars." But having now played through the piece backwards twice, I was unexpectedly struck by the weird sensation of moving backwards through time. I know the music quite well, of course, so although time is obviously moving forward, each little chunk feels like something more past than what's just happened. (A good set of variations has a sense of building to a conclusion, and this is as good a set of variations as has ever been written. Yep, as good as Goldberg and Diabelli.) This is especially striking when I "end" with the half cadence that concludes the first four bars of Handel's theme.

Each time, it feels like the last bit of the piece has been sucked up into some time-consuming vacuum cleaner - that's not an analogy I went looking for or a thought I dreamed up because I wanted to blog about something. It was a genuine sensory experience. I'd like to try this with more big variation sets at some point, like the finale of the "Eroica" Symphony. (The Goldberg Variations wouldn't work as well since that piece ends as it begins.) But that sounds like another blog post, post-recital.

Last weekend, we heard a final concert for my daughter's music camp at which the orchestra of 9-13 year-olds finished with Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on "Greensleeves," chosen because the retiring camp director had played that same piece as a camper in the orchestra - in 1948! Talk about a time-travelling experience. Listening to these kids play this piece (which was quite new in '48, though the tune was already old) in an old-fashioned (though fairly new) barn in the foothills of the ancient Berkshires to honor a woman who's invested so much time in music and children - well, it made me realize that Einstein's theory of relativity may not be fully understood with respect to music.

Gateway to Insanity

2012-08-22T20:36:00.005-04:00

There's nothing like a meandering path that takes you somewhere special. For example, many years ago I basically flipped a coin in choosing one musical festival over another, picked a piano trio to play, had my assigned cellist turn out not to be there, and then was assigned a new cellist...who is now my wife. We now have a daughter in music camp out in Western Massachusetts which led us to an afternoon of Sunday shopping in charming Northampton where I came across a book I've wanted to read for years. Vikram's Seth's The Golden Gate is a novel-in-verse set in 1980s Silicon Valley but modeled on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, especially in its use of the peculiar Onegin stanzas devised by the "Russian Shakespeare." In Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter raves about The Golden Gate, gateway for him to Eugene Onegin which becomes the second most important case study in Hofstadter's wide-ranging study of translation.

I've now read Eugene Onegin a few times in this dazzling translation, and I've intended to read The Golden Gate for more than a dozen years, but somehow never got around to hitting the "buy" button on Amazon or tracking it down at a local library; seeing it on the shelf at The Raven conquered my irrational inertia, and now I'm happily flipping page after page.* My only slight disappointment is that Seth's book (or any good translation of Eugene Onegin) is a perfect candidate for e-book reading on a smartphone or tablet since each sonnet would nicely fill a screen, but it's only available in paper form. Oh well...it's still delightful even only 160 or so sonnets in. My mind is rhyming in iambic tetrameter even when I'm not reading, which is a problem I've had before.

Unfortunately, I also made the mistake of wondering if an Onegin stanza could be fit into a single, 140-character Twitter post. I remember wondering this back in #operaplot days when I successfully tweeted several limericks, but if you do the math, 140 characters divided by 14 lines leaves only 10 characters per line, and that has to include spaces and line breaks. Iambic tetrameter demands 7-9 syllables per line so it's really impossible, right?

However, it occurred to me that using texting abbreviations might make the task just possible, and OMG! (which I'd interpret as "Oh my goodness" since that yields an extra syllable), voilà:

It's pretty ugly to look at, but it's Tweetable, although Twitter doesn't really let you use line breaks, so it ends up looking like this:

IOU a tiny sonnet of ≤ 140; In it 14=143 IIRC SRSLY I ineptly had U ROTF LOL once b4 @my TMI No IMO my MO I AKA admiration ≠ U & yet WYSIWYG

I do enjoy the oddly formulaic juxtapositions of 140, 14, and 143 and the 3-line set of "TMI, IMO, MO I," not to mention that any sonnet ending with "WYSIWYG" is pretty awesome.

If you're wondering how to read it, here's a "translation." Note that every line should begin with a stressed syllable and that line 5 requires "remember" to be accented awkwardly on its first and third syllables. "Seriously" should also get a secondary stress on its third syllable.

IOU a tiny sonnet
of ≤
140; In it
14=143
IIRC
SRSLY I ineptly
had U ROTF
LOL once b4
@my TMI
No IMO my
MO I
AKA admiration
≠ U & yet
WYSIWYG

I owe you a tiny sonnet
of less than or equal to
one-hundred and forty; in it
Fourteen equals "I Love You."
If I remember correctly
seriously I ineptly
had you rolling on the floor
laughing out loud once before
at my "too much information."
No, in my opinion, my
modus operandi I
also know as admiration
does not equal you and yet
what you see is what you get.

OK, it's not Shakespeare or Pushkin...or Seth, but it sort of makes sense as a slightly desperate sonnet from a poet prone to ridiculously flowery flights of fancy. It's a bit pitiful since it seems our hero knows his recipient is a harsh critic; he's apparently trying his best to keep this tweet both short and sweet, but he is who he is.

It's also not quite an Onegin stanza since that requires iambic tetrameter which would add an extra unstressed syllable to the beginning of each line, but chopping off those 14 syllables was really helpful. The astute among you will further note that I've interpreted AKA as "also know as" instead of "also known as." So sue me. My first line takes up a luxurious 24 characters, and I had to find as many ways as possible to abbreviate thereafter. Honestly, I don't think I'd have pulled it off without that "less than or equal to" sign. That's six syllables of pure, 1-character gold.

I later realized I hadn't even thought about abbreviated proper nouns like UK, USA, IBM, etc., but textspeak is a perfect fit for Twitter anyway. Still, I think this is my first and last Onegin sonnet of 140 characters or less.

But I also wondered about a trimmer-style sonnet, and fairly quickly managed the following (I was home sick yesterday, so I had a little time on my hands):

A sonnet

in tweet?

I'm on it

A feat!

140

is short. See

each line

assigned

li'l more than

3 beats.

RT's

will pour in

for me.

You'll see.

If tweeted like so:

A sonnet-in tweet?-I'm on it-A feat!-140-is short.See-each line-assigned-lil' more than-3 beats.-RT's-will pour in-for me.-You'll see.

...this actually comes in at a highly efficient 134 characters. Note that I've kept the Onegin stanza rhyme-scheme with its charming variety of masculine and feminine rhymes. For those not in the Twitter know, "RT's" stands for "Re-tweets," which is the Twitter way of sharing posts. Also, you'll note that "140" in this case should be pronounced as "One forty." It's true that this rhyme scheme has quite a different flavor than Eugene Onegin with only 2-3 beats per line; in fact, in this regard the poem is much closer in spirit to Clement Marot's A une Damoyselle malade, the 28-liner beginning and ending with "Ma mignonne" that is the central case study in Hofstadter's book.

My favorite felicitous detail in my "Mignonegin" sonnet comes with the phrase "li'l more than / 3 beats"; I chose "li'l" to create a nice triple rhyme with "will pour in" but was slightly bothered by the fact that none of the lines actually has any more than 3 beats. EXCEPT, one could say that the contraction "li'l" has perhaps a little more than one syllable, meaning the phrase "li'l more than" contains something like pi beats; it thus becomes the very line to which it refers. I realized that while struggling through the last leg of my morning run, and that put a much-needed hop in my step.

* I could quote favorite turns of phrase for days, but here's one of Seth's couplets that I particularly admire:

Thus by default the fault is Phil's.
Jan sets her gaze at Look that Kills.

More MMmmusing Onegin stanzas:

Musical...er, um, Notational Signatures

2012-08-15T14:44:00.009-04:00

I'm fond of saying to students that a musical score is just a set of instructions. Indeed, one of my Music Ed colleagues doesn't even like to refer to sheet music as "music," preferring to have her children's choirs look at their "notation." After all, all those dots and lines don't actually produce any sound on their own. They're not music. Still, I don't mind referring to these instructions as "music" since the word has clearly inherited that additional meaning. "Notation" sounds cold and too distanced from the music that is somehow magically embedded on paper. (Of course, "notation" "sounds cold" because I'm not used to using it this way; language gets much of its flavor from experience.)

Perhaps notation isn't the same thing as music, but there's still something aesthetically satisfying about these "instructions," even when we don't get to hear music. This, of course, has a lot to do with the meanings suggested by all those dots and lines. I love sightreading, I love studying scores, I love the dozen or so anthologies of scores aligned on a bookshelf above my desk, I love looking at all the other scores filling a large bookshelf nearby, I even love the digital joys of IMSLP. It stands to reason that notes themselves might start to appear beautiful, if only by association.

I wrote a few years ago about the pleasure of following a score while listening, with the idea being that watching the notes go by can be a good catalyst for listening (even for the uninitiated). But I also find that notes can be worth looking at simply for their own suggestive kinds of beauty. By suggestive, I especially mean the reference to particular sounds and patterns, which is why I find it annoying when musical signs are just tossed around like Clip Art. [e.g. the lazy use of musical notes in this disappointing Google logo.] See how I'm dancing back and forth between saying musical notation is beautiful on its own and yet stressing that "beautiful on its own" is connected to what the notes mean as music. It's a Hofstadter-y "strange loop."

Words, words, words. Mainly, I just came here today to talk about a couple of images I created to personalize my Facebook page. The truth is, Facebook is notably uniform and bland in its look - which is mostly a good thing. (MySpace was a visual disaster because approximately 93% of people shouldn't be given free reign over choices about graphic design.) However, every now and then the Facebook gods throw us a design curve that provides the tiny potential for some creativity.

When, in 2011, they rolled out the "photo-strip" header at the top of profile pages, I was first just annoyed. The idea was that the five photos in which one was most recently tagged would become a little Muybridge-esque visual time capsule...

Muybridge

Facebook Photostrip

...with the added surprise that you never knew when someone might tag some 2nd grade picture of you that would suddenly be part of your banner story.

Come to think of it, I'm now disappointed that I never thought to use either of the first two just-created dummy photostrips for my page. But what I did do was decide that those five tagged photos might look cool if they became five measures of music. (This meant tagging myself in these score images and then vigilantly un-checking new photos in which I was tagged.) For some reason, I ultimately decided on the hypnotic opening of Scriabin's Vers la flamme, a piece I've never played, although I intend to. (I have, elsewhere, claimed Scriabin and Poulenc as the composers I like most above their reputations.) Vers la flamme is about as sensual (in the sense of creating a presence that can be felt) as music gets, so maybe that's why I was inspired to objectify it as image.

Like so many of my projects (like this very post!), this ended up taking longer than I intended since getting the measures to be equal lengths required putting the music into Finale (and, sadly, leaving out the pick-up notes). But this five measure group works well as an entity because the arrival at the fifth bar kind of lets us know this piece is going strange places.

Here are those measures as they appear in the score:

And here's what they looked like atop my Facebook page:

Elegant, mysterious, and....yes, just a tiny bit pretentious in its coded, insider messaging. ("What you don't recognize this music? You must not be as smart as I!")

But then, of course, Facebook comes along with this new Timeline feature and suddenly the photostrip was being phased out. I finally got the word this week that my page was automatically going to be converted to the new Timeline format, which replaces the "at least it's small" photostrip with a huge header of a photo (of the user's choosing). These photos take up way too much screen real estate and they're also oddly paired with a small, nested version of the user's profile pic. Thus, I'd avoided making the switch for months, both because I liked my little bit of Scriabin and because I was opposed to this clunky new look. But, it's a free service, so you get what you pay for - which, in this case, is not much choice.

After some playing around with images of piano keyboards, I finally ended up with the following as my new banner image:

[click to view larger]

It's not perfect - maybe a little overstuffed, but I like its painterly look and, of course, you will see that I couldn't give up my Scriabin signature, now heading right towards us due to some simple 3-D rendering. The m.5 chord looks even more ominous now with the notes getting progressively larger. I'm also pleased with the way the notes are poised in the air like ghosts (if you rotate your screen away from you, the notes will likely disappear!), although in an ideal world the bass clef notes floating over the keys would be a bit darker. Are these notes left over from a past performance? Are they waiting to be played? Are they happening right now (all five measures at once?)?

So that's today's story of music as image. Facebook remains annoying, but sometimes crazy constraints inspire unexpected creativity; for me at least, Scriabin's notes add multiple layers of texture that seem to bring the keys to life. Those who are reading on my actual blog (as opposed to in a feed-reader) will also "note" that my homemade template has featured Bach's notes as background image almost since the beginning. (A few of you may remember MMmusing's "Yellow" period.) I created that looping image of Bach's Invention in A Minor for another website way back in the early days of the Internet, but I think it still holds up. (Bach, of course, is great for looping, which is how he made it into Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.) Ironically, I worked hard to distort those notes to make them look like refugees from some ancient manuscript, and now they are getting ancient, at least in web terms.

Finally, note that my attraction to notes as images is based to some degree on my understanding that notes really are music, in a mystical sort of way. In his fascinating book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks uses the term "musical imaging" to describe the way in which we can "hear" sounds in our imaginations - and only after typing that sentence did I think that the word "image" is embedded in the word "imagination." So we now have a strange loop in which musical notes are understood as images that inspire internal musical imaging, and thus became images that can inspire the imagination even more than mere images.

Right Turn

2012-08-09T15:08:00.004-04:00

As evidenced by yesterday's item about Franz Liszt mysteriously appearing on the cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I get a kick out of strange little mistakes. I wrote about this at some length in a 2011 blog post which begins with a story about a missed shift in Dvorak's Dumky Trio. As it happens, the great Dumky has entered my life again this summer since my cellist wife, violinist daughter, and I are learning it for an upcoming recital. A lovely little collateral surprise is that my other daughter, who's seven, has taken a liking to the Dvorak, especially its last movement. I'll admit this might have something to do with my pointing out that Dvorak ends his wonderfully Slavic journey with the theme from E.T. Listen to how the cello morphs into John Williams at about 10 seconds in.

But that's not a mistake and I haven't come here to accuse Mr. Williams of plagiarism. (I might accidentally plagiarize someone else if I go down that path!) However, there is a quirky mistake connected with a recording of this trio. I have a Suk Trio CD that I've been playing in our family van for the past few weeks, but I recently downloaded the Kim/Ma/Ax recording which I first purchased years ago on LP. I put the new downloads on CD only to realize that the break between the last two movements is tracked incorrectly. The next-to-last movement has a kind of false ending, which apparently fooled the person who edited this CD. (I'm not sure if the LP features the same mistake.) Thus, the music fades gracefully away, and here endeth the penultimate movement according to these downloads:

...which means Dvorak's surprise ending becomes a surprise beginning for the finale:

[By the way, the roots of that "E.T." theme are right there in the piano tune that opens the last movement proper, eight seconds into the sample above.]

What makes this quirky mistake all the more amusing is that Younger Daughter of MMmusing will often request "the last movement of the Dumky" in the car, which means we begin with that manic ending. I'm not really bothered by this quirk though. First of all, I've made my share of editing mistakes (the worst of which was letting Tex tremendae slip into the program for a big performance of the Mozart Requiem with Robert Levin giving a pre-concert talk and everything - I didn't type "Tex," but he did get past me), and second of all, it's just kind of funny. (I may or may not have looped the first few seconds of that track multiple times just for fun - don't ask my kids.)

But that's not all! No, I've got another little recording quirk encountered in another trio. This one I discovered listening to an LP of the Ravel Trio in A Minor in my piano teacher's studio, a long time ago in an undergraduate school far, far away. The Beaux Arts Trio was doing the honors when I noticed a pretty obvious page-flip during the Scherzo. I remember first assuming that this must be a piano turn since piano pages fly by in a fast-paced piece like this with all three parts taking up space in the score. So, I pulled out the score (handily available in the same studio; maybe I was using it already?) and discovered the flip didn't align with a piano turn. However, it turned out quite clearly to fall during three precious bars of rest in the cello part.

For some reason this delighted me no end, both doing the detective work and to think that the great Bernard Greenhouse was put on the spot this way, having to execute his turn as if he were playing the whip in Sleigh Ride. You can watch him do this bit of choreography (quietly) at the 1:53 mark below.

But whoever produced their studio recording left a very obvious turning sound in, for whatever reason. I can't imagine it wasn't noticed, but it seems like something that could've been edited out. Maybe it was just decided that it adds excitement to the already jumpy texture, with offbeat pizzicato snaps all over the place. Well, I like it this way. In the video below, you can "think along with Bernie" as the page turn approaches. Imagine how quickly he had to fly the bow back to the strings, ready to execute a delicate staccato passage on page 6.

At that point in my life, musicians of Beaux Arts Trio caliber were nothing less than legends to me - I suppose they still are, but I have a better understanding now that they're also just regular musicians who make mistakes. Back then, I just assumed these recordings were made under ideal conditions with page-turners sprinting noiselessly around like Wimbledon ball boys if necessary. The truth is, Greenhouse probably had some old, well-worn part that he liked, and he probably was so used to making the turn himself that it didn't really bother him.

An opera director friend has told the story many times of an accompanist for a big-time singer (Janet Baker?) who replaced a tattered score of O Had I Jubal's Lyre with a brand-new copy before a recital. Ms. Baker (or whoever) ended up getting lost and having to restart twice during the recital, to her great embarrassment; only later did they realize that the old score demanded an audible page flip from the pianist that the singer had grown used to hearing. When it wasn't there (due to a differently formatted edition), it tossed her memory for a loop. Whether true or not, it's a great story.

Perhaps the Beaux Arts Trio needed Greenhouse's whip to keep them on track...

Wilde About Liszt

2012-08-08T21:34:00.007-04:00

[Emptying out the Twitter summer desk drawer...]

About a month ago I was strolling towards the cash registers at Barnes and Noble when my eye was caught by the following from a row of paperback classics:

Before I even noticed that this was The Picture of Dorian Gray, I recognized that this was a picture of Franz Liszt. It's a fairly well-traveled painting (by Henri Lehmann) that shows up on LPs, CDs, and sheet music...you know, of recordings and scores having to do with the composer/pianist Franz Liszt. I can't really explain why Liszt became Dorian Gray other than that he's a famously striking figure who also dabbled in debauchery along life's way - and, I suppose, it's a public domain image that could easily be slapped on a cheap reprint.

I commented about this discovery on Twitter, and that set off some fun exchanges. First, musicologist Bob pointed out the existence of this book about the songs of Henry Duparc:

Duparc wrote some fine songs which definitely deserve their own book, but it's kind of strange that someone chose to put on the cover...a photograph of old Franz Liszt! (I'll be honest and admit I don't know what Duparc looked like in his later years, but I doubt he looked exactly like Liszt.)

This got me thinking about other possibilities for Liszt as coverboy, and though I resisted re-using "old Liszt" for a Mrs. Doubtfire: The Novelization, I did come up with this natural fit for very young Franz (although Mozart would work even better):

Jose was a bit more clever and found a place for old Franz in a new musical, inspired by this and, perhaps, this:

The Broadway musical idea got me thinking about ensemble casts, and soon this famous painting of Liszt and friends had morphed into a take-off on Sondheim's Company:

Somewhere along the way, it also occurred to me that Oscar Wilde, a pretty photogenic guy himself, might want to exact some revenge. This recording would surely feature a thrilling performance of Etude #8, Wilde Jagd*:

Bob also proposed the following, a book that would appeal equally to me and the wife:

And, finally, it wasn't such a big leap to imagine that the dashing Arnold Schoenberg could also serve ably as a coverboy for a book he helped to inspire:

And there you have it, your summer reading (and listening) list. See how useful Twitter can be.

* Liszt's title "Wilde Jagd" translates as "Wild Hunt," but in this case it might be interpreted as "Hunt for Wilde."

P.S. Some of these images are tangentially related to the "wrong character" principle that drives an amusing meme, which once inspired me to create this.

UPDATE (8/9): I only just remembered that the great piano virtuoso Earl Wild had a surname that was irresistible to his marketers, resulting in quite a few "Wild About [Insert Composer Name Here]" album covers, including this one that I owned on LP:

So, clever as my post title is, I'm sure it was partly inspired by memories of the above. And now that I've looked around a bit, I'm quite tempted to order this.

Happy Augmented Sixth Day!

2012-08-06T16:42:00.001-04:00

This morning, I was grading an analytical graph of a Mozart sonata that a student had prepared in Excel®. The student had, quite correctly, labeled one measure as featuring an "Augmented Sixth" chord, using the abbreviation "Aug 6th." Well, those who have battled with Microsoft Office products over the years will probably guess what came of that; instead of displaying"Aug 6th" in the little square, the graph said "8/6/2012." Perhaps this serves the student right for not being more specific and calling the chord an "Italian Sixth" (one of the three famous flavors of Augmented 6th harmony), but I couldn't help but be delighted by this bit of AutoCorrect® gone wild, especially because........TODAY IS AUGUST 6th!!!

So, this lovely little coincidence has led me to the realization that August 6th should be celebrated every year as Augmented 6th Day, and I quickly set up a hashtag on Twitter for #Aug6thDay. Unfortunately, it's probably too music-geeky to become a viral sensation (probably?!?), but I've still gotten a few nice responses, including proposals from pianist Geoffrey Burleson for a "San Francisco Sixth" and a "Hungarian Sixth" in honor of Henry Cowell and Franz Liszt. I'm gonna admit I don't know my way around Cowell's music, and I don't know off the top of my head exactly where Liszt's variant occurs - which perhaps will make you feel better if you don't know or remember what an Augmented Sixth chord is. (Augmented Sixth chords are notoriously confusing for music theory students just getting used to normal 'ol triads.)

Well, I'm still supposed to be grading here, so it's hardly the time for a big explanation, but although there are different configurations commonly referred to as Italian, German, and French, what they all share is a downward-pulling note on the bottom and an upward-pulling note on the top that resolve out by half-steps to an octave. Half-step motion is quite important in voice-leading in general, so this double-pull in opposite directions can have a very powerful effect since it's also always going to be using at least one note outside of the key. Thus, when Beethoven in his Waldstein Sonata wants to break through to a B Major chord (the V of E Major, which is where he's headed), he can just turn an A-natural into an A-sharp and, voilà, an Italian-style pull into B from above and below.

[Hear in context here, starting around the 0:28 mark.]

You can sample all manner of Augmented Sixth Chords if you so choose at the very useful Internet Music Theory Database. However, I'm going to end with just one more example, in this case a strikingly unsettled way to begin an extraordinarily beautiful song (#12) from Schumann's Dichterliebe. In this "German Sixth," the initial G-flat in the bass pulls down to F (the V of the song's B-flat Major) while an E in the right-hand leads up to an F. [The C-sharp is what makes this a German Sixth, and it also resolves up by half-step to D.]

This tender introduction sets the tone for a song which is quite simple melodically, but which seems to keep floating from one fragile flower petal (translation here) to another harmonically. Listen to the whole song, and note that this opening figure initiates a heartstopping piano postlude when words finally fail.

[should start at the 7:03 mark]

The same postlude returns at the end of the final song (when words have failed for good) and sets up the most satisfying but painful page any pianist ever gets to play (in any repertoire).

[should start at the 2:30 mark]

This chord deserves its own day, if only for the first measure of the first Schumann song above. Happy Augmented Sixth Day!

P.S. Another Twitter acquaintance notes that we've already missed the tritone fun that August 4th had to offer...

Time to Rhyme

2012-08-03T09:50:00.016-04:00

So, I've provided a vague sort of intro to Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot and plenty of passing references in posts this summer; it's time to unveil its central "character" and the first poetic response that it inspired from me. As I mentioned last time, Hofstadter's sprawling book was generated by a tiny little poem from the 16th century French poet, Clément Marot. Hofstadter was intrigued by the question of how such a poem might be translated into English, especially considering all the tight constraints imposed by the medium. He ended up writing more than 600 pages about this question. There are, of course, reasons to translate a poem literally (whatever that means), with concern only for the meanings (whatever that means) of the words, but an important point is that the meaning of this poem is clearly embedded, in part, in its poetic elements. A word-for-word translation is only a partial translation at best.

Still, before I reveal my first translation, it makes sense to include, along with the original poem, one of Hofstadter's "word-for-word" translations so that you can appreciate some of what is going on in Marot's charming creation. The poem was written to cheer up a young girl who'd fallen ill. It is quite lighthearted in tone, but beautifully crafted. Hofstadter, in sending the translation challenge out to his friends and colleagues, identified the following eight structural features that deserve consideration:

It is made up of 28 lines.
Each line has 3 syllables.
The stress falls on the last of these syllables.
It is a series of rhyming couplets.
The semantic couplets are out of phase with the rhyming couplets.
After line 14 the formal "vous" is replaced by the more colloquial "tu".
The last line echoes the first.
The poet slips his own name into the poem.

Actually, Hofstadter originally left out #5, an oversight which surprised me greatly. That lovely cross-rhythm is a key feature that jumped right out at me. (On the other hand, I might easily have missed #6.) Even when one of Hofstadter's colleagues first points out that the rhymes are out of phrase with the semantic couplets, he expresses some hesitation* about whether this property is essential or even intended by Marot. Hofstadter is an avid amateur musician and subtitles his book "In Praise of the Music of Language," so it's odd to me that this particularly musical quality escaped his notice, but it also shows how differently we can hear the same thing. (I probably took extra delight in having out-perceived Hofstadter since his general, wide-ranging brilliance is so intimidating. I do have quite a few other disagreements with his ideas, but I'm saving those for later posts. He's still "the man!")

Anyway, I was quite surprised that on first reading I felt compelled to take up his challenge right away, before reading a single "real" translation. There are dozens and dozens in the book, including dozens by Hofstadter himself, and his own translations of translations others made into languages other than English. (This book will wear you out!) The book is structured so that each chapter is followed by a series of related translations. My hope over the next few months is to continue exploring Hofstadter's book from many angles (especially with respect to musical implications), interspersed with little intermezzo posts featuring various poems I wrote while first reading this book back in 1998. (Too bad I wasn't blogging then, though I was emailing my little creations out to my poor family.) So, I present here my very first translation of Marot's A une Damoyselle malade ("To a Sick Damsel").

To see it, you'll need to highlight the invisible text in the third column. [Of course, you should try translating it yourself first.] You can also go see it here.

Marot
Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C’est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

Hofstadter
My sweet
I bid you
A good day;
The stay
Is prison.
Health
Recover,
Then open
Your door,
And go out
Quickly,
For Clément
Tells you to.
Go, indulger
Of thy mouth,
Lying abed
In danger,
Off to eat
Fruit preserves;
If thou stay’st
Too sick,
Pale shade
Thou wilt acquire,
And wilt lose
Thy plump form.
God grant thee
Good health,
My sweet.

Monroe
My delight,
I invite
you to smile;
For awhile
you¹ve been jailed.
Find your failed
health again.
Open then
the cruel door
to explore
right away,
for I say
you’ve no choice.
Go, rejoice,
since your tastes
lay in waste
while you’re ill;
Have your fill,
cakes devour!
Ev'ry hour
sickness wins,
color thins
from your face,
to displace
roundedness.
May God bless
you tonight,
My delight.

It's not perfect, but I'm rather proud of it as a first effort. I actually prefer it to most of the ones found in Hofstadter's book, but I may be biased...

If you're just dying to read more of my tortured rhymes, there are links to quite a few at the end of this post.

* Hofstadter writes: "...couldn't [this "out of phase" property] be pure chance, something Marot never intended or even realized, but that just by accident came out that way? Of course that's conceivable, though hard to believe." (11a) I find it inconceivable that Marot didn't intend this. It gives the poem a kind of forward momentum since each completed rhyme is only halfway through a thought - and when the thought is completed, the ear knows that another rhyme is around the bend.

Lost in translation...

2012-07-30T07:03:00.086-04:00

I’ve made many passing references this blogging summer to Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton beau de Marot, a book which I’ve said changed my life. The book first attracted my interest when I was trying to find a dissertation topic back in the late 90’s. Since I was in the process of metamorphosing from a pianist into a collaborative pianist*, I had become quite interested in the subject of musical transcriptions. After all, I was often spending hours a day pretending to be an orchestra accompanying concerti, arias, opera scenes, oratorios, etc. – and I loved being an orchestra. Come to think of it, my first deep attraction to music came when I took up the cello and joined my junior high school orchestra; seeing how parts fit together this way had an important catalytic impact on my theretofore casual piano studies. So, perhaps it makes sense that my piano training led me back to the “orchestra.”

And those scare quotes around “orchestra” are what, for awhile, I hoped to dissert about. I was and still am intrigued by what it means to have some core identity of a musical work shapeshift from the product of 100 musicians to 10 fingers. It says a lot about how Western music has been constructed that we so often accept this transfer from one media to another, even though we know something always gets lost in translation. Although piano reductions have long served utilitarian purposes, I thought there should be more literature addressing this curious art as art.

So when I saw that Hofstadter, author of the wonderfully interdisciplinary Gödel, Escher, Bach, had written a book about the art of translating art (in this case, poetry), subtitled “In Praise of the Music of Language,” I read it with great anticipation. (You might say I hoped to write a similar book about translating music, perhaps subtitled "In Praise of the Language of Music.") The surprising thing is that I became so interested in poetic translation that my dissertation topic shifted into the process of translating a French operetta libretto into English (while also “translating” a fairly standard orchestration into a chamber version). The aesthetics of piano reductions continued more as a side interest, something I still hope to explore more fully some day.

Well, that day has not yet fully arrived, but I've brought a small-scale case study. Hofstadter’s book is all about translating a tiny, tightly constructed French poem into English. (You'll see a few of my translations in future posts.) Most of the 600-plus pages flow out of questions about just what a translator should prioritize when transferring this "information" from language to another. Is it primarily a matter of getting the same ideas across? What about the rhymes? Meter? Alliteration? Does every line have to match up exactly, or can ideas move from one place in the poem to another? Medium vs. Message? Robert Frost famously said that "poetry is what gets lost in translation," but Hofstadter disagrees pretty strongly, just as I feel pretty strongly that a big concerto can still be very satisfying with only piano accompaniment. Yet, I'm sure we can all agree that there are times when a translation fails in some fundamental way.

So, to my case-study. My daughter started working on Prokofiev's first violin concerto this summer. I'm not sure why, but it's a piece I've never really gotten to know well, although I heard Hilary Hahn slice and dice it in absolutely glorious fashion (and in a gorgeous dress!) with the BSO a couple of years ago. (The more popular second concerto I've known for years and accompanied - er, served as its "orchestra" - many times.) I've written before about how when Daughter of MMmusing is studying a piece, I tend to like it more than expected and that the enthusiasm often wears off when she's moved on, but I'm pretty sure this "new to me" Prokofiev is a keeper. I've fallen head over heels in love with it, and for now, it seems like the most perfect and special of all concertos. (And I LOVE the violin concerto repertoire.)

One of its most magical and fairly unique features is the way the first and final movements end in almost exactly the same way. In the first movement, the closing section has featured the flute playing [7:37] the melody (see above) with which the soloist had opened [0:20] the concerto, the flute line now embroidered by intricate violin filigree; in the final movement, the violin itself revisits the same tune [5:40], trilling every note ethereally. In both movements, the closing section leads the soloist up to a high D [I: 8:56 III: 7:00], and then a few echoes of the rising fourth (A-D) that first generated the melody. Beneath this stratospheric rocking motion, the flute introduces a quirky, rising figure outlining F-sharp minor and thus emphasizing a C-sharp against the tonic D Major chord, with an even stranger clarinet line snaking up chromatically below. These flute and clarinet lines seem to have wandered in from some other concerto.

[click to view larger]

So, there's resolution mixed with the unexpected, heavenly serenity mixed with earthy sensuality. When the violin finally lands on the last high D, the flute slithers up an exotic scale from its lowest reaches. One could easily argue that this flute line is less about melody or harmony or even rhythm than it is about color – the piece is basically over, but it’s as if this final resolution (and new vantage point) unearths a curious new discovery. I don’t hear the ending as subversive or deceptive, although it could be interpreted that way, but rather as an unexpected heavenly reward, a little bit of earth come to color the sky.

That’s about as sappy a musical description as I’ve ever attempted here on the blog (I hope), and it’s much too wordy. A musical picture may be worth a thousand words, but who wants to read a thousand words about five seconds? The point is, this flute line is both superficial and essential to the character of the ending.

Here’s what it looks and sounds like in the score (slightly simplified to make these parts easier to read; note that this is a synthesized performance - not bad for virtual reality!).

[for some reason, clarinet audio is barely audible in transfer to YouTube; will fix soon.]

And here’s what those three bars look and sound like in the published
piano reduction I have:

All the good stuff is gone, especially in the final bar! Nothing but D Major arpeggios ascending upwards, a completely different effect. In the previous two bars, rather than play the distinctive rhythm of the flute, the pianist is given a bare outline that was originally played by the harp, but clearly subsidiary to the flute line.

There are all sorts of legitimate philosophies about what to leave out in a piano reduction, and all sorts of practical reasons to leave out even the most beloved little orchestral touches, but I can’t imagine the mindset that says those flute lines are expendable. It’s the end, the culmination, the reward, the final thought. The ending of the piece in the piano version above is missing the ending – like getting to heaven and finding it predictable and a little dull. It’s true that a piano can only begin to approximate the special color of a flute in that register. In fact, this concerto as a whole has many lovely chamber-like moments when only a few instruments are audible (clarinet, flute, and harp especially) and a piano can only begin to suggest what Prokofiev had in mind, but we collaborative pianists are all about suggesting. The fact is, it’s not very hard to play that little flute scale, and I will certainly do it when performances come around.

On the other hand, I would probably leave out the clarinet line (because it would be hard!), even though it also adds something unique, so there's a sliding scale in play. Hopefully it would come out something like this, though a real piano can do more shimmering (or so I choose to believe) than you get here.

Actually, after years of thinking I wanted to create my own piano transcriptions, I’ve realized that as a performer, I care less and less about exactly how things are rendered on the page, because I’m more and more likely to use my in-the-moment instincts to make decisions about what to play, how to pedal, etc. I think I’d drive myself crazy trying to get all these little decisions notated, and I suspect that the subtleties of touch and pedaling have more to do with a good “black and white orchestration” than what is printed on the page. (Trying to get that L.H. tremolo to sound decent with synths was much harder than getting the other instruments to sound real-ish.) But I do think this art of translation is worth pursuing as well as possible. I realize that whoever transcribed the Prokofiev above may have thought of the reduction as little more than a rehearsal dummy to let the violinist feel how things synch up, but endings matter. And that's the end of this post.

P.S. It's never totally clear to me how many people are interested in this kind of musical minutiae (I just wrote a lot of words about three bars of music), but if this post has inspired you either to get to know Prokofiev's first violin concerto or to explore Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot, then I will have accomplished something. I genuinely think these are two of the most sparkling monuments of the 20th century.

* I used "scare italics" to put a skeptical tone on this notion that a "collaborative pianist" is somehow different from a "pianist." Personally, I don't even mind being called an "accompanist!" Note the combo "scare quotes, italics, and exclamation point" to suggest just how volatile this word has become. Also note that, although I'm sure many writers and editors would say I use way too many parentheticals, hyphens, italics for emphasis, and scare quotes for eyebrow-raising, I think all these elements can help clarify the language being used.

It also occurs to me that, just as Hofstadter talks about translation as a kind of analogy-game (e.g. "jeux is a French analogy for 'game'"), scare quotes and the like can be a way of clarifying that a word is being used in a particularly analogical way. When I say that I am a pianist being an "orchestra," I want to say more than that I'm playing the orchestra part, but less than that I'm becoming dozens of people. I'm actually acting as an analogy for the orchestra. And if I do a good job, then like a good poetic translation, I have managed to keep from losing all of the art in the process of translation. (By the way, Hofstadter begins his great book noting that "Lost in an Art" is an anagram of "Translation.")

More Cover Coverage

2012-07-16T18:05:00.010-04:00

So, there was this online contest to design the best new album cover for a highly regarded classical CD. The contest promised lots of money and high-profile opportunities for the winner. Thus, I suddenly got hooked on the art of designing CD covers and ended up with a pretty cool Hahn/Lisitsa/Ives CD cover that won me first prize, $1000, and a job as head of marketing at Deutsche Grammophon.

Unfortunately, the only part of that paragraph that's true is the "I suddenly got hooked on the art of designing CD covers" part. This is likely a passing phase, but as I detailed in our last episode, a Proper Discord sampling of text-driven album covers got me interested in trying to create pictures with words. I gave that post the clever title, "A few words = A picture = A thousand words," which of course implies that "A few words = A thousand words." Obviously, there are some problems with my math. Aside from the unsettled question of just how many words it really takes to equal a picture, the slippery part of my equation is to consider these "few words" as just words. In fact, many of the "text-driven" covers are just as much driven by elements of graphic design, which is to say that the words are serving as pictures. There's a kind of slippage between medium and message going on, as my hero Douglas Hofstadter would say; in fact, words often (usually...or, perhaps, always) do more than just stand in for specific ideas, people, etc.

They may not always function as pictures, but they also have sonic qualities which can become musical (some might say "poetic"), whether it's via rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. Words might also have structural properties that create meaningful patterns - like the fact that the following "words" can be interlaced into a fairly tight crossword pattern: Hilary - Hahn - Valentina - Lisitsa - Ives - Violin - Sonatas. So, there are plenty of ways in which a few words might say more than just a few words. They can also say less, but that's a subject for another day.

When I condensed the "Minute Waltz" down to a minute, inspired by its much-maligned title (maligned because people inevitably read mi-'nute as 'mi-nute), I mentioned that I was translating this piece into the "medium of pieces that last 60 seconds." Aside from providing a good excuse for my mischief, it also reminds us that a medium can often be of interest in part due to its defining constraints, another pet Hofstadter topic. Sonnets, haiku, palindromes, acrostics, canons, piano pieces for left hand alone, piano pieces that last exactly a minute: they all offer a special framework which will likely exert a strong influence on the receiver beyond the mere words or pitches. The medium becomes part of the meaning.

And speaking of media, how about the "CD album cover with no artist photos" as medium? When I created my first text-driven cover, I was inspired by the much-maligned font Comic Sans to create a little dialogue with the person holding the CD:

Though it's not a very good translation of Chopin's music (or a very good picture), it's actually a pretty good translation of the subliminal message such CDs used to exert on me. The digital world means I don't buy many CDs these days, but I still have vivid memories of standing in Tower Records on Pennsylvania Av. in Washington, D.C. holding various CDs in hand and trying to figure out what I could afford to take home. And, yes, an image of someone like the legendary Maurizio Pollini on a cover (or even just the image created by the letters of his name) could exert a mystical kind of hold on me. Of course, I would've been insulted to have an album cover openly saying what I was thinking, which is why the subliminal works better than the superliminal.

...but I'd say my cover is a pretty accurate translation!

OK, but how about an even more restricted medium - the medium of CD album covers that resemble medicine labels? Pretty strange way to go, but Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot has many examples of seemingly arbitrary constraints into which ideas are poured. Check out this curious bit of poetry:

Washington Crossing the Delaware

A hard, howling, tossing water scene.
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O Silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When star general's action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands – sailor crew went going.
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens – winter again grows cold.
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with's hands in;
He's astern – so go alight, crew, and win!

David Shulman, 1936

Not the most elegant of sonnets, perhaps even uglier than the average medicine label - until you consider that every single line is an anagram of the poem's title! I know, right?

I cheated a little bit with my "medicine CD" (see below) by making up my own imaginary recording, though a recording of these Bellini songs does exist. I also cheated by indulging in some superliminal counter-marketing on my cover ("may cause drowsiness," etc.) because it was just more fun that way. Otherwise, I tried pretty hard to work within my self-imposed constraint: create a "working" album cover that looks like a medicine label. It's nice that Bellini actually sounds like the kind of name a drug company might give a product with a mouthful of a generic name like Composizioni da camera. I also had some fun inventing the ominous sounding company LaSonn Ambula (Google Translator tells me Ambula means "outpatient!"), which somehow reminds me of the fictitious drug conglomerate Devlin McGregor from The Fugitive - and which also happens to be the name of one of Bellini's most famous operas.

Since that opera is about a sleepwalker, it ties in nicely with the idea that Bellini® is a sort of natural Ambien - at least for pianists. Note that the pianist in this "recording" is named after a famous Puccini aria about not sleeping, so even the imaginary pianist has been translated into this druggy world; Giuditta Pasta is not imaginary, though also not available for recordings; she is the singer who debuted the role of the sleepwalking soprano in 1831, which I might have included as the expiration date on these songs if I'd been more clever.

If medicine label CD covers is too far for you as a worthwhile medium, let's re-visit my crossword design from the last post:

Though it's coincidental, surely there's some value in seeing all these lovely words cross so nicely, a sort of graphic representation of what happens when a phenomenally talented fiddler and pianist cross paths with a great composer. However, as an album cover it's a bit bland, so I decided it might be nice to cross this "word image" with some photos, and here we have my ~~award-winning~~ final design:

You might say (might...) it's my own "cover" of this cover:

And that about covers it...

A few words = A picture = A thousand words

2012-07-12T06:43:00.013-04:00

Over at Proper Discord, there's a nice selection of album covers that get by without photos of the performing artists or reproductions of French Impressionist landscapes. Pure, text-driven covers, abstractly rendered with elegant fonts and color schemes. Here are just a few:

My first, silly Twitter impulse was to take this concept to the absurd extreme by featuring that most disparaged of fonts, Comic Sans. This quickly led to the idea of comic strip bubbles imploring the browser to buy the CD in question:

Ah, the glories of MS Paint.

A little later in the day, I re-visited a design I've used on many a last-minute (or last-minute looking) recital poster: Stenciled text on brown shipping paper. (Vaguely reminiscent, at least in color scheme, of this old CBS Masterworks design; I had dozens of those "Great Performances" LPs.)

What I found most rewarding about this one is noticing for the first time how closely related "Gould Bach" and "Gold Berg" are as word pairs. (Hofstadter would love this kind of insight via interplay of medium and message.)

Somehow, my mind then went to one of the ugliest of text-driven layout genres: the medicine label. As soon as the phrase "may cause drowsiness" popped into my head, I knew this had to happen. After a little image Googling, I decided this had the right look:

On the subject of drowsiness, I decided nothing excites me less as a pianist than hearing a singer say, "Oh, I'm going to be doing a set of songs by {insert one: Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini}" because they all write deadly dull piano parts. Bellini won, partly because Composizioni da Camera has the right imposingly generic ring.

Take two and call me in the morning...

UPDATE: Here's another text-driven idea. The look could be improved, but I'm pretty proud of getting so many letters interlaced. It's a better design than this: