MMmusing

Chopin's Funeral March (with ghosts!)

2009-11-01T14:43:00.004-05:00

Last night, while thinking about music I might use to frighten the trick-or-treaters, I posted on Twitter links to Horowitz playing the 3rd and 4th movements of Chopin's second piano sonata. The 3rd movement is perhaps the most famous funeral march ever written, but the ghostly 4th movement is even more harrowing - just frighteningly fast unison triplets played mostly at a deathly whisper, often described as "wind howling around the gravestones."

3rd mvt		4th mvt

So, naturally, I accidentally opened both videos at the same time and another mashup possibility was born. (You can easily experiment yourself by playing the above videos simultaneously.) I think this one works particularly well, hearing the funeral march in the foreground with the 4th mvt providing an eerie backdrop. I tweaked the tempi just a bit to make things end satisfactorily, so here you go. If you'd like to see the actual score, you can go here (pp.15-20), although the 4th movement notes aren't much easier to follow even when they're sitting still on the page.

Previous MMmashups: Canon a 2 Tempi ~ Campanella Canon ~ The Rite of Appalachian Spring ~ Webern in Mayberry ~ Four Roses

When the Sun Comes Out

2009-10-31T23:54:00.003-04:00

I've been mildly obsessed with Sibelius' Symphony No. 5 lately, partly due to rereading Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, a book which I'm having a class read and which has a wonderful chapter on Sibelius. I came across this video of a performance in which a J.M.W. Turner painting (I think it's Turner) is slowly unveiled behind the stage at the first big climax (about 2:25 into the video). Although I think music should certainly be given a chance to speak for itself as a general rule, I find this quite effective. It does a good job of cuing the listener to the magnificence of the moment without being so visually engaging that the music becomes mere soundtrack.

If you don't know this inspiring work, be sure to stick around for the stunning conclusion.

See also: Seeing Music & Music as Image/Image as Music

P.S. I should add that it's not 100% clear whether or not the Turner image was just added to the video post-performance, but I suspect audiences would enjoy this kind of thing live.

Mysterious arabesques

2009-10-21T14:26:00.008-04:00

I was just passing the time playing through Couperin's beguiling "Les barricades mystérieuses," and remembered how much it has always reminded me of Robert Schumann's Arabeske. Not in a "Tune Theft" sort of way - rather, each piece is based on a similar type of flowing texture in which multiple melodic strands are slightly offset from each other, creating chains of suspensions. No time to go into more detail here, but I think the kinship is quite evident to the ear:

Couperin		Schumann

...and, perhaps a bit less so, to the eye:

Couperin: Les barricades mystérieuses (1717)
Schumann: Arabeske, Op.18 (1839)

You can view the complete scores here:
Couperin (p.123) | Schumann

Whatever you might think about the relative compositional similarity of these two works, written about 125 years apart, what they most share in common is that each composer seems to have unlocked some magical soundworld - two of the more perfect pieces I know.

UPDATE: I said I don't think of these pieces as sharing the same tune, but they do open with similar melodic outlines: a small interval up, a step down, and then a rising 4th - albeit with Couperin's 4th going re-sol and Schumann's sol-do. And each tune is housed in the same kind of dotted rhythmic figure. (Couperin uses ties instead of dots, but same difference.)

Classical Enthusiasm

2009-10-20T18:03:00.005-04:00

Interesting sighting of classical music in pop culture in the most recent episode (Season 7: #5) of Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Entirely coincidental - I think - that my last post concerned Seinfeld. This recent Curb episode, by the way, was chock full of Seinfeld homages, even as the season-long story arc about a Seinfeld reunion show was kept in the background.) I haven't seen all the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I've seen enough to know that Larry David has an obvious, Woody Allen-esque affection for classical music. The funniest Curb moment I've ever seen was the moment when Larry exacts revenge on a rude neighbor (and his trick-or-treating daughter) by conducting (with hilarious abandon) a live orchestra in a performance of the overture to Die Meistersinger on the neighbor's lawn. Wish I could find the clip on YouTube.

Anyway, Sunday night's episode opens with Larry sitting in a cafe, whistling to himself while listening to something through headphones. We first assume he will end up offending someone with his whistling (in fact, it may be the only moment of the entire episode when he's not offending someone), but to our surprise, his whistling attracts the sympathetic attention of an attractive woman who asks what he's listening to. His curious reply is, "Chee-Yun." I'll get to why that's curious in a moment, but it turns out the woman is also a Chee-Yun fan and a half-hour's worth of sophisticatedly crude comedy has been set in motion, all of which will come to a climax at a private Chee-Yun recital.

Now, I and many other classical music types know that Chee-Yun is a very successful Korean violinist, thought hardly the biggest name of her generation; but I would guess a fairly low percentage of Curb viewers would have known this, and there's very little help for those viewers until the end of the episode. Not that there's anything wrong with that - the "Chee-Yun" situation is intentionally established as a sort of exclusive something-or-other, so I'm guessing the director was happy to leave this vague.

However, I was dying to know just what Larry David was whistling along to in that opening scene - at the end of the episode, we briefly hear Chee-Yun playing the slow movement of the Mendelssohn concerto (scandalously, with no accompaniment*), but I didn't think that's what I'd heard. I ended up having to re-watch the opening several times before I could pick out the tune. You can try it yourself here (until it gets taken down - UPDATE: no longer available), although it doesn't help that Larry's first few whistled pitches were cut:

[VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

[WARNING: Episode gets curbier as it goes along.]

So, after several OnDemand rewinds, I finally recognized the beautiful theme from the 2nd movement of Schubert's B-flat trio (see p.94; hear here) - the whistling isn't that bad, but the scene starts from the middle of the tune and Larry's rhythm could use a little work. Still, there's no question this is what we're hearing. Which begs the question: who, listening to a chamber work such as this, would respond to a "what are you listening to" question by naming the violinist as opposed to the composer?

Of course, some people would, especially anyone who happens to be a particular fan of the violinist, but it's still an odd choice for the whistling, when they could have chosen from so many violin-specific pieces (like the Mendelssohn she's later heard playing). I haven't found any recordings of Chee-Yun playing the Schubert, though I see she performed it at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston last year. Maybe Mr. David was there and made his own bootleg recording, but I'm guessing he just really likes that tune - it IS one of the most perfect of melodies, although I always think of it as a cello tune, since the cellist gets it first.

[By the way, we in the classical music world tend to underemphasize the appeal of a good tune, which is why extraordinary tunesmiths such as Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Poulenc are too often underrated. If you can get your hands on Bernstein's The Joy of Music, take a look at this great conversation, "Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?" I love that Larry David's classical fandom manifests itself in whistling a little Schubert here, or whistling Wagner's Siegfried Idyl in the "trick-or-treat" episode that ends up with him maniacally conducting Die Meistersinger. The all-out intensity with which he wails away at his little orchestra is the kind of visceral thrill we want all of our audiences to experience.]

As much as anything, I suppose the little coffeehouse scene illustrates a fundamental difference in how classical music types think vs. the rest of the more pop-oriented world. We're used to thinking in a composer-based way, they're used to thinking in a performer-based way. Neither is right or wrong, but even though the Curb folks were happy to reference a fairly vague classical soloist without clarifying who she is, they still have the characters talk about her from the performer-based point-of-view - even when she's collaborating in some of the most sublimely non-showy chamber music imaginable. [Or, more likely, Larry David was just idly whistling a tune, and no one suspected anyone would actually care to think this much about it.]

* I mean, seriously, they have Chee-Yun giving a recital at a gorgeous, enormous mansion, which obviously would've housed a nice piano, and the producers couldn't be bothered to hire a pianist to play along? So unfair.

P.S. On this very day that I've been thinking about music fans idly whistling great tunes, I was walking across campus and heard a student (someone I didn't recognize, so pretty definitely not a music major) loudly whistling the theme to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, complete with wide, theremin-like vibrato and portamenti. It was quite the unexpected scene.

UPDATE: I've noticed on yet another viewing that the woman actually asks of Larry, "Who are you listening to?" Still begs the question, has she then already recognized the Schubert tune from Larry's whistling? If so, is she expecting to hear only a violinist's name, or, more likely, to hear the name of a trio? It's presented almost as if she's expecting him to say "Chee-Yun," since she's very excited by his response and declares herself to be a big fan - not of Schubert, but of Chee-Yun. Some enterprising musicology major needs to investigate this...

The Seinfeld Sonnets

2009-10-14T22:08:00.003-04:00

[Skip directly to sonnets.]

Here's something odd from my pre-blogging past. I've mentioned many times that reading Douglas Hofstadter's Le ton beau de Marot awakened an unexpected interest in writing poetry - especially poetry that follows fairly strict constraints and that invites lots of wordplay. Two of my favorite MMmusing moments involve sonnetized versions of two of the more celebrated classical music stories from the last two years: the Hatto Sonnets and the Bell Sonnets.

I was reminded of them today when Terry Teachout twittered about Calvin Trillin's fantastic couplet-ized takedown of Roman Polanski, which you should go right now and read. It's short and brilliantly to the point. Pretty soon, my mind wandered back to a kooky project on which I embarked a few years back. The goal: summarize each episode of Seinfeld in sonnet form. After all, I'm certain there's no episode I've seen less than five times, so I've got all this knowledge floating around, just begging to be used. As with the Hatto and Bell sonnets, I chose to follow the delightfully varied rhyming/metrical pattern that Pushkin uses in his great novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin. (Hofstadter devotes part of his wonderful book to the issue of translating Pushkin's rhymed Russian into effective English.)

Alas, as it happened, I only got around to finishing nine episodes before...well, I'm not sure what harebrained scheme drew my attention away, but I don't think I spent much more than a long weekend jamming these words together. I've always had the insane idea that I'd like to finish the project, but it occurred to me today that I probably never will and that I probably never should. So, where I once worried that presenting a few samples to the world would spoil the surprise (or perhaps inspire someone else to finish before me - delusional, though that thought may be), I decided today that I might as well post a few. They may appear as little more than gibberish to those who don't know the plots, full as they are of little quotes and allusions to as many details as I could manage in fourteen lines per show.

So, here are Seven Seinfeld Sonnets (complete with notes to self from way back), with enough enjambment and tortured rhymes to make you glad I never got around to the other 171 episodes:

16. The Chinese Restaurant

A Chinese restaurant is the setting
for dinner for a band of three.
The problem seems to be in getting
a table, so they wait and see.
Elaine is starving, George is waiting
to make a call; he needs sedating.
They try to bribe the maitre d'.
He takes their money cluelessly.
Elaine is offered fifty dollars
by Jerry to steal someone's food.
She chickens out. George scolds the rude
and antisocial payphone callers.
Despair sets in, they hit the door.
The clueless host says, "Seinfeld, four!"

[could still use references to "Skyburger" and "Plan 9 from Outer Space."
Also, the interesting trivial fact that there is no Kramer.]

23. The Parking Garage

Like wand'rers in a desert, fretting
inside a Jersey mall garage,
our heroes search the maze-like setting
for Kramer's car. "Right there?" Mirage!
Elaine's new fish is slowly fading,
while George's folks back home are waiting.
The friends divide, search high and low.
Both George and Jerry have to go.
Behind some cars, they go discreetly,
but each is caught, though Jerry pleads
his Uromysitisis needs.
George finds a woman who quite sweetly
agrees to help, but George misspeaks,
insults Ron Hubbard; then she freaks.

[missing heavy AC unit and closing scene]

34. The Boyfriend, Part I
35. The Boyfriend, Part II

A friendship blooms with Keith Hernandez
for Jerry. Soon Elaine competes
for interest from this baseball man, des-
pised spitter, Newman says; repeats
a JFK-type tale that Jerry
dispels with evidence contrary.
The "magic loogie" must have come
from somewhere else: McDowell, that scum.
To get his benefits extended
for unemployment, George invents
a firm that Jerry represents,
sells latex. All goes as intended
'till Kramer answers Jerry's phone,
"No Vandalay!" George ends up prone.

George dates Ms. Sokol's girl to flatter
in hopes that he'll keep getting paid,
while Jerry thinks something's the matter
when Keith, who's moving, asks for aid.
Poor Seinfeld's doubly jealous knowing
Elaine and Keith are still out going.
Keith's smoking turns Elaine away
and Jerry balks on moving day.
The homely daughter dumps Costanza,
his only hope is to impress
by introducing Mrs. S.
to Keith, but once again the plans a
mistake since Jerry's quit the move,
though Kramer, Newman helpful prove.

[no dropping of baby by Kramer, although that's no big loss to me. Wish I
could fit in ". . . and YOU want to be MY latex salesman!"]

51. The Contest

Poor George's mother lands in traction
when she walks in on George, who's by
himself with Glamour; his reaction
is evermore to self-deny.
His friends do not believe him able
and so they wager at the table
to see who can the best abstain,
be master of his own domain.
First Kramer loses to temptation:
a naked neighbor. Then Elaine
meets John-John. Jerry can't explain
to virgin Marla his frustration,
while George must watch a comely nurse
sponge-bathe a patient. How perverse!

[I'm just happy to have gotten through this one!]

57. The Outing

Elaine starts trouble by pretending
That George and Jerry are in love.
A girl who hears had been intending
to meet with Jerry, subject of
her story for the college paper.
At first it seems that they'll escape her
intent to out them when they chat.
(Not that there's something wrong with that.)
A faulty phone undoes their doing,
and soon they're outed in the press.
Costanza's mom falls in distress.
As Jerry sets things straight by wooing
the girl, in George walks playing gay
to scare his clingy girl away.

[substitution of "something" for "anything" annoys me. No mention of
Elaine's refusal to take off coat, although I never thought that was very
funny. Wish I could've mentioned "Guys and Dolls" and/or Better Midler.]

78. The Marine Biologist

When Jerry meets Diane from college,
he lies, says George matured. Now she
thinks George is a marine biolog-
ist. Kramer golfs balls out to sea.
Elaine repeats, while in discussion
of "War and Peace" with an old Russian,
what Jerry'd said: the book once bore
the name, "War, What is it good for?'"
The Russian hurls her organizer,
its names lead right back to the fiend:
to sum up, twice Corrine gets beaned.
George saves a whale: frees "fish's" geyser
from hole-in-one 'midst angry man-
in-deli sea. Truth miffs Dianne.

[The angry old man's soup is left out, but I'm pretty pleased I got that
much in. I don't think I've got space to work in the tape-recorder in any
more detail.]

The Dread Pirate Oswald

2009-09-27T20:28:00.007-04:00

I’ve confessed that Twitter may have sucked some energy out of this blog for the past few months, but as MMmusing comes back to life, it’s worth paying tribute to some of what I’ve learned from Twittering. For example, it is through Twitter that I learned about a great pirate from whom I’ve sort of been unknowingly pirating some ideas – ideas about pirating, as it happens. John Oswald, where have you been all my life?

I first heard of the enterprising Oswald about a week ago in my first ever “tweetup.” (By the way, I still squirm at some of the standard Twitter vocabulary. For instance, I refuse to refer to my Twitter acquaintances as “tweeps,” [admittedly, better than “twits”], and I really wish Twitter itself had a different name.) Yes, I had my first in-person meeting with a Twitter acquaintance last weekend; we were discussing my interest in exploring my improvisational/compositional side (given that I spend most of my performing life reading other peoples’ notes), and he suggested I check out Oswald’s creative work as a re-assembler of existing musical ideas. A few days later he emailed me the mp3 of what Oswald had done to a Count Basie tune. Segments had been snipped apart, reordered, and turned into something altogether off-kilter. I loved it, and found it wonderfully engaging. Something about perceiving order and disorder simultaneously, I think.

I don’t honestly know if this Oswaldian way of thinking was what inspired me to toss four sopranos into a little mashup of a Ned Rorem song a few days later (see previous post). I know I wasn’t consciously thinking of Oswald when I did it; as far as I could tell, the inspiration came from the following connection: I was writing about the various rates at which these sopranos sang a short little song, and that reminded me of having created a mashup of Maria Callas and Renee Fleming singing a famous Puccini aria at two widely divergent tempi. In fact, I’ve created lots of little projects that have used existing audio files as primary source material. [see below]

But here’s what happened. I posted my new “soprano quartet” on Twitter, and pretty soon got the following response from another Twitterer: “You’re a regular John Oswald!” A week previously, that would have meant nothing to me, but now I started to see the connection. Then, not much later, my tweetup friend tweeted, in reply to my “soprano quartet”:

Oswald Was Here:"Z24" (1993) superimposes beginnings of all 24 CD versions of Also Sprach Zarathustra then extant.

Soon after, I was listening to a remarkable sonic Strauss collage that makes that overly familiar fanfare seem newly breathtaking. So, yeah, this was basically exactly what I was doing with Rorem’s song, although the source material could hardly be much different. I was stealing from Oswald.

Of course, Oswald could hardly object since he’s a confessed thief. In fact, his most famous album is entitled Plunderphonics. Not surprisingly, he’s run into his share of objections from those (including Michael Jackson) who didn't appreciate having their work appropriated. Fortunately, no one's pulled the plug on any of my creations yet, but it's interesting to be learning about the pioneering work of the great Pirate Oswald.

In blog posts to come, I'll write more about why I find this sort of thing so appealing, especially since I'm not generally attracted to the chaotic or avant-garde. Actually, I think the attraction can be summed up by the phrase I used above: "perceiving order and disorder simultaneously." Indeed, though the Puccini and Rorem mashups I've done have their cacophonous moments, the listener is aware (or at least can be) that more traditionally beautiful music is there - it just has to be sorted out from...well, from the other beautiful music that's there. And that's also part of the appeal to me: the exhilaration of listening to multiple streams at the same time. (The marvelously conceived In-Bflat is a good way to explore that.) In this way, the appeal to the listener is not all that different from the appeal of counterpoint.

I'm running out of time for getting this posted, so rather than say much more here, I'll post my most recent mashup. A quick setup: With sadness, I learned yesterday that the great pianist Alicia de Larrocha had passed away at the age of 86. While sampling her playing on YouTube, I came across a very impressive rendition of Liszt's fiendishly difficult La campanella - extraordinary playing, even not taking into account how tiny de Larrocha's hands were. Then coincidentally, and in the spirit of "In-Bflat," I accidentally set two Firefox tabs playing the video at almost the same time. Naturally, I was entranced, and have tried to recreate that here:

Unlike my Rorem and Puccini collaborations among various sopranos, here the two "parts" are exactly the same. There's a cool sort of temporal displacement effect, as one part is echoed in the other. By the way, although I experimented with timing the second part at, more or less, exactly one or two or four measures apart from the first, I quickly found that the effect is more satisfying when the two tracks don't sound like they're trying to get along. We don't want too much order here!

Also, I've created a little YouTube playlist for other little mashups that I've produced in the past couple of years. And here's one other musical merger that hasn't made it to YouTube yet. Oh, yes, and there's Amphetepollini. [UPDATE: in a slightly different vein, here's my 7-part vertical Christmas medley. WARNING: Music will start playing when the page loads.]

The Last Roses of Summer?

2009-09-22T22:11:00.002-04:00

OK, so this latest hiatus has been ridiculous, to the point that you might well wonder if I'd stopped blogging for good. (Would that mean I'd started blogging for evil?) But, it's always been my intention to get back to it - there's just an enormous amount of inertia to overcome the longer one of these gaps lasts. I've also managed to get behind on a number of non-blog projects, so it's been hard to justify taking the time to put a post together, but here I am. I think it's fair to say that Twitter has consumed some of my potential blogging energy, but it's also been a source of lots of interesting discoveries, inspirations, etc. If you don't *do* Twitter, I can't pretend it's the easiest thing to make sense of from the outside, but I am ever followable there at www.twitter.com/MMmusing. Also, my first 1000 (!) tweets are archived here.

I could be wrong, but it sometimes seems to me that the classical music blogosphere is less energized than it was when I first started at this in 2007. Of course, it could just be that the blogs I follow the most have gone through natural cycles of diminishing activity. It is a lot of work to keep the content flowing, and I strongly suspect that Facebook and Twitter have each served to siphon off some blogging energy. While it's easy to be critical of that, what I would say, in Twitter's favor at least, is that it facilitates a kind of regular back-and-forth dialogue that is harder to achieve with a blog - but, depth of content is inevitably lost, just as blogs provide less depth (but more sense of two-way communication) than journals and the like. So, I'm committed to get back on track here. Goodness knows, I've written dozens of blog posts in my mind this summer. (They were all brilliant!)

Well, anyway, I'm here today to report on a minor bit of Twitter inspiration that reminds me how much I love the back-and-forth of the Internet. It began with a couple of Twitterers posting about this astonishing story, in which music industry types are revealed to be seeking payment for the 30-second audio samples iTunes provides in its online store. I realize the intent is probably to get iTunes to pay up behind the scenes, not to make users pay directly for each sample sampled, but nevertheless, it's hard to imagine how the music industry can't see that free samples are a valuable advertising tool.

Still, if I'm honest, I'll admit that I often use iTunes free samples as a way to check up on tempi, performance style, etc. without a real intent to buy. Even more intriguing is the rare iTunes sample that actually is an entire work, making a purchase seem altogether pointless. A few years back, Scott Spiegelberg had a post about the shortest complete tracks on his iPod; that led me to think about the shortest complete pieces I could think of, and I remembered Ned Rorem's tiny little setting of Gertrude Stein's "I Am Rose." Sure enough, it appears four times on iTunes, in lengths ranging from 19 to 30 seconds. (Go to the iTunes Store, search "rorem am rose," and you can hear them all.) So, as I commented on Scott's blog way back then, you can essentially get this song for free.

I was reminded of this by the "let's charge for samples" story, and so I tweeted about the songs briefly here. (I realize that "briefly" is a redundancy where Twitter is concerned.) A couple of tweets later, the thought of four sopranos being timed on this song gave me excuse to plug my "Callas vs. Fleming" mashup from March, and the MMmusing wheels were pretty much in motion. As I tweeted next, "...if you've been following my past few posts & if you know me well (wife nods, frowning), you'd know this had to happen: http://tr.im/zmkO." So, yes, I tossed these four bits of Rorem into a little collage, made all the more delightful by the variations in tuning among the pianos involved. There's a lot more I'd like to say about this, but why waste material that could make another blog post? So, for now, I just leave you with this little oddity, with animations I added this evening. Enjoy!

Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator

2009-07-31T20:31:00.001-04:00

Here ends my longest blogging hiatus to date. My last post was on June 17, and I almost failed to get a single July post in. Actually, I thought I'd get this posted a few days ago, but this project took on a little life of its own. Coincidentally (or, perhaps, not so coincidentally), my previous blog post also concerned Stravinsky. In yet another recent post, I wondered aloud if some of Stravinsky's famously off-kilter accents might be so familiar that they'd benefit from some improvised shifting around of emphasis. And that pretty much led to this:

Follow the link and see what happens!

I'll refrain from commenting more for now (although I have much to say about the experiment), mainly because I'm running out of time and I'm determined not to have a blogless July. Blogging will probably continue to be slow-ish for the rest of the summer, but I hope to work my way back in over the next month or so. Time will tell...

In the meantime, you can always review these fun Stravinsky/Rite links from the past, including the first appearance of Simpsonized Igor.

Googling Stravinsky

Piano Rites

The Rite of Springfield (Simpsonized Stravinsky)

Stravinsky conducting in Springfield

The Rite of Appalachian Spring

Le sacre du Peterman

The Rite of Springtone

The Rose of Spring

Googling Stravinsky

2009-06-17T13:21:00.007-04:00

A Twitter acquaintance notes that Google has chosen to celebrate Igor Stravinsky's birthday with today's logo tribute. As Tom Service observes, that's good exposure for classical music, but this is one of the more disappointing Google artworks I've seen. It just doesn't say Stravinsky to me - it's so breezy and picnicky. Even the Firebird looks remarkably friendly, and I hadn't noticed that Stravinsky's favorite motif is four Papageno-esque sixteenth notes running up the scale.

So, during my lunch hour, I decided I'd try my hand at a Google tribute. It's not perfect - a bit too Photoshoppy, and the incorporation of the letters isn't all that elegant. But it was only a lunch hour!

In addition to the Google o's as glasses for the iconic face, I decided to use the three famous ballets for which the composer is most well-known: The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring. I used a firebird image I'd found hiding out here, we see Stravinsky dreaming up Petrouchka's famously bitonal clarinets in the middle, and one of Nikolai Roerich's set designs for The Rite makes an appearance on the right. (Wish I'd had more time to bend that Google 'l' to Roerich's will.) I also prefer mine at smaller scale. It certainly says Stravinsky more clearly.

Anyway, Happy Birthday to Mr. Stravinsky. You can hear his own arrangement here.

UPDATE: New version (not necessarily better):

Previous manipulations of Mr. S:

The Rite of Springfield (Simpsonized Stravinsky)

Stravinsky conducting in Springfield

The Rite of Appalachian Spring

Le sacre du Peterman

The Rite of Springtone

The Rose of Spring

Weekend at Cliburn-ies

2009-06-09T17:20:00.005-04:00

[WARNING: This may be the most rambling post I've ever written. Be sure to leave bread crumbs as you read...]

When I think back, two particularly important influences in my decision to become a pianist /musician date back to my teen years when I 1) read a charmingly dated 1959 book entitled The Van Cliburn Legend and 2) saw a documentary about the 1981 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The former is a hokey, hot-of-the press sort of bio, written by Abram Chasins shortly after Van Cliburn had stunned the cold world by winning the '58 Tchaikovsky Competition. It was much later than 1959 when I read it, but it was one of the few books on music one could find at my small-town library. I devoured it, with its stories of the legend getting up to practice for two hours before school, amusing stuck-up New Yorkers with his Texas drawl, and conquering the world with his charm and chops.

I'd never heard of the competition named in honor of Cliburn until PBS showed that 1981 documentary (don't know if it was shown in '81 or '82). Within a year, I'd also seen a documentary about the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition, and it's pretty safe to say I was completely hooked by everything about these mysterious worlds that had opened up - if ever so slightly. The truth is, the documentaries were maddeningly brief, with mostly just glimpses of performances, and (especially in the case of the Tchaikovsky event) a lot of emphasis on personalities and less on what had actually happened. As I recall, the Tchaikovsky film focused mainly on English-speaking musicians and then, at the very end, listed winners; I remember being confused that the affable "stars" of the show were not the biggest prize winners. (Several big prizes had gone to Russian and Asian violinists/pianists who'd barely been mentioned.)

That focus seemed odd to me for what was also surely one of the main attractions to me of these competitions. I was, at the time, a fanatical sports fan, so as I was just falling in love with piano and music generally, it was thrilling to see it as competitive sport. On the other hand, sports had conditioned me to expect more attention would be paid to results, not to mention the gameplay itself. So the documentary thing was really frustrating. Not to sound like an old fogey, but it's amazing to think this was basically my only way to find out anything about these events from my South Arkansas town, pre-Internet. It would have been as if the World Series happened in seven thrilling October games, and I found out who won in a two-hour February PBS film that only showed final results during the closing credits. (Actually, diehard basketball fans may remember that as recently as the late 70's, NBA Finals games would be shown in tape-delay after the evening news.)

By 1989, we actually had a local public radio station that carried a lot of Cliburn competition performances; that was exciting, because I knew one of the contestants (though she didn't make it out of pre-lims), but it took a lot of dedication to keep up with what was going on relying entirely on radio. What a change that is from today, when this year's entire Cliburn competition has been streamed live in remarkably satisfying video quality. The truth is, I've been paying less and less attention to these events over the past 20 years, so when this year's competition began, I had almost no interest, for reasons I'll try to explain. However, over the past couple of days, I slowly got pulled back in and ended up devoting much of my weekend to watching, listening, and scorekeeping. In summary, my thesis statement here would be something I Twittered recently, "Music competitions are so stupid - and such fun!"

My last post concerned some of the ambiguities of how it is that we listen to music, and pondering the Cliburn competition is another great way to dive into that topic. It's pretty easy to make the negative case for these events: 1) music isn't supposed to be a vehicle for competition, it's a vehicle for artistic expression. 2) the events put too much pressure on young artists. 3) the judging is almost inevitably biased, sometimes scandalously so. I took my first dip into Cliburn news this year by reading some of Gregory Allen's ongoing blog reviews of the proceedings. Allen is a distinguished piano prof at UTexas, whose posts I've come to appreciate more and more over the past week, but my immediate reaction was to Twitter, "Reading through Gregory Allen's Cliburn reviews. I find this kind of sniping depressing & so not what music is about."

This got some justifiably curious responses from Twitter followers, and I've spent the past several days trying to figure out just what I meant. First of all, "sniping" wasn't really a fair characterization of Allen's critiques, although I do have a general negative reaction to little one-sentence summary putdowns along the lines of "this performance was more about surface than substance." To be fair, my immediate negative reaction may have to do with my own inferiority complex; in the years between my first discovery of Van Cliburn and the Tchaikovsky Competition, it turns out I wasn't the first ever to gold-medal in Moscow both as pianist and cellist. I'm perfectly happy with my musical life and with who I am as a pianist, but it's hard not to read these often merciless critiques without wondering what an Allen might say about my playing. I'm fully willing to admit I don't have the technical equipment of any of the pianists in the competition. Maybe that's why I found his reviews depressing.

So, yeah, on the one hand, I've changed a lot since the early 80's, and no longer think it's such a great thing to turn musical performance into a competitive sport - and I really don't like the way an event like this turns so many sideline viewers into nit-pickers. Reading through the various Cliburn blog comments was often depressing, as eager listeners couldn't seem to wait to weigh in with a "ooh, wrong note" or "there's no overall shape to this playing" or "this is vulgar and an insult to the composer" remark. The poor pianist is up there trying to do his or her best in very challenging circumstances, and in most cases wonderfully world-class music is being made, and yet many listeners seem to find much more pleasure in sniping about what's wrong than in the music itself - and the competitive format makes that almost inevitable.

On the other hand, it can be quite compelling to follow along with these comments (a few despicable trolls aside) as a live performance is in progress - to compare my own reactions with those of others. And, in fairness, the moderators of the Cliburn blog and many of the commenters were mostly respectful and insightful. There's something unique about being able to listen collectively in this way, by silently sharing thoughts with enthusiasts from all over the world, while listening as well. Of course, much is lost by not being in the hall and hearing the actual sounds, although the camera angles (generally quite good and appropriately varied) and the mics provide an aural/visual image that is in some ways more detailed than one would get in person. That, of course, is not really fair to the performers, and I think some of the pickiest online sniping about pianist/orchestra coordination focused on details that would have been appropriately lost in the hall.

So, having ignored competitions for many years (partly because I'd turned my focus from solo to collaborative piano), I'm intrigued to have found myself drawn back in and have realized that such events reflect the most important tensions in the classical music world at large. For better or for worse, an event like the Van Cliburn shows how much the music world is about a very particular, even narrow way of thinking about what music should be. Contestants can play anything they want, but let's face it: they play a lot of Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Ravel, Beethoven, Haydn, and Bach, and just about everyone has a big Russian concerto at the ready. (All six of this year's finalists played a concerto by either Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev. Apparently in '05, there were four Rachmaninoff 3rds!)

Emphasis on chamber music and new music is mostly of the cursory variety - it's basically about being a pianist in the way that conservatories have been defining piano-playing for a century or so. 19th century rep is the core, memorization is an absolute must, fidelity to the score (as filtered through 20th century sensibility) is highly valued, conspicuous pedaling in Bach is frowned upon, being able to create an enormous sound without banging is essential for concerto success, etc. I don't really have a problem with any of this - after all, this is the very world that drew me into music in the first place. If I could play at the level of any of the six finalists, I'd be a very happy pianist. If I had an opportunity to play the Prokofiev 3rd or the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody with an orchestra, I'd be overjoyed. That rep and that ideal of piano playing still is a big part of who I am.

But, yes, it's a fairly narrowly defined culture, shaped as much as anything perhaps by the general jury requirement for piano majors across the world. It doesn't address a pianist's ability to play a Schubert song cycle, to improvise a Mozartian cadenza, to play from a lead sheet in a jazz combo or an indie rock band, to handle something really avant-garde, etc. Like the wider world of classical music, the culture is defined not so much by a constantly questioning sense of what music might be as it is by a shared sense of what it has been. That way of thinking is coming under attack more and more, and rightly so I suppose. But it's easy to overlook the positives that come from having a common sense of musical values and ideals. Art and culture are significantly about a shared sense of what's meaningful.

In a world that's too open-minded about what a great pianist might be, one wonders if there'd be much audience for anyone in particular. Getting back to my sports roots, I sometimes think that those who want to get culturally-defined rules out of the system are like those who would say:

Yeah, baseball's good in concept, it's fun to watch people swing at a fast-moving little ball, but let's rethink everything about it - number of bases, number of innings, number of players, distance from mound to home, ways in which runs are scored, direction you can run around the bases, etc. Why should we limit ourselves to these preconceived notions about how baseball might be played? Maybe fielders should be able to throw directly at baserunners, like in kickball! How about making everyone in the field take turns pitching, like in volleyball? Maybe pitchers should have to use twelve different pitches, and no single pitch can be reused until all have been used once? What if there was no ball, no players, and no scoring? Just 4 hours and 33 minutes of contemplating the beauty of the baseball diamond? Or, why a diamond? How about a fractal? "

It's almost guaranteed that, with years of seeing what works and what doesn't work, someone could come up with a better version of baseball. Except, it wouldn't be baseball, because it would lose that all-important connection to the shared experience with the past. (Tangential excursion: I've always thought football would be better if they got rid of the fumble rule, and basketball needs to get rid of the fouling-out rule - though a penalty box would be cool. I hate seeing football games decided by watching someone rip the ball away from someone, and I hate seeing basketball games decided because a great player is eliminated due to some horrible call.) I'm not saying that moving away from a Beethoven/Chopin/Rachmaninoff emphasis would destroy what piano playing is all about, but we would lose something, something that helps to make the experience richer for all - something that makes it possible for so many people to be interested in the happenings at a major international piano festival.

Of course, it's still fascinating to see how wildly differently people's impressions can be, however narrowly defined the world. Perhaps the most amusing aesthetic question to me concerned Evgeni Bozhanov's widely deplored performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. What's amusing is that, at least out in the wider world of intellectual musicking, Rachmanoff's music is considered a bit vulgar, because it's so much about dazzling virtuosity (showing off) and big, sappy tunes. (It's also looked down on by some, in all likelihood, because it's so popular.) So what's funny is that the word most often applied to Bozhanov's Rachmaninoff was: vulgar. But, not vulgar from that snooty intellectual perspective; no, vulgar, because Bozhanov was not perceived to have paid enough respect to the score and, thereby, to the composer. (In other words, snooty from a different intellectual perspective.)

Even more oddly, Bozhanov was accused of "drawing attention to himself." Shocking! A man with prodigious keyboard skills, who's been put on stage in front of an enormous orchestra because of those prodigious skills, and who's playing a work that's partly defined by it's suitability for showing off prodigious skills - this haughty young man has the nerve to play in a way that draws attention to himself! In some ways, this suggests the part of "piano culture" that I find most troubling. In order to make us feel all the more important about ourselves, we love to pretend that music is some noble cause that must be treated with immense respect. Actually, I think respect is a perfectly good thing, but we have remarkably constricted ideas of what constitutes respect, and we love to pretend that we're not largely about the business of show business. (You should have heard Bob Schieffer prattle on endlessly at the award's ceremony about the trememendous importance of CLASSICAL MUSIC, with little if anything said about how much fun it is to play and listen.)

Maybe I just feel silly because I watched Bozhanov's performance live - and I loved it. I found it gripping from beginning to end. Yes, I recognized that he did some quirky things - brought out some notes unexpectedly, shifted gears impulsively; but I also genuinely heard him expressing love for the music and the experience of being there on stage, making something new and exciting happen. There was much consternation that he didn't care about conductor or orchestra, but I heard him as listening intently to everthing that was going on around him - and maybe responding spontaneously at times. He missed some notes, he probably faked some notes, but it struck me as serious and engaged musicmaking. I intentionally did not follow the Cliburn blog during the performance, and I Twittered my immediate reaction before diving in to view the critical bloodbath. After reading the almost unanimous disapproval of what he'd done, I haven't known quite what to think. [You can view the performance online; by the way, it doesn't help general perceptions that Bozhanov exhibits some very odd facial expressions when playing.]

At some point I intend to go back and listen again, but should it be my goal to identify all the "vulgar" things Bozhanov supposedly did? In other words, should I set out to figure out why I shouldn't have had such a good time hearing him play in the first place? That seems like an odd kind of thing to do, and yet it can sometimes seem that "learning what not to like" is a major part of what musical training is about. And that presents a BIG problem for classical music, because it means a less "enlightened" audience will often be confused about why something that seemed perfectly enjoyable gets panned. We're a top-down driven world in a lot of ways (critics and academics do a lot of the taste-setting), and that's not always a good thing.

My point is not that there's no such thing as vulgar, excessive playing; but I'm not convinced that simply departing from what's printed in the score is automatically vulgar. Two important considerations come into play here. 1) Rach 2 is so familiar, it's can be refreshing to hear some different ideas brought in. 2) The past century did such a good job of establishing score-fidelity as an important consideration, I think it's safe for there to be some market correction in that area. Anyway, Bozhanov, who had seemed to be a frontrunner heading into the Finals, almost definitely sealed his fate with his Shockmaninoff, as he failed to medal. Yet, from the admittedly limited amount of the competition I heard, he's the the one I'd go most out of my way to hear - a reminder of why so many people hate music competitions, with their natural tendency to weed out the ever-divisive originals.

The two gold-medalists provide plenty to think about as well. I completely agreed with the choice of Haochen Zhang, a 19-year old from China. He showed a prodigious technical command and consistency that impressed everyone, although there was much predictable hand-wringing about his supposedly unimaginative musicianship. I honestly find his playing to be satisfying on just about every level, and suspect people are reading into his playing what they see in his youthful, unassuming demeanor. I actually found his playing much more "musical" than that of his co-gold medalist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, the blind 20-year old from Japan who stole everyone's heart.

Read through the Cliburn blogs and you'll read again and again of the sublimely pure spiritual qualities of Tsujii's playing - qualities I honestly heard much less than in Zhang, but again, listeners inevitably put their feelings about what they see into what they hear. Which is fine with me, because music is ultimately about the whole experience of listening, not just soundwaves. All of which is to say, I'm basically content with all the contradictions built into the idea of music competitions; they're far from perfect, but they can do a great job of spotlighting gifted young musicians and of getting us all to think about what we love about music.

In fact, I was in such competition withdrawal when the Cliburn came to a close, I talked my long-suffering wife into watching that B-movie classic from 1980, The Competition, as a Sunday night chaser. That movie deserves it's own blog post, so surprisingly watchable as it is in spite of enormous helpings of unintentional comedy - but I'll say this: it reinforces how riveting musical performance can be, and I think it communicates that pretty well even to a non-musical audience. In fact, I honestly believe the movie begs for a remake. The plot needs tons of reworking, and just about everything could be better, but I think a scene like this would do more for classical music than most of the desperate efforts you see out there.

So this has been a long and rambling post. I think I'll end it here!

Meta-music

2009-06-05T15:11:00.004-04:00

Here's a video to get you thinking about what musical performance is all about. I've been interested in piano versions of The Rite of Spring for awhile now, mainly because I've been listening again and again to Dag Achatz's remarkable solo version. (Get the whole Rite for only two tracks on eMusic.) I'd love to get my hands on Achatz's arrangement, even though I'm sure it would eat me alive. (Piano transcriptions, in general, are of special interest to me.)

There is also a 4-hand version prepared by the composer, and I guess that's what Fazil Say is playing above, but he's apparently recorded two of the hands ahead of time, using a Bosendorfer reproducing piano. In fact, as you'll see, Say doesn't actually start playing until almost a minute into the work (which is odd, because in Stravinsky's 4-hand version, the secondo part enters in the second measure, so maybe this is an entirely different arrangement.) This makes for a strange sort of drama as the work begins with the piano playing by itself, with Say intently watching and occasionally shuffling the sheet music around. (Come to think of it, it would have been really cool if the piano started before Say comes onstage; auto-piano functioning as a sort of primordial, pre-human prelude.) Finally, he starts playing, although the audience can never really know for sure which notes are being played by Say's fingers in the moment and which were performed ahead of time.

Now it's interesting enough to consider how we listen when hearing a piano version of such iconically orchestral music. As I've already suggested, I love hearing it this way, but that surely has something to do with the fact that I'm hearing the orchestral version internally (via what Oliver Saks calls musical imaging) - at least to some degree. The brain is both enjoying the newness of the piano sonority and filling in the gaps with orchestral sounds. Honestly, it's surprising how effectively this incredibly colorful score transfers to black-and-white, but for the experienced listener, there's no question there's a kind of layered listening going on. (Of course, all listening is layered, but this more specifically so.) It's also an opportunity to hear new things in the music, as the transcription inevitably brings different aspects to the surface.

Then we have this whole issue of what an audience expects in a live performance - namely, live performing. Obviously, there are lots of exceptions to that in the pop/rock world with backing tracks, lip-synching, etc., but classical music culture still has this baseline assumption that the notes are being produced in real-time. There are exceptions to this, whether through the use of taped sounds or the growing interest in looping performances live, as seen in this Zoe Keating cello+laptop performance (via Hugh Sung). But here we have something closer to the old studio trick that allowed Jascha Heifetz and Gidon Kremer to play both parts of the Bach double concerto - or the Emerson Quartet to record the Mendelssohn Octet. (Or, for something more extreme, check out Doug Yeo's multi-track recording of the 1812 Overture on serpents!)

So, this is bringing that concept to the concert hall. On the one hand, one might ask why Say doesn't just pre-record the whole thing. The audience still would get to hear the genuine sound of a live piano - not the same as listening to a recording - but there'd be considerably less suspense. An important part of our listening has to do with appreciating the technical challenges that are being attempted. (See my first ever blog post.) Also, Say is clearly a rather theatrical performer, so watching him play can be a catalyst for the audience's listening. It is, after all, music that was written to accompany visuals.

And that brings up another interesting listening layer, one I've blogged about before (here and in Peterman-style here): this is music that is ostensibly about primitive pagan rituals - and yet presented in a very disciplined, civilized, and modernist context. I spent last week in some enlightening meetings with faculty from other arts disciplines, and the theater prof talked about the idea of the Greek theatrical mask as a way of providing a safe distance from the sometimes intensely disturbing content of a tragedy being played out on stage. The audience member for Say's performance is not only dealing with the "piano as orchestra" layer and the "pre-recorded as live" layer, but also the fascinating "primitive/barbaric via cultured/safe" layer.

I'm honestly not sure how to evaluate exactly what's going on here, but I guess I could say that I'd like to hear something like this live, even if it breaks some rules about what we expect a live performance to be. I can see how this allows the transcription to incorporate much more detail than a solo version could, and yet there's something inherently dramatic and heroic about seeing only a single performer on-stage - and there's something curiously dramatic about seeing the piano play itself, as if the performer is in dialogue with the instrument. Perhaps it works particularly well because this is such an iconic work, already full of contradictions.

One of the Twitterers I follow recently confessed to having listened to The Rite every night for a year as a teenager; not only is that making a true rite of the Rite, but it suggests an extreme version of what most fans of this experience surely experience: the sense that, even after repeated listenings, the music is still full of terrifying surprises - even when they're not actually surprising any more. Think of those famous "unpredictable" accents [3:08 in the video above] that augur the coming of Spring and other frightful things:

If you know the work well enough, the accents aren't really surprising or unpredictable, but we continue to hear them that way because they're encoded with a kind of meaning that goes beyond the literal aural experience - in much the same way that a long, suspenseful pedal-tone buildup can still thrill on the 123rd hearing. (It's an interesting aesthetic question to wonder if a performer might be justified in shifting those accents around!)

The bottom line is, we are strange, complex creatures when it comes to how we listen. One element I didn't yet mention is that, because Fazil Say has an established reputation as a virtuoso, his audience will buy into his unusual presentation because they have little reason to doubt that he's still challenging himself. I mean, I could go out on stage with a Bosendorfer programmed to play 90% of the Trois mouvements de Petrouchka (a work I'd dearly love to play, but not sure I have the chops), with me just overlaying the remaining 10%, and the result might be aurally thrilling - but who'd want to hear it?

BONUS: I just ran across this video of another solo pianist (Daniel Rivera) tackling the monster, here in an arrangement by Sam Raphling. Look at that crazy cut-and-pasted score. That guy really needs an Airturn! (Yes, I'm a testimonialist for the Airturn, but an unpaid one who genuinely thinks it's great.)

Twittering away...

2009-05-21T21:31:00.004-04:00

I've got a good, substantive blog post in the works (read: it's all in my head, and it strikes me as completely brilliant in that formless state, but it may never see the light of laptop), but this semi-vacation period seems like a good time to reflect on the Twitter experience. I suppose I could begin with this disturbing stat: I posted 24 Twitter updates yesterday! (Honestly, I thought that number would be closer to 12 until I just checked. Yikes.)

The day was a bit exceptional, for reasons I'll explain, and I'm in that school vacation mode, even though I haven't finished all my grading and even though the house/yard/children/etc could desperately use my attention. Although I'm sure I've never before had 24 "tweets" in one day, I have racked up a total of 346 in less than two months. So, here's an attempt to figure out why and to ramble on about the Twittersphere.

As has been well-documented here, the "Twitter an Opera Plot" contest is what got me to sign on, and it's also what has really defined my Twitter world so far. Alas, I was not a winner of the Big Round 2 version of the contest, but it was a remarkable experience to be a part of such a large-scale creative activity. Think of how much time, knowledge, and invention went into creating these hundreds of little distillations. I admire the winning entries, but I hope it doesn't sound like sour grapes to suggest that it's the total sum of entries that's the real prize here. Read through that big list and you're sure to learn something new, but also to be struck by opera's wonderful combination of simple, emotional directness and convoluted, excessive absurdity.

Most importantly, the best entries are a reminder of how much creative energy can be sparked by tight constraints. As it happens, the contest also sparked some wonderful generosity on the part of one of the winners; he donated his grand prize of tickets to Washington National Opera's Turandot and grand ball to a Washington D.C. public school music teacher. (Got to admit I had my eye on that prize; the grand ball is on my wedding anniversary, and we have relatives [housing & free babysitters] in the D.C. area. Oh well.) Now, there's absolutely nothing not to love about this story, so forgive the following comments, which might seem petty. However, it's sad to me that after a contest that produced such a unique and multi-faceted body of work, the big story (from the media perspective) is that a deserving teacher gets to go to a ball.

Again, the teacher story is fantastic, but this is hardly the most efficient way to have made that happen. The Washington National Opera could just as easily have donated that prize package to a teacher to begin with. As at least one Twitterer has remarked, the WNO has actually done some very slick P.R. work here (helped out by a very generous operaplotter). The point is, people do nice and generous things for other people every day, some more nicely packaged for the news than others. I understand that Anne Midgette almost certainly doesn't even write that Washington Post article if she doesn't have the Cinderella story as the lead, but it's sad to me that: 1) she didn't provide a link to the online archive of operaplot entries, and 2) she didn't bother to credit the author (Nicole Brockmann) of three plots that she cited in the article. (By the way, Brockmann's entries were jaw-droppingly good, such that I'd pretty much given up hope of winning before the prizes were announced, although shockingly, she wasn't chosen as a winner.) Midgette could have done both with minimal effort, and without really changing anything about the article.

The fact is, the mainstream media still hasn't learned how to think in the new hyperlinked way that makes the Internet so revolutionary. Traditional media types want to reduce everything to tidy, single-focus stories with catchy headlines, when it's the multi-layered richness of online collaboration, community, and connections that's the real story. For example, just about every news story I've heard about Twitter completely misses the point about what makes it unique and valuable; it's easier and catchier just to say that it's a bunch of people writing about what they had for dinner. And yet, I can't imagine how something like this enormous collection of clever opera summaries would have come into existence so quickly without something like Twitter. (The Omniscient Mussel deserves a lot of credit as well.)

To be fair, it's quite difficult to describe the Twitter experience, just because it is so multi-dimensional, and yes, it's easy enough to find inane twitter samples. I actually think Twitter still has major kinks, especially related to that charming and genre-defining rule about posts containing only 140 characters. It's a good rule - until conversations start to get more complicated and richly layered. Although users have tried to develop etiquette for quoting and citing other tweets, it gets messy fast when you're faced with that limit on characters. I've seen many example where threads have been broken and ideas have been untethered from their original authors. But I don't want to get into a technical discussion here about how that problem might be fixed. (Curiously, one possible advantage of this limit is that I don't see a lot of arguing on Twitter, at least not in the very small 'corner' where I hang out. I think this is partly because people recognize how dangerous it would be to argue within that character limit. At least for me, I can't imagine trying to state an argumentative case clearly while worrying about keeping it so short; misunderstandings would be inevitable.)

Instead, I'll try to suggest what's good about Twitter. For me, what sets it apart from other online experiences I've had is the way it inspires and facilitates conversation. (Facebook can do this as well, but it tends to be based more on existing personal relationships than on the common interests that cause Twitterers to follow each other.) I've commented on many blogs over the years, and sometimes that works well, but more often than not, there's enough lag between the various comments that's the conversation lacks spontaneity. Assuming one checks in on Twitter fairly often, there's the possibility of virtually real-time communication. Here's an example of how that can play out.

Yesterday, one user commented to another that she'd just realized his unusual Twitter username is an anagram. Since I was still suffering from operaplot withdrawal, this almost immediately led me to think of creating operaplot anagrams. Not much later, I was posting the following operagrams:

Tut to fiances ~ Traitor Love ~ Ado. Insane. Dead.

Soon thereafter, another user chimed in with "I don't even want to think about operaplotpalindrome." Neither did I, but the seed was planted. Remarkably, it wasn't much longer before I'd churned out the following, legitimate palindromes all:

Lo, Lulu. LOL. ~ O Dido! (He's Aeneas eh?) O Dido!

Ha, is Semele Messiah? ~ Hat on, Fidelio. Foiled if not. Ah!

[Each of the "plots" above is linked to its opera. By the way, I'm particularly proud of the Semele one. It may read oddly, but it's historical fact that Handel produced this opera-like work as an oratorio, so that it could be performed during the Lenten season when opera performances were banned. However, audiences didn't take too kindly to a rather erotic Greek story where something noble and biblical was expected, so he definitely failed to make a Messiah out of the story.]

I was actually surprised to learn that creating palindromes is not as impossible a task as I'd always assumed, although it is a serious constraint. I got all excited thinking that the following would be my best yet: "Hey, rise, Mimi! Misery, eh?" until I realized the "ise" goes the same direction both times - and this tiny problem is essentially unfixable within the constraint. Still, I hadn't had so much retrograde fun since creating an ambigram last Spring. And it all happened in one Twitter-torrent of inspiration.

But, more importantly, Twitter turns out to be a good way to get linked to interesting articles, videos, and ideas from all over the Internet - and to be reminded again and again of common interests. Of course, blogs have served that purpose for some time, but this system pushes information to the user much more conveniently. Obviously, the biggest trick is avoiding the temptation to spend too much time there - a battle I've lost in the few days since the semester ended, but I'll be busy enough with other projects soon enough.

I'm not convinced that Twitter itself will hold onto the market for this kind of online community, but it's certain that something like it will be around for awhile. If you've never Twittered and want to try to get some sense of it, you can view an archive of my first 300 tweets here. Because many of these posts are replies to other people, it can be a bit tricky to follow at first. And, by the way, Twitter does a horrible job of teaching its users how the system works. It took me weeks, for example, to figure out that by clicking on the words "in reply to" I could jump to the previous message in a thread. It also turns out to be almost essential to use a free program like TweetDeck to manage one's twittering, although you'd never know that just by signing up. But oh well, it is what it is, and what it is is pretty cool.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that today I decided to try my hand at opera acrostics. Here's how that turned out:

Doer of no good invites offed visitor. Apparition needs no introduction.
Fidelio is deceptive eponym. ("Leonore" in overtures.)
Florestan's in danger. Enter Leonore, ingenious operative.
Lovable artists bring operagoers heartfelt emotion: Mimi expires.

Since they're acrostics, you should be able to figure them out easily enough!

NOTE: I'm pretty certain the Lulu palindrome above is my first ever use of the "LOL" formulation. I hope it's the last as well. I do enjoy the irony of applying it to that ridiculously sordid tale, for which laughter may indeed be the most appropriate response. Also not too crazy about the emerging Twitter vocabulary. I can handle tweets, I suppose, but tweeps? twibes? etc. Ugh.

Magical Music

2009-05-15T17:12:00.010-04:00

I've tended to avoid assigning collaborative projects in my classes for one big reason: I always hated them as a student. In retrospect, this may reflect more on my own social anxiety than the idea of collaboration in general, although I did have some bad experiences. I particularly remember having to work with a group of total strangers to create and perform a mini-play for a truly horrible "theater lecture" class. I volunteered to write the play so as to avoid having to be on stage, but it was just a total fiasco.

However, one thing I really value about our music department is the sense of community among the students. Last year when my music history class got to early 18th century comic opera, particularly the popular and freely borrowing style of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, I got into a spontaneous discussion with the class about the possibility of replacing a paper-writing project with a group opera-writing project. We chickened out for a variety of reasons, but the idea stuck with me, and when I was planning for this year, I realized we had a class very well-suited to the task.

The group includes an ideal balance of voice majors: two sopranos, one mezzo, two tenors, one baritone. For an orchestra, we had two violins (including a piano major who happens to violin), a violist (actually a violin major, which of course is much better), one flute, two oboes, one clarinet, and another pianist to play continuo. OK, we also had a trombonist, which isn't standard fare for the Era, but she's a strong player who helped cover for the fact that I was stepping in as the cellist. (I played cello quite a bit up through college; since then, about once every 1.5 years.) With no double bass on hand, the trombone was a welcome addition to the bass line, and there's certainly a kind of authenticity in being resourceful this way.

I knew for sure that we had at least one aspiring composer in the group as well, but one thing I'm learning much too late in life is that composing isn't as specialized a talent as people tend to think. So, a significant purpose of this project was to let the students see what they could do; they've all had almost four semesters of theory now, after all. Again, The Beggar's Opera provides a good model here because the tunes are generally quite simple, four-square, and straightforwardly arranged; it's not like writing complex sixteenth-century counterpoint or grandly opulent Wagner. (In fact, I believe the specific impetus for last year's idea-hatching discussion was me saying, "I mean, even you guys could write something like this!")

However, I also hoped to use Pergolesi, Handel, A. Scarlatti et al as models for some Italian-style recitative (the English-style ballad operas just used spoken dialogue); the students had already experimented a bit with recit writing in an assignment from the previous quad. I wondered if creating recit-style vocal lines might be easier for some students than dealing in more structured harmonic contexts. (I'm not sure I'm right about this in retrospect; as it happens, the recits never made it to production, but I think I underestimated how difficult it is to master that style without having heard it for years and years. It requires a sophisticated feel for the rhythm of language.)

I knew that not every student would feel all that comfortable composing, and 15 chefs would certainly be way more than ideal anyway, so we began by having 4-5 students volunteer to create a libretto. I had originally envisioned that they would come up with some sort of contemporary college-life farce (actually, I myself would like to take a stab at writing "Facebook: The Opera," which would feature only projected text - no singers!), but to my delight, they came up with a very charming fairy-tale like story, with characters inspired very much by our own cast of singers. In fact, the libretto team put together an entire plot that would have required at least a couple of hours worth of music, so we settled on the idea of just setting the finale.

We then had another 4-5 students assigned various compositional tasks. In fact, I'm still sorting out who exactly did what (ultimately, not that important to me, to be honest) since we had a very efficient student in charge of assigning tasks, keeping communication open, scheduling meetings, etc. (I knew the biggest mistake of all would've been to put me in charge of things.) Other students ended up being involved in helping with orchestrating, producing/printing parts, directing the stage action, chronicling the process, etc. To my happy surprise, a couple of students volunteered to write an overture, which borrowed themes both from the finale that was in process and from various hits of the 17th and 18th centuries.

All this was going on over the course of several weeks (of course, much of the work happened right at the end, as it has ever been among artists), and I chose not to use much class time on the project. I figured they were getting out of doing a paper (though they did still do some writing for the class), so they needed to expect to spend a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent researching and writing. This made the final week very exciting/terrifying for me, because I didn't really know what to expect. We ended up having our big rehearsal right after Friday's final exam. The idea was that if we thought we had something, we'd debut it at Sunday's end-of-year music dept. bash.

And it turned out we (actually, they) really did have something. In the end, we had the witty and tune-stealing overture, two beautifully characterized little arias (each with continuo only), two extended scenes of scene-stealing dialogue (authentic, after all, for the The Beggar's Opera context), and a fully orchestrated final chorus. The story concerns a mischievous witch who sells fruit that makes people fall in love, inevitably with the wrong people (including a poor minister, who gets chased around by a peasant girl), with everything being magically fixed in the end - and if you don't think we ended up calling it The Magic Fruit, well...

The rehearsal was predictably chaotic, given that everyone was pretty much seeing the parts for the first time, but the music was written simply enough that we managed to put it together fairly quickly. (I was very pleased that they took seriously my direction to keep it simple and not try to use every compositional trick in the book. Last quad's recitatives were a bit more "interesting.") There was a bit more coaching on Saturday and some very clever staging that went together at the proverbial last-minute, and suddenly we were performing the thing. It was a big success, with the audience laughing at all the right times and me managing to find most of the right pitches on my dusty cello. (I'd forgotten how much I love playing in an orchestra. It was also amusing as a cellist to find that Pachelbel's Canon had become sort of a ground bass for the overture and finale. I've certainly played those 8 notes a few times.)

So, what did we learn from all this? Well, probably the most consistent feedback I've gotten from the students has to do with how much they enjoyed the collaborative process (tossing ideas back and forth, etc.) and how surprised they were at what they could achieve. As a "learning objective," I would say a real benefit here is to demystify a bit the process of composition, and to remember that much of the music that has become "classical" was thrown together in a much more popular context and in a perhaps similarly chaotic and collaborative sort of way. (I'm not saying that most operas actually had 4-5 composers, but the creative process was often driven as much by practical concerns as artistic principles. I'm also not forgetting that some music does deserve its awe-inspiring status. Notice I didn't ask for a Mozart-style finale.)

Several students also noted that it was fun to see how much fun musical borrowing can be. And speaking of fun, I make no apology for the fact that the success of our performance had a lot to do with silly stage action and inside jokes among the students and their audience of peers. Real theater doesn't apologize for what works - it just looks to make a connection with an audience. It's easy when listening to disconnected musical excerpts from a score anthology to forget that much of this music was written to entertain. There's no business like show business, but how often do we forget that music history is about show business?

In some ways, the most important aspect of this project is to remember that musicology need not just be reading/writing/research driven, although it can often seem that way. I already tend to do a lot of score analysis in my history classes, maybe more than the norm, but I often find myself resenting the idea that academic work is so often associated with writing and research. I have nothing against the development of those skills, but there are other kinds of intelligence that deserving nurturing as well; it's one thing to write about music, but perhaps just as useful to "write music" about music. Anything that encourages creativity is a good thing in my book.

Several students also commented on how gratifying it was to see how what they've been learning in theory and ear-training has paid off in being able to create something original and entertaining. That's a credit to other faculty members and to the willingness of the students to give this a chance. As I've suggested, I really didn't have much at all to do with the final product. (I do wish there had been time to workshop some of what we did, especially the recitative thing, but we did have to use class time to cover minor figures like Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.) And, of course, the students found it very satisfying to have their compositions performed for an appreciative audience. (There is some bootleg footage floating around Facebook, but for now I'm going to leave what this all sounded like to the reader's imagination. Trust me, it sounded pretty entertaining.)

So, the biggest take-away point is that I've been an idiot for shying away from collaborative projects for all these years. It is difficult to give up control in this way, and the project could very plausibly have gone much worse, but it's good to make students sink or swim. I also need to learn better how to manage all the roles that are involved. As happens in any creative situation, sometimes a creative spark takes over, a job gets done suddenly and someone else gets left out. However, as I said above, in the end it's silly to worry too much about everyone getting exactly the same thing out of a project. Hopefully, the time invested is its own reward, and I don't think any of the students will ever forget The Magic Fruit. Many thanks to Andrew, Austin, Beth, Chris, Christine, Diana, Dina, Ian, Jillian, Joe, Kassandra, Katie, Mary, Nate, & Paul.

Piano Hero: Level 1,812

2009-05-05T22:32:00.010-04:00

I haven't written about Piano Hero much lately, but we've still been going strong, and the Season Finale is tomorrow at 12:20. Over the course of the semester, we've played Beethoven 1, 3, 5, 7, Mendelssohn 4, Mozart 40, and Copland's "Billy the Kid." Tomorrow (last day of classes!) will be especially festive though; we're playing an 8-hand arrangement of the 1812 Overture. As a warm-up, we'll play the Overture to "The Barber of Seville." It's a 4-hand arrangement that I've redistributed for 8 hands. Hope it works, as it has not been played or heard yet.

In other news, if you enjoyed my Twitter operaplot submissions, there are more than 500 others to amuse and confound you. (By the way, there are many I'd have never figured out on my own, and many operas I'd barely heard of - or never heard of.) See them arranged by opera on Miss Mussel's blog here. Or, if you really want to challenge yourself, see them in the order originally submitted (without solutions) here. You're sure to learn something you didn't know. Prizewinners will be announced at the end of the week.

Some of my favorites:

nbrockmann Adina's in love w/Belcore,/And can think of no other signore./Dulcamara gives vino/To poor Nemorino/And calls it Elisir d'Amore.

frindley Hello muddah, hello faddah, I'm in love w/ Gioconda! But she hates me (so enticing), And goes in for all this noble sacrificing

primalamusica Amatory lepidopterist traps fragile specimen among Nagasaki cherry blossoms. Fumbling to release her, he crushes her instead.

Amissio Creepy sailor wooes Norwegian lass. She falls for him. Off a cliff.

idmbassoon - take a summer job in the country watching 2 nice kids? great! wait…you didn’t mention the crazy ghosts.

txavacado - SM seeks SF for lifetime of enlightenment. Must match your picture and be open to adventure - esp firewalking and water sports.

primalamusica - Noble lady trapped in harem of surprisingly complex Pasha. Will her fiancé get to her before Stockholm syndrome does?

nbrockmann 2GuysMeetTheirGalsUndercover/TheirFidelityThusToDiscover/ TheyVow”Come Scoglio!”/ButInTheImbroglio/ Each1AlmostWedsTheWrongLover!

frindley Can we sort out this Olympian scandal with Euridice, Aristaeus/Pluto and Orpheus’s infernal fiddling? Yes we Can-Can!

And finally, check out this wonderful operaplot Wordle constructed by dumbledad. You may recall that I went through a Wordle phase last summer. As it happens, that was inspired by the same Miss Mussel who put the operaplot contest together. She's dangerous.

[click to enlarge]

The "boy gets girl" grouping is priceless.

Talking about music - it can work!

2009-05-02T10:20:00.004-04:00

I've taken WCRB's "Kids' Classical Hour" to task several times for being poorly conceived, so I should also give credit where due. This morning, they had Boston Ballet conductor Jonathan McPhee on talking about Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, and he did something remarkable. He talked about the music; he talked about how it worked, what techniques (using non-technical vocabulary) the composer used, always with well-chosen examples to illustrate. This is as opposed to a few weeks ago when the KCH show about "color," made the following kinds of brilliant connections: "Aaron Copland wrote music for a film called The Red Pony. Here's an excerpt!" & "Now, as we continue our exploration of color, let's listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves!!" I wish I was kidding.

Anyway, McPhee is really good, maybe a little low-key in demeanor for kids, but he sounds like an actual person talking - he never sounds like he's reading from a clunky script, unlike another more popsular Boston conductor who appears on KCH frequently. In fact, the couple of other times I've heard McPhee on the show, he's been equally fantastic, managing most importantly to encourage real listening. I wish it was as easy as he makes it seem.

Also on KCH, a few weeks ago, I heard a fascinating little interview with Henry Chapin who, as a 10ish year old boy, narrated Leonard Bernstein's recording of the Britten Young Person's Guide. It was interesting first of all to realize that Chapin (not a musician) got the gig mainly because he was the son of Schuyler Chapin, a big-league arts administrator and friend of LB. But, I love how Chapin talked about watching LB for cues and being mesmerized by the experience of watching the score go by. As I've said many times before, giving people the experience of following a score is underrated as a music appreciation technique. At least, that's the rationale for all the score excerpts that float by in my debut podcast and in various score visualizations I've done. Maybe only I (and young Master Chapin) get a kick out of that.

Not so coincidentally, I've just started a collaboration with an artist (for a November exhibit) which will be exploring the score as a visual. Should be interesting...at least to me.

Apologia

2009-05-01T22:02:00.001-04:00

There's nothing worse than someone explaining a joke, so there's probably nothing worse than this post. Oh well. I figure I've put a lot of could've-been-blogging energy into Twittering opera plots, and most of them have inside jokes that will make no sense if you don't know the operas; I thought I might as well construct a little guide to these plots, so that they might seem less random, even if I end up seeming more self-obsessed. It goes on for awhile, so I've dumped most of the text off the main page.

OK, here are my plots so far. [Read more...]

Musing Out Loud

2009-04-27T11:35:00.005-04:00

[UPDATE: Now downloadable via iTunes as well.]

Today marks the debut of the MMmusing podcast, known for now as the MMmusecast. I'm quite lucky that my first guest is not only an amazing musician, but also a thoroughly polished and engaging speaker; she is pianist Mia Chung, a colleague of mine on the music faculty at Gordon College. As illustrated in the little Venn diagram that opens the video below, there are pianists and there are pianists. Anyone who's willing to take on Brahms' monumental second piano concerto is worthy of attention in my book, so when I realized Mia was in final prep for an upcoming performance with the Gordon Symphony Orchestra, I thought it would be fun to sit down and chat with her about it. And it was fun. You can listen by downloading this mp3 file. You can also watch a graphically enhanced version via the YouTube videos below or by downloading this Windows Media file or this iPhone/iPod compatible file. (The video files are quite large, of course).

The interview was completely unrehearsed and proceeded spontaneously through various topics, but it occurred to me that, for all the talking we do about music, it might be nice to hear some of that music as well; so, while the interview itself is virtually unedited (two very tiny trims), I've dubbed in audio samples where appropriate (and sometimes maybe where not appropriate, as I tend to get carried away). To that, in the video versions, I've added various still images, including a wide variety of excerpts from the score of the concerto. If you're new to the piece and planning to come hear it on Saturday, this should provide a nice introduction both to the musical ideas and to the emotional/narrative world of this music.

It's been said that some people have "a face for radio." Well, I have a speaking voice that might be considered best suited for newspaper work, but I've come to enjoy several different podcasts as ways of getting through my daily commutes, so I couldn't resist giving the genre a try. Hopefully if I do more of these, I'll do better at projecting my own voice; fortunately, Mia comes through quite clearly and has lots of interesting and insightful things to say both about the Brahms concerto itself, and about the pianistic challenges involved in playing it. I'll have more to say about this experience in the days ahead, but for now I'll let the speaking speak for itself.

Twynopses

2009-04-27T09:19:00.015-04:00

[UPDATE: My submissions decoded here.]

Miss Mussel's Twitter Opera Plot contest is back, this time with an astounding number of opera companies participating as potential prize-givers. Submissions were to be accepted starting at 9am this morning, but I ended up crafting mine late last week. I decided to jump right in and submit all six as a batch right out of the starting gate, even though the contest is open until next Sunday. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to send them in at the last minute, but I'm not a patient person.

So, since the point of doing it this way is to keep me from twittering away my work day, I'll say no more, other than to reprint my submissions here. (NOTE: Two of them are slightly contracted versions of entries from the previous round of the contest, back when I didn't realize the 140-character limit needed to include the 10-character tag, #operaplot.) Of course, you can also view my submissions by my following me on Twitter.

Oh, and the first-ever MMmusing podcast debuts later today! Check back soon...

6 Operas in 130 Characters or Less

Cad kills Commendatore. Conquests cataloged, courts country cutie. Cry creates chaos. Cast Commendatore comeback cues comeuppance.

4 Bohemians: Performer sings for supper. Poet authors romance. Painter brushes with ex. Philosopher thinks coat sale. (Girl dies)

Someone must die. Tenor, denied soprano, steps up. Executioner can't hack it, gives up soprano; skirts death by wooing contralto.

Count wishes he Susanna had; wife=sad, servant=mad, a mezzo plays a lusty lad. Switcheroo exposes cad, finale he admits he's bad.

Susannah bathes, Elders see,
blame her; Blitch says fervently
Repent, but sins against her, so
he's killed by her protective bro.

Lumberjack still beating his wife. She ID's him as doctor who must be beaten to practice. Thus thrashed, he's hailed as a genius.

UPDATE: I'm now up to 10. (10's the limit, by rule.)

Dante writes that Gianni Schicchi robs a clan by being sneaky. He wills himself a big estate; his daughter's song is also great.

Life is happiness, Candide; Cunegonde's all you need. She'll get raped & die a bit, but survive & gaily glit. Enough? Grow stuff.

How's the fishing? Not good 4 Grimes; worse 4 his help. He wants 2 marry Ellen, but ends up with the best character: the Sea.

Marie is a French GI Jane/Mom says the girl is insane/2 fall 4 the tenor/but he's sure 2 win'er /He sings 9 hi C's with no strain!

Whoops, I'm now up to 11. (10's the limit, by rule.) I'm retracting the lumberjack one as an entry. (I just posted that in a lame effort to drum up interest in "my" opera.)

Wedding Day: Boss wants bride. Old bag wants me. Page just wants it. Send letter. Dress up page. Find mom in bag. It works out!

Disaster! Miss Mussel has removed the 10-entry limit. And on top of that, people started submitting limericks. (You can see I'd already caught the bug with entry #10.) So, here's a few more from yours truly. Must stop...soon.

A prince's fiancé is kept w/in a harem so expect 2 see him try 2 re-collect her, posing as an architect. Joseph votes:2many notes [NOTE: must pronounce fiancé with 3 syllables, stress on the final. Also, this one's not a limerick.]

Her HS days done, tender Laurie/is doing a life inventory/when Martin and Top/just happen to stop/and inevitably alter her story.

Ms Todd & Laetitia r silly/as women can b, as they really/think each has a chance/with Bob & his pants/arousing an aria STEAL ME

Patience...

2009-04-23T21:55:00.004-04:00

Yes, blogging's been quite slow. Maybe it's Twitter. Maybe it's Facebook. Maybe it's Piano Hero (which went well yesterday with the incomparable Beethoven 7). Maybe it's end-of-semester exhaustion. Anyway, some interesting content is coming soon, including the debut MMmusing podcast (!) and my submissions for the new Opera Plot Twitter contest, which opens on Monday. I've got three new ones I'm quite proud of. [Previously.]

Check back soon... (and, in the meantime, see random things I've posted on Twitter)

plus/minus

2009-04-14T22:36:00.008-04:00

For some time, I've kept informal plus/minus scores in my head as a way of thinking about which composers I like more or less than the norm. Of course, calibrating such a scale is really impossible since there is no establishable norm, but that's part of the fun as well. I can easily imagine that some would object to this sort of rating system - music shouldn't be about ratings, and composers shouldn't be put in boxes. And I shouldn't go to Dunkin' Donuts so often...

Actually, I think charting quirky likes and dislikes is an interesting way to find out about people. I've never been a fan of most kinds of "mixer" games, but we once hosted a church small group meeting at our house when we began informally going around the room to learn everyone's favorite movie/TV show/music. It turned out to be a great way to learn about people and to get all sorts of discussions going. It's always fun to mystify people by declaring that The Purple Rose of Cairo is the best movie of all time.

Anyway, I thought I'd see if I could get some Twitter discussion going by posting some of my plus/minus thoughts there, but they attracted zero interest. So, I might as well recycle this information here. A few explanatory notes. First, I believe this list says more about me than the composers listed. I continue to find Haydn less compelling than many respectable and insightful people, and I'm happy to admit that the failing is mine. I also would gladly admit that he's a very fine composer, and I really enjoy some of his works - the point of this system is to document the disconnect I feel vs. what I perceive to be his overall reputation.

Another way of saying this is that it would be fine if I encountered much less Haydn than I do. On the other hand, I'm not sure I could ever get too much of Poulenc or Scriabin, two admired composers who, nevertheless, don't have thrones as high up on Olympus as I think they should. Thus, they could get my highest + scores, coming in at +3 each. Notice that many of the standard "greats" get zeros; I adore Beethoven and find his music indispensable in my life, but that hardly makes me unique. Same for Mozart; there are times when I'd be tempted to give him a +1, but then I fall asleep listening to one of Sarastro's arias, and I figure his reputation is just about right.

I don't know if it's really possible to be a +1 for Bach either - there are probably some people who are even more fanatical than I am, but still, it's possible that he gets as many as four works on my all-time Top Ten, so +1 feels right. Note that these ratings don't necessarily mean I think a plus composer is better than one with a zero or a minus. I don't know that I'd say Schumann is better than Chopin, but everyone seems to adore Chopin, whereas Schumann always attracts a certain amount of criticism, even if his achievements are considerably more wide-ranging than Chopin's. I'd rate them as about equal on the overall Olympian scale, but Schumann's music probably tears me up more inside. (By the way, that's a blog post of its own. When I was in college, Brahms was definitely the most important composer to me, and Schumann struck me as somewhat bizarre - now, I still love Brahms, but Schumann hits deeper.)

So, here's a starter plus/minus scale. Notice the ever controversial Wagner comes in at a break-even zero, which might be the oddest score here. The truth is, probably most composers would float around the zero mark, so, to some degree, this is just a way to say that I really love Poulenc and Scriabin - and I'm a bit mystified by Haydn and Verdi.

Bach:	+1
Bartók :	-2
Beethoven:	0
Brahms:	+1
Britten:	+1
Chopin:	0
Handel:	0
Haydn:	-5
Mozart:	0
Poulenc:	+3
Schubert:	+1
Schumann:	+2
Scriabin:	+3
Schütz:	-2
Verdi:	-4
Wagner:	0

Please don't hate me or think of less me. Hey, I've forgiven Terry Teachout for dissing Brahms' Requiem. We are who we are, but maybe, just maybe, Haydn will some day make it up to -4.

UPDATE (4/15): Added Bartók, Brahms, Britten, and Handel. Most of the big names not on the list (Copland, Debussy, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Messiaen, Monteverdi, Prokofiev, Ravel, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, etc.) would probably fall right around zero; I think it's particularly difficult to calibrate general opinion for more recent composers, so although I might have strong opinions about some, I don't feel a clear plus/minus tension about them.

UPDATE (5/3): Bumped Brahms up to +1 after hearing Mia Chung play Brahms 2nd concerto last night. Unbelievably gripping, stunning, overpowering, affecting... (and there's the piano quinet, the C minor piano quartet, the F minor sonata, the "Handel" variations, the violin sonatas, the...what was I thinking giving Brahms a 0?)

That and This

2009-04-10T21:23:00.001-04:00

There's lots I could/should be blogging about, but it looks like we'll have to settle for another ramble:

1) I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying Twitter, although I harbor some concern that it will sap some life from this blog. Twitter is in such an interesting early stage - if it continues its success, it will inevitably become something very different from what it is now just as the volume of users increases. It's still a pretty quirky minority of people who keep it buzzing. For now, it seems most useful as an aggregator of interesting links - personally, I could do without some of the "I'm making a sandwich now" kinds of tweets, but I suppose such updates are important early on in keeping the information flowing - but, I also find it useful as a quick place to jot down something that doesn't seem blogworthy, or for which I don't have time to blog. (Follow me here.)

2) Piano Hero Level 5 was a big success, which is ironic because it was surely the least musically accurate of the events to date. Please note, that's not a knock on our guest collaborators - it's just that I'd stupidly underestimated how much harder it is to keep an ensemble of 4 pianists together, as opposed to the 2 of past performances. Because we were playing the very familiar Beethoven's 5th, and because I assumed (somewhat correctly) the parts would be a bit easier than the typical 2-pianist arrangement, and because it's not easy to get 4 pianists together to practice, and because of silly old hubris (mine), we didn't rehearse at all until about 20 minutes before the show was to begin. We didn't rehearse the 2nd mvt. at all.

As it turned out, we did have to stop once when things got off track in the 2nd movement. One of the tricky things about this kind of arrangement is that the pair at one piano can't see the parts for the pair at the other piano - it's a little like being in an orchestra with no conductor, except for one dark little secret: pianists aren't good at counting rests. (We rarely have to do it.) All in all, the fact that we only stopped once was remarkable. There were some tremendously exciting moments in the 4th movement when things were off, but we were able to keep banging away until everything got back on track. And let me be clear - I loved those moments. Must be a little like what it feels like when a play breaks down in basketball/football, and you have to keep your wits about you and make something work.

It was a pretty loud, bangy performance, which I (with little or no good reason) think Beethoven might have enjoyed. But the thing is, the audience seemed to have a fantastic time. We had a great crowd, partly because I sent out a campus-wide email and partly because Beethoven's 5th is inevitably a big draw. Especially gratifying is that there were many, many people from outside the music department. I think it was clear to them that we were having a really fun time and this wasn't some sacred ritual to be endured. (Let's face it - classical concerts can feel that way.) There is also something thrilling about that much piano action at once - just the sound itself isn't something you hear every day. So, it was an especially big success in proving that this kind of informal concert can have a unique sort of appeal. I hope to have some video samples up in a day or two.

3) Continuing to love the Airturn pedal. I didn't use it for this Piano Hero, because the double-landscape page format means I need to attach a monitor (like we did in Piano Hero 1 &2) and I didn't have the time/energy to get that set up. Plus, my keyboard partner had never played from a screen before, so I didn't want to confront her with that with virtually no rehearsal.

But, for last weekend's Opera Scenes program, the digital music reading worked like a dream. This is not to disparage the page-turners I've had in the past, but it's always been inevitable that there'd be some miscommunications about when to flip - sometimes I'd nod my head to cue a singer and suddenly find the page had been turned. (In fairness to the turners, I always nod to signal turns and beg for turners to pay attention to my nods, not the music.) There was a Wall Street Journal article recently that mentioned all sorts of ways in which the human page-turner can turn out badly.

A couple of mildly amusing Airturn tales: During one particularly hectic day of rehearsing, I happened to be playing from actual music for awhile because I'd forgotten to scan one scene in. The pedal was still on the floor, however, and at almost every turn, I found myself frantically pedaling until I remembered I'd need to lift the old-school paper to see what came next. Another time, a couple of weeks ago, I set the pedal up hurriedly to accompany a coaching. The first turn went fine, but I got nothing the second time. I stopped, tried a couple of things, and started getting really frustrated that nothing was happening since I knew I'd just recharged the batteries - until I realized I'd never put the batteries back into the Airturn after charging. There must've been enough charge left in the unit to make the first turn happen - or maybe I just imagined it. So, two free tips from MMmusing if you're going to use an Airturn: don't try to use it with paper scores and do use batteries.

By the way, I'm featured in the March Airturn newsletter as a testimonialist, but I really am a happy customer so far, and have even bought a second backup Airturn for that inevitable day when my almost 2-year old son rips the USB transmitter off my laptop (like he once did with another USB device). It's kind of fun to be a testimonialist. Maybe someday I'll live out my real dream and host an infomercial.

This and that

2009-04-04T15:31:00.004-04:00

It's been a ridiculously busy week, filled with approximately 15-hour work days, listening to a bunch of Sports Guy podcasts while commuting back and forth, coming home each night to a sleeping family, not quite ready for sleep myself, and thus watching a bit of Curb Your Enthusiasm until I fall asleep and repeat the cycle the next day. I mention the Sports Guy and Curb because they somehow ended up feeling like integral parts of a hamster-wheel like cycle. (By the way, I love weeks like this, excerpt for the part about not seeing my family.)

For the record, the SG podcasts have become really good, so much better than typical sports radio, late-night TV interviews, NPR, etc. I particularly liked this one where he interviews SNL's Bill Hader. Not only was it entertaining, but there's a lot of good stuff about the insanity of putting on a show under pressure, and the importance of having cast members who are team players (both of which happened to dovetail with my experience getting our Opera Scenes show off the ground). As for Curb, which I only started watching in the past few months when we finally broke down and subscribed to cable, I think it's pretty overrated, and definitely not even close to Seinfeld-level. However, the episode where Larry David ends up wildly conducting the overture to Die Meistersinger on a neighbor's front lawn - that was funny, especially David's conducting. I wish I could find that scene on YouTube.

See how rambling this post is. That's just how it's gonna be - maybe it's the influence of Twitter, which I ended up joining last week after getting into that opera plot contest. It turned out I kind of bent the rules there because, for the Twitterers who submitted their plots, they had to include the tag #operaplot within the 140 characters. Thus, my three 140-on-the-nose synopses didn't quite work once I joined Twitter - I could submit them as "tweets," but without the tag that linked them with the other entries. Still, the judges were kind enough to award me an honorable mention for my Albert Herring, although I thought my Figaro one was better. Surprisingly, I was the only contestant who went the poetry route. Maybe only I'm surprised. I also felt my summaries fit more actual plot into them than most of the entries, but to each his own.

Unfortunately, once infected with the rhyming synopsis idea, I couldn't help but produce the following when it came time to write up some last-minute program notes for our Opera Scenes program (which debuted last night and repeats tomorrow). So maybe I didn't blog this week, but I did multiply words, with questionable results, and that's what blogging's all about.

The Old Maid and the Thief, Scene 1

Miss Todd and Miss Pinkerton talk over tea;
Each is sad to be old and still absent a he.
Laetitia comes in to announce there's a vis'tor.
Miss Todd and Laetitia are thrilled it's a Mister.

Dr. Miracle, The Omelette Quartet

A resourceful young man makes an omelette as part
of an opera-like plan to secure his sweetheart.
Later on in the plot, to her parents' surprise,
it's revealed that this chef thing was just a disguise.

Susannah, Act II: Scenes 1-2 Carlisle Floyd

An innocent bath seen by Elders has meant
that Susannah's been shunned, told she has to repent.
Sam consoles her, but leaves. Later, at the revival,
she's preached at by Blitch when he notes her arrival.

INTERMISSION

Hansel and Gretel, Act II: Scenes 1-2

Gretel sings to a mushroom while Hansel picks berries,
but the coming of night makes them slowly aware
that they're lost in the woods. Enter Sandman, who ferries
them off to their dreams, though they first say a prayer.

Dido and Aeneas, Act II: Scene 2 – Act III

Aeneas and Dido are all set to marry,
attendants are singing when storm clouds are spied;
as all haste away, an imposterous fairy
gives Aeneas false news that he must leave his bride.

While sailors prepare, witches plot their destruction,
which delights them no end, having also foreseen
that the mistreated Dido will end the production
by lamenting and dying, a heartbroken queen.

The Tender Land, 2nd half of Act I

Two drifters, out looking for work, are quite glad
when they come 'cross a girl, a wide-eyed high school grad.
Though Grandpa and Ma both express some misgiving,
soon they all join in singing "The Promise of Living."

======

Coming up in future posts. Piano Hero rides again next week.

Oh, and yeah, you can follow me on Twitter. I have no idea what I'll be doing there. It's not really my thing to tell everyone what I'm doing at every second, but I do see the potential for sharing information quickly. I guess I would break the Twitter problem down this way. The basic idea is you're supposed to type in an answer to the question "What are you doing?" Now, it seems to me that the most honest answer to that question would always be, "I am updating on Twitter." Thus, any other answer feels a bit like a pose to me.

TwitLit

2009-03-29T09:27:00.015-04:00

It's been far too long since poetry bloomed here on MMmusing. So, Miss Mussel's meme proved to be an irresistable invitation, even if poetry isn't specifically requested. The goal is to summarize an opera plot in 140 characters or less (spaces and punctuation included), which is apparently the tweet length imposed by the Lords of Twitter. I don't Twitter [update: now I do], but I can appreciate a fun constraint when I see one. These are reminiscent of Maurice Sagoff's ShrinkLits, which I first discovered via the indispensable Le ton beau de Marot. Sadly, there will probably be more to come from me. You've been warned.

Queen of May? Girls today! So, be daring; Crown Al Herring. He's afraid; lemonade makes him braver. Misbehavior! Doesn't die. Makes Mum cry.

Poor Susanna counts the Count as quite a fan, a not nice man. His wife is sad, and Fig'ro's mad. Switcheroo exposes cad; he admits he's bad. [see improved version below.]

By the way, I'm proud to say that each of the above uses exactly 140 characters. Now that's following a constraint. (Those are also my two favorite operas.)

UPDATE: Here's another, also weighing in at 140 on the nose.

Susannah bathes, the Elders see, and blame her; Blitch says fervently, "Repent," but sins against her, so he's killed by her protective bro.

UPDATE 2: I'd like to change my Figaro tweet to (still =140):

Count wishes he Susanna had; his wife is sad, his servant mad, a mezzo plays a lusty lad. Switcheroo exposes cad, finale he admits he's bad.

UPDATE 3: Turns out I really should have restricted my plots to 130 since they needed to be tagged (in the Twittersphere) with the 10-character tag, #operaplot. (I didn't understand Twitter at the time, and by the way, this article helps to explain why so many people find it confusing at first.) However, Miss Mussel kindly let me stay in the competition, and Al Herring got an honorable mention. Will try to play by the rules for Round 2.

Piano Hero Blooper and a Hectic Hoedown

2009-03-27T18:31:00.005-04:00

Here's just a bit of video from Wednesday's Billy the Kid Piano Anti-Hero recital. I don't know if Billy the Kid really qualifies as a classic anti-hero, but who can resist a good title? Anyway, this music really was a delight to play on the piano, and the audience seemed to enjoy it as well. It's such straightforward, uncomplicated music, and yet so artfully written.

I think the laid-back cowboy tunes also maybe helped this week's event feel a bit more informal, even if a brawl never managed to break out in the audience. A student came up right before we started and offered me his cowboy hat. How could I refuse? The hat stole the show at the end, as you can see in the video. Unfortunately, the audio didn't capture Nathan's improvised wind-across-the-plain noises that he delivered while I was playing those open prairie open fifths that start the piece.

I've also included our complete performance of the "Hoedown" from Rodeo, but since it was filled with, uh, improvisational, spur-of-the-moment excitement, I decided I'd add a little artificial tempo enhancement to the video - maybe all the wrong notes that flew out of my fingers won't be quite so obvious this way. (If you enjoy hearing that, you might want to revisit my old Amphetepollini post.)

I had so much fun playing the "Hoedown" that I decided on the spot that we should play it again - which turned out to be a really bad idea! I think with sightreading, the whole "your first guess is your best one" test-taking rule applies. I hoped to fix everything I'd just bungled, but I was so tired that my fingers felt like they were glued together. However, I am quite glad that we took the time to play the "Saturday Night Waltz" before the "Hoedown." That is one beautiful piece, maybe my favorite-ever Copland.

No Piano Hero next week, since I've got an Opera Scenes program to survive, but Level Five on April 8 promises to be a lot of fun...

Also see video samples from: Level Two and Level Three.

Piano Hero Level Four: Piano Anti-Hero

2009-03-23T12:43:00.005-04:00

Wish I had more time to blog right now, but things are getting a little crazy. However, Piano Hero is back after a two-week break. The truth is, I'd originally thought of doing Tchaikovsky 4 for "Level Four," perhaps deluded by this mindblowingly great lecture moment into thinking it would sound good on piano. I love Tchaik 4, but the first movement did not sound good on the piano (a blog-worthy topic in its own right), at least not in the 4-hand version we had, so we decided to take an extra week off after Spring Break. (To be really honest, it also wasn't that easy to read!)

However, Copland's arrangements of music from Billy the Kid and Rodeo sound great on the piano, so I'm excited about this week. Such great music, and such fun, and fortunately not requiring too much practicing.

Blogging will probably remain slow for the next couple of weeks....