Musicology for Everyone

Miserere, by Henryk Górecki

2010-07-29T08:30:00.000-07:00

In 1994, when I was living and teaching in the Chicago area, one of my graduate students, a member of the Lira Chamber Chorus, invited me to one of the group's concerts at St. Mary of the Angels Church on the northwest side of Chicago. The entire concert would be devoted to new choral works by Henryk Górecki. I had never heard of him and found it intriguing that an entire concert would consist of the works of one living foreign composer.

For most of the program, the Lira Chamber Chorus made up only part of a massed choir, collaborating with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Chicago Lyric Opera Chorus. I don't remember if my student had told me how large the chorus would be. I do vividly remember how hard it was to find a parking place and how far my wife and I had to walk from our car to the church. We got there in plenty of time before the concert started, but the only available seats were at the back of a very large church.

What an unexpected response to new music! At least I didn't expect it. Organizers of the concert certainly hoped for it. The three choruses spent several days after the concert recording all of the music in the same church: Miserere,, Amen,, and Euntes ibant et flebant by the massed choirs and Wislo moja, Wislo szara and Szeroka wood by the Lira Chamber Chorus alone. (My apology to anyone who knows Polish: I don't know how to make the proper l-bar in the first title.)

I have no idea what Górecki thought about these latter folksong settings, which as I understand the Polish government required all Polish composers to write and publish, but I thoroughly enjoy them. It was for the Latin works, however, that I bought the recording as soon as it became available.

Later I learned that Górecki, like his compatriot Krzysztof Penderecki, had started composing under the influence of the postwar avant garde. Like Penderecki, he began to find that style every bit as oppressive as the socialist realism championed by the government of communist Poland. Both composers sought a more expressive style of music that would build on the traditions of Western music without copying or imitating the past.

Górecki composed the Miserere as a private protest against the government's violent response to a sit-in in the town of Bydgoszcz in March 1981. It did not become possible to perform it until 1987. Like many of his unaccompanied choral pieces, Miserere has a very short text (Domine Deus noster, miserere nobis, or, Lord our God, have mercy on us) and a very slow tempo.

With the choir divided into eight parts, the piece begins very softly in the second basses. After a while, the first basses enter with their own melody. Voices continue to enter, from bottom to top, each with its own melodic identity, until the entrance of the first sopranos--some 20 minutes after the piece begins.

After this slow build-up, the music has become quite loud. The texture changes briefly to four parts, but continues to build in intensity until the words "miserere nobis" are sung for the first time three minutes before the end of the piece. In giving each voice its own melodic identity over the course of a long build-up, Górecki set a very complicated compositional challenge for himself, but the overall effect for the listener is a profound and heartfelt simplicity.

(You can purchase the recording using the Arkiv Music button to the right of this post. The easiest way to find it is to search by composer, then chose Amen, the top piece on the works list, and from there click on either of the Chicago choruses.)

Pending trombone legislation

2010-07-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this on Trombone-L some time ago, chuckled, and deleted it. Now it has just come across another list, and it seems worth sharing. If you like it, you can bookmark it here. Surely that will make finding it again easier than hunting through old emails!

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Each year thousands are people are killed, maimed or
annoyed by trombones. The statistics of head, neck and even shoulder
injuries sustained by reed players, french horn and string sections seated
within reach of the deadly seventh position are truly shocking...not to
mention forced early retirement due to ever-increasing hearing problems
reported by classical musicians of all types who are forced to play the
music of Wagner, Mahler and Brahms, as well as the hundreds of alumni of the
Herman, Ferguson and Kenton bands and OKOM devotees of Kid Ory, Jack
Teagarden, Abe Lincoln Jim Robinson and Lee Gifford.

There is current legislation pending in Congress to restrict the sale of
trombones and equip them with child-safety devices. The influential trombone
lobby is, of course, opposed to this.

There have even been several proposals for requiring a so-called "trigger
lock" on all bass trombones! Every year there are reports of hundreds of
innocent children, attracted by the shiny brass and smooth, seductive curves
of an unattended instrument on a stand in the corner of a room or in an
unlocked case who are traumatized for life by the attempts of a playmate to
get a sound out of it, or who may suffer a collapsed lung or the effects of
hyperventilation by trying the same effort themselves! The owner's feeble "I
didn't know the slide was unlocked" is no excuse! Trombones should be stored
out of reach of children.

Efforts to enact a mandatory 10-day waiting period to purchase a trombone-
which would simply allow a reasonable period of time for law enforcement
officials to cross-check the purchaser's name against an International list
of registered trombone offenders and Slide-O-Mix addicts, have been
repeatedly thwarted by the powerful Conn-Selmer-Yamaha (CSY) lobby.

Law enforcement officials are particularly alarmed over the increase in
crimes involving use of the "sawed-off" trombone or"sackbut."

Legislation is also pending in several progressive states, including New
York and California, to make carrying a concealed alto trombone a Class A
felony!

Some Governors feel that there are sufficient laws already on the books that
simply need stricter enforcement - such as the 1932 nation-wide ban of
screw-on bells, the indiscriminate use of Pond's Cold Cream or KY Jelly and
unsupervised emptying of spit valves on public property, a filthy unsanitary
habit which will help spread the flu this year.

One popular response to the spread of delinquent behavior is the imposition
of mandatory longer sentences for those using a trombone while committing a
crime ("Use a trombone - Go to jail").

Surveillance video tapes have proven especially effective in identifying
violators of this statute because career criminals have often tried to avoid
convictions by having their lawyers insist that what eye-witnesses reported
as a trombone was really only an AK-47 or other legal assault weapon.

Strict enforcement has been especially effective when
used in conjunction with the new "Three sharps, you're out" statutes that
have already been approved by many state legislatures.

Of course the automatic and semi-automatic valved models - both piston and
the middle-European rotary, are much more dangerous than the traditional
single valve trombone. Interpol has also reported the sudden appearance of
rear-blasting Cavalry models that were thought to have been completely
eliminated during the Great Confiscation mandated by the 1918 Treaty of
Versailles signed by representatives of every civilized country of the
period. You may recall that those instruments were melted down and became an
integral part of the Trans-Atlantic Telephone Cable that helped to unite
America and Europe. It is believed that the new source of these WMD's are
isolated factories in rural areas of China.

The awesome destructive power of the double trigger bass trombone could
never have been imagined by the founding fathers when they granted us the
right to keep and bear arms.

Remember:
When trombones are outlawed, only outlaws will play
"I'm Gettin'Sentimental Over You." Joe Podorsek - Local -5, Detroit Michigan

Jeux de cartes by Igor Stravinsky

2010-07-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

After beginning his career as a very Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky became an international composer in at least two very different ways. First, he decided never to return to Russia after the Revolution of 1917. Although he lived in France, he traveled a lot. By the time he moved to the United States in 1939, he had already made numerous contacts. Second, he opened himself to influences from all over the world.

Despite the French title, Stravinsky wrote Jeux de cartes (Card Game) on commission from American choreographer George Balanchine and the newly formed American Ballet in 1936. By that time, he had been writing in his neoclassical style for more than fifteen years. Critics notice a flagging of inspiration in his works of the 1930s, caused perhaps by ill health, family tragedies, anxiety over the rise of Hitler, and the feeling that the French no longer appreciated his music.

If Jeux de cartes is not among Stravinsky's most profound works, it is certainly among his most fun. Even before Balanchine approached him with the commission, he had contemplated writing a piece based on poker, his favorite game. The work has the subtitle "a ballet in three deals."

Each deal opens with the same music, which bears a not-coincidental resemblance to the "fate" motto from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In the first two deals, the Joker, a card that certainly does not belong in poker, dominates the action. He can disguise himself as any other card, at one point becoming a fourth Ace to defeat a hand of four Queens. If he doesn't win the hand, at least he causes a lot of confusion. In the last deal, however, he is promptly vanquished by a royal flush in hearts.

Given the ominous condition of international politics, perhaps the music has the subtext of good overcoming evil, as represented by the Joker. Stravinsky had earlier portrayed the same idea in L'histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale). As Balanchine described the plot, the highest cards represent the most important people in society, who can at least occasionally suffer defeat at the hands of smaller cards.

Stravinsky lets none of these philosophical undertones get in the way of a good time. References to staples of the standard repertoire abound, including Beethoven's Fifth and Eighth Symphonies, Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, and snippets from Ravel, Delibes, Tchaikovsky, and some of Stravinsky's earlier works. In most cases, Stravinsky subjects his appropriated music to the kinds of distortions typical of his neoclassical style.

On the other hand, he presents Beethoven's "fate" motto not only rhythmically altered in the "dealing" music, but nearly unchanged at the end of the ballet. The third deal also contains a nearly verbatim quotation from the overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville.

The American Ballet didn't last very long, and Jeux de cartes never joined the repertoire of another company. If it hasn't been seen often on stage, though, it has delighted concert audiences for more than sixty years.

Brass Bands of the American Civil War

2010-07-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

I like to look around on YouTube from time to time. I recently typed "brass band" into the search engine, and a video called "Brass Bands of the Civil War" came up on the first page of results. I wondered how that subject could possibly work in a video. I have seen "videos" with a single photograph and music playing in the background. This one has a collage of wonderful photos and drawings while the Federal City Brass Band plays on period instruments.

At the time of the Civil War, brass bands ruled. Few bands included woodwinds. As the photographs show, the larger brasses (trombones, tenor and larger saxhorns) often had over-the-shoulder bells. Both infantry and cavalry units had bands to entertain their troops with parades, reviews, formal ceremonies, and both formal and informal concerts. Cavalry bands performed much of their work on horseback.

For a description of one important cavalry band only shortly after the Civil War, see Bruce Gleason, "The Mounted Band and Field Musicians of the U.S. 7th Cavalry during the Times of the Plains Indian Wars," Historic Brass Society Journal 21(2009):69-91. Generally speaking, infantry bands must have had the same basic duties, but on foot.

Aside from the music of Stephen Foster, hardly any of the popular music best known today had been written yet. Sousa had not yet written his first march, and hardly any pre-Sousa marches have maintained their place in the repertoire. The selections on this video are The Bonnie Blue Flag, Columbia Gem of the Ocean, Dixie, and Battle Hymn of the Republic. These, at least, still familiar. Recordings by the Federal City Brass Band feature now-forgotten music that would have been at the "top of the charts" if such things had been tracked back then.

Jullien in America

2010-07-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Before the Civil War, at a time when the United States boasted only one financially stable concert orchestra and few native composers and solo performers of "classical" music, what taste there was for it had to be supplied by foreign visitors. In 1853 the conductor Jullien brought forty members of his London orchestra to the United States and hired sixty Americans to supplement them.

Jullien had come at the invitation of P. T. Barnum, who had talents for promotion and marketing rivaling Jullien's own. During the year, his orchestra gave 214 concerts.

At least some of them were the "monster concerts," for which he was famous in London. According to advertisements, they included 20 soloists among 1,200 total performers! As one critic wrote, "The music is magnificent, and so is the humbug."

When Jullien presented his Fireman's Quadrille at New York's Crystal Palace, he warned the audience that something unusual "might happen." On cue, three companies of firemen invaded the palace with their firehouses to combat real flames.

Ushers had to deal with fainting women and other minor panic, even though Jullien had as much told the audience to expect something of the kind. But the firemen all left on cue, too. The quadrille ended with the doxology, and the audience sang along. During the whole thing, of course, the orchestra kept playing, totally undisturbed.

For all of his showmanship, Jullien was an excellent musician who trained his orchestra very thoroughly. When he played the music of the masters, he would limit his antics to before a piece and after it.

He ostentatiously put on special gloves to conduct Beethoven, or selected a jeweled baton. When a piece was finished, he sometimes sank into his ubiquitous velvet chair, exhausted by his hard work. He was all business during the performance.

After a title less than a year, he returned to England, leaving a remarkable legacy:

Although the New York Philharmonic virtually ignored American composers, Jullien performed the music of such composers as William Henry Fry and George Bristow. He performed some of these pieces several times back in England, giving American concert music its first international audience.

He set higher standards of ensemble discipline and musicianship than American orchestras and bands had yet achieved. Thus, he inspired them to improve their own standards.

Patrick Gilmore, who founded the first of America's professional touring military-style bands, adopted the concept of monster concerts and other aspects of Jullien's showmanship.

Jullien's influence probably explains why Gilmore arranged to have firemen pounding on anvils during a performance of Verdi's "Anvil Chorus," and why he even used an actual canon in another piece.

American bands and orchestras played the Fireman's Quadrille for years, complete with uniformed firemen tramping across the stage (although probably not with fire hoses to put out a real fire).

Jullien also had members of his orchestra put down their instruments from time to time and sing. That practice can still be found in American pops concerts. Jazz bands adopted it, too.

Making sense of sonata form

2010-07-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

People today with little or no musical training somehow "get" a 12-measure blues chorus or the standard song forms of various modern styles. Even music majors taking theory classes have a hard time with sonata form. How is anyone else to understand it?

Sonata form did not always cause confusion or seem to set up a barrier to understanding music. It actual started off as an attempt to simplify music. I have written several posts about the rise of the middle class, the popularity of what we call "classical" music, and the aftermath of the French Revolution, which destroyed public concert life in the three major capitals of Europe.

During the time described in these articles, everyone knew sonata form as well as we know the forms of todays music. Even people with no musical training could follow it. Even people who enjoyed music only as an amusement and not as an art form could appreciate clever things composers did with it. It was current, not a museum relic.

The principles of sonata form underlie all classical music from early Haydn through Bruckner, and not a small portion since then. How can today's audiences without musical training make sense of it? Now, when it's a specialized subject in a music curriculum, people tend to approach it with some trepidation, as if they have to understand this antiquated system in order to enjoy the music.

First of all, enjoy the music for its beauty and wide range of emotional expression. Don't worry about the underlying form. How many people who enjoy blues choruses and Tin Pan Alley standards can explain the difference? How many people who thrill to a great improvisation on either one know or care about the nuts and bolts its structure? Probably not many.

People who don't understand the structure of music, any music, can enjoy it on a visceral level. In fact, pitiful is the person who gains an intellectual knowledge of music at the cost of losing the ability to enjoy it viscerally. Nonetheless, I offer this very non-technical, non-academic explanation. If knowledge and technical understanding are not prerequisite to enjoyment, they can certainly enhance it.

Sonata form grew from dance forms. These, in turn, were mostly two part forms, with both parts repeated. The music started out in a particular key. Either by the end of the first part or the beginning of the second part, it moved to another key. It returned to the first key. After all, too long a stretch of music in the same key can get boring.

In music classes, the standard diagram for these short forms is ||: A :||: B :||, where ||: and :|| indicate repeats and A and B represent different music. Sometimes, though, the first part of A returns at the end of B, or graphically, ||: A :||: ba :||. That has a name of course, but if you don't already know it, there's no need to learn it.

Conventionally, some dances were presented in pairs, as in two minuets. Both consisted of two two-part forms in contrasting keys, each with the standard repetition of both parts. After the second dance of the pair, in order to get everything back to the same key where it started, the music repeated the first one, usually without the internal repeats and with some kind of embellishment of the tune.

Together, then, these paired dances made up a three-part form (which we can diagram A B A), with both parts being a two part form. Operatic arias, another source of sonata form, exhibited a different kind of three-part form.

The first two parts did not repeat, and they contrasted not only in key, but in mood. At the end of the second part, the singer went back to the beginning and sang the first part, heavily embellished.

This kind of aria gave the singer a chance to show of his or her technical ability and imagination in embellishment. Within the opera, it gave the composer a chance to portray a dramatic situation to the point of painting a character's mixed emotions about it.

Sonata form combined aspects of the older dances and arias and built them into something that could last much longer than any previous single movement, and yet maintain unity and coherence.

From dances, sonata form inherited the basic two part structure. Composers quickly abandoned repeating the second part. After Beethoven, very often they no longer repeated the first, either.

The music moved to the new key by the middle of the first part. As in the operatic aria, the new key coincided with a change of mood. A sonata movement therefore becomes a drama in itself. (Although we usually associate sonata form with instrumental music, Mozart used it in many of his operatic arias and ensembles.)

A sonata form may or may not have an introduction. Leaving that aside, the form begins with a recognizable melody called a theme, which might be as long as the entire first part of one of the earlier dances. When it's finished, the music makes a transition to a new key. Most of the time, but not always, the composer writes a new theme for the new key.

I have implied that there are one or two themes, with transitional music in between. Actually, sometimes the same theme occurs in both keys. Other times, there may be more than one distinctly different theme in each key. This first part, called the exposition, presents the thematic material like characters in a drama.

The drama inherent in sonata form comes not from the contrast of themes, but the contrast of keys. Or, another way to think of it, having left home (the first key) for some other destination (the second key), the music has to return to where it started. But instead of simply moving from one key to another, as in the old dance form, the transitional part has made it a challenge to get there.

Therefore, the second part of our movement does not begin in the first key. It gets there over the course of great difficulty. There is a building up of dramatic tension, as the themes get ripped apart and made to pass through many other keys, without ever finding a place to rest.

Technically, musicians know this section as the development, or working-out section. If we look at sonata form as a journey, the music takes the scenic route from the second key back to the first. If we look at sonata form as a drama, the two characters (thematic ideas) wrestle and contend with each other until they come to a place of rest.

That place of rest, called the recapitulation, is the final return to the first key. Aside from music, we usually say recap nowadays. It has taken so much struggle to get there, the music can't stop yet.

The audience needs reassurance that it has gotten back home. So, in a borrowing from the three part form, the recap repeats all the thematic material introduced in the exposition--except this time, it doesn't change keys.

Once the second theme sounds in the first key, the form has finished.
Keeping in mind that the development and recap together constitute the second part of a two part form, it's pretty easy to see why it wasn't repeated. Repeating the first part gives the audience a second chance to hear all the important themes. Repeating the second part would only repeat the drama and its resolution.

In case you were wondering why I provided textbook graphs for the two part form after promising not to be academic, we can see sonata form in this one: ||: A :|| ba ||. "A" is the exposition, which is repeated. "B," divided into "ba," is the development and recap and is not repeated. Besides omitting the second repeat, then, sonata form is very much like that old dance form where the beginning of the first part returns at the end of the second part.

The composer may or may not tidy things up a bit more with some extra music tied on to the end. It's called a coda, which is Italian for tail. Beginning with Beethoven, however, the coda didn't tidy up anything at all. It's as if the two characters in the drama get to the end of the recap and discover some unfinished business. They get into a fight all over again, and the coda gets as long as either the development or the recap.

Up through the middle of Beethoven's career, the various sections of a sonata form are fairly obvious once you know what to listen for. Beethoven experimented with blurring the boundaries.

Later composers got so good at hiding the joints that sonata form became an unseen structure underpinning whatever appears at the surface. It takes a great bit of painstaking study for even the most proficient musicians to find them.

Therefore, when it comes to nineteenth-century music in particular, hardly anyone in the audience can hear the form. There. I've let the secret out. Even professionals can't always follow the form or don't always even want to.

An unexpected crossover: a rock guitarist plays opera

2010-07-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

I will confess that I have never liked very much of the popular music of my lifetime. Once I got out of college, I stopped paying attention entirely. As I have studied the history of popular music, I noticed that from its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century through the heyday of Tin Pan Alley, it was marketed to adults.

Beginning with the rock music, marketers have sought to appeal to teenagers or even younger children. It appears that the audiences age along with the performers. Many people in their thirties and forties consider the Rolling Stones to old to keep playing rock, for instance.

And so I wondered, where will there be continuity? Is there still an audience for Tin Pan Alley songs that's much younger than I am? Will any music popular to one generation be of any interest to any later one? And with so many school music programs as risk from funding cuts, how will any critical mass of young people even hear classical music?

Those of you who enjoy recent popular music and know the scene, please hold your laughter, go on to the videos, and enjoy some very expressive performances. But first let me explain why they are a revelation to me.

I recently received an email with a video clip said to be Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck playing "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's opera Turandot. The person who sent it promptly corrected herself. Clapton sat out the number and Beck played it alone, and very well.

As I listened, I knew I wanted to share it with my readers, but that particular video started with about a minute and a half applause for whatever Clapton had just finished playing. Fortunately, I noticed that YouTube had other performances of Beck's "Nessun dorma" to choose from, given in several different cities.

On the way to making my selection, I read some of the comments. Although Beck has gotten criticism for performing this piece, most commenters loved it. One said, "My favorite aria by my favorite guitarist." There is certainly no reason why someone can't like both rock and opera. I am always happy to see evidence that some people do, in fact, like both.

I couldn't help but notice videos of Beck and/or Clapton playing "Moon River," "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and other pieces that certainly do not come from the rock mainstream. I have selected one of several videos of Beck playing the "Corpus Christi Carol."

Somewhere, I have some sheet music of a setting by Benjamin Britten. I don't recall hearing a performance, recording, or radio broadcast of his or any other setting. Wherever Beck found tune, he clearly has fairly broad knowledge of all kinds of music and believes his audiences will enjoy even lesser-known pieces. I'm so glad he's right about that.

The beginnings of American concert music

2010-07-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

The earliest American orchestras appear to have formed for a single concert. A little later, the larger cities saw the formation of rehearsal orchestras, where members got together to play through the symphonies of Haydn and similar music. Some of them presented occasional public performers.

Beginning in the 1820s, musicians in several cities attempted to establish permanent concert orchestras. Every one of them failed until the founding of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1842.

Shortly thereafter, Anthony Philip Heinrich, William Fry, and George Bristow attempted to establish a reputation as American composers of symphonic music and opera. They hoped that New York's orchestra would give them an outlet.

The Philharmonic, on the other hand, dedicated itself to presenting the best music by the best masters. Heinrich, Fry, and Bristow could not pretend to qualify. Perhaps if they had not had to work so hard to gain performances, they would have eventually become better composers.

Heinrich wrote descriptive music with long titles like The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons. His style superficially resembles Haydn and, to a lesser extent, Beethoven, although he never mastered development as they did.

His music exhibits chromatic melodies and harmonies, dance rhythms, unusual complexity and numerous quotations of patriotic and popular songs, including his own. His somewhat eccentric music proved to be more difficult than any American orchestra could handle, but he visited Europe three times, met Mendelssohn and other notable musicians, and had some of his pieces played to great acclaim.

Most of Fry's orchestral works likewise bear descriptive titles. Most reference sources credit him as the first American composer of a grand opera, although I have proposed an earlier candidate.

Although Fry often used titles with American references, his music exhibits a thoroughly European style. He made his reputation less as a composer than as a journalist and critic. His tireless advocacy of American composers and complaints that American orchestras neglected them paved the way for the next generation of composers, including Edward MacDowell.

Bristow, the best trained of the three, likewise wrote on American themes. He used the story of Rip van Winkle for one of his operas, named his last symphony Niagara Symphony, and composed a concert overture named Columbus.

Stylistically, however, he too was thoroughly European and perhaps already a bit old-fashioned. While contemporary Germans divided into schools of Brahms and Raff vs Wagner and Liszt, Bristow clung to Mendelssohn as a model. He never quite mastered extended forms, although his melodies, harmonies, and orchestration displayed good imagination and craftsmanship.

Although modern audiences would probably not enjoy frequent performances of the music of any of these composers, I would welcome recordings. Their music can't be any worse than, say, Zdenek Fibich or any number of other lesser European composers whose music is readily available.

As a trombonist, I would especially love to hear Bristow's Second Symphony, "Jullien." Two movements contain extended trombone solos, probably the first written for any symphony. Here is the one from the third movement:

The vuvuzela: a new South African musical instrument (?!?)

2010-07-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

With the World Cup taking place in South Africa, we can't exactly say that soccer fever is sweeping the world. After all, it did that generations ago. But with the American team playing well and gaining an international following, it's sweeping the US, at least for a while.

Who of us have not seen news stories of a plastic trumpet made in South Africa called the vuvuzela? That's actually nothing new, either. Cheap stadium horns were readily available for baseball games and other sporting events in this country fifty years ago.

In any case, most people declare that it has a horrible, obnoxious sound. It has the same dreadful fascination as, say, that flower, whatever it's called, that blooms rarely and smells somewhat worse than a hog manure lagoon.

But wait! Is the whole world mocking unfairly? Three brass players from the Konzerthausorchester in Berlin have made a video demonstrating its playing technique and musical possibilities. Even for non-German speakers such as myself, the entire speech is easy to follow. The playing speaks for itself.

Think of it: three very dignified Germans in a concert hall, wearing white tie and tails, and presenting a technical demonstration of the instrument. Playing Brahms and Ravel! We're duty bound to take the vuvuzela seriously now, right?

The Berlin Philharmonic now has a vuvuzela section, featured in concert on a video. Unfortunately, they have disabled the ability to embed it. Follow the link in order to see it.

A History of the Trombone: It's here

2010-06-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

Today is the official publication date of my new book. I'm so excited. My copies came in the mail on Saturday. Trombonists, at least, among my readers here may also be excited at the appearance of a new book on the trombone. Unlike my first book, this one is easy to find. It's on Scarecrow Press' website.

A good book gaudily bound: popular conductor Jullien

2010-06-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, we are accustomed to entertainers who go by only one name, but in the nineteenth century, there was only Jullien (1812-1860). LIke Madonna and so many others today, he was born with more than one name. In fact, his father conducted a French orchestra and every member became the young son's godfather: he had 37 Christian names!

With a start in life like that, no wonder he became eccentric. His concert dress included a shirt front with diamond studs. When he conducted Beethoven, he had a page bring him a special jeweled baton on a silver salver. He kept a white and gold chair near his gold-studded crimson podium so he could rest between numbers.

In Europe, Jullien represented what William Weber has called "low status music," one of a number of conductors who played dance music and informal promenade concerts for an audience of mixed social classes. His promenade programs always featured classical music, including complete symphonies, along with lighter novelties. For the latter, he often put together "monster concerts" with huge orchestras to make a grand effect.

Many critics called Jullien a humbug for his excessive showmanship, but no one could deny his musicianship. In fact, his performances of the classics were often more faithful to the composers' intent than those of some of his more serious contemporaries. Many of them did not hesitate to add additional winds and brass to music by Handel, Mozart, and even Beethoven for a "better" effect.

A critic in Putnam's Monthly (November 1853, p. 573) noted, "He is a humbug, not in essence, but in form. He is like a good book gaudily bound. . . But the music is true and great."

After a stint in the army, Jullien entered the Paris Conservatory in 1831. Because he preferred light music to studying counterpoint, he did not finish. Instead, he left school in 1836 to start a series of promenade concerts. That put him in direct opposition to Philippe Musard, the originator of the concept then at the height of his popularity.

Jullien achieved notoriety, but not financial success. Bankruptcy forced him to flee to England, where he reigned supreme in promenade concerts until near the end of his life. He traveled all over England, Scotland, and Ireland, along with all of his gaudy props and, for the 1853-54 season, visited New York.

His return to Paris in 1859 proved disastrous. He became mentally unstable and died in a lunatic asylum. Along with his contemporaries Musard and Johann Strauss, Sr., Jullien spent a lifetime bringing classical music to a mass audience. His aim was always first to entertain and second to instruct. Perhaps that combination and their order has lessons for modern concert series as well.

Second symphony, in D major, op. 73, by Johannes Brahms

2010-06-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

Johannes Brahms composed his second symphony during the summer of 1877, only a year after finishing his first. Although close in time, the two symphonies differ greatly in character.

The stormy and dramatic first symphony took Brahms an agonizing 15 years to complete. The warm and lyrical second symphony flowed easily from his pen. As he wrote to Eduard Hanslick, "So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to step on them."

Brahms enjoyed teasing friends about the progress of his works with misleading comments, such as the following.

The new symphony, too, is merely a Sinfonie, and I shall not need to play it to you beforehand. You have only to sit down to the piano, put your small feed on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass (ff and pp), and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my "latest."

To another he wrote, "I do not know if I have a pretty symphony; I must inquire of learned persons." This last comment refers to hostile critics, who promptly pronounced the new symphony disagreeably intellectual, cold-blooded, wearisome, and altogether something to avoid.

Even critics normally favorable to Brahms' music were disappointed that he had not tried to reproduce the thunder of his first symphony. The audience at the premiere in Vienna had probably not studied the reviews. Not having the benefit of knowing what the learned critics thought, they received the new work enthusiastically.

In a sense, Brahms was correct when he characterized the symphony as a Sinfonie, although the chord of F minor has almost nothing to do with it. On the surface, at least, it is a profusion of pretty melodies, one following on the heels of another.

Although the second movement is pensive, philosophical, and the most "difficult" of the four to comprehend, the symphony as a whole is otherwise almost unrelentingly cheerful and sunny. Beneath the surface, however, is the Brahmsian intellect.

He derived his melodies from a very few germ motives and placed them in a complex contrapuntal web. These two aspects complement each other. The beauty of the melodies keeps the complexity from becoming bewildering. The complexity rescues the melodies from mere surface prettiness.

The most popular of 100 posts on Musicology for Everyone

2010-06-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

Last Monday's post marks the 100th installment of Musicology for Everyone. It seems like a good milestone to look back at the most popular posts. I have chosen partly on the number of visitors and partly on the number of tweets. If you have read these, enjoy them again. Otherwise, enjoy them for the first time.

The birth of the popular music industry
Centuries ago, there was music for the nobility and music for the commoners, but no popular music. Only when music became a commodity for sale did the concept of popular music become popular. That was a more recent "centuries ago."

Tension and resolution, or, an odd musical alarm clock
According to legend, Anton Rubenstein's wife had trouble getting him out of bed in the morning--until she discovered the power of music theory and and an unresolved chord!

Liszt at an artistic crossroads
How one of the darlings of what William Weber called "high-status popular music" became a powerhouse in classical music.

Popular song in America, part 9: Tin Pan Alley
Before recordings, the popular music industry centered around the publication of sheet music. From about 1890 into the 1950s, New York publishers clustered around 28th Street dominated the publication of popular songs. Tin Pan Alley composers wrote the best of American musicals and provided standards for dance bands.

Joshua Bell in the subway: what does it mean?
When Joshua Bell treated passers-by to a concert at a Washington subway station, only one person recognized him and only seven stopped to listen. Is that because people don't appreciate great classical music? Or because Bell didn't know how to hold an audience outside the concert hall?

Menuhin on Toscanini
Yehudi Menuhin describes a rehearsal in Arturo Toscanini's apartment, where he witnessed perhaps the calmest, quietest temper tantrum on record.

Children and classical music
Thoughts on how children learn to love classical music, and a video of a five-year-old conducting The Rite of Spring.

St. Luke Passion, by Krzysztof Penderecki
The music of such composers as Stockhausen and Boulez generally guarantees that audiences for classical music will despise it. Penderecki's St. Luke Passion, written under their influence, displays a personal Christian faith and an emotional depth that has earned enthusiastic responses from audiences that generally disdain the postwar avant-garde.

A pocket-sized trombone with a full-sized sound!
Trombones are long, awkward, and bulky. As I kid, I found mine a pain to take to school and bring it back home. I would have really loved the iBone then if iPhones and all their apps had been invented. I wonder if I would have been allowed to use it.

Keeping the slide slick and slipping
Trombonists have long been concerned about how to lubricate their slides. Discussions of the relative merits of various oils and creams and whatnot usually bore even most trombonists. But when someone brought a touch of musicology to the subject, well, one discussion became fun enough to share with everyone else!

The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives

2010-06-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

One thing Charles Ives learned at Yale: he had no chance of earning a living as a professional musician if he wanted to be true to his own ideals. Not only did his musical idiom confuse his teachers, it also confused his fellow students. He went into the insurance business and composed music as a hobby.

After a long day at the office, he composed during the evening in his Manhattan apartment. He spent quiet weekends at a cabin in Connecticut, meditating, writing, and planning new compositions.

Ives began two new works in 1906, both called Contemplation. In later years, he had forgotten whether he intended them as a single two-movement piece or not. The full titles reveal both similarities of intention and profound differences in character: A Contemplation of Nothing Serious; Or, Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summer Time and A Contemplation of a Serious Matter; Or, The Unanswered Perennial Question.

Apparently, all of his weekend meditations on the meaning of existence had not given him any satisfactory answers. He decided to express the question in what he called a "cosmic landscape."

He had the piece printed in 1941, but it is not clear if it was performed at that time. The definitive edition, with the familiar shorter title The Unanswered Question, appeared in 1953. Ives explained the piece in his foreword to that edition:

The strings play ppp throughout with no change in tempo. They are to represent "The Silence of the Druids--Who Know, See, and Hear Nothing." The trumpet intones "The Perennial Question of Existence," and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for "The Invisible Answer" undertaken by the flutes and other human beings, becomes gradually more active, faster and lower through an animando to a con fuoco. This part need not be played in the exact time position indicated. It is played in s somewhat of an impromptu way; if there be no conductor, one of the flute players may direct their playing. "The Fighting Answerers," as the time goes on, and after a "secret conference," seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock "The Question"--the strife is over for the moment. After they disappear, "The Question" is asked for the last time, and "The Silences are heard beyond in "Undisturbed Solitude."

Nighttime dangers and the beginning of a musical tradition

2010-06-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Towers of 11th-century Bologna

Brass players know the term Stadtpfeifer mostly in reference to a group of municipal trombonists and cornettists in Leipzig, whose members included composers Johann Pezel and Gottfried Reiche in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Other German towns sponsored similar bands. The first such bands (known in the literature as alta Bands) formed in the Middle Ages, and the last ones persisted into the nineteenth century. Bands started in other countries at about the same time (in England they were called waits), but the tradition did not last as long.

These bands, and similar ones all over Europe, grew from the need for night watchmen as early as the thirteenth century. Towns had walls and watch towers back then and needed protection from wars, fires, thieves, and local robber barons.

Watchmen could use flags and hand signals during the day, but not after dark. They found that signals from a loud musical instrument, such as a trumpet, horn, or shawm provided the best nighttime communication. In those days, trumpets could play only a few notes at the bottom of the overtone series, but that was enough to create a number of signals.

Towns came to depend on signals from wind instruments for safety at night. By the fourteenth century, some towns actually forbade anyone but the watchmen from playing them after dark--except at weddings.

Bologna first hired civic trumpeters in 1250. By that time, its leaders must have recognized that a group of trumpets could do more for them than just play signals from the towers at night. They could lend dignity and splendor to proclamations and other civic ceremonies on the ground.

Neither watch duty nor ceremonial duty required anything more than the ability to make a clear sound and memorize the signals. Eventually, though, someone realized that a group of trumpets and shawms could actually make music.

As early as 1310, watchmen in the town of Bruges performed as a musical ensemble to entertain for civic festivities. They did not just follow a government official to attract an audience to hear a proclamation. They played at a banquet.

For a while, the watchmen performed both musical and non-musical duties with their instruments. Other people, not on the town payroll, learned to play the watch instruments strictly as musical instruments. That is why it became necessary to outlaw playing of trumpets and shawms after dark by anyone but the official watchmen.

Eventually, the town watchmen became the town band. Little by little, they shed the watch duty. They stopped playing trumpets and took up the new and more flexible trombone (at that time, actually a slide-trumpet) instead. Eventually the shawm gave way to the cornett.Towns maintained a separate trumpet corps.

As the bands became strictly musical ensembles, they sought legal protection against non-members who competed against them for what we would now call freelance gigs. The music of Pezel and Reiche was still centuries in the future.

Another musical reason to love New Orleans

2010-06-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

Probably every big city has some kind of street music. I lived in the Chicago area for more than 20 years and heard quite a variety. Off hand, though, I only remember one or two times that I encountered more than two musicians playing at once. I

I've only been to New Orleans twice, and don't particularly recall hearing larger groups there, either, but thanks to YouTube, I have come across some amazing things.

Here's a group playing "Summertime" by George Gershwin. The video opens and closes with a singer, who is not well recorded. In between, there is an amazing trombone solo. The whole time, another trombonist just sits there with his trombone in his lap. I bet that group could keep playing that one song for a long time and provide plenty of variety for anyone who wanted to stick around and listen for a while.

The Ferris Wheel: (what does that have to do with music?)

2010-06-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Ferris Wheels are a staple of every amusement park that ever set up for a week in a parking lot, and usually among the tamest rides. They resemble the original Ferris Wheel, the landmark attraction of the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago 1893), in name only.

At a height of 264 feet, the Ferris Wheel towered over the rest of the fair. The 45-foot-long axle alone weighed 71 tons. No one had ever built or seen anything remotely similar. A popular and financially successful ride, it must have nonetheless invited awe and dread.

In one way, however, the Ferris Wheel resembled every other major attraction of the fair: a musical performance, in this case by the Iowa State Band. The description of the opening ceremony by the Chicago Herald (June 22, 1893) is priceless. Apparently the band assumed they would be playing on the ground, only to discover that they were supposed to perform from inside one of the gondolas.

It was with many misgivings that the bewhiskered leader got his men into the car. But once seated the men started to play a rollicking march. Then of a sudden the wheel began to revolve.

As the car ascended the man with the clarinet glared wildly out the window and laid his instrument upon the seat. Then the alto horn dropped out as the ground began to drop from beneath the players' feet. As the car climbed to a greater altitude other horns and fifes withdrew their support from the leader, who wasn't looking any too well himself. At the top of the wheel it seemed as though the march, which had been started with so much gusto a few moments before, had dwindled to the exertions of the bass drum and the piccolo.

A "second line" in New Orleans (with video)

2010-05-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

Probably no city in the country loves parades as much as New Orleans. As we all watch the progress of that horrendous oil spill and pray for Louisiana, it seems appropriate to highlight some of the musical aspects of the unique character of that part of the country.

New Orleans was founded as a French city in 1718 and did not become American territory until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Where English-speaking southern governments dating back to colonial times attempted to stamp out all vestiges of African culture among their slave populations, the French did not.

A west-African heritage of tribes looking out for individual members in time of need manifested itself in New Orleans first in some slaves devising ways to earn enough many to buy their freedom, and second, in 1783, in the foundation of the Perseverance Benevolent and Mutual Aid Association.

Hundreds of similar organizations later, newly emancipated slaves founded the New Orleans Freedmen's Aid Association shortly after the end of the civil war. In part, it became a life insurance arrangement that allowed members to save up money for their funerals.

At this point, the tradition of aid societies among blacks intersected with New Orleans' long-standing love of parades, especially but certainly not only at Mardi Gras. Although the earliest attested Mardi Gras celebrations there (1730s) did not include parades, a Mardi Gras society at Fort Louis (now Mobile, Alabama) paraded from 1711 through 1861.

New Orleans could not have been far behind. By the nineteenth century, almost any event could include an impromptu parade. Or, if the weather was fine, the many neighborhood bands around town didn't need an event if they felt like parading.

The "second line" tradition grew out of the funeral processions paid for with savings through the New Orleans Freedmen's Aid Association and similar organizations. The band plays a dirge from the church to the cemetery and more joyful music back to the church.

Whatever neighborhood social aid or pleasure club sponsors the funeral (or other parade occasion) is known as the "main line." Unlike more formal parades familiar in most American cities, the spectators do not stand on the sidewalk and watch the parade go by. Instead, they follow along as a "second line." And so the parades themselves have become known as "second lines."

Since second lines take place mostly in neighborhoods and seldom have permits that allow them to move along or across major thoroughfares, they are perhaps among the less well-known aspects of New Orleans culture.

Eastern Music Festival

2010-05-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Eastern Music Festival has been an institution in Greensboro, North Carolina for almost 50 years now. This year's Festival takes place June 26 through July 31 under the direction of Music Director Gerard Schwartz. It looks to be a great five weeks.

It is one of the premiere music education programs in the country. The Young Artists Orchestra, made up of students from 14 to 22 years of age, will be presenting nine concerts. The Festival's faculty, leading musicians from all over the world, make up the Festival Orchestra, which is presenting five concerts, with soloists Lynn Harrell (cello), Barry Douglas (piano), Tianwa Yang (violin), William Wolfram (piano), and Gil Shaham (violin).

In addition, there will be two different chamber music series and the EMF Fringe Series. The latter offers concerts of a wide range of vernacular music from traditional bluegrass and blues to the latest jazz, funk, rock, and--well, not everything fits into a tidy category.

I see that Ko-ichiro Yamamoto will be playing the Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra. And of course, it's the one weekend I have to be out of town. I certainly intend to be at some of the other concerts. The Eastern Music Festival is always one of the highlights of my summer.

Rossini on Wagner

2010-05-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

Some scholars have theorized that Rossini retired from composing operas after Guillaume Tell because he disliked the direction opera was going and the kinds of things he had to write in order to maintain his popularity. He became really upset with Wagner's music. Two of his comments are very well known:

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.

Those were his polite comments. Once he was talking with a singer about Wagner's music when he decided to demonstrate what it sounded like. Opening the piano, he sat heavily on the keyboard and said, "There! That's the music of the future."

Classical music for machines

2010-05-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

The attempt to create music mechanically, without human performance, has a long history, dating back to ancient Egyptians and Asians. Leonardo da Vinci and others in the late Renaissance designed sophisticated instruments. Only in the late eighteenth century did composers--including Handel, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven venture to compose music especially for mechanical clocks.

Museums hold least some of the original clocks with their music, but to my knowledge no recordings have been made. Most of the time, therefore, the only way we get to hear this music is through a transcription for human performance. Here's a modern clock playing music by Haydn and Beethoven.

On the many, many songs of Franz Schubert

2010-05-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

In 1827 the composer Hummel visited Vienna and brought his sixteen-year-old student Ferdinand Hiller with him. After seeing Hummel deeply moved by hearing Schubert and singer Michael Vogl performing several of the songs, Hiller dropped in on Schubert's home the next morning.

There he saw piles of finished manuscripts laying around, with another in progress on Schubert's desk. He exclaimed, "You compose a great deal!" Schubert answered simply and seriously, "I compose every morning. When I finish one piece I start on another"

He wrote his first song, "Hagars Klage," in March 1811 and his last, "Der Hirt auf Felsen," in October 1828. In all, he wrote more than 600 songs. So he wrote on the average perhaps 35 songs a year or three per month, not to mention all of his piano music, chamber music, church music, orchestral music, and several operas. How could he keep track of everything?

As another incident shows, he didn't. Once he delivered several songs to Vogl to see how he liked them. Vogl especially liked one that was too high for his voice, so he transposed it to a more comfortable key and had a professional copyist prepare a new manuscript.

About two weeks later, when Vogl and Schubert were making music together, one or the other of them proposed looking at something new. Vogl got out the transposed manuscript. Schubert played it while Vogl sang. Schubert exclaimed, "That's a good song. Who wrote it?"

Keeping the slide slick and slipping

2010-05-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

Trombonists are the only instrumentalists who have to push a pair of tubes as much as two feet along a pair of narrower tubes inside. They have a wide variety of choices for lubricating the slide--a variety of oils, creams, silicon.

And they discuss slide lubrication so much that sometimes they even bore each other. Oh no! Not another discussion of Slide-o-Mix™ vs Superslick™! (No need to panic now. That's not where this is going!)

A recent discussion on Trombone-L, a popular email list, proved worthy of the attention to a wider audience both for its historical erudition and the way it touched on, shall we say, a variety of contemporary issues.

For background, I want to share some brief personal notes. When I started playing trombone in 5th grade (1958-59), I used slide oil. To the best of my knowledge, the first oil made especially for trombone slides was developed by Frank Holton late in the 19th century. In the research for my upcoming book, I learned that Victor Cornette recommended watchmaker's oil in 1830.

By the time I got to college, I was using cold cream and spraying it with water. I don't recall just when I made the switch. I also don't know offhand who first started using it. The earliest published reference I know is in a 1963 book by Edward Kleinhammer, then bass trombonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The latest lubrication thread on Trombone-L first became of possible interest to a wider readership when Howard Weiner called attention to his recent article on an instruction manual by Joseph Fröhlich published in 1811.

Fröhlich, apparently the earliest writer to address the subject, recommended lubricating the slide Provence oil, which needed to be wiped off every couple of days and replaced with fresh oil. Weiner learned that Provence oil is an especially high-quality olive oil grown in that region.
Chuck DePaolo, part owner of Hickey's Music in Ithaca, New York, thought immediately of the environmental benefits of going back to olive oil and responded according to his understanding of modern marketing techniques:

Howard,

Oh boy, you've opened a can of worms! We should resurrect the old formula and give it a 21st Century twist:

"Hickey's All-Natural Oliviotine (Olivi-O-Mix?, OlivioSlick?) Organic (has to be organic) Extra Extra Virgin Pure Slide Oil. Grown on picturesque hillsides in southern France and Genoa, Italy by free-range (have to insert "free range" in here somewhere) olive farmers, using traditional techniques handed down over the centuries from father to son. Lovingly processed in four hundred year old oak casks and purified using only natural fiber filters. Packaged in compostable cornstarch bioplastic bottles and shipped to you in solar powered UPS trucks. What, they don't have those yet?

--Chuck (recycling nut of the first order)

Later contributions to the thread pointed out that at gigs where the band gets to eat, but serve only Thousand Island Dressing, having olive oil along has obvious advantages as more than a slide lube.

Someone else suggested filling the spray bottle with balsamic vinegar. The very idea! Who ever sprays anything on an oiled slide? And, as others mentioned, the smell of olive oil might make a trombonist very hungry. It's hard to play and salivate at the same time. And the thought of yuppies dressing their salads with slide oil . . . Well!

Someone else objected to the environmental impact of making the compostable cornstarch bottles. If we return to an ancient slide lube, it should be packaged in the ancient manner, too: reusable goat or sheep bladder bags. Who could object except vegans and the folks from PETA?

Oh, and back to cold cream: as I said, I don't know when trombonists started using it, but probably sometime in the early to mid 20th century. That doesn't mean cold cream was a recent product. Weiner pointed out that the 2nd-century Greek physician Galen invented it. The formula included beeswax, water, rose petals, and, oh yes, olive oil.

Niccolò Paganini: The devil's violinist?

2010-05-10T08:30:00.000-07:00

Niccolò Paganini became the world's first international superstar of the violin beginning when he was 22. He could perform technical feats no other violinist could match. If anything, his showmanship was even more marvelous than his technique. The first virtuoso to perform from memory, he could move around the stage and interact with the audience.

In part, he could outdo other violinists because he invented new techniques such as left-hand pizzicato and various new kinds of bowing and tuning. Later violinists have learned them all. But he also had incredible joint flexibility and long fingers, which gave him a reach up and down the fingerboard that no one before or since has been able to match.

Apparently the physiological uniqueness of his technique came from some kind of congenital condition like Marfan syndrome or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Indeed, his health deteriorated rapidly in the last ten years of his life, forcing him to retire from public performances. The nineteenth-century knew nothing of these conditions. Rumor had it that Paganini had sold his soul to the devil.

Whether from his medical condition or his sense of showmanship, Paganini looked the part of an evil genius. Tall and pale, he had a long nose, long curly hair, and thin lips often formed into a sarcastic smile.

On one occasion, in a private home, someone told a story about a young man who killed his father, became a highwayman, fell in love with a girl who spurned him, and took her to a precipice, where he grabbed her and jumped into the abyss. He asked Paganini to improvise music to match the story.

Paganini asked for all the lights to be extinguished, then played such a devilishly expressive interpretation that several ladies fainted. According to one witness, the salon looked like a battlefield when the lights were put back on.

Stories like that enhanced Paganini's reputation and enlarged his audience. They attracted both people who wanted to hear the great violinist and those who wanted to see the devil. As advantageous as his reputation was, though, he disliked the more extreme stories that circulated.

In a letter to the Belgian critic François-Joseph Fétis, Paganini complained that he once entered a hotel restaurant in Padua unobserved. Soon he heard someone telling a story. This person explained how "Paganini" had murdered one of his (the story-teller's) friends, a rival violinist. Sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement with only his violin for companionship, no wonder he developed such technique.

Everyone who heard the story expressed shock at the enormity of "Paganini's" crime, until Paganini himself demanded to know just when and where the supposed murder took place. Everyone recognized them by then.

The embarrassed narrator forgot his claim that the victim was one of his friends. He said he had heard the story with enough proof that he believed it, but he could have been deceived.

Paganini's letter continued that after a concert in Vienna, someone else claimed there was nothing surprising about his performance. He insisted that he had seen the devil himself guiding Paganini's arm. Paganini's resemblance to the devil proved his origin, except, of course, the devil had horns, red clothes, and carried his tail between his legs!

Past the last minute: a Mozart overture barely finished on time

2010-05-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

When an opera performance starts, the overture is the first thing the audience hears, but it is the last thing the composer writes. Rossini disliked writing overtures, and the various impresarios he worked for had legendary difficulties keeping him on track. I haven't found why Mozart waited so long to compose the overture to Don Giovanni, but for whatever reason, it produced a drama equal to anything Rossini did.

Don Giovanni received its first performance in Prague, and Mozart had to travel there for the rehearsals. After the dress rehearsal, that is, the night before the opening performance, Mozart decided to pull an all-nighter and write the overture and asked his wife to stay up with him.

Constanaza's job was to make punch to keep his spirits up and keep talking to him. So she told him stories from Arabian Nights and other common collections of stories. Probably only Mozart could ever listen to stories, laugh at them, and compose music at the same time.

The trouble was that the punch made him even sleepier than he would have been ordinarily at that time of night. Whenever his wife stopped talking, he began to doze off. Even Mozart could not write music in his sleep. Finally, she suggested that he take a nap and promised to wake him in an hour.

He slept so soundly that she didn't have the heart to keep her promise. She let him sleep for two hours. By that time, it was five o'clock in the morning. He finished composing at seven and delivered the score to the copyists.

By the time the copyists finished writing out the parts and passed them out, there was no time for the orchestra to rehearse the overture. So they sight-read it. They must have played it pretty well. One of the members of the orchestra later wrote that the overture roused the audience to great enthusiasm. Mozart turned to the orchestra and said, "Bravo, bravo, gentlemen. That was excellent."