Necessary Facts: history of music

Showing posts with label history of music. Show all posts

Saturday, January 6, 2024

A Musical Joke

I found the book by serendipity, misshelved among works on Typography in the UT Fine Arts Library. I brought it home and then opened it to read:

“I often find that the humorous, joking aspect of music is missing in many performances, even in those of accomplished artists. It seems that people feel uncomfortable allowing the great work of music to be anything but sublimely serious.”
“… crescendo does not automatically mean either agitato or accelerando. In many cases, quite to the contrary crescendo is an indication of the music becoming broader, more majestic, more dignified. If an alteration of timing is justified, such instances may call for allargando rather than an accelerando. Similarly, diminuendo should not always be taken as an indication of calming down, connected with rallentando. I can think of many examples of diminuendo that indicate, in fact, an increase of activity, albeit of a fantastic, visionary order, sometimes accompanied by an accelerando (see passages in a variety of works by Scriabin, for example).” Boris Berman, Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, Yale University Press, 2000, pages 146-149, passim.

About 1988 or so, as a local newspaper reporter, I attended a concert duet for harp and voice. It was nice and all, a range from “classical” (perhaps Bach and others much later), and at least one modern piece, probably two. The last was “The Owl & the Pussy Cat.” I did not know the piece then and had to search for it now. It was the Edward Lear poem. I am not sure if the music was Stravinsky or another. The audience did not entirely suppress its giggles as the soloist sang about her lovely pussy. Not knowing the Lear poem, I, too, was surprised but having grown up with the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of George Szell and his assistants, Louis Lane and Robert Shaw, I learned well to suppress all emotions while in the audience. After the concert, the harpist replied something like, “Nonsense. After all doesn’t ‘scherzo’ mean ‘joke’?” A light went on – Es gang mir ein Licht an: In German, das Scherz means “joke.” The word must have come from Italian because the Germans would never have invented the word on their own.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Google “Haydn joke” - https://www.therightnotes.org/haydn-s-humour.html Other composers also used the unexpected to surprise the audience. For one thing, from the chamber music of the Enlightenment to the huge civic halls of our time, many of the listeners are players if not performers themselves. When the Beethoven Sonata op. 31. No. 3 opens with a cadential harmonic progression, they get the joke, or so wrote Boris Berman. I don't understand it.

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Rachmaninoff

Music Makes You Braver

Austin at Night

World War II Sweetheart Dance 2019

Saturday, February 6, 2021

Rachmaninoff

My mother was more for Chopin and Liszt and we had a lot of that, especially as sheets and books, but also on 33-1/3 LPs, eventually in stereo. So, growing up, we had at least one Rachmaninoff, the Preludes and Variation on a Theme by Paganini, perhaps. And also the Second Piano Concerto. But I never knew that until I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and my 11^th grade American history teacher told me that that particular work was one of Ayn Rand’s favorites. I listened to it often while reading Atlas Shrugged through twice. To me, it is the soundtrack for the book and the soundtrack that the movie should have had.

Rand mentions it and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in The Fountainhead, at the beginning of Part IV. We see an anonymous young man in the woods. Recently graduated from college and seeking a path for his future, he responds to the beauty of the world around him and yearns for something within himself to answer the promise in the music.

Rachmaninoff was an icon in the society in which Rand matured. In Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, Lara, Komarovsky, and Pasha are all at the very fine party in a sparkling home, while in the background, Rachmaninoff plays for the guests.

It is not that I don’t care for music (see Hallelujah here), but that I have a slight hearing deficiency. The piano worked well enough for me because you hit the key and you get the note. As open instruments, the coronet and French horn were impossible for me. In the third grade, we took a “music readiness” test in which we had to identify higher and lower notes; and once they got close, I could not tell them apart. But music is a language; and I am good at languages, dialects, and accents. I have two cassette tapes, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Plays Gershwin. You can hear covers all over YouTube and the performers are accomplished professionals. But these are not just different performers with their own subtle interpretations. They are the right way to play the music because there is no substitute for creation.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

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Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged

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Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Katyusha and History as a Science

Beware of historians who quote each other. It was a forgotten lesson that I remembered in pieces while commuting about ten years ago.

When I was in junior high school, I watched different early morning lectures before going to school. “Sunrise Semester” was the paradigm, but there were others. In the ninth grade, I worked through an entire set on the history of communism. As I remember it now, the sponsors were Harvard University and the Marshall Law School, but the clues have proved impossible to follow.

At the same time, I was on the school newspaper staff and I met a girl there who was a senior. I don’t know why she liked me, but she did talk to me. I told her about the tv lectures and I showed her my notes. She got a hall pass from the teacher and took me to the library. We went to the 900s where the history books were. She pulled down three. “That’s the one,” I said. She opened them all to their bibliographies and pointed to the names of the other authors of the other books. “They just quote each other,” she said. “That’s not history.” Her name was Kathy. Like many in the neighborhood, she was ethnically Russian. I knew her as Kathy; she once said, “My name is Katyusha but I am not an anti-tank rocket.” I had no idea what she meant. A few years later, I was working as a messenger at what we still called City Hospital but which they rebranded as Cuyahoga County Metropolitan General Hospital. Running labs, someone called my name. She was in for something minor, an appendectomy perhaps. We said our hellos and smiled to each other, but her mother was there. The next time that my rounds took me to her ward, she was gone.

But I remembered the lesson and Google having been invented, I looked for “Katyusha.” Of the several versions, I like this one. I had to nod to the old veterans on camera at about 1:50 in.