Wednesday, August 6, 2025

The Augmented Reality Waltz

Ever since that fateful day (a story with an amazing coincidence) thirteen years ago when I discovered "Augmented Sixth Day," I've found that many years I forget to celebrate either until the day of or even long after the day has passed. (This is where a well-stocked Hallmark section could really help keep a guy on track.) In fact, I'm alarmed to see that I've only made holiday-specific posts three times before on this august day, plus another one a couple of months late in 2021. Here's where we've been so far.

I suppose this is a time of year when I'm least likely to look at a calendar closely since it's generally vacation time, but a couple of days ago I was reminded the big day was coming. (Sadly, this reminder came about due to a reading an article about the upcoming anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, which happened on an August 6.) So, on August 4th, I decided to create something special for this year.

I decided it might be fun to create a piece which intentionally overuses - er, um, fully implements - the augmented sixth chord as a structural device. After a few days of tinkering and finally recording, I have something I kind of like. It's built on a recurring, ever-modulating pattern with each two-bar group (or every bar in mm. 9-13) featuring an augmented sixth chord, with a few extras thrown in at the beginning and end. As it turned out, although augmented sixth chords make great pivot points for modulation, in this case most of the augmented sixth chords (these are almost all German Sixths) are simply intensifying the approach to a cadential 6/4 chord. However, each cadence is diverted by a new Dominant Seventh in the next key around the Circle of Fifths, so the music follows a basic circle progression as it chromatically winds its way around.*

I realize a lot of this might sound completely mystifying. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Augmented Sixth chords is that the two outer pitches which form an augmented sixth usually resolve outwardly by half-step to an octave. (It's also important that at least one of the pitches is not in the key, so that also adds chromatic intensity.) Half-step resolutions tend to be powerful forces harmonically. This image shows the first line of music with the Augmented Sixths and their resolutions indicated:

As used in my little waltz, each Augmented Sixth Chord (such an unwieldy name!) is really just a chromatic alteration of a very common minor iv chord (a triad built on the fourth note of the minor scale). It doesn't really need to be there for the standard progression of iv6 to i64 to V, but the progression is made more intense by raising the 4th scale degree (F to F-sharp, for example). This kind of thing was used all the time by Classical and Romantic Era composers. Here's one of my little demos I created in a Haydn quartet. (In this case, because it's in a major key, the switch to German Sixth also requires a flattening of the 6th scale degree, so you get chromatic intensification in two directions.) 

I began composing by simply working out these little repetitions of a modulating phrase, and then I changed up a few things to make it slightly more interesting (?). In addition to demonstrating two classic harmony concepts (augmented sixths and circle progressions), the little waltz also features regular hemiolas, and is by nature very chromatic and, thus, both obsessive and anxious. I couldn't decide whether it should be fast or slow, so you get three different recordings. Happy Augmented Sixth Day!

* Theory nerds will know that German Sixths and Dominant Sevenths are enharmonically the same - which is to say they use the same sounding pitches, but are spelled differently. The first musical example in this post shows how what sounds like a standard Dominant Seventh can turn out to function as a modulating Augmented Sixth chord, taking us from C Major to the distant key of E Major. My waltz does something kind of opposite. The Augmented Sixth chord simply intensifies a standard cadence, but a chromatic alteration introduces a Dominant Seventh chord in the next key around the Circle of Fifths, and off we go.


Posted by MICHAEL MONROE at 3:49 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 1, 2025

Ghosts in the Machine

Continuing from my last post in a "what I did this summer" at music camp kind of vein, I had one other burst of creativity (?) come from our daily piano seminars. A student had gotten up to play the breakneck final movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, and in the moment, this reminded me of a commercial from about a decade back.

That video will also show/remind you how this music is supposed to go - before it becomes literally monotone. [The logic of the ad itself is so bad that I had no memory of what product was being advertised, so it took me a little while to track it down.]

That then reminded me of this amusing video in which a quirky Internet Piano Guy tunes all the keys on his upright to E and then springs the trap on a a few online teachers. As in the ad logic above, he complains that his playing "sounds kind of uninspired." (The first five minutes are the best part):
The dozen or so students in the seminar (ages 8 to 16 or so) loved both videos, so it occurred to me that it would be fun to let them try this out. Of course, there's no way I could re-string a piano, but I figured there must be a way to program a computer to accept input from a digital piano and send back...well, whatever. (I already have a digital piano on hand in the room to pair with the "real" piano so more students can practice sight-reading at a time.) There are probably simpler ways to do it, but I found a way to set up Ableton Live to re-map each key to C, so the next day we gave it a try. It was interesting to see the range of reactions. Some students were immediately amused and intrigued and others just seemed annoyed. Meanwhile, I found that I really enjoyed the feeling of playing one thing and getting this quirky feedback. It's especially fun to play fast passages since playing repeated notes quickly is notoriously difficult on a piano action, but here it's a breeze! 

Even more so, I also enjoyed playing with the repeated notes on (playing through a speaker attached to my computer) while the digital piano's regular sounds played as well. It creates an interesting, ghostly echo/halo around the music. Because the setup I created required remapping the keyboard octave by octave, I didn't try to change the "one note" from C to anything else, so for my demo video below, I mostly explored music in C Major or A Minor. From a tonal perspective, it's quite interesting to hear the tonic constantly articulated (like a pedal point) as it makes it immediately obvious how far we've strayed from home base.* 

For whatever reason, with my setup, although one can hear some variety of dynamics and articulations, chords don't really seem to register as much more than just single notes. That's something I'd like to improve, but for now I chose mostly linear music that I could stumble through without practicing. I also chose familiar pieces since that makes it easier to hear the hidden structures. For most of the selections, you'll hear a short excerpt played with only the repeated notes turned on. Then, the same music is performed with the repeated notes as decoration. For the two Bach pieces (a Prelude and a Two-Part Invention in C), I enjoyed the effect so much that I played through the entire pieces in the second manner. 

The video begins with Mozart in C with some fast scalar passages and ends with the etude-parody of Debussy's Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, so those two excerpts best exhibit the somewhat unreal repeated-note effect. In between are some short bits of Beethoven and more Mozart. Links for each new section are provided in the "about" section of the video. (Beethoven's Für Elise works really well, as it is mostly linear - the excerpts from the 5th Symphony and the first movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata work less well, but they are so iconic, I thought it was worth giving them a try.)
But of course, once I'd thought about remapping the keys, I couldn't resist other possibilities. The most obvious and fruitful so far has been the simplest: reverse everything so the notes go in reverse order. This actually turned out to be even more fun, although again, it would be nice if I had a quicker way to choose the inversion point. 

In this case, it's arguable that the "inversion alone" versions sound better than those paired with the real thing because of a curious feature of inverting. Basically, to put it in simple terms, if one thinks of the "white key" notes of C Major and inverts them from the C at the bottom, the pattern of whole steps and half steps reversed means you end up (going down) with C, Bb, Ab, G, F, Eb, Db, C. Not only is this the C Phrygian Mode, which sounds very different from major, but it introduces four pitches which are not in the C Major pitch collection, so inverted music doubled against itself will very quickly use 11 of the 12 possible pitches (F-sharp is the only one left out) which means: lots of dissonance. 

Once again, I featured parts of Bach's prelude and 2-part invention in C along with Mozart's C Major sonata, Beethoven's Fur Elise and Symphony No. 5 and the Debussy Gradus ad Parnassum. To these are added Debussy's Golliwog's Cakewalk, which a student had played in class and which creates a really fun inversion of itself that is quite recognizable due to the syncopations, and the complete first of Poulenc's Mouvements perpétuels. That last one is the most fun because incidental spicy dissonance is already part of the original, and the inversion of the balanced left/right hand parts is quite satisfying. As with the first video, using the embedded chapters in this video makes it easy to sample the various experiments.
I can easily imagine some people thinking I'm wasting my time with this. Among other things, it would be trivially easy simply to drop this music into a DAW as MIDI and create the same repeated note or inverted effects. In fact, I've done this kind of thing before. What was different for me in this case was the experience of playing familiar music and having these odd artifacts of remapping sounding instead of what my finger-to-ear system expects. Perhaps it's a little like speaking English but somehow having the words come out in French - there's an "out of body" element in play. 

For pit musicians who play musical theater keyboard parts, they are used to having notation instruct them to trigger various sounds and musical ideas by using remapped keys, but even that's not quite the same. (Come to think of it, probably the first experience I ever had of this was playing a John Cage prepared piano piece in high school.) Here, the ear is teased both by the familiar and the unexpected. Again, this is not for everyone. One very talented little seven-year old with perfect pitch was simply confused and spent her time at the instrument trying to get things (like "Mary Had a Little Lamb") to come out "correctly." But others found it really enjoyable and just plain fun in the playful sense. I could even imagine that playing either setup could help with practice and memorization in some contexts. 

Other setups I've experimented with include: 1) remapping all keys to be either C or F-sharp so that everything comes out tritones and 2) remapping all the keys to be C but moving up by octaves going up the keyboard. It is also possible to program keys to respond randomly, but that seemed a little less interesting, although some "controlled random" might yield interesting results. 

So if you've ever felt like everything you do just comes out the same or comes out the opposite of what you expect...perhaps you'll enjoy this light summer fare!


*It now occurs to me I should also try music in F Major in which C is both part of the tonic and dominant harmonies. When C is the tonic, the repeated Cs clash a lot with the dominant chord (G Major), but that does help emphasize the tonic-dominant polarity.

Posted by MICHAEL MONROE at 4:27 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Claire Elise

Just finished the first of two two-week music camp sessions on Friday, and this year's interactions with talented young students have inspired a few new creations. I'm still working on showcasing something else, but here's something unexpected. A couple of very sweet young pianists asked after a piano class one day if I would arrange Debussy's Clair de lune and Beethoven's Für Elise for them to play as a duet. It was only when I got home and started toying with the idea that I put two and two together: these two students are named Claire and Elise.

If you've been around this blog before, it should be obvious that I would find the challenge irresistible - but it was also just challenging. Unlike many other little mashups I've created this year, the Debussy and Beethoven don't pair very naturally, although I have paired Clair de lune with Beethoven before in an even more absurd context. Even when I had downshifted the Debussy from D-flat Major to C Major so that it would merge more gracefully with Beethoven's A Minor (the relative minor of C), it took some finagling to get the motives to play nicely and have a reasonably meaningful conversation. As so often, if this is successful, it is surely in part because both works are so iconic that the listener can enjoy both the recognition and the repurposing of these ideas. 

In addition to transposing the Debussy from D-flat down a half-step to C, it also seemed logical to shift this moonlight music up an octave to make room for the more grounded and rhythmically regular Beethoven. There is a slight connection in that both works are in a compound meter (Beethoven's 3/8 vs. Debussy's 9/8), although Debussy's music is written in such a way as to make the meter seem elusive. You'll see that Elise has to wait a little longer than usual to finish a few phrases while waiting for the moonlight to settle into view. 

I don't think I'd ever written anything for one piano, four hands before, and to add to the challenge, after finding my digital demos unsatisfying, I decided to record this as well - in spite of having only two hands. I didn't get access to the piano I wanted, so this one is a bit less resonant in the upper register than I'd have liked, but it was a fun process. Because two of the hands naturally inhabit a pretty tight space (one of the joys of piano duets!) and actually overlap in space since they were recorded separately, I faded the videos together which makes for an interesting effect.

Camp #2 starts tomorrow, but hopefully I'll be back soon with more show'n'tell.



And, of course, there's much more of this if you're so inclined: Classical Mashups (more than 70 videos!)
Posted by MICHAEL MONROE at 7:00 PM 0 comments

Saturday, May 24, 2025

When the dog barks (Emptying the Desk Drawer #7)

In my last post exploring the connection between a Chopin nocturne and Richard Rodgers' Cinderella, I promised another Rodgers & Hammerstein tune connection. It looks like I first wrote about this on Twitter in August of 2013 (just a few months after the May '13 Cinderella-Chopin connection), although I think I'd felt this one for years before that. It should be pretty obvious how these two tunes are related.

One is a transition theme from Mendelssohn's transcendent Piano Trio in D Minor. The other is....well, hear it for yourself. You'll first have to listen to about 25 seconds of pure Mendelssohn as the wonderful opening cello tune is belted out fully, explored sequentially, and then leads right into that transitional theme. I would say it's one of my favorite things in this trio except just about every page has something exceptional. 

Again, I can't help but wonder if this music had any influence on Richard Rodgers when he was thinking about frightening barks and bees. Although this melodic figure first drops by 7ths in the violin, when the piano takes it up next, the intervals are almost exactly the same as what Fräulein Maria sings to calm the children. With "My Favorite Things" transposed into the Mendelssohn key here, even the 7th scale degree which isn't immediately raised to G-sharp in Mendelssohn is by the end of its phrase. Here's a quick demo:
Otherwise, the distinctive rhythmic and melodic motives, treated sequentially in both cases (though with an extra sequential extension in Rodgers), are unmistakably similar.



I'll add two little extensions to this blog post. For one, if we're really emptying all the silliness from the "things I do on social media" desk drawer, might as well pull out this very silly mashup of the finale to Mendelssohn's 5th Symphony "Reformation" with the ABBA song "Mamma Mia." I don't even remember exactly why I made this, and you don't get any fun visuals this time. Just sit back and enjoy the short ride.


Finally, as a sort of penance for what I've just done, I'm also releasing into the wild my own family performance of the first two movements of Mendelssohn's trio (the very performance to which Maria was added above!). My psychiatrist-cellist wife, then 14-year old violinist daughter (now working on a Chemistry Ph.D.) and I were styling ourselves as Montrieau (which plays on my last name and my wife's French-Canadian last name), though sadly we haven't had that many more chances to perform this way since. We had performed the complete Dvořák "Dumky" trio the year before, but  had much less prep time for my faculty recital in 2013, so we did something I've written about before: we closed the program with only half of the Mendelssohn trio, reversing the order of movements 1 & 2 to make a dramatically satisfying ending.

At the time, I was more concerned about notes that got away (there are a lot of notes), but with the passing of time, I actually find the performances pretty satisfying, if not perfect in balance or execution. So that's Mendelssohn, from the ridiculous to the absurd to the sublime.

More in this quirky series below:
See also these playlists:
Posted by MICHAEL MONROE at 7:56 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Cinderella Chopin (Emptying the Desk Drawer #6)

Back in late 2024, I started a series of "Emptying the Desk Drawer" posts as a way of writing about smaller multimedia projects I've made over the years which haven't been archived here on the blog. My two recent Chopin-related posts (here) and (here) reminded me of something I'd created back about a dozen years ago. Like my fairly recent mashup of Bernstein and Bizet, I was prompted by hearing a student practicing in the next room. A Chopin nocturne, specifically the middle section starting around 2:00:


I wrote the following on Twitter, though I'm leaving out the link I put there because I have made an improved version below.
Student kept practicing part of a Chopin Nocturne next door - knew it reminded me of something - finally realized [link to solution removed here]

Of course, it is possible that my post title already tipped you off, but Chopin's wandering waltz-like tune led me to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella: the second phrase of the Prince's "Ten Minutes Ago." You may hear that one-half step up in A Major here:


And you may hear them in concert here:


It's a combination of the lilting rhythm and the repeated, winding C-Db-C-Bb-Ab-Bb-C motive. If we accept my little transposition of the Prince down to A-flat, we have the Prince using this motive to glide across the dance floor while Chopin, starting in the relative F Minor, is in a more pensive and searching mood. Thus, the two contexts sound pretty different, but I still can't help wonder if Rodgers knew or even played this nocturne and had this figure floating around in his brain, though the connection could as easily be a coincidence. (Actually the Cinderella score has this song in G Major which is a half-step down from Chopin. It is also in 3/4 time, but I've converted it to 12/8 to make the connection easier to see.)

I have more mashup material related to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but I'll save that for another post in a day or two. Rather, I will end by noting something that always surprises me. Though I have nothing close to perfect pitch, and that might even have helped me connect these two melodies in different keys, when I listened to the opening of the Chopin, my mind was almost immediately brought to the opening of Chausson's perfect song Le colibri which I've played many times and recorded here as a piano solo. The two pieces each begin with an upwardly rolled chord in A-flat Major with the exact same notes except that Chausson's top note is an F (not part of the A-flat triad), but I'm sure my ear made the connection because they are in the same key. It's almost as if I have perfect pitch as long as I don't ever think consciously about it!

Posted by MICHAEL MONROE at 9:41 PM 0 comments
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