It's been a good year on the blog, though the last month has been quiet due to a very busy work schedule. For Christmas Eve this year, here's a brand new work I wrote for our church's Lessons and Carols service as sung by the choir on Sunday. I only wrote this over Thanksgiving weekend, so they had less than a month to learn it, and we had only one and a half run-throughs with the strings.
Christina Rossetti is quite well-known for a couple of other poems which have become well-known Christmas hymns: In the bleak midwinter (set by Holst, and even better by Darke)and Love came down at Christmas. But I thought this poem, which is new to me, has a very special quality with its emphasis on paradox and the lovely "refrain" ending to each stanza. My goal in setting it was to bring out this mysterious quality, but I won't say too much about the technical aspects for now - I still have shopping to do!
Here are Rossetti's words:
Christmas hath a darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
And here's what it sounds like. [This is the live recording with no edits, although I did supplement it here with a backdrop from the digital practice version I'd made just to help smooth out the room sound.]
OK, I will say one technical thing about the music, which was actually in part an accident. The first five pitches (A-G-F-D-C#) of the main melody (introduced by violin and sung by the women right after) are also the five pitches with which that final couplet concludes both stanzas. I don't think I did this intentionally, but I was very satisfied when I realized it was so.
November is off to a busy start, so I'll express my nostalgia for the bygone days of September and October (when I had a lighter teaching schedule and was a little younger) with this recording I made late one October night after a recital. This wistful little waltz by Dick Hyman was written for the soundtrack of Woody Allen's 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo - which is, perhaps, my favorite movie of all time. It is an almost perfect film, lighthearted and clever but also touching and sad. Set in 1935, there's plenty of fun music from the era, but Hyman's Carousel Memories is the music that stays with me (ok, also this). The film celebrates the escapism that movies provide while also critiquing the emptiness at the end of such escapes. Although the music was written in the 80s, it expresses nostalgia not only for the 30s, but also for hopes and dreams which turn out to be unrealistic.
Anyway, if you haven't seen it, you should! And if you only have 60 seconds, try these Carousel Memories. (You may hear the version used on the soundtrack here. You may hear Hyman playing it live and then riffing on it here.) I don't have a published score, so my little version is something I worked out, though I've realized it differs in some details from both of the links posted parenthetically. It has always sounded to me like something which could almost fit into one of Robert Schumann's collections such as Carnaval, Davidsbündlertänze, or Scenes from Childhood. This is a commentary both on the elegance of Hyman's work and the forward-looking expressive world of Schumann. In other words, both Hyman and Schumann should be flattered by the comparison (if either were to care about my opinion).
A couple of months ago, a friend shared an unusual radio station tribute to the great Austrian composer Anton Bruckner on the occasion of his 200th birthday. I believe you may still view it here - and be sure to unmute the sound! And what sound do you hear paired with a picture of the composer and some basic biographical background. Aching strings? A richly scored brass chorale? A sublime motet? Hyperpop party music with Chipmunk-style vocals and a heavy backbeat?
Yes, it was something closest to the latter. Everything about this choice is fairly incomprehensible aside from the fact that I'm guessing the music used was royalty-free? Maybe? It's especially odd since, unlike fellow Vienna-based composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven - all known to write comical, lighthearted music at times - Bruckner probably has about the most serious reputation one can imagine. He wrote large-scaled symphonies and solemn sacred music, not lighthearted party pieces.
Anyway, I cannot explain the music choice, but I couldn't resist trying to Brucknerize it. I will admit that I'm not one of those dedicated Brucknerians who knows every symphony and recording and all the alternate versions. But I think the beginning of the 7th Symphony is one of the most radiantly beautiful things ever written - perhaps the polar opposite of the above. So, of course, I combined them:
And, as always, I found the combination/contrast more compelling than I would've expected. The near-silent rustling with which Bruckner begins is basically completely lost, but the starting note of THAT cello melody comes into focus and while the original soundtrack keeps time (in a way that Bruckner intentionally does not do), there are some interesting interactions between this tune and the pop bass line. Look, it's not music anyone was asking for, but there's something charming about this marriage of the highly commercial and the idealized abstract. Even though I chose to have Bruckner be what recedes here, there's a sense in which his music has come to free us from the banal, if only for a moment.
Your mileage may vary.
===============
This post is part of a continuing series in which silly multimedia things I create for social media are given a slightly more permanent home here and on YouTube. See also:
This new entry in my "Emptying Out the Desk Drawer" series, meant to preserve random little things I created for social media, is actually a cheat because, far from gathering dust in a corner, this ghastly creation is bursting with country-fresh flavor. I just made it a few hours ago in as little time as possible - which was part of the point. Think of it as Transcription Tartare.
Quick backstory. I have an ongoing Facebook group chat about many things musical. The subject of my general lack of interest in (and, ok, outright dissing of) Haydn's music had come up. Oh, right, it came up because I posted this image.
I'm not here to make a grand case about Haydn's over-ratedness, and as ever, I'm happy to admit that this may be a failing on my part. But I'll just summarize by saying that, while I absolutely appreciate his craftsmanship and his enormously positive influence on the evolution of musical style (Beethoven without Haydn isn't Beethoven), his gestures (and Haydn's music is very gestural) tend not to inspire much of an emotional reaction in me. Even a legendary "supposed to be stirring" chorus like The Heavens are Telling mostly just inspires me to do things like this.
Also worth mentioning that there IS some Haydn I truly love. I once wrote about a string quartet movement which I fell for so much that I recorded it as a piano solo. And I think his C Major Cello Concerto is one of the most perfect pieces ever written. I really, really love every second of it. It's possible that I love this piece in part because I got to know it before I knew the Classical Style really well, and so the gestures and developmental techniques feel completely fresh and original. I'll confess there's also a part of me that's always wondered if maybe...just maybe...he didn't write it since it was only discovered in 1961. Suspicious?
It does have some Haydnesque features; most notably, its themes and some of its passagework are quite similar to things in his Violin Concerto in C Major, a work which has always bored me to tears. (I've accompanied it many, many times.) Someone might fairly say, "if you love the cello concerto, you should at least like this." But it simply doesn't do anything for me, harmless as it is. It's just there. The conspiracy-theorist in me would be tempted to say, "maybe some enterprising cellist decided it would be nice to have a Haydn cello concerto,* wrote it in the style of the violin concerto, but then added some more interesting ideas inspired by what we've learned since the 18th century." I understand that this is unlikely and probably heresy. But I do think it sometimes.
So, in response to the picture above, one friend - a big Haydn fan - posted a recording of the very same violin concerto, knowing it would annoy me. Another gracious friend in the group wrote:
"this piece is well-crafted—making good musical sense, artfully blending high energy with more reflective moods, etc. But whether one actually likes listening to it is a matter of taste. I'll say no more, except to make it understood that I in no way desire to undermine [Friend #1]'s enjoyment of the piece."
To which I responded:
"I desire to undermine [Friend #1]'s enjoyment of the piece."
This was just because I thought it was a funny thing to say, but of course, I immediately thought of how I might carry out this undermining. My pride in what I'm about to post comes from how quickly it was generated and how diligently I avoided doing anything to make it not sound awful. I quickly found MIDI data for the first movement, entered this into Soundtrap (perfectly useful educational software for producing music, but with a not so sophisticated sound palette), assigned the parts to digital saxophones, added the most obnoxiously heavy and uncool drum part I could find in twelve seconds and....that's about it. (OK, I did add two sound effects.)
The point is, usually even when making something intentionally bad, I would look to refine the mix, maybe pan parts left and right to add clarity, do some EQ work, smooth things out with reverb, adjust some balances, maybe mix in a few different-sounding instruments. Maybe be disappointed that the only option provided for "baritone sax" was "Baritone Sax - Staccato." If nothing else, maybe tweak the alignment so the drums are precisely on the beat. Nope. The point here was to make this sound as bad and unproduced as possible.
So, of course....I love it. I've already said way too much to introduce it, but will finish by saying it seems like a natural thing to post on Halloween. Booo!
* yes, there is that other Haydn cello concerto, but it interests me much, much less.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I might start posting some ephemeral multimedia things I'd only posted on Facebook as a way of preserving/exploring them a bit more. I have a list of dozens of such items, though oddly enough, new topics have been popping up here more often than usual, so it's taken me some time to finish this post. This pattern actually goes back more than a decade with the blog. Once I post one or two things, I'm much more likely to start posting more.
About two years ago, a friend posted an image of a staircase with two bars of music designed into the railing. The treble clef actually looks pretty good, although there are some peculiarities about the music shown - especially the lack of a clear meter. It's a common theme for musicians to be annoyed when musical symbols are deployed as if they only exist for their appearance. (I was recently shown some designs for signs at my school in which quarter notes were used to decorate a page, with multiple stems on the wrong sides.)
Surely, the best response was from a friend of the friend who wrote:
But maybe there’s a REAL bar at the top of those stairs. The designer obviously knew where one was.
My own response was predictably more...well, I invested a lot of time in it. Here's what I wrote:
A friend (h/t David) shared this image of music in measures of 13/16 and 10/16 designed into a staircase. At first I just wanted to hear this musical nonsense, but then of course I felt compelled to make something of it. Those lovely implied 7th chords! The challenge is to use that 13+10 meter to some "advantage."
I'll add that though the original design might well have been conceived with no sounds at all in mind (at least as suggested by the durations), in addition to the implied arpeggiations of 7th chords in each bar, the second bar inverts the intervals of the first bar, and we get two motivic perfect fifths (all of those things are related, of course) - and perhaps most *notably*, the tune begin and ends on E. Because of natural patterns and symmetries in musical design, all of these things could easily have happened by chance.
You may hear the musical notes shown via this nifty little player (note that the music won't play if your phone is set to Do Not Disturb.)
Before long, this had turned into a short little composition. You may hear a digital rendition here.
My thought for the blog was that I'd record myself playing this VERY SIMPLE piece, and I'd be done with it. Well...if I thought the unusual additive rhythms in Messiaen's O sacrum convivium!were tricky, this definitely takes thing to a new level. This is actually a good example of a very widespread phenomenon: composers writing music using computers end up writing stuff that is much more awkward for live performers than the computer and/or notation might lead you to believe.
In this case, it's not so much the irregular meters of 13/16 and 10/16. (I've actually gotten pretty comfortable with irregular meters as shown here, here, and here.) Because I wanted the original piece to have a lazy, but hazy flow, I wrote a left hand part with metrical groupings mostly out of sync with the right hand. This looks really straightforward on the page (and there's a lot of repetition, because I wanted to suggest everything was evolving from the staircase motif), but to a 4/4 classical player like me, it's quite a mind stretch to combine the grooves.
Often, one hand will have sets of dotted eighths which subdivide into three sixteenths while the other hand plays eighths which subdivide into two sixteenths. But unlike many 2 against 3 situations, the places where the parts align do not necessarily have a strong metrical feel. I could have used ties and dotted notes to make the alignments more clear, but the point is that each part should be in its own little world. Also, it looks better this way.
The result of all this is that, like every blog project I conceive, this took a lot more time and effort than I'd expected! (My wife doesn't even laugh anymore when I say something like that.) But, it was fun and gratifying to play. I think I mostly have the combined grooves down, although it's still tricky for my mind to perceive both at once. (I did write in little reminder cheats to help align things and practiced along with the synth performance as well. It is not metronomically perfect, but the flow feels right to the composer.)
And here's the result. Some soothing, but slightly unnerving music for late on a fall afternoon.
This is certainly an unusual inspiration for a composition, though its kernel is a fully formed motif, whether its designer knew that or not. It's not so far from the idea of writing a fugue based on a pre-existing motif and no less random than writing music based on letters as J.S. Bach and Shostakovich enjoyed doing. I've explored decorative markings on a score as suggestions for improvisation. Someone wrote a concerto to go with a cat's nuzzling at a keyboard. People write music to go with bird and whale songs. Perhaps next time I'll go for a true challenge and write a concerto based on a cup of coffee or a rock.
P.S. By the way, this genre of musical railings has many more examples than I'd have expected as this simple Google search shows.
LYRIC POET: Are we embarking on a study of the meaning of meaning? YOUNGER BROTHER: I sure hope not. (from Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music)
NOTE: There are more than 500 possible outcomes.
About Me
MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and college music professor in the Boston area. This is not me. Neither is this. Curiously, these most Googleable Michael Monroe's are each musicians. This IS me.
