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.
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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.
There were some sixteen years between 1983's Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi and 1999's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Much as many people assumed that George Lucas was done with those movies in 1983 (of course, he should have stopped there), my six-part series of "Songs Without Singers" from 2008 surely seemed to have reached its conclusion sixteen years ago, after excursions with Chausson, Strauss, Poulenc, Schubert, Hoiby, and Stanford. I've since repurposed the Chausson, Poulenc, Hoiby, and Stanford with updated scrolling scores, all as part of 2021's Introspective Retrospective Recital project, and I'd like to re-record the Chausson, Schubert, and Strauss on better pianos, but otherwise I hadn't thought a lot about it.
However, in my most recent post, I mentioned (via hyperlink) Gabriel Fauré's early song Lydia. Considering its place in my own pantheon of perfect, self-contained and somewhat restrained miniatures, I wrote: "Fauré perhaps come closest with this song, which loses points for being a bit too emotional but gains points for the refined counterpoint in the piano part. Turn it into a piano solo (why haven't I done this?) and it would be a model example."
So...it just so happened I had a chance after a Friday night recital to sit and record on a very nice piano for a bit. First of all, I made a new recording of last post's obsession (also originally for voices): Messiaen's O sacrum convivium! Although I have some lingering affection for the "Lo-fi" version I'd made on a practice room piano, I wanted a richer sound, less noisy pedal, and a chance to be at least a little more accurate with some of Messiaen's additive rhythms. I also decided I preferred playing all four parts throughout rather than sustaining repeated notes in lower voices. Here you go:
[and if you missed my spaced-out, sitting-at-the-synth version, it's over here.]
But I also took up my own suggestion to record Fauré's Lydia as a piano solo, and I've made my own bespoke score so it can scroll continuously along. Fauré is right up there with Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Strauss, Debussy, and Poulenc as a composer of art songs, and there is no song of his I love more than this simple two-verse wonder. It is a natural for the "Songs without Singers" treatment since most of the melody is doubled in the piano part anyway. (Most important was leaving out some repeated pitches in the piano which would interfere with sustained melody notes.) And though it can be sung beautifully, there's something gratifying about reducing it to just the keys.
Leconte de Lisle's text is very romantic and "suggestive," but sometimes the best things go unsaid (or unsung). In the previous post, I pondered the concept of "Music which sounds right on a sub-aural level" - this is more a case of "vocal music which sounds right on a sub-vocal level."
Fauré's piano part is quite unusual. His songs much more often feature harmonic support via chords or arpeggiated patterns. This semi-Lydian (get it?) tribute to the beautiful Lydia looks almost like a Bach chorale beneath those lyrics - perhaps an extension of using the "old-fashioned" Lydian mode. The poem/song is about a moment of surpassing tenderness and intimacy; although four-part counterpoint may seem intellectual and complex on the surface, the mostly narrow range and lightness of this accompaniment work well to create a sense of stillness suitable to the mood. Maybe the gently intertwining parts can even be considered suggestive as well. It's all a beautiful example of writing against type in a way which yields surprisingly satisfying results.
Reflecting more broadly on this whole "songs without singers" concept, way back when I was "not a doctor because of myself" in search of a research topic, I used to think I wanted to do some kind of work with the kind of translation which happens when we perform colorful orchestral or vocal music on the black-and-white piano. What I realized is that I was and am less interested in doing historical studies of viewpoints on this and more interested in simply exploring the possibilities by playing. And recording. And then writing about it. The proof of concept for me is that I love the way this music feels and sounds this way.
Of course, my Messiaen recording could also be considered a "song without singers," so I suppose this series now extends to 8. That's just one less than the number of Skywalker Sagamovies!
P.S. If you don't know the original song, here's a lovely recording. Strangely, although the original F Major seems like the "right" choice for the Lydian Mode connection, it's not easy to find recordings in this key. Tenors like it up a step and many baritones go down. I also like the King's Singers a cappella rendition - definitely brings out the counterpoint. I much prefer this live (?) recording as the studio version is too precious and slickly recorded.
P.P.S. The song's structure is really simple. Tiny intro, 16-bar verse, tiny interlude, 16-bar verse, piano outro. That outro is a little strange (and not easy to play), though it's actually just a descending F Major scale (not Lydian!), with octave displacements, over ascending thirds. What's unusual is that it has a different feeling than the rest of the song - after the death ("mourir toujours"), as it were. Although it has the contrary motion we expect with counterpoint, it is not particularly melodic. It also reaches almost a full octave higher than anything which precedes. Here's the right hand part, with a reduction below that shows the linear structure of the seemingly disjunct writing, made even more so by the persistent dotted rhythms. I always find this postlude a little mystery.
[This post was an unexpected journey in many ways. It started simply with having fun entering some notes by Messiaen into a computer...Eventually, I get around to that.]
For years I've had this quarter-baked idea that there are certain compositions which exhibit a special kind of small-scale perfection. Although these impressions are certainly subjective, the feeling I have is that every part of the whole has an inevitable, organic quality - almost as if the composer simply discovered a perfectly formed crystal and shared it with the world. With such pieces, it's as if the music simply generates itself like some sort of mathematical proof.
There are fine examples of this from core German composers, such as Bach's Air*, Pachelbel's You Know What, Mozart's Ave verum corpus, the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Schumann's Des Abends, Rheinberger's Abendlied, Strauss's Morgen. What all of these works have in common is a kind of continuity that makes it possible to hear the whole piece as one thing - like a beautiful sphere which simply rotates so we can experience its oneness across time.
An important part of this phenomenon (as I experience it) is that there be a certain degree of emotional detachment - which, oddly, makes it hard for me to find something to include by Schubert, Mendelssohn, or Brahms, even though all are expert at crafting miniatures. (Maybe this is the closest I can think of for Mendelssohn.) The same goes even more so for Chopin and Italian opera arias which tend towards full heart on sleeve. As a natural introvert, sometimes I appreciate a little distance from overt expressions of feeling.
On the other hand, the French sensibility is ideal for this vague, barely defined thing I'm trying to articulate. Stravinsky famously compared Ravel to a Swiss watchmaker, and it is that kind of craftsmanship I have in mind. A perfectly made watch can be a thing of beauty, but it also exhibits a pure, objective kind of elegance which is the perfect marriage of machine and magic. Each little part does its part in sync with others and the result is a very slow and perfectly coordinated ballet which marks time. Each movement (a word which happens to be connected with watches and music) is logically connected to what comes before and after. Music which exhibits such elegance is often less about feeling on the surface, though our response to that formal satisfaction might feel emotional in a less obvious way.
Ravel has some lovely miniatures, including this exquisite Menuet, and perhaps even this paradoxical monstrosity (which I love). But my favorite examples of this kind of...you know, I almost used the word "confection," but that's not right as that would be too sweet...my favorite examples of this kind of crystalline construct are not from Ravel or Debussy. (Debussy wrote some excellent miniatures, but they are too improvisatory or too sensual to qualify here.)
The ideal embodiment of this kind of nonchalant perfection has to be Couperin's Les Barricades Mystérieuses, a work which has its own mythology. (I highly recommend checking out the multiple subsections found under the "Mysterious Barricades" tab there.)
That's not my favorite recording (I prefer something fleeter), but I chose it because the visual of the score, with its lovely interlocking suspensions, is such a part of how I experience this music. (I also like this recording, although the sound is a little too soupy.) Maybe that's part of what I'm looking for - music that looks the part even when you don't hear it. It's hard not to feel that this music really could unlock something purer and deeper in how we understand the world. Music which sounds right on a sub-aural level? (Once again, this concept is only a quarter baked!)
Honestly, nothing quite matches Couperin's barricades for balance and subdued expression. (The music doesn't tell you what to feel, but it might make you feel something profound.) Moving on to other French composers, there are a couple of perfect tunes which are perhaps too famous and too expressive for this topic, but still worth mentioning: Gounod's uncanny "discovery" of a melody which floats above a Bach prelude and Saint-Saëns' perfectly poised evocation of a floating swan. (Sorry, Massenet, great tune - but too sappy!)
Fauré perhaps come closest with this song, which loses points for being a bit too emotional but gains points for the refined counterpoint in the piano part. Turn it into a piano solo (why haven't I done this?**) and it would be a model example. Poulenc offers a few options as well, including this and this. Both of those songs are deeply expressive, but contained within French reserve.
An unexpected entry here, which nevertheless always finds its way into my thinking on this topic, is the brilliant Widor Toccata. As thrilling and dramatic as it can be, the perpetual motion figuration and the inexorable logic of the harmonies give it the same sense of inevitability and unified construction as other works mentioned here. I play it every Easter Sunday, and from the moment I dive in, it feels like one big spin cycle from beginning to end.
Before I get to my final destination, I have to mention the Satie Gymnopédies, works which certainly look the part and are almost caricatures of this idea. As I've written before, they are directionless in a way that maybe seems less meticulous than a classic watch, but they beautifully embody the concept: a musical entity generated by a single idea which spins out for no other reason than its own internal logic. (Maybe more like mobiles than watches?) When everything lines up, experiencing these hand ballets is like stepping outside of time.
So...speaking of stepping outside of time, the composition which prompted all of this is by a composer who is more known for big, bold, heterogeneous works, including one about the end of time. When writing about Olivier Messiaen some years ago, I observed that his music "might variously be characterized as old-fashioned, modern, sweet, brutal, simple, challenging, mystical, colorful, sensual, sacred, jazzy, naturalistic, intellectual, etc." Messiaen's motet O sacrum convivium! - a relatively early, very approachable work - isn't brutal in any way, but just about everything else in that list might apply. Here's a lovely starter recording, sung a cappella:
I first encountered this music when subbing as an accompanist for a local chorus, and I fell in love from the first rehearsal. Even the feeling of playing those ripe chords on the keys - the exotic F-sharp Major key signature, the unusual spellings, the hypnotically asymmetrical rhythms. I've since had my church choir sing it with organ accompaniment, and I've played it as an organ solo multiple times during church. Although it looks a little intimidating at first, it turns out to be very easy and gratifying to play on the organ. (I can handle a pedal part which moves that slowly and infrequently.)
Because the choir is going to sing it again, I decided to create practice parts for them - which meant I had the extra privilege of getting to encounter and manipulate these notes from the engraving point of view. A major theme of this blog is that this kind of encounter can be as enlightening as playing or listening to music.
I also knew there was tremendous potential energy in having the notes entered as data, and because this music can feel like it flirts with the eternal, I realized I would have to experiment with s..t..r..e..t..c..h..i..n..g it out, as I've done with other works in the past. This proved as satisfying as I'd hoped, and so we'll end today's journey with a couple of very different extremes.
First of all, just as Couperin's mysterious barricades have drawn lots of interest outside of the classical world, especially with guitarists, I was surprised - and not surprised - to find multiple guitarists as well as marimbaists and jazz ensembles playing Messiaen's motet. The harmonies definitely lend themselves to those worlds, although it would seem that this music demands a constant sustain not natural to guitar. But I knew from my first time accompanying that this music is very satisfying on the piano, so I've made this informal little practice room version. I wish the pedal was quieter, but this is the kind of thing I'd love to include if I ever get around to creating another "Introspective Recital." I love the way it looks on the page, I love the way it feels under the fingers, and I love the way it sings and rings. (You may notice I took some liberties as to when I re-play repeated notes in the lower voices, although I haven't done very careful thinking about it. UPDATE (10/20/24): This is a newer recording on a better piano. The original version I posted is here.)
But, at the other extreme is my new hyper-sustained version. The slowest "real" recording I'd found was one led by Myung-Whun Chung clocking in at just over seven minutes. Using virtual instruments, I created a "performance" - which will surely horrify some - which almost doubles that. (Yes, I could extend out to infinity, but I wanted to keep the metrical pacing within perceptive reach.) In part because I find the synthetic sustained sounds can be a bit dull and because I liked the idea of an underlying pulse, I mischievously added some distant drum loops to which I'm now rather attached, but I'll leave that version in the playlist at the end of this post. This version is just pure sustain.
So there you have it, two quite different takes on an extraordinary four...or seven...or fourteen minutes of music - music in which the composer evokes the wonder and mystery of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And he does seem to have captured something that is both tangible and earthly while also linking to something transcendental. Messiaen would touch on such glimpses of the eternal many times more, most notably in both the fifth movement and the final movement of his Quartet for the End of Time. I love both of those movements, but whereas the composer spins out endless melodies there (which would really suffer if played by non-humans), it feels as if the entire O sacrum convivium! is generated by the vibrant major seventh harmony with which it opens. I've listened to my fourteen-minute versions many times now and find they pull me along just as inexorably as if played in a quarter of that time.
To give you a sense of the broad range of ways in which Messiaen's motet can be adapted, I've created this playlist which includes my new videos plus many varied takes in all sorts of contexts. I'm not surprised this music has transcended its expected classical boundaries. Hopefully, you'll enjoy getting to know it as well. Although I'm sure not everything on the list will be to everyone's tastes (and some might even be mildly scandalized), it's true of Messiaen in general that while his music has something for everyone, most will also find something bewildering in his idiosyncratic style. I love the Quartet for the End of Timeand at least parts of the enormousVingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus - and yet there are times when I have no idea what he's getting at. For me, that strangeness is strangely part of his appeal.
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P.S. One more honorable mention in the "whatever this category turns out to be" is Charles Stanford's partsong, The Blue Bird, which cast a spell on me decades ago which has never been broken. You may hear my piano take on it here, and note that its warm key of G-flat Major is the enharmonic equivalent of Messiaen's bright F-sharp Major. (They use the same set of mostly black-key pitches - and yet they somehow feel quite different, at least in part due to the appearances of the scores.)
Also, since quite to my surprise this post has now cited more than twenty different works, I'm adding a playlist which includes them all for convenience. (Yes, I've made a few "unusual" choices for recordings to include.) If you're wondering if my shaky thesis about a particular kind of perfect work is just an excuse for me to write about music I like - well, why do you think I have this blog?
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* In re-reading my "German" list, I realize the most obvious choice (among many) for a Bach piece in this mold is the C Major Prelude from WTC, Book I. Sometimes, I actually find that piece too mechanical, and I'm surely biased by feeling that the Gounod "Ave Maria" melody is what brings out its best qualities. But whenever I play it, it does seem perfect, and it feels very gratifying under the hands. The Air I mention can invite a bit of Romantic indulgence, but when played properly, its poised counterpoint is spellbinding.
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.
