This is a connection which has stuck with me even though it's a fairly tenuous one. (I've yet to Google evidence that others have discussed it.) Of course, to some degree, once such a mental connection has been made, it perpetuates itself naturally, but I do think there's an affinity between these manically lighthearted works. For Bernstein's "Officer Krupke," the lightheartedness is meant to relieve the dramatic tension that has been building, with the harmonic instability underscoring how unsettled everything is for The Jets as misunderstood juvenile delinquents. (In the original stage version, the song comes after the disastrous and deadly rumble). For Bizet, a playful chase mood prevails, with surprising harmonic twists suggesting evasions and escapes.
First, if you don't know one or the other of these works, here's Bizet's Le bal, the "galop"-style finale of a 12-movement suite for duo pianists called Jeux d'enfants (Children's Games). [video should start at the 1:08 mark]
And you may head HERE to see and hear "Officer Krupke" as sung in the 1961 movie version of West Side Story.
The most obvious connections are:
each is in a fast-paced 2/4 time
each melody begins with an eighth-note pattern of Do-Ti-Do-Re-Mi (1-7-1-2-3) though with different kinds of upbeats. (This motif is used obsessively by Bernstein, helping our ears adjust to the tonal shifts.)
each features a fair amount of chromaticism caused by quickly shifting key centers mid-phrase. This happens through much of the Bernstein, but also a good bit in the middle of the Bizet.
Back in 2013, I made a slapdash little comparison audio which ends in a sort of sloppy back-and-forth between the two. You may hear that here.
I was a little dissatisfied on hearing that last night, so I threw the MIDI for both works into a DAW blender, tweaked a few things, and came up with this:
If I'm correct in referring to these works as "manically lighthearted," then this smash-up definitely up-ke's the ante on the manic - perhaps to maniacal. Because Bernstein's tune shifts key centers so quickly, there's a lot of incidental dissonance, but I find my ear can still follow both threads in a way that's satisfying. The "score" I created is pretty bare-bones and not really playable in places, but it's useful for giving your ears something to follow.
If you'd like to see scores for these two works, here's a fun "player-piano" style take on Krupke:
...and here's a recording of Bizet's entire two-piano suite with a score helpfully reduced to one piano. (The original duo-piano score has the two parts on separate pages, so it's a little harder to follow along with that.) This video should begin at the 21:06 mark where Le bal begins. The most harmonically adventurous section - which has a little of that Krupke spirit - starts around 21:40.
I've always loved "Officer Krupke," and have found that students really enjoy it as well. After showing the scene to 8th grade boys some years back, I was a little surprised that they wanted to sing it. Since the lyrics are intentionally a bit provocative, I made my own parody version (one less verse and no modulations between verses (because modulations are provocative?)) which I've used with multiple classes over the years. The character names are based on actual authority figures at my school, including the mysterious Mister Doctor Monroe, a reference to the fact that students love to correct each other about how they should address the music teacher (I honestly don't care). This resulted in the Mr./Dr. double-prefix becoming a thing. The lyrics also address the fact that I did my best to get the students to act out the song as a skit. (This tended to result in many overturned chairs; the rest is a blur.)
If you've followed this blog, you'll know I love mashing things up (as evidenced by this lengthy playlist), but there's a particular subset of mashup - into which today's exhibits fits - where two works are just smashed together with little or no effort put into making things fit. As I already suggested above, I find that my mind loves this kind of listening - it's an extreme kind of counterpoint in which the brain gets to try hearing two conflicting things at once. Here's a new playlist to celebrate such monstrosities.
I was on February vacation last week, and though I didn't have a chance to escape our cold winter weather, I did have some time to take walks, listen to music, see some movies, and muse to myself about connections among these experiences. Early in the week, I already knew I'd be hearing acclaimed pianists Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson in a Friday duo-piano recital which would feature Schubert's remarkable Fantasy in F Minor for two pianists at one piano - so I chose to listen to that on a cold, gloomy, colorless Thursday afternoon walk.
The piano is such a generally self-sufficient instrument that piano duets are usually more about creating an opportunity for social music-making than they are about epic musical statements. Even works for two pianos, while allowing for some really big sonic energy, can seem excessive and without the advantage other chamber ensembles have of coloristic diversity resulting from the use of varied instruments. The kinds of textures enabled by four hands at one piano can shine more light on the delicate upper reaches of the instrument and can make it easier to weave multiple contrapuntal threads together than two hands can naturally handle. But there's still something surprising about how far Schubert was able to push this otherwise modest ensemble in this unique and unsettling fantasy. And no matter how much pianists like to talk about coloristic sonic possibilities, the sound of a piano still has a distinctly black-and-white (or grayscale?) character, which I believe Schubert uses to advantage here.
Anyway, almost as soon as the familiar haunting theme began on my Bose headphones, I thought how appropriate it was for the setting. There's so much I could say about this music, its unusual structure, its moments that sound like ice cracking open, but I was especially surprised by my reaction to the recapitulation which begins at the 12:53 mark in the video below. Although it begins as an exact repetition of the opening, I was struck by how different this music sounded after all that had come before.
This caused my mind to wander (to return!) unexpectedly to the movie my wife and I had seen in a theater the night before. The Returnis a 2024 film which depicts the final "arrival back home" part of The Odyssey. We had gone to see it because it was playing at a local arthouse cinema, but didn't know much about it going in. I didn't love everything about it, but it is brutally honest as a depiction of what it means to return to a home that is no longer what it was - and the familiar events I've often thought of in high-minded literary context lead to an extremely violent and disturbing conclusion.
I'm not sure Schubert's Fantasy can be said to end with quite such an obvious bloodbath, but after the recapitulation first seems simply to be going home, a violently contrapuntal coda arrives [14:25] to dispel any sense that things will be the same. Although I wouldn't want to draw any one-to-one correspondences between these works of Homer and Schubert, there is a "Homer-ically" episodic and adventurous quality to Schubert's Fantasy with its "trills gone wild" section [4:30], a tender love duet [5:24] and the swashbuckling scherzo (beginning at 7:12) that soon follows - plus the unsettling return [12:53] and the devastating finish. In short, it's remarkable that Schubert could pour so much depth of human experience into what first might seem to be a humble parlor duet - which would've been played on a much more modest instrument than the TWO nine-foot Steinways Wang and Olafsson used Friday night.
I could do a whole philosophical exploration on the propriety of using two pianos for this music intended for two pianists sitting side-by-side at one instrument, but will save that for later - or never. I will add that I met up a few hours before the Symphony Hall performance with the friend who had invited me. She and I read through the Schubert together, and though it was hardly polished, I think my three experiences of this music (via headphones on a walk in 20 degree weather, sightreading with a friend, and listening with 2500 other people) were all worthwhile and offered usefully different perspectives. For the record, the Wang/Olafsson performance was exceptionally well-played, although I'm not sure this music is most at home in a space as large as Symphony Hall, even with an extra piano thrown in.
And now it's time to end this winter journal journey by observing that today is the 18th birthday of this blog. MMmusing can now vote! As a special birthday offering, I'm uploading something Schubertian on an unusually large multimedia scale. When it comes to walking through snow and ice in the depths of winter, nothing captures that experience like Schubert's song-cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey*) which, like the Fantasy, was written in the composer's final year. In fact, all of my favorite Schubert comes from this final year: Winterreise, the Fantasy in F Minor, the Cello Quintet (string quartet plus extra cello), the Piano Trio No.2 in E-flat, and the Piano Sonata in B-flat. It's unbelievable that one person wrote all of this earth-shattering music in a year in which his young and troubled life was coming to a much too early end.
The experience of listening to the Fantasy on a wintry walk prompted me to listen to a performance of Winterreise from 1997 in which I collaborated with a wonderful, expressive, and very intelligent bass, Mark Risinger. (Mark is also a world-class Handel scholar.) There's no video from that performance, but now that it's almost thirty years old (which is almost as long as Schubert lived), I really enjoyed listening to it and reliving the amazing experience of learning and performing it. As a one-off live performance, of course it isn't perfect, but I think it captures the music quite well, so it's worth sharing. Honestly, it's probably my favorite Winterreise recording, with no apology for personal bias.
Rather than add a score to follow, I've uploaded the video with the German text alongside English translations - I'm not sure I even knew these texts myself very well back in 1997, but I think Schubert's music often does a lot of the work.
Happy MMmusing Day. Enjoy this bitter walk through ice, snow, heartache, and death alongside a hurdy-gurdy! [direct link here]
* Note that this blog began as a sort of "winter journey."
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.
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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:
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.
