Sondheim Slanted Evening

Hopefully the post title is reason enough to be wary of where we're headed here. Just two years and one day ago, I was writing a tribute to the remarkable creative force behind Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods, and here I am presenting a couple of silly distortions of his exquisite musical/lyrical ideas. But it certainly comes from a place of affection.

First up, a couple of months ago, I mentioned seeing just a two-bar cadential figure shown in a question on a Facebook group and I knew at once I'd played this flourish.

It took me a bit of time to realize it's the closing gesture (hear at 2:29 here) from On the Steps of the Palace, Cinderella's big number from Into the Woods. When I mentioned this to some friends online, one repeated a suggestion she'd made before about combining Sondheim's Steps with Borodin's lovely orchestral tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia. Ultimately, I failed to resist this temptation.

As it happens, I was making this around the same time as I was converting Schubert's Erlkönig to a major key, and we were discussing major/minor modes in a couple of theory classes, so I found it interesting that the "key" to getting Borodin and Sondheim to play nice together was to set the former's plaintive minor key melody against the latter's major key ostinato accompaniment. (If you don't know the originals, you may follow the links in the previous paragraph.) 

This turns out to be a nice way to look at the concept of relative major and minor keys, keys which are "related" because they basically use the same set of pitches but with a different starting/ending note. One simple way to say this is that if one starts on the sixth note of a major scale (down two from the original home pitch which can be called 1 or 8) and follow the scale trail up to the same note, one ends up with the major key's relative minor. Thus, Borodin's minor key melody, which begins on scale degree 5 can actually be harmonized in major simply by treating each scale degree as if it is two lower. The same pitch is now treated as scale degree 3.

I'm sure that sounds quite pedantic, so here's a quick demo. 

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First you hear Borodin's melody more or less against his original minor key harmonies, starting on scale degree 5. (This version is already transposed to the key [B Minor/D Major] I used in my mashup below, and the meter has also been switched from Borodin's 2/4 to Sondheim's 6/8, with a few other melodic adjustments.)

Then you hear the exact same melody against the repeating accompaniment vamp Sondheim uses in his song, except the vamp is downshifted from D Major into the same B Minor as the melody.

Finally, you hear the exact same melody against Sondheim's original accompaniment, this time shifted back up to its original D Major. Though not all minor-key melodies transfer so easily (I think it helps that the original minor key melody does not use scale degrees 1 or 2), this one actually works fine against the new harmonies - but it certainly sounds different! It's worth noting that one reason this mashup sort of works is that both Borodin's melody and Sondheim's melody (which you don't get to hear here) spend a lot of time over pedal bass notes (basically meaning the lowest note in the accompaniment doesn't change).

To complete my silly little arrangement, we open with the major-key melody which opens Borodin's tone poem, then transition into Borodin's main tune (now contextualized as major) and, of course, we end with the flourish that got me into this mess in the first place.

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Now as if that wasn't silly enough...today, I ran across a discussion in a Sondheim Facebook forum which resulted in someone jokingly proposing a mashup of The Ladies Who Lunch from Company with the technopop classic I'm a Barbie Girl. Someone else suggested the title, The Barbies Who Brunch, and my mind started racing again.

Although this might seem particularly absurd, the aging alcoholic bitterly singing about the "ladies who lunch" might be thought of as a cautionary tale about where a plastic Barbie lifestyle leads. Joanne sings derisively about Barbie-esque women who live glossy, empty lives. And speaking of "major vs. minor," the "Barbie Girl" song, though relentlessly upbeat, is in a minor key which gives it a bit of a dark undertone, while Sondheim's depressing anthem is a great example of a sad song in a major key.

In this case, most of the music is Sondheim's, with lyrics inspired by "Barbie Girl" and some melodic quotations from the pop tune mixed in, most notably in the accompaniment. 

By the way, a case could be made that Sondheim would be most offended by my frequent use of slant rhyme here (brunch/such ~ world/girl ~ Ken/him). He's generally not a fan of rhyming only halfway, as well described here. "Using near rhyme is like juggling clumsily." Oof. However, I feel like the slant rhymes help pay homage to the pop idiom - and, they were the best I could do in the middle of an otherwise busy day.

This mashup probably won't make much sense if you don't know both songs reasonably well (see links above), but I think it kind of works. Notice I only tease the idea and don't continue with the main body of Sondheim's song, but I am pleased with the Bossa Nova Barbie beat that ends this:

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Concentric Circles: Nardini → Kreisler

Time and again, I return here because of some happenstance by which I make unexpected connections between two works. We've had:

• Stravinsky and Copland
• Copland and Mendelssohn
• Beethoven and Strauss
• Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams
• Britten and Ives
• Jackson and Menken

In the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of accompanying of young string players, and it's provided opportunity for a couple of unexpected new discoveries. The first connection came up two weeks ago when I had back-to-back rehearsals for a concerto competition with a violinist playing the first movement of Prokofiev's first concerto and a violist playing the first movement of the Walton Concerto. I adore the former, but do not know the latter well, having only played it once years ago on short rehearsal - although I did once make this [warning: viola joke] "director's cut" video. 

Anyway, after some rehearsing of both, I started to notice a strange kinship between the two concerti. Each first movement begins with a quiet, lyrical, flowing melody for soloist in compound meter. Each progresses to increasingly busy passagework with relentless sixteenth notes, and each ends with the opening melody in solo winds while the soloist decorates with graceful, perpetual motion flourishes. [Worth noting it's pretty unusual for a concerto first movement to begin and end softly/slowly.]  I mentioned this to a couple of musician friends, and one (a violist) sent me a link to this remarkable article by the violist Atar Arad who makes a compelling case that Prokofiev's 1923 concerto served as a sort of hidden model for Walton's 1929 work. 

I'll leave it to you to read the article (which has some very detailed analysis) and follow up on these connections, but again, what was most interesting to me is that the dots connected naturally for me simply by playing the two pieces within the same hour. In addition to the openings, you could compare the violin passagework at 3:46 with viola passagework at 4:00 and the ending sections which begin at 8:05 [Prokofiev] and 7:10 [Walton]. If you backtrack from the endings, you'll see that each composer links to the closing section with slow, intense, dissonant double-stops for the soloist. But there are many other likenesses to be found.

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Then, Friday night I accompanied a series of student recitals which included a not well-known concerto by the 18th century's Pietro Nardini. This turns out to be one of those works of somewhat dubious origin which was most likely assembled in the 19th century or later and thus has more Romantic stylistic features. There's an interesting and somewhat entertaining discussion of this concerto as a pedagogical work (apparently unpopular with many students?) here.

Honestly, as a student concerto I was not finding it that interesting to play, but there is a striking, heartfelt passage towards the end of the first movement that caught my ear. The violinist plays a soaring sequential idea (same two bars repeated several times with each repetition a step lower) over a "circle progression." Circle progressions (in which chords roots move up by 4th or down by 5th in a way that recalls the "Circle of Fifths") are very common, but there was something about this one that just felt...emotionally right. 

I then realized it was reminding me a similar progression in Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro, an all-time favorite "meant to sound old" piece - which I had rehearsed about twenty minutes before! Lo and behold, both works are in E Minor and the progressions basically use the exact same chords except Kreisler indulges in a few more major sevenths, a sonority not super common in Common Practice Period Harmony, but which adds an extra layer of pathos to both sequences.

Here they are played one after the other (by Pinchas Zukerman and Tasmin Little) and then - of course! - played simultaneously. Kreisler's work is one of the original pieces he originally credited to an "ancient" composer (Pugnani), but I would guess Kreisler would have known the already Romanticized Nardini concerto and might very well have borrowed these chords, whether purposefully or accidentally. 

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Of course, both works go their own directions after starting these phrases with that identical progression, but each composer leverages the logical structure of a Classical progression (movement by descending fifths has a particularly strong sense of forward motion) to strengthen and stabilize their more Romantic melodic/dramatic components. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this or if I would have noticed if not for fortuitous happenchance.

Just a couple more observations about these works. The Nardini is a good example of a work which I think is partly undone by a not-great primary theme. Nothing wrong with the opening idea, but it's just generic, even though it seems to aim for drama. This is a topic I'd like to return to as there are some great works which I believe overcome subpar themes, and other works with fantastic tunes that don't lead anywhere satisfying. There's no reason the primary theme must be first-rate, but for lesser known works like Nardini's, it's more of an uphill battle to overcome a blah first impression.

As for Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro, I really do love everything about this bit of pastiche and the only music of his I love as much is his first-movement cadenza for the Beethoven concerto - another case in which he's intentionally working within a more Classical aesthetic which I find merges well with his sentimental tendencies. (The first part of Kreisler's Sicilienne and Rigaudon is almost as good, but maybe leans a little too sentimental, although if we're talking Kreisler, I'll admit that I do unreservedly love this tune.)

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P.S. This post includes further reflections on my affections for Romantic/Modern works intentionally meant to evoke Classical style. I should've added Prokofiev's 1st and Shostakovich's 9th to that list of lovably neo-classical symphonies.

It talks!

Just to put a bow on my previous post, I'm back with one more version of my Erlkönig in G Major. Though it might seem I'd taken this as far as I could, there was still a level of horror to unlock: have a creepy synth voice sing the new "translation" I'd made to go with the major/minor tonality flips. (Please don't mention that there is theoretically yet another step, which would be to have a real person sing this.)

So, what better day than October 31 to prove that Schubert had only begun to explore the darkness in his iconic song? There is lovely irony in the fact that turning the tune to major actually makes it more disturbing than the original. The same is true for the way a disembodied synth voice brings its own special kind of undeadness that no live human could quite achieve. I hope.

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And no, the diction's not great (my choir members will note that I never seem to care much about diction anyway except as it affects sound/blend), but the price is right with this virtual singer software.

As it happens, I recently updated my "pinned" Twitter post to say:

To quote Sondheim: "I'm still here!" Check out my unique multimedia creations, many either visualizing or distorting (or both) the classics. YouTube: https://youtube.com/MMmusing Blog (16+ years): https://mmmusing.blogspot.com Random Sampler (spin the wheel!): https://thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/machine.html

Only later did I realized the "16+ years" might look like some sort of age restriction. I reasoned that I had in fact produced plenty of disturbing content over the years, and so that inspired the creation of this little playlist which might also be appropriate for Halloween. 

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And in fact, though I did show Schubert's original Erlkönig to some lucky 8th Grade music classes today, I think they probably should be a little older before they hear it in major.

A stranger's just a friend you haven't met

This is really just an update to the previous post. Having "translated" the music of Schubert's Erlkönig from G Minor to G Major, I was bothered that the text displayed was still Goethe's dark and tragic German. Although I'm not capable of re-writing the German, I decided I would translate the original into English. 

As it happens, the connections between transcription and translation have been of interest to me since I started the blog, as can be seen here among many other posts. (A search of the name "Hofstadter" on the blog will turn up lots more!) But most importantly, this will work better when you inevitably feel led to sing along.

So, here we have an updated version of the story. No more "stranger danger" or creepy dancing daughters. (See Goethe's original here.) Because I'm insane, I did try to adhere pretty closely to the stanza structure of Goethe's poem, but with, for example, appropriate switches from a late night ride in the cold wind to an early ride at dawn in the breeze. Notice that, just as my "transcription" of the original Schubert song into a major key is a distortion which is nevertheless defined by the original musical structure, this new "translation" also aims to be a distortion which is nevertheless defined by the original text. 

I think I've said enough:

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But wait! There's more!

Changes both major and minor

 Recently, the following image made its way around on social media:

Schubert's Erlkönig is one of the most iconic works in the classical canon, helped a good bit by the fact that it shows up in many anthologies for music history/appreciation classes. Although Schubert is rightly celebrated for his hundreds of songs, it's a little unusual that this is often the standard-bearer since he didn't really write anything else quite like it, but it packs an incredible dramatic punch. The mercilessly cruel piano part might seem to be a disadvantage for getting the song performed, but the notoriety it adds has only helped to amplify the legend. (I once expressed this in J. Peterman form.) 

As it happens, I spent extra time with this song while leading a piano seminar at a chamber music camp this past summer. I wanted to expose the pianists - some of whom were playing pretty advanced stuff by Liszt, Chopin, etc. - to the crazy technical challenge this "accompaniment" represents. My idea was that, because its relentless repetition is what makes it so difficult, I'd have pianists trade off playing the repeating octaves/chords bar by bar, so it was also meant to be a sightreading challenge. In my "arrangement" for four pianists and two pianos, two students traded triplets while one played the left hand part and another played the vocal melody up an octave or two. This allowed for different levels of skill among those sightreading as well. I won't say we ever made great music out of it, but it was fun and right in my wheelhouse.

Speaking of my wheelhouse, I knew almost as soon as I read the posting above that I'd need to create a version of this song in G Major. To be clear, though Erlkönig is published in a variety of keys, they are all obviously minor keys, so the request for a major key is worth a chuckle, especially considering how that might alter its tragic ending. My best guess is that the requester wanted a version in E Minor, and asked for G Major because that has the same key signature, but what if someone really wants this music in a major key?

Well, it turns out to be less straightforward than one might imagine. There's a kind of casual way in which many think of major and minor as opposites. They are indeed used in opposition to each other often, but without going into detail, it's just not a pure binary distinction - especially if the music modulates, which Schubert's does often in this case. It's one thing to turn a simple melody like that of "Happy Birthday" into a satisfying minor key version which can seem like a kind of opposite, but once there are modulations, lots of things get murky. 

There is actually an entire cottage industry of well-known pop tunes in which major/minor has been reversed, such as here and here (more here), but modulation is generally not a big issue in such contexts. Once I started tweaking Schubert, I knew I was going to have to make some tricky decisions, but what fun! Schubert is particularly known for loving to switch back and forth between major and minor, sometimes turning on a dime, so he is an interesting subject for this experiment. My basic concept was to switch the primary minor sections to major while also converting the contrasting major-key sections (when the evil Elf King is sweet-talking his prey) into minor keys. There are some odd gear shifts that Schubert would certainly have never used, and a few chords (especially m.47 and m.49) that he simply would never have imagined, but part of the fun is to be surprised by these funhouse reflections.

I've long been intrigued by the idea of creating something out of the negative space defined by an existing work, and I hope to return to the idea if I find time this fall. In the meantime, enjoy the upbeat, frolicsome soundworld that exists somewhere on the periphery of Schubert's haunted house.

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Just remembered this song also come up in this blog post.

UPDATE: New version with English lyrics now available!