Birthdays Across Three Centuries

This is a pretty straightforward post, inspired in the usual way. It began three days when a young pianist I was coaching in a chamber group announced that it was his eleventh birthday. The group is working on the very well-known and high-spirited Rondo all'Ongarese ("in the Hungarian style") from Haydn's Piano Trio in G Major, a work which features a tongue-twister of a main tune with which the pianist and violinist must contend throughout. (This newly eleven-year-old pianist has no fear and never seems to trip - although we're not close to the tempo in that linked Argerich performance.)

I had the idea in the moment that I should try to combine the Haydn figuration with the old standby "Happy Birthday," a song which I have now reconfigured at least ten times. There is a long history of treating this tune as a subject of variations "in the style of ________." My interest has tended to be more in mashing it up with a specific work from a given composer than simply imitating a broader style. I also think it's a very satisfying little tune, with nice use of motivic development/expansion. (Each phrase is a little variation on the ones before.) I have found it useful as subject for music theory exercises, in part because it doesn't land on a strong tonic until the end of the second phrase. That distinctive rhythmic motive also helps it to remain recognizable in varied dress.

I had assembled something I liked by the next morning and dutifully recorded it and added it to my ever-growing playlist. This made me think of the many missing links in this playlist. For example, I've yet to treat the big guns Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and have tended to focus more on 20th century composers. So I was happy to add Haydn to the list. This inevitably had me thinking about other composers/works with which I could interact. In pretty short order, two very different victims came to mind. Robert Schumann's impossibly wistful Warum (a title which translates simply as "why?") and Terry Riley's iconic minimalist masterpiece In C.

In the case of Riley, I've already spent time creating music inspired by his magical concept of allowing multiple tiny musical fragments to be assembled in real time by the performers. Of course, being but one performer, I had to use some digital trickery to create a "performance," but I promise I didn't try too hard to make things line up.

For the Schumann (to which I've added a 'nicht' which changes the title to "Why not?"), the birthday tune is pretty well hidden at the start, although it becomes more obvious. This is one that seemed really simple and natural to do when I imagined it in my head (maybe because of the frequent use of dotted pickup gestures), but it turned out to be a bigger challenge than the other two. And that poor piano needs a lot of attention! Hopefully the humble parlor piano sound helps underscore the intimacy of this very inward-looking music.

So, if anyone happens to have a birthday today, perhaps you'll enjoy at least one of these serenades, one each from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These were all created pretty quickly and could certainly be further developed, but I think they each make their point and put a different spin on the idea of spinning once again around the planet.

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And of course, you may view the complete playlist of birthday tributes here, including an odd finale which treats only the first six notes of "Happy Birthday." More of a suggestion to be happy? 

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Sharp Objects

Somehow in all these years of blogging, I've never written about my obsession with the first movement of Charles-Valentin Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano. Actually, I did mention it in passing once here, and I've just added it to my otherwise rather static list of Favorite Music Works - a list which probably deserves a larger-scale re-visit. Leaving it off of that list was a big oversight, although I think my affection for this remarkable thirty-minute movement has only grown since then. I took a long walk this summer where I listened to the whole movement twice in a row, and I listened to it all on several other walks.

Sonic Signature Sequels (Sixty Second Symphony)

In my last post, I wrote about a new seven-second snippet written by Mason Bates as a sonic logo for the Charlotte Symphony - and I debuted my own first try in the genre; but I knew in my heart that it wouldn't be my last attempt. Sure enough, I now have six total sonic signatures to my name - which, to be honest, isn't that big a deal. That's less than sixty seconds of music! But I have found it to be a really gratifying exercise, especially in writing for full orchestra.

Seven Seconds or Less

Recently, a colleague shared an NPR story with me about how the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra had commissioned composer Mason Bates to write a very short "sonic logo" to be played by the orchestra. The story begins by connecting this to iconic logo sounds like the NBC and Netflix signatures which are really just a few gestures - less themes than motives. (The generic Netflix one barely qualities as a motive as there's really not much to it. It is iconic by the brute force of its ubiquity.) You may hear Bates' final product here:

Unexpect yourself

[I settled on the clumsy blog post title as an homage to the Philadelphia Orchestra's notoriously awful marketing tag from fifteen years ago.]

I've written before about my ambivalent attitude towards the "great" Joseph Haydn, a composer whose skill and influence I would never question, but whose music simply doesn't move me that often. Among other things, I find his supposed knack for humor to be pretty overrated, although he can hardly be blamed that an unexpectedly loud G Major chord (hear here at 0:37) has lost a little of its punch due to serious overexposure. 

We'll get back to that in a second. First, here's a little story from a few weeks back.

This just in!

Although I would not have anticipated this years ago when I was considering what I'd do with my life, it turns out that a new part of my high school job this year is running a livestreamed morning news show. It's involved a significant learning curve - still curving - but it's also been fun to work with the technology and, especially, the live performance aspect. Of course, I have a lot of experience performing as a musician, and I think some of those "thinking in the moment" skills transfer over. Managing scene changes, fades/dissolves, cueing announcers - there is a musical aspect to managing the timing of all of these elements.

I've got a little Liszt...to add to this list

In my previous post, I mentioned that I've long been naturally drawn to tune connections. Back in "The Aughts," when the blog was young, I wrote a series of what I called "Tune Theft" posts lightheartedly using the term "theft" to describe instances in which a given melody seemed to borrow quite a bit from a previous melody. As so often on the blog, I was interested in how it is that a given set of notes can carry a specific identity which can nonetheless be repurposed to create something quite different, much as we just saw with four notes from "Swing low, sweet chariot." You may find the original list, mostly from 2007 with some other additions grafted in, here.

A whole new world

Once again, one blog post topic has generated unexpected journeys down a path I'd never intended. You could say that exploring the harmonic progression in four bars of Dvořák's "New World" Symphony opened up whole new worlds of things to write about. At first I thought this would just be a little postscript post, but it has resulted in a few more creations than I'd imagined.

The topic of the day is this: what is actually "new world"-ish about Dvořák's 9th Symphony "From the New World?"

Post #700: America the Beautifulish (Emptying the Desk Drawer #8)

I actually have a couple of things prepared to blog about, but will save one for the near future (tomorrow?). Today, I'm again posting something I created informally which I still thought worth documenting, so this goes in the "Emptying the Desk Drawer" category (see end of post for the complete set). In this case, this past Sunday morning I ran across music I'd created quickly and played on July 6. As the "July 4-adjacent" Sunday this year, we had originally scheduled to have a flutist play "America the Beautiful" (which actually appears in our hymnal) in an arrangement I intended to make. When the flutist ended up being unable to play that day, I decided I'd invent something for organ alone.

...to explore strange new worlds

As summer winds down and students begin to embark on new worlds of learning, let's consider seven chords from Antonín Dvořák's famous Symphony No. 9 titled “From the New World.” Although most of the discussion of the “New World” quality of this symphony focuses on melodic material that might borrow from Native-American or African-American influences, the opening of the second movement has an other-worldly quality which comes mostly from its unconventional harmonic progression. 

Someone posted last week on a Facebook Music Theory group asking how these harmonies would have been understood by theorists in Dvořák's time. Most of the hundred-plus responses focused more on how one might now analyze the harmonies, and that's what I'll do as well;

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.

• Happy Augmented Sixth Day - 8/6/2012
• Happy Augmented Sixth Day! (2016 ed.) - 8/6/2016
• Augmented Reality - 10/16/2021
• An Aug 6 for Aug 6 in an August Sextet - 8/6/2022

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.

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.

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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):

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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.)

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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.

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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!

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*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.

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.

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And, of course, there's much more of this if you're so inclined: Classical Mashups (more than 70 videos!)

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. 

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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:

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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.

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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.

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More in this quirky series below:

• The Two Gustavs: Emptying the Desk Drawer #1
• Riding the Railing: Emptying the Desk Drawer #2
• Haydnween: Emptying the Desk Drawer #3
• Bracing Bruckner (Emptying the Desk Drawer #4)
• Carousel Memories (Emptying the Desk Drawer #5)
• Cinderella Chopin (Emptying the Desk Drawer #6)

See also these playlists:

• MMplaying
• MMmusing Recital (9/22/13)
• Classical Mashups

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:

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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:

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And you may hear them in concert here:

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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!

See more dust and lint from the back of the drawers below:

• The Two Gustavs: Emptying the Desk Drawer #1
• Riding the Railing: Emptying the Desk Drawer #2
• Haydnween: Emptying the Desk Drawer #3
• Bracing Bruckner (Emptying the Desk Drawer #4)
• Carousel Memories (Emptying the Desk Drawer #5)

Was the Star Wars theme born free?

In this relatively fertile spring on the blog, once again we find one post leading to another. In our last episode, we considered the famous Roger Williams arrangement of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves, focusing on the seemingly unacknowledged debt Williams owes to Chopin. 

That little project has led me down a few Roger Williams rabbit holes. I guess I'm fascinated by the success of these "popular pianists" who, though surely trained in the classical style, found big careers by playing "easy listening" arrangements of mostly well-known melodies, often with piano set against lush orchestra. The arrangements certainly borrow some flash from the techniques of more "serious" classical and jazz artists, but are contained in simple structures which don't demand so much from the listener. One imagines such records would work well for a certain kind of middle-aged, middlebrow party back in the 50s-70s. The kind of party Benjamin Braddock's parents might have hosted. 

Roger Williams parlayed this into a very long and successful career, somewhat on the margins of the industry (not likely to be featured in Gramophone, Downbeat, or Rolling Stone), performing on TV shows and for the kinds of...um...mature audiences who apparently want to sit and hear their favorite records come comfortably to life with some fun banter along the way.

Speaking of which, on "May the Fourth" Day this year (also featured on this blog), the "Roger Williams Music" page on Facebook posted the following short video (and presumably have posted it for many years).

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In the video, Williams purports to demonstrate that the famous theme of Star Wars (which came along at a time during which his own star was surely fading while the star of another Williams was rising) is simply the once famous theme of Born Free (one of "Mr. Piano's" biggest hits) turned upside down. Roger Williams claims to read the John Williams tune from a handwritten page, dramatically turns it 180 degrees, and then plays Born Free. Q.E.D. By this process, he is thus born free to play his big tune, and he has a fun little joke for those pesky Star Wars nerds right before he starts. (You'll have to watch it for yourself - I don't want to give EVERYTHING away.)

The problem is that - well, it isn't true. Although the two themes do share some notable features and could be considered distant cousins, he totally cheats! Actually, although what I intend to do here could certainly be considered buzzkilling for the Roger Williams Faithful (let me know if you see one coming after me in a scooter), I think exploring the connections shows something even more interesting about how melodic motifs work. 

Remember that Williams turns the page in a way that should result in the notes being played both backwards and with the intervals inverted - what went up should go down and vice versa.

Here's the Star Wars tune as Roger W. plays it, adding in an extra note (the second "5") so that the rhythm also exactly matches that of the Born Free tune without anything being reversed or inverted. 

In fact, the only thing that is actually upside down is the first interval which goes up from scale degree 1 to 5 in the former and down from 1 to 5 in the latter. (One is striving, reaching up to the stars! One is relaxed and free, ambling its way downhill.) In Star Wars, we next step down to a triplet while Born Free steps up to a similar triplet. Really, the biggest difference is how John Williams then heroically leaps up a seventh to the final two notes whereas Born Free follows the downward pull of gravity. But the endings are more similar than they may appear as each emphasizes the tonic triad (scale degrees 1-3-5) with solid triadic quarter notes descending from the downbeat. (And although John Williams does leap up a seventh, the motion is by step from scale degree 2 to 1.)

But I'll admit that when I first saw this demonstration, my ears were half-persuaded, even if I felt skeptical. First of all, the last two notes of Star Wars are the first two notes of Born Free, so even though that note pair is not reversed in order, it feels like we've flipped things backwards...maybe. Then we step up rather than down to the triplet, although the triplets are otherwise the same shape...they are neither backwards nor inverted. Then, whereas Star Wars leaps way up to the final note pair, Born Free steps down in a way that also feels like a kind of inversion...even though each final pair goes downward. 

So, given that we naturally hear little parts of a tune (motives or motivic fragments) as chunks, there is a sense in which multiple little chunks go in opposite ways. There is no doubt that the tunes have a lot in common, although that leap of a seventh really does give John Williams' tune a charge that stands out. And yes, of course Roger Williams knew this. He's mostly using the power of suggestion and some charisma to make an audience feel smart while they are gently being hoodwinked, but it's all in good fun.

You may compare various versions of these ideas here. Note that inverting a melody is not as simple as it seems because one can decide to keep the notes in the same key (in this case, no accidentals) - and thus adjust some half-steps - or do a literal inversion which makes the music seem to move into a different key altogether. For simplicity, I chose the former.

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And why did I take the time to do this? I guess it's just that - as mentioned in my "Music = Math" post which led me to mashup Chopin and Dr. Dre - I love the way these kinds of musical questions about iconic themes can be reduced pretty clearly to notes and numbers. And I love moving notes and numbers around on a page. And it is interesting that two such different themes have so much in common. (See Bernstein's lecture on The Infinite Variety of Music. And for another look at a relative of the Star Wars theme, see this blog post.)

If you're writing a melody, it's a reminder that maybe instead of going down 2-1, a leap up a seventh from 2-1 can blend resolution (2 wants to go to 1) with drama and intrigue. This actually came up in a brief post-postscript to this post when I looked at how Fauré' uses this technique in his own musical postscript to a lovely song. (By complete coincidence, that post also began with a reference to the Star Wars franchise!)

Finally, once I'd mostly finished this post, I did a little search and see that someone on a Star Wars music blog beat me to most of this more than ten years ago. But he didn't have a video demonstration or nearly as many painful puns.... (And speaking of puns, note that if John Williams had indeed stolen his tune, then it would not have been born free; he would owe royalties to the true father, James Bond composer John Barry.)

P.S. If you like thinking about inversions and retrogrades and other ways musical ideas can be transformed mathematically, you might also enjoy this post. 

Autumn Leaves in the Winter Wind

"Autumn Leaves in the Winter Wind" is surely an odd title for a mid-spring blog post, but this is what the wind has blown my way. I recently had the opportunity to accompany a young saxophonist playing the jazz standard Autumn Leaves. Though jazz is not standard fare for me, I was vaguely aware of this very French, wistful tune. I think I mostly knew it by name, and also had remembered that there was a famous recording of this song by "popular pianist" Roger Williams back in the 1950s. This recording is still listed as the "best-selling piano recording of all time," harkening back to a time when easygoing "piano plus orchestra" recordings were a thing in the popular sphere. (Maybe Chariots of Fire was the last such tune to really hit.)

Perhaps that phenomenon would be an interesting topic for another day. There are some notable historical precedents from the classical canon which contrast a simple, clear piano melody against sumptuous strings-plus going back to Mozart, Chopin and Mendelssohn, continuing through Rachmaninoff's legendary 18th Variation and even Shostakovich - all of which seem to lead naturally to the likes of Liberace and Richard Clayderman...and Roger Williams. 

If you don't know Autumn Leaves, here's a lovely, straightforward version:

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Williams is best known for his arrangement and performances of this song (and the super-cheesy Born Free, I suppose) which famously decorates the melancholy tune with roulades of twinkling chromatic sextuplets. The figuration is certainly intended to be suggestive of falling leaves, although these leaves seem more like they're coming from a machine gun than gently giving in to gravity. 

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Even more notably, they sound A LOT like the right hand passagework from Chopin's famous 'Winter Wind' Etude.

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There can really be no mistaking the connection, although I've mostly only found passing references to it online. It's not clear if Williams spoke openly about this* or not (how could he not?), but I figure I can help document the similarity for anyone who's curious. I did this partly out of my own curiosity to confirm that the Chopin could easily slide into place. (A friend has also pointed out that at 0:48 above, Williams plays figuration quite similar to the oceanic waves of Chopin's Op. 25, No. 12.)

It is mostly a coincidence that my last blog post also had to do with a Chopin mashup. But as I listened to Williams' famous recording, I was struck by the thought that he was doing something very similar to what I had just done with Chopin and Dr. Dre. He changes the figuration enough that it's not a straight-up steal of Chopin, but the influence is very clear, and the result is not much different than if someone had said, "Hey, Roger, can you combine Autumn Leaves and the Winter Wind etude?"

This short, four-part video takes you on a quick tour of: 1) Chopin's original etude in A Minor, 2) Chopin's right-hand figuration paired with the Autumn Leaves tune, 3) Chopin + Leaves again, but in D Minor, 4) Williams' arrangement in D Minor. 

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I decided not to change anything in the Chopin right hand other than to leave out some notes at phrase endings (notes which conveniently didn't fit in well anyway) - thus, we hear some rising leaves as well as falling ones. And I'll just leave it at that.

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* UPDATE (5/11): Just ran across this "Chopin Medley" from Williams which includes the "Winter Wind" Etude - which just confirms the obvious, although there's no mention here or in his introductory remarks of its influence on Autumn Leaves. If you begin at 3:22, there's a dramatic intro (quoting the famous A-flat Polonaise) leading into Williams' somewhat labored and very abbreviated rendition of Chopin's original. Although it's not the most stunning playing (I think his playing was probably most impressive in jazzier styles), I do think it's admirable that he included this kind of repertoire in his shows when he seemingly could have subsisted on big tunes and light flash. And hopefully this might have been a gateway to audience members seeking out more Chopin. 

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Also notable is that Williams tells a formative story of being disappointed that the great Chopin pianist Paderewski did not stay to greet him and other fans after a concert. This was to explain how important it was to Williams that his fans be treated properly, but it also suggests more exposure to Paderewski's Polish predecessor. Williams also majored in piano at Drake University - where he was apparently expelled, not for smoking, but for playing "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" in a practice room! This, of course, led to him joining the Navy and winning the middleweight boxing championship at his base because...of course it did.

Music = Math

Consider these numbers I found myself writing on the whiteboard a couple of days ago:

While it might look like something from math class or some kind of scoring tally, these numbers actually represent notes students were to play on their 64-pad MIDI controllers. The controllers look like what you see below, and the "Bb Aeolian" written at the top reminds students that these very flexible controllers are meant to be programmed for this exercise in rows of B-flat Aeolian, meaning the first and last note of each row is a B-flat (the tonic) and the notes are in the Aeolian Mode, which is basically the same thing as natural minor. [Restricting the pitches to the notes in a given mode simplifies playback for students, although this setup does not allow the use of pitches not in the key - so, in the key of A Minor, this would be like giving students only the white keys of a piano.]

The goal for the students in this Digital Music Production class was to play the very popular right-hand piano hook from Still D.R.E., a 1999 song by the rapper Dr. Dre. I honestly didn't even really know this music (at least by name) until the past few years when it became apparent that a lot of students enjoy learning to play it on the piano - perhaps a modern addition to the "I can sort of play piano" canon of "The Knuckle Song," "Chopsticks," and "Heart and Soul."

For reasons I don't really understand, this intro music has become very meme-able. I remember a few years ago when a student in my high school choir got up and played it spontaneously, and it was clear the whole room of students was more impressed with that than anything I'd ever done. You can find lots of videos where performers get a big reaction by transitioning into this. (A common trick seems to be to take the slow-moving arpeggios from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and then speed them up until they become the quickly rolled chords in Dr. Dre's song. Note that the sheet music below does not show the chords as rolled, but that's the way it's played.)

It's not that difficult to play on the piano, though the accidentals required for B-flat Minor make it a little trickier to teach/learn. (Lots of "easy" online versions put it in A Minor in which everything can be played on white keys.) But since our class mostly uses these pad-controllers, this was a nice way to give them something to play that requires some coordination and helps learn about modes and even voice-leading. I don't actually use the term "voice-leading," but the fact the chords change one note at a time with notes changing by step is part of what makes things sound smooth - and fairly easy to memorize. Anyway, here's a demo video I made that shows students how to play it. (My chords are a little out of sync because I tried to use my fingers in a way that makes it easy for students to see which pads to play.)

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The next video shows how these chords sync with the simpler bass line - which was recorded separately into a different track. I just put the two videos side by side. You'll notice I did not start the bass line on the upbeat, as happens in the original song, because once the two-bar loop is recorded into MIDI, one can easily loop these two bars while also pulling out an upbeat to start if desired. If you're curious and don't know much about MIDI, the 64-pad controller doesn't make any sounds on its own. It is sending information to software (in this case, the educational platform Soundtrap) which routes the data through virtual instruments. Unfortunately, here my right-hand knuckles do block the camera view a bit.

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A Facebook friend (and former student) made the insightful guess that the series of numbers I posted might be related to Chopin's famous Prelude in E Minor, for which the left hand has a series of slowly repeating three-note chords that are not unlike what's shown above. In this case as well, the pitches in the chords almost always change by step, though sometimes two at a time, and also using lots of chromatic notes. Although the controllers we use can be set to show the non-scale pitches, it wouldn't look as cool as the videos above because the chords would not all sit neatly on a single row.

DRE

CHOPIN

In this case, the first eight chords would still be 3-5-8 (first inversion triads), with a switch to 2-4-8 in the next bar. In both the Chopin and Still D.R.E., the chord changes feature lots of suspensions - notes which lag behind changing harmonies, creating extra tension before the suspensions resolve. For example, the downbeat of the second complete bar of Still D.R.E. would be F Minor if the top note (Bb) would just go ahead and move straight to the Ab it's headed towards. But the delay in resolution adds drama and interest. A lot of the emotional power in Chopin's famous one-pager (in which the "melody" often stubbornly sticks to one note) comes from these suspensions and the eerily twisting harmonies they navigate. 

And here's where...well, this is really what always seems to happen. I was writing this post (having prepared everything above), meaning simply to include a passing reference to the Chopin...but then I thought about how to show the connection...and...well...here you...go:

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Honestly, I think it's pretty sweet. It's true that Chopin's music dominates, with the high, plunky arpeggios of Still D.R.E. brought into the same middle register as Chopin's chords. I shifted the timing of most of Chopin's mid-measure chord changes to reflect more of the Dr. Dre feel, and of course the octaves in the bass pay tribute there as well.

But to return to the series of numbers with which I started, I always marvel to realize musical sounds which seem so expressive and which can arouse such a strong emotional reaction, can so easily be reduced to numbers. And in this case, distancing a little from each work by viewing them as number patterns helped make the connection between two very different musical worlds clear. I think I may have thought of this Dr. Dre/Chopin connection before, but I love that it was a student's incorrect but insightful guess which led me down this unexpected path.

I would add that working with MIDI and the "Piano Roll" style way in which one interacts with notes and rhythms has also been reinforcing this math-music connection. Obviously, musical notation can easily be interpreted as representing numeral relationships once you know how to read it, but the numberiness gets a little lost in the mix with all the mysterious symbols. I could even compress the information above to make it more elegant: [{3-5-8} x 4 ] +  [ {2-5-8} x 3 ] +  [ {2-5-7} x 5 ]. But I don't suppose anyone is going to bop their head along to that....

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UPDATE: In a blog which is obsessed with the principle of interconnected hyperlinks, I can't believe I forgot to mention my previous mashups of Still D.R.E. with music by Vivaldi. I do think there's a touch of the "classic" in this modern hip-hop beat which adds to its old-school appeal among the young. And note that the idea of interconnected thoughts/concepts (in a blog in which just about every post can be linked backwards or forwards to some other post) also played out in how my new Chopin/D.R.E. creation evolved from the interconnected back and forth that happens on Facebook. My former student's guess about Chopin functioned as a sort of hyperlink which led to new ideas which I can now connect back to even older ideas. It's the circle of links.

UPDATE #2 (5/8): I realized I was a little disappointed at how little the opening of this mashup sounds like the original Still D.R.E. - for two* likely reasons. 1) The key is transposed by a tritone (6 half-steps), so even someone without perfect pitch will likely notice a different feeling. 2) The distance between the Still D.R.E. left hand and right hand registers is compressed by two octaves. This a good reminder about how much register spacing can change the music's character. The wide expanse between treble and bass elements in the original Still D.R.E. sets up a particular kind of texture which allows the listener easily to hear each part as distinct. Because I decided I still wanted Chopin's melody on top, I dropped the triads an octave after the short intro, but the bass notes are still an octave lower (relationally) than in the first version I posted. I also began the intro by rolling the triads a bit before they settle into something more like Chopin's version.

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* A third factor not addressed here is that the slower tempo also made it less Dre-like.

UPDATE #3 (5/8): And...just like that, a third option which is closer to the original Still D.R.E. tempo.

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May the Fourth Be With You in Five!

This should be pretty self-explanatory. I did have a nice, natural time limit to keep me from losing too much time investing in this. (I only thought to do it on May 4 and wanted it posted by May 4.) The other limit I put on myself is to create this almost purely by cutting and pasting the original audio, although I did add some timpani highlights as well to help clarify the 5/4 time. In retrospect, the opening title theme is probably a better choice for putting into 5/4 time. Curiously enough, I used to think that theme was notated at least partly in 5/4 time - although I was definitely mistaken!

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Also, note that this is not my first post about "May the Fourth" and 5/4 time. See HERE.

Hilarity ensues

There have been multiple times in the past where I've intentionally scheduled a yet-to-be-written composition for a church service, generally with the idea that this will make me write it. This explains better than anything else how I've managed to churn out more than twenty hymn fugues over the years.

Well, the week before Easter I needed to go ahead and submit music choices for the Sunday (today) following Easter since there was so much going on with Holy Week services. As today was both Easter 2 and a celebration of Earth Sunday in the Episcopal Church, I chose a new-to-us hymn written by Richard Wayne Dirksen, a distinguished composer and former choirmaster and organist of the National Cathedral. It's a catchy setting of a 17th setting Easter text and speaks of how God's creation rejoices ("The whole bright world rejoices now"), with interjections of the latin word hilariter which translates as "joyfully" or "cheerfully." The word also, of course, evokes the word "hilarious," and HILARITER is the name Dirksen gave to the tune. As it was to be our recessional hymn, I decided I'd write a toccata to follow. I knew I'd be on school vacation this week, so figured I'd have plenty of time to come up with something. 

Although I've never written a toccata before, and there are certainly some famously intimidating ones, I had in mind the kind of very patterned thing Pachelbel wrote bunches of - something which sort of generates itself with more flash than substance. Mostly I wanted something festive and cheerful which would take some inspiration from Dirksen's festive melody. Actually, come to think of it, I did write one very toccata-like "improvisation" postlude which you may hear at the 4:00 mark here. In general, I had in mind the same kind of thing when I submitted that I'd be playing a "Toccata on Hilariter" as this morning's postlude.

Of course, in spite of vacation, I somehow managed completely to forget about this until about 9pm last night when I was reviewing what I'd be playing this morning - and realized the postlude did not yet exist. So, I set to work and eventually notes did emerge. The structure is actually closer to a chaconne with an 8-bar phrase which is then repeated, embellished, etc. (Pachelbel wrote lots of chaconnes as well.) In addition to devising the opening riff from Dirksen's tune, I had in mind the hymn's references to birdsong and the general idea of good-natured hilarity. So even if you don't like it, you can have a good laugh!

Here is Dirksen's hymn, for reference. (Worth noting that the hymn is actually an adaptation for The Hymnal 1982 of the tune from this vibrant anthem. (Note that in that linked recording, Alleluias are substituted for Hilariters.)) [Here is a simpler digital version of the tune.]

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And this is, more or less, what I played this morning (recording is feeble cellphone recording from before church). It's not profound, but now it exists! Hilariter!

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CLEARER DIGITAL RECORDING HERE

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And here played live after the final verse (actually, the first verse repeated) of the hymn "The whole bright world rejoices now."

Mischievous Mozart

Once upon a time, a wise man tweeted:

There are too many minuets.

This was a Haydn-adjacent remark about my opinion that, among multiple musical practices which became perhaps too formalized in the 18th century, the idea that just about every symphony, sonata, or string quartet should include a "minuet" is just kind of overkill. The minuet is a perfectly fine (if a little bland) stylized dance form, and it had already become a frequent feature in Baroque-era suites; but we just don't need so many of them. I'm fine with most large-scale works featuring fast opening and closing movements and some sort of slower, more lyrical middle movement (those structures invite so many different possibilities), but I simply think we ended up with too many minuets. (My nemesis Haydn even wrote a set of 24 - all minuets!)  

Beethoven, of course, would help push towards replacing minuets with scherzos, and that made life better in many ways (so many great scherzos out there!). I trust Mozart would have gotten there if he'd lived long enough, but in the meantime, he did something marvelously mischievous with the minuet in the Act One Finale of Don Giovanni. In this masked ball scene in which the host Don Giovanni is trying to get the peasant girl Zerlina to himself and thus away from her fiancé Masetto, he has his servant Leporello run interference while also utilizing two small onstage orchestras to play contrasting dances. 

Those contrasting dances are set against the formal, highbrow (boring?) minuet with which the primary dancing begins. The nobles Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio (all suspicious of their bad-boy host) sing their suspicions in 3/4 time with the minuet. Giovanni then gets the first on-stage band to play a less elevated Contradanse in 2/4 time to dance with Zerlina, and soon after Leporello has a third band playing a lively peasant dance in 3/8 time in order to distract Masetto. Mozart has each of these bands "tune up" first with some open strings and warm-up gestures. By the end of the scene, all three dances are going at once before a scream from Zerlina sets the rest of the Finale in motion. 

The treatment of this scene is very on-brand for Mozart - fiendishly clever in a way that is also nonchalant and delivered more with a wink than a hammer. The full-on collisions last for less than ninety seconds and everything still harmonizes so that the average listener might barely be aware of how complex it all is - especially given that audience members are more likely focused on the drama.(Notably, there's only one short passage of about five seconds - right before the scream - when we hear only the dances with no singing to distract.) And yet there is a sort of elegant chaos which is quite ahead of its time. I wish there was more of it, but for all the revolutionary underpinnings of Mozart's mature operas, a surface of formality and balance prevails most of the time. 

Back in the very Covid-inflected days of April, 2020, I started work on a project designed to illuminate how all of these elements come together. This was following on a major project I'd recently completed creating a one-page score and interactive site for Bach's legendary Chaconne in D Minor. I made a lot of progress designing my own landscape-format, efficiently laid-out version of Mozart's score, but I think I got lost a bit deciding how to make satisfying recordings and user interactions to match.

A recent look through my blog's draft folder reminded me of this, so about three weeks ago, I dug back in and, slowly, developed a plan for a website which enables the user to hear the clashing dances from different vantage points. This involved: 1) refining the score layout in Lilypond (managing a score with multiple time signatures creates interesting challenges), 2) producing a range of recordings using NotePerformer inside Dorico, 3) editing those recordings and syncing them metrically with a public domain (-ish) 1955 studio recording in Ableton Live, 4) designing little digital "puppet" dancers to - sort of - dance along using Scratch "sprites," 5) creating subtitles and screen-recording the dancers using Camtasia, and 6) using Javascript (along with HTML and CSS) to design a webpage which integrates all of these elements and allows user interaction. 

I mention all of that to...well, yes, to brag a little, but also to say how satisfying it is to bring all of these elements together. Almost like Mozart did bringing three dances together. Almost.

So, though I hope to have more to say about this and will likely keep tweaking the way the website works, with a YouTube version to come later perhaps, you may go here to see how Mozart brings all of these elements together.

VISIT THE NEW "DON DANCES" WEBSITE HERE!

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I will add that this project joins a long list of little online "machines" I've built which enable a kind of magical integration of score and audio. Go HERE to find a series of "musical manipulatives" which combine audio, analysis, and scores of works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and, yes, Mozart (featured with an even greater finale from another opera*). The Bach Chaconne page features a one-page score in which one may easily jump around. The Beethoven "Eroica" page lets you switch seamlessly back and forth between two very different video performances:

• Bach: Chaconne - full, one-page score with 64 clickable 4-bar sections
• Bach: Crucifixus - SATB practice page with audio, score, and 54 clickable bars
• Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro, Act II Finale - video, score, interactive analysis
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (1st mvt) - two swappable videos, score, interactive analysis
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 (all) - video, score, interactive analysis
• Beethoven: Piano Sonata, Op. 111 (2nd mvt) - video, score, interactive analysis
• Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto (1st mvt) - audio, score, interactive analysis
• Brahms: Symphony No. 4 (4th mvt) - audio, score, interactive analysis

But wait...there's more!

• This Haydn page offers a variety of alternate surprises for...see if you can guess.
• A series of Satie sites let you experiment with some semi-random ways to experience his...see  if you can guess.
• Another Satie site lets you create your own 12-tone Gymnopédie!
• Here's a Scratch program which lets you interact with the three voices of a Bach fugue as they generate popping corn.
• This machine is a bit less interactive, but it does provide fresh new syncopations for some famous Stravinsky accents.

As I've said before, creating these machines is a way of performing this music. Of course, it's not exactly the same, but there is something very satisfying about "orchestrating" various multimedia elements so that they allow fluid interaction with a score. Give it a try!

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UPDATE (4/27): You may now hear all of the various options for this scene (with the three orchestras spotlighted in different ways) via this YouTube playlist. 

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* The Act Two Finale of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro has perhaps my favorite use of minuet-style in any music as Susanna surprises the Count and Countess by stepping out of a locked closet. Go to this page and find the section marked TRIO to hear.