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 which 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." It 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.))
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!
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.
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:
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! 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.
* 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.
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."
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.
