[I settled on the clumsy blog post title as an homage to the Philadelphia Orchestra's notoriously awful marketing tag from fifteen years ago.]
We'll get back to that in a second. First, here's a little story from a few weeks back. Our church was in the midst of a month-long "Season of Creation," and the opening hymn for one Sunday was to be "The Spacious Firmament on High," a somewhat forced but quite jolly hymnization of the most famous chorus from Haydn's The Creation. The early18th century text by Joseph Addison is awkward in a way that is somehow appropriate given that the original English translation version (there was a German version as well) of Haydn's oratorio is a famously gangly mess. I avoided choosing this hymn for years, but have been humbled to realize that congregations really enjoy singing it and, if taken at a good clip, it effectively marries the grandeur of the subject with the exaggerated poetic imagery in a way that strikes me as greater than the sum of its parts. It is fun to play, to sing, and to listen to.
[Although I would generally agree that Haydn's "The Heaven's Are Telling" is a fine enough chorus, it does not rise to Handelian heights in my opinion, which is possibly suggested by this silly video I made some years ago in which Haydn stands in for Sonny and Cher.]
So anyway, my favorite part of the rather long Creation is its opening "Representation of Chaos," five or so minutes of mysterious, primordial musical meanderings that suggest a world before all of the ordered classical elegance of Haydn's style had come to pass. I decided it would be fun to play this music on the organ as prelude to the singing of the hymn to come. I worked up a pretty unspectacular arrangement, but I'd forgotten to take into account the fact that my organ preludes are almost always fairly soft and unobtrusive; and, even worse, since I generally start playing about ten minutes before the service begins, my pre-prelude music was my typical quietly meditative riffing on music to come. I finished that up about five minutes before the hour, then took a longer pause than I'd planned while double-checking a registration thing.
Thus it came to pass that when I played the big octave C's (the "big bang") which initiate the chaos...well, I initiated a little chaos of my own. The church had not filled - a lot of folks tend to file in at the last minute, but those in the pews heard the big chord and responded as Pavlov would've predicted - by standing to sing the opening hymn. Except that Haydn soon downshifts to some of that quiet, primordial stuff, and when people realized what had happened, behold, there was great laughter. So, in that moment, I managed to summon chaos and create a "surprise" not unlike Haydn's most famous joke. I can't help but think that the prolific father of symphony and string quartet would have been amused.
As I mentioned, the biggest problem with Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony is that the surprise [SPOILER ALERT: It's a big loud chord following a lot of quiet stuff] is always the same and quite well-known. There is such a thing as creating something that sounds unpredictable, even when we know it's coming, much like a well-made horror film can make you feel frightened and even startled - even if you know exactly what's going to happen. I wrote about this with regard to Stravinsky here. But I don't think the Haydn symphony surprise rises to that level. (Would be curious to know if it's ever brought about a reaction like this viral video - probably someone somewhere has been jolted into an audible reaction.)
One of my favorite little blog projects was building this "Haydn: A Surprise" website which offers up almost forty legit surprises, delivered randomly so that there's no way to know what's coming. In fact - true story - I just sampled that link and was given, as my surprise, the original version - which surprised only by not sounding at all surprising! If you haven't tried it, take it for a spin.
I happen to have a tangentially related project which I've tinkered with off and on over the years but never published because I haven't gotten it to work exactly as I'd like. Most disappointingly, it will not work on mobile devices, but I've decided to release into the world as is. It does not always run as smoothly as I'd like, but the basic idea is to play on the inherent metrical ambiguities found in Beethoven's chestnut Für Elise. Namely, the unaccompanied E-D# pair which introduces each phrase is designed in such a way that there's no strong sense of a meter - and, to be honest, I've always found I can get a little lost remembering how many times to play this pair each time. In most cases, the pair is played twice in a row, giving us E-D#-E-D# before the music moves on, but before the main idea returns, Beethoven actually gives us E-D#-E-D#-E-D#-E-D#-E-D# - five pairs - in a way that can really mess with the mind. Unlike Haydn's easily remembered surprise, the even more overexposed Beethoven somehow manages to seem indecisive every time, and I find I can easily miscount it.
I suppose the main trick is that the immediate repetition of that motif makes the actual upbeat pair sound more like a downbeat, which results in something like a 4/8 intro bar before the 3/8 kicks in (clarified by the left hand). From there, it's possible for the ear to interpret each recurrence in multiple ways, so we're left with a sense of floating, untethered to clear downbeats between entrances of the left hand.
The website I've created plays on this by semi-randomly adding in extra E-D# pairs each time, kind of like an absent-minded child practicing with either a poor sense of rhythm or a dreamy spirit of freedom. Each time through the page (the repeats are observed only the first time), the likelihood of more extra E-D# pairs is introduced. One can simply listen, eyes closed, and be surprised each time, or watch the little numbers at upper left which reveal how many pairs we're going to get. I genuinely find it kind of mesmerizing, although it's possible any given computer might fail to be perfectly even along the way. I managed to get a pretty consistently steady screen-recording by being sure my computer was plugged in in high-performance mode, but your mileage may vary. If you're on a mobile device, or just want a quick glance of how this might sound, here you go:
[I did warm up the audio a little bit in post-production so it's not quite as dry as listening to the webpage.]
The main point is that, unlike Haydn's prefab surprise which never changes (and in fairness, he could not have imagined how often it would be played), this version of Beethoven is ever-changing, always ready to upset your expectations - but also, perhaps, better suited to remind us of the inherent flexibility built into this seemingly frozen-in-time work. Expect the unexpected (which is a much nicer turn of phrase than "Unexpect Yourself.") To experience this for yourself, go here:
For more Für Elise content, see the following:
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