So, that's not what I was thinking. But if you've spent much time around choruses, you might well guess that hearing "Trinidad" makes me think of THIS:
This choral curiosity was written by the Austrian composer Ernst Toch in 1930 as a kind of musical experiment. It is widely performed, especially I think by school and community choruses, and perhaps sadly has become by far the best-known of Toch's works. I was a little disappointed to find that there don't seem to be many (any?) professional recordings of it, even though there are dozens and dozens of YouTube renditions. I suppose this may be in part because Toch himself regarded the work as a kind of joke in some ways. In fact, I've yet to find a performance that I REALLY like. I remember years ago finding a simple version with four English singers (SATB) sitting around a pub-like table and singing it with great joy, verve, and precision. I've been very sad not to be able to find that again.
You may read much more about this work here. I only learned today that Toch's original intent was to experiment with technology by recording a performance of this music and then "performing" it for an audience at a higher speed on a phonograph. This recording supposedly shows what that might have sounded like.
Since a major focus of this blog is to use technology to interact with music in lots of unusual ways, it was surprising and gratifying to learn that this work was designed in that kind of spirit. In fact, I also only just learned that the English language words, which are all I've ever known, were created by none other than John Cage. (The original German language version begins not with "Trinidad" but with the much less fun "Ratibor.")
Since a major focus of this blog is to use technology to interact with music in lots of unusual ways, it was surprising and gratifying to learn that this work was designed in that kind of spirit. In fact, I also only just learned that the English language words, which are all I've ever known, were created by none other than John Cage. (The original German language version begins not with "Trinidad" but with the much less fun "Ratibor.")
I have been accompanist for at least two choirs which have performed this fugue. For one of those groups, back in the 90's, I decided to make practice tracks to help the choristers learn the sometimes tricky rhythms. I entered the whole thing into Finale and then created a few different digital renditions. The original, of course, has no specified pitches and is meant to be "sung" in speech style, but I decided to make a few different instrumental renderings, one featuring unpitched percussion and a few featuring each of the four parts played on a single pitch.
I'll concede right away that this obscures some important elements of the music. First of all, just about every chorus I've heard speaks the geographical names with varieties of rising and falling pitch, often in very exaggerated ways, so confining each part to one pitch excludes this aspect. Also, the sounds of the geographical names themselves become important musical elements. A group of people singing "Canada, Málaga, Rimini, Brindisi," even if on a single pitch, has a special kind of sonic variety provided by the vowels and consonants which a drummer, for example, can't really recreate by simply playing four sets of triplets.
But, although it was probably thirty years ago that I made these practice helpers, I remembered enjoying the process and hearing the music in this stripped-down manner. I had tried various pitch sets to separate the four vocal parts including: 1) having each part sing the same pitch class in four different octaves, 2) having all the parts separated by perfect fifths, 3) having all the parts separated by minor thirds to create fully diminished seventh chords. I'm sure I tried some other things as well, but somehow what I settled on is a voicing of: a minor seventh of low B-flat and A-flat above in bass/tenor with another minor seventh of F to E-flat in alto and soprano. These two minor sevenths are separated by a major sixth.
I think I must have just liked the way these notes functioned to delineate four clearly distinct registers and create a satisfying harmony that isn't too dissonant, but which also doesn't sound too much like a unified chord (which might make individual parts more difficult to pick out.) Although I could have spent lots of time exploring other options, the existence of this solution I'd already found decades ago just felt right, so I went to work this week making a more convincing performance of it. Here it is:
I will confess that I really love this result. I know it's merely an off-shoot of what Toch intended - and in that way, it falls into the same category of "found music" I described here - but I find the rhythmic interplay comes out very well (even if the back and forth handling of words like "Tibet" is lost). To be honest, just about every choral rendition I've heard indulges in more silliness and exaggeration than I like. There's something really gratifying about the pure mechanical delight of hearing those four parts interacting - and remember that Toch was interested in mechanization in connection to this very composition.
If you'd like to hear even more mechanical renditions, here are the two versions I sent out to that choir many years ago:
And just to return to this "found music" idea again: I love the idea that this way of re-imagining this music is actually quite simple and formulaic. It really does feel like my solution is some sort of satellite of Toch's original creation. An even more complex idea would be to re-write the fugal rhythmic figures as a real tonal fugue with melodic figures devised in place of place names. This would involve considerably more time and creativity of course, but would also extend well past the "found music" ideal. Even though my static harmony creates a different sort of world than spoken geographical names or melodic fugues, it manages to foreground the rhythmic motives very well, and I half-blush to say it may be my favorite recording I've yet found.
One other little postscript is that this is the second project that has grown out of practice materials I made for this same chorus back in the 90's. You may read more about the other such project here: MMmusing: Impossible Peace = Impossible Piece?
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