The Perfect Blackout

My love for mashups and indeterminate pieces has a lot to do with the satisfaction of finding unexpectedly meaningful connections that arise from unplanned intersections. Yesterday, I had a new kind of experience in which multimedia elements came together in remarkably logical fashion. I was accompanying several young cellists at my son's teacher's studio recital, held in the living room of an elegant Harvard Sq. home. One of the pieces I accompanied was the Squire Tarantella, which I hadn't thought much about since I learned (and loved!) it back in my cello days. As part of the Suzuki repertoire, it's a widely played piece, although I have to admit I don't know anything else by Mr. Squire, an important English performer and pedagogue. I was surprised to be handed, for accompanying purposes, an entire book of Squire's pieces for cello, but for now I only know this highly entertaining little solo.

It begins with a dramatic 8-bar intro featuring varieties of octaves: 5 ff sets of A's, followed by a twisting harmonic minor figure and a menacing rising bass line that leads into the cello tune. Just as I started in with those accented A's, the lights went off. (I'd like to think my stunning sense of style startled someone into a switch, but in retrospect, it looks like the lights started off just before I did.) Fortunately, it's a pretty easy bit of music to remember since it's all in octaves, but I can recall wondering if I should stop. I was vaguely aware of people springing into quiet action, but I knew the cellist was using music and it didn't seem fair to have him start in the dark. Honestly, it felt like 10 seconds or so of processing all of this, but the lights did come on in time for the cello to make a particularly dramatic entrance.

As it happened, Son of MMmusing had been the previous performer, so I still had the camcorder running on a tripod, which means I have a document of this whole thing. It was quite a surprise to watch it today and realize how beautifully the "lighting design" synced up with the music. The lights fade to nothing during those octave A's, it stays dark during the twisting, searching 8th notes, and the lights come back up as the bass line ascends, just in time to light the way for the star. (The switch was turned on less than 5 seconds after it had been turned off.) It really does look like it could've been planned this way - especially with that one lonely outdoor light framed through the window. I wish I could've enjoyed it more in the moment!

[I've anonymized the cellist here and faded out at the end, but I promise no other FX were applied. Technically, if I'd been the lighting designer, I would've brought the lights up a bit more slowly. This looks like a rush job.]

The 12 Composers of Christmas (The 12 Musings of Christmas #12)

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...or, if you prefer to do your own singing:

 

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Works cited

See the pre-blog version here

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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The 12 Musings of Christmas

1. Christmas Time is Here
2. In Season
3. Vertical Christmas Medley
4. Trippin' with Chestnuts
5. Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine
6. Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries
7. Sleigh Ride in 7/8
8. A Christmas Carol
9. Savior of the Nations, Come
10. Make it so!
11. The 12 Tones of Christmas
12. The 12 Composers of Christmas

The 12 Tones of Christmas (The 12 Musings of Christmas #11)

Once again, today's feature isn't my own creation (though I wish it was), but it's a true Christmas classic that should be celebrated - and, I do have my own two cents to add. Richard McQuillan's "The Twelve Tones of Christmas" brilliantly houses a famous count-to-12 song within a 12-tone accompaniment, "fiendishly deployed to maximize the dissonance level," in the composer's words. He also scored it for the unusually piquant combination of ocarina and harpsichord, instruments which are perhaps even more chilling in digitally synthesized form.

I wrote a couple of years ago that it "sounds like the kind of thing that would be playing if Captain Kirk showed up on a planet ruled by some sort of eccentric aristocrat." In fact, I'm sure I was thinking of "The Squire of Gothos" episode, in which you can see the strange guest star playing some intergalactic Scarlatti at the 5:48 mark here. It's not 12-tone music, but it would be better if it was.

Anyway, Schoenberg supposedly dreamed of a day when children would be whistling 12-tone tunes in the street. We're not there yet, but I decided to do the next best thing and have my 9-year old daughter sing "The 12 Days of Christmas" while I played McQuillan's spiky accompaniment on the piano. Child labor laws being what they are and me trying to read from an iPad (which allows Airturn page-turning but makes for some small notes), I can't say I nailed every tone in the few takes we did. Perhaps an advanced ear training class could take on the challenge of figuring out where I betrayed the row. Nonetheless, I think it makes its effect, the child's voice bringing an extra layer of sweetness to the texture.



I wish I'd used separate mics to get better balance, and I wish I hadn't kept rushing ahead to the cadences; but the world needs more domestic 12-tone music-making, and I'm glad to have done my small part. Some day, perhaps, every home will have a harpsichord and Schoenbergiads will be commonplace - if not in this galaxy, then in some strange new world.

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The 12 Musings of Christmas (so far...)

1. Christmas Time is Here
2. In Season
3. Vertical Christmas Medley
4. Trippin' with Chestnuts
5. Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine
6. Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries
7. Sleigh Ride in 7/8
8. A Christmas Carol
9. Savior of the Nations, Come
10. Make it so!
11. The 12 Tones of Christmas

Make it so (The 12 Composers of Christmas #10)

Day 10 might be considered either the best of times or the worst of times in "The 12 Musings of Christmas." This video is brilliant and entertaining, but I can't take ANY credit for it, nor have I creatively interacted with it in any sort of way. I'm just saying it's awesome. I'd penciled it in when I first started plotting out this series of specials, but I hadn't realized just how popular the video is, so I'm not sure I'm doing much service by possibly adding a few more numbers to the half a million who've already seen it. Nevertheless:

Naturally, I did start thinking about ways I might interact with this idea, but I couldn't come up with anything half as clever. Plus, silly as it is, creating this video must've taken a LOT of time. I did notice a few years back that Charles Ives wrote a song which begins (in the piano part) with the first seven notes of "Let it Snow." It would be easy enough (trivial, really) to work the rest of "Let it snow" into Ives' open-door harmonic world, but I'm not sure that would be very entertaining since Ives' song isn't very familiar. 

So, if you haven't yet seen Captain Picard et al singing "Let it snow"...make it so.

Also, since I'm here, I might as well mention (already tweeted) the perverse delight I experienced on Saturday at a Christmas pageant rehearsal. Using the accompanist edition of The Hymnal 1982, I was about to start in on the last phrase of "Hark, the herald angels sing" as a hymn intro. My foot headed for what I assumed was a B-flat in the pedal when I suddenly noticed there was no B-flat in the key signature...in the bass clef. The treble staff had the expected B-flat, so it's obviously a misprint, but that's a pretty big misprint. You might be wondering what it would sound like to hear the bass staff played without B-flats. Make it so!

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The 12 Musings of Christmas (so far...)

1. Christmas Time is Here
2. In Season
3. Vertical Christmas Medley
4. Trippin' with Chestnuts
5. Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine
6. Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries
7. Sleigh Ride in 7/8
8. A Christmas Carol
9. Savior of the Nations, Come
10. Make it so!

Savior of the Nations, Come (The 12 Musings of Christmas #9)

For the first eight days of "The 12 Musings of Christmas" I've focused on lighthearted holiday fare. On this 4th Sunday of Advent, which also happens to be the darkest day of the year, here's a more somber musical offering. (Yes, I know that running this series before Christmas should make it all Advent and that the real twelve days of Christmas start on the 25th. We'll put such complaints in the "so sue me" category.)

Many years ago, I had the idea of creating a complete set of piano transcriptions of the 46 short chorale preludes in Bach's Orgelbüchlein. (Busoni made characteristically rich transcriptions of a small selection, but at the time I wasn't aware of any complete piano sets. Now I am.) I only made it through about ten before putting the project on hold, but I might return to it some day. My idea had always been that this kind of repertoire is a great way for pianists to work on voicing and balancing dense counterpoint - and to get to know a type of Bachian keyboard writing different from what one finds in the suites and the Well-Tempered Clavier.

One of my favorites of Bach's collection is the first piece, Nun, komm', der Heiden Heiland, based on a chorale which the composer also featured elsewhere in a much more elaborate prelude and in a couple of cantatas. But I love the simplicity of this relatively straightforward setting, in which the tune is presented once, slowly, above a rich web of interlocking countersubjects. It's almost as if one hears Bach slowly harmonizing the tune one part at a time, so there's always something in motion and out of synch. I think of such music as tilted. (Here's my favorite tilted piece.)

I do play it more slowly (on organ and piano) than most, I suppose because I like hearing the gears turning. I have much more I could say about the arrangement, Bach on the piano, the fact that my piano needs tuning, the use of Lilypond as an engraving tool, and the way in which Bach's music beautifully captures the mystery of anticipation at this darkest time of year. But, it's almost midnight, so I'm going to let the starkness of the music, the arrangement, and the impromptu recording* speak for themselves:



And, if you're curious, here's what Bach's original version sounded like on the organ when I was practicing for Advent 2 a couple of weeks ago.


UPDATE: You can hear the chorale tune sung, followed by a real organist's performance of the Bach prelude here.

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* made just minutes ago at the end of a very long day on this shortest day of the year.

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The 12 Musings of Christmas (so far...)

1. Christmas Time is Here
2. In Season
3. Vertical Christmas Medley
4. Trippin' with Chestnuts
5. Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine
6. Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries
7. Sleigh Ride in 7/8
8. A Christmas Carol
9. Savior of the Nations, Come