My daughter's at a music camp out in rural Cummington, MA and, since we just read the chapter on Copland and FDR-era populism in The Rest is Noisein a summer class, I remembered that Copland had written the score for a little U.S. documentary about immigrants called "The Cummington Story."
I'd learned about the film from the music camp, which had learned of the score back in 2008 and had their junior camp orchestra perform it.
The film/documentary is a hokey but earnestly charming twenty minutes of nostalgia of which I'd never watched more than a few minutes; but since I was thinking a lot about Copland, I watched the whole thing this morning and, not surprisingly, a lot of the music sounds like a lot of Copland, but I was still surprised by an extra jolt of recognition around the 12:45 mark of the film. The music there is very close to the climactic moments in the first movement of the composer's clarinet concerto, as at around the 4:00 mark below:
I wanted to think I'd made some great musicological discovery (although it's pretty obvious), but it turns out even Wikipedia already knew about this connection between the 1945 score and the 1947-48 concerto. Still, as this blog has often evidenced, hearing this kind of connection is one of my favorite things about listening to music...
[EXCITING UPDATE: I finally found a technology (MIT's Scratch) to construct my ideal random Gymnopédie player. See/hear it in action here. Also, I performed a "live-randomized" version at my September, 2013 recital. Performance is here.]
Here's a lazy, aimless post for a lazy summer's day. Erik Satie's famous Gymnopédies have a kind of timeless, anti-gravity quality that makes them seem both like they could go on forever and that they're not going anywhere in particular. I've wondered for awhile about the possibility of creating a system that would play through one of these pieces by jumping randomly from phrase to phrase. So, finally I did something about it with the particularly iconic No. 1. Download this zipped folder of 20 mp3s, put them into an iTunes playlist, set for shuffle and you may never need to do anything again as time may actually stop.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be much harder to get a web-based audio playlist to shuffle without highly annoying gaps occurring between each "track," so I haven't yet created the perfect "Randomnopédie" player, but perhaps I'll figure it out. In the meantime, you can head over here and hear the phrases amble by randomly with only slight (but still annoying) spaces between the phrases. (You'd think Soundcloud could get this right, but no...)
More to come...including, perhaps, a fully "backwards" version and a possible Trois Gymnopédies version in which phrases from all three pieces are freely intermingled.
But wait, there's more! I thought that previous post was all I had to say about The Rite of Spring on its 100th birthday, but my brain wouldn't stop generating puns and pretty soon "It Rite As Well Be Spring" ambled by. Well, just as the words "Rite of Appalachian Spring" once inspired this mashup, I suddenly realized that Vivaldi's iconic Spring concerto is a PERFECT match for Stravinsky's iconic spring chords. I don't really see any reason to say anything else:
Today marks the 100th birthday of the work about which I've blogged more than anything else, so it wouldn't be rite not to post something. I have a little something in the works for next week, but here's a quick recap of my Rite writings to date:
But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. I'd planned to finish up a post-in-progress after dinner, but then remembered that the Boston Bruins were playing the winner-take-all Game 7 of their first-round hockey playoff series. I'm not a particularly big hockey fan, but hockey Game 7's have a dramatic potential that has to be experienced to be understood. (If only Verdi had known, he might've really been successful. Imagine Rigoaletto!) Laptop in lap, I naively thought I'd be able to write while watching, which I suppose is like planning to cook dinner while riding in a car whipping blindly around curves at 90mph. The action is virtually non-stop and you have no idea when the big moment is going to happen, so coordinated multi-tasking just doesn't work.
Don't panic, this hasn't morphed into a sports blog (yet), although sometimes I wonder if "classical music sports blogger" isn't the perfect niche for me. I have written before about the aesthetics of hockey in one of my all-time favorite posts, Atonality on Ice, where I proposed that the wild, hard-to-process back-and-forth of hockey action is analogous to the way in which atonal music often leaves the ears in the virtual dark. One often does better to live in the moment than try to discern clear patterns that might suggest what will happen next. Goals are constantly being turned away - and yet the promise of meaning is ever-present.
The truth is, I've probably watched at most about ten such Game 7's, but it turns out there's never been a Game 7 like this one. (Meaning in sports has a lot to do with the tantalizing possibility of improbability.) The hometown Bruins took a brief 1-0 lead on the upstart Toronto Maple Leafs (more on that name in a bit), but had fallen behind 2-1 entering the final period. At this point, my family took an active role in the events that unfolded as my wife decided to sit and watch with me. In short order, the Leafs added two quick goals to build up a virtually insurmountable 4-1 lead. No hockey team had ever come back from three goals down in the final period of a Game 7. Wife of MMmusing wandered off, idly noting that she was clearly bringing the Bruins bad luck. Not long after she'd left, Boston scored a goal and when the love of my life appeared again to see how things were going, I had to tell her she was banned from the room. True superstitious soul-mate that she is, she understood perfectly and only learned of the events that followed via primal screams from your normally mild-mannered correspondent.
That's right, the Bruins scored twice in the final 90 seconds of regulation and then finished the miracle 5 minutes into Sudden Death overtime. Like a ridiculously over-the-top movie plot (or Verdi opera). In the meantime, the only use I'd managed to make of my "writing instrument" was to fire off a few tweets like the following:
Although I can type a typo with the best of them, typing out "Leafs" kept feeling strange to me, even if it is correct. Once the once-in-a-lifetime outcome was settled, I found myself thinking about how horrible it must be to be on the wrong side of such an ending, but the mischievous part of me thought it would be fun to express this in a way that had fun with leaves being leafs. I'll spare you the rest of this process (which continued into today as I wordsmithed while overseeing the final final exam of the year) and just show you the final version of my tweeted Leafs' Lament.
It's silly, of course, but the iambic pentameter and all those explosive f's (10 if you make the most of "of") have an old-school, Beowulf-ian kind of flavor that captures the raw, gripping, historical nature of the moment. And, if you "correctly" pronounce "lifes" so that it sounds just like "leafs," you'll find the "leaf" sound appearing four times within the nineteen syllables. Like so:
So with that, my long blogging silence is ended. Ironically, the silence is framed by strange poems inspired by the unexpected (see 12/30/12). And perhaps soon enough I'll finish that post-in-progress which also has to do with unexpected inspiration. It's actually about music.* Stay tuned...
* UPDATE: Of course, this post is also about music in a broad sense, as I find this kind of poetry is at least as much about sound and rhythm as it is about whatever the words might mean. As it happens, the recording above is also an example of a musical transposition. The anonymous "singer's" recording has been transposed up a major third to protect the innocent.
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 600 possible outcomes.
About Me
MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and 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.
