Accords mystérieux

Yesterday on Twitter I posted as a puzzler the following series of chords, which have been crossing my path lately, to see if anyone could recognize them. I don't think I would have been able to ID them if they'd been handed to me out of the bleu, but they are quite gripping in effect and I love playing them.

I provided two audio versions, one with me feebly playing on my out-of-tune piano (the composer asks that they not be arpeggiated, so playing them softly is tricky) and the other "performed" by a synth piano. Here are those audio helps:

• Real Piano: - >
• Synth Piano: - >

There were a variety of guesses, but no one actually ended up ID'ing the actual composer. If you'd like to know who it is, scroll down....

That's right, it's the great Francis Poulenc who, along with Scriabin, ranks at the very top of my own subjective plus-minus scale. (Basically, this means I think I tend to like these composers considerably above their reputations. Haydn and Verdi are my other extremes - admittedly great composers who just don't excite me as much as their reputations would suggest.)

Like Scriabin, Poulenc has a great flair for creating sensuous sonorities, nowhere moreso than in the best ad for nicotine that Philip Morris fortunately never thought to use. [Note: This is not the source of the chords above...keep reading.]

By the way, Poulenc's "Hôtel" is possibly the most perfect song ever (unless it's this), Apollinaire's words roughly translating as: "My room is shaped like a cage / the sun puts its arm through the window / but I who would like to smoke / to make smoke pictures / I light at the fire of day my cigarette / I do not want to work / I want to smoke."

[Excuse me while I virtually step outside for a minute...]

But the chords shown at the top of this post are darker and more mysterious than those lazy smoke rings - less jazzy and more opaque. They are found in the middle of a tiny song found in the middle of Poulenc's gorgeous cycle, Tel jour, telle nuit. Here is Paul Eluard's complete text, with Pierre Bernac's translation next-door.

Une roulotte couverte en tuiles Le cheval mort un enfant maître Pensant le front bleu de haine A deux seins s’abattant sur lui Comme deux poings Ce melodrama nous arrache La raison du cœur.

A gypsy wagon roofed with tiles the horse dead a child master thinking his brow blue with hatred of two breast beating down upon him like two fists this melodrama tears away from us the sanity of the heart.

If you can figure out what that's about, good for you. But those wonderful chords hover over the 3rd and 4th lines and create a palpable sense of...something even vaguer that interests me more. Here are all 48 seconds of this very strange little song*, with the composer at the piano accompanying Pierre Bernac. (Poulenc is known for quirky endings to songs, but even for him, this ending is unsettling.)
https://thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/monroemusic/ <
Since I've declared that these chords (and words) are mysterious, I'm just going to let them speak for themselves and, at least for now, not try to analyze them. They are what they are. Dense, dissonant, desultory, and ineffably beautiful.

 [*Note: You can buy that song and 24 more hours of glorious Poulenc for only $30 on iTunes!]

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UPDATE: An astute student (go, Joel!) noticed that the penultimate chord from the mystery progression above is none other than the "Tristan chord" - one half-step higher. The French couldn't escape Wagner, no matter how much they wanted to....

skillz

It's time for me to start blogging again. I have things to say and ideas to toss out there and...well, some other stuff. But, let's get (re)started back with something a bit stranger.

As most  musicians with an Internet connection will have heard by now, there's a $45 million viola about to go up for auction. It's a Strad, one of only 10 intact violas (so many potential jokes in that word 'intact') the great master left behind. (Presumably, Stradivari used most of his other no-longer-intact violas for more practical uses such as: paperweight, gardening tool, ping-pong paddle, etc.) It is a story both cool and absurd - of course, no instrument should really be worth $45 million, although monetary worth is what it is, I suppose.

The additional absurdity that this most expensive of instruments should be a viola - well, my head's been spinning around about that for days now. I love viola jokes as much as anyone (and I honestly do love the viola too, by the way*), but I haven't really been able to find the perfect joke here. "Q: Why are they asking for $45 million for a viola?" "A: So it will end up in a museum where no violist will ever find it." See, that's not really that funny (as if I need to tell you), but all my efforts have turned up equally unsatisfying. The $45 million itself is the joke, it seems.

Anyway, today for the first time I listened to the lovely sample of this instrument provided on the New York Times website. David Aaron Carpenter dashes through the Bach C Major Prelude effortlessly, and the instrument sounds wonderful, though probably not 900 times better than the average $50,000 viola. At some point as I was listening, I decided it would be fun to dub in some less ideal viola playing, in the great tradition of "shredding" videos like this and this and this and a hundred more.

My first thought was to enter the notes into the computer by MIDI keyboard and then send them through a viola synth that I would de-tune (I know, sounds redundant), but that just ended up sounding too fake. However, I'd found I could synch up pretty decently with Mr. Carpenter by slowing his version down to half-tempo. Then, it suddenly dawned on me: I can (sort of) play the cello and had learned this prelude once upon a time. Perhaps if I were to record myself playing it at half-tempo, I could follow along with the Strad and quite naturally provide that special viola brand of tuning and sonority. Then, of course, all I'd need to do is double the speed of my recording and that would put my automatically transpose my cello up to violaworld.

So, I set myself a pretty strict time limit - no practicing or warming up allowed (the better to inhabit the violist's spirit) - hooked up some headphones to the half-tempo Carpenter video on my laptop and dove right in. There were a couple of spots where I found it hard to hear where he was, so my "violist" ends up having a couple of minor memory slips, but mostly we stayed "together." It was a pretty fascinating challenge, trying to follow the score, the audio coming through my headphones, and using the video of Carpenter to help guide me - and also trying to negotiate all those string crossings. (I also had our new puppy sitting contentedly about three feet away from me while I played on my wife's very fine cello - so I had to keep an eye out for her as well; I figured if the dog advanced on the cello and I ended up yelling "No, No, No" out loud, it would fit right in.) I came up with some very creative fingerings along the way and I'll admit I let myself miss a few shifts on purpose. It was all a great kind of fun and satisfying in a way I can't quite explain. (Also painful, as I hadn't played a cello for months and months, so even at half-tempo, my hand started cramping up. Remember, I wanted to "become a violist.")

Here then is the result:



I suppose as "shredding" it's a bit too competent, although I like that the beginning is almost plausible as real playing. Almost... Send it to your friends and see if they'd pay $45 million for this instrument.

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* P.S. Curiously enough, I honestly have the intention of getting a viola in the next year or two and learning to play. My two daughters are violinists and my wife and son are cellists. The son is only 6, but I figure if I start viola soon, maybe I'll be able to join in the Schubert quintet when he's ready to play it. That would be about the most satisfying thing I can ever imagine doing - and a fun sort of viola joke on myself. But I don't think I'll be ponying up for the Strad...

P.P.S. Apologies to Mr. Carpenter are in order, of course, although being the subject of a shredding video should certainly be considered a kind of flattery.

UPDATE: New version posted, now with 100% more Pop, Goes the Weasel.

Happy Bruchday!

Sure, Wagner, Verdi, and Britten got lots of attention for their big anniversaries last year, but every year January 6 seems to pass without people celebrating poor Max Bruch. Who else could've written "The Bruch Concerto" but dear Max?

Well, as I've posted once before, I once created the following for the birthday of a fantastic young violinist who was learning that very Bruch concerto:

 

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 [This is, of course, an homage to this (which should start at the 1:22 mark).]

So, sing along and celebrate! Bruchday comes but once a year.

MMerry Christmas!

My "12 Composers of Christmas" first debuted online in 2005 as a family Christmas card. (It even got a brief mention on a Boston Globe blog.) It made it to Youtube in 2007 and now I've finally updated it with some vocals. Perhaps someday I'll  make a more sophisticated choral arrangement, but for this year, I used my own in-house chorus to do the job - and a charming job they do:



I know Christmas is barely more than a day away, but maybe we can maybe this thing go viral. It's up to you.

For other MMmusing Christmas specials, check out last year's post: Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries, Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine, the Vertical Christmas Medley, Trippin' with Chestnuts...sure to put you in the Christmas spirit. Or something.

MMerry Christmas!

Canons Away!

I hope this isn't how I got out as a blogger for 2013 (by the way, I'm on sabbatical in the spring, so expect much more blogging), but for lack of a better intro, here's something I thought of and did.

I was thinking about a possible upcoming performance of Pachelbel's Canon, and it occurred to me that, with more than 3 violinists on hand, the canon could easily be more than a 3-parter. After all, in addition to being a very nicely designed strict canon, this overexposed work also features a basso ostinato structure, which basically means any two measures of the violin line can go with any other two measures - more or less - as every cellist knows. In theory, since the basso ostinato line occurs 28 times while the violins are playing, you could have 28 separate violin entries (resulting in a 29-voice texture), which would lead to quite a D Major soup.

I decided, for various reasons, to be reasonable (?) and limit myself to 12 violins. Here's what that sounds like. [If you don't seen an embedded player, try this]




I settled on 12 in part because it's a nice round number, 4x the original, but inevitably, I quickly came to realize that 12 offers one other cool possibility, which is to put each of the 12 violin parts in its own key. And so, here you go:




[Again, if there's no visible player there, try this.]  Now, hopefully I'll come up with something more in the holiday spirit before 2013 departs...