MM's Musical Manipulatives

[full-screen, HD viewing recommended]

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It's been a quiet summer here on the blog, but I've been multimedia-ing away in the background and finally have something to show for it. I've been working on my (previously meager) programming chops for the past 6-7 months, which means that JavaScript (a programming language used for controlling web pages) is less of a mystery to me than it once was.

About four years ago, I put together a series of "integrated listening guides" for my own teaching - they allow the user to click through the landmarks of an analytical outline to jump instantly back and forth within an embedded score and video (or audio). The JavaScript I used was mostly copied and pasted from other sites I'd found online. I often understood very little about how the code worked, but kept applying virtual duct tape until I got the results I wanted, and indeed, I found these guides very useful in the classroom. They made it so easy to navigate a large musical structure on the fly as there's no time wasted turning pages or cueing up a video to the right point.

But there were plenty of drawbacks, especially in terms of cross-platform compatibility. Reliance on some flash elements meant the guides wouldn't work on iPads and the like, and reliance on the quirky Scribd platform for embedding the scores caused some limitations and made things look kind of clunky.* And, basically, it seemed like every six months or so, some web standard had changed so that the guides didn't work properly until I applied more virtual duct tape.

Anyway, over the past few weeks, I finally got around to updating these guides, and they now work much more elegantly, with a variety of improved features, including:

• Pages now turn automatically with the music!
• The outline automatically updates to highlight the section being played at the moment.
• Two of the guides (Brahms and Mozart) feature running captions that describe the music.
• Pages resize nicely according to the size of the browser window.
• The guides work pretty smoothly across a range of browsers and on iPads! (I assume they work fine in Android devices as well as long as the screen is big enough. They more or less work on my smallish Kindle Fire HD, though it's not a great user experience.)
• In the two Beethoven symphony guides, one can instantly jump back and forth within the first and second times though the repeated Exposition sections.
• The Beethoven "Eroica" guide includes the option of switching orchestras on the fly! The two performances (Järvi and Bernstein) feature very different tempi, but they nevertheless stay closely synced.
• Just for fun, you can speed up or slow down the performances.

In short, they do most of the things I'd want them to do, and I'm also gratified to say that I now understand 98% of how the JavaScript is working. In fact, much of the code is written from scratch. The guides available now include:

• Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 "Eroica," 1st mvt.
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 5, all four movements
• Beethoven: Piano Sonata, Op. 111, 2nd mvt.
• Brahms: Symphony No. 4, 4th mvt.
• Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro, Act II Finale
• Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto, 1st mvt.

I began referring to these guides a few years ago as "musical manipulatives" by analogy to the kinds of hands-on physical objects used to help teach math concepts. The idea here is that, for the student, grasping the structural relationships within a large-scale work can be daunting. These guides provide a framework for visualizing the structure as a whole and examining the components instantly. This makes it easy, for example, to compare various appearances of a theme in different keys and contexts. I've found this to be a great way to help explain the tonal features of sonata form. In the variation movements (Brahms and Beethoven Op.111), one can easily sample individual variations to see how they relate to each other. (Designing the guide for Op.111 helped me make sense of how the last few variations begin departing from the thematic structure.)

I've written before about the concept of storyboarding a piece by listening only to a few seconds of each segment to get a quick overview of the shape of things. In the new Beethoven "Eroica" guide, if you click on the "Big Bangs" link, you'll hear a relatively seamless performance that condenses 15.5 minutes to exactly 60 seconds of sforzando milestones.

A few years ago, commenter dfan wrote here:

I remember as a little kid when I suddenly realized that I actually could hold the whole structure of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th in my head and follow it from beginning to end, and that it actually made logical semantic sense in the same way that a long sentence does, rather than just being a continuous stream of arbitrary music that happened to end at some point. It was a real epiphany.

That is the kind of perspective I hope these guides can help to provide. (Listening to the "Eroica" at double-speed, though kind of silly, is also an interesting way to get a bird's-eye perspective, a concept I explored here: listening at 10x!)

I realize I'm not the first to design something like this, though I think my design has some nice advantages over what I've seen before. The San Francisco Symphony's excellent "Keeping Score" series has an "Eroica" guide. (Warning: music starts playing right away. Bad design.) It certainly has more detail at some levels and a cleaner (though ugly) looking score, with a vertical bar that awkwardly lurches ahead every measure to show exactly where the music is. It also, most frustratingly, only includes excerpts, and never provides a structural view of an entire movement.

Touchpress's amazing Beethoven 9 app includes four perfectly synced performances, plus cool bells and whistles like a manuscript view, a little light-up orchestra simulation, tons of background information, and a constantly scrolling score (which I find a bit disconcerting). It's not easy to view the entire score at once, although a cool "curated score" option shows only the most "important" instruments at a given time to save space. Again, I feel what it does least well is keep a focus on the large-scale structure, as there's no option of viewing an outline while the music plays. It also has the notable disadvantage of only working on iOS devices. I've thought before about getting into mobile app development, but it's more gratifying in some ways to design a single site that works equally well on desktops, laptops, and tablets.

Of course, not everything is perfect about this project. The most glaring problem is that I don't own rights to any of the recordings I'm encouraging you to manipulate. Most are still available on YouTube as well, so it's not like I'm the first to throw them into the wild. Here's an expansion of my Unfrozen Caveman Blogger defense from 2011:

I'm just a caveman. I don't really understand how this whole brave new world wide web works - your free-flowing videos and mixed media messages frighten and confuse me. When I see a big symphony orchestra playing pretty tunes on this smooth, flat, glowing rock, I think, 'Oh no, did an evil fairy shrink them?'  I don't know. Because I'm a caveman. I don't understand what's right or what's wrong when it comes to posting media. But what I do know is this: Paavo Järvi knows how to bring out the prehistoric in historic music - and Stefan Jackiw, at age 14, plays the Mendelssohn concerto as beautifully as it can be played.

A project for the future is to build guides like this that use embedded YouTube videos, so I don't have to worry about how it got posted. (I know the basics of how to do that as demonstrated here and here.) This introduces more complications as some videos don't allowing embedding outside of YouTube and there are ads to contend with. (Yes, I understand that watching ads is a fair trade-off for getting free content.)

So, I'm just referring to these as prototypes for now - evidence of what can be done. I'm certainly not making any money from them, but I would encourage people to give them a try, especially in the classroom. I'd love to get feedback on what works and what doesn't. If you do use them in a class or with students, I'd love to know about that as well. I'll do my best to keep them functioning well. If you've visited any of the guides before, it's always a good idea to refresh the page to be sure you get the most recent version as I'm still tinkering with page-turn timing and like - and more features might still be added.

The best place to go to access the guides is thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/guides**.

Oh, and I have the demo video above (full-screen, HD viewing recommended) which samples the two Beethoven symphonies, the Brahms symphony, and the Mozart opera.

Spread the word!

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* If you're curious, here's what things looked like with the Scribd platform, although this version has the auto-page turning enabled, which wasn't true back in 2011. An odd aesthetic principle I've discovered as my design has improved is that the simpler and more elegant things look, the less it seems like there's any significant work behind the scenes. I actually had a strange feeling of being a bit disappointed at a stage when the "virtual duct tape" stopped showing so much and it all just looked like these pages must be easy to throw together.

** I've also recently debuted a new landing page for thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com, which used to point to information about an edition of a Gounod operetta I prepared, but now serves as a gateway to a range of multimedia creations.

For those for whom the "Star-spangled Banner" melodic range is too narrow...

Back in 2009, I posted a July 4th video on Facebook in which I set off some carbonated fireworks with a sleeve of Mentos and a bottle of 7-up. The explosion doesn't last long, but I ran it backwards and forewords and slowed it down a few times to turn it into more of a video show, with the inimitable sound of Doug Yeo's multi-tracked 26-serpent version of the 1812 Overture providing the perfect soundtrack.

Six years later, with the iPhone's HD video and slo-mo capabilities, it seemed like the right time to try this again. (I'm expecting to revisit this well in 2021 when smartphones are capable of generating 3-D holographic recordings.) I added a couple more Mentos to the sleeve and the 7-up shot way up over my head, surpassing the 2009 results!

Then came the inevitable question: what soundtrack would best serve this viewing experience. I wanted something patriotic, but a little off the beaten path. I remembered that Stravinsky had made an arrangement of our national anthem which, in my mind, I'd conflated with his much spikier version of "Happy Birthday." The tunes actually begin with strikingly similar gestures rhythmically.



Curiously, it's not this irreverent take on a then-copyrighted song that got Stravinsky into urban-legend legal trouble, but rather his relatively unspangled and respectful "Star-spangled Banner":



I'll admit I was disappointed to hear how sober and solemn this is. It would've been fun to re-work that Happy Birthday dressing for the Anacreontic Song, but I was running out of time to post before the 4th ended, so I first decided to speed up Stravinsky's anthem by about 30%. When that still wasn't interesting enough, I used Audacity's Sliding Pitch Scale Tool to create a constant pitch slide up through an octave. The effect was cooler than I expected. In fact, my violinist sister with a great ear commented, "That music made my ears hurt."

When you've successfully annoyed your little sister, then a brother's work might be said to be done, but I do think this version has other virtues. There's something wonderfully aspirational about the way each phrase seems to arrive at a new key [insert Francis Scott joke here], reaching, soaring, never satisfied with the status quo - a virtual representation of the American spirit. Or something like that.

Anyway, this is merely Exhibit #157 along my strange journey of finding that the most compelling listening (for me) comes not necessarily from a) great classics performed impeccably, nor from b) modernist works that strain my ability to make sense of their sound worlds, but c) an odd combination in which the familiar is deconstructed and re-imagined in a way that mixes the pleasures of a and b. I realize this hardly makes me some bold progressive, but it's not an aesthetic position at which I'd ever expected to arrive.

Yet, here I am...albeit a few days late of July 4th.



P.S. Yes, I probably shouldn't have had my videographer film this in portrait mode, but on my iPhone at least, you can get it to play more or less full-screen in portrait mode if you hit the little "expand" button.

 

Notes on a Recital

Yeah, I haven't written much here on the blog this year (so far), but I did just finish writing 1400 words or so about a chamber music recital I happen to be playing in on Sunday. More regular blogging will resume soon, assuming I come out on the other side of this encounter with Brahms and Ravel and their rather absurd demands. For now, here are many words.

My goal in writing such notes is to help provide a scaffold for listening. I try to avoid technical terms like "sonata form," "pentatonic," and "this passage makes me want to set my hair on fire," and focus more on providing just a couple of main things to listen for in each movement, although for some reason I thought I'd also provide a sort of apologia for why piano trios are called "piano trios." (I just chose to sidestep the whole confusing notion of the "trio" section in a scherzo, which of course doesn't literally mean there are three parts, although in piano trios there usually are three parts, though not three pianos...)

But I still end up with a lot of words, so I'll stop writing about the words and just let them speak for themselves. And...if you live in the Boston area and want to come here some of the best music ever written (plus some Beethoven variations), come see me flail.

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Consider the social life of the curious species “pianist.” A keyboard player has the advantage of being able to create a fully satisfying texture with just one instrument, but this can also leave pianists making music all by themselves, for better and for worse. When called upon to support singers or instrumental soloists in duo situations, the pianist is often regarded as the servile “accompanist,” sometimes more fairly than others. There is an enormous body of music written for two pianists at one keyboard (which creates an immediate kind of physical intimacy), and there’s also plenty of music written for the less practical pairing of two pianos. But, good luck finding two good ones in one room, and good luck hearing which is which when two pianos are making a racket together.

So it is that the richest repertoire for the socially-minded pianist is found in the strangely named “piano trio” format, which actually involves only one piano. The genre gets its name from the 18th century context in which a leading piano part is enhanced by the “accompaniment” of violin and cello. Although there are also some fantastic piano quartets (just add viola) and piano quintets (throw in a second violin, and prepare to move a lot of living room furniture), there’s something quite practical and satisfying about pitting two string players against one big keyboard. The grouping certainly has intrigued a wide range of composers to write works that transcend the casual living room scene to musical heights as ambitious as that found in full-scale symphonies.

Beethoven: Fourteen Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 44 (1792)

Beethoven was a leader in elevating the piano trio in this way, but the variations opening today’s program are closer to the 18th century spirit of lighthearted musical banter among friends. The simplicity of the perfectly stupid theme is emphasized by having all three performers present it in stubborn unison, as if they’ve been handed a topic for discussion. The conversation that ensues gives everyone a chance to lead and accompany as the theme takes on various characters, mostly of a jovial sort. Beethoven is famous for his masterful control of dramatic pacing, but here we find him more interested in entertaining his guests in a kind of variety show. Hear here.

If Beethoven is playing the role of appetizer today, the trios by Ravel and Brahms are each full course meals on their own; this is a demanding program for performers and audience alike, though it’s hard to imagine two more rewarding works. The French Ravel and the German Brahms summon very different sound worlds from this instrumental combo, but the two trios have much in common as well. Each is a four-movement structure 1) anchored by a relatively lengthy and lyrical first movement with an unforgettable opening theme; 2) followed by a mischievously animated scherzo; 3) countered by a very serious slow movement; and 4) concluded by a fairly manic finale that ends with a bang. Though Brahms’ work is the embodiment of 19th Century Romanticism and Ravel’s has a more 20th Century Modernist style, both composers have a classicist’s devotion to detail that paradoxically enables them to create music that soars passionately and pushes the performers to their limits.

Ravel: Piano Trio in A Minor (1914)

One hears the early 20th century in the occasional wild outbursts of color and sonority in Ravel’s 1914 trio, but in many respects his approach is more old-fashioned, refined and efficient than Brahms’. Each movement is generated by one primary idea that Ravel then explores with his uncannily imaginative ear, coaxing all sorts of otherworldly sounds from these old-world instruments. The music is unfailingly expressive though, and each movement has a fairly clear architecture articulated by vivid climaxes.

The trio begins hypnotically with a melodic/rhythmic idea that immediately conjures up a “long ago and far away” kind of mystery. There are a couple of frenetic climaxes on this theme, each time countered by a more tender melody, but each time the hypnotic idea creeps back in down in the depths of the piano, which is where things finally fade away. Hear here.

The second movement scherzo skitters around with an unceasing kinetic energy. Ideas are fragmented, strange sounds and register leaps abound, and finding the theme can seem like chasing a firefly at times. Even the contrasting middle section features a kind of mashup in which a smoothly flowing new theme (first in piano, later in strings) is played with the dizzying scherzo motives darting around in the background. Again, two enormous climaxes anchor the proceedings, the second leading to a wild crash of an ending. (The unusual title “Pantoum” refers to a kind of poetry in which lines from one stanza are repositioned in succeeding stanzas, an effect re-imagined here in musical terms.) Hear here.

The third movement returns to the somber mood of the first, here dressed in the centuries-old form of a passacaglia, a kind of theme-and-variations structure in which a bass line is the recurring idea. In this case, the beautiful melody indeed begins in (and returns to) the piano’s bass register, but it’s treated more as main tune than bass line for most of the movement’s progression to an impassioned apex and heartrending follow-up. Hear here.

The compact finale begins with glassy, whirring motions in the strings, against which the piano introduces a circular melody with an exotic, East Asian flair. The second part of the tune has a rising trajectory that dominates much of the movement. There are three ecstatic climaxes, the first and last featuring brilliant string trills above massive piano chords. Ravel clearly enjoys pushing the ensemble to its limits, flying close enough to the sun to achieve incandescent results. Hopefully, no one gets singed. Hear here.

Brahms: Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 (1854/1889)

Brahms’ writing for these instruments has fewer sharp edges than Ravel’s, though he still loves to indulge in richly layered sonorities. His Trio in B Major is an early work which he revised significantly late in his career, so it draws both on youthful exuberance and years of experience crafting large-scale musical narratives. It’s likely a youthful indulgence in letting many ideas develop at length that results in such an expansive canvas (it’s long!), but you can tell the composer loves these ideas, and the music is inspired from end to end.

The opening of the first movement is a perfect example of how Brahms is willing to take his time letting things unfold. A sublimely perfect melody is introduced by piano and then taken up for an extended period by the cello (no cellist can resist this piece) before the violin finally joins in to continue a long exploration of the main tune. The rest of the movement alternates between this kind of lyrical outpouring and more dramatic interchanges. The return of the opening material is beautifully handled, subtle enough that one hardly knows when the return started, and though tensions remain, the movement is finally brought to a close by a lullaby-like reminiscence of the main theme, alternating between cello and violin. Hear here.

The second movement is both playful and neurotic, with a simple elfin theme passed around nervously, occasionally exploding violently. A contrasting middle section is more relaxed, with a switch from minor to major and a lovely, lilting melody that builds triumphantly. Hear here.

In the next to last movement of our afternoon, time might seem to come to a stop as Brahms dares to experiment with stillness. In some ways, this music is the most challenging for performers and audience, but if one is willing to surrender to a dream state and suspend the desire for suspense, the effect is magical and celestial. A gentle rocking motion introduces a more troubled midsection, but the glacially spaced piano chords of the opening return to usher us back to rest. Hear here.

As with the first and second movements, the cello (often given the least interesting role in early piano trio repertoire) takes the lead in starting the finale, which begins restlessly, as if in midstream. It’s quite rare for a work with a big major key first movement to end in a minor key, but Brahms is not interested in recapturing the big-hearted lyricism of the opening. There is a rollicking second theme that seems to suggest something more optimistic, but a series of violent eruptions are always around the corner, culminating in a stormy final flourish. Hear here.

MMmusing's 10th (base 8) Anniversary!

If we lived in a base-8 world, today would be the 10th anniversary of MMmusing! As it is, since most of us include our thumbs when counting, today will be more properly be understood as the blog's 8th anniversary, but that's still something. January and February have traditionally been hibernating months here (check the archives to the right), but I'm back just in time with a strange little video that maybe should've stayed underground.

Some quick background: in the run-up to the Oscars last week, we ended up watching "The Theory of Everything", the Stephen Hawking bio-pic that was up for Best Picture. It's an enjoyable movie, though a bit too smooth and elegantly packaged for my tastes, but I did find one little scene particularly enjoyable - enough so, that I made my own iPhone bootleg of the scene as it streamed on my laptop:



Poor Emily Watson didn't have much else to do in the movie, but she nailed this scene, which seemed to me the perfect thing one might e-mail out to that potential church choir recruit. In fact, I made my own looping page for anyone who wants to try that out. (It leaves out Felicity Jone's clever, though possibly too perfect, reply.)

Because that resulted in me hearing the bit repeated over and over, I started wondering if it could be subject to the "speech-to-song effect" described quite memorably in this fun Radiolab "sometimes behave so strangely" segment. The idea is that a phrase repeated over and over can start to sound more like music than speech, partly because such repetition is a common musical device, but also because pitch and rhythm are important (if often taken for granted) parts of speech. It turns out that, at least for me, because Watson's speech is so whispered and relatively unmodulated, it didn't convert to a tune quite as easily as I'd hoped, though the rhythmic cadences are quite musical, and the tea-cup percussion adds a lovely counterpoint.

Anyway, I did come up with this, for better or for worse. There's an old saying, worth repeating: "there's humor in repetition." Perhaps there's music in repetition as well.



So: Happy MMmusing Day! If you don't want to join the choir, perhaps you'll enjoy something found on this interactive, annotated bibliblography.

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P.S. For an example of spoken phrases used really effectively as musical phrases, there is Steve Reich's wonderfully inventive Different Trains. "From Chicago to New York..." starts at about 35 seconds in.

Der Schaufelmann

Spending 3-5 hours a day shoveling snow gives one lots of time to reflect. Inevitably, for me over the past week, those reflections turned to ways in which winter has been expressed through music, and though the likes of Vivaldi, Liszt, and Debussy have tried their hand at depicting the harshness of the season in sound, it occurred to me that no one really understood the loneliness of standing out in the freezing cold like Schubert. He wrote a whole song cycle about it. The poignant final song is supposedly about a pitiful hurdy-gurdy player standing out in the freezing cold and providing a nice metaphor for the poet's hopeless love life, but I felt a one-ness with the futility of the hurdy-gurdiest while tackling the white stuff these past fews days - and my time spent moving snow around (as the snow kept falling, and knowing the snowplows would come and push more back into my driveway) provided the mental time and framework for me to re-translate Wilhelm Müller's grim words for the common man. Here you go, winter.