TwitLit

It's been far too long since poetry bloomed here on MMmusing. So, Miss Mussel's meme proved to be an irresistable invitation, even if poetry isn't specifically requested. The goal is to summarize an opera plot in 140 characters or less (spaces and punctuation included), which is apparently the tweet length imposed by the Lords of Twitter. I don't Twitter [update: now I do], but I can appreciate a fun constraint when I see one. These are reminiscent of Maurice Sagoff's ShrinkLits, which I first discovered via the indispensable Le ton beau de Marot. Sadly, there will probably be more to come from me. You've been warned.

Queen of May? Girls today! So, be daring; Crown Al Herring. He's afraid; lemonade makes him braver. Misbehavior! Doesn't die. Makes Mum cry.

Poor Susanna counts the Count as quite a fan, a not nice man. His wife is sad, and Fig'ro's mad. Switcheroo exposes cad; he admits he's bad. [see improved version below.]

By the way, I'm proud to say that each of the above uses exactly 140 characters. Now that's following a constraint. (Those are also my two favorite operas.)

UPDATE: Here's another, also weighing in at 140 on the nose.

Susannah bathes, the Elders see, and blame her; Blitch says fervently, "Repent," but sins against her, so he's killed by her protective bro.

UPDATE 2: I'd like to change my Figaro tweet to (still =140):

Count wishes he Susanna had; his wife is sad, his servant mad, a mezzo plays a lusty lad. Switcheroo exposes cad, finale he admits he's bad.

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UPDATE 3: Turns out I really should have restricted my plots to 130 since they needed to be tagged (in the Twittersphere) with the 10-character tag, #operaplot. (I didn't understand Twitter at the time, and by the way, this article helps to explain why so many people find it confusing at first.) However, Miss Mussel kindly let me stay in the competition, and Al Herring got an honorable mention. Will try to play by the rules for Round 2.

Piano Hero Blooper and a Hectic Hoedown

Here's just a bit of video from Wednesday's Billy the Kid Piano Anti-Hero recital. I don't know if Billy the Kid really qualifies as a classic anti-hero, but who can resist a good title? Anyway, this music really was a delight to play on the piano, and the audience seemed to enjoy it as well. It's such straightforward, uncomplicated music, and yet so artfully written. 

I think the laid-back cowboy tunes also maybe helped this week's event feel a bit more informal, even if a brawl never managed to break out in the audience. A student came up right before we started and offered me his cowboy hat. How could I refuse? The hat stole the show at the end, as you can see in the video. Unfortunately, the audio didn't capture Nathan's improvised wind-across-the-plain noises that he delivered while I was playing those open prairie open fifths that start the piece.

I've also included our complete performance of the "Hoedown" from Rodeo, but since it was filled with, uh, improvisational, spur-of-the-moment excitement, I decided I'd add a little artificial tempo enhancement to the video - maybe all the wrong notes that flew out of my fingers won't be quite so obvious this way. (If you enjoy hearing that, you might want to revisit my old Amphetepollini post.)

I had so much fun playing the "Hoedown" that I decided on the spot that we should play it again - which turned out to be a really bad idea! I think with sightreading, the whole "your first guess is your best one" test-taking rule applies. I hoped to fix everything I'd just bungled, but I was so tired that my fingers felt like they were glued together. However, I am quite glad that we took the time to play the "Saturday Night Waltz" before the "Hoedown." That is one beautiful piece, maybe my favorite-ever Copland. 

No Piano Hero next week, since I've got an Opera Scenes program to survive, but Level Five on April 8 promises to be a lot of fun...

Also see video samples from: Level Two and Level Three.

Piano Hero Level Four: Piano Anti-Hero

Wish I had more time to blog right now, but things are getting a little crazy. However, Piano Hero is back after a two-week break. The truth is, I'd originally thought of doing Tchaikovsky 4 for "Level Four," perhaps deluded by this mindblowingly great lecture moment into thinking it would sound good on piano. I love Tchaik 4, but the first movement did not sound good on the piano (a blog-worthy topic in its own right), at least not in the 4-hand version we had, so we decided to take an extra week off after Spring Break. (To be really honest, it also wasn't that easy to read!)

However, Copland's arrangements of music from Billy the Kid and Rodeo sound great on the piano, so I'm excited about this week. Such great music, and such fun, and fortunately not requiring too much practicing.

Blogging will probably remain slow for the next couple of weeks....

Maybe it's just me...

Our family finished up the original Star Wars trilogy on Sunday night, a first time experience for my 9-year old. (Very fun to watch her get pulled into the story, be astounded by the Luke/Leia sibling revelation, etc.) As I mentioned a couple of posts back, the first of the movies came out when I was at the ideal age of 10, so it's not too surprising that Empire and Jedi never quite measured up for me, but I also just remembered that when Return of the Jedi I came out, I had firmly entered the "classical music geek" phase of my life. So, it only just came back to me that I used to refer to the early bit in which Han Solo is unfrozen from the carbonite as the "Glenn Gould" scene; the temporarily blind Han, with hair slicked back, stumbles around with the sort of tortured/ecstatic look that I associated with the late period Gould, whose odd appearance on record jackets always fascinated me.

These pictures don't exactly do the comparison justice, because you really need to see unfrozen Han in motion (ha) to appreciate fully the way in which he seems to channel the greatest of piano heroes. Here's some very poorly transferred video of Han (who knows how long it will last on YouTube?) and one of many available videos of the quirky Gould. [2016 Update: more Unfrozen Han here.] As I recall, Han is at his most Gould-like when he meets up with Chewbacca in the prison cell, but I couldn't find all of that scene online, and this is definitely not worth the time it would take to transfer the video myself. So, use your imagination.


Also, note that just as Han was frozen in carbonite and put on display for Jabba the Hut, Gould has been immortalized in bronze for the good people of Toronto. If only he could be unfrozen...

Brahms 4: Watching the Chaconne Go By

[UPDATE #2: Though, as the previous update notes, this embedded video here doesn't work, the good news is that all of this content and more (including synced score) is now available as one of my "musical manipulative" listening guides here: https://thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/brahms04/

[UPDATE: Sadly, the video below won't work in most web browsers now as Quicktime .mov format is no longer as readily supported. If you have an old version (7) of the Quicktime Player on your computer, you can still download the file here and then open it in that player. For whatever reason, newer versions of the player won't show the captions, which are the raison d'être for this particular file.]

I have a great gift for burying ledes. I wouldn't blame you if you never made it to the end of this recent post that takes the BSO to task for putting out uninspiring podcasts, but that post did end on a positive note by showing a little listening guide I once made for the last movement of Brahms' 4th. It's a great piece to teach because it shows both the Romantic and Baroque classicist sides of the composer, and because a chaconne structure is relatively easy to follow. What I like about how this guide is designed is that the QuickTime architecture makes it possible for each caption to be its own little track, so that the listener can easily jump back and forth from variation to variation by using the arrow keys. (If the embedded file below doesn't work right, you can download it here.)

Music history textbook/anthologies are featuring this sort of captioned listening guide (generally with more graphics) more and more, although they vary greatly in quality; but this strikes me as a perfect way to help a novice listener make sense of a big piece. The biggest problem with creating them on one's own is that they need to be attached to a specific recording, so it's a little dicey for me to be posting the copyrighted work of René Köhler and the NPSOAS (National-Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra Association Society). Still, hopefully this kind of thing will inspire someone to buy an actual recording of the whole symphony. Or to go hear the local orchestra play it!

As designed for a class website, the above was accompanied by the following basic information:

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What to Listen For:

This movement is in the old Baroque form of
a passacaglia or chaconne.
Basically, that means it's a set of variations on a
short, chordal theme.
In this case, the theme is 8-bars long and
heard right away.

There are 30 variations, followed by a 59-bar coda. Listen for the way in which Brahms creates a rich variety of musical ideas above and around this simple theme.

Also, listen to how some variations seem to blend together to make larger units. For example:

4-6 become an extended waltz
8-9 are a matched set
12-15 are all twice as slow (like a slow movement within the movement)
Note that #16 (exactly half-way through the 30 variations) acts like a sort of recap, as the theme is again in the original tempo and quite loud.
17-18 are unified by continuous string tremolos
19-20 go together, with 19 adding triplets
26-28 flow together as the last bit of calm

Note that Variation #30 is extended by 4 bars to introduce the big:

CODA In the coda, there's no longer the constant presence of the theme's structure, though the music still often falls into 8-bar phrases. The coda can be divided into 7 sections of the following measure lengths: 8-12-8-8-8-4-11

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By the way, you'll note that, in spite of my love for scrolling scores and the like, this guide doesn't show any music at all. That's partly because it was designed for a class of non-music majors, and even more because that would have taken more time, especially because figuring out what to show from a full orchestral score can be complicated. Still, it's tempting to think about adding score images to the above...