Herbert von Karajan Gives Us A Great Break From The Great Grate Of Donald

 

 
Donald makes America grate again; here's a brief respite.

Cat's Paws

I started out looking for my speaker wires, lost since our move seven or eight years ago, so that I could set up the one stereo in the house that can connect with my decent turntable. That task proving hopeless, I switched to searching YouTube for a particular piece from the Glogauer Liederbuch, a set of 13th-century partbooks with some truly charming ensemble works including this one, called Die Katzenpfote, which in my playing days I had the pleasure of playing many times and actually performing a couple of times.

Here are four settings by several different ensembles; the third one probably most resembles our performances:

Lester Young, The Most Relaxed Sax Player Ever

The POTUS is never relaxed (it's not the nature of the job) but the Prez (Lester Young, tenor sax) certainly was, in 1951 at least. Enjoy a laid-back hour of Prez sitting in with the Nat King Cole Trio, featuring

• (tracks 1-10) Cole on piano (we forget that the guy did more than sing!), unknown on bass, Buddy Rich on drums; and
• (tracks 11-14) Cole on piano, Harry Edison on trumpet, Dexter Gordon on tenor sax, Red Callender or Johnny Miller (?) on bass, and again Buddy Rich on drums.
  

Mmmmm, it's like eating homemade ice cream!

We are fortunate that despite Young's short life (yes, he died Young, at age 49), he influenced many of the great players of the following generation.

[Doowop... Doowop... Doowop...]‘The Penguins, The Moonglows, The Orioles And The Five Satins’

Those are the four mid-1950s doo-wop/R&B groups that Paul Simon chose for his Rene and Georgette Magritte... to dance and romance to. Guys (or gals), think twice before you queue up these sample songs and dance them with your favorite gal (or guy)... if you aren't already in love before you start, you will be after this feast of close-dancing music!

• The Penguins: Earth Angel
• The Moonglows: Sincerely
• The Orioles: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me
• The Five Satins: In the Still of the Night

Paul Simon: Two Songs That Each Span Half A Lifetime

First, ‘Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War’; then "The Obvious Child,".

I always wondered why the Magrittes song and The Obvious Child brought tears to my eyes. Finally today it dawned on me why: each of these songs describes a series of events in a person's life (or two people's lives), and manages to elide half a lifetime in a couple of sentences.

First, the Magrittes:

...

Rene and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Were strolling down Christopher Street
When they stopped in a men's store
With all of the mannequins dressed in the style
That brought tears to their immigrant eyes
Just like The Penguins, the Moonglows
The Orioles, and The Five Satins
The easy stream of laughter
Flowing through the air
Rene and Georgette Magritte
With their dog apres la guerre

Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined
...

...

Cool: "Decades gliding by like Indians / Time is cheap" ... Time flies like an Indian arrow, I suppose. Next, "The Obvious Child":

...

We had a lot of fun
We had a lot of money
We had a little son and we thought we’d call him Sonny
Sonny gets married and moves away
Sonny has a baby and bills to pay
Sonny gets sunnier
Day by day by day by day

...

Whew! A very small amount of text covers a lot of years. And similarly...

...

Sonny sits by the window and thinks to himself
How it’s strange that some roots are like cages
Sonny’s yearbook from high school
Is down on the shelf
And he idl[y] thumbs through the pages
Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there
Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
Runs his hands through his thinning brown hair

...

Again, perhaps a greater part of Sonny's lifetime passes in a mere couple of sentences. Then again, IMNSHO, Simon is one of the truly great lyricists of my generation; your mileage may vary, but if you disagree, you're just wrong... :-)

Please go listen to these songs. Listen to each song whole; as you might expect, the texts work best in context. Then allow yourself to while away an evening listening to more of Simon's music; it will be time well spent, no matter what your age.

Die Zauberflöte, Revisited

The parody below got me to thinking. I have no attachment to the philosophical content of Mozart's Masonic opera, Die Zauberflöte, but it has to be one of the most tuneful operas ever written. And it gives beautiful young people with spectacularly good voices an opportunity to show off!

If you have 2-3 hours to spare, go enjoy Die Zauberflöte; you won't regret it.

(Full disclosure: yes, I do know and used to work with one person in the orchestra in this live performance. If that prejudices me, I think you'll agree if you watch the performance that he must be pretty good to be in that orchestra!)

Handel: Water Music And Music For The Royal Fireworks — BBC Proms 2012

I have a lot to say about these two works and this performance, but perhaps first you should just take an hour out of your day (a well-spent hour, surely — actually more!) to listen to this performance by Le Concert Spirituel conducted by Monsieur Hervé Niquet. The word for the day, the word for this orchestra, this conductor and (to a much lesser degree) this festive music is "idiosyncratic," and I'm going to let you go to the music before I say anything more:

I'll be back sometime this weekend. There will be a quiz. Here's a sample question for you:

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (born Georg Friedrich Händel) was

1. German
2. Italian
3. British
4. All of the above
5. None of the above

(Answer: 4. Look it up. Or Mother Wikipedia will tell you. Born Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg, Holy Roman Empire; studied in Halle, Hamburg and Italy; lived out his life and fulfilled his promise in a surpassing wonderful career in London.)

---

UPDATE: forget about the quiz. If people are disinclined to read this blog already, what will they do when confronted with the classroom of their youth? Right. I'd rather keep the two readers I have left.

‘Soft Summer Breeze’ — Eddie Heywood (Piano Solo), Or The Diamonds (Male Vocal Quartet)

Eddie Heywood, 1946

Music from my childhood! This song was #11 on the charts in 1956 when I was 8 years old. My parents, who loved to dance (slow dancing or jitterbug) somehow came by a 45 RPM record of songwriter Eddie Heywood soloing on his own too-cute love song, and I later somehow heard it on a cover by The Diamonds, a male vocal quartet typical of the time. One of my early play-by-ear efforts was an attempt to memorize Heywood's solo in the second chorus... I didn't yet have the technique to play it, but damn, it certainly was fun trying.

Through the miracle of YouTube, this charming bit of early music (heh) can be found online. First, Heywood; second, The Diamonds:

Oh, yeah; I almost forgot: lyrics!

Music For Monday — Bill Evans: Peace Piece

Even without America's endless War on Everything and Everyone, Monday is a shock to the system after a weekend (whether restful or raucous). This piece by one of America's greatest musicians ever, the late Bill Evans, may be just what you need:

(View on YouTube site)

Need more? Listen (offsite) to the works by Erik Satie that were surely Evans's inspiration for the Peace Peace... different meter, different degree of dissonance, but very much in the same spirit: the three Gymnopedie.

Blissed out yet?

François Couperin (le Grand): Soeur Monique

I don't feel like writing today this week; there's just too much violence and tragedy in the world. Here... put all that aside and listen as Couperin, himself the signature harpsichordist of the Court of Louis XIV, sketches a nun (one of his teachers?) ambling through a convent in no terrible hurry, but not without a certain grace in her deliberate motion. Written for publicantion in 1722 as a movement in Ordre 18ème de clavecin in Couperin's Troisième livre de pièces de clavecin; performed here by Nancy Kito (who??) on a harpsichord of unknown origin:



(View on YouTube site. This is a better performance by Pastor de Lasala (who??) on a Flemish two-manual harpsichord appropriate to Couperin, built in 1988 by Carey Beebe, Sydney, Australia. The good Pastor declines to allow his better performance to be viewed from another site, i.e., this one. Hey, it's at his discretion...)

(View a recently created .pdf of the score.)

ACRONYM Ensemble Plays Giovanni Valentini: Canzona A 5 in G Major — UPDATED

Delicious music performed by a strikingly good ensemble formed only in 2012...



Now that you've heard that, see what YouTube has under "ACRONYM ensemble"; then visit ACRONYM's own web site. There are lots of Oberlin-educated folk in this group; that's probably part of why I like their sound... two of my private teachers studied there, and one of them taught there.

Yes, "ACRONYM" is an acronym, one with many expansions. See the group's web site.

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: this piece by Johann Pezel may be more generally representative of the kind of high baroque music that is ACRONYM's stock‑in‑trade:

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis — Antoine Forqueray And His Son; Gustav Leonhardt And His Students

I spent part of the afternoon listening to a CD of the late and truly great harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt (1928‑2012), performing works mostly by Antoine Forqueray (1671‑1745) as arranged and amended after his death by his son Jean‑Baptiste Forqueray (1699‑1782).

Father and son were reportedly both cranky people, and one of the son's arrangements was from his father's viola da gamba composition to the son's transcription for harpsichord (no small step!), with some movements newly composed by the son, all two years after his father's death. Had they lived in a different era, that family was almost dysfunctional enough to have been American!

But the music was stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. Here is the recording (if I got the link right in spite of YouTube's new "simplified" mechanism for chaining volumes together (so "simple" that you'll likely do just that even when you don't intend to):

Life is short. Music is shorter (with the exception of a few pathological 20th-century works; some of those are still going well into the 21st century). Fathers write music and perform it; sons learn how to play in part from their parents, but again in pathological cases await their parents' departure from this world before tinkering with their parents' music.

Performers relearn the essence of a particular work sometimes literally centuries after the work was created; then they pass their own performance traditions on to their students, who do their own things with the work.

Is the work recognizable as the one the composer created centuries ago? Some performers don't care. Some care so much they obsess over every particular of style and craft. Music is an emphatically human activity, engaging every human foible; when music-making involves multiple generations of a family, well, that's when it gets really challenging.

I guess if I intend to leave any compositions to my child or my student, I'd better, first of all, write some music, and second (and not incidentally), have some kids, or at least some students...

---

ASIDE: lately I feel too old and tired to participate in even the passing-on-traditions part of the process (let alone passing on genes or technical advice on playing an instrument). Would one or more of you do all that for me, please? I can't promise your efforts will be appreciated, except by me...

---

ANOTHER ASIDE: I've had the privilege of rehearsing and performing with one of Mr. Leonhardt's excellent students, an American now living in Amsterdam (I think) with her cellist husband and their two sons. Like all of Leonhardt's students I have met, she was aware of the community in which they all participated, and, again like all of his students, was crestfallen at his death; it's going to be tough without him. But whatever tradition that family and I were once part of for about a decade in Houston continues, different in every particular in a land utterly familiar to that family and utterly foreign to me, but still a part of a tradition. I worry about humankind a little less every time I think of them.

Thirty-Seven Years Ago Tonight...

... I performed my only faculty recital at University of St. Thomas-Houston, where I taught on the adjunct faculty at the time as (get this title) "Lecturer in Recorder."

18th cent. alto recorder
made by J. W. Oberlender the Elder, Nürnberg,
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Back then, UST was the only university in Houston that took recorder seriously enough to offer applied lessons for credit, though the others with music schools typically had someone on faculty who could teach it privately. There was no degree program in it even at UST, of course; that would confer too much dignity on a "child's toy." But by golly, I performed in the faculty early music ensemble, which, to no one's surprise, was named Aquinas Ensemble. Ah, those were the days!

NOTE about the pitch of the pictured instrument: the Met Museum online catalog lists this instrument as being "in F‑sharp." The maker certainly wouldn't have recognized it as such: he built either an alto in F, well high of our modern pitch, or an alto in G, about a half-step low of our pitch. In those days, different communities in Europe had different pitch standards, and it behooved a professional performer to own (or have access to) an assortment of instruments suited to the pitch standards of all the cities in which s/he performed. For better or worse, today's EM performers have emulated their predecessors, not because of community pitch standards, but because for historical and acoustic reasons, concerts are frequently performed at pitches other than today's standard. I own a set of Baroque recorders at A-440 (i.e., the note "A" sounds at the frequency 440 Hz), another set at A-415, several transverse flutes all at A-415 and one transverse flute at A-392, which in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was French court pitch (Louis XIII and XIV). It's a damned nuisance for the performer, but I have to admit the music sounds better played at something close to the pitch the composer heard three centuries ago.

Band-In-A-Brain, Wetware Beta 0.1

This damned cold (yes, it's ongoing) has provided me a fascinating experience. Almost anyone who writes original music or song arrangements to fit the band they have at hand knows the utility of listening to potential passages in his or her "mind's ear," that wonderful facility of the human brain that stores, reproduces and transforms music (or any other sound) in ways that allow one to try things out before writing out parts for the band. I've done that quite a few times back in my performing days... and of course baroque music, like jazz, expects some aspects of both accompaniment and melodic material to be improvised on the spot.

The phenomenon that appeared in my mind this week is something more than that, and I've never experienced it before. My brain (apparently, presumably) composes a piece of music, then renders an arrangement for my ear, specifically, my left ear, to hear, with all the harmonies but with a very limited repertoire of tone colors, as if drawn from the patches available on a very limited synth. The arrangement literally plays itself. If there were a reason to do so, I suppose I could transcribe it out on staff paper, but IMHO the world doesn't really need any new 18th-century music, so I won't. Still, it's fascinating to listen to this "band-in-a-brain"; the most fascinating part is that it surprises me on a regular basis. We've all been told again and again that the human brain is highly parallel, far beyond anything we regularly build in commercial hardware; I suppose this is just another example of that: one part of me composes new music and synthesizes it for another part of me to listen to.

Is there any utility to this? Well, there would be, if I were still a working musician. I could use it to try out continuo (accompaniment) parts while I am away from the keyboard. But you're right... it's pretty useless to me in this stage of retirement. Still, it was quite a surprise to learn what my brain can still do.

There's just one problem. Once it gets going, the band-in-a-brain rarely takes a break...

---

UPDATE: curiouser and curiouser: the band-in-a-brain is playing 17th-century-style canzonas a la Gabrieli, Dario Castello, etc.; folks songs including Home on the Range; and what sounded a bit like a suite of Christmas carols fully arranged for small string orchestra; then some Forties swing... I AM NOT CRAZY; I really am hearing this! We've all heard rumors of people's receiving signals on their dental bridgework; well, I have plenty of bridgework...

Obama Takes First Steps Toward Normalizing US‑Cuban Relations

And it's about damned time. (More here.)

Cuba survived its unhealthy dependency on the old Soviet Union. I suppose Americans assumed when the Soviets dropped their support of Cuba that Cuba would collapse in a heap; to the apparent consternation of our Red-baiters, that did not happen. You have only to watch Michael Moore's film SiCKO to see evidence of at least one aspect in which Cuba's citizens enjoy life circumstances superior to those of lower-income Americans, namely, medical care.

But I'm not here to talk about medical care. I want to talk about the performing arts. For better or worse, I'm going to quote myself, from a post on the ancient hand-coded YDD in 2003:

...

Chucho Valdés, 2014

Tonight the youth were supposed to share the stage with Chucho Valdés, a famous jazz pianist (about whom there's more below). ...

...

So... why am I writing about this, on a mostly political blog? Simple: the concert I expected to hear was not the one presented. I went because the eminent Latin jazz pianist Chucho Valdés was scheduled to perform. Why did he not perform? Again, simple: he was stuck in the Havana airport, unable to obtain a U.S. security clearance to fly here to perform. Yes, Valdés is Cuban. He has performed so many times in the U.S. that I can't begin to count them. But apparently George W. Bush & Co. are sure that anyone from Cuba must be a terrorist. Of all Dub's flaws, raw, unmitigated ignorance... proud ignorance, often enough... must be one of his worst.

...

Fast-forward to 2014. Valdés is still alive and apparently still performing at age 73, with a backup band called The Afro-Cuban Messengers. Bush-baby is no longer president. So if Obama can manage to complete negotiations of basic diplomatic ties with Cuba while he is still in office, maybe Valdés can come to the US one last time.

On the other hand, a Rethuglican still hellbent on Commie-bashing (e.g., soft-brained Sarah Palin or madwoman Michele Bachmann) could become POTUS in 2016, and Chucho could once again be stuck in the Havana airport...

Barenboim Plays Beethoven: Sonata Pathetique

Daniel Barenboim, pianist, one of the outstanding interpreters of our time, plays one of Beethoven's signature sonatas, Op. 13, Pathetique. Listen first, then you can decide whether to read my ramblings:

I was probably about 13 years old when I finally confronted this sonata at the other kind of keyboard. Believe me when I say that a 13-year-old is not ready for this work, physiologically or musically, but sometimes I think that a 130-year-old would not be, either. My dear parents suffered politely as I hammered my way through the work ("Hammerklavier" takes on a different meaning when a kid does it). Dad took a second job at night and bought the piano for Mom and for me; Dad himself didn't play or... if we could prevent it... sing.

Barenboim may not be today's version of a Beethoven scholar; he is 72 years old now, and people of his generation had a different idea of how Beethoven should be played than many of today's original-instruments performers. But in the case of Beethoven and Barenboim, I am not one to quibble. When one of the great interpreters of our era applies his skill and inspiration to one of the great creators of art music of all time, we all have to listen with respect and enjoyment.

Beethoven was not afraid of the future; many have remarked that when it comes to piano in particular, the instruments of his day sometimes did not survive his relentlessly aggressive attack. I am willing to concede (as I do not with most composers) that Beethoven required of his instruments things they could not provide. A concert in a sports arena with a speaker stack blaring bright and loud in every remote corner would probably have suited his personal taste. Surely Beethoven would conceive the Pathetique more the way Barenboim renders it than the performances Beethoven heard (when he could hear).

(Some say today is Beethoven's birthday. Maybe so: it is better established that he was baptized on the 17^th.)

Henry Purcell: Chaconne 3 Parts Upon A Ground — Ensemble La Fenice

This work is indeed a chaconne and consists of only two parts: a ground (i.e., repeating bass) and a single upper part played by three melody instruments as a round: Each melody instrument (in this case, recorder) enters at a different time, so that all the harmony comes from the interaction of the one upper part with itself, much like Frère Jacques or another child's round. Given Purcell's idiosyncratic ear, though, the harmonic results here are certainly far from child's play.

Purcell: Chaconne 3 Parts Upon A Ground

I remember performing this work with two other recorder players, a gambist and a theorbist sometime in the early 1980s at Oberlin College's annual Baroque Performance Institute. All of us were at an age to be at our performing peak; ah, those were the days...

Ignore the less-than-optimal recording here and enjoy this truly odd but ingenious music, splendidly performed performed in a gorgeous cathedral!

Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of This Blog

 
Beethoven String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 - American String Quartet (Live)

Lush Life With A Sophisticated Lady

I just finished watching the PBS special featuring Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. As unlikely as the pair may strike you... Tony of my parents' generation, Lady Gaga of my children's (if I had any)... the result was splendid. The post subject names the two songs by great songwriters/bandleaders of Bennett's generation (Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington) who wrote the centerpiece solos by Gaga and Bennett respectively... which I have never heard performed with greater passion, craft and drama. This show is available on DVD; if you missed it on the air and you like 40s music, you might consider hearing it from the disc.

Jazzing It: ‘The Way You Look Tonight’

Sometimes we forget that "jazz" was originally more frequently used as a verb than as a noun. I was looking for moderately comprehensive details of the song "The Way You Look Tonight" (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields). Sources seem to agree that the song was first performed on screen by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the film Swing Time (1936). From that point forward, just about every crooner has performed it, and a lot of them have recorded it or worked it into a film (it even appears in the final episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9).

Searching YouTube yields dozens of versions. Two of them in particular caught my attention as an example of a song played straight vs. the same song "jazzed." In this case the straight version is by Fred and Ginger; the jazzed version is by Billie Holiday, accompanied (says one reader) by a band including Benny Goodman and Lester Young (I own that recording, but it's part of a gigantic set of Holiday's work, and I have not confirmed the accompanists). Please listen to them in that order, and notice the effect of jazzing on one of the most popular songs of the 1930s.

First, Fred and Ginger:



Then Billie Holiday:



Got the idea?