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Category: music to ponder

August 22, 2012

Chopin Preludes, opus 28‏

you will remember surely preludes from Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier, but as indeed an
introduction to, there, fugues  
 
it might be interesting to note that preludes
were originally ditties instrumentalists cooked up,
spontaneously and improvisationally, to warm up
and tune their muse, one would expect the form
then to be short, sweet and pithy
 
and, by definition, unfinished, which is why Bach
added the fugue  
 
Chopin in 1839 gets them to stand alone, they 
have become by then of course entirely stylized,
less improvisational than formal  
 
Chopin gives them their rightful eminence by simply
validating their claim to the role, they have no trouble
at all standing forthrightly in the footlights, and are
even still individually commanding, unblemished yet
by the infelicities of most lacerating time   
 
like Bach they are still an intellectual exercise, there’s
a prelude for every key, all 24 of them, major and minor, 
like the “Études”, they are technical challenges to the
pianist, an Everest to climb, the work of an eminently
able nevertheless practitioner who didn’t shirk at 
challenging himself heroically, though surely goaded
by the most magnanimous, if unrelenting, of gods
 
others of course took up the contest for the sake of
both the prestidigitational Olympics his compositions 
represented as well as for itself the rapturous music, 
works for the deftest of fingers as well as for the
newly stranded, existentially unfettered and
hungering, 19th-Century soul   
 
you’ll note the humanity that didn’t appear in Mozart,
the intensely emotional appeal of both a more ardent
fury, a tip of the hat here to Beethoven, and a more
melting, sentimental tone  
 
 
incidentally I find Chopin infinitely more aristocratic
than Mozart ever, despite being the epitome of the
more democratic Romanticism, whereas it had been 
the more unruly Mozart who’d written for the
“Classical” courts 
 
Haydn is temperamentally the only other so courtly
composer, appropriately and most efficiently fitting
in his case his own Classical mold, even up until now,
no others have had that distinct personal pedigree 
 
 
allow me to submit my prose therefore to your most
good and gentle graces, as well as the illustrious
music contained therein
 
 
yours
 
Richard 
 
psst: here‘s a version played in a castle, noteworthy
         for its aristocratic allusions not to mention its
         accomplished artistry   
 
 
 
 
 
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August 10, 2012

Chopin “Études”, opus 25‏

if the Debussy, was a bit too fast a move from Chopin’s
Romanticism, his enchanting melodies wrought with
pressing and intent emotion to tug at your most
unresisting aural senses, into a 20th Century of
cynicism and machinery, speed, neurosis, world war,
it was probably too fast for those who actually lived
it as well, just as we think of our own world as out of
control, ultimately the swoons of Chopin would no
longer cut it alone as mileposts towards so unmoored
a future, a heretofore beyond mere private emotions,
other voices would come up responding to further
calamities, inconsistencies in the cultural argument,
where the poet no longer could stand prophetically
alone, there were others also to tend to, and nations
and even new ideologies burgeoning, social, sometimes
sinister even, experiments, Romanticism would have no
choice but to cede to the imperatives of a new, often
inclement, order

but that nevertheless choice still imprint is nowhere
near as definitive as Chopin before all that happened,
as people were still all celebrating and expressing
their newfound personal validity, freedom, worth,
fruit of the revolution not only of the political world
but of the cultural one as well

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to my mind his only
literary equivalent, compare their equal ardour
and the likeness of their compelling muse

Daniil Trifonov, playing Chopin’s other set of
“Études”, opus 25, not only lives them, he’s
utterly possessed, he’s in Tel Aviv, it’s May, 2011

Richard

psst: the first Étude is called the “Aeolian Harp”,
the ninth the “Butterfly”, the second to last,
or eleventh, the “Winter Winds”, all of which
you might try to make out in passing, they are
not that difficult to identify, all the others are
named for their key

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August 3, 2012

Debussy’s “Études”

 Man with a Guitar - Georges Braque
 
                    “Man with a Guitar“ (1914)
 
                               Georges Braque 
 
                                       ______
 
 
while we’re on the subject of études, listening to 
hundred years later, 1830s to 1915, would prove
instructive, I deemed 
 
picture me deeming, August 3, 2012, my brow
just slightly pensively constricting 
 
 
if the basis of music as defined by the Classical
period depended on beat, tonality, and the repetition
of the tune, usually of both musical statements, these
apparently essential components of course would be
the first places to bear the scrutiny of probing musical
minds, seeking to find, seeking to set more expansive,
more profound dimensions to the areas of their quest,
that’s what artists do 
 
and this of course is exactly what happened starting
with Beethoven, by the time of Chopin music had
relaxed its stricter Classical rhythmic precision,
allowing great expansive gestures in the more
malleable tempi, tempos, producing the effect of
more compassion and soulful examination than
the earlier less indulgent, more disciplined code
 
the fact of having musical tapestries, sound patches,
take the place of melody, narrative, in the musical
presentation of Chopin also suggests a more
diversified, dare I say prismatic, telling, than the 
linear account of for instance Mozart‘s solitary
tuneful wanderer
 
it also evokes incidentally the vagaries of the
inconstant heart rather than its unflinching
condemnation, a repudiation of atavistic
Christian ecclesiastical intolerance 
 
 
by the time the old order was about to be extinguished,
in 1915, at the onset of the First World War, Debussy’s
“Études“, like Chopin 12 of them per set, had seen
social injustice – see Charles Dickens, see Émile Zola,
see Karl Marx – the improbable discoveries of science –
Darwin, Freud, Einstein – the car, the airplane,
photography were changing everything, the old
paradigms no longer applied, were irrelevant, even
harmful, in this new context, the First World War 
would prove all that 
 
in the language of music, tempo, melody, repetition
would be inevitably subverted
 
Debussy produces erratic tempi, foregoes melody for
harmonic exploration, combining incidentally the
musical patches of Chopin with the intellectually
driven investigations of Beethoven for a more
cerebral understanding of music, a music for the
head, with expert displays of pianistic skill, indeed
prestidigitation, for, along with the intellectual
rigour, spectacle  
 
is this then still music 
 
is Post-Impressionist painting still art  
 
what would 1915 have said
 
 
above is Georges Braque‘s nearly contemporary, 1914,  
 
man with a guitar, who’d a thunk it
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
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July 29, 2012

Chopin: “Études”, opus 10

if I haven’t brought up Chopin much in this series
it’s that I think of him more as a decorator than
as an innovator, he was developing a sensibility
that had been defined by the earlier Beethoven,
adding texture and style, form instead of function,
the wheel had been invented, now it remained to
be artfully applied
 
some break new ground, others decorate it, make
it enchanting, Chopin makes things enchanting 
 
he is also the first composer we think of when we
think of Romanticism, which says quite a lot about
the quality, the universality, of his gift 
 
 
here are his opus 10, “Études”, or “Studies”, 12 of
them, they are not sonatas, for not having more
than one movement, they are “études” , “studies”,
called by that name for being what they are, then
given numbers to differentiate them, also their
key, the convenience of universally attributing
titles not having quite caught on yet though a
couple of these do have them, the 5th, the
“Black Keys”, for obvious reasons, and the last,
the “Revolutionary”, again for reasons you’ll find
obvious once you’ve heard it 
 
tonality however remains, no apparent discords,
that’ll come later  
 
 
note that in comparison to Mozart the notes are
a shimmer, the same alphabet is used, the one
set up by Bach, but where Mozart made these
into narratives to follow, and even sing along to,
with Chopin the same flurry of notes becomes
a wash of sound you could never vocally keep
up with, a texture rather, an enveloping caress,
prefiguring incidentally the Impressionists, the
lush soundscapes of for instance Debussy 
 
 
though you’ll find the same prerequisite opening
musical statement as in Mozart, followed by the  
contrasting one, often these will be in altogether
constrasting rhythms as well, tempi, compared
to the single strict beat throughout of the 
foundational Classical model    
 
the tempo itself is also much more lax, some
passages surrendering formal rhythmic strictures
to greater emotional content, more self-expression,
less attention to rules, in accord with the newly
installed ideal of individual human rights 
 
hence Romanticism, the fruit of the Revolution 
 
 
note also that the musical argument is no longer
in the Mozartean playground but of a more mature
understanding, Chopin has known love 
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
 
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July 22, 2012

How to Listen to Classical Music: Beginner’s Manual

 
How to Listen to Classical Music: Beginner’s Manual    
 
                                     (after Pamela Spiro Wagner) 
 
            First, forget everything you have learned,
            that Classical Music is difficult,
            that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
            with your high school equivalency diploma,
            your steel-tipped boots,
            or your white-collar misunderstandings.    
 
            Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
            the best Classical Music means what it says and says it.
 
            To listen to Classical Music requires only courage
            enough to leap from the edge
            and trust.
 
            Treat Classical Music like dirt,
            humus rich and heavy from the garden.
            Later it will become the fat tomatoes
            and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.
 
            Classical Music demands surrender,
            language saying what is true,
            doing holy things to the ordinary.

            Listen to just one Classical work a day.
            Someday an irresistible composition may open in your heart
            like a daffodil offering its cup
            to the sun.
 
            When you can identify the Mozart fantasia 
            among the four of his sonatas I’ve included here in this gentle message,
            close this manual.
 
            Congratulations.
            You are now hearing 
            as opposed to listening to Classical Music 
 
 
Richard 
 
 
 
 
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July 14, 2012

XVlll. I never gave a lock of hair away – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XVlll. I never gave a lock of hair away

I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose- or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more: it only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified, –
Take it thou, – finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_______________________________

with her one word, “this”, peremptory and indicative,
Elizabeth anchors us to a common present, making
us witness to the scene, a scene of the most tender
intimacies

these effortlessly transcend by their apparent
urgency and truth the usual meter of a sonnet,
leaving in the dust however always only perfect
rhymes, like wooden sentinels left twirling in too
strong a wind

enough of them however to constitute a poem

or what’s a poem

the same kind of thing happens in the history
of music, where notes skip deftly over a bar
without even the semblance of an
acknowledging curtsy, caught up in the more
compelling reality of their vivid and impetuous
imagination, like children who haven’t learned
quite all the rules yet

in Mozart, his piano sonata in D major, K576,
here for instance, the incorrigible child is
ever even present, even ever evident

both poets reflect a search for greater
authenticity, challenging established ideas
of beauty in its unending deliberation with
truth, see Keats on this irreducible dichotomy

Richard

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July 13, 2012

XVll. My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XVll. My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes

My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes
God set between His After and Before,
And strike up and strike off the general roar
Of the rushing worlds a melody that floats
In a serene air purely. Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind’s forlornest uses, thou canst pour
From thence into their ears. God’s will devotes
Thine to such ends, and mine to wait on thine.
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?
A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine
Sad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?
A shade, in which to sing – of palm or pine?
A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

______________________

it is to be remembered that Robert Browning at the
time was considered a poet of growing authority
though Elizabeth herself had not been of no
consequence, and her star was not to lose its
brilliance in the literary firmament throughout her
lifetime and beyond, but Robert was a man and
benefited therefore from greater consideration
than would’ve then a woman, a not unfamiliar
situation even now

the institutional role of women was pretty well
the one that Elizabeth naturally took on, when
women had no other recourse but to be
dependent, if not graced with comfortable
independent means, which in fact Elizabeth
was

with such an unmistakable gift as hers, however,
I can’t imagine that beyond the genuine love she
manifests for her husband throughout her poems
she would have been unaware of her own
considerable worth, ever granting that love can
be even ever so blind, my own love for instance
riding each morning for me preternaturally and
however improbably the very chariot of a
blinding, mesmerizing, sun

“Choose” though, she at the very last commands,
striking again a telling imperative

note the elision of the rhyme through several
verses in the poem giving the lines a momentum
that lets the poem fly, making the matter
compelling, urgent

compare Mozart soaring above the bar lines
when the piano is comparably unleashed, to
let the music make a similar irrepressible magic

prose is finding its way into poetry here, poetry
conversely into prose

Richard

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July 4, 2012

Mozart – Clarinet Quintet in A major, K581

there are several reasons for which Classical music
is called Classical, the word itself suggests a standard – 
austere, concise, clear, rigorously authoritative – nearly
like mathematics 
 
and such is the music of Mozart, and most others, even
into Romanticism
 
despite the flurry of iridescent notes filling vaults of
effervescent atmosphere, like the apparent serendipity
of so many flights of birds that describe music for us in
our own heavens, you’ll hear a tune, then another
constrasting one, then you’ll hear both of them all over
again, not much different from a song’s refrain and verse,
except that the verse is not new but like the refrain a
repetition 
 
both repetitions usually will have some embellishments,
and sometimes the repetitions are in a divergent order,
but the idea remains the same, you’ll always hear again
what you heard at the beginning no matter how far away
you’ve strayed
 
this foursquare structure is at the basis of music
 
nearly like mathematics
 
 
beat remains also essential, a peremptory component of
what it means to be music in the Classical Age, despite
the leeway now given by a revolutionary it would turn
out fortepiano  
 
Mozart doesn’t sway from the tempo he imposes on a
movement, does so even categorically, otherwise would
be louche, disruptive, in an age of order 
 
 
in the last movement of his Clarinet Quintet in A major,
however, K581, he has his way with that proscription by
making the movement a set of variations, which allow
him, of course, to on a theme display an array of melodic
options, irrelevant of coherence of pace, to test the
boundaries of what it means to be within the larger
musical structure one of its movements 
 
a path is thereby forged to a new understanding
 
 
he gives us also here another new invention, the
addition of a clarinet to the usually set quartet – two
violins, a viola and a cello – that was then the staple
of chamber music essentially 
 
nor can I think of an earlier Clarinet Quintet 
 
you’ll find this unassuming, usually more reclusive, 
wind instrument to be an utterly inspired addition
to even the most vaunted sounds of even this most
silken string quartet
 
 
Richard     
 
 
 
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June 24, 2012

beat (Mozart Piano Concerto no 13 in C major, K 415)

it should be considered that even without tonalities
here – another word for “notes”, tonal divergences – 
just the rigorously held beat is enough for this riff 
to be called music
 
pretty impressive music at that
  
the reverse hasn’t always been true, is still not
for many, the history of Western music has been
the attempt to change that, to find music in the 
discordant ordinary, trust in an underlying cosmic
flow, melody even in tonalities devoid of any 
immediately recognizable rhythms 
 
hidden rhyme, where the beat of a verse obscures
the usual accent given to the last word of a line,
which usually sings thereby in conjunction with its
sister word at the end of a following one, performs 
in verse a similar function   
 
instances of hidden verse abound in for instance
 
 
     from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“
 
            X. Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful …   
 
                        Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
                        And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
                        Let temple burn, or flax; and equal light
                        Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:
                        And love is fire. And when I say at need
                        I love thee … mark! … I love thee—in thy sight
                        I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
                        With conscience of the new rays that proceed
                        Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low
                        In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
                        Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
                        And what I feel, across the inferior features
                        Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
                        How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
 
 
                                                          Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
 
 
listen to Mitsuko Uchida blur the staunch rhythmic
line of Mozart’s 13th Piano Concerto delivering again
thereby absolute transcendence, Mozart himself
would’ve been, I’m sure, ultra wowed  
 
 
Richard  
 
 
 
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June 9, 2012

Mozart Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, K365‏

  Blind Man's Bluff - Jean-Honore Fragonard

                               “Blind Man’s Bluff” (1769-70)

                                               Jean-Honoré Fragonard
 
                                                      _______________
 
 
the spirituality that is everywhere in Bach, the
sense of musical exploration and ultimate solace,
will not be found again in the history of music
for another hundred years, in Anton Bruckner
then, 1824 – 1896, a profoundly devout Catholic
organist – Bach, 1685 – 1750, was Lutheran –
then for another hundred years again, in Olivier
Messiaen, 1908 – 1992, again a profoundly
devout Catholic organist, perhaps a
reincarnation, like a Dalai Lama 
 
already in his day Bach was being considered
old-fashioned, gasp, the new age was revelling
in courtly extravagance, see also for instance
François Boucher, and Fragonard, featured for
your convenience above
   
Mozart would fit right in, for a good time call
Wolfgang Amadeus  
 
 
Mozart takes the tools that Bach created, the
newly installed well-tempered clavier and does
what kids do with their parents heritage, play
with it, Mozart doesn’t explore, he entertains,
notes are the toys in his sandbox, and he makes
the very most of it, never leaving his kindergarten
sanctum, nor would anybody be as effervescent
again for, this time, another 150 years, with
Prokofiev, 1891 – 1953, even more outrageous,
though ultimately not for that more famous,  
being perhaps for many too out there, fun like
a jack-in-the-box, too unnervingly unpredictable, 
still 
 
Mozart, though eminently delightful, is
appropriately predictable for his epoch
 
 
of all of his works my favourite, is what I put
on for instant exhilaration
 
it never fails me
 
 
enjoy
 
Richard 
 
 
 

 

 

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