andante / polonaise, Chopin
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Category: talking tenuti
March 9, 2018
by special request, more Tina
Tina Turner performing in Norway, 1985
__________
for Norm
shortly after my most recent post, a
friend, as avid as I am about Classical
music, but who also lived through our
own golden age of music, and throbbed
as I did to its pounding rhythms, sent
me this video of one of Tina’s greatest
hits, “Proud Mary“
not to mention that my inbox lit up at
the same time with equally corroborative
applause from a host of other, apparently
also fervid, admirers
it was the best of times, it was the worst
of times, everyone did everything with
anyone then, and was impeded only
by hir own personal inhibitions
therefore Studio 54, and even more
glamorous Manhattan party outlets,
the Paradise Garage, Les Mouches,
warehouses full of carousers, and
Bette Midler was showcasing at the
Continental Baths, if you were
wanting a less frenzied, though not
at all uneventful, evening, or night
London had it’s comparable Heaven,
nowhere was not having its bacchanals
the era would come down crashing,
never to be put back together again,
of course, as a soothsayer I knew
was then prophesying, but while it
lasted we revelled, and had Tina
Turner, among other, as incendiary,
oracles telling it like it was, is, listen
Beethoven would’ve been proud of
Tina, incidentally, note the adherence
to Classical conditions, tonality, tempo,
and repetition, art is about doing your
own stuff around those imperatives, or,
if you can, busting through them
Tina might not have burst through, but
she sure knew what to do with her
perimeters, which is to say, knock them
right out of the ballpark
wow, watch, what a woman
R ! chard
psst: thanks Norm
May 12, 2017
“Tango Lesson” – Lisa Richter
‘El Jaleo‘ (1882)
_________
After a history lesson, crash course in Buenos Aires
a hundred years before our time, we begin
at last. You gently place my arm over yours, my hand
on your shoulder, our bodies distant enough
to have an invisible body between us – this is open embrace,
you explain, abrazo abierto. We dare not dance in abrazo cerrado,
where our chests would nearly touch – I’m not single-
minded enough about learning these moves to unlock
what I fear might spill out, should I let myself fall
into your hazelnut voice – so rich and deep I might never
emerge from it. You teach me the new skill of following,
though your lead feels less like control and more
like stewardship, carving swans of negative space
that stretch their graceful necks along the diagonals
of our bodies. We’re in a conversation of pauses
and advances. I step too soon, but you are eminently patient,
your large hand over mine, poised mid-air, a paper crane
mid-flight. As you shift your weight from side to side,
I wait, trying to sense which way we are going,
and for a moment, I have the chance to look at you not
looking at me, your calm grey eyes fixed above my head.
On the small of my back, your warm hand –
a breathing orchid, cupped flame.
____________
for, especially, Tonyia
the clash of cultures is exposed to the light
here as a tango dancer teaches an English-
speaking novice how to dance
there is no evident metre in the verse, the
poem is in prose, contained within terse,
two-lined stanzas which act as constraints
on the forward flow, however ever fluidly
continuous, like tenutos in music, where
the note is held, dramatically, before a
return to the original rhythm
but slowly this prose develops its own
irresistible rhythms, an abandonment
to the metre of the whole, a languid
surrender to the pulse and propulsion
of the dance, and becomes, despite
its, ahem, flat feet, a poem
the very vocalic construction of
Romantic languages, abrazo abierto,
for instance, or abrazo cerrado,
propelled by vowels for their forward
motion, in imitation of the heartbeat,
preclude in natives unfamiliarity with
cadence, the tango is already in their
blood, the teacher here ineluctably
lives, breathes, hir ethnic identity
Anglo-Saxons and Teutons excel,
rather, at political science and
philosophy, more sober, cerebral
preoccupations, suppressing
gutturally in their glut of gurgled
consonants, the more carnal
allure or, from a primmer
perspective, temptations, of the
senses
which Romantic poets, incidentally,
pointedly sought out in the seductive
rhythms of the Mediterranean, much
as this very student succumbs to the
‘breathing orchid’, the ‘cupped flame‘
of this tantalizing tango
Richard
February 20, 2017
“First Piano Concerto” – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
“Concerto“ (1975)
_____
if there’s a piece that defines Classical music
for most people, encapsulates it, even for
those who aren’t especially interested in
Classical music, that piece would be, I think,
Tchaikovsky‘s “First Piano Concerto“
strictly speaking Tchaikovsky isn’t a Classical
composer, but a Romantic one, the Classical
period in music having been transformed
some years earlier into the Romantic period
by none other than Beethoven, 1770 – 1827,
perhaps the most transformative composer
of all time – Tchaikovsky‘s “First Piano Concerto“
was written in the winter of 1874 – 1875, pretty
well at the end of the Romantic Period, which
then ceded to the Impressionists, just to get
our periods right
what the Romantic Period added to the
Classical Era was emotion, sentiment – note
the use of tenuto, for instance, beats being
drawn out, languidly, longingly, for pathos –
what it maintained was the structure, the
trinity of Classical conditions, rhythm, tonality,
and repetition, which is why even the most
uninformed listener will usually be able to
sing along throughout the entire performance,
the blueprint is in our collective blood, in the
DNA of our culture
to remain present a piece must remain
relevant to the promoter, an interpreter must
have reason to play it, substance surely plays
a big part, but technical considerations play
perhaps an even greater role towards a great
work’s longevity, “Chopsticks“, for instance,
is good but it won’t fill a concert hall
unless, of course, it’s with Liberace
the “First Piano Concerto” of Tchaikovsky is
the Everest of compositions, emotionally
complex and technically forbidding, nearly
impossible, it would seem, were it not for
those few who’ve mastered its treacherous
challenges, conquered its nearly indomitable
spirit
Van Cliburn put it on the map for my
generation, with a ticker tape parade in
New York to confirm it
Martha Argerich later on kept the ball rolling
and now Behzod Abduraimov, a mere youth,
born in 1990 in Uzbekistan, Tashkent, delivers
by far the best performance I’ve seen since,
giving it new life for the new millenium
behold, be moved, be dazzled, be bewitched
Richard
September 4, 2015
String Quartet no 1, “From My Life” – Bedřich Smetana
“Coucher de soleil sur le lac Léman“ (1874)
_________
paying attention to tenuti is not as
easy as all that, you’ll have found
probably that the music’s kept on
going and you’re not so sure if
what just went by indeed was a
tenuto, so brief, however stressed,
might’ve been the impression
rubati are easier, it’s hard to miss
them when they come round, for
being spread out through the
musical passage as a
consequence of being at the very
least three notes, usually
considerably more
tenuti happen on one note only,
one fleet fish in an ebullient river
rather than a more noticeable and
synchronous school
interestingly, not many of either,
rubati, tenuti, show up in music
history until the late Romantic
Era, the mid- to late 1800s, they’d
been only theoretically, and here
and there, part of the musical
vocabulary for having had no
purchase in music written for the
harpsichord, an instrument that
had allowed only minimal
resonance, though it laid the
foundations for composition,
and therefore dictated taste
into the very mid-nineteenth
century, a whole hundred years
after the invention of the piano,
by having entrenched the ideal
of strict tempo, the reflection,
note, of an ideal, and belief
then in a scientifically cogent
world
that was the Enlightenment
Romanticism came along to
express the ineffable reality of
the truths of the human heart,
in contrast to merely reason –
“Le coeur a ses raisons que la
raison ne connaît point”, says
Pascal, “The heart has its own
logic which allows it to
understand what the rational
mind cannot”, though he in a
somewhat other, much more
theological, context
but the shoe snugly fits, so I’ll
wear it, though with the same
consideration I’d render the
shoes, understand, of my
father
you can tell we’ve reached the
late 1800s when you start
hearing tenuti, ritardandi,
atonality, for that matter, and
also obscure and eccentric
repetitions
this pattern is probably more
evidenced in pictorial art,
where precision gives way to
individualized expression,
and the blurred lines of Early
Impressionism, see above
at the same time, the German
grip on the history of Western
music which it had held for a
hundred and fifty years, from
Bach to Brahms, began to loosen,
along with the idea, incidentally,
of a rationally, even irrationally,
conceived world, you can hear
it in the evolution of the tenuti,
the rubati, like canaries sense
altered conditions in a coal
mine
note however that music itself
is as indifferent to bald facts
as mathematics, it merely
describes, doesn’t comment
listen to Bedřich Smetana, a
Czech composer, his String
Quartet no 1, “From My Life”
follows in the footsteps of
the Germans, but with a
distinctively folkloric air,
there’s even a polka
tend the tenuti, relish the
rubati, if you can identify
them, they’re milestones
to the modern
but, more than anything,
enjoy
Richard
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