how to listen to music if you don’t know your Beethoven from your Bach, XV – what’s a rhapsody
“Rhapsody of Steel“ (1959)
________
so what’s a rhapsody
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Tag: rhapsody
June 1, 2023
a rhapsody is in the eye of its
April 26, 2023
how to listen to music if you don’t know your Beethoven from your Bach, XII – on rhapsodies
“Rhapsody“ (1958)
_____
if, in my last instalment, I compared iconic
funeral marches, let me do the same for
a couple of iconic rhapsodies, another
musical form that came and went, that’s
come and gone, but not forgotten
what’s a rhapsody
as far as I can make out, it’s much the
same as a fantasia, if you can remember
what a fantasia is, a free form composition,
but with a Romantic, which is to say a
heartfelt, twist, more pathos, less
technical wizardry
Gershwin wrote his Rhapsody in Blue
in 1924, you can hear New York, Times
Square, Broadway, from the first wail
of the languid horn
Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme
of Paganini, written in 1934, ten years
later, gives you, however, Vienna, its
Romantic Period, the traditions of,
a century earlier, Beethoven, Schubert
Rachmaninov is personal, introspective,
tragic, Gershwin is extroverted, social,
fun
Rachmaninov looked back to his
European, Old World, traditions,
Gershwin augurs an entirely new
voice
listen, you can hear it
enjoy
R ! chard
February 13, 2013
Beethoven – 32 Variations In C Minor On An Original Theme, WoO 80
of all musical forms variations lend themselves
best to intellectual speculation, which is to say,
by way of concepts, words, objects of rational,
cohesive, not nebulous, thought
it is immediately evident that a set of variations
considers the many facets of a given subject, in
music represented by a theme to be analyzed,
dissected, explored and, in the best of cases,
rendered transcendental
this is of course also the case in any science
it is more difficult to so investigate a waltz, a
sarabande, a rhapsody, which speak a much
less literal language usually, unless of course
the verbal construct itself has been applied to
the composition, “The Carnival of the Animals“
or “Pictures at an Exhibition“, for instance, but
that’s putting the cart before the theoretical
horse, unfair and unethical
variations demand inherently cerebral
participation, a considered evaluation, a
nearly literal result, music finds its one-way
ticket thereby to veritable language
around the same time as he wrote the
“Waldstein” Sonata, 1806, Beethoven wrote
Theme, WoO 80, my very favourite of his
sets of variations, courtesy here of the
inimitable Glenn Gould
note, in passing, the similarities between
the two contemporary works
of the C minor Variations, however utterly
an earlier great, accompanied by immensely
helpful annotated commentary the sum of
which is hugely more telling than its mere
point form parts, sharpening in the process,
inconspicuously but highly effectively, one’s
aesthetic pencil, pulse
what could be more fun than that
variations, incidentally, are a most democratic
form, where every iteration is the equal of the
other, given always, however, that fixed and
intractable initial model
an interesting interpolation, incidentally, that,
philosophically, of course, speaking, asking,
as it does, does democracy require, rest on,
a founding contextual blueprint, in light
especially of the infinite number of those
blueprints possible
is our democracy merely an arbitrary, and
only contingent, shade, therefore, of that
ideational abstract
you decide
psst: WoO is an acronym for Werke ohne
Opuszahl, or, in English, works
without opus number, Beethoven
seems to have been completely
unconcerned with naming his
compositions, that he’d written the
music had been apparently already
quite enough
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