The Father of Classical Music

I have often repeated that there is no greatest composer (or singer, or pianist, or whatever).  But J. S. Bach, the amazingly musical genius of the first part of the 18th Century, deserves to be granted special mention, and as an authority in the classical stream of music: the music that flows from harmony. 

To some degree, even up to the time of Wagner, the inspiration for all music can be said to be classical harmony; the harmony which J. S. Bach developed and polished during his lifetime. 

In the 65 or so years that Bach lived—as a student, a performer, a composer, and a teacher of music, he built a solid foundation of music; his own compositions, as well as adaptations of the music of others—that there would have been literally a whole library full of music for future generations to work on.  But, alas, not all of it has survived. 

There is a huge amount of misstatements and misunderstandings about the music of Bach: that it is dry, that it is merely intellectual, that it is difficult to play, that it is outmoded, and so on.  All these statements are not entirely true; but they're subjective statements, and maybe true for some people. 

Bach was born in the month of March.  But at that time there were (at least) two calendars that were followed; the Julian Calendar, which was fairly useful, because the leap years adjusted for the length of the year not being exactly 365 days.  (If not for leap years, Midsummer's Day would not fall on the longest day of the year.  To most people, the test of a good calendar is that midsummer and midwinter would always fall on the same date.)

By the 17th Century, astronomers in Rome had concluded that, in fact, the Leap Years—February 29 once in four years—was overdoing it.  By just a few minutes each year.  The solution was to cancel a leap year every 100 years.

Now Bach lived in a part of Germany that was strongly Protestant.  To them, any scheme invented by the Catholics in Rome was something they wouldn't stand for.  So, when Bach was born in 1685, on March 21st, it was well into the summer, and not the Spring Equinox, which it should have been. 

What are we to do?  Should we celebrate the birth of our favorite composer on the date entered in the church register, or should we celebrate it on the date it would have been in the more accurate Roman Catholic world?

Well, March 21 is, today, the Equinox, so it is convenient to celebrate Bach's birthday on the Equinox.  In the year he was born, it writing have been some weeks into the Summer, and we really could figure out what date it would have been in the rest of the world, but to hell with it.  I will celebrate it on the Equinox, and what is more, if Bach were to be brought alive, he would be happy, because (not being an accomplished astronomer), he was very likely confident that his birthday was March 21, because that would have been what his family told him. 

I repeat this story every year.  And now my duty has been discharged.  So I will plan a mini celebration for this Friday!

Archie

Paul Simon

The Beatles provided the sound track for my teen years; I liked lots of other artists and groups, but I loved the Beatles the most of all. 

I loved to sing, and the Beatles' songs were the ones I loved to sing the most.  There were others: Peter, Paul and Mary; Harry Belafonte; Simon and Garfunkel; The Rolling Stones; The Seekers; The Mamas and the Papas; and various uncles and aunts, whose names I can't even remember now. 

But, as an adult, reflecting the full sensibilities of my adult musical tastes, I think I have to single out Paul Simon.  His tunes, his lyrics, his instrumentation, his harmony; it's all perfect.  I don't need anyone to agree with me; I just think he captured almost exactly how I would have wanted to write a song.   How I would have written a song, if I could've written a song. 

I think I'll come back to this post, and add in my favorite Paul Simon tracks—I'll probably leave out the S & G tracks; there's too many of them—but not right now.  He did write some songs that didn't like; can't be helped.  Also some songs that I never knew; in fact, there are a lot of albums released in the last decade or so that I have completely missed.  I think 'Still Crazy After All These Years' is probably my favorite album from him; 'Graceland' comes a close second. 

Archie

Incy Spincy Spider

I'm wondering what would happen if I wrote a little piece based on the nursery rhyme ...

A Tune Used by Bach for a Chorale-Prelude

In the last several years of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach, my musical hero, prepared several packages of music for publication, though he did not expect them to be actually published.  They were intended to serve as a sort of summary of his art, a testament to his compositional skill. 

The Matthäuspassion, in English: the St. Matthew Passion.  This is a brilliant Oratorio, depicting the last days of Jesus, from the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his interment in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

The Mass in B Minor.  This version of the Catholic communion service is set to some of the most glorious music by Bach.  Some of the numbers are modifications of existing arias and choruses by Bach himself.  The work also features amazing writing for Baroque brass instruments. 

The Musical Offering (Musicalische Opfer), a set of contrapuntal compositions called canons, of very high ingenuity. 

The Goldberg Variations, a set of variations on a single theme, given by a German aristocrat.

The Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of 6 concerti grossi, an old musical form for groups of diverse instruments

The Well-Tempered Klavier, a set of 48 preludes and fugue in every key, major and minor, to celebrate a way of tuning a keyboard to make it possible to play in any key

The Art of Fugue, a set of 14 fugues, all based on the same subject.  ('Subject' can be interpreted as 'theme'; a fugue uses a subject over and over, the subject not undergoing modification, as it would in a Beethoven symphony, however.)

The Art of Fugue is considered to be incomplete, because the last fugue (a fugue on four subjects—the common subject of the entire set, and three more subjects) is incomplete.  That's not surprising, because writing a fugue on four subjects is not at all easy.  To make it harder, the fourth subject he intended to use was his name: B A C H.  In Germany, the letter B stood for B Flat; the letter H stood for B Natural!  Using this as a subject for a fugue is not impossible, but Bach must have wanted to write a really good one. 

Anyway.

After Bach had died, the music of the several fugues of The Art of Fugue were discovered among his belongings, together with the Unfinished fugue.  And, on that last page, there was a chorale: 'Vor deinen Thrön hiermit' ("Here before Thy throne I stand").  Though it is called a chorale, that's the German word for chorale-prelude, that is, a composition based on a hymn- tune, where one of the voices is (possibly an elaborate version of) the hymn. 

The hymn, based on an hymn tune composed by Frenchman  Louis Bourgeois in the 1400s,  was held in such high regard that it was printed in many hymn books for many years, until its popularity has faded in recent years. 

When I was younger, I heard it sung in a favorite hymn, by an English choir:  "The day thou gavest, Lord, is Ended."  Obviously an evening hymn, the words are poetic, and the tune does suit the words well.  Today, though, other tunes are used for this hymn.

As I wrote in an earlier post, evening hymns are occasionally used as funeral hymns (e.g. "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.")  So this tune, associated with two funeral hymns, could have been taken to mean that Bach felt his end was near, and so placed this chorale at the end of his Unfinished fugue.  There is some reason to believe, however, that it wasn't placed by Bach at all, but by one of his assistants, or a son.  (On the other hand, Bach is known to have died from complications arising from an eye operation, so if not completely blind, he was really in no state to write new music at the time of his death.)

There is also a lot of evidence (which I have not examined personally) to show that Bach was working on the Art of Fugue for at least 15 years; also, this Chorale had been written earlier. 

Even without the drama, actual or invented, of the last minutes of Bach's life, The Art of Fugue is a fascinating collection of pieces.  In particular, the very first fugue in the collection—titled Contrapunctus 1—is probably one of the best introductions to what a fugue is.

Arch

[Added later:]

Here is the Wikipedia-supplied link to an entry in an article for BWV 668:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eighteen_Chorale_Preludes#BWV_668?wprov=sfla1

Tom Hulce, in Amadeus

I learned, just a couple of days ago, that Tom Hulce, who played the role of Mozart in Amadeus, did not initially know to play the piano!  He learned the instrument in order to take the role.  (If you remember, he played the piano while being held upside down, in one scene!)

Now, we know movies these days have amazing tricks they can use, and people who put up these pieces of information often sensationalize the stories to increase their audience statistics.  I'm not accusing the author of the story I read of anything; I'm just warning you not to swallow this story wholesale.  But there's a good chance the story is largely accurate.  (Tom Hulce looked like a very clever fellow.  If the story is true, he must be an incredibly clever man, and we ought to be making a bigger fuss over him.)

I'm sure I wrote a blog post on the movie Amadeus.  I just looked through the list of all the posts, and didn't find anything like a review of the movie. 

Amadeus

It is commonly regarded that the play Amadeus, by Peter Shaefer is a carricature of mozart. In my opinion, it isn't a carricature at all!   When I wasin school,  one year I win a prize book, called Letters of Composers, and it had numerous letters—in translation—written by Mozart.  I can say quite confidently, that Mozart's manner of speaking in the movie is a perfect depiction of what his letters were like.  Shaffer has clearly read this book, and the character of Mozart is true to this source.  (The irritating giggle was Tom Hulce's invention, but, honestly, that's probably how the great man laughed.) 

Lots of Mozart admirers were embarrassed at how their idol was depicted; nothing can be done about that; Mozart was probably just a shade—at most—more sedate than how Tom Hulce portrays him; but this is all of a piece with what we know of the man. 

There's a certain amount of invention in the playwrights depiction of Mozart's wife and mother-in-law, but not much.  That's how they are described by many witnesses!  But the miracle is how Mozart was inspired by them, and they appear in his operas in disguised form!  With a genius, nothing is wasted. 

If you haven't seen this movie, go get it and watch it.  All the characters are brilliant, including the King, Salieri, Mozart's father, the archbishop, and even some courtiers.  (One of them was instrumental in Haydn's composition of The Creation, Die Schopfung.)

Dvorak's Song to the Moon

Song to the Moon, from Rusalka. 

I was browsing the—usually annoying, but surprisingly interesting—feed from YouTube, when I stumbled on this soprano aria from 2018.  I'll try and link it here, but I've had bad luck doing that the past few times I have tried. [Succeeded!]

Apparently it's from his opera Rusalka.  It just knocked me flat; it was so lovely.  The girl entreats the moon to remind her lover that she waits for him.  Near the end, she practically screams at the moon to not disappear!  I can certainly sympathize; you don't want the one to whom you're talking to start walking away,  or disappearing!

I would say that this aria is as deeply moving as Strauss's fourth Last Song: Im Abendrot, though it is much more diatonic. 

I read the synopsis of the story on Wikipedia, and it is essentially identical to that of The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen.  'Rusalka' means, essentially, water spirit in Czech, and except for some details, the story follows that of the Andersen fairy tale.  It ends in tragedy, which—I believe—was the original Andersen ending. 

Not surprisingly, the best performances of the aria is by those who were native speakers of Czech, or at least those who understood the language.  When Rusalka scolds the moon for disappearing, Dvorak's setting is very angry.  That's probably appropriate, considering that Rusalka is the child of The Water Sprite, a powerful spirit.

https://youtu.be/Us_F2xLJgKI?si=BdZOIjP3NoTlaFGi

Paul McCartney: A Wonderful Christmastime!

When U was living with my parents, in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), I can't remember very much of what the Beatles—post breakup—were doing.  I probably didn't really know.  (Actually, I thought Imagine was post-breakup, but it might not have been ...)

Then, when I got here, I was confronted with a lot of McCartney and Wings-type music, a little of which I really liked ('Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey' - type songs, and Band on the Run), but a lot of which I didn't care for.  John Lennon's early songs I rather liked, but not the Double Fantasy songs, for the most part.  But that was close to half a century ago; I heard Wonderful Christmastime just yesterday, I believe, and I thought: wow, what a great song!

Some of these late McCartney songs really show us, in clear focus, what McC could do: very musical, highly whimsical songs. 

Lennon, in contrast, thought in very edgy musical terms.  If Paul declared that something John wrote was a little too conventional or formulaic, we have reports that John would rewrite it.  ("Here come old Flattop," the opening phrase of Come Together, was a case in point.  I recently sangthis with a Karaoke machine, at wedding, andpeople looked at me crosseyed.)

You can easily see how Lennon and McCartney, together, could moderate each other's tendencies, to produce essentially perfect pop songs, which is what the fans wanted.  The fans who still deplore the fact that the band broke up don't realize that the vast majority of Beatles fans just would not like Lennon/McCartney songs now.  It's impossible. 

The Concert on the Roof, which was their last live broadcast, was (in my view,) brilliant.  You might think: why couldn't we have more of that?  Well, those songs were mostly written when they were in their teens, or were just parodies of their early songs.  They had had breakups, the frustrations that they wanted to express were very individual.  There were "You never give me your money," - type frustrations, which united them, but a lot of what they wanted to express would probably not found echoes in what the others wanted to express.  Or they probably didn't want to express some of those feelings at all; after all, they were English.  They were quite capable of expressing their feelings, but I'm sure they had rather not.  Perhaps in allegorical form, but it might have struck them as just too much work. 

(I can't resist deploring the murder of John Lennon.  Can't say anything more than that.)

Well, all McCartney's post-breakup music awaits my attention.  I would not be able to persuade anyone who wasn't already an ardent Beatles fan about what an amazing band they were.  Listen to the music, I'd say; if it doesn't grab you, give it up. 

Archie