Stop the Presses: It's Wolfie's Birthday!!!

Johannes Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756, apparently on this date, February 28th.  Is this true?  I'm a little too lazy to Google it, but it must be accurate if everyone is saying so.  Wait ... no, it was yesterday: February 27th.  (Wikipedia states that he was christened: Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; they were Catholics, and they sort of Latinified everyone's names.  The Protestants protested about this.)  Egads, imagine being born on a Wednesday, when all the undergraduates are planning to drink their brains out the minute classes are done ...

Just kidding, dear friends; undergrads of Mozart's time didn't drink on Wednesdays.

But seriously, a lot of people think Mozart was a genius, and that's rather a problem.  (Or, as we say around here, "That's kind of a problem."  What kind of a problem is it?  Oh, that kind.)  If anyone claims that X is a genius, my immediate reaction is: Oh yeah?  I don't think so.  In an instinct of self-preservation, I have always contended that people generally considered to be geniuses are just misunderstood idiots.  But the question that we're interested in is: is his music any good?

Before I answer that, we have to admit that all music isn't appreciated equally by everybody.  Classical music, especially, is a music of the emotions, and you're not going to easily get music written three hundred years ago by people whose lives were very different from ours.

The music of Bach, in my humble opinion, is about joy, about symmetry, about wonder; about solving a puzzle, about rhetoric, about grandeur.  John Eliot Gardiner, a British conductor who rose to prominence in the seventies and eighties, said that Bach's music was about the wonder of the universe.  I don't know where that comes from, but if you understand Bach's idiom (the particular way he used music), you do get the strong impression that it is about fairly universal values.

The music of Beethoven, John Eliot Gardiner also said, told you a lot about being Beethoven.  I'm sure this was intended to be humor, because Beethoven had (according to what has come down to us) little insight into the thoughts and feelings of others, but was able to express his own feelings only through music.  This is obviously an exaggeration, but this much is true:  In Beethoven's time, musical works were becoming more like manifestos; it was the musician saying this is what I believe, and this is what I stand for.  The culture of being subjugated to society was being replaced by strong individualism.  In music, Beethoven was almost the poster-boy for the new Romantic individualism, hence the epigrammatic statement that Beethoven's music told us about being Beethoven.

If that is true, I would suggest that Mozart's music tells us what it means to be human.  I'm not sure whether John Eliot Gardiner said that, but certainly the idea is not original: despite the surface perfection of Mozart's music, humanity is found it: about struggle, and love and loss, and small triumphs, and putting on a brave front, all that sort of thing.  It is carefully hidden, because in Mozart's time, people hid their feelings.  Children are drawn to the pretty music of Mozart; youths are drawn more to the the bold individualistic vigor of Beethoven.  But in middle age, you begin to notice feelings in Mozart's music that resonate with your own.  Unless you've had a certain amount of life experience, a love affair or two, you're not going to pick up on the beauty and meaning of Mozart's music.

Where Mozart was a genius is in the technical skill of his writing: how well he wrote for the instruments that he had.  But that sort of technical skill can only be appreciated by people whose business is music; to force an ordinary listener to see genius in Mozart is really to ask a little too much.  People are too easily willing to declare someone a genius, as if anointing a genius is an enormous achievement.  It's quite enough to enjoy Mozart's music if you can; it is truly beautiful, and often poignant.  A beautiful moment in Mozart is usually very un-self-conscious; it passes by, and leaves you wanting to rewind to that point, because it isn't set up with a lot of fuss.  Perhaps that's genius too: to be able to throw a beautiful moment at a listener without a lot of fussy set-up.

Archie

Show 117: In Memory of My Mother

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 17.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show117.  For instance, the July 4^th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

Introduction  Part 1

Greetings to all our listeners, and a happy new year for 2015! I have been away all of December, while Curt, the station engineer set up repeat programs from August and September, at my request.

Peter Jelosits and friends

One of the reasons I had been away was that I had planned a memorial gathering for my mother, who had died around Thanksgiving. For this weekend, I’m going to feature music that my mother liked, or music that reminds me of her. She loved music, and she taught me a lot of the music that I know.

Mein gläubiges Herze

When my mother was about 45, she decided to sit for music examinations, in music theory, and singing.  One of the pieces she sang was this Bach aria I have played before: the title in English translation is My Heart ever Faithful, or in German, Mein gläubiges Herze.  Here it is sung by a boy soprano.  Don’t forget to look out for the extended ending, which is a trio for violin, oboe, and cello; actually a baby cello, called a cello piccolo.

Elly Ameling

Der Nussbaum

Another song Mum sang was the Nut Tree, or Der Nussbaum, by Robert Schumann.  Here it is, sung by Elly Ameling.

Sheep may safely graze

A family friend once told me that the piece “Sheep may safely graze,” which is an aria from a Bach cantata, had been played at my parents’ wedding.  I heard a transcription of it, and liked it, and I learned to play it on the piano and the organ, but when I asked my mother whether it was true that it was played at their wedding, she claimed that it hadn’t been.  “It certainly is lovely, but no; I think it was something else!”  But she liked to hear it.  My Dad died some years ago, and we had a memorial service for him (at which I was at the organ), with lots of music, but afterwards, Mom said she had been waiting for Sheep may safely graze, and I had not played it, and she had been disappointed!  Anyway, here is an instrumental version of it.  It is my own arrangement, based closely on the Bach original, and performed by MIDI instruments.

Isidore Godfrey

I am the very model of a modern Major-General

Mom loved the D’Oyly Carte Operas, the light operas by Gilbert and Sullivan.  One of the most famous songs from them is from Pirates of Penzance: The Major General Song.  It is sung here by Isidore Godfrey.

The Donkey Serenade  Part 2

My mother learned a lot of songs from the movies of her time.  One of these was Donkey Serenade.  Here is Alan Jones singing it.  One of these days, I’m going to steel myself to actually watch the movie!

Weggis Song

This next song was one that my mother taught people to sing at various camps.  It is a yodeling song from the Swiss Alps, I believe, about a town called Weggis, on Lake Lucerne.  This is the Weggis Song.

Dona Nobis Pacem

This piece is a round my Mom taught at a camp once, and apparently it was a popular things to sing at impromptu gatherings.  Anyway, our generation heard it there for the first time, and we sang it every chance we got.

Thomas Arne: Where the Bee Sucks

A song my mother loved to sing: Where the Bee Sucks, by Thomas Arne.  (We've played this before on our program.)  This is Emma Kirkby.

Byrd: Ave Verum Corpus 

My mother and I learned this song together, when we joined a music society.  This is Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd.

Handel: Return, O God of Hosts

This is a family favorite, by Kathleen Ferrier, who was also a favorite singer in our family.

Take a pair of sparkling eyes

This is a song my mother used to sing every once in a while.  She sang all the time, while she was cooking, or doing the mending, or tidying up the place.  This is from The Gondoliers, by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Haydn: On mighty pens --from Creation

At one time, my mother sang with a choir called the Colombo Philharmonic, and they sang Haydn’s Creation.  I used to get taken along to practices, and I got to know this song, sung not by my mother, but by a wonderful soprano soloist, Joan Cooray.  This is Emma Kirkby.

Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio

Now, as I said, my Mom decided to take singing lessons, and tried some music exams.  She passed a few, but when she sang this one, they refused to pass her.  It is supposed to be sung by a young boy, and they thought the choice was not a good one for a woman of about fifty.  She sang it as well as she could, but the Italian alone was pretty difficult.

Paul Robeson

Jerome Kern:  Old Man River --from Showboat

My mother sang a lot of songs by Paul Robeson.  I’m not sure where she heard them, but these next few were some of her favorites.  "Old Man River" is from Showboat.  The others are:

• The Lonesome Road
• Song of the Volga Boatmen

Part 3

I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair

A favorite Stephen Foster song, sung by John McCormack, a popular singer of my mother's youth.  Another is: 

• Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms

Rara Venu Gopa bala

When I was very little, my mother taught me an Indian song she had learned, probably in school.  It is a traditional song sung in Telugu, a language that my mom did not understand at all.  South Indian, and particularly Telugu music, is in the Carnatic tradition, in which music is written in ragas.  A raga is both a collection of notes, as well as rules about how you’re allowed to arrive at a certain note, and how you’re allowed to leave the note.  (In addition, there are little characteristic melodic phrases that must appear in any song in that raga.)  This is tricky for little people to learn, so in school they’re taught catchy melodies in each important raga —and of course, they can learn the less-important ragas when they grow up, right?— and the songs teach the kids the rules of the raga, by example.  First they learn an easy song, such as the present one, called a Swarajati, and then they learn a definitive song, called a Varnam.  So there is a Varnam for each raga.  If you want to compose a raga —which is a major undertaking, because, essentially, you’re creating a framework for the compositions of other people— you have to compose a Varnam for your raga.  And of course, your Varnam will be carefully examined for consistency.  So this song is a Swarajati for the raga named Bilahari.  The Bilahari raga has an ascending scale which is pentatonic, and a descending scale, which is our usual major scale.  The song is about Lord Krishna, when he was a young shepherd.

Kathleen Ferrier

Gluck -- Orfeo et Euridice: What is Life?

Kathleen Ferrier was a favorite singer in our home.  She was a gifted contralto, who lived around the time of World War 2, but she died very young, of throat cancer.  We know her mostly from the recordings she made, with quite famous accompanists, orchestras and conductors.
This first song is from the opera Orfeo, by Gluck, who lived about the time of Mozart.  In this song, Eurydice has just died, and Orpheus is grieving, disgusted, and furious with the gods.  He sings: What is life without Eurydice?
The next few songs by Kathleen Ferrier, many of them also sung by my mother, are:

• Handel: Largo Ombra mai fu (Serse)
• Mendelssohn: O Rest in the Lord (Elijah)
• The Keel Row
• Purcell: Sound the trumpet

the last sung by Kathleen Ferrier and Isobel Bailey.

• Schubert: To music
• Coming through the rye

both sung by Isobel Bailey.

Tom Lehrer: The Elements

Self-explanatory (Tom Lehrer introduces his song.)

Gerschwin: Overture to Porgy and Bess

[This segment is not included in the podcast, but in case you listened to the broadcast, and were wondering what it was, I include this information.]

Archie

A Tour Through Arch's Videos on YouTube

For years, one of my favorite pastimes was creating music files in a music editing program (Finale, from MakeMusic --this is not a commercial!!), which also plays the music, using sound samples, which sound very realistic, indeed, then creating videos with these pieces as the sound track, and uploading them to YouTube.  The video portion of the file was usually trivial, and was sometimes just a photograph, and other times a video of the music software while the music was playing, and yet other times, a graphic program that interpreted the MIDI files generated by the editor in terms of pretty moving designs.  (The software was created by Steve Malinowski, a fantastic musician who lives in California, and whom I have only met on the Internet.)

The very first video I ever uploaded was the Fugue in C major by J. S. Bach.  The pictures were images of Baroque organs from all over, many from US colleges.  This was a very primitive effort, but it was viewed several thousand times.  You can find it here.  Years later, I uploaded an improved version, with more sophisticated sounds, which is also on YouTube.  (What was, I believe, the main attraction with the early version was that it was very fast!  Of course, it is a computer, so I could set the speed to be anything, and I did set it going fairly fast.  But that was uploaded in 2008, when a lot of viewers did not quite understand that it was not some guy playing a real organ very fast.  That first one lasted just 3:04 minutes, while the more moderately-paced newer one is 3:45 minutes long.  The faster, early one has been watched 7,783 times, as I write this, while the more recent one, in HD, has been watched only 88 times.  Not that I care, particularly ...)

The next few videos were of my daughter and her group, Episodes, singing various original songs.  They were rehearsing in a garage, and I was recording it on a little hand-held camera.  The group is now defunct, but both the group, and many of the songs were really great.  The songs were all written by my daughter, Uma.

A year or two later, I created this performance of a Bach chorale-prelude called Num komm' der Heiden Heiland, or "O come, thou Saviour of the Gentiles."  It is a solemn organ piece intended for the solemn days of Advent (a sort of mini-Lenten season of fasting preceding Christmas, in certain German traditions), but here it is instrumented for oboe, English Horn, and trombones, all instruments with very dark colors.  The video portion is just a photograph.  If you want to hear the original, there should be numerous links alongside the YouTube window.  It is Bach BWV 659.  Bear in mind that the suggested videos YouTube throws up are individualized for the viewer, and what is suggested for me is probably different from what is suggested for you!

The next interesting video that comes along is this animation of Heighway's Dragon, which is a fractal, which is in this case a sequence of figures, and the actual fractal is the limit of the figures.  The music is a portion of a composition of mine, called Serenade.  Understandably, I uploaded more than a dozen versions of the piece, and this is just an excerpt from one of the earliest versions.

To get it out of the way, I ought to give you a link to the final version of Serenade, which I made for my friend Ako Shiffer, a horn player who attempted to play it with her wind quintet.  Unfortunately, they found it unpleasant to play.  This version is again played by computer.

The British folk song called Linden Lea was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the great Welsh composer.  This song is taught in many schools, and it was a favorite of my sister, who sings it incessantly when she gets it stuck in her brain.  I got to like it, and harmonized it for myself.  At about this time, I was also getting interested in Barbershop Harmony, which is a sort of singing by all guys, or all girls.  It's close harmony, plain and simple, but a distinguishing characteristic is that the melody is often in one of the inner voices.  In this clip, the tune is first in the highest voice, and the next verse has it in the alto voice.  The visual portion is just the sheet music, which you're welcome to follow along!

[Added 2015-1-26:]

Episodes played a cover of a song by King Crimson: Dinosaur.  Here's how it sounded.  Notice the six-string bass.  It was a five-piece group: keyboards, lead guitar, violin, bass and drums.  It was awesome, but various interests took them away from Tucson (not to mention that many of the members were graduate students).

Here is a piece that I wrote, based on a hymn of Johann Cruger.  It was written when I was just about 19, so there are many youthful mistakes.  But it is not easy to write in six parts, and I could not easily repair it even a few years ago.  Don't listen to the whole thing; a more recent version with fewer errors is here.

Here's Brazil by Xavier Cugat!  I love this piece.

Mr. Sandman, using MIDI.




More later.

Archie