My Mother

Today is the birthday of my mother!

It may not seem appropriate that this description of my mother should be put here, on the musical blog, rather than over on the all-purpose "I Could Be Wrong" blog, but bear with me!

My mom was the second of four siblings: one boy, the eldest, followed by three girls.  I was told a lot about my mother in her girlhood days, which I quickly forgot.  She didn't seem such an exciting subject back then.  But I do get the impression that she listened.  She absorbed everything she was taught in school.  She absorbed everything she was taught in numerous clubs, in school.  She absorbed and retained everything she was taught by her father, who was a physician and a surgeon.

She was also very much into sports, and was the sports captain of her school.  (They had one sports captain for the entire school, as well as individual captains for each team sport.  Don't ask me why.)

She was accepted by the YWCA for training as an administrative secretary. (Back then, the YWCA was the conduit of a vast amount of support for working women, as well as abandoned women and families, and so the administrative secretary---who essentially ran the YWCA office---needed to have training, unlike the president of each YWCA, who was elected, and often changed from year to year.)  The YWCA decided to send my mom to college, at a time when most women went straight into the workforce (or got married) without bothering with college.

After working for the 'Y' for several years, my mother took up teaching, and then met my dad, and they got married.  My mom continued to teach while I was still on the way, took a brief leave of absence (while she delivered me,) and then resumed teaching.  She taught English, history, geography and civics.  For various reasons, she decided to teach singing as well.  (Most of her students were learning English as a second language, and the singing helped these kids to lose their discomfort in pronouncing English words.)

She continued to teach for twenty years, until she retired.  Even then, she did not stop teaching.  When I was about 13, I started taking music and piano lessons, whereas many kids took piano when they were a lot younger.  Anyway, I was in boarding school, which meant that when I went home for the holidays and reported what was going on with me to my mom, it was more interesting to her, than if I had reported it daily.  When she learned that I was learning simple harmony, she revealed that she too had been taking lessons in advanced harmony from a friend.  Pretty soon she was teaching me advanced harmony, which fact I had to carefully conceal from my music teacher, who would have otherwise gotten mad.  (The last thing a teacher wants to hear is that she's getting upstaged by a competing teacher somewhere else!)

My mom's musical friend, meanwhile, taught music theory at three schools.  When she and her husband decided to take a year-long vacation to Australia, she arranged for Mom to substitute for her as music teacher at those schools, which supplemented our family income nicely!

My mother was very much into music and drama.  My father's job involved being transferred from one location to the other all through our lives.  At every place where we were posted, my mom got involved in the local musical and dramatic scene.  She sang at weddings, and she trained choirs, and directed plays.  My most treasured memories were of my mom practicing choruses from Messiah, or The Creation, or the St. Matthew Passion, and other major choral works.  So my mother was responsible for about a third of my knowledge of music theory, while three other ladies were responsible for all the rest of what I know about music, and a couple of gentlemen as well.

Despite the very public role my mother played in most places where we lived, including as a teacher, she was a very soft-spoken woman.  I realized only recently just how soft-spoken she was.  Even my father was moderately soft-spoken.  (I, in contrast, tend to yell.)

After my father also retired, they both retrained as psychologists and counselors, a move that is difficult for me to understand.  By all accounts, my mother was considered a very capable counselor, though my father gave it up rather quickly.

My parents died several years ago.  We miss them greatly; it is difficult to describe what it is like when your parents are gone, even if the parents concerned are in ill-health, and advanced in years.  You do get accustomed to it after a while, but every once in a while there is something you want to run by them, but of course, they aren't there.  Of course, there are your siblings, who are a good substitute, in a limited way.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Uma's Podcast!

Well, guess what.

My daughter, who lives in Tucson, AZ, has decided to have a Podcast.  The easiest way to do this is to set it up in our Archie's Archives Blog, and provide links to the mp3 files which contain her blog.

Uma's genius is telling stories.  So she's going to tell her stories over the phone, and the first few podcasts will be joint exercises with me, after which she will probably get into her groove, and run with it.

I have no idea what the topic is going to be, so I'll have to fill that in later!

 

Here's a brief introduction to Uma.

Uma is---theoretically---a graphic designer by trade; that means that she can design a web-page, or a poster, or a book, or a piece of mail advertising, or a custom business card; that sort of thing.  In actual fact, she has been doing all sorts of computer-related things for years and years.

She also used to play tennis pretty well, and all sorts of games, including touch football, where the guys loved her so much, they would affectionately slam her into the furniture.  One time, she had a tennis match right after a touch football game, and she was slammed so hard that she bruised a rib, and lost her tennis match, and was in tears.  (Maybe I was not supposed to let that particular cat out of the bag.)

Mostly, Uma is a vocalist and a keyboardist of an alternate rock band, which has gone on hiatus since Covid.  (If she insists, I will come back and put that in ALL CAPS, but I think it's time we put the disease in its place, and relegated it into a more appropriate non-caps position.)

The occupation Graphic Designer suggests that all her activities have to do with computer-generated images.  In fact, though, she loves to draw and paint, and given the chance, she would much rather drop everything and take up drawing and painting.  The only thing she likes better than drawing and painting is telling stories, so look out; these podcasts are likely to bend your ear, and fill it with lots of stories.

Arch

Johann Sebastian Bach

March 21st of each year is the date on which I celebrate the birthday of J. S. Bach.  For those who are interested, a curious set of circumstances arranged that for many years, while the Vatican decreed that the Catholic world must adopt the Gregorian Calendar, Bach was born in a region where the dates were different, and so there is some disagreement about exactly when we should celebrate Bach's birthday.  In the past, I have tried to describe in greater detail the calendric details of the problem, but this year I will focus on the composer himself.

Johann Sebastian Bach's family contained a large number of musicians.  It also contained a large number of individuals named Johann, in fact almost every eldest boy in the family bore that as his first name.  In family conversations, our favorite composer was known as Sebastian, for that reason.

After the death of Bach in 1750--a date that is used also as the date of the death of Baroque Music--it became necessary to catalog Bach's enormous output, and this huge job was taken up by one Wolfgang Schmeider.  Rather than number Bach's works chronologically (so that his first composition was numbered Opus 1), Schmeider numbered Bach's work structurally (according to genre); that is, all the cantatas were numbered 1 through 200 or so, after which came the motets, then the masses, then the passions, and so on.

Most of Bach's most popular works--at least his best known works--have the property that they sound very ordinary, but skillfully composed.  This is probably because Bach was such a consistent and logical composer (don't ask me what I mean by logical) that it became reasonable to create a system whereby anyone who wanted to write harmony that sounded correct could do so, following certain rules and principles.  In a sense, modern harmony is harmony according to Bach.  Even Beethoven, Brahms, and many of the romantic composers write Bachian harmony, except when they needed to stretch those principles in order to be more expressive, according to romantic musical needs.  Many great composers referred to Bach as the father of them all, sometimes with adoration, and often with frustration.

Musical Journalism
In the time of Bach, composers were expected--required--to compose new music for every occasion: birthdays, funerals, marriages, and even for each Sunday.  So composers were not expressing their deepest feelings in each composition, but rather delivering music for a deadline.  (In spite of this situation, many or most of Bach's pieces stand up well against the most inspired compositions of other composers, though Bach tended to wish that he had the leisure to write music that was truly his personal expression.)

Bach very often recycled his non-church music into music for church (but seldom or never the other way).  The amazing B minor Mass, which contains movement after amazing movement of gorgeous music, contains a great deal of material borrowed from other Bach cantatas or concertos.  This procedure is called parody composition.  

The Gloria of the B minor mass is a particularly grand movement.  Bach was an extremely religious person, almost to the extent that he was defined by his beliefs.  In another man, this could have been seen as a failing, but the teachings of Jesus expressed his world-view so well simply because he explored them in such detail.  More than half the volume of Bach's musical composition was in his 200+ cantatas, and the ideas in them--even if formulaic to us in the 21st century--covered a wide gamut of religious thought for his times.  Furthermore, these cantatas are only the ones that have survived; when I surmise that Schmeider began his cataloging process in 1942, possible 2/3rds of Bach's Cantatas were already lost.

Secular Compositions
Bach had several sons, almost all of whom were musicians.  (We know little about his daughters; which is not unexpected from a time when the achievements of women were considered insignificant.  We do know that one of his daughters was married to a man named Agricola, who served as an assistant to Bach in his later years.)  One of the reasons that Bach's sons were important is that when Bach moved to Leipzig--a city of great significance to music, since Telemann, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner all lived and worked there--he found himself in charge of the musical activities of the famous Zimmerman's Cafe.  The musical evenings of this venue had become famous, and Bach was happy to take up the directorship of the music, because it afforded an opportunity to display the talents of his musical sons, who were capable keyboardists.  Bach wrote many concertos to be performed in this place, including rewrites of existing concertos for violin and oboe and so on.  We are fortunate indeed for this set of circumstances, because the music of many of those concertos for oboe, etc. are now lost, but the music for the keyboard versions remain.  The history of Zimmermann Kaffeehaus is interesting.  These concertos, as well as the concertos Bach wrote as calling-cards for various German nobles, are the closest things to Symphonies that Bach wrote, except perhaps for his set of four Ouvertures, which are dance suites after the model of music composed for the French kings in Versailles.

Academic Compositions
Bach had his theoretical side, which led him to compose sets of pieces in the most common keys; for instance his two-part inventions.  There are 15 of these, in the keys of C major, C minor, D major and minor, E Flat major, E major and minor, F major and minor, G major and minor, A major and minor, B Flat major, and B minor.

You might wonder whether the keys that are omited have to do with the difficulty of the key-signatures.  You would not be exactly right; these keys were the conventional ones in which sets were written (yes, other composers also wrote sets of works), but the problem was with tuning.  In Bach's past, instruments were tuned in such a way that two notes a perfect fifth apart, for instance, had frequencies in the ratio of 2:3, and which therefore sounded smooth when played together.  But by Bach's time, the ears of people had become accustomed to a little roughness in the sounds of chords, and it was possible to play music in quite distant keys; in fact all these 15 keys.  Bach, in later years, devised a tuning system, or developed an existing system, using which it was possible to write pieces in all twelve keys.  Some writers believe that Bach's tuning was that of Equal Temperament, which is the tuning we have today, in which none of the fifths are perfect.  Others believe it was a very creative compromise in which some fifths, and some thirds were in integer ratios, and did sound smooth.  The set is the famous 48 preludes and fugues for keyboard, called The Well-Tempered Clavier.  They are by no means merely academic works; almost every one is a masterpiece.  Many experts agree that they were intended to be played on a clavichord, an interesting type of keyboard instrument that is very rare today, and was probably not common in Bach's day either.  But the compositions are titled as for the keyboard.

There are also a set of 15 Three Part Inventions, or Sinfonias; 6 Trio Sonatas for Organ, a set of 21 organ preludes and fugues (or sometimes fantasia and fugue), a set of 6 concertos for ensembles ranging from large to small--the Brandenburg Concertos; and a set of fugues, The Art of Fugue.  The last is emerging as a compilation of fugues Bach wrote throughout his lifetime, based upon a particular subject, and not a final project he undertook in his declining years.  These sets were intended to be instructional, to give examples of the possibilities within a particular form.

While the large-scale pieces of Bach are beautiful, the small-scale pieces are beautifully intimate as well, and display Bach's counterpoint well.  Counterpoint is the art of combining different melodies concurrently together.  Listeners new to this device find it confusing at first to hear every part seemingly going its own way.  Eventually, though, the different melodies seem logical and right, and it is possible to hear the melodies in the lower voices as adding texture, so that it is possible to ignore them as melodies, and to know that they are present, and to feel that their presence is welcome.  A particular instance of counterpoint is Imitation, where a lower voice imitates a melodic fragment from a higher voice.  Contrapuntal imitation is practiced by composers even today.