Mozart's Piano Concerto in C minor, K 491

I think I have blogged about this piece before, but it needs to be done again!

The piece opens with the first theme played in unison (actually in octaves) by the whole orchestra, and then it bursts into an explosive flowering of a sort of bouquet of music.  (Alas, a few years ago I would have done justice to this description, but ...)

The first movement maintains this sense of seriousness throughout; the urgent statements of the piano and the orchestra are often underscored by the kettledrums.  (These are a set of tuned drums that can play melodies, but are actually sparingly used to emphasize the occasional bass note.)

The second movement starts with a very simple tune, almost like a nursery rhyme.  As the movement proceeds, we are treated to a sequence of lovely variations on that tune, that will probably stick in the memory of a first-time listener. 

The Finale (the last movement) is again a set of variations, on a much more studiedly serious theme, that has a characteristic pathetic cadence-like modulation (to D Flat, in this case) just before the end of the theme. 

It's easy to fall in love with this piece; we're told that this concerto was one of Beethoven's favorites, and in my humble opinion, Beethoven had excellent taste, most of the time. 

Earlier today, I was unexpectedly shown (the late) Claudio Arrau playing Mozart's Sonata in A minor, K. 310.  Well, it's been a Mozartian day, for sure.

Archie

Bach with Trumpets and Drums!

Piccolo Trumpet

Valveless (Natural) Trumpet

Piccolo Trumpet

On Saturday the 9^th, Katie and I headed out to hear the Bach Choir.  (There's a Bach Choir in Britain, as well, but this is the local one, established in Bethlehem, PA, a million years ago.)  We had already got tickets, and I had dreamed of hearing this choir for close to 50 years, so Katie---always ready for an adventure---set out.  Knowing we were leaving Wilpo for a Big City, Bethlehem, the chances of finding Chinese food a little more authentic than at home was good, so we left home early.

Katie decided to take the road less traveled, and the GPS took us all over the place, sometimes instructing us to take sudden turns, to avoid congestion.  Finally, we were in Bethlehem!  But the Chinese restaurant we had wanted to go to had closed down, :( but we soon found another one, and had a wonderful lunch.

Presently we were at the First Presbyterian Church---why do they number these churches?  My aunt attended the First Methodist Church in Phoenix, and I had always wanted to get to the the other Methodist churches: the second, and the third, and so on.  For many of the Third Shall be First, and vice versa, and verse visa.

Both the Bach Magnificat and Cantata 63 (Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, BWV 63) feature high Bach trumpets, as well as interesting combinations of soloists.  Perhaps they had found two specialists in high trumpet (not something a typical trumpeter can be confident about) and decided to perform these two, which are appropriate for the season.

First of all, I just loved the contralto soloist (a mezzo-soprano, really) called Luthien Brackett, who despite having a quiet voice, did a fabulous job, and lent a lot of charm to the set of 5 soloists on the dais!  She alone would have been worth the price of admission---almost.

The orchestra---a small one---was beyond excellent.  The strings were lovely, but being about a 150 feet away, we couldn't hear well enough to give a critical appraisal.  But the tympani, the flutes, oboes, trumpet(s?) and bassoon, and the portative organ, were just fabulous.  This is the first time I have been in the same room as a portative organ, but I did not go up close, for fear that they'd think I wanted to smuggle it out of the church.

Another surprise was the Bach Trumpet.  Johann Sebastian Bach wrote amazingly florid but tasteful, lovely parts for high trumpet.  At the time of the first Bach revival of around the middle 1800's, the trumpeters available were baffled as to how to play these parts; they were so high, and so florid.  The first line of attack was to invent a new sort of trumpet, called a (high) Bach trumpet, that enabled some trumpeters to play these lines.  There are wonderful trumpet parts in the Brandenburg Concertos, a couple of the Orchestral Suites ('Ouvertures'), and some of the celebratory cantatas and choruses, such as those in the B minor Mass, and in the Christmas Oratorio.  Now, with the new Bach Trumpet, these trumpet parts could be played.

The Bach Trumpet unfortunately does not have the traditional appearance of a trumpet, but rather looks like something that MI5 dreamed up to crack enemy coded transmissions.  I wouldn't have known what it was, if I had been shown one, if not for the fact that Flip Herfort, my friend and teacher, had demonstrated one to me a week before.  In the 1970's straight trumpets that looked like heraldric trumpets began to be used---some of them with little holes on the side, instead of the valves on modern trumpets,  (To see one, find a video of the Christmas Oratorio, or the Weihnachts­oratorium, on YouTube; the video of John Elliot Gardiner and the English Bach Soloists will have three gentlemen playing straight trumpets), which makes them close to chromatic in the higher registers.

The first chorus of the Cantata had an interesting feature.  At the third line (or somewhere in the middle, anyway,) the harmony takes an abrupt left turn, and modulates to the relative minor.  In Bach's time, the congregations were probably accustomed to these harmonic jinks, but today, I'm sure Federal Safety Standards require a more sedate harmonic rhythm!  Bach has done this in other places; the opening chorus of BWV 147, for instance.  I don't think conductor Chris J. could have done much to ameliorate the violence of this modulation, but the congregation seemed to take it with great equanimity.

Well, to conclude, writing about music is always a bit of an iffy proposition; you have to hear what you're talking about.  It's a relatively easy operation to hunt down the two pieces on YouTube, and numerous video clips of Luthien Tinuviel singing.  Give yourself a treat!

Arch

A Bach Triple Concerto

I'm trying not to talk about musical things my readers are not familiar with, so: what's a Concerto, again? It is a piece of orchestra music, featuring a solo instrument; in other words, that instrument is given a very prominent part in the piece.  (These days, piano concertos are some of the most common, but in the time of Bach, for instance, concertos were written for all sorts of solo instruments.  The one I'm going to write about is a triple concerto.  The instruments are flute, violin, and oboe.

Now remember, Bach died in 1750, which is centuries ago, so a lot of what we know about him has to be painstakingly dug up, and we only know about this flute / violin / oboe concerto from indirect evidence, but the evidence is very strong.

Around about 1735, Bach applied to work at St. Thomas's School in Leipzig.  The job involved teaching, and training the choir, and providing music for church services.  Being an energetic guy, he also undertook to provide live music at a certain Zimmermann's Coffee Housein Leipzig.  Now, at his earlier job, Bach had written numerous orchestral pieces to be performed by the modest orchestra of the Duke he had worked for.  About half the music from that time never came down to us, but we have catalogs, which tell us what sorts of pieces he had written.  In Leipzig, Bach's three oldest boys were around 20, and he (and they, probably) wanted to display what they could do, and they being skilled harpsichord players, Bach rewrote some of his older multi- instrument concertos for various numbers of harpsichords.

There is also a concerto for three violins, which is well known.  It was evidently the work that was the origin of the three harpsichord concerto!  In fact, Bach was well known for borrowing his own music, and cannibalizing it to write more music for different instruments.  Most interestingly, musicologists (sort of musical detectives) studied the triple  harpsichord concerto, and the triple violin concerto side by side, and, as you can imagine, learned a ton about how Bach went about converting one type of concerto into the other!  If modern-day composers were to go about doing this, they would possibly do it differently, but musicians have been insanely fascinated with Bach's methodology for a long time, so this process of comparing concertos was fascinating. 

But, listen to this.  They studied the violin triple concerto, and decided that that was also a conversion from an as-yet-unknown earlier concerto, for different instruments.  So, working backwards, they reconstructed this triple concerto for flute, violin and oboe. 

Approximating with Polynomials

I recently saw a title of a video about how to find the square root of 2000.  Having taught the math background for solving problems like this for our computer, and actuarial students, I was happy to try this problem, without watching the video.  The easiest thing in the world is to type in 2000 into a calculator, and then press the Square Root key, and we would get the square root in one shot.  But that would be no fun to us math people; we would prefer to have some more meaty mathematics to sink our teeth into!

Finding square roots directly is a skill that is slowly vanishing.  It isn't something that we teach youngsters in school, to do with paper and pencil; over the years, math teachers have never been coached with this method in their school years either, so they don't even know that there is a direct method.  Everyone relies on calculators to do it for them; in fact there's hardly any reason to actually find square roots anymore in this brave new world.  Approximations, though, could still be useful, especially polynomial approximations.

[I don't really know why I put this post in this blog!  The topic of 'Approximation with sines and cosines' might have made a little sense, because of the harmonic series, and so on ... Some of my best buddies are dead; they might be messing with my head ... Anyway, it's probably time to move it 'next door', into I Could Be Wrong, But ...]

My Band Debut!

I thought I had told you (my readers) this, but I mayn't have: I have taken up a new instrument!

My wife saw an announcement that the local New Horizons affiliate was ready to sign up new members, and urged me to go and see.  What is New Horizons?  It's a countrywide (and maybe international, to some extent) organization that has brass bands in many localities, that encourage retirees to take up playing a band instrument.  In our area, it's sort of associated with a large music store, which provides space for rehearsals, rental instruments, administrative support, and so on.

So, I attended one of their rehearsals, and when it was over, I talked to the band director, and I said I wanted to join. 

"What would you be interested in playing?" they wanted to know, and I said, 'Anything; but I would really like to play a bass instrument!'

They said: well, we have found that it works better if the new member chooses their own instrument.  In spite of all that, I was strongly encouraged to learn to play a baritone horn.  These things are also called just baritone. It is a brass band instrument (not an orchestral instrument), and is pitched roughly an octave higher than a Tuba.

 

They meet for rehearsals every Tuesday and Thursday; and I would get a half-hour lesson each Thursday, after which I'd sit in with the band rehearsal, though all I could do at first was play the B Flat in the bass stave.  So I gazed intently at the scores they were playing from, and pounced on any upcoming B Flats, and played them.  (New members who couldn't read music would have to be taught that skill too.)

That was in early October.  We were rehearsing some standard marches, some carols, some Christmassy songs (Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Jingle Bells, etc.) and a few items that the locals liked, e.g. some Penn State marches, etc.

Finally, today, we got all dressed up, and went out to play at a state hospital!  (In Pennsylvania, state hospitals are mental institutions, but they're not called that, to save the feelings of the inmates.)

It went off OK.  I couldn't play everything I should have played, but I figured it was better to skip the notes I couldn't get than play wrong notes.  Every rehearsal I seem to be playing more notes than before; there are some chromatic sequences, like F, E, E Flat, which I can play now, as long as it's not too fast. 

The Baritone is keyed like a trumpet.  There are three pistons; the first one drops the note by a whole tone.  The second one drops the note by a semitone. The third one drops the note by three semitones—a minor third.  So the B Flat scale goes like this:

• B Flat: just blow. 
• C: pistons 1 and 3 (and blow).
• D: pistons 1 and 2 (and blow).
• E Flat: piston 1 (and blow).
• F: just blow, a little harder. 
• G: pistons 1 and 2, blow harder. 
• A: piston 2, blow very hard.
• B Flat just below middle C: just blow, quite hard. 

You must have guessed that, when I wrote 'blow harder,' there must be more to it than that!  There is; you have to tighten your lips, and blow harder.  But, as with almost all wind instruments, blowing a little harder does give you a new note. 

Without any pistons, you get a B Flat, then an F, then octave B Flat, then you get the entire so-called harmonic series of B Flat.

Using pistons 1 and 3, you actually get the harmonic series of F, which happens to contain C.

Using piston 2, you get the harmonic series of A (which happens also to contain E).

Using piston 1, you get the harmonic series of A Flat, which contains E Flat.

Knowing all this is well and good, but since the fingering of consecutive notes isn't simple—as it would have been on a recorder, for instance—you just have to memorize the way each note is played.  But when a note sounds perfectly, it sounds like it's being played on a horn; in other words:  beautiful. 

Archie
 

Antonin Dvořák

It's Dvořák's birthday!  (There's altogether too many punctuation and accents in that word, there.)

It's convenient, when studying the history of music (that is, examining the sequence,  or the panoply, of composers in chronological order), to group them into lots of composers that write music that was broadly (very broadly) similar.

Renaissance Music.  The Renaissance composers I know are Gabrielli, Dowland, Gibbons, Palestrina, and several fellows I want to mention, but whose names I forget.  They use beautiful harmony, very fluently, and I find the music very soothing (though it may not have been intended to be soothing).  Next comes:

Baroque Music.  The characteristic of this style of music is ornamentation.  The melodies are ornamented, and the harmony is complex, but only from the point of view of a century or so later!  When it was being written, though, everyone thought it was perfectly normal.  My favorite composer, J. S. Bach falls into this group, as do some of the people in the Renaissance list, e.g. Byrd; Telemann, Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Purcell, and many others.  Counterpoint, the art of combining melodies, which had been developed by Palestrina, was raised to new heights by Bach.  But counterpoint was considered too fussy by those who came after.  They considered it insanely busy, and the next generation wanted music that was sane.  It was called the Age of Reason.  The music of this era is called...

Classical Music.  Many people take the term classical music to mean 'not popular music', and that's not wrong.  But even within classical music, there is classical music, exemplified by Haydn, Mozart, Salieri, Boccherini, Clementi, Gluck and others.  Compared to music of Bach's time, it is simple, minimalistic music.  That description is not the final word; Mozart's music is often very complex indeed; it is simple only to the eyes of those of that time. 

Romantic Music.  Then came Beethoven, who can be regarded as the pioneer of Romantic music.  Unlike the previous eras, which could be characterized by a single aspect of musical style, romantic music has several facets.  (1) It is highly expressive, and individualistic.  (2) It is closely related to literary themes.  (3) It is inspired by nationalistic and folk music, and feelings of national identity.  (4) It rejects constraints, and resists rules and structure, and convention.  Beethoven's music achieved all of these ideals, and those who came after him tried very hard to write music that had some of the qualities of Beethoven's music, while trying very hard not to sound like Beethoven's music!  This kept them quite busy. 

It's into this era that Dvořák arrived.  He had the gift of writing music that sounded amazingly melodious, very rhythmic and engaging, very unique, very colorful, modern, but at the same time traditional.  It was simple and intimate, but also grand and exciting!

He was Czech by birth... born in the vicinity of Moravia and Bohemia, melodic motifs from these parts frequently appear in his music.

Depraved Statistics Lovers Look At Pipe Organs

A lot of parodies of US culture was based on the fanaticism of baseball fans.  We all know about RBI's, and the sorts of averages that the expert announcer spouts during play-by-play commentating.  That sort of treatment of the sport has now spread to every other sport as well in the US, and across the world in US-friendly foreign countries.  It wasn't always thus, you know; this sort of approach to hyping up excitement is post-1960's.

Now, a certain entertainment group has acquired what they call 'The Largest Pipe Organ In The World,' based on the number of pipes ("tubes" as they term it) of the instrument:

https://www.boardwalkhall.com/arena-info/pipe-organs

which link you can follow up yourself, and find out how many football fields it would fill if the air in the pipes were spread out one inch high.  The photos I saw had stops positioned so high that the organist could not turn them on (or off) in the middle of a piece. 

Big organs became popular in the 19th century, when composers began writing pieces that could compete in volume with a symphony orchestra.  One composer who wrote quite a wonderful piece for organ, piano and orchestra is Camille Saint-Saens: Symphony no. 3.

That's probably the exception; there's a part for organ in the Richard Strauss fanfare associated with "2001: A Space Odyssey", but as an amateur, I know no other works that feature organ and orchestra other than religious works. 

At the end of a decade, or a century, TV stations and networks often compile a list of the 100 most wonderful movies, or songs, or books, or actors.  Well, just compiling a set of things is harmless, and it's an exciting activity that gains the network some viewership. Poor fellows, they probably need the cash.  But, organs?  Why?  This ranking thing is in very poor taste. 

Also, the beauty of the sound of an organ is not proportional to the number of pipes it has.  Organists--- the people who play the organs--- are,  I think, secretly impressed by the size of organs, and can't resist an opportunity to play a really big organ.  But those of us who listen to the darn things are often quite uninterested in the volume of the sound it makes. 

Archie

An Earbug: A Brahms Sextet

For some reason, I listened one day to a Sextet by Brahms.

Sextets are strange animals.  A quartet is a well-defined, well-established musical form, written for the instrument ensemble called a string quartet: 2 violins, a viola, a cello.  Both the genius and the failing of a string quartet is the fact that the four instruments sound so similar.  It's tonally homogenious.  The string quartet is the godfather of all small ensembles, but I suspect the genre is dying from its own popularity. 

Someone got the idea of writing for a string quintet; they just added a viola.  The two violins were called first violin and second violin, and the violas were first viola and second viola.  There are a very few great string quintets, including Boccherini's famous quintet, of whose minuet is famous. 

Brahms decided to write a set of string sextets; these had, in addition to the two violins and two violas, two cellos (or celli).  The one I like the most, and probably the first one I listened to, is the one in B Flat.  Here is a link to one on YouTube:

• https://youtu.be/Yig9hDelRsE

This recording is, I think, the very one I first listened to.  I had been a member of a 'mailing list', a sort of music discussion group, and one of the guys said he was trying to get rid of his vinyl records in favor of CDs, and offered his discs for free.  Of course I jumped at the chance, and one of the items I got was a boxed set of the Brahms sextets. 

The lovely thing about this piece was how it sounds like a discussion among friends.  This is a characteristic of most of the best string ensemble pieces.

OK, I don't have much more to say about this piece.  You might want to listen to a different recording of the same piece, and see if you like it better.

Aims and Objectives

When I first started this blog, I had some fairly clear objectives; they were to support the weekly radio program I used to deliver on WXPI.  The radio station has now become a Web-only station, because we---or they, really, since I don't contribute to them any more--- found it impossible to maintain the transmitter.  Now, I can put anything I want here, since there isn't a radio show to drive it along.  But the problem, for me, at least, with complete creative freedom, is that I can't think of what to create!

The problem I'm facing is common.  If you ask someone to write a tune, any sort of tune they like, or to write a story, with complete freedom, that often leads to a sort of paralysis.  Instead, if you set out certain rules that have to be satisfied, such as that the piece has to be in the key of D minor, and be about 32 bars long with no repeats, or that the story must feature a cat, who gets left behind when the family goes on vacation, it is so much easier to get started on the project. 

At the moment, this blog is completely rudderless, and as a result, you don't see very frequent posts.  I decided that I'm going to establish a theme for a few months; when I run out of posts that follow that theme, I'll set up another theme.  The theme for the next several posts will be: pieces and tunes that are stuck in my head!  After all, the implicit objective that underlies this blog is to make classical music accessible to those who vaguely like music, but don't know enough about it for them to get into it on their own.  If I describe these 'ear-bugs' that keep popping into my head, maybe they'll pop into yours, too!

Okay, the first installment will be tomorrow!

Archie

P.S. : By the way, if you didn't already know this: the image of a goofy- looking guy in period get up on the blog banner is me.  I took a well- known portrait of J. S. Bach, and 'photoshopped' my own face in there.  The photo was from about 15 years ago, so I don't look that good anymore. 

Archie

Musical Talent

I have begun writing to a friend of my childhood, who is now a professor of medicine in Wales!  I told him--- after having waited a decent interval--- about my string quartet, and he readily agreed to listen to the piece, and remarked that I was talented. 

I have to admit that I have a bit of talent, which means I really can't take full credit for anything I create; those who labor to perfect a piece of music, like Beethoven did, deserve far, far more praise than someone who tosses off a piece offhand-ly, like Mozart.  But that doesn't sound right; Mozart has written some of my very favorite pieces. 

Here is a complete list of the pieces I have written:

1. Chorale-prelude on 'Jesu Meine Freude'.
2. Fantasia on 'Starlight Serenade'
3. Mystery Waltz
4. A Polka. (Not really, but that's what I called it!)
5. String Quartet in C major. 

All of these are derivative, by which I mean that they're based on an existing piece, except 4, and 5.  It is hard for me to write something completely original; something that's worth listening to, anyway!  So much for talent.  Bach, for instance: imagine creating a piece of music, like a fugue, that's not only wonderful to listen to, but has all the inner structure that fugues are expected to have!!

So, I really don't have much to say on the topic of talent, except that we have to measure how much praise we give someone for creating something by first discounting what can be attributed to pure talent.  This recalls the parable of the talents, and the summary of that parable: From those to whom much is given, much is expected. 

Archie
 

Noticing Things

This is what I wanted to say when I was talking about Kim's Game!  But I got sidetracked.  (Happens every few hours.)

Thinking back to my teaching days (i.e, before 2017), I realize that I missed a lot of good opportunities.  One of the basic tricks (it's not really a trick, but kids pay attention if you call it a trick) is: to notice things. 

One of the major things I taught was techniques of integration.  If you don't know what integration is, it's a little like being a doctor.  You have an integration problem (which is a math problem that has to be solved), which is your patient.  You first have to assess what kind of integration it is, because what you do next depends on that assessment.  It's like a diagnosis, get it?  You need to find out which way to go.  In math (unlike in medicine) if you go the wrong way, nobody gets sick or dies; you just have to back up, and start again in a different direction. 

Classifying your problem--- the diagnosis--- depends on noticing various little things, just as in medical diagnostics.  Once the doctor notices one thing, there are other related things he or she could look for.  It's exactly the same in mathematics!  Is there a radical of a certain sort?  Is there a logarithm?  An exponential?  A fraction?  A simple substitution you could do?

The good students are already hot on the trail of these critters.  At the time I was teaching, I was so annoyed with the typical students, that I thought: oh let them go screw themselves; they should have picked up a lot of this in Grade 10.

But a lot of things could have gone wrong in Grade 10: athletics---even if the kid was hopeless at it; hormones; a marginal high school teacher; a home environment where there was nobody to help with studying; all sorts of problems.  If I had gone just a tiny bit outside my lane, and helped my students with the FOIL rule, for instance,  which is something they learn in 6th or 7th Grade, they might have kissed the ground I walked on!  Well, that's going too far; I walked on some pretty dirty ground.

When I was thinking about this post, I wondered whether the whole concept of noticing things might be a pretty universal performance aid.  Does critical reading require noticing certain things?  Does debugging faulty code in a program involve noticing certain things?  It seem to me that even getting the benefit of a video clip a teacher shows a class requires noticing things.  This is huge. 

Notice things, young people.  No pressure. 

Arch

Harmonica Harmony

When I was a kid, I was given a so- called "mouth organ", which was the term, where I grew up, for the gadgets known in these parts as a harmonica.  These things were everywhere, at one time, but they're getting to be a curiosity.  Bob Dylan played one, so did John Lennon. 

When I learned to play one, it was considered a great achievement---briefly.  After a while, the constant racket of the thing got on my family's nerves, until I went off to boarding school---a humble school, not at all the same thing as the luxury institutions we find around here---and it became the responsibility of the school authorities to moderate my explorations with the harmonica.  Then, along came A Hard Day's Night, that miraculous introduction to the Beatles and their music. 

I lost no time learning to play I should have known better, a lovely soft rock song that featured the harmonica, and my friends and I sang it all the time, for a year.

It's time to get into the meat of this post. 

You can either Blow into a harmonica, or Suck.  Blowing produces a nice chord, in the key of the harmonica; mine was in C, and you'd get a bold, brassy C chord:

C E G C E G ...

and so on, depending on how many octaves your harmonica had.  A typical kid harmonica had three. 

If you sucked in, you also got a chord, but not one of the common (major or minor) chords, but a more sophisticated chord.  Rather than give you its name, I'll give you the notes:

B D F A B D F A ...

When I first learned music theory, I learned a whole lot of major chords, which I and my fellow-students played on a piano. Then I learned a whole lot of minor chords. Then, on certain (root) notes, I learned seventh chords. The most heavily-used one was the dominant seventh, GBDF.  In a pop song in the key of C major, you could do quite well if you just knew C major, F major,  G major, and G major dominant seventh.  In the quest for brevity, pop musicians called that last chord G^7th, but there are many seventh chords on the root of G.  Pop musicians don't need to know those, so they don't; it is The Way, as the Mandaloreans would say.  But if you were Elton John, you'd know all the chords on the root of G. 

The peculiar chord you get by sucking in on a harmonica is also a seventh, but not one of the common ones.  Since you can only either blow into the harmonica, or suck on the thing, there are only two chords, and this sucking chord is actually quite a clever choice, and in fact the only possible choice.  You could play a huge number of tunes with those two chords, and of course that's what we did.

In smaller harmonicas, all the way at the left end, if you blew, you would actually get a low G.  Oddly enough, if you sucked, guess what?  You would also get a G!  So, for complete disclosure, the chord you get if you blew is actually

G C E G C E G C E G C,

and if you sucked, instead, you'd get

G B D F A B D F A B D F A.

You would think that this would give you a horrible discord!  In fact, though, you get one of the most glorious chords of all, called a chord of the ninth.  This chord of the ninth on G,  GBDFA, is an important chord in 19th- century music; in fact you hear it all the time in Strauss waltzes!  In The Beautiful Blue Danube, in the introduction, it is the third chord you hear.  (Not on G, but the key of the piece.  The introduction is in A, if I remember right.)

Now, once that low G is added, we can call this chord of which I speak, the ninth on G, or the dominant ninth of C major.  But even without the G, the chord is the seventh on the chord BDF, which is a diminished chord.  We do not call it a diminished seventh, which is the name of a significantly different chord (OK, I'll tell you what it is, since you might not be able to sleep if I didn't: it's B D F FlatA.  The extra Flat makes it a note not strictly in the key of C major.)  Honestly, I don't know the common name for that chord---BDFA---in popular music.

OK, I  need to take a nap now.

The Passion according to Matthew, by J. S. Bach

This work is one of Bach's greatest creations; and tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, when according to the New Testament record, the Last Supper took place.

Those who are familiar with the story know that a lot was going on that night.  When Bach wrote the great opening chorus of the Passion, this was one thing that he managed to put into it: the sense that a lot is going on.  This was for good reason; by the end of Friday, Jesus was dead, the disciples had gone into hiding, Jesus' mother and the other Mary had fled the city, and few of them knew what was going on.

Musically, a huge amount of planning had taken place.  As I've written before, there are two entire orchestras---modest-sized---spatially separated; two organs, and two choirs; and a third choir consisting only of trebles.  That's what Bach wanted; whether it was performed this way in his lifetime, we don't know.  (We do know that Mendelssohn staged a festival version of the Passion in 1832, which kicked off a Bach revival.)

If you're new to this work, and you get an uncomfortable sense of restlessness and foreboding, that's intentional.

In addition, the text of that first chorus does not present any part of the story; it only invites 'The Daughters of Zion' to come and mourn.  I only know that this group of women---or this woman---is a symbolic representation of the Hebrew Nation.

While the daughters are mourning, the third choir, the Ripieno Trebles, are quietly intoning a chorale: Oh lamb of god unsullied.  Altogether [this opening chorus] is an incredible achievement, that batters the listener for some 8 minutes.  I recommend the performance conducted by Wolfgang Gonnenwein, of around the 1980s.

In certain parts of the world, at certain times, on Good Friday they have a three hour service.  This was the case when I was growing up; it was a 3- hour meditation, but kids were permitted to leave after one hour, provided they kept perfectly quiet in the churchyard.  It appears that this choral St Matthew Passion is in the same tradition, to force the congregation to engage with the horrors of those hours.  It was considered to difficult for one minister to lead the entire meditation (When I was a kid), so they had a tag- team of three clergymen lead it in rotation.

In Bach's tradition, the Passions took the action through the crucifixion, to the point where the body is left in the grave.  And that's what we hear in this work.  The multiple choirs take leave of Jesus, each part in turn.

Bach's Birthday!!

Due to an inconvenient accident of history, we're not sure of Bach's actual birth date; I illegally use this fact as license to celebrate his birthday on the Spring Equinox, or rather, the 21st of March!  The actual Equinox is (very slightly) variable from one year to the next, for reasons that sound highly dubious to me, so I stubbornly and unilaterally decide that it shall be on March the 21st.  (This is one of the few instances where scientists---particularly astronomers---are more a nuisance than a help.)

In some ways, it's rather a blessing that Bach is no longer with us.  When it came to music, he got tunnel vision; this led to many, many serious arguments during his life, so that we could not pretend that he was a nice guy while he was alive.  He also had, like, a million kids (well, about 19 or twenty that survived their childhood, anyway), which would give the sweetest man a poor temper.  (I get this from hearsay, because I have only one kid.)

He was one of the most important---probably the most influential, in my opinion---musicians in Western music.  He wrote some really fantastic pieces, but much of Bach is an acquired taste.  Still, few pieces by Bach would sound truly strange to modern listeners.

I'm going to take this opportunity to point readers toward some of my Bach favorites that I haven't highlighted on this blog; or at least don't remember highlighting on this blog!!

Italian Concerto, movement 2.  This is not an earth-shattering piece; it is charming, and calm and tuneful, characteristics that I appreciate greatly as I sample the waters of septuagenaria.

Brandenburg Concerto 6 in B Flat.  This set of 6 concertos are Bach's crowning contributions to the genre of the concerto grosso.  This post isn't intended to be educational, so I'll explain what concerti grossi (?) are another time, but the 6th Brandenburg is in a class by itself.

Ouverture (or Orchestral Suite) no. 4 in D: Gigue.  Everyone knows Handel's Watermusic Suites; or at least everybody used to, back when I was a kid.  Well, the last two of Bach's orchestral suites give Handel a run for his money.  They're grand, and brassy, and amazingly jolly---you wouldn't expect Bach to have written stuff like this.  (Actually Bach did; it's just not common knowledge.). If you like this piece, and you're not familiar with Handel's Royal Fireworks Music, you ought to try those next.

If you're a choral singer, you just have to listen to 'Cum Santo spirito' from the Mass in B minor, which will knock your socks off.  (Of course, if you don't like loud brassy music, maybe you should stay away from it.  It is the last line of the Creed, and the tradition was to shout it out at top volume.)

I'm filled with gratitude that I know enough about Bach to evangelize like this!  Well, that's Bach for you; he makes us all spread the word about his music!

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