Unlikely Revolutionary

           

Coastside Community Orchestra's spring concert is Saturday, May 9, at Coastside Lutheran Church, 900 Cabrillo Highway, Half Moon Bay. The program includes music of Schubert, Bizet, Saint-Saëns and the unlikely revolutionary, Gioacchino Rossini.

             Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) Overture to The Barber of Seville (1816)

            Most people would be astonished at the idea that Figaro, the Barber of Seville, could have had any political influence away from the opera house. Equally surprising would be the suggestion that Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) were revolutionary in any way other than musically.

            Yet both Rossini’s opera “The Barber of Seville” and Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” were based on plays of the same name by Pierre de Beaumarchais, plays which Napoleon called “the revolution in action”—because of their egalitarian treatment of servant and master.

            The French playwright de Beaumarchais supported the American Revolution and even personally arranged to ship arms from France for 25,000 American soldiers.

            “The Barber of Seville” was written in less than two weeks, Rossini’s normal time frame for his productions. The overture does not contain themes from the opera itself, possibly because Rossini had previously used it for three other operas, “Elisabetta”, “Aureliano” and “L’Equivicato Stravaganti”. “Barber” also used arias and ensembles from yet another Rossini work, “La Cambiale de Matrimonio,” written in 1810.

            From 1811 5o 1818, Rossini staged at least three operas a year. By 1829, he had written at least 39 such works.

            Although opera seems to have been mere business as usual for Rossini, his fellow musicians greatly admired his work. Schubert in particular was influenced by Rossini, and Beethoven admired his music.

            Rossini retired at age 37, a wealthy man, at the time of his greatest popularity. He never wrote another opera and in fact composed very little for the rest of his life—39 more years—though he continued to be honored throughout the western world as the grand old man of music.

                       

Why Was the "Unfinished" Unfinished?

I've been writing program notes for the Coastside Community Orchestra concert May 9, and thought it might be fun to post them in advance. Why Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, Number Seven or Number Eight, depending, remained unfinished is one of those music mysteries which has always invited speculation, and sometimes downright fiction. Here's my take on it. (The concert will be at 7 P.M. at Coastside Lutheran Church, 900 Cabrillo Highway, Half Moon Bay.)

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Symphony in B Minor, D. 759 “Unfinished”

            Franz Schubert himself said that he was born for no other purpose than to make music. And make music he did, producing in his short life 19 string quartets, 21 piano sonatas, 600 songs, ten operas, seven masses, volumes of work for piano solo and piano duet, and nine or ten symphonies including the “Unfinished.”

            Harold Schonberg says in Lives of the Great Composers that Schubert “seemed content to pour out page after page of music, whether or not it was performed.” He left no estate—no property or progeny-- except for music manuscripts scattered all over Vienna. Robert Schumann discovered Schubert’s unplayed ninth symphony, the so-called “Great C Major” in a box left at a brother’s house, and Felix Mendelssohn conducted the world premiere of the work in 1839, eleven years after Schubert’s death.

            Schubert was the twelfth of 14 children and became a boy soprano in Vienna’s court chapel at the Imperial and Royal Academy, where he received his musical education. He never traveled far from Vienna. By the age of eleven, he was already a prolific composer. He may not have had quite the gravity of his contemporary, Beethoven, but no one could resist the singular beauty of his melodies and the startling innovations in his key-shifting harmonies. The house concerts—Schubertiades—arranged by his friends were famous.

            The original seventh symphony, in E major, was sketched out in 1821 and was never completed, so the B Minor work done in 1822 became Number Seven. Number nine, the symphony unearthed by Schumann, was written in the last year of Schubert’s life. Another symphony known as the Gmunden-Gastein (for two places Schubert had spent summer vacations) has been lost, though some elements may have been used in the Great C Major.

            Just why the Seventh remained unfinished has been the subject of much creative speculation. The symphony was dedicated to the Graz Musical Society which had just nominated Schubert, and in 1822 the composer left it in the hands of a member, who apparently laid it aside and never delivered it to the society. Since Schubert lived six years after that, composing all the while, chances are that he—and the friend—simply forgot about the symphony, or that the friend lost the last two movements.

            Schubert was a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral and died of typhoid a year later at the age of 31. He was buried beside Beethoven in what today is called Schubert Park, in Vienna.

            In 1894 Franz von Suppé (“Light Cavalry Overture,” “Poet and Peasant,”etc.) wrote an operetta, “Franz Schubert,” which one reviewer described as “wonderful biographical kitsch based on Schubert tunes,” and in 1916 another musical play loosely based on Schubert’s life had its premiere in Vienna, setting words to his famous melodies. Known as “Blossom Time” in the adaptation by Sigmund Romberg, the musical was wildly successful.

            Although classicists may have cringed at the popularized treatment of Schubert’s music, the operetta did in fact accomplish posthumously Schubert’s hopes of writing for the stage, and the play’s success was due almost entirely to the beauty of Schubert’s unforgettable melodies.

(Watercolor by Howard Gilligan, from Julius Schmid's 1897 painting of a Schubertiade.) 

Yesterday's Darling?

            Say you had a device which had been proven to make you smarter. It could teach little kids numbers and letters; it could teach big kids math and physics. Say it was made of organic material, had a shelf life of a hundred years, could work without batteries or electricity. Wouldn’t you want such a thing around, whether or not you could use it to play music?

            Last year I was on the losing end of a much-publicized argument over so-called performance art which involved burning a perfectly good piano. This week I had two calls from people wanting to get rid of their pianos. “To a good home,” they said, as if pianos were kittens. The problem is that nobody seems to want the pianos, and nobody seems to know what to do with them. Some of them are turning up in landfill or being placed on the street for anybody to play.

            And people do play them. People come and listen to them play. But why aren’t they taking the pianos home?

            I know I have an extreme view. My grand piano in the small front room takes up the space some people might want for a proper sofa, a coffee table or a big-screen television. I am prejudiced in favor of pianos, which are so much more than musical instruments. I think every home and every classroom should have a piano, whether or not anyone plays or plans to play.

            Electric keyboards have their place—I have a couple and have given away a dozen-- but they are not pianos.  There are real pianos, and then there are mechanical pianos. If you have no choice, living in an apartment with thin walls or needing something portable, then the keyboards are something, though they need power, don’t blend with other instruments, and only sound like pianos if you are next door. A real piano changes with the weather. It is capable of nuance. It goes in and out of tune. It is a living thing.

            There was a time in Europe and America when everyone except the poorest of the poor could play at least a little piano music. Playing was considered a social grace; it made young women more marriageable and young men more attractive. Arthur Loesser in Men, Women and Pianos writes about the piano’s role in social history.

            But pianos are going begging any more. I have not been able to learn whether “Send a Piana to Havana”, a mission started by a Berkeley piano tuner, Ben Treuhaft, is still operating. Treuhaft arranged for unwanted pianos to be shipped to Cuba, which had more players than instruments. The documentary film “Buena Vista Social Club” underscores the Cuban passion for music and the need for instruments.

            My former student Lauren told me about  a national database for free pianos, http://www.pianoadoption.com/. Thousands of people are trying to get rid of their old pianos, and yet a new Steinway B will cost $110,990 next year, Mason and Hamlin pianos appreciate at 4.5 percent per year, and a new Bösendorfer will cost you $175,000 right now. I could almost swear to you that those pianos are being purchased by people who had some kind of piano around when they were little.

            I worry about people born around the turn of this century never achieving mastery in anything. The ones I know are smart enough, loyal, even passionate, but they can barely read and write (judging from Facebook) and  few of them can stay with anything voluntarily for more than a few minutes. Maybe they can bang out a few root-position chords on a Casio keyboard, but very few of them can play a Bach Invention.

            Video games and sports are not much comfort when times are tough, but music can always be your consolation through thick or thin, and the ability to plan an instrument will last a lifetime, as the neurologist and pianist Oliver Sachs has documented in Musicophilia and other books.

            Even if that old upright is gathering dust and making you feel guilty for not playing it, isn’t it an art object in itself? People staging houses for real estate sales often want to borrow a harp or piano for just that reason. The top of an upright is even better than a mantel for displaying photographs and family treasures and the rack can old an open album for display. Piano benches themselves are so useful that they disappear virtually on their own.

            If there’s a piano around, any toddler will try to play it, will make a personal voyage of discovery with those keys. Whether or not that toddler becomes a music prodigy, music will have a special meaning for him all his or her life. It’s not too late for you. Keep your piano. Sooner or later somebody will show up and play it. It might be wonderful. You might love it.

Fat Cats and Meta-Music

Many years ago, Michael Marcus came up with a jingle for remembering the order of sharps in music: Fat Cats Go Down Alleys Eating Baloney. If a piece has one sharp, it will be F# (Fat); if two, then F# and C# (Fat Cats) and so forth. For the order of flats, one simply says the jingle backward: Baloney Eating Alleys Down Go Cats Fat or B-flat, E-flat, and so forth.

For reasons we don’t need to explore for now, nine of the twelve musical tones can be called by more than one name, disregarding double-sharps and double-flats. For instance, A-sharp (A#) is the same sound as B-flat. The name for this relationship is enharmonic spelling; same sound, different name.

All this is leading up to a marvelous image for memorizing musical key signatures, which tell us which notes are used in the twelve major and twelve minor scales of western tonal music. Most musicians know the Circle of Fifths, and you can’t get through freshman theory without memorizing your key signatures, but the image in question takes you into the area of meta-music. When I showed it to my piano duet partner, John Maxwell, he said “So there is order in the universe after all.”

 

Here’s how it goes. Look at an old-fashioned (analog) clock and note the twelve positions for the small hand. Fold a piece of paper in two, then two again, and then in thirds. When you open the paper, you should have twelve folds (or you can draw a circle and divide it into twelve parts.) Copy the numbers from the clock onto your paper, with 12 at the top, one in the next wedge to the right, and so forth.

Beginning at the one o-clock position, write in a letter G. In the next wedge to the right, write in a letter D. Then continuing with the Fat Cats jingle, continue lettering until you come to B at the five o-clock position. Continue labeling the wedges with letters from the jingle, this time adding “sharp” to the name. So at the six-o’clock position you will have F-sharp, at the seven o’clock position, C-sharp, and so forth, through B-sharp (Baloney) at the twelve o-clock position.

Translating: The key of G major (one o’clock) has one sharp. The key of D major (two o’clock) has two sharps. Continuing clockwise or to the right, you will reach seven sharps at C-sharp.

Since normal musicians try not to deal with more than seven sharps, on the next key, we will spell the key enharmonically. Thus G-sharp becomes A-flat, D-sharp becomes E-flat, A-sharp becomes B-flat, E-sharp becomes F, and B-sharp becomes C at the twelve o’clock position.

You can back up and spell B, F-sharp and C-sharp enharmonically as well. These three keys are commonly spelled one of the two ways. Reading around the Circle to the left or counter-clockwise, the key of F (enharmonically E-sharp, at the eleven o-clock position) has one flat. If you continue to the left, saying your Fat Cats jingle backward, you’ll run into the key of B (five sharps) or C-flat (seven flats), F-sharp with six flats, same sound as G-flat with six flats, and C-sharp (seven sharps), same sounds as D-flat with five flats. Now you have all the key signatures of the twelve keys as well as the names of the sharps or flats used in their scales. Only the three keys at the bottom of your circle, B, F-sharp and C-sharp are in common use with either of their two names apiece.

If we were crazy enough to construct theoretical major scales beyond C-sharp major with its seven sharps, G-sharp major would have eight sharps. F would become a double-sharp (Fx) and the other sharps would follow the jingle: C-G-D-A-E-B. Spelling the remaining meta-keys, double sharps would be added in the exact order normal sharps were added. At the twelve o-clock position in the meta-key of B-sharp major, we would have a key with twelve sharps: Fx,Cx,Gx,Dx,Ax, E-sharp and B-sharp. Spelled enharmonically, of course, it is a plain old C major scale, C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C.

The only flaw in the image is that when first labeling your wedges, you must remember to start your jingle with a G (or “Go”), not F or C.

All this will be incomprehensible to non-musicians, who might well ask why you need this information in the first place. Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man” has the band play “Minuet in G”. If you know about key signatures, you’ll know what it means to play a minuet in G.

Church Music

J.S. Bach got in trouble in the 1700s for showing an unchaperoned young lady the pipe organ in the choir loft. I didn’t get in trouble when a young church organist showed me the Allen organ in the choir loft Tuesday evening, but I did get a bit winded from climbing three flights of stairs.

            Nicodemus and I, finding ourselves without a Christmas gig for the first time in memory, volunteered to play for caroling at our church in San Francisco.

            Music at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox is almost exclusively Byzantine chant, as it is in almost all Orthodox churches. A number of Russian composers have made beautiful settings of the liturgy’s 11^th-century words, but church choirs find the music daunting and mostly stick to the ancient modal chants. Some Orthodox churches still use the primitive notation called neumes, music writing which looks a little like some kind of pasta.

            The choir accompanist is the only organist we hear at church, so I met the wedding organist for the first time when he came over while we were playing to see if there was a way to open up the little Rippen piano to get more sound (there wasn’t.)

            After the carols and the treats—you can imagine the spread a Greek church calls snacks--we got to talking about organs and the young man, George, said he had selected the instrumental sounds for the church’s organ, an Allen, when it was being built. Organists usually sound a little apologetic when they speak of electronic organs (as opposed to pipe organs,) though the serious electric ones have a wonderful sound and don’t depend on hard-to-find pipe repairmen.

            “Would you like to see it?” he asked.

            “Oh, yes,” I said. I have never been in the choir loft, which has its own beautiful mosaics of Saint Kassiani and other hymn composers.

            “Oh, it’s just like the one our local orchestra used for the Saint-Saëns organ concerto a little while back,” I said, still a little out of breath.

            “Oh, wow,” the organist said, and immediately launched into the famous theme on full organ with every pedal stop depressed, hands and feet moving happily, drowning out the taped chanting which goes on downstairs all the time and probably terrifying a few sleeping pigeons on the roof.

            “Oh, my goodness,” I said,  overwhelmed. Saint-Saëns was a universe—and ten centuries—away from the five-note Kyrie Eleisons we usually hear in church.

            “What does your trumpet sound like?” I asked.

            He whipped out a computer card, did some sleight-of-hand, and played the Jeremiah Clarke Trumpet Voluntary, full organ, pedals. I reached over his right hand and joined the fun up on the high notes.

             I got all the way home before I remembered that there’s a closed circuit TV camera on all the time at church so that people can look at their computers to see the mosaics and listen to the chanting if they need a quiet moment. I do it myself from time to time when I can’t sleep.

            If anybody was watching Tuesday evening, they wouldn’t have seen anything different, but they would have heard a lot of organ music which was anything but Byzantine.

The Music Mystique

 I have been searching in vain for a music theory book which would be good for a couple of bright young instrumentalists who want to know more about the architecture of music but who don't yet need college-level theory and harmony. The next several blogs are what resulted. We had to write our own book, the kids and I. It is called

The Music Mystique

Basic Music Theory

Did you know that musical rhythm is based on your own heartbeat and breathing rate? Or that the scale, the basic building block of music, is actually based on the physics of sound? Did you know that every human being has these musical elements built in, and that this fact can be proven? That some people believe the Big Bang which started the universe was actually a dissonant chord? That everything in creation from the atom to Jupiter vibrates and thus has a sound?

The Nineteenth Century composer Robert Schumann called music a bridge to the unknown. Music theory shows the construction of that bridge. Because it encompasses history, anthropology, physics, mathematics and languages, knowing something about music theory reinforces all these other fields. Understanding basic theory, you can learn the rudiments of reading music in less than an hour, can play three chords and a melody...all it takes for some folks to be country music performers or rock stars!           

There are hundreds of music theory books in print, many of them college-level books which include music history and advanced analysis. There is a Music Theory for Dummies which, despite its unfortunate title, may tell you more than you really wanted to know about music theory. The theory books which accompany instrumental method series mostly refer to applied theory.

You probably already know a lot of music theory intuitively, since you have been listening to music all your life. My primary goal in teaching music theory is to provide a vocabulary and to demonstrate the elegance of  the traditional customs which lie behind the music you know and love. This little book is intended for the music student who has played an instrument for several years and is interested in learning more about the order behind the music he or she is playing.

There are several good on-line sources for basic theory information: Music Theory Pro, an application for iPhone and iPad, lets you test yourself in various areas of theory. An invaluable web site, updated daily, which tells you everything you wanted to know about music theory is found at http://www.teoria.com/index.php.

The neuroscientist Daniel J. Levin is among those who have used magnetic imaging to show the positive way music affects the brain. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Levin says “By better understanding what music is and where it comes from,, we may be able to better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories, and even communication in the broadest sense.” The neurologist and music lover Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia says that all people are hard-wired to love music and that the ability to sing or play an instrument creates positive physical changes which last a lifetime.

Music Guilt

Do my old piano students hide when they see me coming down the street? I am convinced that they do. Why else would I live in a community of 30,000 and hardly ever see one of the thousands who have sat at my piano and said “I played it better at home”?

When I made my excuses for not practicing enough, my piano teacher would say “I’m so sorry” and then give me an unforgettable lesson on some aspect of my assignment which did not involve much playing on my part.

At some point in my 50-year teaching career, I got the idea of the graceful exit. I had already made myself the student’s ally in situations where clearly it was time for the lessons to end.

“Pleasing your parents is a legitimate reason to take some lessons, but I can see you aren’t enjoying it very much.”

“Would you like me to get you out of this?”

“We can still be friends. You can come to see me without having to play piano.”

“You have accomplished quite a lot during this time, so you should feel good about that rather than feeling bad that we’re stopping here.”

On one occasion, I presented a teen-ager who was quitting lessons with a certificate of accomplishment, a prize ribbon and pin, a list of her repertoire, and suggestions for pieces she might enjoy playing on her own. I never heard from her or saw her or her parents again, though they live in my neighborhood.

Piano teachers become attached to their students, and occasionally the attachment goes both ways. I am still in touch with a few of my former students. But for the most part, once they quit lessons, they are gone. I have only discontinued lessons a few times without being asked to do so by parents or students, once because of persistent rudeness and the other times because of persistent absenteeism. So I think I am dealing with music guilt most of the time.

Of course they should have practiced more, and so should I. I hate to think what my poor mother went through to get me to practice. The final incentive was the threat to end the lessons if I didn’t practice, and that one always got me to the piano. I am not a very good example when it comes to practice, but if I total up all the hours I have spent at the piano, it certainly would surpass the 10,000 hours the experts now say it takes to really learn a skill. (Notice that I do not say “master” a skill.)

I left my teacher only when he moved to a rest home which had no piano. At my last lesson, he couldn’t even remember my name, but he remembered that we were fond of each other, and he remembered all the page turns in the Chopin Scherzo I was studying. He got up from his chair across the room and turned the pages for me.

It is possible that my students’ lessons were not all that important to them, that they were just one more activity, that they were like a sixth grade English class or something, where you would go on your way and never feel the need to stay in touch. But piano lessons are one-to-one, not one-to-thirty. Piano teachers and their students know a lot about each other. They might still have something to say to each other even after the lessons are over.

(The Seal of Approval, above, appears on all my students' assignment sheets.)