If one should admit to having a favourite breakup song, this is mine. There are so many things I love about this song, I have to make a flypaper thoughts style list to encompass some of them.
The piano intro
In fact, the piano part throughout the song
The vocals, opening with a mumbled groan, as though it physically hurts to sing this song
The deep huskiness of Pappademas' voice
The way the refrain gets progressively more intense as the song goes on
This lyric: "I am curled on one side of the bed / in a motel six with my independence"
This description: "the low sky hangs in God's own noose"
Part of my love of chamber music comes from the fact that I played in a string quartet all through college. This quartet was the first piece I learned with that wonderful group of women and it was of the pieces we performed together on our senior recital, so also one of the last pieces we played together. Even if I didn't love it for those memories, I would still be fond of it for the wonderful weaving of harmony and melody, and the way the instruments call and respond to one another.
Another Mountain Goats song which demonstrates John Darnielle's casual brilliance as a lyricist. I mean, just look at the last three lines of the final verse:
The scene ends badly as you might imagine In a cavalcade of anger and fear There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.
On the first day of Advent, here is my favourite piece of Christmas music. It is played ever year at end of Central Congregational Church's carol service, so I grew up hearing it played by a fabulous local cellist with the excellent name of Daniel Harp, who would later be one of my chamber music coaches when I was at university. In 2020, the church's carol service was recorded--you can hear it being played at the end of the video of the service (it starts at 53:41). There's something magical about the way it sounds in that space.
For such a beautiful piece, this seems to be relatively difficult to find on Youtube. Here is another recording.
In university music theory classes, you do courses on ear training, where you learn to transcribe the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of music that you hear. This is as difficult as it sounds (I was always very bad at it), but I loved how it challenged me to pay attention to what I was hearing. My appreciation for rhythmic dictation, in particular, was enhanced by one of our guest lecturers, the incredible violinist and composer, DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain), who spoke with his violin in hand, playing to demonstrate his points. He spoke passionately and enthusiastically about the beauty and rhythmic complexity of hip hop. Years later, when I heard 'He's a Mental Giant', I thought of that lecture. It was such a joy to experience. So is this song.
Today is Thanksgiving, so let's have some music inspired by the United States.
The Czech composer Antonín Leopold Dvořák composed his string quartet in F Major, Op. 96, in the summer of 1893, which he spent in Spillville, Iowa. Scholars have struggled to identify specific folk music or songs in the quartet, but Dvořák himself spoke of his fascination with American music, especially Black American music. The Black composer Harry Thacker Burleigh, who studied at the National Conservatory in New York City, met Dvořák there during the composer's visit to the United States, and introduced him to spirituals, the religious folk songs created by Black Americans during enslavement.
I played this quartet in college--it is some of the most fun I've ever had learning and performing a piece of music. In honour of that experience, here is a performance by an excellent student quartet at the American chamber music festival Kneisel Hall.
This is one of my very favourite contra dance tunes. It makes me think of walking by the ocean on a calm summer's day, watching the light sparkle on the water.
The last live performance I saw before the pandemic shut everything down was Opera North's production of Turn of the Screw. The plot of the opera is based on a novella by Henry James, about an unnamed governess who cares for two children, Miles and Flora, in a house that may or may not be haunted. Ghost stories suit opera and operas suit ghost stories. Turn of the Screw is splendidly unsettling.
Miles' aria 'Malo, malo' is one of the eeriest bits. Enjoy.
PS The lyrics Miles is singing are half in Latin, half in English. For an interesting discussion of the meaning behind them, see this article by Valentine Cunningham (which makes me want to listen to the Bad Gays podcast episode on Benjamin Britten.)
My knowledge of popular music is mostly bounded by what was on the radio in the early 2000s. When I was in middle school, one of the bus drivers always turned it up for Eminem, and in my teens, there was the dance floor at chamber music camp.(Italicized for the hilarity, but in all honesty, the people who controlled that playlist had great taste in dance music.) Further exposure came when I was in university, through the long and varied playlists my frat brothers would put on while we hung out or played pool on Friday evenings. Lady Gaga was usually added to those playlists, and I can never hear songs like 'Bad Romance', 'Poker Face', 'Just Dance' or especially 'Edge of Glory' without thinking fondly of that time in my life.
When I was a young teenager, there would always be a few days each summer where my parents drove to western Massachusetts to attend concerts at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We would have a family picnic on the lawn and then we would hear some of the world's best classical musicians perform live, which is a good way to fall in love with classical music.
We went to a number of BSO performances (one of those concerts was the first place I heard the Dvorak violin concerto, though I can't remember who was playing). But the performance that stands out in my memory was a chamber music concert. One year, my family and I were in the audience when the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt played an all-Brahms programme. It was one of those magical performances where time stops and everything but music ceases to matter. It made such a deep impression on me that I was saddened to see Lars Vogt's obituary in the New York Times earlier this year.
Two weeks before he died, Vogt played Brahms' first violin sonata with Tetzlaff, on an electric piano in his hospital room. In a beautiful tribute to his friend and collaborator, Tetzlaff said,
For both of us, Brahms felt so close. He was there in moments of deep
emotion. Maybe because he doesn’t seem as superhuman as some other
composers, or as addicted to desperation, but instead—to quote his
requiem—says, “I will console you, as one is consoled by a mother.” It’s
something that resonates even in the darker Brahms works. He isn’t
trying to be bigger than us; he wants to be with us. Brahms is
the composer who connected Lars and I the most all these years and who
allowed us to say goodbye in such a beautiful way.
Tetzlaff and Vogt recorded the Brahms violin sonatas in 2016, and their label has released the recordings on Youtube. Here they are, playing that first violin sonata.
The first movement, vivace ma non troppo (lively but not too much)
The second movement, adagio (slow)
The third movement--allegro molto moderato (very moderately fast)
The possessor of an extremely euphonious name, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote extremely euphonious music. Scheherazade is a three-movement orchestral suite based on One Thousand and One Nights; I had the pleasure of learning and performing it when I was a member of the Oxford University Orchestra, in 2009-2010.
It was one of the best orchestras I've ever played in, and consequently one of the best musical experiences of my life.What I particularly remember is that the OUO woodwind players (that is, the instruments who sit at the middle of the orchestra--flute, clarinet, oboe, English horn, bassoon, etc) were excellent. Student and amateur orchestras will often have a lot of decent string players (enough to drown fumblers like myself out) by virtue of the fact that lots of people learn to play these instruments. (To be fully accurate, I should say that lots of people learn to play the violin; amateur orchestras typically aren't overrun with violists or double bassists.) Fewer people have the opportunity to learn to play woodwind instruments, they are difficult to play well, and orchestral woodwind sections are usually very small. Which is to say that any mistakes of timing or intonation woodwind players make are much, much more exposed than similar sloppiness by string players. Classical composers often write important melodies or harmonies for woodwind instruments, so it really makes a difference when the players are good.
There's so much amazing writing for woodwinds in Scheherazade and for the whole orchestra. I love the violin solo in the first movement...the whole piece is just so fun much to hear. It's even more fun to play. When I was in OUO, the viola section sat in the middle of the stage, between the cellos and violins, and in front of the woodwinds. Being a violist in our performance of Scheherazade was like being in the centre of the sea.
It's not Advent quite yet, but the Christmas lights lining the High Street were turned on this week and are brightening our long, dark evenings. That makes today a good day for a carol.
"Let All Mortal Flesh" has good memories associated with it. I was in a literary fraternity in college and we had a beautiful grand piano in our common room. In the lead-up to the winter break, some of us would get together to sing Christmas carols, including this one.
The original text is Greek, and late antique, and the melody is a late medieval French folk song. The English translation is from the nineteenth century. Together, they make a magical combination.
Apple Hill is a place that is very, very special to me, in a way that's hard to put into words. Madeline L'Engle, in one of her published journals, describes playing the piano and writing stories in her first studio apartment as part of her deepening. It's hard to say just what exactly she means by that--on the surface of things, it's simply growing up, but also growing up in a way that leads towards curiosity and empathy and love of beautiful things. And Apple Hill was for me a place of deepening. It was where I learned to make music with other people, and music played with other people is always more than music.
Oblivion always brings to mind the following poem.
Special Glasses
I had to send away for them because they are not available in any store.
They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames, but instead of filtering out the harmful rays of the sun,
they filter out the harmful sight of you -- you on the approach, you waiting at my bus stop, you, face in the evening window.
Every morning I put them on and step out the side door whistling a melody of thanks to my nose and my ears for holding them in place, just so,
singing a song of gratitude to the lens grinder at his heavy bench and to the very lenses themselves because they allow it all to come in, all but you.
How they know the difference between the green hedges, the stone walls, and you is beyond me,
yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain do come in, as well as the postman waving and the mother and daughter dogs next door,
and then there is the tea kettle about to play its chord— everything sailing right in but you, girl.
Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen, but not the mosquito, and as water swirls down the drain, but not the eggshell, so the flowering trellis and the moon pass through my special glasses, but not you.
Let us keep it this way, I say to myself, as I lay my special glasses on the night table, pull the chain on the lamp, and say a prayer—unlike the song— that I will not see you in my dreams.
PS I'd forgotten until wrote this post but that same summer my sister and I were playing tangos, a delightful and charming group of women were celebrating their fiftieth birthdays at Apple Hill--one of them wrote about her experiences here.
(My sister and I are the twins playing violin and piano with daylilies in our hair--though I don't remember seeing the bat!)
Peter S. Beagle is probably best known as a fantasy writer, the author of The Last Unicorn and many other delights. His short story "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" is one of those pieces of writing that makes me think of what the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler allegedly said after hearing the young Jascha Heifetz play. "Well, gentlemen, shall we all break our fiddles across our knees?" It's an impossibly perfect story.
I read it in, together with the essay, "My Last Heroes" in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, an anthology of Beagle's essays and short stories. One of his last heroes is Georges Brassens, and he writes so passionately about about falling love with Brassens' songs that I promptly repaired to Youtube to discover them for myself. The songs accompanied me all through my PhD and I still put them on every so often, in the right mood. In truth, my French is exceptionally bad; I depend on translations to understand the lyrics of the songs. A great resource for appreciating Brassens is a wonderful blog byDavid Yendley, which offers English translations and commentary on the songs and what they mean.
There are a few songs that I could share in this month--La mauvais herbe, with its abrupt changes in mood; and Les amoreux des bancs publique, because it's sweet (or as sweet as Brassens ever gets). But I'm picking a third song instead: Le Gorille, which was banned on French radio from its first release in 1952 until 1955.
Le Gorille is an obscene song about a lot of things, among them opposition to capital punishment. The contrast between the between the lively, cheerful music and the acid-black humour of the lyrics amuses me greatly.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: child prodigy, scatalogical letter-writer, and astonishingly prolific composer.
There's nothing like the pleasure of watching a Mozart opera and the Marriage of Figaro is such fun. This particular aria is sung by the title character, Figaro, on discovering that his employer, Count Almaviva, plans to trick him and assert this feudal right to sleep with women on his estate. This is a problem, since the woman in the count's sights is Figaro's finance, Susanna. In Se vuol ballare (which translates to "if you want to dance") Figaro
sings about his determination to thwart the count's plan.
Operas: long on hyperbolic silliness, not long on realism. People really do sing about being mortally wounded for fifteen minutes before expiring, it's glorious. Or they sing gleeful, bouncy, incredibly catchy tunes while plotting the downfall of their enemies. Like so.
This song became one of my favourites during the period of the coronavirus pandemic, from early January 2020 to late December 2021, when I was unable to go home and see my family. Jontavious Willis is a multi-instrumental musician and songwriter from Georgia; I first encountered his music on The Blues is Dead? episode of The Bitter Southerner Podcast.
This song makes me so happy. If you can, I urge you to watch the music video too.
And then, if you enjoyed it, go listen to the entire album, Spectacular Class.
I love sad songs in a major key. It doesn't get much grimmer than the message that everyone dies alone--yet this message is transformed into something hopeful, even joyful, by the quiet beauty Mississippi John Hurt's singing and playing.
It's hard to write about this song. I first encountered it in 2020 and it means a lot to me.
The road to me hearing and loving this song involved the first several months of the pandemic and a Bitter Southerner podcast episode on the blues. Listening to the artists and songs mentioned in the episode led me to Last Kind Words. I can't fully explain why it grabbed me and would not let go--part of it is Wiley's incredible voice and the expressive, rhythmic, and complex guitar accompaniment. The lyrics are part of it too--transcriptions vary but the story haunts.
Wiley, with guitarist and singer L.V. (Elvie) Thomas, recorded six songs for Paramount Records, in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930.
Last Kind Words, in particular, is widely regarded as one of the great classics of early American blues, and a number of blues historians, musicologists, and music critics have written about it. I would recommend the following two pieces to anyone who wants to learn more:
AnneMarie Youell Cordeiro's 2011 MA Thesis Geechie Wiley: an exploration of enigmatic virtuosity;
which offers a transcription and analysis of the songs, as well as
historical context and information about the recording process.
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, a 2014 New York Times Magazine article by Jeremiah John Sullivan, an intriguing account of working with blues historian Robert 'Mack' McCormick and researcher Caroline Love to find out more about the lives and stories of both women.
Classical music has a reputation as elitist and inaccessible--and so it can sometimes be. But I also wish that people who felt that classical music isn't for them had the chance to engage with the tremendous variety of classical music that exists: there's such an abundance of genres and instruments. Some music is literally meant to tell stories, to respond to particular events, or evoke particular visual or natural phenomena. Compilations of 'easy listening' classics are a great gateway--and there is so much more to enjoy.
Here is one of the pieces I would share with someone who was curious to learn more about classical music. Scaramouche is a duet for two pianos. The French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), composed this piece at the request of his piano teacher, who wanted something for her students to play at the 1937 International Dog Show in Paris. (This is one of those facts that raises Many Questions. I'm not able to answer them, but I swear I'm not making this up.)
The piano piece is actually a reworking of incidental music Milhaud and written for two plays, one of which featured characters from the theatrical
tradition of commedia dell’arte, a form of European theatre in which the
actors, playing stock characters, improvise a show. In the eighteenth century, French playwrights such as Molière started to write out parts for stock characters like Columbine and Pierrot and Harlequin--one of my favourite historical novels, Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche, is centered around this change. As Maureen Buja writes about the character of Scaramouche:
[He] is a stock clown, serving
sometimes as the servant and sometimes as the henchman. He usually
appeared in black clothing and was often beaten by his master,
Harlequin, both for his boasting and his cowardice.
Milhaud's piece seems to take its title from the place where the plays he was writing for were first performed, the Théâtre Scaramouche, but I think the commedia dell'arte character also factors in.
My twin sister and I played piano from the time we were six until when we graduated from college--as pianists of similar age and ability we played a lot of duets. So many duets. Milhaud's Scaramouche was one of them. I have a photo of us performing this piece inside my violin case--it was a joy to learn and a perform together.
Robert Beaser's Mountain Songs--an arrangement of Appalachian ballads for flute and guitar--is probably my favourite work by a living composer. It was commissioned by Eliot Fisk and Paula Robison, who gave its world premier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. Fisk and Robison recorded the piece a year later, and as a teenager I stole my mother's copy and listened to it over and over again.
One of the things that makes the recording so wonderful is the incredible vocal quality of Robison's performance--her flute sings. I loved what I heard so much that the fortuitous discovery of anthology of Appalachian ballads in my undergraduate university's music library led to me spending a semester break teaching myself to sing as many of the ballads in Mountain Songs as I could. The House Carpenter is the only one I can still sing today.
Anyway, Robison and Fisk's recording is on Spotify, here. Should you lack access to Spotify, Youtube has a few recordings, too.
One of the mindblowing things about teaching university students in the year of Our Lord 2022 is that many of them are too young to remember a world without social media. Meanwhile, I was a few years younger they are now when Youtube was becoming a Big Thing, and I remember the first time I encountered a fan vid for a TV show. The combination of music and clips from the show was absolutely perfect.
The song was Jethro Tull's 'Rare and Precious Chain' and the TV show was Robin of Sherwood. Such a good show, such an excellent song. Here it is.
I should also add: rather unusually for a rock band, Jethro Tull includes a flutist (the flute part is one of key ingredients that make this song so excellent). My mother is a professional flutist and I grew up reading her Flute Talk magazines. One of their issues in the early 2000s had a fabulous profile of the flutist of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson. He seemed amused and delighted to be speaking about his music and career to a bunch of classical musicians.
NB: I'm trying to make sure that all the recordings I'm sharing are from the artists' official channels or have been licensed to Youtube by their record companies--that way they make money from engagement with videos and ad revenue (also, it respects their copyright rights as creators!) However, I want to share the Robin of Sherwood fanvid that introduced me to this song because I enjoy how the creator of the video has matched lyrics and footage from the show. Here it is.
In her book, Heifetz as I Knew Him, Ayke Agus writers about the great violinist's love of 'itsy-bitsies', short but musically rich pieces that could be played as encores or at the end of concerts. There is a great interview where Agus speaks more about these short pieces and her love of them here.
Edward Elgar's Salut D'Amor is one of my favourite of these. It has a lovely story behind it, too: the composer wrote it as an engagement gift for his wife.
Being introduced to great music by a friend is one of the true pleasures of life. When I was in high school, our friend Catherine introduced me and my sister to one of her favourite artists, the incredible American folk musician and songwriter John McCutcheon. I left my CDs at home when I moved to UK, and hadn't listened to McCutcheon for years--until the coronavirus pandemic hit and he played a regular concert over Facebook Live. The three of us got together to listen from three time zones and two countries, sharing our delight in what we were hearing by sending each other text messages.
Today is the New York City Marathon, and so this one also comes with a dedication for everyone who had a difficult day in today's hot and humid weather, and most especially to the back of the back runners finishing in the dark. Step by step, you got this!
Chamber music is a glorious subset of classical music written for small groups of instruments, meant to be played by small groups of friends and family in homes and other intimate spaces. Seeing it performed in a concert hall by professional musicians is one of my favourite things to do. I also adore playing it myself, though I haven't made the opportunity to do so in many years.
There will be more pieces of chamber music to come but let's get this started off with a Mozart piano quartet. The Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478, is something I first heard as a teenager, when I attended a summer camp called Apple Hill. The camp focuses on bringing together people of a ranges of backgrounds and ages to play music together, on the theory that the sort of listening, openness, and responsiveness one learns through making music with others can be applied to making the world a more just and peaceful place. This piece always brings back memories of being fifteen, sitting in the hayloft of an old barn, legs laced through the railings, listening in spellbound wonder as my fellow campers made their instruments sing to each other.
Sometime in the early 2000s, I borrowed a CD of the soundtrack for Shrek (2001) from my local public library. I no longer remember how and why this happened--I'm not sure I had even seen the movie itself at that point--but it's how I first heard this song. It makes me laugh.
One of the things I love about classical music is the complexity and beauty of its structure, and the piece I choosing to share today requires some explanations of those structures. The word passacaglia comes from the Spanish words pasa calle, to walk down the street. It first appears in seventeenth century instrumental music as an interlude between dances or songs and often has the form of a set of variations over a sustained bass line called an ostinato.
The Austrian violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) is known for the way that his music expanded and explored the possibilities of the violin as a musical instrument. This is especially apparent Biber's fifteen Rosary Sonatas, each of which was written to illustrate a different meditation on the life of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Many of them use a technique called scordatura, in which the violinist tunes the strings of their instrument to non-standard pitches in pursuit of different harmonies and textures. The series of sonatas ends with a sixteenth piece, one of the most famous Baroque passacaglias, and one of my favourite pieces of music.
I learned and played this on the viola, so I am giving you a link to a recording by the violist Wenting Kang.
November is National Blog Posting Month! This year, inspire by a wonderful series of posts on John Scalzi's blog Whatever, A Personal History of Music, I'm going to be sharing a song or piece of music that I like each day of the month. Sometimes I'll say something about where I heard the song and why I like it, sometimes I won't.
First up: 'Sea of No Cares', by the Canadian folk rock band Great Big Sea.
This is a song that has been a favourite of mine since, I don't know, 2009? More than ten years, anyway. I first heard it at University and its gentle, lovely melody and message of leaving fear behind have always stuck with me.
