Sonatas for Two Instruments

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I was startled to see that some of my earliest posts on music were no longer very useful, because some of the links to performances on YouTube lead to clips that had been deleted.  Record companies are become ever more reluctant to give away anything for free, even a single cut from a CD, and they hound YouTube (Google) until they ask the person who puts up an identified track on YouTube to remove it.  [The music recording business was notoriously profitable at one time; the ease of ripping CDs and sharing the music is cutting into their profits very dramatically.  Unfortunately for most of us, getting "unfair" profits from things is not objectionable in this society, it is supposedly the very economic foundation of it.]

At one time, only keyboard instruments had sonatas written for them alone; sonatas for any other instruments had a keyboard instrument accompanying the other "soloist".  There were exceptions: Bach, for instance, wrote sonatas for solo violin and solo cello, and later these sonatas were adapted for flute and recorder as well.  (It is possible that Bach wrote original solo sonatas for flute and recorder; I'm not certain.)

It seems reasonable, though, to call a violin sonata with a piano accompaniment a sonata for violin and piano.  The wonderful Sonata in A major by Cesar Franck, certainly, deserves this description.  Here is the fourth movement:



The pianist is not identified on YouTube, but reading the comments we learn that it is (possibly) Pierre Barbizet.  (The arguments in the comments are precisely about the point we are making.)  Isn't it brilliant?  This last movement is exceptionally easy to 'get', because of the close imitation between the two instruments.

J. S. Bach wrote in most of the musical forms in which composers wrote at that time.  I was looking for a good example, and this is what I found: it is a modern transcription for violin and piano of a violin and piano sonata.  It is the last movement, and is in the form of a dance.  Arguably, the modern piano played judiciously is a better partner for the violin in these sonatas in which the two instruments are far more equal in Bach's music than they customarily might have been.  (The sheer joy in performance of the piece is clearly evident on the face of the pianist, though the violinist frowns with concentration most of the time!  One good reason for this is that to obtain a good tone takes a little more work on the violin than it does on a piano, so that the pianist is just a little more at liberty to appreciate the piece.)



In Baroque sonatas, independence of voices was a major value: at the height of its development, Baroque music was written so that every voice was important, and ideally, equally audible in the tapestry of the music.  This being the case, the keyboard part was usually written for two very independent voices--left hand and right hand-- or three partially independent voices: one in the left hand, and two in the right hand, where it is clear the the two voices could be kept moderately independent only with some loss in freedom.  So, ironically, the Baroque violin and piano duo sonatas are actually for three voices.  In the example above, you can clearly hear the main tune of the movement entering three times: the violin, the piano right hand, and the piano bass.

It seems rather a coincidence that both the examples should have this feature of the themes introduced imitatively, but in fact I suspect that it is a rather common device, especially in chamber music.

A brilliant duet for flute and piano is by Francis Poulenc, his flute sonata.  It is more a solo for flute, but the accompaniment is virtuoso grade.  This clip is essentially a sound clip:



Many baroque arias by Bach have an obbligato instrument.  The lovely aria "Qui sedes ad dextram patris" from the Mass in B minor features the voice and the oboe, accompanied by the so-called continuo.  The most important part of the continuo is the bass line, so in effect this is a trio.  The contralto vocalist is Hertha Töpper, whom I have never heard before.  I link to this in preference to the rendering by Kathleen Ferrier only because it is a true video:



[To be continued]

Tom Lehrer

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The songs of one of my heroes, Tom Lehrer, as sung on a little 1967 broadcast in Oslo, Norway, is now out on video.  The first song is about National Brotherhood Week.  The words are utterly non-PC, as the saying goes.  (The Politically Correct lobby has no humor at all; evidently the butts of all sixties jokes are deeply hurt by them.  So those of you who live among potential victims, wear headphones, please.)   The link above gives you a sequence of three or four video clips from the new DVD.

The funniest song of all, is Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.  Also see Pollution, and The Vatican Rag.

I was stunned to learn that he had sung lots of songs for Electric Company, the PBS program for older kids.  Here's him singing Silent E.

Probably one of the jolliest ones is the Chemical Elements Song, in which he lists all the elements know at that time --the middle sixties.  The tune was borrowed from Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan (well, Sullivan, anyway, since Gilbert's lyrics were substituted with Lehrer's words).  In this clip, the enterprising poster has indicated each element in its spot in the Periodic Table.  (The Periodic Table is a listing of the elements in order of number of electrons in the atom, beginning with Hydrogen --one electron.)

aIt strikes me that you might find it handy to have at your fingertips a Periodic Table, to follow along.  Bear in mind that some elements are represented by unexpected symbols; for instance Iodine is represented by I, which makes sense, and Phosphorus with P.  But Lead, to give an example, is represented by Pb, for the Latin word for lead: Plumbum.  Sodium is represented with Na (for Natrium) and Potassium with K (for Kalium).  The very first element in the song is Antimony, which is represented by Sb (evidently the Latin word for Antimony was Stibium.)


Arch  [Revised 2016-9-6]

More Good Old Days: Going Postal by Terry Pratchet

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There's another, huge difference between how businesses were run half a century ago (okay, laugh; brave new world, right?) and how they are run today, and more importantly, by whom.

When the Stock Market was invented, it was a way for entrepreneurs to be connected with development money, essentially directly from investors.  (It used to be the case that you had to get a bank to finance your project, and being under the thumb of a single bank was too difficult, not to mention open to abusive practices.)  You sold a symbolic fragment of your company --called a share--to each of a number of investors, and you paid them a share of your profits.  (You could, in principle, buy back those shares, at the going rate, when you were rolling in dough someday.)

When a better mousetrap began to be successfully marketed, the inventor and his sons (and maybe daughters, if he was soft in the head) would migrate into more of an oversight role, and let younger people, and assistants, take over the actual running of the company.  The Head Family, to coin a phrase, became the nucleus of a Board of Governors, added in some outside experts, a few representatives of the stockholders, a lawyer or two, and they elected you Chairman.  By now your son (or son-in-law, or daughter) was the Manager of the company.  So there was (1) The Board, headed by the original developer, (2) The Stockholders, who had given the money for development, and now simply sat back and raked in the profits, but kept an eye on how the company was run, and (3) the folks in the workshop, who kept churning out the mousetraps.  Of course there were (Appendix 1) marketing folks, who dream up fanciful names for your newer models, do research to choose the best colors for everything, accountants to keep the records, lawyers to make sure you stayed within the law, receptionists, coffee-brewers, etc etc.

Somewhere along the line, companies decided that small companies had it hard.  Big companies were better able to fight to stay alive, and survive the changing fashions of public buying patterns.  Who knew whether mousetraps would sell over the long run?  Better get a share of your biggest competitors: the Cat Breeders, just in case Cats became the fashion.

Once the idea of buying out your competition gained ground, it became the main interest of both the Board, and the Stockholders.  And so a fourth group of people came into being: Upper Management.  Their job was to diversify.  In other words, there were specialists to look after everything that had nothing to do with mousetraps.

One of my favorite authors is Terry Pratchett, a Briton, who writes in a genre that subsumes science fiction, fantasy, and parody.  For his own inscrutable reasons, he has invented a "corner of the universe" in which there is a planet that is shaped like a disc, called Discworld, all the better to emphasize the fact that any resemblance between anything that takes place there and anything happening on a more familiar planet is entirely coincidental.

In one of his more recent books: Going Postal [2004], Pratchett vents his frustration at this changing pattern of corporate governance.  In that book, a company that invents something akin to the Telegraph (but based more on a network of heliograph stations) is bought out by a new management, which drives it into the dust through business practices that one reads about with increasing recognition and mounting fury.  It is a mixture of deceit, financial maneuvering, blackmail (which almost never happens in modern finance, actually;), strong-arming, and murder.  Reading that book makes the forces in modern finance far more transparent than I can make them.  It is nothing if not a simple, funny story, in case my readers begin to suspect that it is a lecture.  Pratchett very occasionally falls into a brief lecturing mode, but in this case, the editorializing is usually confined to maybe a couple of sentences, and then we're back racing through the absolute riot of a story.

The story (spoiler alert!) is as follows: our hero, a confidence trickster named Moist von Lipwig at birth, finds himself on Death Row, but is plucked from oblivion by the Tyrant of the City.  (Tyrant simply means a cross between Mayor and Governor, in this world.  For all intents and purposes, the City may as well be a large country.)  Moist is charged with resuscitating the Postal Service.

Anyone who is impatient with inefficiency is unlikely to be amused by this book.  The first half of the book is essentially a rollicking introduction to the way Pratchett can describe almost mythic inefficiency, as well as a cast of toweringly wacky protagonists.  But, while this is going on, we begin to learn about the vicious crew that "runs" the telegraph company across the way.  Murder, mayhem, fraud, romance, chain-smoking, labor laws, all are paraded before our disbelieving eyes.

Unseen University Stamp

To be perfectly honest, a reader unacquainted with Discworld will be definitely left mildly puzzled by some of the inside jokes.  But only very mildly.  All the more reason to read this one a second time, after you've learned up the private jokes.  They are not very funny, but they have a lovely cumulative effect.  The rules of magic, symbolized by Academia, in turn represented by Unseen University and its breezy Archchancellor, are pretty much What You See Is What You Get.  It seems an enormous waste of time to read all the Discworld books, just to pick up a few inside jokes.

(Incidentally, another marvelous Pratchett story, The Truth constitutes a sort-of prequel to this one.)

Anyhow, to summarize, I recommend Going Postal with all my thumbs and my Big Toe up, as a brilliantly entertaining allegory for all that is wrong with modern business and the modern corporate culture, and its infuriating Too Big To Fail-ness.  The resolutions of all the inconsistencies are too Discworld, and sentimental (and satisfying) to give a hint of direction to resolution of our own real-world problems.  But recognition and understanding are first steps.  Modern Corporations do not represent American Ingenuity anymore; they simply stand for institutionalized greed.  It is a frightening thought that my own pension plan is cradled in the gentle hands of a modern corporation.

(Postscript: Evidently Going Postal was shown as a two-episode TV series in May 2010, something I just learned a minute ago.)

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The Good Old Days!

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When (most) conservatives talk about the good old days, they give the impression that they were better: that's the essence of (cultural, at least,) conservatism.  Keep the old ways.  When liberals talk about the good old days, it's usually to point out how far we've come.  But, of course, what has happened is that the conservatives have had a field day for 30 years, so I guess that would be several field decades, so that things are not as good as a liberal would like.

I'm going to be ambiguous about it; some things are better, some things are worse.

One thing that has changed a lot is everyday life.  For instance, buying groceries.  Of course, prices used to be unbelievably lower, you got a lot of local food from farms close by.  You ate mostly food you cooked at home from scratch, and most folks knew to cook (even the guys, though they kept this kind of a secret).  These days, the prices are higher; the cost of college and the cost of food are the things that go up the fastest.  But there is a lot more variety of food, and it doesn't cost as much as you would expect, once you're used the prices.  How is this?  Some of the food is even half-cooked; you only need to go home and, you know, add water, or whatever.  What has changed?

Enormous trucks.  Enormous farms.  Corporations that get food from all over the world, and sell it to your supermarket.  The people who make the most money out of all this are the big food companies (e.g. Kraft, ConAgra, General Mills, Hormel, Perdue, and the usual suspects), with the trucking companies coming next, the Supermarket chains coming after that, and then the providers of plastic containers and packaging, etc etc.

What about the local farms?  Well, now they're competing with the big farms out west, which means that they have to sell their produce at much lower prices than they would if they got to sell directly to the grocers.  This is a tragedy that is well recognized.  The Economists would say that the small farms were mismanaged and simply ran at a loss.  The rest of use would say that the workers were paid a fair wage, the animals were kept under much more humane conditions, and the food was actually superior.

Another thing that has changed is the roads, and vehicular traffic.  The traffic is heavier, the vehicles are bigger, there are more of them, and they're going a lot faster, and it is more dangerous.  In addition, of course, people are actually conducting phone conversations while they drive.  On the other hand, more people have (more) cars; some of them several cars per person, one for work, one for off-road, one for cruising for chicks, one for towing the boat, one to go with your red jacket ...

Cars are, generally speaking, more sophisticated, and pollute a lot less, per car.  Of course, with a trillion cars out there, there are a hundred cars helping to pollute the air in the place of one car from around the sixties, so there has not been any net improvement.  (In the special case of Los Angeles County, however, apparently there has been improvement for some time.  However, a recent news story revealed that, since cars in California hardly rust out at the rate in colder climes, many older cars (of pre-1980 vintage) are still on the roads, so that the pollution control in some legal vehicles are well below the standards for new cars.  They are sliding standards, which are more lenient for older cars.  Maybe it's time to stop the sliding?)

When you buy most products whose use or consumption has an impact on your health, labels are now required, to let you know facts about the product.

Cars, for instance, must report miles per gallon.  Flushes must tell you water use per flush.  Food has to tell you saturated fats and lots of little details per serving.  Products potentially harmful to children have to be labeled.  Most amusingly, of course, cigarettes and alcohol are labeled as being harmful, something we have known for a century.

Recently, legislation was passed in Pennsylvania that large diesel vehicles (more than 5 tons in weight) are not permitted to idle while parked in public areas.  Hallelujah!  Not only are rest areas on Interstate highways going to be quieter at night, they are going to be a trillion times less noxious.  It became fashionable for diesel truck drivers to keep their enormous engines on all the time in the seventies, and it was so much fun for them, it became the norm, a sort of macho thing.

What about family life?  Were the good old days better for people?  For children?  For women?  Men had a lot more power in their homes, and women took greater responsibility for keeping the family together, and looking after the children.  This was arguably better for the children, in an ideal middle-class family.  But many women were unhappy staying at home, and in poorer homes already both partners had to work.  Women's occupations were uninspiring, repetitive jobs: answering phones, making coffee, slaving over stoves, looking after children, sewing clothing, weaving, and of course, farm work.  The more rewarding jobs, such as teaching, nursing, etc required long hours for pay considerably less than their male counterparts.

In the last analysis, many of these conditions have changed only in small ways.  The income gap is still present, though it has narrowed; a woman teacher would earn almost the same as a man.  A nurse earns considerably less than a doctor.  Women doctors: do they earn as much as their male colleagues?  It is difficult to know.

Alcoholism and smoking were difficult issues.  These vices disrupted homes across demographic lines; one could almost guarantee a typical woman that her husband would be a heavy drinker in the earlier parts of the last century.  The situation is somewhat better, mostly because drunken misbehavior on the part of men is not as widely tolerated anymore.  On the other hand, women have started drinking much more heavily.  Drinking among women starts in college, and it seems to me that it is getting very heavy indeed.  Smoking, I believe, is now a bigger risk for women than for men.  Certainly, a greater percentage of people smoking outside college buildings, in my observation, are women.

Education?  The dropout rate has gone down.  But what does it signify?  If a typical college graduate of 2010 was as well-educated as a typical college graduate of 1960, we could claim that things were looking up.

On the plus side, students have to be prepared for a more complex society today than the one their grandparents lived in.  Health insurance, the stock market, college, computers, even obtaining phone service, are all more complicated, and we can safely say that modern kids manage these things OK.  On the other hand, at the simple things of life, such as running a family, educating your children, maintaining your home, repairing your car, holding down a job, our grandparents would have been vastly better.

But we are comparing apples to oranges.  These days, everybody completes high-school; we're comfortable ignoring those who do not.  But fifty years ago, close to a quarter of the population (and it could be even higher) did not have a high-school degree, and a high-school degree was not required for many jobs.  Those who did not have a High-School Diploma were, some of them, quite able to do a lot of things that would probably defeat a typical modern adult, e.g. fix a leaking roof.  On the other hand, there were undoubtedly many others, around the 1950s and 1960s, who might have been capable, but never made it through high school, and led miserable lives.  So the formal education system has improved to accommodate a wider variety of ability and family background, but the education content has not kept pace with the needs of the workplace.

The awareness of health issues: being overweight, cholesterol, exercise, high blood pressure, environmental pollution, smoking, highway safety, drug safety; these things make it easier to live a healthier life.  There are more effective drugs today: Ibuprofen, diabetic drugs, drugs for asthma and allergies, childhood diseases.  There is greater awareness of how American business, commerce, economics impacts quality of life in other countries: Mexico, Colombia, Africa, Palestine, China, etc.  On the other hand, lifestyles are far more sedentary; people do not even need to leave their homes to watch a movie.  Is this progress?  Well, yes.  But the physical exertion of earlier times undoubtedly helped to offset some of the disadvantages of poor diet.  Our modern diets are, on the average, actually worse, though access to good food is far, far greater.  So we eat bad food out of choice, not out of necessity.
Finally, for many older people, the memory of older times are memories of growing up in homogeneous neighborhoods.  The racial homogeneity of the neighborhoods of the last century are undoubtedly a part of the yearning at least some of us feel.  For some, the richness of the demographics of many urban and suburban neighborhoods are pluses they do not recognize.  Children consider hanging out with black, Latino, Asian and Oriental kids the normal state of things, but for the adults: this is now, but that was then, when everyone on your street was almost exactly like you.  So, it's neither better nor worse; just different!