Poverty in the USA

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Before I go into this subject, I want to make it clear that I would much rather live in the USA than in any other country in the world. To be honest, when I visit the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Hem-hem) I do feel ---briefly--- that I would really love to move there; and I would probably feel the same if were to visit, say, Germany or Holland (though who knows how much they welcome foreign folks over there?) but I would sooner or later feel the urge to return to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Bananas.

I keep meeting wonderful people here. So there's no shortage of them. A person I never knew turns out to be someone wonderful, and we sit together and deplore the state of things. Lovely women mourn the difficulty of finding men with a liberal attitude; all the guys seem to be conservative-leaning. (On the surface the guys are quite reasonable and well-balanced, but there does seem to be dissatisfaction with social welfare programs, spending on education and the arts, impatience with environmental initiatives, and hostility towards women, immigrants and ethnic minorities. All the liberal guys seem to be married. What does that tell you?)

This was brought home to me strongly just this morning when I read about a little 2-year-old Chinese girl being knocked down by two vans in heavy traffic, and lying there bleeding, ignored by all the bystanders. It appears that Good Samaritans have, in the past, found themselves liable after interfering in similar cases. Such things do not happen here in the US very often, but I cannot say whether people are just that much nicer, or whether the laws are that much more strict about hit-and-run accidents. In addition, the enormous population of China has a negative effect on the social responsibility of average citizens, it appears to us from here. The phrase "Life is cheap" seems to take on a whole different meaning ...

However, if you read the websites of organizations that study such things, we learn that poverty in the US is on the rise.  Bread.org, for instance, gives a quite dispassionate but depressing account of the picture of hunger in the US.

The causes of hunger, says Bread.org, is economic. Their lead article describes various technical states in which a household can find itself, one of which is food insecurity, which describes a household that struggles to put food on the table at least once a year. There is no shortage of food; only a shortage of money to buy it.

Poor, uneducated families tend to spend their money on food that does them little good in the long term; very poor folks are often overweight. The effects of low incomes are complex and varied, and in the US, in particular, families seem not to have the cultural resources to cope with poverty. Because of the American lifestyle which focuses on nuclear families, and which minimizes interference from older (and very occasionally, wiser) relatives, poor families have few or no ideas about how to ride out a hard patch. The Village does not help. The Church does not help much, since the intellectual liabilities of belonging to a church are so vast, that most people who might be able to cope with the church's incessant demands for money (by just saying no, for instance) tend to keep away from it. Increasingly, too, the churches have no use for people who are too poor to tithe to them.

Preparing for Affluence

Ok.  We're really far down this particular post, and not at a very good point at which to start a completely new idea, but that's exactly what I want to do.

I suspect that most of the affluent "fiscal conservatives" come from families of so-called "self-made" men. These are working-class men who have worked very, very hard, and made their money. They pay their taxes very resentfully, and the money they make is earmarked for their spouses and their (often quite undeserving) offspring; after all, blood is thicker than water (whatever that means), and why should the Government distribute their hard-earned wealth among the undeserving poor?

In my last post, I addressed the issue of what Education is for; here I'm musing about what Money is for. The Ignorant are convinced that money redistributed by the Government is ill-spent. My money, they say, is for my kids, and my grandchildren, to splurge on whatever they want. I shall give some of my money to my church (which will bankroll missions in Darkest Africa, ostensibly, but which really goes to support the church bureaucracy), and some money to my golf club, and that's all I'm going to do.

But can we really live well while our fellow-citizens, some of them very probably thoroughly lazy people, are on the brink of hunger, our schools are sorely short on equipment, school canteens are serving junk food, the orchestras and bands are going bankrupt, the libraries are shortening their hours, the police force is laying off officers, the city cannot afford to replace burnt-out light fixtures on the streets, and public TV and radio has to beg for funds to keep operating?  We are rapidly becoming a nation of newly-rich surrounded by newly-poor. Neither component of the population knows how to deal with its new circumstances.

Part of what we must learn is how our spending impacts our life in ways that are not obvious. It is difficult to persuade children that the welfare of others is important, that it is satisfying to see our neighbors healthy and comfortable. I really don't know how to do this; it must come from constant exposure to the idea. Public-spiritedness is very rare; and we must study it when we see it: where does it come from?

Arguably, the children of today know neither how to deal with affluence nor with poverty. Our community organizations are inept both with addressing needs here in the US as well as with needs in the world abroad; it is a miracle that anything gets done anywhere.

On July Fourth, 1890, one Albert Pillsbury gave a speech in Boston. Evidently 120 years ago, he felt that public spirit was in the decline, and he deplored it eloquently. A search on Public Spirit brought up a link to his speech, and I give it here: Public Spirit.

Comrade Pillsbury pursues his theme at length. But he says:

If public spirit is declining, the decline must be stayed; if it sleeps, it must be awakened. We need not lose confidence; we must not omit caution, nor forget the maxim, which contains the essence of all political wisdom as applied to popular government, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We have fairly entered upon a period which, to the republics of ancient times, has proved to be the period of decline, — a period in which new sources of mischief are opened, different from those to which we have hitherto been exposed, — the period of wealth and luxury, in which the people are liable to be seduced from proper attention to their public interests by the pursuit and enjoyment of riches. It has been said by a political philosopher that while danger to a small republic comes from without, to a great republic it proceeds from within. We have nothing to fear from foreign power; we must turn the eye of vigilance upon ourselves. It was long ago foreseen that one result of the unexampled opportunity for the acquisition of wealth, afforded by our resources and our laws, would be to divert the attention and the energies of the people from public affairs to the pursuit of private gain. We are beginning to realize this result. It is not a source of danger if it is met with a quickened sense of public duty on the part of the whole people. We cannot expect to enjoy the fruits of the prosperity which has made the United States the first nation in the world in aggregate wealth, and in the annual production of wealth, without the difficulties which seem inseparable from such a situation. We are reaping its benefits in every avenue of enterprise and philanthropy; in the march of industrial development, moving at a pace and upon a scale of which history affords no example, and in the boundless liberality of private munificence, manifested in the endowment of schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, and in every form which can increase the comfort and promote the progress of society. These are all proofs of public spirit, but to be effective for the security of popular government public spirit must be carried into the actual work of government by the whole body of the people.

What Education is For

A few months ago, I wrote about what use Education was.
By now most of us must be tuned in to the fact that, though, on the face of it, getting an education is --at least mostly-- still a voluntary thing, people are out there furiously getting an education.  (At least, when they do expend the least bit of effort getting their education, they certainly let everybody know about it.)
I had been firmly of the opinion that, among other things, an Education was all about what to do with oneself when one was home from work; in other words, it is all about one's leisure time.  In the light of the terrible unemployment picture that obtains presently, this attitude is laughable: how in the heck is one supposed to enjoy one's leisure when one hasn't got a job in the first place? 
This brings out an enormous contradiction in our society.  The vast majority of people are in occupations that merely give them a living: sales, services, management, whatever: be it an office job or a floor job or a job in the outdoors, most employed people keep their jobs just to bring home a paycheck. This means that they use, possibly, a very small proportion of their education in their actual workplaces: a little arithmetic, a little language capability, a little knowledge of law and accounting principles, and that's all; all the rest they pick up on the job, so it's a common complaint that the education they received was "useless".
My claim was that the education was for when you really began to live each day, when you came home. Surrounded by your family, you can focus on the things you choose to do, rather than the things you have to do to earn your bread.
I completely recognize that most people are exhausted by the time they come inside the house and slam the door shut. You know, this wasn't always the case: half a century ago, a middle-class citizen spent a moderate amount of energy at work, and came home with a certain amount of energy left to talk to the kids and the spouse, cast an intelligent eye on the newspaper (if it hadn't been read at breakfast already), and possibly had a friend or two pop over in the evening, to play a hand of cards, or go out for a night of bowling, or whatever. If you look around you, those who have the energy to do any of that are rare, except for those who have some fun on the weekends. The Great American Business Boss has gotten much better at sucking every last calorie of energy out of you before you head home.
Given that this is the case, it is perfectly true that one's education is useless. It is preparation for your leisure time which you simply do not have the energy or even the time to enjoy anymore.
It is our leisure time that makes us human, and civilized. When our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, they had to be on the alert every moment, to keep from becoming food for some wild animal. Once we settled down in villages and in farms, it was the leisure we found that enabled art, and music, and literature. The whole point of education was that every new generation did not have to start from scratch.
But I'm seeing a different side to the story. Everything I teach seems immediately forgotten by each class. Every semester, I have to start from scratch. Starting from scratch has become a way of life for everyone, even young people who haven't started working yet. Somewhere they have got the idea that it is better to learn the same little thing in their ten mathematics classes than to learn ten different things.
My students, are, by and large, a lazy bunch. A few of them forget themselves and find themselves actually learning something in a class, to their extreme embarrassment. They recover quickly, and manage to forget the material quickly in time for the appropriate ignorance they have to display the next day.
At one time, this country truly was civilized; it is difficult to put one's finger precisely on the era in which this was true. There was a recognition of the higher things, the greater good, the dignity of labor, the equality of Man, and the things held in high esteem by the Founding Fathers were in fact truly admired by all educated citizens. But in the course of time, people found themselves professing these high ideals, while not actually understanding them, or even understanding the vocabulary that was required to explain the ideals. Today, it is very likely, even if the great Preamble to the Declaration of Independence were to be translated into the modern idiom, that a large proportion of the population would not have the background for understanding what it is saying. Isn't it obvious that everyone should be able to understand at least that? After all, it encapsulates almost everything that Americans hold dear. But I doubt that, in fact, it is any longer the body of axioms that holds this nation together.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting that it is the enormous influx of immigrants into the country that has diluted this knowledge. It is simply the fact that the vast majority of people have been trapped into working so hard that they have no leisure to think about anything but work. They cannot convey their ideals to their children because they simply have no time. They could not learn the ideals of their parents, because their parents had no time for passing it on.
From being the Land of Plenty, the USA has become the Land of Plenty of Work for those who have jobs, and Plenty of Worry for those who don't. We are working in the Mines all over again.
Those in upper management work a lot less, it is true. All their time is spent appearing to be a lot busier than they are. In principle, they should be perfectly able to interact with their families in culturally meaningful ways: convey family values, engage in cultural pursuits, interact with their friends in civilized ways. But I suspect that mostly what gets done is a lot of drinking, smoking, and boasting about fictitious achievements. Things are set up in this society in such a way that most people get to be wealthy because their parents worked extra hard, which means that those parents had even less time to engage with them in ways that allowed family values to be meaningfully transmitted. So once junior gets to be a big shot on the shoulders of Papa's labor, junior has hardly any family values to speak of.
Perhaps the complaints about the irrelevance of education are true. A typical American liberal education is perfectly suited for a society in which obtaining a job is not a desperate thing. The fact that the American economy is uncontrolled to the point where every young person cannot be guaranteed some sort of a job, is deplorable. In this situation, where the economy is based on public mood rather than rational decisions, it is obvious that young people will insist that their education should guarantee them a job. In other words, most students will migrate towards narrow, technical educations, leaving only upper-crust kids --who typically do not worry about obtaining employment once they graduate-- to seek a liberal education: i.e., an education focused on understanding civilization. This is a situation that will lead to an even greater stratification than we have now. No doubt there are those who think this is a good thing. I think it is a very bad thing, because the most affluent students are by no means the ones who are most capable of understanding civilization. We shall be throwing our civilization before swine.

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Modern Orchestral Suites

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Suites, as a genre, seemed to have emerged in the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. I'm just guessing here, but I can imagine some feudal lord listening with satisfaction to a bunch of dances performed by a roving band of musicians, and calling one of them over. "So what was that you fellows were playing?" The leader, half in fear of being decapitated, would have looked over to the drummer, who was a little braver than the others, and the drummer strolls over. "Hi, Lord! Hi, Toots; what's up?" You can imagine Toots glaring at the impertinent young drummer, shooting an embarrassed smile at the nobleman, and mumbling to his colleague that they were being asked what the music was called.

The dances were probably called things like Kick the widow while she's down, and Jumping on the chickens, and so on, so of course the last thing Toots wants is to disclose the names of the dances. Upon reflection, it was a bad idea to get the drummer over.
"They're just some dances we play, you know, when folks want to dance, you know, like ..."
"Yeah, like on May Day, and stuff," adds the drummer.
"Yeah, that's it, your lordship," adds Toots.
"But it's got to have a name," insists the lord, or maybe the laird, and so they decide to call it The Mudheap Dances, since it was the Lord of Mudheap that was insisting on a name for the dances. He insists that the next time they come through, he wants to hear the same set of dances, and they had better remember the name of the set.

A suite is basically just a collection, such as a suite of furniture, or a suite of rooms, but most definitely a musical suite is a collection of movements that are intended to be performed together, and, moreover, performed in a designated order.

By the end of the Baroque, when Telemann, Handel and Bach were doing their stuff, they took as their models the suites being performed at Versailles, with Lully and other court composers playing grand-sounding music for the entrance of the King (the Overture), followed by a set of about five dances in contrasting meters, for actual dancing, or for eating to the sound of.

In the time of Mozart, of course, there were the Divertimentos (more properly divertimenti) and Serenades that he wrote for the amusement of the aristocracy of Vienna, and all of Europe, really, since he was invited to Czechoslovakia and France, being a celebrity in a small way. Nobody really wanted to hear his symphonies and concertos; they preferred the Serenades by far. These were lighthearted pieces, intended to be enjoyed with half an ear (in contrast to symphonies and concertos, to which the audience was expected to give their undivided attention).

By the time Beethoven came along, the Suite made a comeback.  Composers were writing Operas like fury, since they were all the rage. (Just as musical theater is more popular than classical music today, so it was then.) Once the opera had finished its run, composers discovered that they could write several movements from the music of the opera, and call it a suite. Hence the Egmont suite by Beethoven. [I have just learned that the Egmont suite is not an instrumental work, so it perhaps does not quite belong in this discussion.] I'm not certain that Mozart did not do something of the same sort, but some of the most popular of suites written in the 19th century have been derived from operas and ballets.  (I must mention here that Purcell, in 17th century England did the same; his suites written for various plays of his time are still frequently performed today, and are among the most accessible music Purcell ever wrote.)

Let me place here a reference to Suites that I found on the Web, the only really useful one: Suites, on Wikipedia. The need to be precise, and the requirement of satisfying Wikipedia's self-imposed, and rather defensive, standards of documentation make filling out a Wikipedia article an exercise in frustration, I imagine, and so all we can find is this compendium of links to existing articles in Wikipedia.

Mendelssohn wrote at least one orchestral suite that I am aware of, namely one inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare.  Schubert also wrote at least one suite, whose name eludes me. Schumann wrote collections of pieces, not intended to be performed all together, and so do not really qualify for the name of "suite", e.g. Kinderscenen.  Weber wrote the Oberon overture, but possibly not a suite to go with it.

Before I forget, let me mention the major suites that inspired this entire post:
The Mother Goose Suite, by Modest Mussorgsky, originally for piano, but subsequently orchestrated both by the composer, and by Maurice Ravel;
I could not get a decent clip of this one; sorry! I'll keep trying...

Pictures at an Exhibition, also by Mussorgsky (also orchestrated by Ravel, among others);
This is a grand and brilliant work that is very accessible and entertaining.

Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Ravel;

A favorite work of mine!

Pines of Rome, Ancient Airs and Dances, Roman Festivals, and a few other suites by Ottorino Respighi;
Ancient airs is lovely. Festivals is noisy and brassy, evidently very influential; you can hear echoes of this style in film scores.

The Enigma Suite of Variations, by Edward Elgar;
Nimrod is by far the most popular variation.

The Wise Virgins ballet suite by William Walton, based on chorales by J. S. Bach;
The clip contains movements 1-4; the first is from Bach's harmonization of "What God hath done is rightly done."

Numerous ballet suites by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, including Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, as well as a Serenade for strings, which is a suite pure and simple;
The clip is of the second movement of the Serenade: a waltz.

The Rite of Spring, and Firebird, both ballet suites by Igor Stravinsky;

Porgy and Bess, by George Gershwin;

Karelia, by Jean Sibelius;

Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Ma Vlast;
The clip is the dance of the clowns.--Pardon me: the Dance of the Comedians. I realize that the two categories are not the same, and not knowing Czech I cannot tell which word is appropriate, and must defer to the documentation on the clip.

Peer Gynt, by Edvard Grieg.
The clip is of the movement Morning, also known as Morning Mood.

To be accurate, suites of variations are a slightly different animal from orchestral suites generally. The fact that the variations are linked by being variations of a common theme is an additional structure that is absent in a typical suite.  Because suites are such loosely-linked collections of movements, there is usually --but this is by no means a rule-- a non-musical, or more correctly, an extra-musical idea that holds the movements of a suite together. In Bach's time, for instance, the movements of an orchestral suite needed have nothing in common except key. (The only reason the tune of movement 4 pops into my head at the end of movement 3 is because I have heard the entire suite so many, many times before.)

OK, girls and boys, I'm getting a little hungry, and I'm going to postpone adding some YouTube links for a later date. I can't think of pictures that go along with this post, so if I do add images later, they will be completely gratuitous.

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Sobriety Tests

Falling in Love with Dead Authors: Louisa May Alcott

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Louisa May Alcott

I was given a copy of Little Men by Louisa M. Alcott when I was about 10 or 11.  I can't remember the occasion; perhaps it was a birthday.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I took it as a "school story", and could not quite understand the central position Jo Bhaer occupied in the story, because in all the school stories I had read, it was the kids who were central to the story and never the adults.  Still, I began to understand Jo's affection for all the children in her school, gradually working my way past the slight sentimentality that occasionally got in the way.

A few months later --or perhaps years-- we were taken to see the movie of Little Women, the version starring June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor.  I was instantly in love with all the girls, but most especially Jo.  I was furious at Rossano Brazzi, who played Professor Bhaer, but I was by then accustomed to falling in love with older women, only to have them snapped up by older guys, some of them with outrageous sideburns.  Anyway, of course I had to go home and read the book.  (At this time Dad was away at Yale, and did not have the money to come visiting during the breaks.  Everybody was glad that I was reading Alcott, and not James Bond, etc ...)

Reading Civil War era novels is heavy going.  But through it all, Louisa May Alcott's storytelling shines through.  My mother observed my progress through the book (I think I had gotten sick with something serious, but I kept reading), and explained how autobiographical the book was.  Looking back, I think I was impressed at how open-hearted Jo March was, a very likely genuine portrayal of the character of the author, Louisa Alcott herself.  It was certainly in the spirit of the times for women to be overly sentimental about children and poverty, but there was just enough of a touch of restraint to give Alcott's characters the weight of authenticity.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

At times, the author makes her characters just a little too perfect.  When they have faults, even the faults are perfect, and there is a veiled glamor over even the humblest of personalities in Alcott's account.  After a while, you forget the sentimentality.  Unfortunately, some of those tricks of writing have attached themselves to me, and the observant reader will know just how much I have been influenced by L. M. Alcott.

It is interesting to read just how engaged the middle-class was in national affairs, to the extent that they were able to obtain news of current events.  The Alcotts in Boston were far better informed of the events of the war than folks further west must have been.  I'm still trying to get a clear idea of what gave solidity to Alcott's boundless enthusiasm.  Even in the Little Women, Little Men series, she is already half in jest about her enthusiasm, but she is beginning to see her attitudes about education and the new society she was envisaging, and presumably the vision of whoever inspired the character of Friedrich Bhaer, taking shape.  All the way up unto that time, the idealists who were the successors to the founding fathers of America were keeping alive the idealism of those founders, even if some of that manic idealism must have been fueled by the cheap labor provided by slaves and former slaves, and the leisure it brought the propertied classes.  Labor was no longer cheap, but the open Western frontier was enough to keep driving the vision of a good society that lay just beyond the horizon.  This is the most attractive thing about Louisa M. Alcott: her belief in the boundless potential of young people.  This is attractive to me in anybody.

Charles Dickens

The almost contemporary books of Laura Ingalls Wilder are set just after the War, and refer to it rather distantly if at all.  Wilder is more concerned with the details of life in the West than with the personalities of those beyond her immediate family.  Gifted with equal charm, Laura Ingalls makes her very restraint lend her the glamor that Louisa Alcott must craft with Dickensian deliberation.  (I don't know that Dickens was all that deliberate about anything; I only mean that Alcott admired Dickens greatly, and seems to have set out to emulate him in depth of feeling.  And she certainly succeeded.)

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Quartets and Quintets in the Classical Era

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There is something delicious about how music sounds with just sufficient instruments to fill out the harmony!

Back in Bach's day, I think it is fair to say that rhythm and syncopation were really the driving engines of the musical scene.  Though some of Bach's melodies are among the most lovely ever written, the vast majority of his orchestral works appeal to us ---to me, at least--- because of the rhythm.  The harmony does certainly play a major role; in fact, the harmony actually plays a rhythmic role, which is a phenomenon that is just a bit too subtle for me to describe.

Alongside the rhythms and the harmony, is the texture created by the interweaving melodies of the parts, or the voices.  This texture is characteristic of the contrapuntal era, beginning before Palestrina, and culminating probably with Mozart.  Some, of course, insist that Bach was the crowning glory of Counterpoint, and how are we to argue?  Chacun á son gout, as they say.

Let's leave that aside for the moment.

Imagine a lovely composition for just three voices!  Many composers have contemplated this very ideal, but Bach went further: what if the three voices were perfectly matched?  One of the ideals of chamber music is to have a small ensemble of perfectly matched voices.


Homogeneous Ensembles

At the end of the Renaissance, and up to the beginning of the Baroque, there was a genre of composition for a small set of matched instruments called a consort.  Two major consort types have come down to us: the Consort of Viols, and the School of Recorders (or consort of recorders).  Noble houses commissioned skilled instrument-makers to create a set of matched instruments of sizes ranging from a high treble size (or even a tiny descant), down to a large bass size (or larger contrabass size).  Then, the patron hoped, the jaded court composer would be spurred on to write new and better music for this matched set of instruments.

Among the consort pieces I enjoy the most are those of William Byrd and John Downland.  Here is an In Nomine by Byrd:



(The performer appears to have played all the parts himself.)

The homogeneity of the tone-color of the instruments --in this case, the single instrument-- enhances the contrapuntal texture, or the weaving in and out of the parts. Syncopation, especially --where different voices sound at different times, on the beat and off-- is particularly effective.

Bach wrote a number of Trios for the organ, where the two hands and the pedals played a single voice each, constituting a trio.  The important thing in Bach's Trio Sonatas was the delicacy of the texture and the lively rhythms, and not the weight of the sonority.  The Trio Sonatas are almost invariably performed with very light registration (very few stops), most performers understanding the esthetics of the Sonatas perfectly.  Here is the Trio Sonata in E Flat major played on an organ.  Here it is, played by a modern string ensemble.  It is just as charming, but the neutral organ tones lend themselves more towards enjoying the music independently of the performance (though an organist would be indignant at taking second place to the music itself, perhaps).

The famous Loeki Stardust recorder ensemble from Amsterdam is one of the few recorder ensembles that I am familiar with, and the following is this group playing the famous (incomplete) last fugue from The Art of Fugue of J. S. Bach.



Joseph Haydn, you may know, developed the musical structure called Sonata Form.  This was a plan for writing the large-scale first movement of a symphony.  (Subsequent movements contrasted both in mood and complexity with the First movement, so their forms were correspondingly simpler, usually, though often the last movement, too, was in a variant of Sonata Form.)  Another genre Haydn brought to full development was the String Quartet.  In some ways, the String Quartet, both the ensemble consisting of two violins, a viola and a 'cello, and the String Quartet form, consisting of a first movement in Sonata Form, followed by up to three more movements, was a successor to the Viol Consort, and the multi-movement pieces written for them.  The instruments were perfectly matched, and the music written for the ensemble exploited to the fullest the homogeneity of tone of the instruments.  (It must be noted that the three sorts of instruments do actually have a degree of distinctiveness in their tones, even if they sound very similar indeed.  Some composers exploit this slight variety in their sonorities, especially modern composers.)

Here is a string quintet movement by Mozart (not a quartet, as I had originally written!).



Heifetz, Primrose and Piatigorsky were famous performers of their time, and we can tolerate the poor recording quality to hear these folks play!

Heterogeneous Ensembles

In contrast to string quartets and viol consorts, a different sort of ensemble became popular in Mozart's day, namely the Woodwind Quintet.  The woodwind quintet consists of a flute, a clarinet, an oboe, a bassoon, and, of all things, a French Horn.  On one hand, these are five very distinctive voices, but on the other hand, they are similar enough to be able to blend together to a certain extent.  Quite honestly, I know little about this particular sort of ensemble, and the genre of music written for it (except that I have been scoring a movement that I wrote for various groups of instruments, including a wind quartet).  Let's look for examples of Quintets from about Mozart's time.

Well, I couldn't find any!  What a shame.  But here is a quintet anyway.  They're playing a movement from one of my very favorite modern suites: Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Maurice Ravel.  (It was originally written for piano solo, and subsequently orchestrated for orchestra.  Ravel was a genius at orchestration):



This is a piece by Anton Reicha:



And my Serenade. This is scored for Flute, Clarinet, English Horn (Cor Anglais) and Bassoon.

As I was fooling around with this piece, I was fascinated with the dual problems of scoring it (that is, assigning instrumentation to it) on the one hand, to make the strands of the harmony blend, and on the other, to make the strands of the harmony not blend too much.  For instance, if I had one instrument looping upwards past other melody lines, I didn't want the motion to be obscured by those other melodies.  This sort of thing happens beginning at 2:24, where the flute spirals past the rather laconic melody in the clarinet.

I also realized something directly that I had only read about up until last winter: the Clarinet has two entirely different "voices" in different parts of its range.  (Yes, I know everybody knew this but me, but ... never mind.)  In the higher register, which is beautiful in its limpid simplicity (or jaunty and perky, when playing popular or jazz music), the tone is actually uninteresting and sort of characterless.  In the lower register (more reminiscent of the ancestor instrument from which the Clarinet was developed: the chalumeau, the clarinet has a unique reediness different from the oboe and the bassoon.  In other words, the flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn and bassoon are really six quite different instruments, which can be made to blend together beautifully, but also keep their individuality.

Beginning in the time of Mozart, music that was essentially classical (using the word "classical" to distinguish from popular dance music) was being played by commoners: ordinary folks, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, farmers, etc.  Music, until this time, was played for the nobility by professional musicians, or played for dancing by musicians while they were off-duty, or by completely different musicians, who played for contributions from the dancers, e.g. street musicians.  But now, groups of serious musicians had obtained instruments for themselves, such as clarinets and bassoons and such, and played serious music on the street; or at least semi-serious music.  They formed themselves into clubs and Harmonies, and Mozart wrote some of his most brilliant music for them.  Some of Mozart's serenades are for these sorts of groups, including this one, K 375 in E flat:



This movement is incorrigibly jolly --it is the Finale-- but you can hear clarinets high up, bassoons earnestly keeping the bass going, and horns occasionally splashing chords in the middle.  (Flutes seem to have been used rarely, since it was probably too difficult to play flutes while marching along.)

The  Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet in rehearsal.

[More later.]

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