Little-Known, and Oddball Classical Pieces

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‘Little-known’ is pretty obvious, but what do I mean by ‘Oddball’?  I don’t really know, but there are a few pieces of music that are interesting from the point of view of the circumstances under which they were written, or for some such extra-musical aspect of its existence, at least as much as for its interest simply as a piece of music.

People who are trying to “get into” classical music are usually —and quite understandably— interested in trivia about a piece of music (or at least, a piece of music which is associated with some accessible piece of trivia), just so that they have something to hang their thoughts on!

The music of Haydn is famous for little eccentric things that he put into his pieces.  One little-know instance, I believe, is the opening movement of Creation, or Die Schopfung.  It is intended to represent chaos, and as you can appreciate, music is almost the very antithesis of chaos.



(The clip is conveniently titled, in German: "Introduction: Chaos"), and you can almost guess the meaning of the word Einleitung: Lead-in, or introduction).

Bach is holding one of his
crab canons!

My favorite composer is  —surprise!!!— Johann Sebastian Bach (or just Sebastian Bach, as he was apparently called, in his family, since almost all his uncles and cousins were Johann's).  There are a number of oddities to be found in Bach's music, but one of the most fascinating is also one he was evidently most proud of; in fact, he had his portrait drawn with himself holding a scrap of parchment with this piece drawn on it painfully, in oils.  It is a mirror canon, which is a piece that sounds the same played forwards as well as backwards, as well as upside-down.  It is one of --I believe-- several crab canons he wrote, and actually sounds amazingly good, for a piece that tries to do so much.  Incidentally, the first half of the main tune of the canon is just one of the motifs in another piece from the Musical Offering, namely the Trio Sonata.  That has several themes that are traded around between the three voices of the Sonata of which this is one.  (The mirror canon theme is indicated in purple, because it was also known as The Royal Theme.)

Bach also wrote an aria in one of his church cantatas, which was taken from an aria from a "secular" cantata --pieces written for public celebrations, such as the installation of a new City Council, etc; even civic events had religious observations.  (This particular one was written for someone's birthday.)  Anyway, at the end of the aria (vocal solo) in the church cantata, Bach adds a closing section that is a trio, which goes on for almost a minute and a half!  That is certainly unusual.

Canons are certainly interesting: it is a piece in which a second voice enters with the tune after a delay.  It is the same principle as a round, but the tunes are longer, and typically there are just two voices, each following the other.  Pachelbel's Kanon is an exception: it has three voices: the three violins, and as you know well (especially at Christmastime), the tune is far longer than a typical round.

 [Added Later]

Well, I guess I just couldn't resist.  I hunted down the music for Pachelbel’s famous Kanon (a movement from a sonata), and scored it for as wildly different-sounding instruments as I could think of.  The original, scored for three violins and bass is just too homogeneous-sounding for the canon to emerge; it just sounds like a dance with three masked, identical dancers looks : the dancers are indistinguishable, and you have to take the thing as simply abstract moving patterns.  But I gave the top voice (or at least Voice Number 1) to the violin, the next to the flute, and the third to a bassoon.  That move completely destroys the homogeneity, but guess what: you can actually hear the canon beautifully.  So the delicacy and restfulness of the Canon we hear (usually at Christmas, as I remarked) is gone; this version does sound a little rowdy:



Another unusual use of canon is the last movement of Cesar Franck's famous Sonata in A for violin and piano.  This is beautiful, and the canon is only incidental to the beauty of the piece.

Hmm.  Let's see now.  (I'm running out of things that I can remember.)  Ah, Dvorak's Harmonium Quartets.

Dvorak wrote some lovely chamber music featuring a harmonium: they were called Bagatelles.  The humble harmonium, of course, is never even heard today as a serious musical instrument.  They're used as accompaniments in poor parish churches that can't afford either a pipe organ, or a Casio keyboard, and heaven knows those cost only about $150.  But a harmonium is a simple thing: it is essentially an enormous harmonica (no, they don't look like harmonicas; they look like tiny organs.  The organ in the Pachelbel's Canon clip is actually a tiny chamber pipe organ.  The pipes are just about 4' long, at the longest) connected to a keyboard, and a foot-operated bellows.  (In the clip, the bellows are operated by hand, which means you can't play with both hands.  This type is not intended for classical music, but for folk music, especially Eastern European and Indian.)  Anyone older than, say, 65 years, is likely to have seen one.  Here is a movement from one of the Bagatelles.  Here is a clip of a rehearsal, showing a harmonium actually being played!

I have to take time out for a brief rant here.  The world is full of countless old things that are extra, we don't need them; they're old, they're marginal, they're on the fringes of modern life.  Should we preserve them?  Will we miss them if they're gone?  If they belong to the distant cultural history of a people with whom I have no direct connection, need I be aware of them, and maintain an interest?  The pieces of paper on which Bob Dylan scribbled the words of his song: Like a Rolling Stone, are being auctioned off at Sotheby's.  They will probably bring millions of dollars.  But I feel it is almost, or more, important to find good harmoniums, and learn to play them, (actually they're easy to play) and perform unusual pieces like Dvorak's Bagatelles on them, and keep them in the public eye.  The wonder of life on Earth is about richness, especially richness that does not imply destroying the environment.  Young people are increasingly difficult to keep entertained; it seems that only something coming out of a video monitor has the ability to keep them engaged.  I suspect that the more balanced individual in tomorrow's society, and the ones on whom we can depend to provide motivation and leadership to solve the enormous problems tomorrow's society will face, will be aware of, and familiar with, a variety of cultures and traditions and cultural artifacts, and at an early age.  We had better work on this; I doubt that my own child knows half the things I'm talking about ...

Talking about unusual instruments, Mozart wrote a few pieces for Glass Harmonica.  The glass harmonica is essentially an instrument that uses an array of things like wineglasses to make a sound.  You may know that it is possible to make a lovely sound by running a wet finger around the rim of a wineglass.  You can even tune the note, by adding liquid to the glass.  In a glass harmonica, the glass pieces are arranged sideways and rotated by a motor, with the lower parts dipped in a container of water, to keep them wet.  Let me try and find you a video clip of one ... Here it is.  (I have been known to disrupt wedding receptions by fooling around with the champagne glasses.  I regret it now.  At a wedding, we should leave the disruption to the couple.)

In popular music, my favorite group is The Beatles.  Over the years, every one of them got a chance to sing in one song or another, but the majority of songs were sung, of course, by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  Once the group disbanded, arguably it was George Harrison, who played Lead Guitar most of the time, who was best known for his post-Beatles career, certainly among those who were not initially Beatles fans.  But the number of songs in which all three: George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang are relatively few.

One of the best known is Nowhere Man, a song that is sadly neglected nowadays.  (It is a commentary on disengaged individuals, and was probably inspired by someone whose attention John Lennon wanted, and did not get!)  The opening phrases are in 3 vocal parts, after which John takes over, and the other two sing backup.  Another song, even less well known, is You're going to lose that girl, from Help!  This follows a similar pattern, except that most of the song is with a single lead vocal, with backup in harmony by the other two.

While we're on 3-part harmony, here's another favorite: In the early morning rain, written by Gordon Lightfoot, and brilliantly outFooted by Peter, Paul and Mary, arguably the trio that sang the most correctly-written 3-part harmony, that is to say, the most satisfying to the classically-trained ear.

I plan to add a couple of examples here, but that's all for the moment!  Talk to you later,

Arch

Three Trios by J. S. Bach

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While I was putting a well-known Bach piece into Finale the other day (well, PrintMusic, anyway), I noticed that really, the movement was in just 3 parts.  (Note: this is different than a 3-part sermon, or something similar.  A piece of music "in 3 parts" means that there are 3 lines of music.  For 3 sections we would say, 3 sections, or 3 movements, or something like that.)  Perhaps fortuitously, it turns out that many of the pieces I’m most nostalgic for are trios, that is, written in 3 parts.  Now, bear in mind that with J. S. Bach, specifically, and also with other composer of the Baroque period, instrumentation is not rigid; they indicate the essential instruments--the featured players, called the obbligato parts--but also might indicate that there has to be something like what we would call today “the rhythm section,” which was a bass instrument--usually a double bass, or a bass and a cello, or a bass and a cello and a bassoon-- as well as a harpsichord, organ, or lute, or any or all of those, depending on how big the rest of the orchestra was.  This was called the continuo.  However, very often the music for obbligato instruments were harmonically complete, and made the continuo actually redundant.  At other times, Bach wrote a piece to be performed with only three parts; actually the only instances I know are organ pieces.  So when I call a particular piece a trio, I intend to mean that the piece was either an organ piece written in precisely three parts, or that it could be reduced to three parts (by leaving out all, or some, of the Continuo).  I’ll try to make the situation clear in each instance, but really, you probably don’t care.

BWV 140  One of the most famous Cantatas of J. S. Bach (and his cantatas were by far the largest and most important portion of his compositional output,) is Cantata No. 140: Sleepers wake, for night is flying.  It was written in Leipzig (where Bach spent the last several decades of his life) and was based on a hymn of the well-known hymnodist Philipp Nokolai.  Somehow, this very four-square hymn-tune of Nikolai’s, as well as the magnificent cantata by Bach, has caught the fancy of people the world over, not least in English-speaking countries, and several movements from it are performed frequently.

The fourth movement, particularly, is an amazingly vigorous piece of writing, and it is set for either a Tenor soloist, or, as sung today, a chorus of tenors (which might have been as few as four), with an incredibly catchy counter-melody in the violin.  The piece is therefore the tenor melody (the hymn-tune), the violin melody, and a bass line, and chords on the organ, or a theorbo (a kind of big old-time precursor of the guitar), and that’s all.  It’s a trio!  When you hear it performed nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there are only three essential parts actually written out by Bach; the rest is made up by the performers (according to strict rules, however).  This is the first piece I'm going to introduce today, in the spare trio version.  At the end, there is a link to a complete, grand realization of the same piece, followed by a verse of the basic Nikolai hymn, performed by a full orchestra, just so you can hear how much potential there was in the hymn, to begin with.   It is a very irregular meter: 8,10,8,8,10,8,6,6,4,8,8.



I can’t resist the temptation to comment on the violin melody, which is, to say the very least, jaunty in the extreme.  I actually wrote out the ornaments: mordents, trills, grace-notes --the little notes that lead up to the main note-- then had to get rid of them and put in the notation for the ornaments, which is harder in this editor than to do them by hand.  They make the music score look somewhat cluttered, but believe me, nowhere as cluttered as if the notes were actually written out.  In a couple of places I had forgotten to replace the written-out notes with the ornament notation.

As you might be aware, the last several decades have been occupied with the authenticity movement, which tries especially hard to perform period pieces (and this one is certain a case in point) as they were probably performed at the time they were written.  There is a certain amount of indirect evidence to show that, for instance, pieces were taken generally faster than they were in the first half of the last century, when there was a huge explosion of interest in Baroque music, but in which the performances were clearly too slow for the modern ear to make sense of the complex musical textures.  However, the various authorities overstated their cases, in my humble opinion, and the performances of the 1960's and 1970's were actually a little too fast.  Other issues that came under the scrutiny of the authenticists were: instruments (and rightly so; many beautiful 18th century instruments had been converted to use steel strings, for instance, and a number of brave owners of Stradivarius violins took the leap to convert the instruments back to what they would have been before they were upgraded, and put gut strings back on them, and so forth), and ornamentation.  It is clear that a lot of ornamentation was ad lib, and my choices for ornamentation may or may not meet with the approval of the authorities.  But the authorities do not have much of a leg to stand on, since all the evidence is indirect.  I have erred in the direction of possibly over-ornamentation.  But it is a very florid melody, and would probably have been performed with a little more zip than some purists would have liked, and that’s how you’re going to hear it.  Note: Bach wrote an organ piece based on this movement, written out as a pure trio.  The version in the video clip above is essentially the organ trio written out for strings and trombone.  The version linked at the end of the post is the cantata movement, with the continuo played by the organ, and the tenor voices again given to the chorus trombones.

BWV 85  Even before I studied the piece above, I had been working with another aria, namely the tenor aria from Cantata 85.  This one is less well known, but the aria was noticed by Sir William Walton, the British Composer, and used in his ballet suite, The Wise Virgins.  Family friends of my youth had an album of the ballet suite, and I got to know and love this beautiful trio.

The text of the aria (or “song”) can be translated as “Behold what His love can do!”, and is on the one hand a sweet pastorale.  On the other hand, the frequent jumps of a fourth (two notes with two notes between them) are associated generally with what we call “jigs”, the lively dances that sailors are suppose to have indulged in in olden days, when they had their ration of rum, or a dance of villagers is a festive mood.  Which is it: a pastorale, or a jig?  Many Bach tunes are to dance meters, but morphed by Bach so that they have more serious or contemplative moods.  Pay attention to the bass line: in this piece, as in the first one, the bass is clear and confident and solid, a familiar and expected characteristic of a Bach bass line, and for some people, including myself, the most important line in the harmony.

Caution: in the performance below, the top melody has been divided between two instruments!  It is still in fact a trio, the two instruments (a flute and an oboe, actually) are just sharing the part.  I could have (with a little work) shown the video with just three lines of music, but it would have been a little tiresome.



The two upper melodies twine about each other, almost as if this were a love-song.  Once you notice these things, you want to hear the piece over and over again.  (By the way, for those who are just learning to follow music, those little curves over the notes are of two kinds: the black / white curves connect a note at the end of one measure with the same note continued in the beginning of the next measure, making a single, long note.  The colored curves over a group of notes are phrasing marks, and are, in the case of string music, actually bowing indications; the group is all to be played up-bow, with a single bowing, or down-bow.  In this performance, of course, it is not a real violin, just a violin sound.  Somehow the software is able to fake bowing; don't ask me how!)

In this performance, the pace is brisk, and you can perhaps understand my reference to it as being related, at least in certain characteristics, to a jig.  A more sedate (and actually more accurate) version is here, an earlier effort of mine, a lot more solemn and quiet, and heavily orchestrated.

BWV 525.  Bach wrote six so-called Trio Sonatas for the organ.  They were intended to be played in church wherever a non-liturgical piece was appropriate.  What is interesting about them is that they were strictly in three parts: the two hands playing two keyboards (as you know, Baroque organs already had at least two manuals, or keyboards for the hands, in addition to the pedals, to be played by the feet), and of course, the feet playing the bass on the pedals.  The two hands being on separate manuals allowed them to freely cross each other, enabling the composer to show his skill without being compromised by physical limitations.  I got it into my head to transcribe this piece for guitars, and that is what I’m presenting below.  Sorry about the minimal video; it is just an mp3 disguised as a video, for the purpose of giving you an example of a Bach trio actually consciously written as one.  Here it is:



Here is the link to the expanded performance of verse 4 of Sleepers, wake.

Added later:  I could not resist the temptation to add a fourth Bach trio, this one is from the Musicalische Opfer, the Musical Offering.  There is a story behind this work.

Bach’s son, Wilhelm Friedmann Bach (I think I have the right son; if not, please substitute a suitable son here, please!) was a principal musician in the court of King Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia.  Having heard of the skill of the older Bach, he had the son send for J. S. Bach on the occasion of the arrival of one of the new Fortepianos at the court.  J. S. Bach duly arrived at court after a long journey, and was invited to play the new instrument (or instruments), and to improvise on a certain theme he was given (by the King).

Bach is said to have made up a piece or two based on the theme, but said that he could do much better.  Returning home, he composed a number of musical canons and variations on the royal theme, including a lovely trio for Flute, Violin and Cello (plus, of course, harpsichord continuo).  I’m including the gorgeous second movement from the trio, the Allegro.  This next statement might not make much sense to most readers, but the style of the trio is very modern, for Bach.  His younger son Christian Bach was a leader in the (at the time) modern music movement, which moved from the Baroque style to the classical style of Haydn and Mozart.  The big difference is the tendency towards a more open, light and airy style.  The removal of the continuo makes it even less dense.  Bach lovers of course love the density of the older style, but this graceful movement shows what Bach might have done if he had chosen to write in the modern style:



OMG, as they say; I just discovered a version of this by electric guitars, using distortion.  Play this at your own risk.

Arch