I should put up a poll.

Except for no one reads this blog.

I’m trying to decide whether to score “Mormorio” as viola+piano and share it with my old viola teacher, or just piano. Honestly, the former is more appealing and will make for prettier music. This thing would sound perfect on a viola.

I think I’ll try it, at least write down the melody on a viola scale and then piffle around to see what sort of accomp I can manage to do with it. I cringe at the idea of putting it in Lilypond, though. I’ve never worked with multiple staves there.

I have to say …

… it really frosts me when people talk about classical music showing up in frou-frou venues like this as some symptom of classical music being reborn as Music of the People.

It’s moving from fairly democratic municipal venues close to public transit and that seat several thousand into chi-chi little clubs with max capacity of around 100 filled with cognoscenti only … and that’s seen as less elitist? In what universe does this make any sense at all?

I really am starting to think that a lot of this protesting about mixing and mingling classical music with “the people” is just a smokescreen for getting their monied Hummer-driving butts away from the hoi polloi and their polyester clothes and getting back with The Right Sort, sipping overpriced drinks in their little Union League clubs that keep out the riff-raff. At the municipal concert hall, you’re more likely to sit next to a bus driver than you are to sit next to someone who summers. I doubt that is the case at the frou-frou clubs.

They aren’t protesting that classical music isn’t “relevant.” It’s just not hip and cool anymore, and it doesn’t function as well as it used to to set one off as having superior genes. So it’s time to lose the concert hall (amazingly under the pretense of being less elitist) and slide into chic clubs the parking lots of which are filled with Lexuses and BMWs. It’s just very amazing to me that this new “cultural change” which touts itself as being an attempt to lose the perceived “elitist” color to classical music, is at its heart an attempt to reclaim it — and will have that effect, believe me.

Upper-middle-class folks hanging around in chic clubs with French names is not where the revolution will happen.

Ambivalent

Okay.

I’m still not sure if I’ll go. I heard about this some time ago, and of course I would love to hear him and Fleming do these roles, live.

But the only time I ever visited New York was in 1980. Overall, I wasn’t thrilled with the place. It was too big, too loud, and dirty. The only thing I really loved was the World Trade Center; I thought those buildings were the most wonderful things I’d ever seen. They reminded me of giraffes — appearing so spindly and fragile from a distance, but when you get up close to them, you realize that they are almost apocalyptically massive.

Some part of my brain has been telling myself since 2001 that, if I never see the absence of those buildings in the New York skyline, that it never happened, that I could kid myself that they were still there humming away with energy and full of busy, purposeful people. I don’t want to see the new skyline, with that gaping hole gouged out of it.

There is going to be a simulcast on December 3, one of those live-in-HD things that the New York Met does from time to time. I may do that instead, so I can enjoy the opera and not have to go into NYC to do it. The opera house is not way down at the bottom tip of Manhattan, so it might be doable. I have to think about it. Hearing Andreas Scholl singing this role live may be the only thing that can pry me up and into Manhattan. I can avoid looking out the window of the airplane when I land and just keep my head down otherwise. We’ll see.

Why the hell couldn’t these people have been doing this out here, or with the Opera Company of Philadelphia?

Woodshedding your own stuff

There is a serious mental shift that has to be made when woodshedding one’s own music. I can feel myself in my brain thinking, “Well, I don’t have to get it PERFECT — after all, I wrote it.” It’s a combination of not taking it seriously (let’s face it, I’m not Brahms), and thinking that as long as I can hear the Platonic Ideal of the thing in my head, it’s done and on to the next shiny object.

Step Zero: I need to realize that writing the thing doesn’t mean it’s over. I have to learn to play it, and possibly perform it.

Step One: Print it out and start treating it like I would treat someone else’s music, by making notations and little memory jogs in red pen on the page and otherwise scribbling reminders to myself. Like the old saying goes, the Amateur forgets. The Professional writes it down.

This will also help me since I haven’t actually added more than the most basic dynamic markings to the thing. As an aside, I hate dynamic markings. If the piece doesn’t suggest the best way to play it by itself, I suspect I haven’t written it properly. I need to figure out how to mark things with more than just “rit.” at the end and the occasional “mp.”

F&A’s Advice on Writing for the Piano

I will probably add to and tweak this list for some time:

1) Avoid thirds in the bass. They make your teeth clack together because of the tempering. Only stick them in if you’re writing something to be played on strings.

2) Thirds in the treble are better. They’re still tempered, but the beating isn’t as noticeable the higher you go.

3) Use changes in texture; don’t make the music too isotropic. Don’t make the whole thing a blizzard of 16th notes, or keep your hands over the same rough area of the keyboard the whole time. You’ll bore people to tears. A given piece of music needs to evolve as it goes.

4) V-I is probably the simplest, shortest piece of music ever written. It’s like that shortest poem ever written, in trochaic monometer, called “Fleas” by Strickland Gillilan:

Adam
Had `em.

V-I is like that, and can be thought of as going from a half-step beneath the tonic to the tonic, like B –> C. It’s like subject-verb in a spoken sentence.

5) Write a piece of music like you’re writing an essay. Make a thesis statement with a few sub-parts, maybe three different gimmicks. Expand on each gimmick, and then go back and restate the thesis in a new way, with insight on each gimmick that you gained from having noodled with each.

WHY, damn it?

This sort of thing drives me up the wall.

“Leaps of a seventh are NOT allowed.” Why not?

“Are compound 5ths (i.e. an octave and a 5th) wrong ? YES, they are also illegal.” Why?

“You must NEVER write consecutives.” Why not?

This is useless information, and the way it’s presented is why newbie kids come up thinking that music theory is a bunch of worthless proscriptions that came out of nowhere, and that can therefore be broken willy-nilly to the effect of writing some seriously lousy “modern” music. The problem isn’t that the rules of harmony are arbitrary proscriptions; it’s that the teachers are inarticulate when it comes to explaining why they came about.

There are reasons for these rules — and no, it’s not illegal. It’s just that, if you do write compound 5ths, you will end up writing stinky sounding music.

But why? What is bad about music with these tendencies? Does it sound thin? Does it sound off-key? Does it not give the ear enough information to hold onto the melody? What is bad about it?

I’ve absorbed a ton and a half of music theory just from studying piano for so long. You can’t avoid it when you have the whole keyboard in front of you. Arp G-B-F with your left hand when you are playing something in C Major, and after a while you will start to notice when you arp D-F#-C while in G Major.

But even to me, these lists of Thou Shalt Nots are worthless. They don’t impart any information — why are consecutive 5ths a bad idea? What goes wrong with the music when one writes them?

(And we’ll conveniently sidestep the fact that there is indeed some gorgeous music that does use consecutive fifths, such as my beloved Ginastera’s second Argentine dance. The universe is a complex place.)

*sigh*

Ultimately, it becomes much easier to simply noodle around at the keyboard and use your ear to detect when something “sounds bad.” Chances are, it will sound bad because it has unwittingly broken one of the rules of harmony. However, what takes less time? Noodling and poking around for oneself, or reading a list of Thou Shalt Nots that doesn’t actually explain anything?

No wonder young kids in college think that music theory is useless and that they can write equally good music without the rules of harmony (BTW, they can’t). It’s presented to them as nothing but a bunch of things that are illegal for no reason whatsoever … even though there are good reasons why these rules are best adhered to. (Well, what the hell are they?)

Music teachers are worse than scientists when it comes to utterly lacking the ability to actually tell anyone what they’re doing. Geeks are geeks are geeks, no matter the discipline.

The full intro for “Mormorio”

Done. Now, the melody starts.

A titch more left hand for “Mormorio”

I really do seem to be doing this in tiny two-to-four measure increments. Although I have been having a devil of a time figuring out what the time signature of this thing is! It’s obviously 3/8, 6/8, 12/8, something along those lines. After having dug around in the score itself, it appears that Haendel also marked it a little strangely … or at least the person who did this score sure did, and in several ways.

It’s 12/8, but has the longest pickup I’ve ever seen before the first measure. This puts the downbeat in a nice place and prevents another irritating pickup from popping up after the intro … but I might use a 6/8 time signature anyway, just to keep the thing in a rhythm that feels more comfortable and easier to keep track of for me.

Also? It’s in Eb Major! What in gawdz name is the score doing with only two flats in the key signature? Every single A in the music is flatted, and yet for some oddball reason impenetrable to me, the thing is marked as Bb, with those two little flats staring at me from next to the clefs like beady little possum eyes. Ridiculous. There’s probably an abstruse reason known only to the highest level of Haendel nuts, but I’m sorry, that key signature is whacked. This thing is in Eb Major.

Well, when I do it, it’s in D. I figure it was halfway there anyhow since they play this sort of thing on a Baroque A anyhow. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I think the next one I want to do might be “Dove sei?” (although I’m a little sheepish about it since it’s so pretty as to be intimidating), and I might like to try putting it in a sort of melodic-rock context. That’s going to take a lot of ruminating and attempts to channel Jonathan Cain, but it should be fun, and the thing reminds me of something Cain would write anyway.

Someday, I might want to do “Son nata a lagrimar” as a duet for violin and viola with piano accomp, too. *sigh* That would be so perfect …

Funnily enough …

… when I imagine myself in an old-style opera house, I’m not in a box hobnobbing with the Countess and offering her my servants.

I’m in the pit, laughing and drinking with friends and looking up at the rich people in the boxes. Or I’m one of the proffered servants running from place to place too busy to even enjoy the music while the rich people complain about not having enough ice in their drinks.

It just struck me while I read this, and reminded me of all those upper-class girls in college who loved Jane Austen because they inevitably saw themselves as the good girls in ball gowns trading witticisms with Mr. Darcy. I just kept wondering who was doing the dishes when they all got up from the table.

When you are more likely to identify with the scullery maid than with Elizabeth and her sisters, it changes how you see Great Literature, and how you imagine Great Performances. It changes how you hear them in the present. It changes everything.

And I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I don’t think there is a wealthy person on Earth — not one born to money — who understands what it felt like for One Of Us to hold up a lighter during a power ballad, to be descended from family who could sing the quartet from “Rigoletto” around the dinner table, to cry while watching Steve Perry singing along to his own music on the Jumbotron, to have a mother who cries when she hears “O Sole Mio” and means it, to have grown up surrounded by minimum-wage kids who really got Styx’s “Blue Collar Man” and who didn’t think that “She Works Hard For The Money” was schlock but an anthem of badly needed empowerment. That sort of background and the lack of understanding of it in classical music is a big part of the problem of its bemoaned lack of relevance.

And yes, it bothers me to watch Western culture swallow the lie that my music, the music of my working-class people, has historically been the music of the Countess and her cronies, that tiny slice of humanity that seems to go through life with its ears stopped up and is continually behind the curve when it comes to anything innovative or revolutionary. What do they know about being a starving artist (La Bohème), or a crafty servant (The Barber of Seville), or working in a cigarette factory (Carmen)? Stories like that, just as much as the music video for the Donna Summer song I mentioned above, might as well be a minstrel show to them.

I don’t expect born-wealthy people to suddenly grasp all this, and I don’t think they’re evil because they can’t. But I do think that the overwhelming dominance of the culture of classical music by that one way of looking at everything is a big problem. Sure, there were and are expensive seats at rock concerts, some of which are preposterously overpriced compared to the matinee seats at any classical concert. But I think of John Lennon’s old 1964 crack — “the people in the cheaper seats can clap your hands … the rest of you just rattle your jewelry” — and I know that a big part of the appeal of popular music is that it truly is music for the people. A pop musician can get away with a crack like that; a classical musician would end his career if he said anything like it.

Classical music and opera has been seized upon and claimed by those born to wealth as Their Music. To a large extent, this was inevitable, since this music lives on big-ticket donations anymore, and only the children of wealth will have the Rich-Man’s Rolodex necessary to hit relatives and business partners up for big checks. They and their endowments keep it going month-to-month, but decade-to-decade they are killing it. Its short-term survival depends on the people in the boxes and their endowments … but if it’s going to be beloved generations from now, it’s the people in the pit that had better walk away smiling. The Countess was never really there for the music. The servant girl is the one who will be singing those arias to her grandchildren.

Cosmic injustice

This is when one must woodshed one’s own music. I wrote it. It should teleport itself into my hands, damn it.

Still chewing on “Mormorio.”

I am a pianist through and through, though. By “chewing on,” what I mean is going over it in my head silently while noting the way my left hand wants to bounce.

Not only am I a pianist, I’m very glad I am a pianist. I’d hate to do this on any other instrument. I can’t imagine writing music without the freedom and scale of a keyboard. The only other combination I’ve ever heard of that works effectively replicates the full function of a keyboard anyway, and that’s a singer-plus-bass-guitar. There is a reason why the best composers are bassists, violists, pianists, or play some other non-spotlighted theory-heavy instrument. You need that knowledge in order to write well, otherwise you’re geared almost entirely for your own cadenzas and solos and are unaware of modulations and chordwork. All too often, musicians who only play melodic instruments “write music” that consists of little more than extended solos for songs that never get written.

No, not always. But often, if we’re honest about it, this is indeed the case.