MUS 101 – Professor O'Connell's Music History Blog: Class Assignments, Readings, Listening Examples, and Random Stuff (2023)

(Variation V m. 30 from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111.)

In 1913, an art exhibit was mounted at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City (around the corner from where Hunter College is now located). This exhibit, which came to be known as the Armory Show, was the first introduction to American audiences of Modernist art. One of the most notorious and vilified paintings in the show was Marcel Duchamp’sNude Descending a Staircase.

The artist spreads out every moment of a motion that takes place over time — a woman walking down stairs — on one plane.

The artist Man Ray did something similar a few years later with his paintingThe Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows.

The painting shows every moment of a dance, flattened out on one canvas, all at once.

It has been theorized that the perception of time changed with the birth of Modernism. Certainly technology had something to do with this: the invention of the automobile and innovations in railroads made it possible for distances to be breached more quickly than anyone would have imagined even a few years earlier. 1913 was also the year that Stravinsky’s balletThe Rite of Springhad its premiere:

What does Stravinsky do with the concept of time in this ballet?

Do you think that Henry Ford’s assembly line, also rolled out in 1913, contributed to the changed idea of time? How?

Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity three years later, in 1916, in which he declared that gravitation is a principle ofspace andtime, orspacetime.

Nevertheless, let us think back to the year 1822, when Beethoven wrote his last piano sonata, no. 32 in C minor, op. 111, which you studied earlier in the semester. In it, Beethoven (who was by then profoundly deaf) begins to experiment with space and time, predating Einstein’s theory by decades. In a sense, it’s not even a sonata, but rather a searching meditation on time itself.

If you look at the second movement (out of only two!) in your course packet — which Beethoven calls an “Arietta” — you will see that it starts with a sixteen-bar theme in 9/16 time. Why do you think Beethoven used such an unusual time signature?

The movement takes the form of a theme and variations. Notice that, as the variations succeed one another, Beethoven is further subdividing the beat and the time signature. Notice, for instance, that by variation III, the pianist is playing 64th notes against 32nd notes. And notice that Beethoven takes the meter from 9/16 to 6/16 to 12/32 and back. 12/32!Why does he do this?

Note that tiny note values does NOT mean fast playing.Whatdoes it mean?

And it’s not just time Beethoven is playing with: it’s alsospace.Space on the page, and distance on the keyboard. By the time we get to variation V, there are only eight measures per page, which is necessary because of the infinitesimal divisions of the beat. And notice that in variation V, m. 30, the pianist is asked to play virtually as high as possible on the keyboard, while in variation VI, m. 8-10 the right and left hands are outlining an enormous space across the piano from high to low.

Beethoven is expanding and compressing time and space in this late work in a way that foreshadows Einstein. Why? What do you think he means?

April 16 is a state holiday in Texas: Selena Day.

Who was Selena?

Selena was, is, and, were I to guess, will remain for eternity the most beloved female of all time in the Latino community. (Second place is the Virgin Mary, if you’re looking for context.) . . .She looked like (a more attractive version of) us.

This year, a (mostly) white singer caused controversy by booking a Selena tribute gig at a Dallas club.

Singer Suzanna Choffel explains:

Some cried foul. One Facebook commenter noted:

“Call it what you want, but the fact that you preface your video with, ‘Yes, I know I’m a white girl,’ means that the little 1/8 of you that you now (after being called out for appropriation) claim is Mexican means very little to you, and you ain’t Latina.”

Choffel was defended, on the other hand, by Rachel V. González-Martin, a professor of Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, who

[defines] cultural appropriation as what happens when [a] community with significant resources takes as its own the expressions of a community with fewer resources.

But, [González-Martin] said, cultural appropriation can be hard to identify.

“Once people are exposed to culture, it’s out there . . . That’s why cultural appropriation is so difficult. To say, ‘You’re not Latino, so you’re not allowed to like Selena’ is ridiculous, and it’s bigoted, and it’s small-minded.”

What do you think?

To put it in a certain context: this is one of the best-known songs by Flaco Jiménez, a Texas-born singer and accordionist, like Selena a master of the Tejano style.

Every year on his birthday, these two white Dutch guys make a video of themselves covering it as a tribute to Jiménez. Is it cultural appropriation? Is it cultural appreciation?

What about the Japanese group Orquesta de la Luz, considered one of the best salsa bands in the world in the 1980s and 1990s?

Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa.

Professor González-Martin’s idea that once culture is out there, it’s out there, is not true just for the cultural expressions of historically-oppressed or underresourced groups. In recent years, for instance, Richard Wagner’s operas have been adopted as required listening by American white supremacists who probably never took Music 101. (If they had taken it with me, I like to think, they might have emerged with a little more love for their fellow man.)

For instance, the famous Ride of the Valkyries fromDie Walküre was used as the opening theme music for a white supremacist radio show in Florida.

And at a speech at a rally in Sweden, white supremacist Lana Lokteff asserted that:

“lionesses and shield maidens and Valkyries” would inspire men to fight political battles for the future of white civilization.

Someone else used Wagner’s music as a sonic pun in an endless loop of alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer getting punched at Trump’s inauguration:

In 2019, the ensemble Roomful of Teeth was criticized by Inuit women on Twitter for incorporating Inuit throat-singing practices, uncredited, into one of their pieces, “Partita for 8 Voices,” by award-winning composer Caroline Shaw:

Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices”; the movement with the throat-singing begins at 10:18:

As the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in 1916:

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

Baritone Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, onstage with “The Gadget” inJohn Adams’sDoctor Atomic.

In a previous blog post, I discussed Oppenheimer’s Act I aria in John Adams’s operaDoctor Atomic.The entirety of the aria’s text is John Donne’s Holy Sonnet no. 14, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”

As you know, an opera aria is a moment in the narrative that takes place out of time: the drama advances in the recitatives, but the aria is the place for a character to step out of the action, to reflect upon it, to collect his thoughts, and to offer commentary on it. In the aria “Batter my heart,” Oppenheimer wrestles with one of the greatest moral dilemmas of our age: what it means to harness science — knowledge — in the service of war. He knows that the atomic bomb is a necessary tool for winning the war, but he knows, too, that it will ultimately result in the destruction of untold thousands of lives.

Peter Sellars, who you know as a visionary opera director, is credited as the librettist for Doctor Atomic, but in fact hecompiled the libretto from diaries, letters, memoirs, and declassified government documents. He filled in the remainder with poetry. Not only is Oppenheimer’s aria a musical setting of John Donne; earlier in Act I, Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, sing a love duet, in which her words are taken from a poem by the Oppenheimer’s contemporaryMuriel Rukeyser, and his are by the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire:

Kitty:

Am I in your light?
No, go on reading
(the hackneyed light of evening quarrelling with the bulbs;
the book’s bent rectangle solid on your knees)
only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes
splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love
in a slow caress blurring the mind,
kissing your mouth awake
opening the body’s mouth stopping the words.

Oppie:

If you could know all that I see!
all that I feel!
all that I hear in your hair!
My soul floats upon perfumes
as the souls of other men
float upon music.

How do you think this method of writing an opera works? Is it effective? Is it piecemeal?

It can be argued that the momentous circumstances of the opera’s plot — the test of the first atomic bomb — warrant words that go beyond the ordinary utterances of everyday life, and that thus Peter Sellars’s pulling materials from many different published texts from disparate times and cultures elevates the libretto to its rightful drama.

On the other hand, one critic complained:

(Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann.)

Robert Schumann, no. 4 ofBunteBlätter (Colored Leaves), op. 99.

In 1853, his wife, Clara (Wieck) Schumann, wrote a set of variations on this piece.

The following year, Schumann was confined to the insane asylum at Endenich. Clara, who gave birth to their seventh child that May, was forbidden to visit him, as his doctors believed it would worsen his condition. Brahms, who moved in with Clara and her children, wrote his own variations on the same theme fromBunte Blätter to console her, and as a tribute to the man they both loved.

Music professor Robert Greenberg muses:

What is it about older women? A cynic might claim that a young man’s attraction to an older woman reflects nothing but an Oedipal desire to sleep with his mother and a longing to be babied. But we are not cynics. We understand that Clara, as a professional musician, saw past Brahms’ childish appearance the moment she heard him play his own music at the piano. We understand that this beautiful, smart, experienced woman treated Brahms like a man and as an equal, not like a little boy . . .

Was Clara a cougar, a Mrs. Robinson-type BABE out looking for a naïve but energized (*wink*wink*) young man with whom she could partay heartay?

Answer: Um, no.

How are the Clara Schumann and Brahms variations different? In what ways are they faithful to the original theme by Robert Schumann, and in what ways do they differ from it?Do you believe that the variations enlarge, expand, and (perhaps) even improve upon the original theme by Robert Schumann? How so?

(J. Robert Oppenheimer)

How does contemporary art music respond to the moral problems of the age?

John Adams wrote the operaDoctor Atomic, about the Manhattan Project — the top-secret World War II initiative to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis could — in 2005. The libretto is by Peter Sellars, whom you will remember as the stage director of the production ofDon Giovanni that we studied earlier in the semester. Sellars put together his libretto from historical texts, including letters and diaries.

The principal character in the opera is the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer is reported to have said, at the first test of the prototype bomb — quoting the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

It is difficult to imagine how it must have felt to the brilliant team of scientists to witness the test explosion, knowing as they did that their invention would rupture the innocence of mankind for all time to come.

In the finale of Act I, Oppenheimer is alone with the prototype bomb (nicknamed “The Gadget”). He sings an aria whose text Sellars took from one of the Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poet John Donne:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; For you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock, breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person’d God;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow
burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Why do you think Sellars and Adams gave the character of Oppenheimer these words to sing?

George Crumb (1929 – ) wroteApparition, a song cycle for soprano and amplified piano,in 1979. The text is taken from Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” considered one of the greatest of all American poems.

Crumb used the following excerpts from the poem:

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,

One of the things that’s really interesting and attractive about the poem . . . is that Whitman at several points seems to say, “I don’t know how I can find words that are adequate to express the depth of my grief” . . .Crumb intensifies the sonorous qualities of the words, helping us to hear how Whitman is “musicalizing” the language . . . It’s Whitman’s way of saying that mere words can’t express a sense of loss—only music can do that.

Interspersed among the Whitman song settings are vocalises, i.e. melodies without words. This vocalise comes right before the song “Approach, strong deliveress!”

It may sound absolutely wild, free, and improvisatory, but it is not, as you will see when you look at Crumb’s score in the classroom.

On the other hand, John Cage’sAria (1957)is improvised, with guidance from the score:

As is Cage’sWater Music (1952):

And hisWater Walk(1960), a revised version of Water Music:

Here is Cage performingWater Walk on the game show “I’ve Got A Secret”:

Bartók recording folk music. His subject sings into the horn of an Edison phonograph, which incised a cylinder disk with a needle.

Bela Bartók was one of the earliest ethnomusicologists.

Here is a field recording he made of Romanian folk dances.

Here is his piano composition entitleRomanian Folk Dances.

Here is a folk song he recorded:

The same piece, transcribed for two violins:

A piece by Bartók, based on a folk song he transcribed in Slovakia:

Nuit du carnaval (Henri Rousseau, 1886).

In an art song, there are many layers of meaning.

There is the meaning of the sounds of the music.

There is the meaning of the words of the text.

There is also the meaning of thesounds of the words themselves.

Listen to thesoundsof the text read in French.

Another reading, with a poetic translation into English in the subtitles.

“Clair de lune” (Paul Verlaine, 1869)

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

In translation:

Your soul is a delicate landscape
Where roam charming masks and bergamasques*
Playing the lute and dancing and seeming almost
Sad under their whimsical disguises.
While singing in a minor key
Of victorious love and easy life
They don’t seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
With the sad and beautiful moonlight,
Which makes the birds in the trees dream
And sob with ecstasy the water streams,
The great slim water streams among the marbles.

*Masks = masked players; bergamasques = dancers of a rustic peasant dance called the bergamasque or bergamask, supposedly derived from Bergamo in northern Italy (you can see here a reference to the migration ofcommedia dell’arte from Italy to France). The bergamasque is supposed to be an awkward, clumsy, buffoonish dance.

Debussy’s first version of the song, written in 1882.

A live performance by South African soprano Pretty Yende.

Debussy’s second version, written in 1891.

Debussy also wrote a piano piece called “Clair de lune” as part of hisSuite bergamasque(bergamasques again!) in 1891 (he revised it for publication in 1905).

The piece has been orchestrated many times. This version was cut from Disney’s classic 1940 filmFantasia.

Here is Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the Verlaine poem, written in 1887, in between Debussy’s two versions.

“Au clair de la lune” is an old French folk song in which the protagonist takes advantage of an opportunity that presents itself unexpectedly (talk about “la vie opportune”!)

“By the light of the moon,
My friendPierrot,
Lend me your quill
To write a word.
My candle is dead,
I have no light left.
Open your door for me
For the love of God.”

By the light of the moon,
Pierrot replied:
“I don’t have any pens,
I am in my bed
Go to the neighbor’s,
I think she’s there
Because in her kitchen
Someone is lighting the fire.”

By the light of the moon
Likeable Lubin
Knocks on the brunette’s door.
She suddenly responds:
– Who’s knocking like that?
He then replies:
– Open your door
for the God of Love!

By the light of the moon
One could barely see.
The pen was looked for,
The light was looked for.
With all that looking
I don’t know what was found,
But I do know that the door
Shut itself on them.

Debussy quotes the melody throughout his 1881 song “Pierrot”:

The text is a poem by Theodore de Banville.

In translation:

The good Pierrot, whom the crowd watches,
Having finished at Harlequin’s wedding,
Wanders as in a dream along the Boulevard du Temple.
A young girl in a flimsy blouse
In vain entices him with her scamp’s eye;
And meanwhile, mysterious and shiny
Making him its dearest delight,
The white moon with horns of a bull
Casts a glance offstage
At his friend Jean Gaspard Deburau.

Pierrot and Harlequin (Pablo Picasso, 1920).

Pierrot is one of the stock characters ofcommedia dell’arte, an improvised form of theater that was performed by traveling players throughout Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a sad clown, in love with the stock heroine of commedia, Colombina (Columbine), who in turn is in love with the more virile and aggressive Arlecchino (Harlequin).

Pierrot and Harlequin (Paul Cézanne, 1888).

While Harlequin is identifiable by his trademark checked leotards, Pierrot usually appears in a loose white suit, as shown here by the French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721).

By the nineteenth century, whiteface makeup would become a trademark of the character as well, an innovation of the famous mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846), who added depth and nuance to the stock figure of Pierrot. Debureau’s portrayal of Pierrot even earned him comparisons to Shakespeare. The classic 1945 French filmLes enfants du Paradis(Children of Paradise) is a fictionalized account of Deburau’s life.

Claude Debussy wrote a song called “Pierrot” in 1881, a setting of a poem by Theodore de Banville which references the great Deburau:

The text, in translation:

The good Pierrot, whom the crowd watches,
Having finished at Harlequin’s wedding,
Wanders as in a dream along the Boulevard du Temple.
A young girl in a flimsy blouse
In vain entices him with her scamp’s eye;
And meanwhile, mysterious and shiny
Making him its dearest delight,
The white moon with horns of a bull
Casts a glance offstage
At his friend Jean Gaspard Deburau.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Pierrot became the idealized image of the suffering, alienated, and melancholy artist. His white costume suggested innocence; his white face, with its corpse-like pallor, suggested death. He became a favorite subject of modernist painting.

By Georges Seurat.

By Georges Rouault.

By Pablo Picasso (who painted many images of Pierrot).

By Elaine Haxton.

A very early animated French film of Pierrot.

In 1912, the German actress Albertine Zehme commissioned Arnold Schoenberg to write a song-cycle for her, based on German translations of the poem-cyclePierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot) by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud. Giraud’s poems begin in a dreamlike, surrealistic manner, and gradually become more and more nightmarish.

Albertine Zehm.

Schoenberg pioneered the extended vocal technique of sprechstimme (speech-song), and used an ensemble consisting of flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet in A (doubling on clarinet in B-flat and bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano. This particular amalgamation of forces — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano — is still known as a “pierrot ensemble.”The piece was first performed on October 16, 1912, with Zehme dressed as Columbine.

The German critic Theodor Adorno said thatPierrot Lunaire is about “the homelessness of our souls.”

Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Black Pierrot,”
which was set music by William Grant Still, 1895-1978):

I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So I crept away into the night
And the night was black, too.
I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So I wept until the red dawn
Dripped blood over the eastern hills
And my heart was bleeding, too.
I am a black Pierrot:
She did not love me,
So with my once gay-colored soul
Shrunken like a balloon without air,
I went forth in the morning
To seek a new brown love.

Pierrot has continued to haunt the music of our own time. David Bowie told an interviewer in the 1970s:

I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. . . . It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants – they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness of 1976.

Later, Bowie appeared as Pierrot in the video for his 1980 song “Ashes to Ashes.”

In 1996 and again in 2015, Björk sangPierrot Lunairein live performance.

Europe in 1914.

The multiple alliances that led to the European conflagration

This sums it up: