A Minute with Miles: Recent Episodes
Miles Hoffman
Illuminating 60-second flights through the world of classical music with host and longtime NPR commentator Miles Hoffman. Produced by South Carolina Public Radio.
Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.
Ears can be trained. Which is why every music school in the world offers ear-training courses. I suppose it should go without saying, but for musicians the ability to recognize fine distinctions among sounds is crucial.
In 1767 Franz Anton Mesmer moved to a magnificent estate in Vienna, and among the guests he entertained there were the composers Gluck and Haydn.
Bach himself didn’t invent any of the forms he used. He used the forms he inherited, but he transformed them .
Franz Liszt invented the solo piano recital, and in fact he coined the term “recital,” too.
It occurs to me, when considering the history of music, that the endlessly recurring and often bitter fights over musical styles and trends have actually been quite productive, if only because they’ve acted as spurs for composers in supposedly opposing camps to produce their best work. And then, of course, it turns out that later generations usually have no trouble enjoying all the styles in question, and the old disputes, even though productive, just seem silly to them.
Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809. By the time he was fourteen he had composed four operas, twelve sparkling string symphonies, and various other pieces, and by the time he was seventeen he had composed masterpieces of chamber music and orchestral music that will be played for as long as music is played anywhere.
Bernstein stopped and said, “I’ll give ten dollars to anyone who can tell me which piece this Walton Concerto is directly modelled on.” I raised my hand.
In a famous letter to his father, Mozart once wrote, “you know I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument I cannot bear.” He was talking about the flute, and the occasion of the letter was a commission Mozart had received to write several flute concertos and quartets for flute and strings.
If you have a chance to attend an orchestra concert anytime soon and one of the pieces on the program calls for a harp, make sure to watch the harpist’s feet. They’ll be busy.
People’s anxiety dreams tend to be tailored to their particular personalities, circumstances, and experiences, and often to their particular professions.
Ginastera was undoubtedly the most important Argentinean composer of the twentieth century.
Gabriel Fauré is often referred to as one of the greatest French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I wonder if that description goes far enough.
Many years ago there was a great string quartet that was famous for its members not getting along. I don’t know if we can blame this particular quartet, but one theory that took hold was that the best results for chamber music groups are produced by conflict, and the resolution of conflict. I would like to on record as saying that I think this theory is a bunch of hooey.
For performers, just about everything the composer writes, with the exception of the notes themselves, is a matter of interpretation
The body length of a full-size violin is about 14 inches, give or take a very small fraction. This is a standard length, and an optimum length, arrived at by trial and error over many years by the great violin makers of history.
If I told you about a letter from a famous composer to his employers, a letter in which the composer complained that he needed a higher salary because he’d been making less money freelancing playing the organ at funerals, because there hadn’t been nearly enough disease going around – could you guess who the composer was?
Staccato is the Italian word for “separated,” or “detached.” Staccato notes are notes that are not sustained for their full rhythmic value: they come to a short stop, which separates them from notes that follow.
Today is January 27, and it’s Mozart’s birthday. I know I don’t have to tell you how wonderful Mozart’s music is to listen to… but if you’re not a musician yourself you may find it interesting to know that Mozart’s music is also wonderful to play. And it’s not that it’s easy—in fact it’s usually pretty hard, and sometimes very hard.
I’m grateful for advances in neuroscience, and for many reasons glad that every day we know more about how the brain works. But for all the studies of left brains, right brains, and neuron networks, some things will remain mysteries, and there’s no way around it.
The literal meaning of the Italian word spiccato is similar to that of staccato—“detached,” or “distinct.” In string playing, to play notes spiccato means to play them with a bouncing bow. With its stiff but flexible stick and tightened horsehair, the bow is like a long spring, so it wants to bounce. But spiccato involves a controlled bouncing. The bow comes off the string after each note, but the player has to find the balance between making the bow bounce and letting it bounce.
The strings of stringed instruments—violins, violas, cellos, basses, guitars, and harps—may be made of steel, nylon or other synthetics, or of gut. Often the steel, nylon, or gut serves as the core of the string, and around the core is a tight winding of very fine wire—wire of steel, aluminum, or silver.
The American composer Seymour Barab started out as a pianist and organist, but as a teenager he took up the cello, and as a cellist he became a highly successful orchestra musician, founder of important string quartets, top commercial free-lance player, champion of new music, and later, after mastering the viola da gamba, champion of old music.
I mentioned yesterday that by the mid-1700's the modern flute, technically called the transverse flute, had to a great extent replaced the recorder. The replacement wasn’t complete, though: both Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel had continued to write for both instruments.
The flute is one of mankind’s oldest instruments, and in one form or another it’s been known to virtually every culture around the world.
No piece of music is ever just “about” any one thing. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni stands beneath Donna Elvira’s window and sings the aria Deh vieni alla finestra, “Come to the window, O my treasure.” It’s a serenade, a love song, and a very beautiful one. But there’s one big problem: it’s a fake.
The da capo aria, which I talked about yesterday, was a form that by 1750 had begun to lose its once enormous popularity. It was a form that was essentially killed by excess. The reign of the da capo aria coincided with the reign of the castrati as the stars of Italian opera.
For about a hundred years, roughly from 1650 to 1750, the principal type of aria in opera, and also in the oratorios and cantatas of such composers as Bach and Handel, was the da capo aria.
The aria - a musical form that’s a kind of song, but more elaborate and vocally demanding than the pieces we usually call songs. The development of opera in Italy in the 1600's is what brought the aria to glory.
Arias are the pieces for solo voice with instrumental accompaniment that are found in operas, oratorios, and cantatas. They’re songs, in a sense, but they tend to be more musically elaborate and vocally demanding than the kinds of pieces we usually call songs.
Acoustics is the science of sound, but the word also refers to the qualities of a room—the qualities that determine and describe how things sound in that room.
When discussing acoustics it’s important to remember that there’s no absolute standard, and that different kinds of music may be better served by different acoustics.
Absolutely everything in the design and construction of a room, or concert hall, contributes to its acoustics… from the shape and size of the room, to the building and finishing materials, to the seating configuration and height of the stage, to the seemingly minor decorative details.
When we ask about the acoustics of a concert hall, or of any room, we’re asking about qualities, about how things sound in that room.
“People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my [reviews] as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading."
“We know rather more now about the psychology of artists than we used [to], and so we no longer incline to the naïve belief that if a composer has quarreled with his wife his next symphony will be a Pathétique, or that if his liver happens to be functioning normally he will produce a Hymn to Joy at the next [Choral] Festival."
“Music is a medium through which certain unnamable experiences of life are exquisitely conveyed through equivalent sensations for the ear…"
"...today all [the] intelligent and sensitive souls, on whom his genius has shed its radiance, turned to him as toward a benefactor and a friend.”
“Real music goes beyond the intentions of its author for it nourishes itself from a much deeper and more mysterious source than mere intellect. It represents a synthesis of all the vital forces, of all the hidden instincts of an individual..."
"Sonata” and “sonata form” are not the same thing, and that—in any kind of piece, not just sonatas—a movement composed in sonata form consists of three primary sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation.
“Sonata form” and the musical form known as the sonata are not the same thing. A sonata is a piece - usually for piano or for piano and one other instrument—that’s composed of several distinct sections called movements.
Dmitri Shostakovich's political views have long been subjects of controversy. Was Shostakovich a loyal Communist, or was he a secret rebel who suffered for years under oppressive conditions and yet contrived time and again to encode powerful subversive messages into his music?
A wind instrument is any instrument whose sound is produced by a column of air vibrating inside some sort of tube, or pipe. But I’d like to clear up a common misconception: Wind players aren’t blowing away to try to fill up their instruments with air —the air inside a wind instrument is already there.
The double bass is the one member of the modern violin family whose roots are in the viola da gamba, or viol family.
We’ve recently learned that the South Carolina Research Authority’s investment affiliate, SC Launch has invested $250,000 into our next guest’s startup company to help them continue to develop their data management and analysis product. Mike Switzer interviews Christian Screen, founder of AICG in Fort Mill, SC.
Art song is a general term that refers to the kinds of songs written by classically-trained composers for classically-trained singers. Composers themselves don’t talk about writing “art songs,” they simply say “songs.”
Fantasy is the English translation of the Italian fantasia, a word that first appeared as a title for instrumental works in the 1500's. Since then, it’s a title that’s been used over and over.
Musical child prodigies have always fascinated the public. Far more rare than the child prodigy performer, though, is the child prodigy composer. The first name that comes to many people’s minds when they think of child composers is Mozart, and it’s true that Mozart started writing music at the age of four or five. But of all Mozart’s great pieces, very few were written before his twentieth birthday. Felix Mendelssohn, on the other hand, composed works when he was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen that are still considered masterpieces, and that far surpass anything Mozart wrote when he was a teenager.
It’s popular, in some circles, to find links between creative genius and mental illness. Among composers, Robert Schumann is usually Exhibit A, but there are others who are regularly mentioned, as well. My own view is that the so-called link is no link at all.
The word cello, believe it or not, comes from an Italian word meaning “little big viola.”
Modern scholars have found that Fasch’s music represents an important transition between the style of the late Baroque period and the “classical” style of Haydn and Mozart.
Professional opera singers often have to sing in languages with which they’re completely unfamiliar. And yet they’re expected to pronounce all the words correctly. How do they do it?
Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.
Chairs that are too low, too high, too hard, too slippery, or with seats tilted backward… they’re the bane of musicians’ existence.
Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light, or charming, or profound, when no two people ever have precisely the same reaction to the same piece? One person’s “sad” may be another’s “noble,” and one person’s intense and penetrating may be another’s pretentious and annoying.
A while back I spent a minute offering a few suggestions of what to say after a concert when the concert was really pretty bad, but the performer is someone you know and you have to say something. In the unfortunate event that you’ve already used up your store of useful phrases, I thought I’d suggest a few more.
In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a music director woke up in a bad mood and decided to fire an orchestra musician on the spot, he could… never mind that it might instantly deprive that musician of his livelihood.
Do you agree with the judgment that the two greatest composers of the late Baroque were Bach and Handel? Well, that means, unavoidably, that the rest of the late Baroque composers weren’t as good.
He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.
He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.
I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.
I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.
Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes whenever you’ve moved from place to place?
The riches that music has to offer, whether in times of great sorrow or great joy, are both incalculable and irreplaceable.
I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were.
The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?
Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our mood, rather than music that might jar us out of it?
If you like beautiful old keyboard instruments, not to mention beautiful small museums, I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to the Carolina Music Museum, in Greenville South Carolina.
For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French hornists, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players playing plenty of different notes, but the number of times they move their fingers—or in the case of trombonists their slides—doesn’t nearly add up to the number of notes.
Why have Verdi's operas stood the test of time, while those of his contemporaries have not?
If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.
If you’d like a remarkable example of the genius of Leonard Bernstein, I recommend that you listen – or listen again – to the song “Cool,” from West Side Story.
Every musician will tell you that there are some musicians who just seem to have better ears than others do.
One of the reasons Mozart’s operas seem so profound to us is because they’re so true to life, and perhaps especially true to life’s complexities and contradictions.
Louis Spohr isn’t one of those composers who fell into complete obscurity. But for better or for worse the majority of his works remain unknown to modern audiences.
One of the common dangers of studying composers’ lives is finding out that some of the people whose music we love and admire turn out to have been very unadmirable human beings.
Bach and Mozart died over two hundred years ago – – Is there anybody alive today whose music will be played two hundred years from now? It’s a tricky question.
I wonder what today’s voice teachers would think of the composer Gioacchino Rossini’s ideas for a vocal training curriculum.
It’s always fun to propose lists of the “ten best” of something – or the ten worst of something, for that matter. But when it comes to thinking about composers of classical music, there’s a word I like better than “best,” and that word is indispensable.
I’ve spoken about this before, but the subject seems to come up a lot, so why not go over it again: in America, 99.9 per cent of the people who play the flute for a living call themselves flutists, not flautists. That’s not a scientific number, but I think it’s pretty accurate.
There are many people who say they love classical music, but not “that modern stuff.” What’s interesting is that some of “that modern stuff” is well over a hundred years old.
If you explore the history of psychotherapy, you’ll come upon the name Franz Anton Mesmer. In 1767 Mesmer moved to a magnificent estate in Vienna, and among the guests he entertained there were Leopold Mozart and his family. When Leopold’s 12-year-old son Wolfgang wrote an opera called Bastien und Bastienne, the premiere took place in Dr. Mesmer’s private theater.
The most common tempo markings in music are words like allegro, adagio, and andante. But often composers indicate expression along with tempo, and this is when foreign-language dictionaries can come in handy.
In May of 1761, Benjamin Franklin was in Cambridge, England, and he heard a man play a performance on musical glasses. They were crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water, and when the performer rubbed the edges of the glasses, they produced different notes.
Galileo, whose full name was Galileo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of science. What may surprise you is that Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of Western music.
Musicians tend to tell lots of stories about funny things that have happened on stage during concerts. Often the stories are about disasters or near-disasters, and to be honest, they usually seem much funnier later on than the events themselves felt when they were actually happening. But one of the funniest stories I know isn’t about a disaster.
When you hear a Baroque piece described as a trio sonata for “flute, violin, and continuo,” remember that the continuo isn’t an instrument, it’s a part, and with two instruments playing it.
Percussion instruments, whether alone or in combination, have always been very useful ingredients for adding flavor and color to orchestral compositions.
When it comes to Spanish composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the three most important names are certainly Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados, and Manuel de Falla – all composers who brilliantly integrated Spanish folk influences into the Western classical tradition.
Some years back colleague and I were listening to a Bach violin concerto on the radio. After a while my colleague said, “You know, there are a thousand Baroque violin concertos. Why is it that this one is just…better?”
In addition to his own works, Lizt's recitals featured pieces by all the great composers of the day and by those he called the “classics,” including many works of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
By the late 1700s, the piano had replaced the harpsichord as the primary keyboard instrument for solo compositions, concertos, and chamber music. Lovers of Baroque music may not like to hear this, but for most musicians of the time—of the late 1700s, that is—this replacement represented progress.
Claude Debussy often performed his own works, but he tended to get nervous, and he didn’t enjoy playing in public. And yet by all accounts Debussy was a wonderful pianist, especially noted for his remarkable “touch” at the keyboard.
What I somehow hear in Mozart, whether in his operas or his instrumental works, is a kind of fundamental optimism.
After Beethoven, all composers were seen and evaluated in Beethoven’s light, or rather in his enormous shadow.
In 1838, ten years after the death of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann traveled to Vienna, and while he was there he paid a visit to the graves of Schubert and Beethoven. On a whim, Schumann decided to call on Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand, who was living in Vienna, and this turned out to be perhaps the most fortuitous social call in the history of music.
A scientist I know was talking about great works of literature the other day, and she said that what characterized them was the “density of brilliance.” What a wonderful phrase. And how perfect, too, for great works of music.
Claude Debussy was a great composer, but like many other famous composers, he was also a wonderful writer.
Everyone makes progress at his or her own pace, and what’s crucial is where you eventually arrive, not how fast you get there.
Some years ago I had the privilege of appearing as viola soloist with the United States Marine Band, “the Presidents Own,” and I can tell you it was a great experience. Like the members of the other premier service bands, the bands of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, the Marine Band players are graduates of some of the nation’s top conservatories, and they’re terrific musicians.
And what about those musicians—Beethoven being only the most famous of many—who can hear combinations of pitches in their heads—chords, harmonies—and can invent, just in their heads, sequences of harmonies that have never been heard before?
Vincenzo Bellini—the composer of Norma, La Sonnambula, and I Puritani, to name a few of his best-known operas—is famous for the beauty of his melodies, but also for his ability to use melody to define character, express passion, and advance dramatic action.
It occurs to me, when considering the history of music, that the endlessly recurring and often bitter fights over musical styles and trends have actually been quite productive, if only because they’ve acted as spurs for composers in supposedly opposing camps to produce their best work.
In The Barber of Seville and his many other operas, Gioacchino Rossini gave singers plenty of opportunities to show off their talents. But in a letter he wrote in 1851, Rossini made it clear that he didn’t have much patience for the cult of the great singer.
Mozart, they say, could compose music while he was playing billiards. Rossini wrote that he had once composed an overture while standing in the water fishing and listening to his fishing partner discuss Spanish finance.
A violin may look perfectly symmetrical from the outside, but on the inside it’s not symmetrical at all.
The members of the violin family—the violin, viola, cello, and double bass—are made of wood. But on any one instrument you may find four or even five different kinds of wood.
Bernstein stopped and said, “I’ll give ten dollars to anyone who can tell me which piece this Walton Concerto is directly modeled on.”
For at least six hundred years, composers have been borrowing the melodies of folk songs and incorporating them into their compositions. And there’s a good reason: they’re good melodies; they’re melodies that have stood the test of time—that have never lost their hold on people.
Now, if ever there was a musician who was entitled to say of a Bartók quartet, “This is the way it goes,” it was Robert Mann. He knew those quartets inside out, and had recorded them more than once.
When musicians and music scholars prepare performances of works by dead composers, they often get stuck in arguments over determining what the composers’ “original intent” was. And while I certainly recognize the importance of scholarly accuracy and authenticity, and of staying true to the composers’ wishes, I think that sometimes musicians forget that dead composers were once alive. Back in 1980 a pianist I know was preparing a performance of the Copland Piano Concerto, a performance that Aaron Copland himself was going to conduct, and the pianist had the opportunity to play the piece privately for the composer. After the first movement, Copland asked, “Why are you playing it so fast”… and the pianist, a little flummoxed, said that he was just trying to follow Mr. Copland’s printed metronome marking. “You know,” Copland replied, “I wrote this piece over fifty years ago. That may have been the tempo then, but this is the tempo now.”
Virtually all major composers of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries, of whatever nationality, have made important, and in some cases extensive contributions to the chamber music repertoire.
You could write a book about the life of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann– and as it turns out, Telemann himself wrote three – three separate autobiographies.
I had the enormous good fortune as a young man to get to work with the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich, or “Slava,” as everybody called him, was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra when I played in that ensemble, and with all his other engagements he still somehow made time to give master classes just for members of the orchestra.
In the world of instrumental and vocal teaching, most teachers approach their students with certain basic principles in mind. For me, one of those principles is that whether we’re dealing with individuals or with ensembles, there’s no separating technical goals from musical goals.
One of the things I’ve learned as a string teacher is that good habits can often replace a student’s bad habits quickly, because the good habits make playing easier. But it was Mark Twain, strangely enough, who helped me to realize that the switch can only result from a very conscious and rational process on the student’s part, a process of understanding and acceptance.
The efficient and graceful use of the body is crucial to both sports and musical performance. But there are certainly many mental parallels as well.
Our notions of “truth” in the history of musical ideas and performance practice may not always be quite as solid as we think.
Cello students everywhere have struggled with Popper’s “High School of Cello Playing,” a book of études that’s a kind of Mount Everest of cello technique.
We musicians have all known people we’ve found to be thoroughly unpleasant, even cruel, or thoroughly insipid and boring, who walk on stage and play or sing beautifully, movingly. How is this possible?
Counterpoint, also called polyphony, is the art, in musical composition, of combining two or more simultaneous lines of music.
Pizzicato is the Italian word for “plucked.” Why is pizzicato never translated? Beats me. Maybe just because pizzicato is a delightful-sounding word. It certainly sounds better than “plucked.”
“Program music” is instrumental music that attempts to tell a story, paint a scene or picture, or convey impressions of a character, place, or event. But no matter how sonically descriptive, music is always open to a range of interpretations—sometimes far removed from the composer’s intentions—and no two people will ever hear the same work in exactly the same way.
Your strange job as a performing artist—musician, actor, or dancer—is to immerse yourself completely in the work of art you’re performing—to lose yourself, in a sense—and yet at all times to remain aware of precisely what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. It’s not easy, and sometimes the process—which is complicated to begin with—becomes downright mysterious.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in classical music, the final movements of instrumental pieces—the finales—were almost always in fast tempos, and they usually ended loud, and emphatically.
Composers often call for repeats, in their music, for whole sections of their pieces to be played twice. And the question is: what’s the point?
Outdoor concerts can be delightful, especially when the music and the natural surroundings make a perfect mix. Then again, when you’re playing outdoors, things sometimes happen that wouldn’t ever happen in the concert hall—and I’m not just talking about thunderstorms.
If you have a chance to attend an orchestra concert anytime soon and one of the pieces on the program calls for a harp, make sure to watch the harpist’s feet. They’ll be busy.
“F” is for Fishing Creek, Battle of (August 18, 1780). Coming on the heels of the defeat at Camden, the rout of Thomas Sumter’s force at Fishing Creek marked the low point of the patriot cause in South Carolina.
Of the many musical terms that have made their way into general usage, one of the most colorful—and useful—is Prima donna. These days the term gets applied to anyone with an oversized ego—man or woman—but in Italian it simply means “first lady,” and it’s been in use since the 1600's as the title for the singer of an opera’s principal female role. By the 1700's the term was already associated with the artistic and commercial cult of the glamorous leading lady—a cult that met with little protest from the leading ladies themselves—and some prima donnas demanded to be called prima donna assoluta, “absolute leading lady.”
J.S. Bach composed his St. Matthew Passion in 1727. But for the better part of a century after that, the piece essentially disappeared, unknown to all but a few specialists.
J.S. Bach composed his St. Matthew Passion in 1727. But for the better part of a century after that, the piece essentially disappeared, unknown to all but a few specialists.
I find it fascinating that many of the greatest composers of the 19th century—composers such as Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorák, and Tchaikovsky—knew one another, and in many cases had very friendly personal and musical relationships.
In 1950 a musicologist named Wolfgang Schmieder published an enormous catalogue of J.S. Bach’s works, but Schmieder organized it by category, that is, by type of composition, not by date of composition. The catalogue is known in German as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or BWV, and that’s why you often see Bach’s works listed in programs with their BWV numbers.
Do you find traveling glamorous? Sitting around in airports, waiting in lines, carrying luggage, eating in unfamiliar places, sleeping in unfamiliar beds? Well imagine doing that for about ten months a year, and imagine doing it alone, while having to prove, over and over again every single week, that you’re one of the best in the world at what you do.
Musicians, like actors, have to deal with something a drama teacher once called the “paradox of integrity.” On the one hand, you have to be completely “in character” when you’re performing. On the other hand, you have to remember where to put your fingers, and not to make the same mistake tonight you made at the rehearsal yesterday morning.
I won’t mention any names, but many years ago there was a great string quartet that was famous for its members not getting along. People joked that it was a tragedy for this quartet if they showed up in a town that only had three hotels.
If you’re allergic to highly technical program notes for classical music concerts, you’re not alone. Most musicians I know find such notes boring and irrelevant, and most non-musicians find them useless, not to mention seriously off-putting. Well, it turns out it’s an old problem, as I discovered when I read a wonderful essay by George Bernard Shaw from 1896.
Walter Pater was an influential 19thcentury English author and critic, and in 1870 he wrote a fascinating essay about the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.
Joseph Lanner was a hugely popular and important composer and orchestra leader in Vienna in the 1820's and 30's, one of the first composers to create a refined version of the Viennese waltz
How can you look at your music and play all the right notes if you’re also looking up at the person waving the baton?
I’m guessing you haven’t thought much about this, but one of the things we musicians have to put up with is calluses. Not feeling sympathetic? But what if the calluses are peeling, or bleeding, or have bruises under or around them, or make you look like you’ve been attacked by a vampire?
In music, the terms “high” and “low,” as in “high notes” and “low notes,” “high pitched” and “low pitched,” are metaphors.
It wasn’t until the late 1700s and early 1800s that the brilliant operatic tenor as we know him today came into his own.
Under the heading “Real Musical Understanding,” here’s something that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote in 1910...
If there are such things as “good pieces” or “great pieces,” then there must also be such things as bad pieces.
“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies..."
When “classical” public radio stations surveyed their audiences some years back, the most common answer to the question, “Why do you listen to classical music,” was, “Because it’s soothing.”
It’s often - not always, but often - interesting to read what composers have written about composing—especially if they’re good writers.
Partita is a synonym for “suite,” and the Baroque suite, which is to say the suite in the time of Bach, consists of a set of dance movements.
If you are a regular listener of our show, you’ve probably heard our many discussions recently about South Carolina’s SmartState program where 51 endowed chairs are tasked with developing centers for economic excellence based on their research efforts. Since 2012, research at our next guest’s center has resulted in six patents and the formation of a startup company that is working on commercial development of nanotechnology for the remediation of oil spills in the environment. Mike Switzer interviews Jamie Lead, founder of GeoMat and the endowed chair and professor at the Center for Environmental Nanoscience and Risk at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Stradivarius is the Latinized last name of Antonio Stradivari, often regarded as history’s greatest violin maker.
Though the songs of the song cycle are all individual entities, they’re designed to be heard together.
For centuries, composers of classical music have been borrowing and adapting ideas and styles from popular music.
When it comes to the history of the guitar, the only thing that’s certain… is that nothing is certain.
To make an arrangement of a musical composition is to rewrite the composition for a new set of musical forces—to rewrite a wind quintet for string quartet, for example, or to transform a string quartet into a piano trio.
The literal meaning of a capella in Italian is “as in the chapel,” or “in the style of the chapel.” And what has the chapel got to do with it?
Many composers over the years have tried to express in writing what the music of Mozart has meant to them—and to the world.
In the letters of great composers, certain themes come up again and again, especially the composers’ struggles to get their works performed, and the desire—often frustrated—to have those works understood and appreciated.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was an example of one of the great “types” in the history of classical music: the virtuoso performer who was also an important composer.
Jean Sibelius was a fascinating man. He was born the year the American Civil War ended and he died in the year of Sputnik.
Muscle strain, tendinitis, nerve damage—all fall in the general category of “overuse” syndromes, and all are unfortunately extremely common among professional musicians.
The composer is the creator, and long after even the most brilliant and famous performers of the moment are forgotten, it’s the music that will remain.
In the long run, the judgment of the public is much more important than that of the critics, and the music that lasts is the music that moves people
Although they had similar training and came under many of the same influences, Debussy's and Ravel's musical styles and techniques were really quite different.
A famous music critic once referred to the French composer Maurice Ravel as “this most conscious, most naturally artificial of composers.” And in fact Ravel specifically said that he wasn’t seeking “profundity” in the music he wrote. He was merely seeking perfection...
More today about the timpani, or kettledrums. The “kettle” of a kettledrum is called the “bowl,” and is made of copper or brass. The “head” of the drum, the surface that the player strikes, is a piece of Mylar plastic stretched over the rim of the bowl. Timpani heads were originally made of calfskin, but calfskin is very sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity, and it’s expensive, so although some players still prefer the sound of calfskin heads, these days most players stick with plastic. Tuning the drums to specific pitches is a matter of adjusting the tension of the drumheads—tighter for higher, looser for lower. This is done with a pedal mechanism on most modern timpani, although hand screws around the rim are still used for fine adjustments. And if you see a timpanist bending over his instrument during a concert with his ear close to the drumheads, it’s because timpanists often have to tune their drums to different pitches while everybody else is playing.
It was Beethoven who liberated the timpani from the trumpets, expanding their role and the range of notes they played, and even writing solo passages for them.
"I find an exquisite joy when I search deeply in the recesses of myself, and if anything original is to come from me, it can only come that way."
Yesterday I spoke about picturesque titles of musical compositions, and I quoted Robert Schumann on what he called the “clumsiness” of taking those titles too literally. Schumann’s friend Franz Liszt, on the other hand, coined the term “program music,” and said that when a piece has a program, or story, the musical ideas should clearly reflect the unfolding of the story.
Like many 19th-century composers, Robert Schumann often gave his works picturesque titles. Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, for example, a set of pieces for solo piano, includes pieces with titles such as “Pleading Child,” and “Frightening.” How literally should we take these titles – and perhaps the picturesque titles of other composers’ works?
A word of advice today for non-musicians reading program notes in concert programs: If the program notes are heavy on technical analysis and are loaded with terms like modulation, inversion, augmentation, diatonic intervals, chromatic progression, modified sonata form, what have you… ignore them.
Beethoven replaced the minuet in his four-movement pieces with the scherzo. Scherzo means “joke,” in Italian, but in Beethoven’s scherzos you won’t usually find anything that qualifies as out-‘n-out funny.
The word scherzo, which means “joke,” in Italian, had appeared in music as early as the 1600's, but it was Beethoven who gave the scherzo its modern character, and established a permanent place for it.
Syncopation is a general term: there’s no limit to the number or variety of possible syncopated rhythms or syncopated patterns, and no limit to the ways they may be used.
Syncopation is a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm. It’s the placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur.
Percussion players can vary the sounds of their instruments by using different kinds of drumsticks, or drumsticks with different kinds of heads.
Already during their lifetimes, Antonin Dvorák and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky were among the most famous composers in the world. Their music is extremely sophisticated, the product of highly skilled composers, and their beautiful melodies have always been especially beloved.
Yesterday I listed several pieces of music that would definitely not be the pieces I’d want to be limited to if I were stranded on a desert island. And I’m afraid I can’t resist adding to the list today, especially since I’ve had a few excellent suggestions from friends.
Yesterday I mentioned a few pieces of music I’d like to have with me if I were marooned on a desert island. Today I thought I’d list a few pieces I would definitely not want along. I’m assuming my island would be surrounded by water, so right away Debussy’s La Mer would be out...
It’s an old question: if you were going to be dropped off on a desert island and you could only take a few recorded pieces of music with you, what would they be? For me, the first piece on the list is easy: Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
When the dance known as the waltz first became popular in Europe in the late 1700's and early 1800's, it was considered by many to be the ultimate in lewdness and licentiousness.
The clarinet was the last of the principal woodwind instruments to join the orchestra. The modern clarinet evolved from earlier forms in the early 1700's—later than the modern oboe, bassoon, and flute—and it wasn’t until late in the century that orchestral composers included the clarinet in their scores with any regularity.
I’ve been talking this week about vibrato, the vibrato that string players use to warm up their sounds, and the vocal vibrato that’s the natural product of healthy singing. All vibrato consists of small oscillations in pitch, but not all vibrato is a blessing.
singers use vibrato, too—although use isn’t exactly the right word. Vibrato happens, is more like it.
When violinists play, their left hands always seem to shake. But it’s not because they’re nervous. Violinists, violists, cellists, and double bass players all use a technique called vibrato.
The harpsichord, the keyboard workhorse of the Baroque period, is an instrument with a problem: varying the touch on the keys has absolutely no effect on volume or tone quality. Depress a key gently or pound on it, it doesn’t matter — the note will sound the same.
Atonal music is music that isn’t written in a key, music that doesn’t follow the traditional rules of harmony. But although the term “atonal” tells us what a piece isn’t, it doesn’t tell us what it is. Many different styles and musical languages, whether harsh or lush, cool or intense, simple or complex can be described as atonal.
Serenade is one of those musical terms that has meant many different things at many different times. The term itself comes from the Italian sereno, which is from the Latin serenus, which means “serene.”
The word sonata comes from the Italian sonare, an old form of suonare, which means “to sound,” or “to play,” as in “to play an instrument.”
Atonality and dissonance are often linked in listeners’ minds, but they’re not the same thing. Dissonance, from the Latin words for “sounding” and “apart,” is the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes to produce a clashing, or unpleasant effect. Its opposite is consonance, a pleasing sound, a “sounding together.”
Chamber music rehearsals are very different from orchestra rehearsals. In an orchestra rehearsal, it’s the conductor’s job to make the overall musical decisions and to ensure that the members of the orchestra carry them out. A chamber music group, on the other hand, is—ideally, at least—a pure democracy.
In operatic singing, there are three principal voice types for women. From high to low, they are soprano, mezzo-soprano—mezzo meaning “middle” in Italian—and contralto.
Have you ever wondered how the violin came to play such an important role in the history of classical music? Well, it starts with singing.
The members of the modern violin family are descendants of various kinds of medieval fiddles—fiddle, by the way, being an older word than violin.
The modern oboe most likely originated in France in the 1600's. The word oboe, which is the instrument’s name in both English and Italian, comes from the French name, hautbois, meaning “high wood,” or “loud wood.”
Maurice Ravel was certainly a composer who pushed boundaries, including the technical boundaries that musicians faced when performing his music.
The composer Ernest Bloch was born in Switzerland, and after spending time in America, he was thinking of returning to Europe. But a visit in 1922 to the Library of Congress, in Washington DC, convinced Bloch to stay in this country, and to take American citizenship.
Imagine, for a moment, Mozart walking down Broadway, in New York City. It’s not so easy. But Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the librettos for Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, died a New Yorker.
Prokofiev visited America a number of times, and his concerts here were extremely successful. His opera The Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago, and he met his first wife, the soprano Lina Llubera, in New York City.
As a young man, Ernest Chausson studied law, and was admitted to the bar. But music was his great love, and instead of practicing law he enrolled at the Paris Conservatory.
Miles Hoffman discusses where the word "Overture" comes from and the earliest iteration of the overture.
Operetta is light opera...or opera light. Its goal is to amuse: to be witty, charming, funny, not serious either in style or substance.
So here’s the famous riddle: Which came first, the chicken... or the violin? Or the piano? Or the valved horn?
Franz von Suppé could be the poster child for composers who were extremely prolific and very famous in their own time, but who, if they’re now remembered at all, are only remembered for two or three pieces.
Turning pages for pianists is a pretty thankless job—the page turner is usually only noticed when he or she messes up. But for pianists who depend on page turners, good, dependable, unobtrusive page turners are worth their weight in gold.
Have you ever wondered why pianists need page turners? They’re not, after all, the only ones who use both hands to play their instruments.
In a lifetime of performing and teaching, I’ve never once witnessed an argument that had anything to do with where somebody was from, nor, for that matter, have I ever heard, among the musicians I’ve known, a single word of nationalist or racist invective.
I came across a collection of the letters of Arturo Toscanini recently, and in the introduction the editor writes, “A whole psychology textbook could be written about Toscanini and anger.” Well all I can say is that if there had been such a book, Toscanini should have read it.
Anybody who’s been around the music business for any length of time has met performers who are – how can I put this gently – legends in their own minds.
The image of the starving artist may be a romantic one, but it turns out that poverty has not always been a necessary condition for writing great music. Sometimes, in fact, great music has gone along with great wealth.
I always enjoy telling the story of how the piano got its name. Piano means “soft,” in Italian, and it seems a little strange that an instrument that can weigh almost a thousand pounds and compete in volume with a symphony orchestra should be called a “soft.” Well we have to start with the piano’s predecessor, the harpsichord, or gravicembalo, in Italian. The strings of a harpsichord are plucked, not struck, and no matter how hard, or how softly, you press the keys, the sound volume stays the same. But in about 1700 an Italian named Bartolomeo Cristofori invented a keyboard instrument with little hammers that strike the strings, and now by varying your touch on the keys you could vary the volume. Cristofori called his instrument the gravicembalo col’ piano e forte – the “harpsichord with soft and loud.” Eventually this lengthy name got shortened to pianoforte, and from there it was just a short step to “piano” all by itself.
If you’re looking for a group of people whose unlimited dedication is matched only by their extraordinary skills, I suggest you look no farther than public school music teachers.
These days, with convenient hindsight we take it for granted that good music lasts, that pieces that are well known now will remain well known for years -- perhaps even for centuries to come. But I often wonder what was in the minds of the great composers of centuries past whose music we still love.
One of the wonderful aspects of life as a musician: age differences among players don’t mean anything. What counts is what kind of person you are, and how you make music.