Dancing about Architecture

This work is composed for chorus with a male soloist and orchestral accompaniment. It is comprised of several sections, which are all tied together with the “Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” lyric. It’s mostly a march, but there is a slower, more tender lyric section in the middle. It ends quietly with military drums fading away into the distance (or into the heavens).

I’m not sure what to make of this piece. I like it—the “Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” melody runs through my head a lot. Some of the tunes sound vaguely familiar and based on what I’ve read about Ives (CD liner notes and the Jan Swafford biography, mainly), I would guess that parts of the melody are based on old New England, Protestant hymns.

I actually visited Danbury, Connecticut on Charles Ives’ birthday last year. I highly recommend making the pilgrimage. Nancy Sudik, exec. director of the Danbury Music Centre, was in charge of the celebration and all the people there were really great.

One of the things I liked about this work (and I liked this work a lot) is that it’s very short and very quiet. I burned all the pieces for this assignment onto CD and would listen to them both at home and in the car. Now, when a piece is fairly long, as are some of the other works on this CD, your attention can drift. It doesn’t really matter (or at least that’s what you think), if your attention wanders for a few seconds. However, if your attention wanders even for a few seconds during one of Five Pieces, you’ve missed half the piece! So, I would always pay especially close attention when Five Pieces was playing (this was also due to the fact that they’re so soft for the most part). Sometimes you think a short piece cannot be as ‘important’ as longer pieces, but I think Five Pieces belies that idea. Actually, shortness is another thing I like about Satie’s compositions (besides the fact that they’re brilliant). It’s also what I like about that thing Paul McCartney sings on that short, untitled fragment on The White Album. The one that goes, “Can you take me back where I came from? Can you take me back?”. (In McCartney’s case, it’s a throwaway, but yet it’s not.)

Download Pierre Boulez

Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep while listening to some Debussy followed by Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw. The Debussy will lull you into a peaceful, somnolent state. Then A Survivor from Warsaw will come on and it…will…scare…the…living…hell…out…of…you. (But I guess that’s sort of the point of it, isn’t it?) I learned this from personal experience.



Download A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, performed by Erich Leinsdorf.

This caused riots in Paris? In Paris?? I guess times have changed. This almost sounds like it could be from a Disney movie. It would fit right in with parts of The Lion King. My little nieces would love dancing along to this piece. Seriously, I do know that this was featured in Fantasia. I can’t listen to it without picturing dinosaurs lifting up their heads and looking around. Anyway, I guess this is what Christopher Small meant when he wrote in his book Music, Society, Education about “this ability of our society to absorb into itself and neutralize revolt that has characterized the history of music […] in our century”.

This is a solo piano piece with a binary, ABA1B1, form. Its tempo is marked as “profoundly calm”. Most of it is pianissimo (una corda, even), but there are some louder bits and accents. It’s basically, in my opinion, a chordal study. It reminds me a lot of Chopin’s Prelude in C Major (Op. 28, No. 20) and Chorale from the Nocturne (Op. 37, No. 1).

Like the Chopin Chorale that I just mentioned, I would almost consider this a religious work even though it’s not commonly considered so (as far as I know). I liked this one so much that I went out and bought the score for it and spent a lot of time reading through it.

This is a piece for orchestra played at a moderate to slow tempo, perhaps adagio. At the beginning a woodwind (a clarinet or a flute, maybe?) is the featured instrument. Woodwinds play featured solo parts throughout much of the work. Also, there are some nice bits near the beginning played by the trombones (or maybe baritones). Somewhat near the end of the piece, a solo violin plays a lovely part. But, mostly, it’s just the chamber orchestra painting lovely swathes of color, with gentle crescendos and descrendos

The woodwind part at the beginning of this sounds an awful lot like the clarinet intro to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (perhaps Gershwin was influenced by this work). Actually, a lot of this, the overall orchestral texture, in particular, reminds me of parts of Rhapsody in Blue. I guess, judging from its title, that this work is meant to be programmatic (do the solo woodwinds represent the fawn? (later I found out that a faun is a 1/2 human, 1/2 goat sort of thing; I think this piece sounds much better if it’s about a fawn (such as Bambi, for example)—fauns seem a bit twee)), but I just like its lush, gorgeous sound. This was recorded in 2001, when Michael Tilson Thomas was already musical director of the San Francisco Symphony, where I happened to live at the time (601 Van Ness! Apt. 1007! Right up the street from Davies Symphony Hall! Overpriced “junior” 1-bedroom apartment!). I would like to have heard him conduct it with the SFS.

This is an unaccompanied vocal work for two women and one man. One of the women sings the main melody, while the man sings sometimes as accompaniment to her and sometimes in counterpoint to her. The second woman, meanwhile, sings longer, slower-moving lines. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but the song seems to consist of only verses without a chorus or bridge. Perhaps some of the background singing, especially that of the second woman, is improvised, but not the main melody sung by the first woman.

At first, I didn’t think too much of this song. Maybe I didn’t like the singing. But it grows on you, and, after listening to it a few times, you’ll find that it will be running through your head quite often during your day. The melody (sung by the first woman) is simple, like a folk song (is it a folk song?), but beautiful. The man’s singing is interesting in the way that in interacts with the main line. The second woman, meanwhile, seems to be singing in her own strange, but darkly interesting, parallel universe. She sounds like maybe she’s the Holy Fool of their village (I don’t actually know for a fact that they live in a village, but, never mind)—a woman whose gnomic, cryptic utterances can’t be understood by the villagers most of the time, but which always reveal a dark, mathematical, Gödelian truth, regardless of whether they’re comprehended by others. And for this reason she’s both feared and revered. She sounds like she might be one of those blind, Zen masters who always live at the peak of high mountains in the Andes (or wherever those high mountains that blind, Zen masters live on are) that the heroes in movies always have to scale to receive the wisdom necessary to face their nemesis. Except that I get the feeling that she’d be too smart to bother with going and living on the peak of some high mountain somewhere.

This is Tibetan monks sort of chanting and sort of singing (at some extremely low pitches much of the time) mostly in unison, but sometimes there will be a solo voice. The unison parts use an interesting isorhythm. Due to the low pitches that they sing, their voices have a deep, resonant sound—it’s almost as if you can hear the individual vibrations of their vocal chords (maybe you can).

This sounds like frog music—good frog music, to be exact. I don’t mean that to be derogatory; I happen to like frog music. It’s just that I simply can’t listen to this without thinking of the frogs singing in Paul McCartney’s animated film, Rupert and the Frog Song. Frog music is a strangely neglected (in my opinion, anyway) genre of music. I know for a fact that kids like frog music, and I know for a fact that adults like it (and I wouldn’t trust any adult who didn’t like frog music with my kids (assuming I had kids)). It’s fun (although these Tantras are certainly more on the serious side of the frog music spectrum). Of course, part of the reason why it’s easy for me to abstract these Tantras as ‘simply’ frog music is the fact that I don’t understand the language they’re sung in, so I don’t have a clue as to what they’re actually about. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to any of the religious ideas expressed by the words (In fact, I consider myself to be a lapsed Zen Buddhist/Taoist). But I do think it’s fun to listen to.

This is a woman singer, backed by a single drummer. The drumming consists mainly of interjections between the lines being sung. Also, there is a sound like a foot stomping on a stage, which may or may not be produced by a drum. Although the drumming is only intermittent, the piece has a steady beat due to the singing. The vocal part consists of lines that are long, melodic, and intricately melismatic, but still have a steady pulse underlying them.

You have to pay close attention to this piece to really appreciate it; otherwise it can sound like just so much primitive wailing (that was my initial reaction to it). Also, you sort of have to get past the voice, which isn’t pretty by conventional, Western standards. But, if you do that, and, if you listen closely, you will hear some lovely, complex melodies being sung. However, they’re not repeated, so it’s easy to miss them or overlook them. I have no idea whether this piece is semi-improvised or composed. If the latter, then, since it seems to be through-composed, I can’t imagine how the singer can possibly remember all of it (it’s sort of written down (the words are, anyway)), especially since p’ansori can be quite long.

This consists of many men doing a rhythmic, fairly static, chant, while one or two other men sing what sounds like improvised melodies behind them. The unusual thing about this piece is that what would commonly be thought of as the backing part, the rhythmic chanting, is much louder than what would be commonly thought of as the main part, the improvised singing.

It’s easy to dismiss this piece as just some annoying, repetitive chanting, unless you listen closely and hear the sort of improvised wailing that is going on by one or two (or, maybe, three) men in the background. This wailing, or singing, is pretty impossible to describe except to say that it sounds maybe what demented cousins of Little Richard, Sam Cooke, and Solomon Burke wailing away in the psych ward after drinking a little too much (but not way too much) cheap, red wine (smuggled in by a sympathetic trusty) might sound like. And I mean that as a compliment. It’s cool.