Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922.

Watercolor, pen and ink

~

HP: “Twittering Machine”

*

Dictionary of Musical Puns

Bach choy

Bloch chord

Bruckner Expressway

Bülow-average

Chopin Tinkerbell or he will get upset

Cowell-bunga, dude

Dufay the odds

Haydn seek

It is Godunov for me

The Mahler the park?

M*A*S*H* aut

Massenet’s Mass in A

not so Modest

Philip Glass to rim

Pictures of an Exhibitionist

Ravel in the moment

Sonata – tractive

Tavener on the Green

The tritone: the Bubonic Plagal

I am now residing in graduate housing.  Ignoring the eerie coincidence of again occupying a Chapin building (the name of MSU’s music building), it’s everything I wanted it to be: proximity to campus, a big room, full kitchen, and no landlady to make life awkward.   In fact, my move here is exponentially more satisfying because of that last reason.

For courtesy’s sake I will not recount the details of my previous living situation.  Instead I composed a limerick based on a “fictional” situation:

A guy named Sammy Smorder

Lodged with a manic hoarder.

He paid the rent

And off he went

Across the Setauket border.

I moved in last Saturday.  Although it is about an hour and a half from Staten Island (not bad), the drive made me realize that I’d be a little farther from New York than I would like.  As I was approaching my exit on the Northern Parkway, my radio, tuned to 105.9, started sounding fuzzy.  The static soon turned into a battle for frequency between a Chopin waltz and a kitschy rock song, the latter eventually winning.  Soon enough, most of the available radio stations were being broadcast not from New York but from Fairfield, Connecticut.  By the time I reached my destination, WPXR was gone, succeeded by rock radio, Q 104.3 was hanging on by a 100^th, and I was surrounded by trees, sidewalk-less roads, and the eerie calm of Long Island suburbia.

I will not rant too much about my living situation (those who have heard from me in person can testify to my dissatisfaction) but I am renting a room in a one-floor home of an older lady.  For now it is just the two of us.  My neighbors are quiet houses, empty streets, and the ceaseless drone of crickets.  I am not used to rural life, and the lack of human activity freaks me out.  Last night was an especially difficult one in this respect.

`

Yesterday at around 6:00 PM I returned from shopping to an empty home.  “Great,” I thought, “I could make my stir fry and not worry about being messy.”  I made a charming concoction of chopped chicken breast, baby Yukon potatoes, green bell peppers, Portobello mushrooms, broccoli, Grannysmith apple, and a slab of butter.  The dish came together well, and I enjoyed a large portion in my room while watching television.

By 9:00 I had finished watching a CBS documentary about a medical student who led a secret life of rape, robbery, and murder.  I turned off the TV and soon became aware of the house’s emptiness.  Audible only was the turbine of crickets through the open window.  Then, something fell.  I jumped, but soon crept out of my room to investigate.  I could not tell what had happened, because the floor was cluttered as it was.  I telephoned my girlfriend to break the silence.  As I was sitting on the couch in the den, adjacent to the garage, I heard the murmur of a man and a woman talking in what sounded like Korean through the door leading to the garage.  Thinking that my landlady had for some reason left a radio on, I opened the door.  Down the darkness of a small hallway I saw the shadows of a washing machine and dryer.  Past them, the door to the garage.  Light was shining through the door’s crevice.

Approaching quietly, I knocked.

The conversation stopped.

The sudden silence gave me chills.  Someone was there.

“Hello?” I sighed.

No answer.

“I’m Jack.  I’m living with X. Who are you? Can you come to the door?”

Silence.

Relieved that my request was not granted, I sprinted for my keys and darted out the front door.  I locked it after me in case the intruder wanted to pursue me.  I ran through the darkness down the driveway to my car, ripping the door open.  Around me, nothing but trees and droning crickets.

Driving away, I phoned my parents.  After I had calmed down a little, I decided to stake out the house from 500 feet away until the landlady returned.

`

`

By 11:30, all had been resolved, and I was back in my room.  She was renting the garage-turned-studio to a Korean medical student.  She apologized for not telling me about it.

`

Poor guy…he was trying to woo a woman and was interrupted by a strange man knocking on his door.  I thought we weren’t allowed overnight guests?  I wonder if he managed to get to first base…

In any case, no more crime shows before bed.

Lindberg described the unusual title of his orchestral work, Al largo, in the program notes: “Al largo is an unusual title.  This is the fastest music I’ve ever written, yet deep down there is a feeling of a very slow undertone and a very slow momentum, something large and wide in terms of expression…Al largo means being offshore, referring specifically to that moment when you reach the open sea, you don’t see the coast anymore, and what’s before you is vast.”  Indeed the work, spanning twenty-five minutes, seemed like an endless ride across present but ambiguous tonalities, undulating between great rises in volume and thin, subdued passages.  Although twenty-five minutes can pass by quickly in symphonic music (Mozart’s “Jupiter” flies by when I listen to it), Al largo seemed monumentally long. There was, in my opinion, a little too much going on.  Rich string textures give way to an extended oboe solo midway through, giving way to more climaxes.  Melody does not play a dominant role in Al largo; the music is propelled forward by rises and falls in pitch, dynamic, and speed.

One can easily recognize an influence of the past in Lindberg’s writing.  Motives are presented in parallel chords  a la Debussy.  Lindberg himself identified Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht as an influence, even working in a quote towards the end.  He was also aware of his work’s preceding the Missa Solemnis, even throwing in a recurring four-note motive that cannot help but recall a certain Beethoven symphony.

Both modern in his elastic form and traditional in its timbral influences, Al largo is a formidable work.  However, I would need to hear it multiple times to appreciate it.  So would the audience, it seemed, who greeted the conductor and composer with warm but perfunctory applause.

`

Beethoven placed so much emphasis on the composition of Missa Solemnis that even his monumental Diabelli Variations and Ninth Symphony were temporarily shelved so he could focus on his Mass.  Even the promotion of his beloved Archduke Rudolph to cardinal, the original impetus for the Mass, could not push Beethoven to finish on time.  Missa Solemnis was eventually considered by Beethoven to be his greatest work.  Its 70 minutes are full of sensitively scored passages, sophisticated counterpoint, and triumphant choral flourishes that at times recalled his work on the Ninth.  Gilbert led the Philharmonic and the New York Choral Artists in a vivid, energy-driven, and dynamically diverse performance.

My impression of Beethoven’s setting of the Mass text was that he characterized the liturgy’s ideas.  He divided the Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy) into distinct sections, forming an ABA form.  Where the outer pleas are directed towards the celestial God, Beethoven wrote homophonically and in the major key.  The middle petition, addressed to God the Man, sounds more terrestrial and less “perfect”: the music changes into the minor, and the chorus divides into four.  Did Beethoven wish to distinguish the celestial from the human, perfection from suffering?

In the Gloria, we hear again the contrast between the tutti majesty of “Glory to God in the Highest” and the lightly scored, dynamically subdued “..And on earth peace to men of good will.”

Beethoven’s setting of the Credo is unusual in its dramatic portrayal of the text.  The music is not constant; instead, there are detached sections of quiet, harmonically unstable music (recalling the crucifixion) and elated homophonic choral passages (recalling the rising after the third day).

There is, of course, the “solemn” transition between Sanctus and Benedictus, the portion of the Mass where the priest silently “converts” the bread into the Christ’s body.  Beethoven makes a big deal out of this moment, where in some cases (Verdi) the Sanctus and Benedictus are dashed  off as one movement.  Beethoven even introduces a fifth soloist: the solo violin, played sensitively by Glenn Dicterow.   Beethoven makes this transfiguration of bread into God the dramatic epicenter of the work.

The New York Philharmonic repeats this program tomorrow night, at the last concert of its subscription season.