Mozart's Walk through the Crystal Garden

Those of you who a.) saw the Golden Globes last Sunday and b.) are awesome might have noticed that the excellent Mr. Holmes was completely shut out, a doubly heinous crime considering that it featured one of the great stunt instruments of musical history, the glass harmonica.  It's part of a major turn of one of the film's main plots and is one of the only times it has appeared in a film, and considering the time period when the plot takes place (the turn of the 20th century) it's surprising that anybody would be playing it, much less teaching lessons on it.  The instrument is the most famous member of the crystallophone family, instruments that produce sound with glass, and is part of a larger family of friction idiophones, operating by the same mechanism of someone creating a tone by rubbing a wet finger on the rim of a wine glass.  The latter device became something of a vogue technique for composers writing for percussion in the late 20th century, specifically inspired by the use of crystal glasses in pieces by George Crumb and Joseph Schwantner, but that hasn't inspired a revival of the full glass harmonica, or armonica.  The most common form of the instrument is one designed by America's favorite renaissance man and horndog Benjamin Franklin - a set of concentrically-arranged glass bowls, each one a half-step apart in Western equal temperament, are partially submerged in a tub of water and turned with a foot pedal, allowing the player to simply touch their fingers to the bowls' rims to produce the notes.  Oddly enough, one of the biggest proponents of crystallophones in our time is Linda Rondstadt, and she produced an all-crystallophone album in the early Oughts performed by Dennis James.  The heyday of the instrument was in the late 18th century and use of hit virtually disappeared by the 1820's, as it was seen as an impractical novelty instrument and hardly any music was written specifically for it.  One of those pieces, however, was written by none other than Mozart himself, and it's actually quite lovely.

As producing sounds via glass friction is somewhat difficult Mozart's piece here is mercifully slow, though there are a few 16th-note passages to keep the performer on edge.  The mood is reverent and nostalgic, rife with suspensions and a handful of surprising harmonic twists, all made all the more enchanting coming from the glass harmonica's unearthly sound.  Both metallic and intangible, one can imagine that its tone quality is what one would hear walking through a greenhouse on a distant planet.  The performance here is a little incomplete, as the performer Martin Hilmer doesn't bother with the recap of the B section, but the technique is excellent as there are only a few notes that don't sound (and understandably so; I've never been able to make a note on a crystal glass).  Now, if there was only a leaf written for the cristal baschet...

~PNK

Trickery's Eternal Return

Classical music is a largely humorless enterprise, save for the illustrious oeuvre of P.D.Q. Bach.  Perhaps academia is to blame, or perhaps composers fearful of their reputation among the pompous and vindictive, but either way classical jokes are few and far between (and often not funny).  One of the most prolific classical humorists, Joseph Haydn, wrote the "Surprise" symphony, wherein loud orchestral hits interject quiet passages, and this was considered the height of classical trickery for some time.  There's also that guy who wrote a piece for each key of the piano exactly once, but it's humor value lies in how much you care about how many keys a piano has and how important serialism is to your life.  In this mire of stiffness one device has cropped up not once but three times in leaf form, each time separated by decades of time and composer M.O.'s - and we're looking at all three today.  With the image above in mind, take a wild guess what it is.

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See it?

As you can probably guess, repeat signs are usually followed by more music, or at least have another ending as to give the section closure.  Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was a charming and clever lad, and many of his works exude a sunny smile, one that would shine across the works of Debussy and Ravel.  His Petite Valse may not seem that odd at first glance, but that repeat sign gives it a snickering new dimension.  As the bar is the dominant ending to the phrase, it wants to lean to the tonic, and the pickup note leads back to the first bar.  However, there is no exit - following the score forces infinite repetition.  The pianist Georges Rabol decided that if he was to circle around the mulberry bush he was at least going to put an octave jump in there for yucks.

It's an elegant trap, and recalls a scene from Animal Crackers:

And if Chabrier could do it, Erik Satie (1866-1924) could certainly up the ante.  Satie was one of the most eccentric and enigmatic composers in history, and his extensive piano oeuvre includes such gems as Pièces froides and Embryons desséchés (I'll let you translate that).  His superb piano set Sports et Divertessements is one of his most extensive and varied works, and near the set's end this appears:

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If you'll tear your eyes from the beautiful fountain penmanship for a second, you'll notice that symbol at the end of the score, and the lack of a double bar.  The symbol means that you go back to where it appears earlier in the score, and that just so happens to be the very beginning.  When Satie calls something Le Tango perpétual you'd better believe he means it.  It's the most famous of the three by far, and Satie's influence ensured at least one direct Tango descendant (but we'll get to that later).  YouTube's scrolling score project illuminates how the Devil's preferred music is the path to madness.

If one were asked to name the most humorless composer of all you couldn't give a much better answer than Anton Webern (1883-1945), the master of serial purity and smile suppression.  His mature style is so spare and emotionally cold you'd be hard pressed to find a jokey moment in all that empty space.  With that in mind, there may be a reason he left off the opus number for his 1924 Kinderstück.

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Is "lovely" really the most appropriate mood for this piece?  "Quizzical" seems more apt, and it shall remain quizzical to me because I'm of the opinion that life is too short to divine the root collection of serial pieces without good reason (it's not palindromic, that's for sure).  I can see some humor here, what with the "lovely" at the top and the bubbling texture in the meat of the thing, but I can't see the appeal for children, if that's at all what Webern had in mind.  And ultimately, it's that dang stinger under the last bar that cements this piece in the joke rep, the one at the start of this article, and the one that the pianist in the recording below chooses to ignore - but he does squeeze a heck of a lot of charm into his go at it.  Perhaps rather than asking the question of "Why the repeat?" should we be asking "How can we use the repeat to our advantage?"  The problem is that every time I get an answer to one I come back to the other.

~PNK