Johann Sebastian Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Johann Sebastian Bach is another one of those great composers whose music can serve as a starting point for someone interested in learning about classical music. I use the term generic term "classical" here to refer to all "serious" music, because as most of you know, Bach falls into the baroque period. Confused yet? I think I can be forgiven, because The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music lists among its definition for "classical", "music of permanent value, not ephemeral." The technical definition is to describe music that is concerned with form and proportion rather than emotion, and usually refers to the 18th and early 19th century. The Oxford manages to get a dig in at us hoi polloi: "Amongst less educated people, music with no 'tune' in it." Those whacky Brits. How can you not love a country that gave us Shakespeare and baked beans on toast?

Baroque refers to the period of music immediately preceding classical, that is the 17th and early 18th century, usually from Germany and Austria. Baroque, from the French meaning "bizarre," was applied to the fanciful wrought-gold and cherub adorned architecture of that time period. Bach was probably the most prolific composers (in more ways than one) of this period: he produced countless works for the organ, chorus, instruments and orchestra—-plus 23 sons. That doesn't sound too impressive, except for the sons, but consider this, he wrote a cantata (in this case a sung mass) for every day of the year!

I usually think of music from this time period as being either stately—like Handel's Water Music and Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos—or meticulous like Bach's works for solo instruments such as the harpsichord, violin, viola and of course the organ. Bach wrote a lot of organ music, having been a church organist and director of the school of the church of Saint Thomas in Leipzig.

The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is probably one of Bach's most famous and accessible pieces. It gets played a lot around Halloween in the U.S., because some idiot used it the soundtrack for some horror movie years ago. The opening part, the toccata, for that reason now sounds ominous and full of sturm und drang. The fugue is a form of composition that has several "voices" or melodies that start in succession, almost like a round, but then which interweave with one another according to strict rules of harmony. This is why the music to me sounds meticulous or mathematical. The modern philosopher, Douglas Hofstader, wrote a huge tome called Godell, Escher, and Bach in which he analyzes the structure of the fugue, almost ad nauseum.

Another place where the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor turns up is in Walt Disney's film Fantasia. Leopold Stokowski orchestrated the piece and the Disney cartoonist used the technique of aurora borealis to represent the different voices of the fugue. It's sort of boring really, and to my mind, kind of emasculates this piece.

Of course, as an adolescent, I was drawn to the toccata, but eventually I came to love the fugue as well, which is actually quite beautiful and sweet compared to the strong emotions in the toccata. In my high school French class, I met a fellow student, named John Claeys, who was a gifted artist and could play the organ by ear. One of his hobbies was collecting decorative molding from abandoned Victorian houses in our county. His basement bedroom looked like something out of a horror film itself, with its dark paneling. John had even found an old upright pump organs on one of his forays and installed this in his lair. He was able to figure out the fingering for part of the toccata and took great pleasure wheezing it out on that old organ.

John and I made a horror movie for our French class with his dad's super eight camera. I played a crazed madman, who at one point runs out of control in my mothers black 1968 Volkwagen beetle and dirves it over a cliff. John sacrificed one of his plastic car models for the actual crash and burning of the bug. The only thing it had to do with French class were the hand-written dialog cards, which said things like sacre bleu! Of course, we used the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for the soundtrack.

In 1972 or thereabouts, an organist named Virgil Fox, decided to adapt techniques from The Grateful Dead and give concerts with psychedelic light shows. He came to a small private college in my home town and I dragged John along to the concert with me. It was absolutely captivating.

Fox must have thought he was the reincarnation of Franz Lizst: he strode onstage wearing a black cape, which he whirled off as he sat down at his instrument. He played a huge five-manual (keyboard) organ and between pieces he would explain to the audience exactly how each piece was constructed and how complex it was. One piece, I think it was the Gigue Fugue, required him to play four melodies, one with each appendage simultaneously. The crowd—and I—went wild and after he finished he played a number of encores. After each set of applause would die down, I would stand up and scream "Play Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!". After his fourth encore, and dripping with sweat, he yelled back "OK!" Needless to say, I was transported, and though somewhat embarrassed by my behavior after all these years, I still enjoy this piece.

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Richard Wagner: "The Ride of the Walkyries" from the opera, Die Walkyrie

Every Sunday, the local classical radio station, which originated from Notre Dame University in the next town over from my hometown, had a call-in request program. This is where I first heard a good number of classical pieces in high school. The down side of call-in request shows, is that you end up hearing the same popular, and less challenging pieces, over and over again, sometimes ad nauseum. But in all fairness, who wants to spend a reflective Sunday afternoon listening to something that sounds like a cat walking across a piano keyboard?

As mentioned yesterday, in high school I checked many albums out of my little hometown library, that I heard on the radio. "The Ride of the Walkyries" got a lot of air play, and it is one of those rousing pieces that gets everyone's attention—even my pre-teen daughters'. For a teenager with not much cash, the library gave me access to works of music that I couldn't even think about buying. Most of the works of Wagner fell into that category.

Wagner is probably most famous for his magnum opus, Ring Des Niebelungen, a series of four operas based on themes from Norse mythology. Die Walkyrie appears second in the collection. I think back in the 70s, the library had a couple of sets of the entire Ring cycle, which altogether took up 18 vinyl LPs. Think of 36 sides times 20 minutes (playing time of one side) for a total of 12 hours! Recording the Ring was no mean feat for a record company, so only the premium labels--Deutsche Grammaphon,, Phillips, and London--did so. At eight or nine dollars a disk, to own the Ring would have cost over a hundred dollars (two to three hundred dollars today). And I had to save for college!

So I ended up checking it out of the library several times. I never seemed to have the time to listen to the entire set and most often I just searched for and listened to all the most famous arias or choruses. Those excerpts like the "Ride of the Walkyries" were exciting and rousing. At the check-out desk of the library worked a friendly college student, who was majoring in music at the local university. He used to advise me on piece of music. During my "Wagner" period, I remember telling him once that I really liked Wagner and whether he could direct me to any other pieces that Wagner had written that were, well, "lighter." He looked at me and said, "Wagner didn't write light operas." I felt a bit embarrassed.

I have a friend, a mezzo soprano named Ellen Rabiner, who sang the role of one of the Walkyries at the Metropolitan Opera. She explained to me the scene in which this piece appears. The Walkyries were the daughters of some Norse god. Their job was to ride around after the big battles and pick up the corpses and transport them to Valhalla, the Norse heaven. In the scene, the Walkyries return after a successful run and give each other the "high five." The filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola used the "Ride of the Walkyries" in the late 1970s in his film, Apocalypse Now! It's blasted from helicopters that conduct a napalm bombing of a Vietnamese village. Coppola's probably not first person one to think of this as a militaristic sounding piece.

In the early 1970s, the budget Seraphim record label, a subsidiary of Angel, re-issued the entire set of the Ring for the modest price of $40. Even that was a lot--to give you an idea, my driver's education course at the time cost me $50, which was really expensive. But I bought it anyway, despite the protests of my parents. At the time, it was touted as an historic recording by the German Conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler recorded by the Italian radio company. When I bought it, it turned out to be a mono-recording that had been reworked to sound like stereo. And even more disappointing, it wasn't even from the original master tapes, which because of the Italian musicians' labor union rules (it figures), were destroyed.

Truth be told, I never listened to the entire Ring. To my untrained and novice ear, all those years ago, the rest sounded, well, kind of boring. A couple of years ago, while cleaning house, I gave my copy of the Ring Des Niebelungen to a friend who is a bassoonist and Wagner fan.

There was a point in college, where someone once told me that Wagner's nationalistic ideas and music became popular among the Nazis. That's not Wagner's fault, just as the use of his music by Coppola had nothing to do with it either. It's especially important to keep an open mind about these things, I've learned over the years, but back in college, I was a bit of a prankster. So to get a dig in at Wagner and the classical call-in show that always played the same music I once played the following trick. I called up the station during the request show and asked them to play the entire Ring, and then I left to go to the library.

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Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore

Hooray for libraries! Had I grown up in France, where they didn't have lending libraries until about 30 years ago, I probably would only have discovered half the classical pieces I love. My small hometown public library in Mishawaka, Indiana (pop. 33,000 circa 1972) had quite a respectable collection of classical albums. Whenever I heard a new piece on the local classical music station, I'd write the name down and pay a visit to the library to check it out.

Which leads me to my next thing to be thankful for, namely CDs. In the olden days, when you checked records out often they were in less than pristine condition. Back then most everybody had these huge old console stereos with tone arms that weighted about 12 pounds. True, when hi-fis were in vogue, the records were made of pretty strong plastic. When the next generation of stereos hit, with feather-weight arms that held magnetic, not ceramic, cartridges, record labels started to scrimp on the plastic and then things became really bad. You'd check out one of these flimsy records and it would sound like a hail storm. I swear you could hold these disks up to the light and see through them from where the old steel styli had worn through them. Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit. Only Deutsche Grammophon continued to use high-quality, thick plastic right up to the end. These were the Mercedes of LPs.

When CDs arrived on the scene, I heaved a sigh of relief. True, if you abuse a CD it might end up skipping about a 1000 times a second, so that Brahms ends up sounding like it's performed by a Rap group. The really annoying thing about the CDs you check out from the library nowadays, that the staff aren't diligent about finding people who do not turn back in the liner notes and booklets. Often, therefore, you don't even know what the names of the tracks are if they aren't printed on the disk itself. Of course, even more annoying are record labels that scrimp on the booklet, which are often pathetic advertisements for other records on the label. They don't have any meaningful text in them or description of the music in them.

Again, in the era of LPs, you could actually learn something from the liner notes. True sometimes these were written by pompous gas bags, but most of the time they included some biographical information or anecdote about the composer or the orchestra or even interesting facts about the piece itself. Sometimes, they actually hired someone who understood music theory to explain the piece. Not being a music major, a lot of this information--about keys, chord progression, etc.--went over my head, but it was nice to know it was there anyway. And I'm sure some people understood it.

On the plus side, rock albums also have been hit by this cost-saving measure, or else they just spend it on artsy advertising. Rock critics sometimes can't string two sentences together, or they gush in flowery or gonzo-type prose, which is really ghastly. For example, here is an excerpt from a recent album review found in Rolling Stone:

The whole album thumps like the soundtrack to a lost Eddie and the Cruisers sequel, one where Eddie gets crucified by Roman soldiers, while Gaga stands under the cross weeping and sending dirty texts to the DJ..

Which brings us back to today's piece. One of the albums I used to check out from my hometown library was Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Il Travatore (The Trubador). As in the case of many pieces during this period, I was drawn to it for a particularly rousing section that had been used in some film or commercial. This was the "Anvil Chorus." It appears in Act II, scene one, in which a band of gypsies sing a chorus about a beautiful gypsy maid while bashing away on their anvils. The sound of crashing metal worked into a classical piece excited the little boy in me, no doubt. That leads into a soprano solo, in which the gypsy woman, Azucena, sings an ominous aria.

One time a friend of mine and I went to see a revival of the Marx Brothers' film, A Night at the Opera. In one part, Harpo is chased onstage during a performance of an opera, which turns out to be Il Travatore. He dresses in the costume of a gypsy woman, and when Azucena starts to sing, he rises up next to her an makes his trade mark ugly face, the "Gookie."

This of course has nothing to do with the opera, but I found it hilarious, and it only served to make me appreciate the piece more. (Not to mention how intellectual comedies used to be.)

I include a link here to the plot of Il Trovatore.. It involves the rivalry between a Count and a gypsy Troubador. The Count has sworn to revenge the death of his infant brother, who supposedly was burnt to death by the gypsies in a vendetta. Only today have I read the synopsis, and I am surprised to find out how complex and powerful is the story line. You'd never guess listening to the "Anvil Chorus." But it turns out to be almost as moving as Romeo and Juliet with an evil character on a par with Iago in Othello.

Thirty-nine years ago, when I discovered Il Travatore at the local library, I would have laughed at the plot. It's too melodramatic. How many people burn babies and kill to revenge themselves of events that happened generations previously? Since then, however, we've seen continued fighting between Jews and Arabs; Iraqis and Iranians; Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims; and countless other toil, strife and genocide, the roots of which go back for centuries. The plot of Il Travatore, unfortunately, seems much more plausible and contemporary to me now than it did all those years ago.

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• Harpo: Start at about 2 minutes and 45 seconds in

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Symphony Number 9 in D Minor, Fourth Movement

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is probably one of the most recognizable piece of music. If number of recordings indicates popularity, this symphony, of which Tower Records list hundreds of different recordings(some by the same conductor), is very popular indeed.

If you're looking to buy a recording of The Ninth Symphony, I'd avoid the stuff on some of the cheaper budget labels. They don't seem to have top orchestras or if they do, the recording might have been a first take with some problems, kind of like a "factory second." One exception is the Sony Infinity Digital line, which has adopted the strategy of recording artists from the former Soviet Union; that enables the label to hold down the cost of the "talent." But you can get burned on famous labels as well. Once I bought a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Carmina Burana, which had a soprano solo in which the singer hit a high note and her voice cracked. I can't believe they left it in.

The music world had never seen anything like the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth. It starts out with a strong statement followed by a complex interplay of different melodies heard throughout the symphony. The basses ominously play a melody that will be sung later to the words "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" (O friends, let's stop our moaning). Beethoven introduces a second major theme, also sung later in the movement, "Freude, shöner Götterfunken" (Joy! Bright spark of divinity!), and he goes back and forth between them. Once a melody from the second movement bubbles up on the flutes and oboes to sort of break the tension. Eventually, it quietens down, but then after a tiny pause, the full orchestra restates the opening theme again at the end of which, the baritone sings the melody, and this begins the incredible choral section.

The text for this part comes from Schiller's Ode to Joy. The baritone exhorts us all to sing more joyful songs, full of joy. He then launches into the first stanza, which describes joy and its magic power to unite all men. On the second stanza, the sopranos join the baritone to sing about friendship and a loving wife. For the third stanza, the tenor and sopranos sing about how we all nurse the joy from nature's breast and even the lowly worm can feel contentment. The choir repeats the last four lines of each stanza after the soloists. This part is quite rousing, and when it ends you think "Gee, that was a good finish." But then the drums, cymbals and flutes start wonderful march upbeat march, which the tenor joins to call all brothers to lead the heavenly life of a hero. There follows a quick orchestral interlude, which ends with the choir joining in and singing the entire first verse again. If it ended there, you would say "Wow, that was really great." But it's still not over.

Next the basses in the choir starts the last stanza of the poem and the melody goes back and forth between them and the sopranos. From this it moves onto a number of solos, duets, trios and quartets for the voices. Some are serious; some are joyous. In this stanza, Joy addresses the multitudes and tells us to recognize our creator in heaven and to fall down to worship him. At the end of these duets, the strings start in sounding like the beginning of rain, and it rapidly builds to the grand finale with the full orchestra and the choirs singing snatches from the first stanza again. It slows for a bit, but then speeds up and ends with a great clash of cymbals and drums.

It really is quite an extraordinary piece. A whole symphony in one movement. You can't really touch it with anything. Nothing compares with it since then. It is glorious music, full of passion, joy and hope for mankind.

Consider for a moment that Beethoven wrote this when he was stone deaf. There are people who can play chess without a board. That is, they can just sit together and call out the moves to each other and visualize the whole game in their mind. Imagine composing a whole symphony in your head though. And without being able to sit at a piano and plunk out the chords to see how it sounds. That is pure genius.

I first heard the second movement to the Ninth on the same soundtrack that I wrote about in my previous post, namely A Clockwork Orange. I can't remember when they used it in the movie—probably in some pointlessly violent scene. Had they not used it there, I probably would have heard it sooner or later. It's now nearly forty years after the film was released and few people—outside of film majors—remember it anymore. But it's been nearly 190 years since Beethoven died, and I don't see any signs of Beethoven: Symphony Number 9 losing popularity.

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Henry Purcell: Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary

In 1972, Stanley Kubrick released his film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' book, A Clockwork Orange. It was hyped as a stylized, post-apocalyptic tour de force, and I believe Life magazine did a spread on it. It was immediately given an X-rating for its violence and sex, and that meant as a 17 year-old, I could not go to see it. This was frustrating, because many of my swim teammates were old enough to go and came back to tell us it was great. They even started using the slang used in the film and acting like the toughs and thugs, who were the protagonists of the movie.
So since I could not see the film, I got a copy of the book and bought the sound track. The composer, Robert Carlos, had done the music for the film. Carlos had achieved success for performing Bach's music on Moog synthesizers on his album Switched-on Bach. Since the book was about a young thug with no redeeming social value except that he listened to Beethoven, every other track on the album was classical interspersed with Carlos' own compositions. I thought it was absoultely fantastic, despite Carlos having altered a number of the classical pieces by pumping them through synthesizers. One of the "altered" classical works (well, baroque, really) on the album was by Henry Purcell: Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, which is used to set the dark, brooding tone at the outset of the film.

The Purcell piece was used in March of 1695 for the funeral of Queen Mary II, and it was played again for Purcell's own funeral in November of the same year. It has five short movement and repeats the march at the beginning and the end. There are two anthems—choral pieces—which sing about man's short time on earth, and asking god to be merciful. In the middle is a thoughtful baroque trumpet canzona. The piece that Carlos used A Clockwork Orange is the march. Carlos also used it twice in the soundtrack. The first time, the synthesized version at the beginning, and then to close the album in an arrangement for electronic harpsichord, which sounds almost like a music box. The original march is scored for trumpets and timpani, and you can imagine a catafalque bringing the bier of the Queen into Westminster Abbey. Quite affecting.

Now Burgess' book and the film of A Clockwork Orange, on the other hand, disturbed me when I actually got to see it. This despite the fact that, in 1972 when it was released, I and all my friends on the swim team loved it. We identified closely with the gang of thugs on the screen, because we were the outcasts and underdogs among the athletes at our high school. On weekends we'd drink beer and smash people's mail boxes, and drive across the yards of people with didn't like. We never approached the level of violence depicted on the film—gang fights, rapes, murder and robbery—but we did think of ourselves as a kind of brotherhood of vandals. It was teenage angst channeled into aggressive behavior, and A Clockwork Orange fed this fire.

To show what getting old does, this morning I was trying to think of a redeeming value to A Clockwork Orange, both book and movie. It's supposed to be about the oppression of the individual in a fascist society, I think. But does anyone care for this particular individual, Alex? Alex and his gang get tanked up on hallucinogens, rape a woman to the music of Rossini's "La Gazza Ladra," rapes and kills another woman in front of her husband, who is a writer. Later Alex is caught and the authorities deprogram or brain-wash him by giving him a drug that makes him violently nauseous while showing him images of Nazi death camps and playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. After Alex is rehabilitated, his old friend beat him up and leave him for dead in front of the writer's house. When the writer discovers who he is he tries to kill Alex by locking him in a room and playing Beethoven's music to him. In the end, Alex is made a hero by the state because the writer was a member of the opposition party, I think.

I don't think it makes a very good case for the evil of fascism. The state is not put on the stage that much. What A Clockwork Orange does emphasize is the glory of youthful violence as a reaction against an oppressive society. And though it showed how evil it was to use music to brainwash Alex, the filmmakers used music as a background to mindless violence as well. The difference is lost on me--now a middle aged man. If the film had a message, it was obviously lost on me and my friends, who weren't stupid—one went on to study the classics at the University of Chicago and became a jesuit. We just loved the violence.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, eh?  About 10 years ago, I lead a high school youth group.  When they said horrible, disrespectful or cheeky things, I had to remember that I was once like that. I also had to listen to see if there is any pain behind their acting out. One day, one of the most obstreperous ones in the class shared that his father had tried to teach him to swim by taking him out in the middle of a lake and dropping him overboard. It doesn't take a fascist state to remove the dignity of a person.

About 20 years after A Clockwork Orange came out, I stumbled across a recording of Purcell'sMusic for the Funeral of Queen Mary. It is a short, sweet, sad and spare work. Fitting for a funeral and for a look back on one's impetuous youth.

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• Youtube (Carlos' Version)

Grofé: Grand Canyon Suite

When compiling the list of pieces I used to listen to as a child, some subconscious part of me made me leave out The Grand Canyon Suite. "It's not serious, or classical music," I heard a voice inside saying. As a child, however, I often played the recording of it that belonged to my older brother, Bob, on the days when I'd sneak into his room.

The Grand Canyon Suite is a highly imagistic piece of music. Grofe tried to capture the majesty of the striated canyon as the light gradually reveals the dazzling colors at sunrise. In another section, he imitates the clopping of donkey hooves transporting tourists down into the canyon floor. Grofe then shamelessly uses the violins to imitate the bray of the asses as they loose their grip and then grind to a stubborn halt. You know how it goes, every filmmaker has used that technique in every documentary and cowboy western film. Still, I wonder, what lies behind my ignoring the piece.

Looking Grofe up in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, I find an entry for the composer. Well, if the musical Dons at Oxford thought him serious enough to include in their book, why should I turn my nose up at him? Also, while researching this piece, I learned that he was quite an accomplished musician, having orchestrated Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Grofe's entry also says Grofe wrote The Grand Canyon Suite in 1931, which means he probably wasn't the first composers to imitate animals. Let's see: I think, Saint-Saens has braying assess in Carnival of the Animals and Prokofiev, born just one year before Grofe, imitated a wolf, a duck, and a twittering bird in Peter and the Wolf. All of this occurred in the infant stages of film, and television and Walt Disney's anthropomorphic animal documentaries were just a twinkling in a cartoonist's eye. So it's not really Grofe to blame for making this device hackneyed, it's TV.

There must be more to my negative associations with this piece than just TV, and while thinking about my last couple entries, the answer suddenly popped out at me. Snobbism and ignorance. I mentioned earlier that the Mankowskis weren't really snobby people. Mind you, they could spot bad taste more quickly than anyone I've met. Yet, they did not look down their nose at the perpetrators of kitch. They usually just laughed at it or attributed it to greed.

In retrospect my actions become clear: in my desire to be "cultured" and an "intellectual" I divided the world into cultured and non-cultured, and labeled the one "good" and the other "bad." Though my origin is definitely working class, I put on airs. Why? Why does anyone? To be liked? Respected? Popular? It's now painfully clear that I drew the wrong conclusions about culture that the Mankowskis exposed me to. What the harm? Missing quite enjoyable experiences that some people label "popular."

Fortunately, life always give you second chances, when you make a mistake. While driving home from my daughter's violin lesson when she was in her teens, the local public radio station playedThe Grand Canyon Suite. Instead of switching it off, I left it on for her to hear, so she could form her own opinion. I listened as if for the first time, and then I realized this piece was an old friend, and it was still fresh and vibrant for me. So here's to Ferde Grofe and second chances.

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May 9 Mozart: Symphony Number 35, in D Major, "Haffner"

When I think back to my high school days, it is with a sense of wonder. For me, it was a time filled with turbulence: as hormones coursed through my body I had to establish an identity, my place in the social, academic, and athletic pecking orders, while assimilating new ideas, and coming of legal age. The Vietnam War still raged on and the threat of the draft hung over the heads of all us young men.Until then, I had played the class clown, a happy-go-lucky, pudgy kid with acne. In high school, however, I became aware of "culture" embodied in literature, art, and music. My parent saw this as puzzling. "What happened to our happy son?" they said. In all fairness to them, I did change radically, especially as I began to spend more and more time in the company of the Mankowski's, whom I wrote earlier on this blog.For those of you J.D. Salinger fans, to me the Mankowskis resembled the Glass family in that author's books Franney and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter. All five Mankowski children had high SAT scores, excelling in both math and English. But what you noticed most about them was how gosh-darned articulate they were. At the same time, because of the father's interest in Thurber and S.J. Pearlman, they all had a great sense of humor and could wise crack and lampoon with the best of them. We all became comrades in the struggle against the sports and glamour cliques at school. We also had another bond because of our Eastern European backgrounds—them Polish, me Hungarian. But what I remember most about them is the music.Yesterday I wrote about how some parents push their kids to try to turn them into prodigies. The Mankowskis had much too much taste to do that. They whole family just loved being cultured. But that makes them sound snobby, which they weren't. Some gourmet once said comparing the French and American palate: "Americans eat to live; the French live to eat." Some people user their brains to live. The Mankowskis lived to use their brains.
Some families follow sport and athletes religiously. The Mankowskis followed not only classical music, but the careers of the performers as well. They introduced me to such names as Rubenstein, Heifitz, Callas, Toscanini, Von Karajan, Bohm, and Reiner. One of their favorite performers was the Spanish-born cellist, Pablo Casals
A refugee from Spain after Franco seized power and annexed Catalonia, Casals became the World's greatest cellist (according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music). In his later years, he became a noted conductor, spending summers leading the Marlboro Symphony orchestra. I own a number of his recordings both as a conductor and a performer. Some people didn't like his performances, because he would become so engrossed in the music that he used to moan along with them. Certain audience members found this distracting. One of my LPs included a recording of one of his rehearsals in which his moans almost hit a fervid pitch. Thank god that in the final recording the engineers turned off his microphone.
The first album with Casals conducting that I bought on the suggestion of the Mankowskis was Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony Number 35. If you didn't know anything about classical music but wanted to learn about it, I can't think of a better piece to start with. I think it is a "perfect" piece of music. Not too long. Not too short. Two nice, pensive, emotive movements sandwiched between quick, upbeat ones. I particularly love the third movement, the menuetto, which has a beautiful slow melody that would make anyone moan.
Mozart wrote the "Haffner" when he was just 26, and penned another six symphonies before he died. The more I think of his life, the more it astounds me. Nowadays, in our self-absorbed culture, we tend to think children are cute when they act grown-up and—as my British ex-wife, Judy called it—"cheeky." On the other hand, the news is full of stories about teen gangs, drug use, prostitution, and other scary behaviors. Sitcoms are full of such grotesqueries, and few show children acting in a noble or intelligent way. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they also showed the 99% of kids who are in the middle? Or at least a few who participated in some kind of ennobling activity.  I firmly believe that given the right stimulation, education and support, any child can grow up to accomplish great things.  It's odd that in developing countries the brainpower of children is wasted because of starvation, disease, neglect, and overpopulation.  In the developed countries, we're wasting the brainpower of children through lack of education, leadership, and by providing role models that lead to self-destructive and wasteful lives.  What a tragic waste of talent, which, if applied correctly could improve the lives of people the world over and perhaps save us from ourselves.

• Mozart on Wikipedia
  
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Jaquin Rodrigo: Berceuse de Printemps

Every once in a while,  you hear a piece that stops you dead in your tracks.  This just happened while I was eating dinner and Pandora was streaming works on my "Gymnopedies for Piano" channel.  Now recently Pandora seemed to have lost its edge and sold out to advertisement.  Sometimes in the midst listening to a stream that was clearly in one genre, I'd be jolted by a song that was from a completely different one.  It took me a while to figure out that it was because my daughter and I shared the same Pandora account and she'd add channels of hip-hop, rap, and other artists.  So I created a new account and got back to my uninterrupted, sedate works.  Then I noticed that sometimes, in a stream, Pandora would eventually end up playing the same works over and over.  So that's why it surprised me today when it suddenly kicked out "Bercesues de Printemps."  It also surprised me for two other reasons.  First, I didn't know Rodrigo composed for piano.  We've all heard his "Concierto de Aranjuez" about a gazillion times, so that was new for me.  Second, I was stunned by its sheer, unadorned beauty.  Rodrigo's life spanned nearly the entire 20th century and he studied with Paul Dukas in Paris before returning to his native Spain.  So this piece sounds like it was influence by Debussy or Ravel.  It's an utter joy, so please take a moment to give it a listen.

• Composer Biography
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• Link on Pandora

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony Number 38.in D "Prague"

Most people consider Mozart one of the greatest musical geniuses of all times. He was precocious, to boot. Starting at six, he toured all of Europe with his sister, an accomplished harpsichordist, until the age of ten. I believe he wrote his first symphony at the ripe old age of seven, and by the time he died at 35, he had written over 40 more symphonies, five violin concertos, 23 piano concertos, countless choral pieces, and five great operas. Some people have seen his father as an evil task-master who forced his child into music. And as the movie, Amadeus tried to show, though Mozart created sublime music, he had the social skill of a five year old, (and a highly sexed one at that.) Good thing we moderns know better, right?
Nowadays the hunt for the youngest prodigy has spread to almost every area of human activity—Olympic gymnasts are over the hill at 13; fashion models old hags at 25; 25 year-old actresses have face lifts to look 18; and if you don't start playing a musical instrument by the age of 4, you'll never be a Paganini.
Parents, money and greed, I suspect, are mostly behind this. Imagine seeing your child on the silver screen, playing a violin concerto at Carnegie Hall, or getting a gold medal at the summer Olympics. Think of the merchandizing! You'd be set for life!
No one seems to question whether this contributes to the mental stability of the "talent." Imagine doing one thing to the exclusion of all others. Then, after peaking at a young age, what kind of let-down will they be in for? What skills will they have? A friend of mine once told me about a documentary she once saw about ballerinas. That is a highly competitive profession, and some body types just don't fit the standards. When asked what kind of job one hopeful might consider should her career as a dancer not pan out, she replied, straight-faced: "A princess, maybe."
Let's say that somehow a parent was able to provide proper balance in a prodigy's life so that the child became a fully functioning human being. Can you say they're a great artist? That is, could they successfully marry technical virtuosity with a wide-range of feeling? Children were once considered to be closer to God, but would that necessarily give them depth of feeling? True, the hormone-wracked body of an adolescent feels intensely, but only extremes, in my experience. "Sensitive to nuances" is not how I'd typify most teenagers, though they are capable of great feats.
A friend of me told me a story about the pianist Aurthur Rubenstein, who also was a child prodigy. Supposedly when he hit 60, he abruptly retired from performing. When asked why, he said he was going to spend three years practicing. "But you're the greatest pianist alive," they said to him. "No," he said. "I've been faking it." So he spent three years practicing, and when he re-emerged and started performing again, his playing had greatly improved. Then he went on to perform for another 20 years.
Our focus on the cult of the personality and younger and younger performers has something of the freak show about it. Rubenstein's story is telling, because it meant the concert wasn't about actually listening to him, it was about seeing him. To see RUBENSTEIN. The cult of youth means that people now view life experiences and accumulated wisdom as worthless. The wise usually say: "Take it slow. It will come. And if it doesn't, no problem. Be happy." No one wants to hear that message when you're young. Everyone wants instant gratification.
That leads me to suspect the real reason child prodigies are so valued. They prove that you don't have to be patient. You don't have to peg way and work hard at something to excel in it. A pity, because what if you're not gifted? What if you're pre-wired to develop slowly? What if you got to spend your whole life watching the wonders of existence unfold before you? If you peaked at the age of 12, what else is there to do? And if you focused exclusively on one field of endeavor, how can you begin to appreciate all the other things there are to enjoy?
Mozart wrote his 38th Symphony at the age of 30. He had just finished his opera The Marriage of Figaro which was going to be produced in Prague, and he premiered the symphony in that city as well. For that reason, it is called the "Prague" Symphony. Though it has two fine slow movements, what really interested me was the final presto movement, which is joyous and reminiscent of the overture to the Marriage.
By this time in his life, Mozart was almost "channeling" music from the gods. He once wrote three symphonies in six weeks! And the music was getting better and better. One can only imagine what direction his work might have taken had he lived to a ripe old age, alhough, some of Beethoven's early works sound a bit like Mozart's last symphonies. Oddly enough, Mozart's early, early works are seldom performed. Could it be they are considered immature?

• Mozart's Biography
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture

Little boys like things that go "BOOM." Come to think of it, big boys do, too. How else can you explain the wars that continue to spring up even after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Several years before my daughters were born, an article appeared in the Washington Post, by a puzzled mother. She had a small son whom she had tried to keep away from toy guns, violent movies, and all other traditionally gender-based activities. One day at a friend's house she saw her son hop on a tricycle, pretend he was an airplane fighter pilot, and go racing down a hill, making a rat-a-tat noise as he imaginarily strafed his playmates. The mother concluded that boys possess a gene for this kind of behavior, or else the missing leg of the "Y" chromosome, which girls don't lack, is involved in masking this behavior. I suspect this might be the secret reason behind the popularity for the1812 Overture

This turns out to be another one of those pieces that's hard-wired into everyone's neural structure, because of over-playing. My earliest memory of the piece goes back to a 1960's television commercial for the cereal, Quaker Puffed Rice. The ending of the Overture blared in the background as canons exploded, showering the screen with the puffed cereal. The clever copywriters had penned these memorable lyrics: "This is the cereal that's shot from guns. This is the cereal that's shot from guns. Quaker Puffed Rice!" which scans perfectly.

Nowadays you can't go to an Independence Day concert, without the orchestra playing it. What's more, a kind of 1812 Overture arms race has begun as people found the kettle drums lacking sufficient "oomph." You can now hire a company that will set up a row of computer-controlled mortars, which the percussionist can percuss in perfect cadence with the music. I have also heard of towns making deals with the Army artillery to actually set off real Howitzer canons at the end of the piece.

I must admit that as a boy, those bursting canons did fascinate me. When I first heard the entire piece, though, I was surprised to find that the canons only occur at the end. Before that, Tchaikowski effectively captured the worry of Napoleon's campaign, the rallying of the Russian people, and the terror of battle. This music evokes vivid images and that too might be a reason for its continued popularity. Even among boys.

Before my daughters were born, I came down on the side of nurture in the "nature versus nurture debate." To prove the case, I tried to capture my their interests with non-sexist toys, book, and games. My oldest daughter went through a strong tom boy phase, which I believed proved the case. However, they both raised their eyebrows later when I brought home a used race car set from a garage sale. I stopped the experiment when I realized they were drawing the wrong conclusion: one day I overheard Claire—the oldest—say to my wife that she thought that I must have really wanted a son.

Now, they're both in college and have boyfriends. They don't follow contemporary fashion, but they dress fashionably in retro-Hippy. They're both studying science and are quite articulate and environmentally aware.

Still, one summer, at an Independence Day concert in front of town hall, they were excited to find out that the orchestra would perform The 1812 Orchestra that evening. They were up for it when I suggested we go watch the computer-controlled mortars. We all laughed when the mortars went off and nearly scared us out of our skin.

Boom!

• Composer biography
• Recording
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