Beethoven is
not particularly known for his
programmatic music. When he did write
a piece of story-driven battle music,
"Wellington's Victory," it made him
enormously popular for a while, but it
is regarded today as one of his most
embarrassing compositions.
He did,
however, concoct a program for one of
the nine symphonies. It is concise--in
fact, it is downright terse if you
compare it to the flowery, verbose
plan of musical action left behind by
the Swabian composer Hienrich Knecht,
whose "pastorale" symphony seems
to have provided the inspiration for
Beethoven's own. Sir George Grove
speculated that Beethoven, seeing the
advertisements for that symphony on
the backs of Beethoven's own early
piano sonatas from his Viennese
publisher, thought he could do it
better. And he did.
Beethoven's
plan also evokes the natural world, an
idyllic world of shepherds and
babbling brooks, with a storm and a
hymn of rejoicing at the end. What is
interesting is how this unique foray
into narrative-fueled music changed
the way he wrote music.
The piano was
invented over 300 years ago, and
while many inventions are improved
upon over time, the piano managed to
do something that hasn't been
equaled by a keyboard instrument
before or since. It is capable of
responding to almost limitless
varieties of human touch, producing
sounds ranging in volume from
thunder to a whisper and as many
shades of sound as a gifted painter
could produce on a canvas. Neither
the instruments that preceded it
(organ, harpsichord, clavichord,
etc.) nor the modern day electronic
keyboard which has replaced it in
some places respond to the subtle
imaginations of the player like the
piano. It is not, however, such a
simple matter to bring such a device
into being.
When you depress a
piano key, several things happen.
I started
programming my "Use your Imagination"
piano recital from April of 2015 with
a serious question in mind: what are
the merits of "program" music, and how
does a composer draw inspiration from
something besides the interplay of
notes and phrases? But things shortly
began to veer off into the ridiculous.
That,
obviously, is one risk of trying to
make music tell a story; it is like
unto concretizing metaphors, double
entendres, bad puns, and all manner of
linguistic tricks that start to wear
thin after a while because the focus
is on the language itself and not on
what it is trying to point to beneath
its dazzling surface.
And if Erik Satie's little
escapade didn't warn you of that
(though Satie was clever enough to
recognize it), let's dive into a
little Kotzwara.
I wrote about
him nearly ten years ago, shortly
after moving to Champaign-Urbana. An
item in the news stirred him from his
deserved slumber. Some folks were
upset that a cellphone ringtone was
topping the charts in England, and I
wrote an article that suggested that
this was hardly a new low in the
annals of public taste. What I dredged
up to support my argument was a piece
of piano music called "The Battle of
Prague," published in 1790, which went
on to become a huge bestseller for
half a century, and even got mentioned
by name in two of Mark Twain's books,
so embedded in the culture it was.
Kotzwara's
battle piece was an early entry into a
genre that was to glut the market for
years after--the idea that the noise
and glory of a great and messy
enterprise could be represented by one
only moderately talented player was an
idea that sold a lot of music. Trumpet
calls, canons, guns, were easy to
imitate on a piano. Canons,
particularly, didn't take a lot of
practice. Mr. Kotzwara's piece turned
out to be disappointingly polite: many
of the other entrants into this kind
of piece wrote loud, low clusters for
the flat of the hands, the kind of
thing that two-year olds naturally
produce once they can reach the
keyboard.
part one of the "Flashy French Organ
Toccata" Series
"And they're all
lining up for the start of the
spring semester....they'll be
running into gale force winds...it's
really a beautiful day out there!"
It's always a good
idea to have a strong opening.
That's what each of today's
panelists would tell me if they were
still here to do it, and if they'd
debase themselves by coming on this
blog to being with. They are all
very gifted French composers--werevery gifted, anyhow.
And they all knew how to lead with
some arresting musical ideas.
This is something I
could use right about now. The start
of the "long semester" can be a bit
daunting. While the fall semester
seems short and intense, and usually
involves cramming in a concert or
two before the Christmas season,
which runs from about Nov. 20 to the
1st of January, and includes every
organization I work for putting on
most of their shows for the year,
the spring semester is less packed,
though it seems to go on twice as
long and largely takes place in the
cold and dark of January and
February and sometimes March. When
it's not dark it's overcast.
I could use a new
start, the sense of a fresh new
beginning. That's where these
consultants come in.
.... we'll let these
fellows dazzle us with the loud and
the flashy for a little bit, and by
the end, we'll really know something
about the institution of the French
organ toccata.
