Mishka Rushdie Momen: Notes on the Program
WILLIAM BYRD The Bells
Although the Portlandia meme and catchphrase “Put a bird on it!” is probably just as played out by now as the phrase’s original intended meaning, it’s hard to resist the reference when writing about one of the most interesting figures of Shakespearean England, William Byrd. Together with his Italian contemporaries, Palestrina and di Lasso, Byrd can well be considered one of the most outstanding composers of the Renaissance, having enormous influence on the trajectory of musical development in England, the Low Countries, and Germany. Byrd’s keyboard compositions give us the earliest substantial legacy of keyboard virtuosity in Western music. There is no better source to dive into the soundscape of England, circa 1600, than listening to one of his most famous works, The Bells.
An important note on applying our modern ears to listening 400 years into the past: The plural bells in the title most likely refer only to two distinct sounds: an alternating C and D in the bass that serves as an unchanging, hypnotic chime throughout the work. The pealing downward scales heard in the second part most definitely sound bell-like to us. But, it is unlikely that Byrd himself would ever have heard bells ringing like that. In the sixteenth century, bell towers did not have enough bells to sound a scale.
Still, it is fascinating to “hook” one’s ear onto the droning chime in the bass and to marvel at the varied paragraphs of sound that the composer built above it. Does it evoke a Lincolnshire landscape with the white stone towers of Lincoln Cathedral looming in the distance? The building energy of a marketplace on a cool morning? The calming interior of a church or a library or a favorite bookstore? You choose. For even though this music is more than 4 centuries old, it affirms that Byrd is still the word!
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 6 in F Major, op. 10, no. 2
The period during which this sonata was composed, between 1796 and 1798, falls right in the middle of Beethoven’s “early Vienna years,” a time when he was building a reputation as a performer and improviser in the salons of the Viennese nobility. Note that in these years, he was a student of Haydn. Two keywords, therefore, to listening to this sonata: form and expectation.
Beethoven plays straight into the structural expectations of the day, with an unmistakable nod to his teacher and overtly paying tribute to Bach’s fugal style, but with an indisputable touch of his own sentiment, quirky humor, and virtuosity. The reason this sonata is so delightfully charming and full of humor and wit is precisely because of how Beethoven played with the expected norms within the commonly understood musical language of his day. He surprises us with his modulations. He keeps us wondering whether he’s lost his way, yet always bringing us back home to where the sun is shining, even if clouds sometimes threaten to darken the mood.
Just listen to the singing opening motif, like birdsong, in the rising and falling of the melody, and the echoing interplay between the two registers. Later in the exposition, we hear music in which Sir Andras Schiff has compared the two hands to Laurel and Hardy: one short and stout, one tall and thin, deliberately not together for comic effect!
Even though the sonata is one of Beethoven’s shortest, it’s an absolute tour de force. And, if you don’t like it after seeing it performed live (in the words of Sir Andras), “you have funny taste!”
BYRD Will Yow Walke the Woods soe Wylde
“Will Yow Walke the Woods soe Wylde” is the title of a popular song from the Tudor era, believed to have been a favorite of Henry VIII. Although the complete text of the song has not survived, the short refrain contains the following words (or variations thereof): “Shall I go walk the wood so wild, wandering, wandering here and there?”
The melody is highly singable and easy to hear in William Byrd’s keyboard adaptation:
Although many other composers of the time (including Orlando Gibbons) also used this melody as a basis for further invention, Byrd’s adaptation merits special attention, notably for the fact that it is both precisely dated (composed in 1590) and that it appears in five Renaissance-era manuscripts, a sure sign of its popularity at a time when printed keyboard music was still in its inception.
Byrd’s interpretation takes the form of fourteen variations, based upon a popular improvisatory technique which Byrd adapted to his needs. Additional to the melody on which the variations are based, Byrd also introduced a ground, a repeated bass line involving the alternation of the first and second notes of the scale.
The melody is clearly audible in the first half of the work. Starting with variation 8, for a time it more or less disappears, although the ear supplies it without problem. For the last two variations it returns, first in the alto then triumphantly at the upper octave for the last variation.
(For anyone yearning for an even more immersive Elizabethan experience, check out the vocal duo Wilde Roses on YouTube)
MENDELSSOHN Variations sérieuses, op. 54
In a program opening with the chime of bells, what could be more fitting than including the composer of that ultimate cause-for-bell-ringing anthem, the Wedding March? By the time of Mendelssohn, instrumental music had long migrated from churches and parlors to grand concert halls and vast stages. Mendelssohn (a child-prodigy who made his public debut in Berlin at age 9) had enormous success during his lifetime as the composer of incidental music, symphonies, oratorios, concertos, chamber works, and keyboard music rife with the lyricism and sentimentality that would ultimately earn him a deserved place in history as one of the most important composers of the Romantic era.
His Variations sérieuses (composed in 1841) have a fascinating inception story. They were composed to be included in an anthology, Album-Beethoven, published by the prominent Viennese music publisher Pietro Mechetti to raise funds to erect a Beethoven monument in Bonn.
Whether Mendelssohn really needed to describe his Variations in D minor as “serious” is questionable once one listens to the music, which sounds earnest, somber, and almost chorale-like from the get-go. Most likely, he wanted to dissociate his music from the frothy virtuoso stuff that could be expected from some of the other composer-pianists, such as Czerny, Henselt, Moscheles, and Thalberg, who, along with Chopin and Liszt, had been invited to write pieces for the same album.
The seventeen variations in Mendelssohn’s opus 54, rather than being a strict display of inconsequential ideas and entertaining virtuosity, form a collection of carefully structured variations that very clearly resonate with the influence of Bach’s fugal style and choral texture. Mendelssohn uses chromatic suspensions, contrapuntal imitation and chorale-like four-part harmonies to create a work that is at once an echoing the past and pulsating towards the future.
BYRD Pavana Lachrymae, after Flow My Tears by John Dowland
Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn ….
In our contemporary circumstance of emojis and memes, there is an almost automatic association between “dance” and “joy,” and even the least technologically savvy of us would be able to access a slew of #happydance images on the internet with the click of a few buttons. But dances aren’t always happy, as the great popularity of the pavane during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reminds us. The pavane was a slow processional dance which the Dictionnaire de Trevoux describes as being a “grave kind of dance, borrowed from the Spaniards, wherein the performers make a kind of wheel or tail before each other, like that of a peacock, whence the name.” Add the Latin word “lachrymae” (tears) and we have a serious, melancholy mood that might today earn the hashtag #sadness.
The composer, lutenist, and singer John Dowland was a contemporary of William Byrd and the sorrowful melody that inspired this pavane was composed in 1596. It would become Dowland’s “signature song” literally and figuratively, as he would occasionally sign his name “Jo: dolandi de Lachrimae”.
Byrd was not the only Renaissance composer to arrange the original lute melody for keyboard, but his setting is by far the most interesting and least mechanical. Whereas most of the other keyboard versions are in A minor, Byrd transposes it up into D minor, lifting the work into a more singing part of the instrument. This also allows for richer harmonic textures underneath and, more significant, places the important expressive notes higher.
ORLANDO GIBBONS Lord Salisbury’s Pavan and Galliard
While the pavane was the ceremonial entrance dance of the seventeenth century (“a kind of staide musicke, ordained for grave dauncing” (Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Music, Thomas Morley, 1597), it was almost always paired with a galliard, “a lighter and more stirring kind of dancing,” with the same pulse but in triple time, for the young bloods to introduce their skill and energy. Orlando Gibbons, who was most likely a student of Byrd and who followed in Byrd’s footsteps by being appointed gentleman of the Chapel Royal, had an enormous and lasting influence on the development of keyboard music, in part because of his talent as an organist, but also because of the fact that his keyboard compositions were published during his lifetime. Lord Salisbury’s Pavan and Galliard, in fact, was one of six works by Gibbons to be included in Parthenia, the very first collection of keyboard music to be printed in England.
Lord Salisbury’s Pavan and Galliard each consist of three “strains” or sections and follows Byrd’s compositional style of using a ground or set of variations on a bass or harmonic pattern. Note the importance of ornamentation and the “strumming” or rolling of chords – reminiscent of courtly lute music.
Fun trivia fact: Canadian pianist Glenn Gould called Gibbons his favorite composer on more than one occasion and included this piece frequently on concert programs, including as the opening piece for his American debut on January 2, 1955.
PROKOFIEV Selections from Visions fugitives, op. 22
I do not know wisdom — leave that to others —
I only turn fugitive visions into verse.
In each fugitive vision I see worlds ….
Visions fugitives, Op. 22 – a cycle of twenty piano miniatures – were written between 1915 and 1917 as individual pieces dedicated to specific friends of Prokofiev. When performing these pieces during a private recital to a group of friends in 1917 (well before its public debut a year later), the Russian poet Konstantin Balmont was so inspired that he composed a sonnet on the spot, in which he described the pieces as “Mimolyotnosti”. This word, which roughly translates as “transiences” in English, inspired Prokofiev to then apply the French translation “visions fugitives” as a unifying title for this set of musings or reflections. In their effervescent, almost Impressionist style, they defy neat labeling.
So, what are these slippery, hard-to-pin-down visions? Maybe first and foremost the composer’s toying with tonality. Prokofiev experimented with modernism in these works and, at the same time, also experimented with much older forms. There are gently floating chords and agitated dissonances; we hear wistful melodic wandering and driving, motor-like rhythm. And, to tie it in even more directly with today’s theme of resounding bells, in the fifth piece, Molto giocoso, the composer himself wrote that there is an audible “peal of bells,” to celebrate the wedding of a friend, Lida Karneyeva.
SCHUBERT Sonata in C Minor, D. 958
Wedding bells to death knells, there seems to be no human emotion or experience not to be found in Schubert and none of his compositions take listeners on a quite as all-encompassing ride as his last three piano sonatas, of which the first, the Sonata in C Minor, D.958, maybe most intimately reveals Schubert’s heart.
“If Winterreise (completed in 1827) is heartbreak, a study in unrelieved sorrow,” wrote musicologist Frances Wilson, “the final three piano sonatas reveal and revel in all of life – heroism, determination, spirituality, dancing high spirits, humility, intoxicatingly bittersweet, nostalgic, and life-affirming, never unremittingly melancholy nor heavy.”
Written only three months before his death in September 1828, Schubert overtly paid homage to Beethoven in this sonata, boldly choosing the melancholy key of C minor and modeling his first movement on Beethoven’s 32 Variations in the same key. Too, he also referenced Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor Op. 10 No.1 and the slow movement from the Pathetique sonata (op.13) in his Adagio molto second movement.
But, while Beethoven usually leads his listeners to heroic triumph, even Schubert’s moments of tranquility and grace have to succumb to darkness. We find in the tarantella rhythms of the concluding Allegro an almost Erlkönig-esque freneticism and a sense of ominous foreboding.
And yet, the sonata is infused with moments of golden transcendence and joyous otherworldliness (the opening of the Adagio! the skipping rhythms of the Allegro!), maybe made even more sublime by the lingering proximity of the metaphorical minor key. Like life itself . . . .