A Claycophony of Instruments

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages--
Thanne longen bloggers their blogges to update.

I'm thinking of Chaucer because yesterday, I was on a jog with my friend C, and something she said made me think of The Squire's Tale, in which the narrator claims he will not speak of something and then goes on for a while speaking of it. C said there's a name for that rhetorical flourish, and I've tracked it down on Wikipedia: Apophasis (more specifically, Paralipsis and Proslepsis).

Says the Squire:

This Cambinskan, of whom I have you told,
High in the palace, mounted on his throne
With crown and royal vestments sat alone,
And held his feast, so splendid and so rich
That in this world its like was not, of which,
If I should tell you all of the array,
Then would it occupy a summer's day.
Besides, it needs not here that I apprise
Of every course the order of service.
I will not tell you of their each strange sauce,
Nor of their swans, nor of their heronshaws.
Moreover, in that land, as tell knights old,
There are some foods which they for dainties hold.
Of which in this land the esteem is small;
There is no man that can report them all.
I will not so delay you, for it's prime,
And all the fruit of this were loss of time...

At the point in my education when I read The Canterbury Tales, it seemed that the narrator went on for pages and pages like this. As an adult, I see he didn't (maybe there are longer examples elsewhere in the text), but my memory of him inspires my blog today.

Thus, I will not tell you of the past year of running with C, training first for a 10K and now for a 10 mile race; of the weekly interwebs running assignments she signed up for and from which I mooched; nor will I tell you of our increasing endurance, nor how 5K, once strenuous, now feels brief.

Moreover, I will not so delay you by reporting on my renewed love affair with Robert Schumann, of my exploration of his Six Canonical Etudes (with which I was previously acquainted through Debussy's arrangement for two pianos), nor of their beauty on the organ, nor of my continued good but largely unrealized intentions to record and here upload my organ demos at Duke Chapel, so that I might learn from the listening thereof. Moreover, I will not mention the comment left by a YouTube listener regarding someone else's too-fast but otherwise accomplished performance of Bach's "Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist," BWV 671 (a piece about which I erstwhile wrote)--no, I will not mention the five words that cut to the quick, dissuading me from ever being so bold as to post anything but cute cat videos on YouTube; nay, I will not here type the patronizing punch: "This is a laudable start."

Instead, I will get to my primary point of the day (about which I will actually say little; there's probably a rhetorical term for that too): musical instruments made out of clay. I've blogged before about making clay flutes and, of course, chickarinas. Thanks to a request by a student at Claymakers, this past session I taught a class entirely devoted to making clay instruments ("Bells and Whistles: A Claycophony of Instruments"). We made ocarinas, flutes, penny whistles, rain sticks, drums, horns, vuvuzelas, and tooters, with some bells and bowls on the side (not surprisingly, pretty much anything you whap will produce a tone).

Barry Hall's fabulous book From Mud to Music served as our inspiration. Barry Hall's even more fabulous CD Terra Cotta made me and E drop everything one evening after dinner and rush out to Home Depot to buy PVC parts for a didgeridoo. The student who requested the instruments class ended up building an impressive didgeridoo-horn hybrid that is way cooler than PVC tubing can ever be.

This was a great class to teach, since it involved problem solving and engineering, music theory and physics, and rawhide (sorry cows) and roofing nails and holes and a willingness to make noise on the way to making music. (Did you notice all the conjunctions in that last sentence? The rhetorical term for that is Polysyndeton.)

Naturally, we ended the class with a potluck and jam session. Alas, I did not have time to bake jam bars, but one student did bring caramel Bugles.

Note: video has been edited to protect the embarrassed; you know who you are. Also, S insists the flute lick is "House of the Rising Sun," but that would mean I actually absorbed something other than classical music during my early youth, which is unlikely.

Resolutions

I need to start an Etsy store. That will go on my list of New Year's resolutions, along with coming up with a way to take decent photos of my work, building a gas or soda kiln in the back yard, and learning to repair plaster walls. Can you tell which of the Klein Bottles below were photographed by a professional photographer and which were photographed by me using a low-tech piece of white poster board propped on a chair as a backdrop?

I didn't make any specific New Year's resolutions on January 1, 2010, but some goals did crop up along the way. I'm pleased to report that I have successfully renewed my devotion to Robert Schumann (to whom, incidentally, I dedicated my Master's thesis in Astronomy way back in 1989) by learning the six B-A-C-H fugues for organ. For those who question the absolute brilliance of the fugues, might I recommend several months of worshipful practice and analysis?

By comparison, I've been resisting my way through The Lord of the Rings, but with December 31 looming, I've bumped things up a notch and am now a mere 200 pages away from finishing The Return of the King (not counting the hundreds of pages of appendices). By New Year's Eve, I hope to call my cultural literacy oath to Tolkien fulfilled.

Honest concert notes

In 1845, the year he wrote his six fugues on the four-note theme B-A-C-H (Op. 60), Robert Schumann was renting a spiffy Louis Schone pedal piano with a 29-note pedal board. According to Schumann's contemporary and biographer, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, Schumann wrote the fugues specifically for organ, amidst a sea of other contrapuntal pieces written that year specifically for pedal piano.¹ B-A-C-H, like Bach, belongs on the king of instruments.

But if you don't happen to have a king in your living room, you could compose sitting at your right swell rented prince^* instead, which is maybe kind of close enough to an organ that no one will notice the difference, unless you do things like (dang) double octaves to mimic pulling out stops, forget that tones decay when you hold down a piano key but that they don't when you hold down an organ key, or stick in subito piano and sforzando and crescendo indications that are trivially easy on a piano but make an organist wonder "what the *&$# were you thinking?"

A non-organist, Schumann had enough experience with the instrument to understand its challenges. As he advised in his "House Rules and Maxims for Young Musicians" (1849), "Lose no opportunity of practicing on the organ; there is no instrument that so quickly revenges itself on anything unclear or impure in composition or playing as the organ." How ironically perceptive!

Schumann considered the B-A-C-H fugues to be among his finest compositions, writing to his publisher in 1846 that "I worked on this set for the whole of last year in order to make it somewhat worthy of the exalted name it bears; [it is] a work that will, I believe, long outlive my other works."² Of course, any Schumannophile who's read any Schumann biography will know that Schumann regularly wrote with effusive enthusiasm about whatever next great "entirely new!" composition he was working on at the time, so his opinion of Op. 60 (sincere though it may have been) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Although Schumann's contemporaries heard much to praise in the composer's fugues, posterity has viewed his contrapuntal pieces less kindly. Ah, fickle fashion. To illustrate this point, compare one modern critic's review ("you sure are a glutton for punishment") to Wasielewski's glowing assessment^**:

"Of the two sets of fugues (Ops. 72 and 60), the latter, consisting of six fugues on the name of Bach, is of extraordinary merit. The first five fugues especially display so firm and masterly a treatment of the most difficult forms of art, that Schumann might from these alone lay claim to the title of a profound contrapuntist. They show variety of plastic power with four notes only. The tone of feeling varies in all six pieces, and is always poetic, which, in connection with a command of form, is the main point in composition. These are serious character-pieces. The sixth fugue offers a difficult problem as to execution, since the mingling of even and uneven movement renders it very difficult to perform it properly upon an organ."³

And now, for your aural edification, here is Op. 60 #2 on organ and on pedal piano, performed by Martin Luecker and Silvio Celeghin respectively.

^*I'm not sure king:prince properly describes organ:pedal piano. It should probably be something more like king:king's second cousin.

^**Indeed, Wasielewski, whom we might consider the chief booster of the first-generation ardent Schumannophile club, found it nearly impossible to write about Schumann in anything but glowing terms.

1. Wasielewski, Life of Robert Schumann (1871), 149.
2. John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age" (1997), 308.
3. Wasielewski, 149.

Schumann update

Back in August on my Wadlstrumpf blog, I wrote about hearing two of Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues performed live at the Baroque church in St. Peter im Schwarzwald, and about how I nonetheless remained certain that these pieces could be performed convincingly, and about how I was giving myself until the end of this year--until the end of Schumann's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr--to work toward that goal myself. To quote:

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

Now that I've been back on the bench for a month, I've made good progress refining fugue 2 and getting fugues 3-6 under my fingers and feet, and I'm beginning to find satisfying registrations for all six on the Flentrop. It's time to play them for my organ teacher, David A., with whom I haven't had a lesson since early July. I happened to run into him today, and told him, with the devout fervor of a born-again Schumannophile, that I was working on all six fugues. It says something of the challenging not-quite-rightness of these pieces that David replied, "you sure are a glutton for punishment."

(Ironically, I initially dove into the Schumann fugues in part to hide from the piece David wanted me to work on this summer, Marcel Dupré's "Variations on a Noël." Talk about punishment. The Variations are like the two-semester senior quantum mechanics sequence I took in 1986-87: amazing and awe-inspiring, surely, but the ratio between effort to learn and consequent intellectual pleasure makes you think maybe you don't want to spend the rest of your life as a physicist after all, nor, 24 years later, spend the summer slowly and methodically practicing all those notes.)

Schumann, bless his heart

Before I became a Mendelssohnophile, I was a Schumannophile. At some point, after I turned into more of an organist than a pianist, I transferred my affections. I needed a break. Schumann may have written some of the most stunningly beautiful phrases of all time, but Mendelssohn's music just seems so, well, sane, in contrast: mature, confident, reliable, and able to form complete paragraphs, rather than moody, petulant, fragmented, and ravishingly, achingly, hopelessly Romantic.

2009 marked Mendelssohn's 200th birthday, so I celebrated by learning a few of Mendelssohn's organ sonatas. 2010 is the Schumann bicentennial year, so now I'm learning some of Schumann's organ music--specifically the fugues on BACH. (In German, the letters B-A-C-H are the names for the pitches B♭-A-C-B♮, a nifty little chromatic motive that even Johann Sebastian himself had fun with.) Schumann didn't leave much music for organists to choose from, actually; he wasn't an organist.

What I've learned so far is that, indeed, Schumann was no organist. When he wants a crescendo, for example, he pretends the organ is a piano: instead of telling the organist to pull out a few more stops, he tells the organist to grab a few more notes; instead of adding in a 16-foot stop to some 8-foot stops (one of the resourceful things you can do on an organ that you can't do on a piano), he has the left hand double everything the right hand is doing, an octave lower.

Even if you can't read music, you might still be able to see this happening in the middle two systems below. The top stave of each system is the right hand, the middle stave is the left hand, and the bottom stave is the pedals. He does it in the pedals too--see that octave doubling in the third system?

If my knowledge of organ repertoire were broader, I might know of other composers who do this sort of quirky, unidiomatic thing. But for now, it's just Schumann, all the more endearing for plugging resourcefully onward on an unfamiliar instrument, a passionate fish out of water ("bless his heart," as we say in the South).