Today is Saturday; take a half-hour to close your eyes, sit, breathe, think, and of course, listen.

You have to admire Carson Cooman‘s legendary work ethic. At 35, he already has penned over 1100 musical compositions, all the while maintaining careers in organ performing, academic writing, and others. He has written for every genre and his music has been performed all over the world “in venues that range from the stage of Carnegie Hall to the basket of a hot air balloon.”

His poignant Symphony no. 4 is best described using Cooman’s own words (taken from his website):

… for me, a symphony is a piece that attempts (in some rather small way) to make an artistic comment on a “big topic,” whether that be emotional/psychological, societal, or natural…. My fourth symphony, Liminal, addresses climate change—a topic at the forefront of discussion in the present time. The English word liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold. In social and cultural anthropology, the concept of liminality is used when describing rituals and processes; it refers specifically to the quality of ambiguity that occurs in the middle of the ritual, when participants are not the same as they were before the ritual began, but have not yet reached the conclusion.

It seems inarguable that the earth is (and perhaps has always been) in a liminal state. This piece is made up of varied soundscapes that reflect musically on the large-scale changes taking place, many of which have very distressing consequences for the future of the life we know…. while the ultimate trajectory is perhaps disturbing, as the ecologically-minded composer John Luther Adams has written, “Amid the turbulent waves we may still find the light, the wisdom and courage we need to pass through this darkness of our own making.”

[In this symphony,] one harp is tuned a quarter tone lower than the rest of the orchestra, and the two harps together provide an uneasy, blurry tonal area through which the rest of the ensemble is led…. in the final section only one harp remains. Some sort of transformation has been reached, or at least the search for light continues. The quarter tone contrast returns for the final chord. Perhaps the process only seems to be at an end from our limited perspective.

Today I leave for a much-needed vacation. I intend to continue this blog while away because it is a big source of joy in my life. But there’s also a chance that I’ll have no internet access … and if that’s the case, there will be one of these:

There’s a great classical music story about the need for vacation. Back in the 18th century, Art Musicians were essentially servants to the aristocracy. You found yourself a royal patron, and you did whatever he said. When the king says, “write me music for a fireworks party I’m throwing,” you wrote music for the royal fireworks. When the king asks you to improvise a fugue on his own five-note theme, you write the most complicated, amazing music ever composed (accompanied by copious amounts of royal-ass-kissing.)

And when the prince demands you stay at his summer-house much longer than expected, even though you’re exhausted and dying to travel back home and see your family whom you haven’t seen in weeks … well, you have to stay and continue to play for the prince. Franz Joseph Haydn‘s “Farewell” Symphony was written under these circumstances – and only someone as awesome as Haydn could get away with this level of cheekiness. His musicians appealed to him for help – “maestro, please, we need a vacation!” Haydn wrote a symphony in which the musicians leave the stage, one by one, until at last, only two players remain. The message was clear, and the very next day, the prince let the musicians go home.

The classicists (composers from 1750-1810) were all about form. Symphonies, sonatas, concertos, operas – there were specific forms associated with all of them, which audiences expected to hear. A typical symphony would start with a sonata-form movement, then a slow rondo or theme & variations, then a 3/4 dance in trio form, then a quick rondo.

But these 18th-century wig-wearing aristocrats weren’t so stuffy that they couldn’t occasionally break away from convention. When they did, the pieces were called Divertimenti – “amusements”. These were like a hybrid between a baroque dance suite and a classical symphony: a flexible, multi-movement suite of short pieces (like the baroque suite, often more than four movements – more than a symphony), using traditional classical forms (sonata, rondo, trio – not the binary forms of the baroque).

Confused? Put more simply, this is late 18th century party music – short, flexible pieces that could be cut short if dinner was about to be served, or repeated if the cooks failed to cook the main course on time. Often they were written for smaller ensembles which could fit into smaller spaces, and often used wind instruments, which were a little louder and could be heard indoors and outdoors. Today’s piece is just this – a divertimento for wind sextet (two oboes, two horns, two bassoons). Go ahead and play it while your food is cooking; Mozart wouldn’t mind.