This week, I wanted to listen to a certain piece of music on the way to work. I didn’t have it on CD, but I pulled it up on my phone … but my phone refused to connect to my car’s Bluetooth! I was furious … my desires weren’t instantly gratified. Poor me.

Before recorded music, there was only one way to hear music – either you made the music yourself, or you listened to a live performance. This also meant that if hearing the newest, hottest music meant a lot more than turning on a radio, TV, or computer. You had to get a score, then you had to get it performed. And often, that meant you heard the latest symphony played not by an orchestra, but by on a keyboard – very often, a piano-duet (often called “piano four hands”  – one piano, two players; not to be confused with two pianos, two players, popularly called “dueling pianos”).

Four-hand piano music makes a ton of sound, and can cover the many moving parts of a complex symphony. Besides getting new music heard, four-hand scores are often the first thing a composer writes when preparing a large-scale opera or symphony – this way s/he can hear the piece and make edits before s/he takes the time to write out all the orchestra parts (a long and laborious process.) However, four-hand music is more than just playing orchestral works – many composers have written pieces specifically for this genre. Franz Schubert wrote his Fantasia in F minor in his last year (he died at 31). It was a gift for his student, whom he loved; she didn’t love him back. The gravity, weight, and maturity of this piece is a regular part of Schubert’s late works (like Winterreise), as he was preparing himself for a death he knew was coming (he suffered from late-stage syphilis.)

Fall is here – and to celebrate, here is the iconic fall composition, “Autumn” from Vivaldi‘s “Four Seasons“.

Vivaldi wrote 500 concertos, though musicians will say that he actually wrote the same concerto 500 times. Most of these concertos are given really interesting titles – for example, “Violin Concerto in D” or “Violin Concerto in E” or maybe even “Violin Concerto in F.” In a sea of compositions with very similar names, four of his concertos stand out above the rest (not surprisingly) because they bear a title that suggests something extra-musical. The Four Seasons (having nothing to do with Franki Valli) are four Baroque concertos that musically capture the spirit of the respective times of year – Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. This sort of use of extra-musical influences is known as Program Music, and is commonplace nowadays. If a composer today wrote a piece called “A Cold Winter’s Day” or “The Ice Storm”, we wouldn’t think twice about it; in fact, we would probably begin making assumptions as to how the piece would sound, built on the musical ideas handed down through generations of wintery composers. But in 1720, for Vivaldi to write a Concerto that captures the spirit of the harvest AND to title it “Fall” was out of the ordinary.

Actually, there is more to say. Julia Fischer is awesome!

Today’s post comes from composer Kile Smith – I had to share this. I heard it on the radio this week and was really caught off guard by his words. His analysis helps to capture the difference between what is Art Music and what is not (“rock rolled over sophistication”).

The original post comes from the WRTI blog, “Arts Desk“. Here it is:

Two Englishmen, Guy Wood and Robert Mellin, slipped it into the Great American Songbook just before it closed, just as rock rolled over sophistication. It begins from below, a slowly twisting Roman candle of a tune, and explodes in the top range of the singer, as the eyes of onlookers reflect the glory of what songs once were.

Sinatra recorded “My One and Only Love” right away, in 1953, but ten years later John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman made it a landmark of an age.

Johnny Hartman sounds like a man who breaks his heart open, and yours.

Coltrane’s tenor saxophone sounds as if it’s made of something not of this world, and yet it is uncannily apt. Every note is a discovery, every phrase an experiment that comes out exactly right.

Johnny Hartman sings the way every man wishes to sing—an everyman standing up in a room suddenly silent—sounding like a man, but a man who breaks his heart open, and yours. And just when he sounds like anybody, that voice turns into one in ten million.

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman spread their mystic charms, especially in the high ranges of their low instruments. In “My One and Only Love” they made a song for the ages. Remember what songs once were.