Hooray, it’s Friday!

While Art Music is typically heard by sitting audiences, much of it is written in rhythms or forms that come directly from dances. Take the gavotte – a French dance, originally performed by peasants, and later adopted by the royalty (who added erotic kissing to the dance moves …) It has a distinct rhythm which makes it easy to identify.

This is a movement one of Bach‘s orchestral dance suites. It’s in trio form – which means there are two contrasting “songs” – the first ends at 1:15, and next you hear a second, contrasting “song”. When he second concludes, the first is played one final time. Trio is a simple but important form which is often heard in symphonies (minuet and scherzo movements), waltzes, and military marches.

What the hell is a cakewalk? Is it the long, hungry walk you have to take in order to get to the cake store, or is it the long walk you have to take after eating cake to burn off the calories?

Louis Gottschalk is another one of those American composers that you rarely hear about, because, like the Boston Six, he was before Ives and Jazz. However, unlike the Boston Six, I’m willing to agree that Gottschalk isn’t exactly a true blue ‘Murican. He was born in New Orleans, but when he was 13, he traveled to Europe to receive musical training. When he returned to the US, he mostly traveled abroad, and ultimately got himself kicked out of the country because of a little hanky-panky.

Enough about him – his music is remarkable. 100 years before Copland and Bernstein made the Latin American sound popular in the concert hall, Gottschalk was living and inventing the style.

And, for the record, a cakewalk is a dance that originated with the southern American slaves.

In a time when composers wrote prolifically as a matter of course, Georg Philipp Telemann exceeded all other composers in the sheer amount of music he produced (over 3,000 pieces – and by “piece” I don’t mean a 3-minute ditty for keyboard, I mean a 20-minute cantata or suite for orchestra.) He was a self-taught musician who had a real talent for writing great music – but more importantly, a real mind for business. He did not die a poor penniless pauper (the way many of us imagine musicians die), but instead a successful business person whose work was the rage of 18th-century Europe. More than that, he was a forerunner in the idea that a composer’s work is his/her intellectual property, which helped shape the future of Art Music and publishing.

This short piece from an orchestral suite captures the sound of a Scottish Reel – or, at least what a 18th-century German thought a Scottish Reel would sound like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLxTZVAnPzc