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.)

The Schumanns are probably the most famous pair of married composers, and most definitely the sappiest. Romantic sensibilities simply drip from nearly every note they wrote. Robert‘s sappy high-point is probably Dichterliebe (poet’s love); Clara‘s might be her Three Romances for Violin & Piano.

Clara was an all-around musical powerhouse with an extensive performing career and a long list of compositions to boot. Thanks to good-old-fashioned-19th-century sexism (not to mention the 20th and 21st centuries), her music is overshadowed by her husband’s – though I would argue that only an expert could pass the “pepsi challenge” and tell their music apart. Even more unfortunate is the fact that her music is overshadowed by inferior male composers of her time (Jacques Offenbach, for example, was born the same year as Clara …)

Sometimes my choice of music for this blog is sometimes based on the date or event (especially for important days, like Saturnalia), sometimes based on what is playing in my head, and sometimes based on a completely random train of thought. Today, it’s the third – a random train of thought.

Since this particular thought-train is perhaps a bit dark, I should explain. 9/11 has been on my mind (and all over the news), and I couldn’t help but ponder the events of that day. Acts of terrorism, mass death, airplanes, suicide attacks … and then, without intending it, I remembered a piano piece titled “Suicide in an Airplane”, by Leo Ornstein. Tasteless, yes, but that’s how the brain works sometimes. So that’s why today’s piece is by Ornstein – but a different piece, titled “Solitude”, which I hadn’t known before today.

Ornstein skyrocketed to fame in the 1910’s with his futurist piano works. Futurism was meant to bring about a sort of industrial revolution in music – shunning the old musical ways or traditional instruments and singable melodies, and looking to machines and factories for inspiration. Hence, “Suicide in an Airplane” sounds like a plane motor (propeller – this was 1918, after all) in takeoff. However, after this 15-minutes of fame, he returned to a conservative musical style, composing all the way into his 90s. “Solitude” is a lovely piece and a return to the impressionistic style found in Debussy‘s earlier piano works.