Dreams have fascinated us for thousands of years. They can give us inspiration, true horror, or clarity on a real-life situation; they make us laugh or cry; sometimes they seem to warn us about something, predict the future, or reinvent the past.

Not surprisingly, the very human act of dreaming has inspired all kinds of art and music. Rather than explain the science behind dreams (of which I know very little), let’s dive into a few musical interpretations of dreams.

First of all, a confession – the main reason for this post is that I wanted to include a piece I wrote called Fantasmagoria. It’s three movements long and for flute & organ. The movements document: 1) Fantasmagoria – a calm, pleasant dream that corrupts into a hideous nightmare 2) Oneironautics – the act of being in control of one’s dream 3) Deja Vu – the feeling that you’ve experienced this before (in this case, an unchaning single-note pulse).

If we look at the body of art music, I think we can boil down dream-music into two categories: 1) sweet, gentle, calming works 2) wilder, fantastical visions.

Starting with category 1 – sweet, gentle, calming works. Common characteristics of these pieces include simpler, more predictable harmonies, a consistent, slower rhythmic pulse, and hummable melodies. They are more often written for solo instrument, or for two players. They appeal to our musically conservative side, hinting at music we already know – perhaps lullabies or songs of tenderness. They put our minds in safe places and make us feel love and warmth.

Reverie was one of Claude Debussy earlier works, and captures a delightful, pleasant daydream of sorts.

Francisco Tárrega wrote this gentle dream for solo guitar.

Franz Liszt was known for writing-impossible-to-play piano music, but his Liebestraum is almost manageable. On top of that, its supremely cheesy melody and sentimental mood make it a regular encore at piano concerts or romantic piano CDs.

And speaking of cheese, the master of all sentimental cheese was Robert Schumann. He was so cheesy that Brahms tried to out-cheese him, but failed. So Brahms decided to go after his wife instead.

Let’s just stay in cheese zone for another moment and move on to Gabriel Fauré‘s haunting “Après un rêve” (after a dream).

Alexander Scriabin was a true nut job, and that is historical fact, not opinion. Even so, his music is pretty amazing, and strongly influenced by his interest in philosophy and theosophy.

This first category of dream music is mostly romantic schlock – but there are some modern pieces that fit here, including George Crumb‘s Dream Sequence, which uses a glass harmonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin, no less!)

Now, the second category of dream-music: wilder, fantastical visions. These works are more likely to challenge our musical expectations a bit, perhaps with sudden changes of harmony or meter, broader dynamic range, and lack that singable melody. Like a wild dream, they don’t go where we expect them to go – sometimes making us dizzy, filling us with a sense of dread, or even frightening us into waking up.

Going right back to Debussy – Reverie might have been a child’s innocent daydream, but his later dreams turn much more erotic. Besides the dreamy harmonies and short, gesture-based melodies, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is based on a poem in which a faun gets aroused by nymphs before falling asleep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzzF21CFJFE

Engelbert Humperdinck might win the award for composer with the funniest name (an old-school Butterscotch Cabbagepatch?) In his most famous opera, Hansel and Gretel, there is a lovely bedtime prayer which is sung, followed by a dream sequence based on the prayer’s hymn-like tune.

Tōru Takemitsu wrote many pieces with “dream” in the title, and most of them paint an impressionistic and atonal dreamscape.

If that was a little too modern for you, the next piece is by the tried-and-true Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. His First Symphony bears the title “Winter Dreams”, and really is more of a typical symphony than a dream-piece, but hey, there must be some dreaming in there somewhere.

Bedřich Smetana wrote a series of solo piano works on dreams. They’re a little more involved than the earlier solo piano works, with a broad range of emotion, which is why I think they belong in the category of wild, fantastical dream music.

Sergei Prokofiev wrote a symphonic poem on dreams – it’s also fairly conservative, but too dramatic to be in the first category.

And of course, no music collection based on dreams would be complete without Hector Berlioz‘s bad opium trip, where he dreams of witches and an orgy around his dead body.

Next up: if you listen to one of these pieces while falling asleep, does it affect your dreams? Happy dreaming!

My newsfeed exploded this week with posts about Ludwig van Beethoven‘s 250 birthday.

trigger warning: If you love Beethoven, be prepared to hate me.
2nd trigger warning: I’m about to mention abortion, but this post has nothing to do with the being pro-life or pro-choice. So for goodness sake, don’t comment on it. If you must send me a hate-comment, do so because I am throwing shade at Beethoven.

There’s a pro-life meme that’s been travelling around for some time – there are variations, but it goes something like this:

“A syphilic mother of eight handicapped children becomes pregnant. Should she have an abortion? If you said yes, you just killed Beethoven!”

Just for the record, this is incorrect. Ludwig was the 2nd born, and the oldest surviving child in his family, and I won’t get into the logic issues of the argument.

So it’s Beethoven’s 250th birthyear. That means that musicians all around the world will be programming MORE Beethoven on their concerts this year. I can’t say I’m particularly excited.

To be clear: I love the music of the great composers of the past. There is a reason that masterpieces stand the test of time – their message is enduring, they are crafted perfectly, or they evoke a sublime reaction. If I didn’t think it was worth keeping these pieces alive, this blog wouldn’t exist.

So here’s my Beefoven with Beethoven. You can hear his symphonies performed live every year – at least the best six of the nine. If you look at orchestra repertoire in general, the composers are overwhelmingly dead. This chart from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra takes into account thousands of concerts and shows living composers represent 12.3% of pieces performed (and I get a sense that the chart is bragging about how high that number is). A rough estimation based on this chart suggests that Beethoven is performed 25% of the time – one composer, getting twice the amount of performances as ALL living composers combined.

Ok, so his music is great. It’s hard to argue against that. But let’s go back to the “would you abort Beethoven” meme. Today, a syphilic mother of eight handicapped children needn’t worry that she might abort the next Beethoven; nobody will perform the child’s music anyway, because they’re too occupied with overplaying the first Beethoven’s music.

Now throw in the concerns that orchestras are failing to attract young or diverse audiences. Living composers are far more likely to bring musical ideas to the stage that would attract new audiences – not only with new sounds and styles, but also by addressing current issues or events. And using living composers would allow orchestras to actually diversify their repertoire and include more women and non-white composers. (go back to the chart from the Baltimore Symphony. A whopping 1.3% of music performed is by women composers. The chart doesn’t even mention race; I’m willing to bet it’s because the percentage of black composers would be even lower than women.)

But no, no, no, let’s not change anything. Let’s play Beethoven’s 5th for the birthday boy for the 5,555,555th time.

Wind is one of those words that can mean different things according to the context in which it is used. Physically, it is the movement of gasses; metaphorically, it can refer to luck (winds of fate), change in society or culture (winds of change), change of (metaphorical or actual) season, the state of being alive (having breath). Wind takes a role in many, if not all, religions. And of course, let us not forget the wind of the butt.

So, how do composers set the idea of wind to music?

We may as well start with some of the stereotypical musical settings of wind – the fast, chromatic passages that rise and fall in Richard Wagner – Overture to Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), the trills and tympani in Gioachino Rossini – Storm Scene from Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), and the spooky violin glissandi in this colorful, fun work by Ferde Grofé – Cloudburst from Grand Canyon Suite.

Franz Schubert – Die Wetterfahne (The Weathervane) from Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how Schubert paints the wind in this song – piano arpeggios and trills practically make you shiver, just like a cold, biting wind. This song is part of the wonderfully depressing song cycle that Schubert wrote as a he approached the end of his short life.

The wind is turning the weathervane on the roof of my sweetheart’s house. Round and round it mocks and teases my sighs and my tears…. For Nature plays with our hearts as the wind plays with the vane.

The wind also plays a part in Schubert’s Erlkönig.

Gustav Mahler – Im diesem Wetter (In this Weather) from Kindentotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). Another happy little composition, here the wind is a nasty thing that kills babies. Mahler’s amazing orchestration makes you feel the stinging raindrops and blowing gales.

In this weather, in this windy storm, I would never have sent the children out. They have been carried off, I wasn’t able to warn them!

César Franck – Les Éolides (The Breezes). This is a sort of tone-poem about Aeolus, the keeper of the winds in the Odyssey, who gifts the winds to help Odysseus find his way home. The piece doesn’t narrate the story like some other tone-poems, but instead paints a picture of the breeze blowing the sea and gently swaying a ship on its journey. The music is so ridiculously French Romantic in its melodic gesture and harmony; it’s easy to see where Debussy and Ravel got their sound. Finally, we need to note that the composer’s full name is César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck, because it takes a good bit of wind to get that name out.

Speaking of Aeolus, there’s an instrument called the Aeolian Harp which is played by – you guess it – the wind. You can listen to one here.There are two piano works related to this ethereal instrument – though neither can be said to really imitate the Aeolian Harp’s sound, they do capture the mystical, magical quality of its music. First, Frédéric Chopin’s Ab-major Etude was subtitled “Aeolian Harp” by his fellow composer, Robert Schumann, because of its quick, wind-like arpeggios.

Henry Cowell – Aeolian Harp. Cowell was known for pushing the boundaries of composition. Ironically, this work is one of his tamest, but it’s still a little different from what you might expect in a classical piano piece. And, unlike Chopin, he himself titled this piece with Aeolus’ name.

Carson Kievman – Hurricane Symphony. You might call this a modern equivalent of the Franck work mentioned earlier. It’s a longer listen, and tells the story of a real storm rather than mythology. Kievman is a living American composer whose current project is an opera about Nikola Tesla. How cool is that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwI9oNJSzAI

Johann Sebastian Bach – Kyrie, Gott Heiliger Geist (Have mercy, God Holy Ghost). This is part of Bach’s third Clavier-Übung, also called the German Organ Mass – much has been written about it, so I won’t discuss it here for the sake of brevity. This piece is a fancy setting of a hymn which pleads for mercy from the Holy Spirit, which, in the bible, first appears to the disciples in a wind. The melody of the hymn (cantus firmus) is found in the bass –  long, slow, deep notes – and as it is an organ piece, these low notes require a lot of wind flowing through organ pipes. As the piece progresses, there are rhythmic motifs that sound like the rushing of wind as well. There is also a sequence which repeats itself seven times (normally, it should be no more than four), climaxing at the highest note on the baroque organ. Bach is definitely thinking deep here.

Olivier Messiaen – Le vent de l’Esprit (The Wind of the Spirit) from Messe de la Pentecôte (Pentecost Mass) Not to be outdone by a German, Messiaen writes his own windy setting of the Holy Spirit for that big bag of hot-air, the organ. At the end, a nice fat chord puts the bellows to the test, as wind rushes through the pipes and into the church.

-= So, I promised some fart music as well. =-

Carl Orff – Ego Sum Abbas from Carmina Burana. The fart in this short little aria (if you can call it that) from this monumentally famous choral work is, sadly, nearly always ignored by conductors and performers. A baritone soloist sings a satirical monologue about being a nasty drunken abbot. But then, at 1:26, there’s a single-note tuba solo, which has no musical relation to the rest of the piece. Why? I’ll tell you why. It’s a fart. The drunken jerk of an abbot farted. And I believe it should be required that the soloist pretend to break wind at this pinnacle moment of this oratorio.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Bei der Hitz im Sommer eß ich. Mozart was a dirty little boy. He wrote a number of canons on butt licking, probably for singing with his mates at the local drinking hole. No, I’m not lying. After his death, his dirty little canons were all published, but with alternative words that were much more acceptable for public performance. The video below, unfortunately, is sung with the alternate “clean” lyrics, but here is is a translation of the original:

In the heat of summer I like to eat roots and spices, also butter and radish; they expel a lovely wind and cool me.