The Fine Art of Listening

If you think about it, writing (musical or text) is just the older way to record sound. To preserve an image through eternity, you paint a picture. To preserve a sound for eternity, you have to use a code which tells you how to recreate the sound in the present – whether that code is phonetics, hieroglyphs, or notes on a staff. If a human isn’t recreating the sound (out loud or in the mind), the writing is just visual patterns.

As history progressed, music notation became more and more complex, giving composers complete control over the music they wanted to preserve or create. More and more musical terms and symbols made their way into scores from the 18th to the 19th centuries. By the 20th century, scores were expected to be precise down to the most miniscule subtlety. If it wasn’t written down, the performer didn’t do it. There also opened up fields of musical scholarship that studied the older scores and tried to detoxify them of modern performance practices. For example – if Bach wrote a little squiggly line above a note (called an ornament), what exactly did that mean? play an extra note below the printed pitch? two? or above? above and below? fast or slow? etc. etc. etc.

This is similar to a lead sheet – sheet music regularly used by jazz, pop, and rock musicians. It displays the melody of the piece with chords labeled above the melody. It allows the performers a good deal of freedom – they can choose which instruments to use, what sort of beat to play, and how the accompaniment will work. Take “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, which is famous in two versions – the original and the ukulele. So, if you have a lead sheet to “Bad Romance“, you could perform it as a polka if you really wanted to (why has nobody done that yet?)

All Souls’ Day marks the end of Allhallowtide, the second of two Christian celebrations related to Halloween (the first being yesterday, All Saints’ Day.)

All Souls’ is a celebration that commemorates the dead. Not surprisingly, there are loads of great pieces linked with death – our own or that of a loved one. One of my favorites is “Bring Us, O Lord God”, a setting of a prayer for a peaceful death by the poet and priest John Donne, composed by the English cathedral musician William H. Harris.

What’s the best way to get your kids to be obedient? Lie to them, of course! Tell them frightening tales of monsters who will get them if they don’t do what they are told. So, when you read fairy tales or nursery rhymes to your children, be sure you are reading the REAL ones – not the updated happy-lovey versions. You know, the one where Rumpelstiltskin rips himself in half, or Hansel & Gretel cook the witch, or the evil scissor-guy cuts off the thumbs of the thumb-sucker.

Shortly after the Brothers Grimm published their collected stories (in German), a guy named Erben published similar set of fairy-tale poems in Czech. Antonín Dvořák, being a nationalistic composer of the Czech people, composed music after the poetry. “The Noonday Witch” is a tone poem in which the story is clearly laid out by the music:

A mother scolds her baby for making so much noise; she complains about what a nuisance he is. She threatens to call the “noon witch” to come and take him away if he doesn’t do as she asks. Whether or not the witch comes is up to interpretation – but either way, the mother becomes frightened that the witch has arrived and is about to steal her child. She clutches the child close to her breast, and faints. When the woman’s husband arrives home, he finds his wife passed out on the floor, and his child dead in her arms – suffocated by the mother’s hold.