“Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.” – Mark Twain
If you need proof that the second half of this statement is true, look no further! The overture to Jacques Offenbach‘s first opera, Orpheus in the Underworld, is all the proof you’ll need.
The opera is based on the Greek myth where Orpheus travels to hades to bring back his dead wife (spoiler alert: Orpheus is a dolt and screws the whole thing up). Now, when Mozart drags us to hell, it’s genuinely frightening. When Wagner descends to the underworld, the music is sinister and fiery. But ignore those examples. Take the big journey down with Offenbach, and you get … the CAN CAN!
François Couperin wrote approximately ten bazillion short pieces for harpsichord. Okay, not really; but he wrote enough that if you were to listen to them all in a row, it would take well over 10 hours.***
Most baroque composers gave their keyboard compositions boring titles that merely told you the tempo or what kind of dance they were: titles like “Suite” or “Minuet” or “Allegro.” Couperin gave many of his works names that evoke a scene, mood, or idea – a full 100+ years beforeprogrammatic music became all the rage. And to boot, he actually wrote the book on keyboard playing.
One of his short harpsichord pieces is titled “The Mysterious Barricade.” People have interpreted this title to mean a number of different things: the barricade between life and death; the barricade between past, present, and future; and the barricade that underwear provides.
***If you’re up for that Couperin marathon, start here, with book I, then continue through volume IV. And bring popcorn. A LOT of popcorn.
35 years ago today, MTV was born. The first music video played was, of course, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It’s a good song, and the video is a great collage of old footage. If you don’t know it, it’s worth the 3 minutes it takes to watch:
It’s fun, and typical of 80’s New Wave rock; I like it with or without the accompanying video. Looking (er, listening?) only to the music (IE ignoring the words), it’s upbeat and catchy, repetitive and shallow. Add the words, and there’s more to latch onto – it’s your standard critique of technology, the pros and cons that come with any new innovation. “Video killed the radio star, pictures came and broke your heart.” Is it about how beautiful the music sounds, or how sexy the artist looks?
Art Music has struggled to deal with the recent rapid changes in technology (and I’m talking about since the late 19th century here). The invention of recorded music and radio revolutionized the musical landscape – before, you either had to play music yourself or go to where someone else was making music. Then came video …
But I’ll venture to say that NO, video didn’t kill the radio star. Maybe the radio star had to change to adapt to a video world, but there was no murder here. The Art Music world is no different. With cameras and video technology, we can now see a LIVE opera performance thousands of miles away from the opera house, and see intimately close images of the singers’ faces. It’s quite moving, actually, and a different but equally enjoyable experience from actually sitting in the opera house, seeing the action from afar. It’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing.
Art Music recordings and publicity images have also recently adapted in a somewhat desperate attempt to win the attention of Gen-X and Millenials. Formal photos have been replaced by eye-catching shots that give us a taste of the performers’ personalities.
Here’s a video of Charles Gounod‘s Romeo and Juliet; the composer probably never imagined his audiences would ever experience opera in this way – on a computer, sitting by ourselves, looking at the singer from better-than-a-front-row-seat. Video didn’t kill the radio star – it is making worthy things to become immortal.
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