The Fine Art of Listening

Alternate title: GuilloTUNEs

France’s Fourth of July takes place on the fourteenth of July – Bastille Day (or, as the French prefer to call it, the much nicer-sounding La Fête Nationale), the beginning of the French Revolution. Now technically, the real beheading party didn’t begin until a few years later, Still, the guillotine has become the iconic icon of French liberty and justice.

Which is why I bring you this – iconic French composer Hector Berlioz‘s “March to the Scaffold”, the fourth movement of his Symphonie Fanstastique. Written in 1830, after two generations of political turmoil, it is a testament to the hardiness of humanity and our need for beauty in an ugly world. This Symphony is historically important because it fueled the romantic obsession of programmatic music; it also introduced an idea Berlioz called the idée fixe – a musical motif or melody which is attached to a specific thought, person, or idea. Out of the context of the whole symphony, the idée fixe won’t have much meaning when you listen to this single movement. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

Programmatic music is the idea that music can convey a non-musical story or idea. Sometimes programmatic music composers can be cryptic; other times they are very specific. Berlioz is the latter! He provided this awesome, drug-inspired summary of this head-rolling movement:

Convinced that his love is unrequited, the protagonist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

I heard a great anecdote while I was studying at the music conservatory: during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bass player was sharing an elevator at the conservatory with a woman who was completely out of sorts over the impending doom of nuclear war. “What if they bomb us today? What will we do? What will happen to our world?” She went on and on, working herself into a frenzy of hysteria and anxiety. Finally, the bass player looked over at her and said, “Lady, I have to practice,” left the elevator and walked to his practice room.

Some of us are born to be social activists. Some, like me, are not. The last few weeks in the US have become pretty intense. I despise all this ugliness. Everybody is guilty of it. I find myself searching for and needing some beauty to neutralize the poison. I don’t know this cellist, but I know he’s like me. From his facebook post:

“With all the recent stuff that has happened in society, it has really taken a toll on me mentally/emotionally. My heart is hurting and there’s nothing I can really say. So since music is the thing I know best I figured I’d just play. Here’s a bit of Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. “

Barber’s incredibly famous Adagio for Strings has kept his name among the top 20th century American composers. It is originally a movement from his String Quartet; upon hearing it for the first time, he immediately knew he had written a real winner. He arranged it for many different ensembles, but it is best known as a work for string orchestra or chorus (using the text “Agnus Dei“). It was played at the funerals of JFK, FDR, Albert Einstein, and many more, and is used in numerous video games, TV shows, and movies (most memorably, Platoon).

Ah, the sounds of the sea …

Many people are familiar with the visual art of the Impressionist movement – the Monets and Manets. Impressionist Music retains a strong place in the history of Art Music – so much so, that it is now considered a linking era between the romantic and modern eras. As I spend a week’s vacation near the seaside, I continue my oceanic thoughts with one of the most famous Impressionist pieces of all time – Claue Debussy‘s La Mer. The first movement is titled “From Dawn Until Noon on the Sea.”