The Fine Art of Listening

I occasionally play organ music to accompany silent films (and did so at a concert yesterday evening). When I do this, I like to steal borrow melodies from other composers. One of the pieces I used last night was Csárdás – though I admit that I knew nothing about the piece or its composer. (I’ll never forget the first time I heard it, though, under a funny circumstance***).

So here it is: Vittorio Monti‘s only lasting contribution to the Art Music world – but it’s a good one!

*** The funny circumstance: I was teaching at a university, and giving a final exam in Music Theory. The students were silent, hard at work, concentrating deeply. Suddenly, music broke out from the practice room next door – it was a marimba playing the fast section of Csárdás. The music can be a bit silly to begin with, and having it break the solemn silence of an exam made all the students’ heads pop up, eyes wide open – and then we all had a good laugh. I guess you had to be there.

Amy Beach was the first successful female American composer. She remains unsung today, but ironically this has less to do with her sex than it has to do with the year she was born.

Beach was one of the members of the “Boston Six” – Six American composers whose musical success marked a new era for Art Music in the US. After centuries of being considered a backwards musical wasteland, the United States was finally on the Art Music map. So what happened? Why are the Boston Six not household names? Well, their writing was very rooted in the European style (German, specifically), and there is little that is uniquely American about their music. This wasn’t a big deal during the height of their careers; but soon afterwards they became completely overshadowed by two things: Charles Ives and Jazz. Ives became the poster-boy for academic, aloof, cultivated Art Music, while Jazz quickly became the defining American musical idiom.

Back to Amy Beach – her music is truly fantastic; as good, if not even better, than the European masters who get overplayed.

In truth, it’s way more than two floozies.

Cosi Fan Tutte is a comic opera by Mozart, whose plot is fairly conventional as far as late 18th century operas go. A couple of men, being complete pricks, decide to make a wager on the fidelity of their fiancées, and agree to try for a switcheroo. The women, naturally, being wholly brainless and without any morals (please note my heavy tone of sarcasm here), quickly fall in love with the other man and are unfaithful to their husbands-to-be. In the end, the truth of the wager is revealed to the ladies. For some bizarre reason, the women are completely fine with the fact that their fiancés played with their emotions like toys, and that they were traded like a piece of property. Nobody questions the motives of the men, of course, and the newly-formed, swinging couples have a double-wedding. The moral of the story? “All women are like that” – cosi fan tutte.

All of a sudden, an opera about necrophilia doesn’t seem so morally bankrupt. The good news is, you can still enjoy the music of Mozart, and blissfully ignore the stories that late 18th century aristocrats liked to reinforce.