(continuing the celebration of this blog’s birthday)

If you search for inspirational quotes about music, you will come up with a shitload, er, treasure trove of insipid, er, heartwarming phrases. Joking aside, it is fascinating that our species wastes so much energy on making air molecules vibrate in specific ways – so much so that some people do nothing but make music for a living (depending on your definition of “making a living“).

If cheesy phrases like “music is what feelings sound like” make your eyes roll, then I have good news for you! The great bard himself (Shakespeare) penned a poem about music in The Merchant of Venice. Many composers have set these words, but the most famous is Vaughan-Williams – a Serenade to Music.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,
And draw her home with music.
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
The reason is, your spirits are attentive –
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Music! hark!
It is your music of the house.
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
Silence bestows that virtue on it
How many things by season season’d are
To their right praise and true perfection!
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion
And would not be awak’d. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

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?)

Occasionally I will dream about a new piece of music – when I awake, I desperately try to cling to the notes flying in my head and, in my tired, confused state, write them down before they evaporate forever. Musical dreams are fascinating, and I’m certainly not the only person who has them. Take, for example, composer and violinist Giuseppe Tartini …

Tartini had one of these musical dreams which he describes thus:

In 1713, I dreamed that I sold my soul to the devil. Everything went perfectly – the devil fulfilled any desire I named. I handed him my violin to see if he could play; he began to play a marvelous sonata which had me completely enraptured. Never could I have imagined such beautiful music. I was so moved that I woke up in a cold sweat, and running to my violin, I tried in vain to remember the music I had heard. What I did write down, however, is the best music I have ever written; even so, I would destroy my violin and forsake music forever for a chance to hear the devil’s music once again.

Now, this description was not written by Tartini, but related in a book by his friend, so it is very possible that it is completely made up! Even so, it makes a great story.

Making a deal with the devil is a common theme in literature was well as in music. The sonata Tartini ended up writing down (whether or not he actually composed it) is called the “Devil’s Trill Sonata” – perhaps because the devil was the composer, but more likely because of the devilishly difficult double-stops (playing two violin strings at once) and trills in the work. It’s a classic example of a baroque sonata for solo instrument and basso continuo (fancy word for bass accompaniment, which was provided by cello, bass, harpsichord, organ, theorbo, guitar, or a combination of those instruments.)