The complete idiot's guide to classical music (20 page)

Before you decide to stay home with a good book, reflect on this modern music comment by the composer Samuel Scheidt: “I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times. It is false and wrong, and no longer does anyone pay attention to what our beloved old masters wrote. I hope this worthless modern coinage will fall into disuse, and the new coins will be forged according the fine old stamp and standard.” What makes this quote remarkable is its date: January 16, 1651.

Got a few weeks? Every country has literally dozens (if not hundreds) of instruments unique to its own culture, and there’s no way we can even begin to cover them here. They range from A (a Korean percussion tube) to zeze (an African drum). There’s a bumbo and a bombo, a pang and a pong-pong, a going-going, and a gong. No kidding, you could look them up, only you don’t have to because we already did.

Among the other world instruments you’re more likely to encounter are the Japanese koto, with 13 silk strings; the Indian sitar, popularized by such classical virtuosos as Ravi Shankar, and appropriated for effective pop use by George Harrison of The Beatles in songs such as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “Within You Without You”; the Chinese pipa (more properly spelled p’i p’a), a short-necked lute; and another lute-like instrument from the Middle East called the oud.

Here in the U.S., of course, you far more likely to encounter the banjo, with strings running up a long neck from a kind of tambourine body. African in origin, the banjo (or “banjar,” as Thomas Jefferson called it in his “Notes on Virginia”), soon became part and parcel of the American folk scene, both in its four-string version, beloved of minstrel show and vaudeville entertainers, and the five-string, preferred by Pete Seeger and most other folk song specialists.

The folk guitar (nowadays called acoustic to distinguish it from its electronic cousins) has six strings, although some performers prefer the richer, deeper sounds of the 12-string version. The ukulele (anybody remember Arthur Godfrey?) is a small guitar from Hawaii, and Latin American groups will often feature a large Spanish guitar called the guitarron.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Benjamin Franklin played the guitar, as did Francis Hopkinson, another signer of the Declaration of Independence. The instrument was also popular among the wealthy Virginia planters. “When we returned about Candle-light,” wrote one colonial era diarist, “we found Mrs. Carter in the yard seeing to the Roosting of her Poultry, and the Colonel in the Parlour tuning his Guitar.” In Philadelphia, meanwhile, one Henry Capron advertised that “he instructs ladies and gentlemen in the art of singing and playing on the guitar. His terms are one guinea for eight lessons; at two lessons per week, he engages to perfect any person, possessing a tolerable ear, in the space of six months.”

Classical composers loved the guitar too, and wrote extensively for it. Boccherini combined the guitar with strings in a quintet, Schubert wrote a cantata for male voices and guitar (friends who visited him in the morning would often find him still in bed, “singing newly composed songs to his guitar”), and Weber put guitar accompaniments to 30 of his songs. “I love the guitar for its harmony,” wrote the famous violinist-composer Niccolo Paganini. “It is my constant companion on all my travels.”

In our own century, the much loved Spanish master Andres Segovia sparked a worldwide renaissance of interest in the guitar through his superb transcriptions, his own compelling performing personality, and by inspiring literally dozens of composers to write new solo pieces, chamber works, and concertos for his instrument. Between the amazing flamenco players of Madrid, the country-pickers of Nashville, and the superb classical performers whose tastes and techniques have circled the globe, the guitar has indeed reclaimed its place of high honor in the instrumental scheme of things.

 

• The piano evolved from the harpsichord and its ancestors.
  
 

• New instruments, particularly electronic ones such as the synthesizer, continue to be developed in our times.
  

Chapter 11
 
Musicians Are People, Too: The Makers of Music

 

• Music before the piano
  
 

• Pianist/composers
  
 

• Virtuosos on the rise
  
 

• 20th century legends
  

Those of us who grew up on
Fantasia
or those wonderful old Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny wreaked his havoc in step to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 and other classical favorites, may sometimes think that musicians’ formal “tails” are the kind that come with four legs, floppy ears, and sundry other accessories of the animal kingdom.

Not too surprisingly, though, someone in human form has been putting those sound waves forward—writing the music, playing it, and enshrining it on the CDs we pop into our players without a second thought of the sweat and strain that went into their creation. Before the invention of the gramophone, of course, the only way to encounter music was to hear it live. Or better still, make it yourself, playing the flute, fiddle, or the keyboard that was a staple of so many pre-20th century households.

In any case, despite the halos that have been posthumously awarded to composers, singers, and players of earlier times, these artists were regular people as well as musical masters, beset by the same foibles and fantasies, problems and predicaments, laments and love stories that afflict the rest of us lowly nongenius types. In this chapter and the next, we’ll look beyond the biographical facts and figures to consider the humanity of some of the composers whose music we love, and some of the artists whose performances gave them life.

Although the young Mozart spent many childhood years going around to the courts of Europe, astonishing all with his prodigious skills, and Beethoven’s dramatic temperament first surfaced at his keyboard concerts, the phenomenon of the touring piano virtuoso was largely an invention of the 19th century. There were fabulous keyboard masters before then, of course, but primarily the players were the composers, performing their own pieces since there was no use sitting around waiting for somebody else to do it. As noted in Chapter 10, the early players used clavichord, harpsichord, virginals, or other soft-toned keyboards whose sounds did not project far enough to permit performances in rooms even approaching modern concert hall size. No, these were instruments of palace or parlor, on which Bach could improvise complex works at the harpsichord, or the six-year-old Mozart could wow everybody with his prodigal feats at the fortepiano without feeling that they had to reach the back row of a 2,000-seat auditorium.

The clavichord was smaller and less expensive than its embellished peer, the harpsichord. It was (and still is, if you can find one) a rectangular box with a keyboard that works in a similar fashion to the piano: When you press the keys, a mechanism is activated that strikes the strings with a small blade called a
tangent
. There are no pedals, but the skilled player could achieve gradations of sound and texture.

 
Music Word
In musical (as opposed to mathematical) usage, a
tangent
is a small, flatended metal pin attached to the inner end of a key. When the outer end of the key is pressed, the tangent strikes the string, which produces the sound.

Clavichords were in widespread use by the early-16th century, so had some mechanical mastermind come along to convert the clavichord into the piano, we might have taken a 200 year short-cut. As it was, the harpsichord—where the mechanism plucks the strings instead of striking them—was soon top dog in the keyboard department. Bach, superb clavichordist though he was, wrote many of his most famous keyboard works, including the
Goldberg Variations,
the French and English Suites, and probably the
Well-Tempered Clavier
for the harpsichord, while Domenico Scarlatti, who was born in Naples just seven months after Bach, wrote more than 550 harpsichord sonatas.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
They say that one of Scarlatti’s students brought his dog to a lesson one day, whereupon the composer’s kitten, unused to such alien intrusions, leaped onto the harpsichord as the nearest means of escape. As the kitten hopped around angrily on the keyboard, Scarlatti came rushing delightedly into the room, grabbed some music paper, and copied down the notes the frustrated feline had pushed down. The student had no lesson that day: Scarlatti had to develop the theme into what is now known as “The Cat’s Fugue.” Fact or myth? Who knows. The same story is told about Chopin’s cat, who allegedly gave him an idea for his F Major Waltz, Opus 34 no. 3.

 
Important Things to Know
Although the harpsichord was an important instrument, it came into disfavor because of inherent limitations: Tones could not be sustained on the harpsichord as they could be with the clavichord or piano, nor could the volume be changed by the players’ heavier or lighter pressing of the keys. The bright clarity of the harpsichord made it perfectly suited to baroque polyphony, but once high drama entered the classical picture (“Sturm und Drang,” meaning storm and stress, is what musicologists like to call this stylistic development) it virtually disappeared from the musical horizon. Beethoven could not create his thunder at the harpsichord nor could Beerlioz put one next to his dozen kettledrums.

It was an amazing woman who almost single-handedly brought the harpsichord back to 20th century life. Born in Poland in 1879, Wanda Landowska began her keyboard training, like everybody else, at the piano, studying first at the Warsaw Conservatory and later in Berlin. In Paris, though, she heard and fell in love with the harpsichord, developing a lifelong passion for the instrument that would change the face of music in the 20th century. Her first public harpsichord recital was in Paris in 1903, and for the next 55 years, her superb performances and evangelical fervor would revive public fascination with the harpsichord. In fact, her accomplishments generated renewed excitement about Baroque and early classical music altogether.

 
Music Word
A
cadenza
is a solo vocal or instrumental section interpolated into a longer piece of music, usually to enable the soloist a display of virtuosity. Most concertos have a cadenza just before the end of the first movement, and sometimes the second movement as well.

Landowska showed that playing Bach on the harpsichord could reveal the polyphonic textures of the music with unexpected clarity. She wrote stylistically apt
cadenzas
for several Mozart and Haydn concertos that had come down to us without any by the composers themselves, and she convinced such important composers as Poulenc and Manuel de Falla to write new harpsichord concertos for her. She taught harpsichord in Berlin, established her Ecole de Musique Ancienne near Paris, and when she moved to Connecticut in 1941 to teach, tour, and make recordings until her death in 1959, she profoundly influenced a whole new generation of American musicians.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Musicians are forever arguing over details of ornamentation or other stylistic performing practices. One day Wanda Landowska was having an increasingly heated discussion with another early music specialist. The conversation came to an end when Landowska calmly said “Very well, my dear. You continue to play Bach your way, and I’ll continue to play him his way.”