Ernest Alba's Blog

Precious Mozart Tidbits

It's so funny reading about Mozart. Every precious little tidbit of music that people find is carefully analyzed for authenticity and, if found to be authentic, then it is celebrated joyfully because another divine piece of music has been found.

Case in point, after Mozart's death, his sister Nannerl sent three of Mozart's early solo sonatas to a publisher in Leipzig. The publisher never published them and then lost them. Critics in the 20th century moan and groan about these lost pieces. All they have are the opening measures of the first movement of each sonata, and these have been carefully and lovingly added to the official Mozart canon, the Kochel Catalogue.

Another one: Saverio dalla Rosa in 1770 painted a portrait of 14-year old Mozart in front of the piano. On the piano stand next to him is a sonata, so clearly painted that one can make out the first 34 measures of a "Molto Allegro." There's no way to know whether that actually was Mozart's work or someone else's work or just the imagination of the painter, as it isn't a part of any surviving music. However, musicologists transcribed the notes in that painting and those 34 bars are now in the Kochel Catalogue. Imagine! 34 bars...that's about a minute of music, and everyone jumped at the chance to hear more Mozart.

Source: Zaslaw, Neal. The Compleat Mozart: A Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. W.W. Norton & Co. New York, NY. 1990.

Pyramids, Spheres, and Daughters of Elysium

If there is one thing that makes life worth living, it's music. It feeds our need for catharsis in a way that no other temporal event can. And that is what music is - it is an event as much as it is a physical thing. Whether it's a concert, a morning jog, or a commute to work, the music experience is one that we inevitably feel compelled to re-experience, time and again. But what is it about music that compels us? How does it satisfy us the way it does?

To illuminate the issue, we must first ask a more basic question: what is music? The most basic definition is that music is the organization of sound and the absence thereof. From that genesis arises a veritable cornucopia of topics for discussion like musical structure, texture, and quality. To many of us, it may come as a surprise that these topics aren't reserved for discussion in a high school music class. These are matters of serious discourse in a field of research that has existed for centuries. We often like to think of music as being a strictly personal, practically ineffable experience, but that is far from the truth. The ways in which the organization of sounds can create pleasure and emotion in the human mind is at the heart of music theory.

Composers study music theory in order to learn the techniques that create these emotional effects on the mind. Music theory has been significantly studied, documented, and expanded by people like the 6th century philosopher Boethius, Guido of Arezzo, an Italian monk who invented staff notation in the 10th century AD, and the Renaissance music theorist Franchinus Gaffurius. Today, musicology encompasses all aspects of music, from its internal elements to its external history and its groundings in physics (e.g. frequencies, pitch) and mathematics (e.g. time signature). However, its application in society is somewhat nebulous because, increasingly, musical taste is deteriorating. You would be hard pressed to find a person who even knows the difference between a song and a tune, much less a person who can critique a song or a tune using musical terminology. To the vast majority of people who harbor such apathy towards learned music, music as science doesn't exist.

The more I read about music theory and music history, the more I feel sorrow for the loss of this science and distress for what has replaced it. Music has become fodder for pigs. We consume music the way we would consume McDonald's Big Macs - cheaply and in mass quantities. Because of the cheapening of music, it, like food, has steadily decreased in value and quality over the decades. How else do you describe Ashley Tisdale or James Blunt? The inane repetitiveness of rock? Where has all the passion for learned, intelligent music gone?

One could say that this passion hasn't been lost. That it still lives, in fact, in a much wider array of musical styles. After all, with the globalization of cultures, have we not expanded our musical tastes, and will they not inevitably continue to expand? Quite the opposite. The only music that has truly expanded is American and Western music. More than that, though, the only music that has flourished is the shallowest of American music - music created to appeal on the broadest level possible. Thus, music is divided up into little four-minute packages, hardly enough breathing room to present and explore musical ideas. Then, it's marketed as sexy, fresh, NEW! when really it's the same slop they've been feeding us, only with a different color package and instead of pushing the xylophone button on the keyboard, they pressed the French horn button. I wonder what would happen if someone tried to market an hour long piece of music. Or, wait a minute, does anyone even know how to write an hour long piece of music?

Artists today even have trouble presenting an idea, which is why they use the cookie-cutter mold of AABA form ad nauseam. It is also the primary reason for producers. Producers are generally classically-trained composers whose job it is to harness the "creativity" of the artists and organize their ideas into musically coherent pieces. Their jobs include writing the instrumental accompaniments to the lyrical tune. The most famous example is the fifth Beatle, George Martin, who, as the Beatles' producer scored and arranged practically all of the Beatles' music. The process is actually rather embarrassing. McCartney might hum a tune, and George Martin would write it down and arrange the instrumental accompaniments to the lyric or have the horn/sax/flute/ player write them. The Beatles' music is immortal as much because of the way in which it was arranged as because of the melody itself. Without proper structure, a melody is rendered useless. It has no vehicle for expressing itself.

Structure is paramount to musical creation and is an indelible part of the creative process. Mozart could write perfectly worded contredanses that lasted less than a minute, yet were much more eloquent and interesting than the best songs written today. Why? He knew music theory intimately and could create musical structures that expressed emotions beautifully and succinctly. He knew how to captivate an audiences' minds and hearts in marvelous flights of fancy and explosions of creativity, all within the briefest spans of time. At the same time, he could write huge, powerful, masterful symphonies that lasted half an hour.

All of this talk about structure may seem tangential to the query I posed initially: how and why does music "do it" for us? How does it fulfill the need to identify, to recall, and to celebrate our humanity? The answer, I believe, lies exactly in the issues I raised. The structure of music, more so than the sounds of music, beckons us, calls to us, entrances us with its beauty and sublimity. We, as humans, are fascinated and moved by works of structural ingenuity. Be they the pyramids at Giza, Dante's The Divine Comedy, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, works of structural brilliance and profundity strike a chord (no pun intended) in our body, mind, and soul. The fact that the structure of modern music is appallingly simplistic worries me.

In case you feel so inclined, below are 4 short (3 are less than one minute each, the 4th less than two) but truly great musical works worth hearing.

I spoke of the beauty of Mozart's contredanses. Well, time to put up. Here are three of literally dozens that he wrote.

http://web.mit.edu/ealba/Public/k509_2.mp3
http://web.mit.edu/ealba/Public/k509_1.mp3
http://web.mit.edu/ealba/Public/k509_3.mp3

I'll also include a much older piece from the middle Renaissance era in the late 1400's. It's a very solemn, but awesome piece because of the way in which he interweaves the melodies. This interweaving is called polyphony, which I've discussed before, and the composer, Josquin des Prez was the preeminent composer of polyphonic music during the Renaissance. Except for modern classical music and musical theater, polyphony is rarely used today, in large part because of the difficulty of mastering the technique.

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/jorbis/JOrbisPlayer.php?path=Josquin+Des+Prez-Tu+Pauperum+Refugium.ogg&wiki=en

Bibliography:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9033282/Eusebius-Of-Caesarea
http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory35.htm
http://www.ipl.org/div/mushist/clas/mozart.htm
http://beatlesnumber9.com/martininterview1971.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josquin_des_Prez
http://www.angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/boethius.html

Spring Break Paris - Part 03: Slightly More In-Depth Iceland

To a part of the world that exists on the fringes of civilization, nature is the undisputed master and its alternating beauty and savagery set the tone for the people's way of life. Nothing makes this more evident than the way in which Iceland presents itself to the community of internationals that fly aboard its only international airline, IcelandAir. I had the chance to read the in-flight magazine, and I became so absorbed in it that I read it from front to back. I came away deeply impressed and intrigued by the tiny nation of Iceland. So impressed, in fact, that I took the magazine and scanned some images from it in order to better illustrate the impressions I got of Iceland.

Iceland is a small island and sovereign nation in the Atlantic Ocean. 75% of its 300,000 inhabitants live in the capital city of Reykjavik. Because of its size, it provides a fascinating look into large-scale politics at a local level. It has a parliament called Ajnarok, which is the oldest in Western civilization. Betcha didn't know that.

For the country of Iceland, which rests on the fringes of the Arctic, global warming is a major issue. They plead with international travelers that pass through their airports for help:

They use natural hot water for heating to avoid polluting. They make products specifically to deal with the effects of global warming and they emphasize energy efficiency in regular consumer products:

Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, president of Iceland, has offered Iceland to the international community as a case study for the effects of global warming. To a country whose glaciers, snows, and natural beauty are its national treasures, global warming has already begun to erode the structures of Icelandic identity.

Spring Break Paris - Part 02: Iceland and the Eiffel Tower

I'll do a more in-depth post on Iceland later, but for this post, I'll mainly post pictures (most taken brilliantly by Jose).

This is the airport in Iceland. As you can tell, it's nice and surprisingly big for a country with a population the size of Waco, TX.

"All trains go to Paris" - I think we're in the right place.

On the train into the city.

Looking out of the hotel room onto Republique, our city square.

Our insanely tiny, but comfortable hotel room.

Our even more insanely tiny bathroom.

Our First Tourist Site: Notre Dame
We came back for Mass on Sunday as photographed in the third picture.

The famed university, La Sorbonne. Unfortunately, we didn't get sweatshirts.

Hotel des Invalides still houses wounded soldiers. From what war that France has been in since WWII? Got me.

In front of Napoleon's tomb, Hugo can't give back massages.

Though Napoleon wanted his ashes buried on the banks of the Seine, his ashes were instead transported to this monumental tomb and now "supposedly" reside in several coffins within one gigantic one.

A noble hero, he could have been. Instead, Napoleon chose to make himself, well, an emperor.

Finally, the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower can appear in so many different ways to so many different people. The people in Paris walked by as if nothing. We couldn't stop beholding its staggering beauty and enormity. But from some angles, you really can consider it less than extraordinary, or simply part of the landscape. For example, we saw it from afar and it looked normal. Not staggering, simply iconic. As normal as any part of Paris that separates it from the rest of the world. We also saw it peeking behind a normal building. It looked like a tiny version of itself. Something you might even find in someone's backyard. But finally, we saw it the way it probably was meant to be viewed. A formidable monster of puddled iron, it towers over the land around it. Truly, an amazing structure.

Some personal pics:

And, as a postscript, I've included this picture of a street I was excited to find.

Spring Break Paris - Part 01: Renaud

Okay, this MIT blogging service is so pathetic, that for all I try, I can't embed videos. So, for the first installment of the Spring Break trip to Paris, I will redirect you to my hardly used before, but now indispensable Google Blogs site.

Please follow the link ---> http://eialba.blogspot.com