Beautiful Song Of The Week

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Most of the time, procrastination is a bad thing. But I’d like to suggest that it’s not always a bad thing, and that sometimes it might actually be a good thing.

It all depends on how you procrastinate.

If you adopt the “YouTube rabbit hole” method, you’re doing it wrong. You’ll end up eating Wheat Thins at 3:48am, wondering how you became so interested in cat videos.

But if you procrastinate by doing something that is extremely different from your normal routine, completely unrelated to the task you’re trying to avoid, the results might surprise you. If you go to the library and grab a book at random, or go see a movie that you are absolutely sure you will hate, or eat at that place around the corner that you always pass but never enter…one simple decision to do something out of your ordinary might lead to something good.

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is a good example of this. After a few years of reasonable but not earth-shattering success, he decided to do something different. He broke out of his normal routine. By moving to Italy.

During his self-imposed exile from his homeland, he wrote the two plays that would launch him to worldwide fame; Brand and Peer Gynt. So while I’m not trying to imply that Ibsen was a procrastinator, he certainly knew how use a change in routine to spark his creativity. So perhaps he was an effective procrastinator.

Appropriately, the play Peer Gynt features a main character legendary for his procrastination. It also features a legendary soundtrack by Ibsen’s countryman Edvard Grieg. The soundtrack is filled with songs that even non-classical fans are familiar with (like this one and this one), but my favourite is “The Death Of Ase”.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The slow, climbing chords that open the piece.

2. The same pattern one minute later, but a fifth higher.

3. The same pattern in reverse, creeping downwards chromatically about three minutes in. I don’t know if Grieg meant these sequences to represent Ase’s last breath, or an ascent to heaven, but they’re chill-inducers.

Recommended listening activity:

Something else.

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Polyphony used to be considered offensive.

It’s hard to imagine how two people singing different notes could possibly offend anyone, but there was a time when the Catholic Church decreed that anything other than Gregorian chant, or plainsong, was unsuitable. Pope John XXII had this to say about composers who used harmony:

“These composers…cause great confusion. The great number of notes in their compositions conceals from us the plainchant melody, with its simple well-regulated rises and falls that indicate the character of the church mode. These musicians run without pausing. They intoxicate the ear without satisfying it; they dramatize the text with gestures; and, instead of promoting devotion, they prevent it by creating a sensuous and indecent atmosphere.” (From Teachings of the Holy Father, 1324)

With this in mind, songs like “O Vos Omnes” seem as rebellious as anything London produced during the peak of punk. So put on some ripped jeans, gel your hair into a mohawk, give yourself a “Palestrina 4 Life” tattoo, and enjoy this wonderful piece of polyphony by Tomas Luis De Victoria.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Often, a line begins with a single note, allowing the harmony to grow around it, and accentuating the polyphony.

2. At 1:48, most of the choir drops out, leaving just three voices.

3. It spends so much time avoiding thirds, that when it becomes decisively major or minor, it’s always a surprise.

Recommended listening activity:

Seeing the sign, but walking on the grass anyway.

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Mozart’s death has spawned more theories than probably any other event in the history of music.

Depending on whom you choose to believe, Mozart may have died from poison, a streptococcal infection, kidney stones, rheumatic fever, a subdural hematoma, malpractice on the part of his doctor, or self-medicating an illness that didn’t exist.

But no matter whether you think it was Salieri on the grassy knoll or simply the common cold, you’ve got to think he died too young. At 35, he had survived the transition from child prodigy to fully-grown superstar, and some of his later work is considered by many to be his strongest. His legendary Requiem, which he had barely begun when he died, remains as mysterious as his death. How much of it was finished when he died? Did he write it because he foresaw his own death? Who completed it once he was gone, and which sections did they write?  All these things add to the mystique of what is, by any measure, a beautiful piece of music.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening bars (which may be the only section actually written by Mozart) give the feeling that something ominous is coming. If there was a soundtrack to the grim reaper tip-toeing, this would be it.

2. There’s a quiet, major-key section around 1:40 that’s like a fake-out sequence at the end of a horror movie, when it seems like everything is going to be okay. But by 2:10 we’re back to the minor key, and the grim reaper is back.

3. It ends with a big, wonderful “Amen” that the orchestra holds for as long as it can before the choir runs out of breath.

Recommended listening activity:

Dusting off the Ouija board.

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I would love to tell you that I discovered this piece because I was researching Shostakovich’s life. I would love to say that I was curious about the rumour that some of his music, composed during Stalin’s reign of terror, contained secretly coded anti-government sentiment. Or that I knew that many of Shostakovich’s friends and relatives were imprisoned and killed in the years before he wrote his fifth symphony, and I was wondering if it contained any anti-Stalin messages, so I studied it intensely for months in a University library.

Unfortunately, the real story of how I found out about this piece is far less intellectual: I was browsing a cardboard box filled with records at a garage sale. I saw the soundtrack to a sci-fi movie I’d never heard of and thought it looked cool, so I bought it for $1.50.

The movie, it turned out, was “Rollerball”. I watched it, and it’s awesome in the way that only 1970s sci-fi can be awesome. In the future, apparently, everyone will be dressed entirely in brown and orange, and computers will be small enough to fit in a single room. But at least we’ll listen to good music; Andre Previn did some great arrangements of classical pieces for the soundtrack, including this one. The movie, along with its soundtrack, was released in 1975. (Funnily enough, the year after Shostakovich died.)

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The strings are amazing. They soar and pulse and roll and sing and fade.

2. From the midst of all the soaring and pulsing, the harp and flutes poke their heads out at 3:32.

3. It’s unpredictable, but still melodic. A lot of 20^th-century composers tried to veer away from the conventional patterns of earlier music. I like that Shostakovich’s music does that without being too atonal.

Recommended listening activity:

Watching figure skating with the volume on mute.

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This is one of those pieces of music that everybody knows. If you’ve ever been to a wedding, owned an album of “Relaxation Music”, or watched footage of hot-air balloons, you have heard this song. But no matter how many times you’ve heard it, this one deserves a close listen.

The first time I really listened to this song was in university, while taking a course called, and I’m not joking here, “Listening to Music”. You can imagine how a course with a name like that might appeal to a 20-year-old with a severe allergy to hard work. There was no textbook to purchase, just a set of 6 CDs that contained all the music deemed worthy of analysis. I took home the stack of digitized course material, put on some headphones, sat on my ratty old couch, and listened, skipping straight to Bach.

I remember coming to the conclusion, then and there, that this piece was the most beautiful, most perfect combination of notes ever assembled, and that Bach was the uncontested champion of musical genius. Years later, it’s still a conclusion I find difficult to dispute, and it’s still a piece I love to hear.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s impossible to get it wrong. In 1902, this became the first piece of Bach’s music to ever be recorded, and in the 110 years since, it must have been recorded literally thousands of times…and yet I have never heard a bad recording of it, no matter what the instrumentation, the tempo, or sublte variations in performance. It’s as if the notes won’t let themselves be played badly.

2. The way each phrase slowly builds and subsides, like a boat bobbing on the ocean.

3. The way some notes are held for just a bit longer than expected, creating just the slightest bit of tension between the different instruments.

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining yourself rolling down a mountain of pillows in slow-motion.

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At some point, as the 1800s became the 1900s, the lion’s share of the world’s power, wealth, and culture creation shifted from Europe to North America. It’s impossible to say exactly when this happened, and of course it was probably a series of events rather than a single moment. But for the sake of making a point, I’m going to say that it happened in 1893.

1893 was already promising to be a breakout year for the United States; the Chicago World’s Fair was a showcase for American ingenuity, giving the world the Ferris Wheel, Juicy Fruit gum, Quaker Oats, and some of the first functioning electric lights. Clearly, the 20^th century was shaping up to be a century in which most of the world’s breakthroughs would happen west of the Atlantic.

Providing a soundtrack to this power shift was Antonin Dvorak, who, having moved to the US from Prague, premiered his legendary “New World Symphony” at Carnegie Hall in December of that year.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening chords. Grand, ominous, powerful. For the first 30 seconds of this piece, I like to imagine the sun rising on the horizon, wearing sunglasses and an expression that says, “That’s right. I’m the sun.”

2. The melody. Having opened so grandly, the melody that follows on the clarinet is sweet and gentle. Dvorak was a huge fan of folk music, and much of this symphony was based on African-American spirituals that he heard during his time in the states. He famously (and controversially) said he was “convinced that the future of music in this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies.” The following 100 years of American music would seem to prove him right.

3. The closing chords. Having climbed to a squeaky high note in the final minute, the closing chords are played exclusively on the low strings, and if your spine doesn’t tingle when you hear them, your spine might be missing.

Recommended listening activity:

Going home.

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Along with years of piano lessons, the experience that really fixed music as an important part of my life was being in a choir. It was a church choir, and I enjoyed it immensely, even though I was never really religious (the only time I remember praying was when I lost my brand new baseball glove and declared privately that I was prepared to go to church for the rest of my life if God would be so kind as to let me have it back).

There were no girls in the choir, which made it much less complicated for me, as I couldn’t figure out how to talk and breathe simultaneously in front of girls, much less sing in front of one. There was a nice friendship between the boys; it was a bit like being in Boy Scouts, except that instead of tying knots and building fires, we were singing choral music. (And, occasionally, building fires.)

But the main reason for the men & boys choir is the sound it creates. There’s a purity to the men & boys sound that can’t be produced otherwise, and in no other piece of music is this as evident as it is in Gregorio Allegri’s famous “Miserere”, performed in churches around the world at this time of year.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The chanting. Inserted between each verse, it gives the piece a middle-agey feel, despite the fact that it was written during the Baroque period.

2. The solo. When I was a choirboy, this piece was the Super Bowl of the choir calendar. And if you got the solo, with its incredible top C, you were the MVP. Funnily enough, I’ve heard that the top C wasn’t in the original score, but came into being as a result of a copyist’s error in the 1800s.

3. The harmonies. Although the soprano solo with its top C is exciting, each vocal line is beautiful in its own way. I wouldn’t use “haunting” or “mysterious” to describe many songs, but this one fits. The mystery was, for the first few centuries of the song’s existence, intentional, as the Vatican prohibited copies from being made, on threat of excommunication. The first unauthorized copy, apparently, was made in 1770 by a 14-year-old named Wolfgang Mozart, who heard the piece twice, imprinted it on his memory, and wrote it out later.

Recommended listening activity:

Sitting by a stained-glass window late in the afternoon.

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A lot of people find baroque music to be a bit showy, a bit too fancy for its own good. But you don’t need to be wearing a powdered wig to appreciate this wonderful piece by Johann Rosenmuller.

In the musical history books, Rosenmuller is a overshadowed by Baroque powerhouses Bach and Handel. In his own time, he didn’t fare much better: he held a promising job at a church in Leipzig, but his career was thrown off the rails when he was imprisoned for homosexual activities in 1655. He fled to Italy and didn’t return to his homeland until just before his death. Meanwhile, the promising job he had once held in Leipzig before his imprisonment had been filled by a young man named…Johann Sebastian Bach.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The way the strings creep upwards at the beginning…

2. …and then creep downwards at 1:33. The slow chromatic rise and fall gives the song a lot of emotional weight.

3. After sliding around chromatically for the first three minutes, the chords abruptly begin giving us dramatic pauses and cadences. The last cadence, especially, takes several seconds to resolve, before ending on a heartwarming major chord.

Recommended listening activity:

Breathing on a window, using your finger to write the name of the person you secretly like, and then immediately erasing it.

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One of the best things about the internet is its ability to help you find things you didn’t know you were looking for.

I was thinking that it was about time I added something by Chopin to this list. I figured his famous Prelude in E minor was suitably beautiful, but I didn’t own a recording of it. So off I went to the internet to find a good recording somewhere.  But, as so often happens on the internet, one tangent led to another, and before I knew what had happened, I had forgotten about Frederic Chopin, and was instead reading about someone named Jim Perkins.

Perkins is a British composer who, like many modern musicians, combines classical training with modern technology, bridging the gap between Amadeus and algorithms. His music is fairly experimental, and at times can be a bit glitchy and choppy; if that’s not your thing, it can get difficult to listen to after a while. But in this particular song, I find the choppiness (and the Chopin-ness) to be hypnotic.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The use of stereo. If you can, you should listen to this song on headphones. Recognizable fragments of the original piece pop up here and there, panning from left to right, jumping octaves…it’s like someone took Chopin’s sheet music and made confetti out of it.

2. The not-quite percussion. At 1:30 there’s the faintest hint of a shaker or a tambourine way back in the mix, and because so much of the quick edits hint at 16^th notes, you almost expect the song to break out into full-on rave-style beats. I’m glad it doesn’t.

3. The non-cadence ending. Chopin’s original ends with a grand and ominous minor cadence. But here, after hinting at some kind of resolution for a while, Perkins leaves us hanging.

Recommended listening activity:

Standing under a tree while it sheds its leaves.

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Erik Satie was a tragically romantic figure.

For starters, he lived in Paris in the late 1800s. This was a time when poets roamed free in the streets, the smell of croissants filled the air, and the paint was still drying on the Eiffel Tower. But what makes him more interesting than my possibly flawed understanding of turn-of-the-century France is his tortured love life.

Satie had been solitary most of his life, until his late twenties, when he met Suzanne Valadon. She was an accomplished painter, the first woman ever admitted to the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also quite striking, having modeled for many famous French painters of the day, including Renoir. (And, if you believe some accounts, she may have done more than just pose for Renoir.)

After their first night together, Satie was hopelessly in love with Valadon, and proposed to her. She, however, turned him down, and their initially heated affair lapsed back into friendship. He remained obsessed with her, and for her part, Valadon didn’t do much to cool him down: she moved across the street from him, and even painted his portrait and gave it to him as a gift. (I can almost see it… “Here’s a painting of you that I did. But I think we should just be friends. Okay, well I guess I’ll just go home, right across the street where you can pine over me from afar. See ya!”)

Eventually, she moved away, and Satie drank himself to death, succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver in 1925. He never got over Valadon, and was quoted as saying that her departure left him with “nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness”.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The pianist’s left hand, which alternates between the tonic and the fourth of the scale. I don’t know what it is about that interval, but it gives an immediate sense of relaxation, as if the piano is letting out a tired sigh.

2. It’s just a bit moody. The way the piece begins makes you think it won’t stray very far, but the occasional tangents into the relative minor give it more substance.

3. It ends on an unexpected and slightly unsatisfying half-cadence. If there is such a thing as a half-cadence. It’s a bit frustrating, but once you know Satie’s romantic history, you can forgive him for it.

Recommended listening activity:

Repeatedly writing your name in cursive.