The Fourth of Four

In classic 4-line hymnody, the third line is often the place for a tonal change. Pivoting on the fifth (e.g. the G chord in a C-major hymn), and incorporating the fifth of five (D in our example), the hymn flirts with a key change, going up the circle of fifths . (A clear example is Salzburg. In Nicaea, a remarkably thorough key change occurs on line 2.)

The effect of the shift is a certain opening-out, an exuberance and dare I say playfulness, which counterbalances the solemnity of the organ. At least that is what I hear.

Much of modern church music employs the fourth of four in abundance. I need not list examples, I hope.

The fourth of four squishes the sound, making it seem serious in a way I find somewhat deadening. That's what I hear, anyway. The question is, is it something new in music? In sacred music?

Same tune, waaaay different orchestration

Church Music Association of America Colloquium 2009

I've just returned from a terrific musical and liturgical experience, the Church Music Association's annual Colloquium. The Colloquium is an immersion experience in chant and polyphony. Participants are organized ("sorted," in Harry Potter language) into working groups: chant choirs and polyphony choirs. Within a few days, each choir learns a substantial amount of music well enough to sing at Mass.

Here is a page of very well-done sound files to provide hours of listening pleasure. My favorite piece of all is the Gloria from Thursday's Mass, which was actually not sung by a Colloquium group but by a parish choir from St. John Cantius, in Chicago.

"Canon: that's Latin for Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

The other day I scheduled Jesus Shall Reign for a Communion hymn. That's not something I ordinarily do, but it was the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. My choir's greatest strength is SATB harmony: power in every voice, and a certain lovely motion. So at the organist's excellent suggestion, we did this:

1. verse 1: in canon. Men first, women closely following in the second measure. Jesus shall... Jesus shall... It breaks up somewhat in the very last measure, but by then the impact has occurred. It was light and almost fun.
2. organ interlude
3. verse 2: SATB harmony

A nun friend of mine who is by her own admission very tired of this hymn attended the Mass, and she paid us a very high compliment: she said we made it new for her.

Hymn-Playing

Quite a nice post about organ accompaniment of hymns on The New Liturgical Movement by Michael E. Lawrence.

Music Matters

When Casablanca was released in January, 1943, World War II was not at all decided. Stalingrad was aggressively pulling out of its seige, but the city's fate was still at issue. D-Day was a year and a half away. In the face of present danger from mindless, brutal aggression, this powerful musical moment asserted that there was hope, and devotion, and most importantly, freedom.

When we sing hymns, we know that the issue is not yet decided. Our salvation is not fully assured--although it has been promised. We sing in protest, and in hope. And somehow, in our singing, we are fighting the war.

The Historical Significance of the Figured Bass, or, Why We Hear Music in Four-Bar Phrases

"[The figured bass accompaniment] blurs the independence both of the three contrapuntal voices which it theoretically contains and of the chordal or homophonic harmony which it supposedly illustrates. It breaks down the isolation of the voices by integrating them into one line, and of the chords by integrating them into a continuous movement. Linear form is essentially the isolation of the elements of music, and the history of music, until our day, may be seen as a gradual breakdown of all the various isolating forces of the art--contrapuntal independence of voices, homophonic progression, closed and framed forms, and diatonic clarity.

The attack upon the tendency to isolate comes paradoxically from within by means of the isolating forces themselves--just as, in painting, Impressionism went beyond Delacroix in its attempt to avoid isolating the larger forms, and yet its method was a doctrinaire isolation and equalization of each brush stroke. In music, the classical style attacked the horizontal independence of the voices and the vertical independence of the harmony by isolating the phrase and articulating the structure. Late eighteenth-century phrasing is emphaticallyperiodic, and comes in clearly defined groups of three, four, or five measures, generally four. Imposing this new periodic system upon the musical flow and blurring the inner progression of that flow by the new accompaniment figures meant that the linear sense of the classical style was transferred to a higher level, and had to be perceived as the continuity of the whole work, and not as the linear continuity of the individual elements.

The vehicle of the new style was a texture called the sonata."

Charles Rosen

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

U2 - When love comes to town

These are the days when music comes unbidden: the bright metallic ring of the cicadas, the soft roaring of the air conditioner.

When there is this much music in the air, memories come unbidden as well. Among them are musical memories, one of this rockin' joint by U2 and the incomparable BB King.

When love comes to town, I'm gonna jump that train
When love comes to town, I'm gonna catch that flame
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town.
(ooo yeah yeah yeah yeah
ooo yeah yeah yeah yeah)

The Watchmaker, the Precentor, and the Problem of Tuning a Guitar

I've been enjoying the miniseries Longitude, the story of a man who worked for decades to solve the problems of longitudinal navigation at sea. It's a good story, well-told, and it talks about both creative insight and bureaucracy in an effective way.

I thought I'd google the hero of the story, John Harrison, and I was very interested to see that he worked not only in making maritime timepieces, but also in solving the problems of musical tuning. Now in a way this is not too far-fetched: both clock making and music are very mathematical. On the other hand, solving the problems of the ticking of a clock seem more like solving problems of rhythm, but Harrison's concern was in the perennial musical question of the musical intervals.

Apparently there have been recent manuscript discoveries that reveal in Harrison's writings a new way of tuning, which one man, Charles Lucy, has applied to guitars. Here is an introductory essay to what is called "Lucy Tuning" after its pioneering enthusiast and promotor.

The precis of Harrison's manuscript:

Wherein is shown the Absurdity of such imaginary stuff as was first crowded into the Scale of Musick by the Ancients, and has still been retained therein by our more modern Writers, in order to make the matter seem more Reasonable or Philosophical, whenas in reality it is even as hence, or would be as thence, bereaved of all such Ornament, and as, when at the same time, its Foundation or basis as in another Sense tho' secret, is most strictly true or perfect in itself; and therefore, as being otherwise therefrom not only to a much higher degree than what we should think. or have thought to have been Mathematically Beautiful, or even as otherwise so Perfection itself, consequently, it can have nothing to do with any such Arbitrary Conjectures:
And herein are also, very necessary Observations exhibited and as with Instructions about the highest, the most Important, or the most Undeniable life of the Subject.

The Musicianship of the Recording Engineer

"Electric performances are the result of teamwork. Not only the musician but also the engineer contributes to the execution of a musical score. It is hardly necessary to explain why the result of the broadcast or the record rendition depends on the "close harmony" of their performance. The performing musician is somewhat at the mercy of the engineer at the control board. No matter how delicate the touch of the Chopin player or the harmonics of the violinist, a rough handling by the controlling engineer would nullify these effects.

...Heretofore the man at the control board has been too much the mechainc and not enough the musician. A new type of performer, however, is in the making: the musical sound engineer, a technician who will be fully versed in musicl discipline and score reading, whose technical and artistic qualities will supplement those of the musical performer. The ideal sound engineer, as collaborator in interpretation of the score, would rehearse with the performer, note for note, bar for bar. His sound-control machinery would supplement the performance as an accompanist supplements a soloist. In such a case, the performing musician would have the full sympathy and understanding of the accompanying engineer. Thus, electric performance will bring forth a type of performance that will be demoncratic not only in the technical sense but also in its ideology of co-operation. Neither of the two--the musical sound engineer nor the performing musician--can alone reach the ultimate goal."

In 1941, Frederick Dorian wrote these words in his very informative and interesting book, The History of Music in Performance: The Art of Musical Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Day. His prediction turned out to be very true. In 1941 the career of a young recording engineer was just beginning.

His name was Tom Dowd, and his star would rise with that of his employer, Atlantic Records. He pioneered technology, and worked, as Dorian predicted, in musical tandem with the musicans whose work he recorded, from Arethra Franklin to Eric Clapton, Ray Charles and the Allman Brothers. Without restricting the free movement of the artists, he orchestrated their work for the purpose of optimally recording their sound.

Among his many achievements in recording and pioneering and integrating the use of new technology, I find it marvelous that Dowd was the first to record in stereo

In the movie Ray, Tom Dowd was played by Ray Gomez. Dowd died in 2002, shortly before the release of the award-winning documentary on his life's work, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music. Here's a nice tribute page to this remarkable 20th-century musician.

A Great Night to Be a Cantor

The people started off strongly on From All that Dwell Below the Skies, so I thought I'd risk singing the Kyrie in true antiphonal style, simply intoning the Kyrie...Christe...Kyrie and letting the people respond. Didn't quite work on the first Kyrie, but they did fine on the Christe and final Kyrie, so I dropped out.

They were strong throughout. In addition to a complete Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Mysterium, and Agnus Dei), the priest, who loves to chant, led almost all of the dialogues.

The best was the last: "The Mass is ended, go in peace." "Thanks be to God." It was one of those rare congregational sounds: full, a capella, unified, and musical. That's what heaven will be like, I suppose!

The Organist-of-All-Trades

"The objectivist movement in organ performance in this country is most significant, because the United States is definitely a land of organists. Here organ playing outside of church walls is more popular than anywhere else in the world. The baroque "queen of instruments" has for the past generation been serving a useful purpose: it has acquainted music-loving people with the wide scope of nineteenth-century music, at a time when orchestra concerts could be heard in only a few cities, and of course only by those with ability to pay. Here the organist stepped in. In the days prior to records and broadcasts, his playing substituted for orchestral performance. Free recitals promoted knowledge of the literature, forcing the average organist to undergo a metamorphosis from church musician to jack-of-all-trades. Thus it became the organist's task to play not only music written specifically for his instrument, but also, in arrangements, anything in the whole range of music, ecclesiastical or secular, orchestral compositions or vocal scores. It is an open secret that not all organists (among whom are many fine scholars) are wholeheartedly in sympathy with such a practice. But the musical mores of bygone days still compel them to imitate the brass fanfare of the Light Cavalry and the sighing strings of the Liebestod in an effort to emulate as much as possible the multicolors of the orchestra palate."

Frederick Dorian, The History of Music in Performance (Norton)