The most well-known bourrée is the one in E minor from the so-called "Lute Suite No. 1." I say so-called because despite a few recordings, the suite is nearly unplayable on the lute (or the guitar, for that matter) though this movement works very well. I say this because there are some passages in the gigue that no-one even attempts. Nearly every classical guitar student takes on the bourrée at some point, though. It is a charming dance with good examples of counterpoint in contrary motion. It is in two sections, a binary dance form, and the first section is pretty easy. In the second half the student will run into a nasty sequence near the end that will be hard to master.
Here is a perfectly decent performance on guitar:
The piece, with its simple, but distinctive character, has been surprisingly popular among non-classical musicians ranging from Paul McCartney to Jethro Tull.
But the dance was used by many Baroque composers. It is one of a group of dances called "galanterie" that were optional members of the suite and often came in pairs. Here are the pair of bourrées from the Cello Suite No. 3 by Bach:
As you can hear the first bourrée is repeated after the second, giving a ternary form. Here is a bourrée by François Couperin. It is followed by its double or variation.
And here is another bourrée by Bach, this time from an orchestral suite:
Bourrées are also dance steps in ballet, those tiny steps en pointe that seem to glide across the stage. There are examples here at 0:56 and 1:35:
So there you go! Now you know a bit more about the bourrée than you did before. Possibly!
You could make the argument that, up until the 1950s or even 60s, the music of Stravinsky was the most influential on composers and the "language" of music generally. But not all of his music was equally influential. The piece with the greatest impact was certainly the Rite of Spring, which just had its hundredth anniversary, but the two important pieces leading up to the Rite, the Firebird and Petrushka, were also very important in shaping the sound of contemporary music. There were, of course, a multitude of competing visions such as that of Schoenberg, Bartók, Messiaen, Berg, Boulez, Stockhausen and others. There were also composers writing in a pre-Stravinskian mode such as Sibelius, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But, as I say, I think the argument that it was Stravinsky who was at the centre is easily made.
One caveat is that I am not talking about exclusively academic circles or experimental ones, but about musical styles that found a place in concert halls and a mainstream audience.
Stravinsky's influence was really paramount until the minimalists began to have an impact in the 1970s and since then, it is they that have been driving the shaping of musical style. But I think that if we look closely at what Stravinsky was doing on the rhythmic level, we might find some interesting connections between him and the minimalists.
If the aesthetic power of Stravinsky's music were graphed like the chart of a tech stock, it might show a huge leap upwards from 1909 to 1913, then something of a decline thereafter with occasional spikes upward around 1930 (Symphony of Psalms), 1940 (Symphony in C) and 1945 (Symphony in Three Movements). I find much of his neo-classical period to be far weaker than the Russian music that preceded it. Pieces like Pulcinella are, to my ear, relatively trivial compared to the Rite. The career of Stravinsky fits so awkwardly with the modernist template of how careers are supposed to go that it was even problematic for Stravinsky himself who was constantly, with the help of ghostwriters, trying to obscure and rewrite his own history. Richard Taruskin has uncovered numerous examples.
But let's not get too caught up in side-issues as what I really want to focus on is the music. The thing that has got to stand out is that these three great works that shaped so much modern music are ballets. While the ballet genre was a lovely and popular one in the late 19th century, it was probably the furthest from being an advanced or avant-garde one and this was one reason why the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev had such an inordinate impact. Taruskin writes about how the tumult that accompanied the premiere of the Rite in Paris was actually prepared by a publicity campaign, but the Rite of Spring was preceded by two other ballets that were also far outside the usual bounds of the genre. Ballet music in the late 19th century was lyrical, refined and anything but primitive so when Diaghilev put together a stunning collaboration of design and choreography together with advanced and exotic Russian music, he invigorated the whole genre and in turn the course of 20th century music.
Dance music has a long history, going back to the very beginnings of instrumental music. We often forget that as far as written music goes, the voice dominated for hundreds of years. When it came to polyphony and larger forms, the voice ruled. Instrumental music for a long time consisted of short dance pieces with the occasional transcription of vocal music or the accompaniment to vocal music. Often, while instruments were used, they were not even indicated in the score. But underlying all instrumental music, even when it took on the sophistication of the vocal forms, is the energy of the dance.
Let's just remind ourselves of the sound of early dance music. This is a volta, very popular in the Renaissance. I like this version, transcribed for guitar, because it has more punch than a lot of other performances.
What distinguishes this kind of sound from most vocal music is the rhythmic drive and the sparkle of the quick melodic runs. You can dance to it! By the time we get to Bach, the dance forms have gotten a bit more complex, but the basic idea of a strong rhythmic drive is still present in some pieces, like the gigue:
Mozart was very fond of dancing himself and wrote a great deal of dance music such as this one:
More refined than primitive, I think! Beethoven's best "dance" movements are likely his scherzos, a quick movement in 3/4 that came out of the older minuet:
You can't quite imagine yourself dancing to that. As the century wore on, even dance-like music tended to get more and more ponderous except for the elegant Viennese waltz and the somewhat cruder polka:
Before the ballets by Stravinsky the Ballets Russes had a big success with the Polovtsian Dances from an opera by Alexandre Borodin:
That's my very idiosyncratic mini-survey of dance music before Stravinsky. Now, to highlight the impact he made with the Firebird, the first of his pieces for Diaghilev, let's listen to the climax, the Infernal Dance of All Kastchei's Subjects:
Next time we will take a closer look at the Firebird!
One of the most pleasing things about doing this blog is the quality of commentary that it seems to encourage. I have had comments from music critics like Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, composers like Jennifer Higdon of the Curtis Institute and professors of music like Ethan Hein of New York University. And of course, music lovers from many countries. But what is almost universally true is that the debates are courteous and informed. It seems as if the goal is actually to understand music better, not stoke one's own ego. In the over three years of this blog, and thousands of comments, I have only had to remove one (1) comment! Usually I learn a great deal from them!
And this is the case with the last run. Sparked by an article on NewMusicBox by Ethan Hein, we got into a few interesting questions. Many of the comments were put on a very old post titled "The Tyranny of the Backbeat" which I link to so you can go read them. There have been several since I linked yesterday. Others are on the post that got this debate started, titled "Sampling". Go have a look there too. Leave a comment if you wish.
It seems as if there are almost no egocentrics in the world of music. Except for record executives and conductors, of course...
(that was a little joke, sort-of)
I am working on a post on the Emancipation of the Dissonance, but I don't know when I will get to it as right now I am working on a composition.
In the meantime, have a listen to this, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Symphony No. 1:
This being the end of the year the media feel they have to do some summing up. Here are three prominent music critics discussing their choices for best and worst classical music of the year. Interesting to read and it drew my attention to this performance, which Anne Midgette highly praised:
Yes, they really are performing the piece from memory which you almost never see orchestras do. There are good reasons why they don't. But I suspect that this was an experiment that everyone, including the audience, enjoyed. A university orchestra can do things that a professional orchestra cannot. They have certain freedoms that professional orchestras don't have. For example, student orchestras are not paid and do not have the demands of a heavily-scheduled concert season to meet. They can decide to spend a whole month, or a whole term focusing on one piece, memorizing it, learning a choreography and so on. A professional orchestra typically has to learn two hours of music every week. For them, the option of memorizing is simply not available, let alone learning choreography!
Here is a thought: could they do this with a more demanding piece, such as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring? I suspect not. First of all, musicians and dancers tend to think about and feel and express rhythms quite differently. Typically musicians are not good dancers and vice versa. The students in the video above are not professional dancers and the choreography was designed with this in mind. Apart from moving about, walking in stylized ways, lying down and doing a tiny bit of jumping, they really don't execute any difficult dance movements. The Rite of Spring would demand much more and much more aggressive dancing and the shortcomings of those who are primarily musicians would be obvious. Also, I doubt if the ensemble would hold together--the Rite is difficult enough when you have the score in front of you and a conductor beating time. Also, it is one thing to memorize twelve minutes of not very difficult music as opposed to forty minutes of very difficult music.
The reason that orchestras do not typically wander about on stage, playing from memory is that it is all too easy to err. With your part in front of you, sitting beside your fellow violinists or flutists, if you do err, it is easy to get back in sync with your colleagues. In a performance such as the one above, there is no room for error! This is, therefore, something of a tour de force--something you can bring off with a short piece of modest difficulty and unlimited rehearsal time. Imagine trying to do this with three rehearsals!
In a lot of pieces, precision of rhythm and tuning would be greatly hampered by, for example, the horns wandering around far away from one another. There is a reason the horns sit together!
So I suspect that, while interesting and entertaining, this is not the kind of thing that has any chance of catching on with orchestras. There is also an aesthetic problem: the creators of this describe the movement as bringing out the "meaning" of the piece (this is in another video clip of a rehearsal, also available on YouTube). Now of course, this just means that they have tried to find movements that are analogues to the musical ideas. You could do it in a thousand different ways. Music doesn't have 'meaning' in this sense. If we look at the example of pop music over the last twenty years, I think we can see that the more the visual aspect is highlighted, the less interesting the music becomes.
One summer I was studying with a very famous teacher and played for him, in the master-class, my transcription of the First Cello Suite by J. S. Bach. He had a conservative side and since my transcription was in A major rather than in the usual D major, he refused to take it seriously. The next morning at breakfast he apologized for giving me a "song and dance" and asked me to play it again for him. The second time he gave me some good ideas.
This phrase, "song and dance" reminds me of something so fundamental about music that we usually forget it. All music is really based, on the most fundamental level, on either the activity of singing or dancing. In most pieces of instrumental music the two are fused together so closely it is sometimes hard to separate them. But it is an interesting thing to do, nonetheless. This is pure song:
So is this:
This is pure dance:
And so is this:
But much instrumental music fuses the two fundamental ideas, melody and rhythm, together:
I usually try to post about something I know something about, but this one is a bit of a mystery to me. On several occasions I have taught adult beginners who have had considerable background in dance--one was a professional dancer. Now one might expect that they would have a special sensitivity to or head start on rhythm. But it turned out not to be the case. In most cases, the students with dance background turned out to have more problems with rhythm than the average student. Their background in dance turned out to be of no advantage and possibly a disadvantage.
Now why is this? It seems counter-intuitive, after all, rhythm is rhythm whether you are following it with your legs or with your fingers, right? But it seems not. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would be interested to hear them. I would speculate that the way dancers feel and execute rhythms in their bodies is quite different from the way musicians do. I can't quite put my finger on it... Is it that they are moving weight in space while we are placing moments in time? I really have no idea. But it is an interesting mystery.
