A Report from the Music Department at Mosul University

An old friend of mine, the head of the Music Department at Mosul University, has agreed to send me the occasional report as his school has been in the news a bit recently.

My dear friend,

Yes, things have been a bit fraught lately, I must admit. Here is a photo I took the other day, from my office looking out on the quadrangle. Standing just outside is a member of the Iraqi Special Forces counterterrorism unit:

Click to enlarge

We hope that things will settle down pretty soon, after all, the Battle of Mosul, which began on Oct. 16, 2016, has already lasted longer than the whole invasion of Iraq in 2003. Let me tell you, it will be a relief to finally be able to get music supplies again! Our stocks of reeds, strings, rosin and valve lubricants have been running dangerously low, though the students, a resourceful bunch, have been coping amazingly well.

Of course the main problem all along has been that the Islamic State folks just don't get what we are doing. That's a bit of an understatement: their actual policy is NO MUSIC and, yes, Death to the West, but that is a side-issue. You people who live in the West have no idea how difficult it is to run a music school based on the Western Classical Tradition when you have to put up with a constant stream of death threats and the occasional suicide bomber. Honestly, sometimes I think that the only appropriate repertoire for our orchestra is the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky because at least it features explosions. Cannon fire, C4, what's the diff? We could pair it on the program with Beethoven's Wellington's Victory.

But it is our ear-training classes that have been suffering the most. For one thing, a lot of our students (and faculty) have significant hearing loss from the shelling and automatic weapons fire. Minor sixth, major sixth? Who can tell the difference? Our professor of counterpoint, on loan from Tel-Aviv University, hasn't been seen in several years. He is either hiding in his office or the victim of an assassination. I don't think it was because of his no plagiarism policy, but you never know.

My personal beef this week is that we haven't had decent bagels in the faculty lounge for breakfast in months. What happened to all the Jewish bakers? And why does all the meat in the Faculty Club have to be halal? Really!

Rest assured, though, we will soldier on (just a metaphor!) and await our final liberation, much like Paris did in August 1944. Though in their case, they merely had to put up with the occasional festival of German music played by the visiting Berlin Philharmonic, while we have to sneak around surreptitiously just to organize a rehearsal of a Haydn string quartet! Let me tell you, those imams have sharp ears--they can hear a V-I cadence even through a brick wall.

I have to close now as I am organizing a welcoming concert for the Peshmerga fighters. Do you happen to know of any good cantatas in Kurdish? And can you email me the score and parts right away?

Yours gratefully,

Ignatz Moskowitz
Dean of Music
University of Mosul

[Yes, this is a satire. I don't actually have a friend at Mosul University and they probably don't even have a Music Department. I was just reading about the capture of Mosul University from ISIS and this popped into my head.]

Catty Micro-reviews: New Edition

From time to time I like to randomly have a look at what is going on outside classical music. A simple way to do this is to go to YouTube and just type in a single letter into the search box and see what comes up. I like to give pithy one-sentence reviews of these videos which are overwhelmingly pop music. Here are some previous installments.

I'm going to start with the letter 'j' (what is this, Sesame Street?). First up is the English singer/songwriter Jessie J:

You know, that's pretty good. Lyrics that are not just perfervid narcissism (you're online, go ahead, look it up, I'll wait...). But I twitch a little at this sentiment:

Seems like everybody's got a price
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first and the truth comes second
Just stop for a minute and smile

But isn't pop music pretty much all about the money? In any case, more power to Jessie J, who is a bit like an English version of Katy Perry.

Next up, 'k', and the artist is K. Michelle:

She comes from the Beyoncé school of cleavage, doesn't she? Setting aside the song itself, which seems absolutely generic except for a piano part stolen from "Chopsicks", the arrangement combined with the video is kind of hilarious. The setting for a lot of the video is K. Michelle playing a grand piano surrounded by a small orchestra, flutes, violins and so on. But all you can actually hear, apart from the singing, is a very prominent drum part, mixed very high! The only other instrument that you can actually distinguish is the piano: all those orchestral instruments are just there to give the video the look of authenticity. Oh, and K. Michelle gets a special award for playing the piano with impossibly long nails. Just for comparison, here is "Chopsticks":

The letter 'l' brings us "L'enfer et moi" by the French singer Amandine Bourgeois:

Bluesy French pop with lots of sultry writhing around in the presence of religious symbols.

Which brings us to 'm' and "I'm Out" by Ciara featuring Nicki Minaj:

I almost didn't put that one up because of the explicit lyrics. I'm not going to quote them, but they leave little to the imagination. The video presents current rap/r & b culture which seems absolutely obsessed with clothes, jewelry (notice the gold accessorized teeth) and sex. The music however is pretty minimal, reduced down to little more than synthesized percussion and a few bass lines. As a metaphor for superficiality it is superb.

Now I think I will stop before it gets boring!

Musical Humor

After several rather heavy theoretical posts, time for some fun. I call this "musical humor" rather than "humor in music" because they are different things. Here is humor in (or perhaps with) music:

Lots of possibilities in making fun of the formality of classical music. Take the Marx Brothers, for example:

But my favorite has always been Victor Borge:

There is a little known piece by John Dowland "for two to play on one lute" that is just as funny. Not for the music itself, but the contortions involved in the performance. Just as the audience settles down to enjoy the music, the players switch parts and more hilarity ensues:

Alas, most performers don't let themselves enjoy the comic aspects of the piece! But I have performed this in public and it can be nearly as funny as the Borge performance of Liszt. And this was written this way! Good set-up line: "hands off my G-string!" How about some more Victor Borge?

It's the incongruity that makes for the humor: famous virtuoso pianist can't get it right, but every backstage blue-collar worker can just toss it off, even wearing gloves. Lots more Borge on YouTube for you to watch.

But we also have musical humor. There are only a few composers really good at musical humor and probably the best is Haydn. Here is a minuet that is so rhythmically twisted that the first rehearsal is likely to be pretty hilarious for the players:

Then there is his famous quartet from op 33 nicknamed "The Joke" because the last movement has multiple false endings, each tempting members of the audience to burst into applause before the piece is actually over:

That almost worked! I think audiences nowadays are so cowed by the tsk-tksers that they live in fear of clapping in the wrong place--even when the composer tempts them. Another composer with a sense of humor--though rather dark at times--was Shostakovich. Here is his setting of "Tea for Two" which he re-named "Tahiti Trot" and orchestrated for his ballet The Golden Age:

Here is a polka from that same ballet, arranged by Shostakovich for string quartet:

Another humorist in music is Beethoven, but I'll save that for another post as it takes a bit more context. But this post was inspired by a post on Norman Lebrecht's blog about a recently discovered letter from Beethoven. The letter was written to a composer named Stockhausen--alas, not Karlheinz, but a Franz Anton Stockhausen, living in Paris. Norman comments, "As usual, Beethoven complains about his health and living conditions. He does not, sadly, offer analysis or criticism of Gruppen." That sounds like good material for another post!