A great deal of baroque keyboard music (suites, partitas, sonatas) is based on dance. In many of his sonatas, however, Scarlatti seems to have found a way to stay clear of dancelike music. The sonata I discuss in this blog, K. 318, is an excellent example. It is in double time and has the nobility of an Allemande, and yet it doesn’t resemble one at all. It is an entirely self-sufficient work that appears to draw its material from the world of improvisation.
What does one of the most slapsticky finales of a Mozart piano concerto have in common with his most anguished ones? For one, both take the form of a theme and variations, an unusual choice for the final movement of a piano concerto. In this blog, I explore some of the other formal similarities between the structures of the two movements, alongside the stark contrast between them.
We are accustomed to highly lyrical and singable slow movements of Mozart piano concertos, like the popularly known Elvira Madigan andante from the C major concerto, K. 467. But every now and then Mozart throws a curve ball at us, as in the andante movement of the G major concerto, K. 453, the subject of this blog, an introspective second movement that separates two fiery ones.
Beethoven’s relatively late piano sonata, no. 27, from 1814, has often been called “Schubertian.” What is it that associates this two-part sonata with the style of Schubert? One possible answer is the strophic meter of the music, which is characteristic of song writing but rarely appears in Beethoven’s later works. Schubert, by contrast, whose “core genre” was the Lieder, naturally imparts strophic rhythm to his music. In Beethoven’s sonata Op. 90, the strophic meter can be heard throughout the work, without the rhythmic irregularities characteristic of Beethoven’s writing. As I show in the blog, this kind of rhythmic writing is rare in Beethoven’s later works, so in this sense, in the Op. 90, he harks back to his earlier music, much of which he had by then disavowed.
Where do Debussy’s “Footprints in the snow” lead? This is the question I try to answer in this blog. Since the title of this prelude provides no clue, we must look for the answer in the music itself. Is the music leading in any particular direction, or is it mostly circling in one place? “Footprints” is at the center of the 12-prelude cycle, so a circular journey does make sense, but so does an understanding of “Footprints” as a transition from one section of the Preludes to the next.
Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica when Mozart was a small child. The instrument was immensely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, and many composers included it in their works. The Adagio by Mozart, which I discuss in this blog, is one of the many pieces written for it. Franklin’s glass harmonica has a range of 37 notes (some three octaves) in the upper range of the piano, and articulation is rather difficult when the sounds are produced by pressing wet fingers against rotating glass bowls. So what can Mozart make out of all these limitations? As it turns out, quite a bit. And rendering the work on the piano raises several intriguing questions.
The fascinating points of intersection and divergence between Debussy and Albéniz are strongly present in two pieces I discuss in this blog: La sérénade interrompue and El Albaicín. The difference I find most glaring is that while Debussy seems to observe the music happen, Albéniz experiences it. This is most poignant in the ending, where Albéniz’s spontaneousness is in stark contrast with Debussy’s calculatedness. While El Albaicín fades away slowly before taking the audience by surprise with a final outburst, La sérénade disappears before we notice it disappearing, leaving the audience surprised by the silence that follows the last figure.
Scarlatti, an exact contemporary of Bach and Handel (all three were born in 1685), spent much of his life in Spain and Portugal, away from the main centers of baroque music in Germany and Italy. In his isolation, he developed his own baroque style, which is often wild and uncouth, by learned standards. Some aspects of the music of Scarlatti do not show up elsewhere until Stravinsky and Bartok. The sonata in G minor, K. 426, which is the subject of this blog, is one of the more tame of his keyboard pieces, but it retains many of Scarlatti’s idiosyncratic rhetorical gestures.
20th century atonal music can be opaque and often fierce. The works of Schönberg and his contemporaries are often impenetrable to the naked ear. This is why Six Little Pieces for Piano are such a pleasant surprise, to performers and listeners alike. Schönberg opens for us the display case of atonal music, and invites us to look inside and examine its inner workings.
A melodic line can have an “implied” harmony, even if no other notes are sounding at the same time, because the melody is constructed in such a way that it strongly “suggests” a harmony that could accompany it. The listener’s ears fill in the missing notes, so that they can “hear” the implied harmony in their mind. In this way, an unaccompanied melody can imply a harmonic accompaniment, that is, the chords that are missing. Implied harmony is common in jazz and in unaccompanied solo pieces for string and wind instruments, for example, in Bach’s cello suites. It is quite rare in pieces written for the keyboard, where there are always plenty of fingers left to play the necessary chords in addition to the melodic line. Bartók’s Unisons is an exception, as I show in this blog.