revolution: n. 1a. Orbital motion about a point, especially as distinguished from axial rotation: the planetary revolution around the sun. b. A turning or rotational motion about an axis. c. A single complete cycle of such orbital or axial motion. 2. The overthrow of one government and its replacement with another. 3. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology. (The American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
evolution: n. 1. A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. 2a. The process of developing.
b. Gradual development . . .
word-play: n. 1. Witty or clever verbal exchange; repartee. 2. The act or an instance of such exchange.
I can name that tune in four notes.
In 1964 the comedian and parodist Allen Sherman (1924–1973) performed a concert with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The program included Sherman’s reading of Peter and the Commissar, a parody on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with Cold War overtones (when discussing the effectiveness of an imaginary Politburo, Sherman quipped: “A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.”), and a hilarious orchestral medley, Variations on “How Dry I Am,” which opens with a statement of the original and familiar melody (sol-do-re-mi) and continues with the beginnings of a series of familiar compositions and songs that start with the same four notes, ranging from You are my sunshine to the 1812 Overture. There’s even an inversion moment quoting one of the variations of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.
I think most musicians have had the experience of freely associating a few notes from one melody with another. I know it’s happened to me many times—I’m sitting all dressed up at Symphony Hall surrounded by serious music lovers (and a few old men snoring), when one of those associations hits me—I chuckle and receive my wife’s elbow. And I know I amused the choir at church countless times (at least I thought so) by interrupting a rehearsal to turn a phrase from an anthem by Vaughan Williams into a Rodgers and Hart song. As a budding continuo player while a student at Oberlin, we roared one night in rehearsal turning the second trio from the last movement of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto into “The Lonely Goatherd” from The Sound of Music. You can’t tell me Richard Rodgers never heard Bach.
Word-play is same sort of thing. You hear a word that reminds you of another, swap them in context, and you have a pun—that high form of humor that invites such frequent elbows. It’s a matter of sound association—does that make musicians naturally inclined as punsters (otherwise known as pundits)?
I’ll give you a couple classics for free:
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) was a writer and poet, perhaps best known for her humorous commentary on urban life in America published in The New Yorker. She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, critics, and other literary folk who gathered each day for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel (West 44th Street near Fifth Avenue) from 1919 to about 1929. Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edna Ferber were among other participants. Speaking about the Round Table years later, writer and curmudgeon H. L. Mencken commented, “their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely ‘in the know’ and inordinately trashy.”
One session included a contest—each member was given a word around which to construct a pun. Ms. Parker was given horticulture. Her response, “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”
Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov presented his favorite pun, which involved the story of an old cattle rancher whose offspring inherited the ranch, renamed “The Focus Ranch” as a stipulation of the will. The source of the name—“Where the sun’s rays meet.” Get it—focus, sun’s rays?1
An evolutionary revolution
In the last several days I’ve experienced two artistic revolutions and as I reflected about them, the word evolution joined the fun. I couldn’t find any published etymological connection between the two words, but I can’t avoid the sound association leading to a more meaningful connection—is a revolution a re-evolution? The evolution of musical theater includes several revolutionary moments like Monteverdi’s opera, The Coronation of Poppea (1642), which stands out as a breathtaking and groundbreaking composition with a raft of soloists, a chorus, lots of orchestral music and dancing—a mid-17th-century foreshadowing of the tradition of romantic Grand Opera.
Yesterday we attended a live-by-satellite broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust. The revolutionary brainchild of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006, these performances are broadcast to nearly 800 venues, including movie theaters and concert halls, exponentially expanding the Met’s paying audience. The audiences are treated not only to huge-format excellent-quality broadcasts of the great operas, complete with “see every hair” close-ups so well known from televised sports, but also to backstage tours and interviews that give a great sense of the bustle that goes on behind the scenes. You see grand stage-sweeping shots and intimate close-ups. When the on-stage lovers are embracing, noses five inches apart and singing at the top of their gargantuan voices, one wonders if there is any hearing left when the afternoon is over. (Makes me think of the cheek-flapping films from early G-force experiments.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) created the character of Doctor Faust, a melancholy aging scholar who is contemplating suicide until he hears church bells and an Easter celebration. As he changes his mind, he is approached by Satan (Mephistopheles), who undertakes to win his soul. After several twists and turns, Satan provides Faust with the vision of a lover who ironically kills her mother using Faust’s bottle of poison as a sleep aid, trying to keep the old woman out of the way so she could encounter Faust. In the original Faustian Deal, Dr. Faust signs a pact with the Devil committing his soul to the underworld in return for freeing his lover for ascension into heaven. (After all, it wasn’t her fault that Satan made her fall in love!)
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was a revolutionary composer. His skill and insight as an orchestrator was such that his treatise on orchestration is still used in formal musical educations. He was a pioneer of the use of huge musical forces, on several occasions conducting more than a thousand musicians in performance. Berlioz originally called La Damnation de Faust a “légende dramatique”—as such it has most frequently been performed as an oratorio, only gradually evolving into a recognized part of opera repertoire.
Berlioz’s score is fantastique, contributing to the evolution of the symphonique tone poem, his interest in the form having been piqued by such masterworks as Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. His orchestral technique is far ahead of its time. His sense of the dramatique is unique—the evil villain’s actions oblique, and the outlook for Faust’s soul is blique.
The evolution of stagecraft has been forever changed by electronics. The set for the Met’s production of Faust is a three-tiered skeleton on which the cast of characters carries on, and onto which virtual scenery is projected. The grid changes from a crucifixion scene to a bustling boozy inn to a stately mansion—from a creepy and spooky forest to the underworld and finally to heaven, all controlled by the proverbial flicking of switches. The concept is as revolutionary as the media. And I’ll tell you, watching such a progressive production in a quaint little tin-ceilinged second-story theater in a small town in Maine is surreal. Damnation and ascension complete, we walk out onto Main Street greeted by a wintery wind and the familiar sights and sounds of our little town. Revolution complete.
I think Hector Berlioz, whose imagination stunned the French public in the middle of the 19th century (200 years after the first performance of Coronation of Poppea), would have loved how the Metropolitan Opera, ostensibly but no longer that most stodgy of institutions, would present his music in such an imaginative and revolutionary way.
The other evolution of my week of revolutions was my second visit to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. I have yet to hear the extraordinary, revolutionary Rosales/Glatter-Götz organ in a live performance, but I have now had two opportunities to be with the organ in the company of Manuel Rosales in an otherwise empty hall. The visual design is fanciful enough in photographs, more so when viewing the organ from the hall. But the most fanciful is standing amongst the curved 32-foot Violone pipes that comprise the essence of the unique design. It’s a little like looking in a curvy fun-house mirror—the familiar is lost, and you feel a little disoriented. After all, the façade pipes of most organs sit obediently on an impost above the fray. To get to the “tracker console” of the Disney organ, you walk between a forest of façade pipes. Their toes are on the stage floor around the console—wind coming from who-knows-where through the floor.
Looking at the façade from inside the organ is a little like getting a backstage glimpse at the Met—you can see the clever structure that supports the façade: each pipe is curved, each pipe faces in a different direction, and there’s no apparent order to them that can be derived from musical scales, tuning systems, or chest order, as with virtually every other organ with an architectural presence. So much for obedience. (Notice that I didn’t bother to mention symmetry!)
In one sense this mighty organ represents a logical evolutionary step. In the past couple decades we’ve celebrated the design and construction of quite a few tremendous new concert hall organs. Each one has design features that build on its predecessors. A terrific amount of work has been devoted to understanding how to move enough air through an organ to produce pleasing and musical tones that can take a listener from whisper to volcano. It’s a grand achievement for a pipe organ to “stand up to” a modern symphony orchestra, which is capable of bewildering volumes of sound. To achieve that with modest wind pressures and slider chests is especially impressive.
There’s nothing quite like the bass response of a symphony orchestra. No great conductor is willing to wait a nano-second for a bass note to develop. The bottom notes from the orchestra’s tuba, trombone, contrabassoon, cellos and basses, and timpani are in the listener’s ears right now. Having spent a lifetime working to make organs sound their best, I can remember myriad struggles with bass response. Think of that low note in the Pedal Bourdon that yodels a little around the second partial before it settles on its pitch, or the note in the Contra Bombarde that offers a half-second of pfffff before you hear a note. No way. The organs that play with modern orchestras have to perform with their orchestral neighbors. On the Disney organ it’s possible to draw a dozen or stops at 32- and 16-foot pitch and play staccato notes in the bottom octaves—surreal.
§
On the score of his massive Grande Messe des morts (Requiem), Berlioz notes, “The number [of performers] indicated is only relative. If space permits, the chorus may be doubled or tripled, and the orchestra be proportionally increased. But in the event of an exceptionally large chorus, say 700 to 800 voices, the entire chorus should only be used for the Dies Irae, the Tuba Mirum, and the Lacrymosa, the rest of the movements being restricted to 400 voices.”
The score calls for 4 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 English horns, 4 clarinets, 8 bassoons, 12 horns, 4 cornets and 4 tubas (in the orchestra), 4 brass choirs [Choir 1 to the north: 4 cornets, 4 trombones, 2 tubas; Choir 2 to the east: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones; Choir 3 to the west: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones; Choir 4 to the south: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 4 ophicleides (usually substituted by tubas)], a battery of percussionists, 16 timpani played by 10 timpanists, 2 bass drums, 4 tamtams, 10 pairs of cymbals, 25 first violins, 25 second violins, 20 violas, 20 violoncellos, 18 double basses, 80 women’s voices (divided between sopranos and altos), 60 tenors, 70 basses, and tenor soloist.
Alas, no organ. And he thought it would be a grand performance.
But the nearly equally ambitious (minus the four spatial brass choirs) Te Deum is scored for 4 flutes, 4 oboes (one doubling on cor anglais), 4 clarinets (one doubling on bass clarinet), 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 6 trombones, 2 ophicleides/tubas, timpani, 4 tenor drums, bass drum, cymbals, tenor solo, 2 large 3-part (STB) mixed choirs, 1 large unison children’s choir, strings, and (yes, Virginia) organ.
I’d love to hear that piece performed in Disney Hall. Given available space, they’d probably have to settle for about 300 singers, but that’d do. In the hall’s spectacular acoustics I’m sure I’d be able to hear every “K”, every “T”—and while most vowels would be clear, I’m afraid barely “O’s.” (Sorry, Hector.)
