One of the fun things for me about playing Hovhaness' 12 Armenian Folk Songs, which I introduced in my last missive, is that the scales and rhythms are out of the ordinary for me. So, along with sharing a few more of my (very non-professional) renditions, I'd like to give a bit of info now on what is going on with these scales. A later post will address the meters.

Eight of these twelve songs are in Dorian mode. Take number 1 as an example.
Armenian Folk Songs #1

The most common scales (or modes) in Western classical and folk music for the last few hundred years have been the Major (Happy Birthday To You) and the Minor. (Blues and Jazz are a whole 'nother story.)

But Dorian mode is not uncommon, even in European and American folk music (e.g., Yankee Doodle). To understand why that is so, suppose you had an instrument that could only play a diatonic scale (like the white notes on a piano) over the following range:
BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D

The dashes represent the black notes on the piano, which you don't have on this instrument. The dashes also show that the distance (frequency ratio) between D and E is larger than the distance between E and F. This is an imaginary instrument, but there are real instruments (simple flutes or harps) with similar restrictions.

If you want to play a piece in Major you've got two full octaves to work with.
BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D

If you want to play a piece in Minor, you can use A Minor, but you are limited to one octave with some bits and pieces above and below.
BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D

Minor sounds different from Major because the distances between the notes are different. Most importantly, the distance from the first note to the third note is 5 semitones for Major (C—D—E) and only 4 semitones for Minor (A—BC—). Why this smaller distance makes the Minor sound sadder than Major is a complete mystery to me, but most people agree that it does.

If you want to play a song with that sad, Minor sound, you get a lot more room if you switch to Dorian mode. In fact, you get two full octaves.
BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D—EF—G—A—BC—D
Note that the spacing of notes is pretty similar to Minor. The distance between the first and third note is identical; only the distance between the first and the relatively-unimportant sixth note is different:

1—2—34—5—6—78 (Major)
1—23—4—56—7—8 (Minor)
1—23—4—5—67—8 (Dorian)

Enough theory. Here's another piece in Dorian mode.
Armenian Folk Songs #2

Now, if you have an instrument like the piano, with access to all 12 semitones (the black and the white keys), there is no reason you have to play Dorian mode starting on the key D. Both of the pieces 1 and 2 above use the Dorian mode starting on A, which looks like this on the piano:


Piece number 7 also uses Dorian mode, but starting on G:


They look very different on the piano keyboard, as well as in Western notation, but they sound very similar:
Armenian Folk Songs #7

I can not simply look at or listen to a piece and immediately know what scale or mode it is in. I often have to do a bit of research. The piece that gave me the most trouble was number 12. It is interesting both for the scale and the meter. I'll talk about the meter later, but for now just consider the scale: "E F G# A B C# D E".


I had to do lots of digging-around on the web last week to find out what scale this is. It turns out to be the "Harmonic minor inverse", which I'd never heard of. That is the Western name, but I'm sure it is called something different in Armenian folk music. In Arabic music, this appears to be called Maqam Zanjaran (Zankulah), and in neighboring Turkey it seems to be Makam Hicaz (video musical example). Of course Turks and Armenians don't really get along.

So here is number 12. Notice how very unusual the scale sounds to a Westerner.
Armenian Folk Songs #12
For me, this is a fascinating sound. Hope you enjoy it, too.

Since I did my digging last week, a new toy has become available called Wolfram Alpha. With it, my search for scale names could have gone a lot faster. All I would have had to do is type in "e f g# a b c# d e" and it would spit-out the answer "E Harmonic minor inverse scale", along with pictures and a button to let you listen to an example.


In summary:

• 1-2 are in Dorian on A;
  
• 3-5 are in Dorian on C;
  
• 6 is in Mixolydian on A;
  
• 7-9 are in Dorian on G;
  
• 10 is in Phrygian on D;
  
• 11 is in Full Minor on F;
  
• 12 is Harmonic Minor Inverse on E.

(PS: The copyright issues around Happy Birthday To You are both fascinating and disturbing, so be sure to follow that link.)

Cinco de Mayo

It's "Cinco de Mayo" today. In honor of this special occasion, I thought I'd offer you a few Armenian folk songs.

Armenia is in South America, right?

#3 

These pieces are by the very prolific Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness, from his collection 12 Armenian Folk Songs (Opus 43).

#5 

While this is among the easiest of his piano works, it does offer some challenges to me. Unusual scales and meters, for instance. I have no doubt I've totally botched some of these.

#8 

Nonetheless, I've had great fun learning these. I'm sorry I neglected Hovhaness for so long!

#11 

The rest of the collection is coming soon, along with some commentary. But I really need to go watch American Idol now!

5/4

It's the fifth day of the fourth month. What better time is there to celebrate songs in 5/4 ?

About a year ago, when I was 100% determined that I was quitting my job, the song of the moment for me was When Your Minds's Made Up, from the movie Once.

When Your Mind's Made Up.

(My mind truly was made up. Why I didn't actually quit is another story, but at this moment I'm glad I didn't, because things got better there and got worse elsewhere.)

That song plays a central part in the movie, and we get to see it built up bit by bit through a long recording session. Though the 5/4 signature is rare, and has a reputation for sounding odd, when it is done well it can sound just as natural as 3/4.

Since it is a rare meter, it is rarely done well, especially by non-professionals. To prove that point, here is me doing Serenade by Emma Lou Diemer. (MP3)
I don't know much of her work, but the piano scores I've looked at look right up my alley, but mostly too hard for me. Very rhythmically interesting, with what appears to be an influence from Khachaturian.

The first piece I ever learned in 5/4 was In Mixolydian Mode from Bartok's collection Mikrokosmos. I had a hard time learning this one. For a long time I thought that was because it was in 5/4. I understand now that it was really hard because Bartok was making it hard on purpose. Though it starts out with a strong 5/4 feeling, very soon he starts playing with the stress, hiding the downbeats and subverting the rhythm so much that it is very hard to keep the feeling of 5. This is one of the very rare times I recorded with a metronome. (MP3)

If that doesn't sound good to you, you are not alone. I think Mr. B was thinking more of challenging the piano student more than making something that sounds good.

A few more famous examples of 5/4 actually done well are, of course, Take 5 and the theme to Mission Impossible.

Less well known, but good, are:
Science, by Sevish.

English Roundabout - XTC

River Man - Nick Drake

All I can say is, I'm glad this isn't the 7th day of the 8th month, because it will be a good while before I can play Hovhaness' Macedonian Mountain Dance at the right speed!

Compuers Scare Me: part 2

I got an e-mail from e-music this morning asking me to check-out the new album by he group 0.43888888888889. What? It turns out the group is actually called 10:32 (don't ask me why) but the computer has interpreted the number wrong.

This sort of thing happens all the time with computers and it freaks me out. They control so much of our lives.

Even at this very moment my screen is blinking in and out.

Let us clear our heads with some music from a simpler era. Here is the B minor Prelude of Chopin.

Complaints

I knew it would happen sooner or later. Obama has disappointed me. At least it happened later that I thought. He sure lasted longer than Clinton, who disappointed me almost from his first day.

Despite claims that he wants to make government more open, he is refusing to release details of negotiations on an insane copyright law extension by claiming that to do so would endanger national security! Even if the proposed treaty made sense, and it doesn't, the appeal to national security is ludicrous.

Copyright is a useful concept, but it gets ridiculous at times. People who had no part in the creation of a work can fight for years over who can get paid for its use. Relatives of a deceased celebrity get to say who can or can not perform one of his pieces or can stick his name on a can of spray cheese, as may soon happen to Bob Marley. While at the same time living celebrities can do next to nothing to stop their image being plastered all over the place, and products like "Obama Fingers" can be legally sold. (I'm not sure why there were never any "Bush Nuggets" or "Clinton Balls".)

Now, for no particular reason, here is me playing "A Doll's Complaints", by César Franck. IMSLP claims it is in the public domain, if there still is such a thing.

Repetitive Stress

This is a long post. Your listening assignment for today, Metamorphosis 4, is also pretty long. So you may as well download the mp3 now and listen while you read.

I'm all excited because Monday I finally get to hear Philip Glass' Music in 12 Parts played live.

This is a massive work. The concert will last 5 hours, including a one-hour dinner break. I was a little nervous about buying a ticket and committing myself to sit in a chair that long. I've never even listened to the whole thing at home. In the end, I couldn't pass up the only chance I'll likely ever have to hear a complete, live performance. Though written in the early 70's, this is one of the few times it has ever been performed in its entirety, and the first on the West Coast.

The effect of his early music, whether Glass likes to admit it or not, is to put the listener into a trance. It can be sheer bliss for those who enjoy it, or a maddening hell for those who don't.

Up to this point, his music really was "Minimalist", though that was never the point for him. Yes, he had removed lots of things that we had come to expect, like melody, harmonic tension and release, and big emotive gestures. But the point was never what was taken away, but what was added in rhythmic complexity, with simultaneous meters as well as abrupt sequential changes in meter and rhythm. Melodic motifs were very short, but would gradually add and remove notes, disrupting our expectations of a smooth pulse.

This piece was a comprehensive index of all those rhythmic techniques created up till that time. For ever after, he has been gradually adding back all those things (except serialism!) that were thrown away before, beginning with harmony in Another Look at Harmony. His recent film scores seem conventional enough that most film-goers hardly notice them. I've overheard lovers of more conventional opera surprised by the "normalness" and "hummability" of Appomatox. The CD Songs and Poems for Solo Cello has won rave reviews for its overt romanticism, while also being compared to Bach.

I've often heard fans of "old" Glass music lamenting the changes and complaining that he has gone too conventional. Not so! Other composers have incorporated some of his ideas, as well as ideas from Reich, Riley, Adams, and others who once wrote mimimalist music, so that such music now is pretty conventional. But nothing has been lost in Glass' music. Everything good in 12 Parts is still there today. But so much more has been added, and the changes come faster and faster.

Performing such a work presents many challenges. There is a great deal of repetition, so it is easy to get lost and forget what you have or haven't played yet. Parts are very fast and relentless, with no stops for breath for the soprano or winds and no rests for the keyboards either.

Back in the 90's, when I was at university, I got a copy of the music for Metamorphosis for piano. Even though this is not one of my favorite Glass compositions, not by a long shot, it was one of the few for solo piano, so it was all I had to work with. I played it over and over and over, trying to get it right.

I was also playing lots of Hanon exercises at that time, as well as some other highly difficult music. The end result was, I very much damaged my hands. I'm not sure whether it was simple repetitive stress injury, or the onset of focal dystonia. But I would get pains in my wrists, and my fingers would simply refuse to obey my commands.

So it was probably a good thing that when I moved to California, I had to give up my piano. (I still found one to practice on; just not as often.) I eventually bought a digital piano, but by then I'd learned my lesson. I listen to my hands when they tell me they can't take any more, and I stay the hell away from Hanon. Plus, after a year of jazz piano lessons, I'm much better at seeing notes as parts of chords, rather than just as individual notes, and that reduces the stress on my brain in those fast bits.

A few weeks ago, I started playing Metamorphosis 4 in the morning. Through some miracle, I actually made it through the whole thing with no significant mistakes, except some accidentally skipped repetitions near the 10 minute mark. Because of my experience with injuring my hands before, I will not attempt it again trying for perfection. This will have to stand as my last word on this piece for some time.

In fact, I shortened the piece for the web to about 7 minutes, so you won't even get to hear the part where I skipped a bit, not that you would likely notice it anyway. Even so, this is almost at the file size limit that my host will accept!

Enjoy!

If you want the effect of the full piece, you can play it twice in a row! The full version has the form xAyBxAyBxAx, which I shortened to xAyBxAx.

Parts x and A are nominally in 4/4, while y an B are in 3/4. I think a certain ambiguity is part of the point of this piece, so I intentionally do not emphasize the first note of each measure. As there are distracting other rhythms going on, you won't likely notice that change from 4 to 3 explicitly. But you will notice that the center section seems much faster than the rest, though the pulse is constant throughout.

Although this piece takes 7 pages in normal notation, I was able to compress it comfortably onto two hand-written pages, though I use some unconventional notation. (See image). When I first realized that was possible, I was dismayed to find there is seemingly so little there. But there must be something there, since I'm still enjoying playing 15 years later!

A little night music

We now consider the curious Nocturne of Benjamin Button. I mean Benjamin Britten. I always get those confused! But so, apparently, does Susan Sarandon.

Here is my performance (mp3) of the Nocturne from Britten's Sonatina Romantica.

Britten apparently rejected this composition. But, it isn't so bad. It is odd in parts, and seems too load and fast for a Nocturne, but it sure looks pretty as a piano roll.

Candlefire

Next up for your enjoyment, my recording of Candlefire by Michael Nyman.

Yes, it is supposed to be that slow! Slower, actually. It should be one beat per second, but I like it a bit faster. With many Nyman pieces, I have to be very careful to go slow enough at the beginning because he will often double the tempo once or twice before the end. Not this time, though, so I can speed it up a bit.

Nyman is most well-known for his scores for the films of Peter Greenaway, but they had a falling-out. This song was written for a Japanese anime version of the Diary of Anne Frank, called Anne no Nikki.

The bass line is block seventh chords, one per beat, descending stepwise through the F minor scale. The melody is simple, but is made interesting by constantly switching between short notes (written as 4/4) and long notes (in 3/4). There isn't much emphasis on the downbeats, and the right hand often avoids the downbeat, so it doesn't feel like you are switching meters so much as just slowing-down and speeding up.

This is a waltz?

Next up for your audio pleasure (?) is my rendition of Philip Glass' Modern Love Waltz.

This brief piece was written for The Waltz Project, a set of short, contemporary piano waltzes by a variety of composers created in 1978. It was made into a ballet in 1981. I saw that performed many years later in Berkeley.

Although the piece is indeed in 3/4 time, Glass makes you struggle to hear that! The basic rhythm is simple, but ambiguous. Then he adds every trick in the book to disguise and distract you from that rhythm.

The left-hand line is a short basso ostinato, repeated constantly throughout. It consists of two measures of six eighth notes, grouped into 4 sets of 3. Already that does not sound like a waltz! It is ambiguously in 3/4 time or 6/8 time, but sounds more like four beats (two per measure). The chord changes from A to B♭ and back again over and over, giving an additional impression of two slow beats.

On top of that, the right hand bounces along trying one rhythm after another. Sometimes reinforcing one of the possible interpretations of the bass rhythm, and other times confounding them. In this two-measure example, the right-hand is playing 4 beats per measure, with each beat divided in three.


Lots of composers have created pieces with much more complicated poly-rhythms or poly-meters. To keep my sanity, I keep my distance! At any given time in a piece by Glass, the tempo ratio between the beats in any two voices is rarely anything other than a simple 1:2, 2:3, or 3:4 ratio. But there can be four or more of those voices and the time signature and the relationships between the tempos of the voices can change suddenly and frequently.

It isn't important for the listener to be aware of all that is going on at each moment. In fact it may be better to just let it wash over you.

This is a pretty early piece for Glass and not one of his best. But it is fun to play, and I hope it isn't too hard to listen to!

Audio Torture

I've finally got myself set-up to record songs from my piano to my computer. So you'd better watch out!

To test this out, here is a fairly simple and inoffensive lullaby by Alfredo Casella.

Click to download: Berçeuse.

This is from his collection Undici Pezzi Infantili. My Italian is rusty, but I think this translates to "The Idiots Guide to The Toy Piano".

Seriously, this is a set of pieces for "children". Some pieces in this collection actually could be played by children. But, in the world of classical piano music, any piece not intended for a virtuoso is labeled "for children". Quite a few sets of "pieces for children" are near the limits of my abilities.

This piece not only allows, but actively encourages the use of every lazy pianists favorite trick: hold the pedal to the floor. So if it sounds all run-together, that is, in this case, the composer's intent. This lullaby should sound somewhat like a celesta.