Some serious fun for the weekend: the legendary KRS-One performing live, rapping over Vivaldi and Pachelbel.

Forget So or Empty Glass or Radio K.A.O.S.—my new favorite solo follow-up project belongs to ex-Queen guitarist Brian May, who just finished his thesis for the PhD in astrophysics he abandoned in 1974 to pursue international rock stardom. May’s work concerns interplanetary dust clouds—you can find some of his pre-“Fat Bottomed Girls” research here—and, according to the Times, his thesis demonstrates, for the first time, that dust clouds in our own solar system move in the same direction as the planets. Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus!

By the way, Brian’s blog is a lot of fun.

What happens when that illusory arrow of progress takes a bit of a u-turn?

Today’s exhibit in the zig-zag of music history is Dieterich Buxtehude, who most people only remember as a precursor of Bach, and that Johann Sebastian once hiked 200 miles to hear him play. But that organist’s holiday should tell you something—Buxtehude was pretty famous in his time. He was the organist for the church at Lübeck, and judging by his published compositions, Sundays in Lübeck must have been something. His preludes whip through promiscuous numbers of textures and moods. He thinks nothing of turning a simple chorale prelude into a full-fledged multi-movement dance suite (“Auf meinen lieben Gott,” BuxWV 179—score here). His imitative works are built on unusually angular and ruminative themes. Here’s a particular example: the Fugue in C major, BuxWV 174 (score here). Go on—show this subject to your 18th-Century Counterpoint instructor and see if you pass.


Break out the red pen—too long, too jumpy, too harmonically ambiguous (eight notes in, and he’s making the tonic sound like the dominant). But it’s the final cadence that’s really far out: Buxtehude just hangs on to that tonic triad in the face of all kinds of diatonic dissonance from the bass.


Now Bach certainly had his wild moments, but I can’t think of anything near that crazy. In just about every one of his organ works, in fact, Buxtehude tosses off some musical inspiration—a melodic turn, a clash of harmonies, an unprepared jump-cut to an entirely new texture and tempo—that Bach would have at least thought twice about.

The point here is not to somehow demonstrate that Buxtehude was a better composer than Bach, or that one or the other of them made some sort of “wrong turn,” to borrow that awful phrase so beloved of prescriptivist music historians. The point is that those composers we remember as particularly important, or influential, or innovatory—that’s as much a fortuitous accident of time and place as it is the force of individual creativity. Bach had an unparalleled talent for assimilating disparate influences into an architecturally harmonious whole at a time when an unprecedented number of disparate influences—Renaissance polyphony, Lutheran chorale, Italian monody, French dance music, you name it—was ripe for assimilation. If Bach’s personal style evolved in a more conservative direction than Buxtehude’s ever did, that evolution intersected with the musical current of the time such that it became a river feeding countless tributaries over the next centuries. And so Bach is remembered as the singular genius, the navigator that charted the way for everyone who came after him, while Buxtehude is just the guy back in port who encouraged him to buy a boat. (It’s interesting to consider what part local preference played in both careers as well. Buxtehude’s avant-garde ways—in addition to his organ-playing, he was a pioneer in large-scale sacred dramatic works—apparently went over well in Lübeck: he kept his post for nearly forty years, ending only with his death in 1707. Bach, on the other hand, returned from his trip to hear Buxtehude to find local officials in Arnstadt complaining about, among other things, the over-elaborate nature of his chorale accompaniments.)

In other words, even if Buxtehude was more adventurous, more innovatory than Bach, Bach became the more important composer because he was lucky enough to live at a time uniquely suited to his formidable genius. Buxtehude is rather like Winston Churchill in 1912 or so—obviously talented, impatiently forward-looking, but lacking access to a stage on which his talents can fully flourish. Bach is like Churchill in 1940: the exact person at the exact moment in history.

Buxtehude is one of those radical composers who always seem to flourish just before a historical consolidation—think of C.P.E. Bach, or Carl Maria von Weber, or George Antheil. Would they rank higher in the Pantheon if they had come along fifty years later? Fifty years earlier? It’s hard to say. But then again, what if Bach had been a contemporary of Mozart? What if Beethoven had been born in France in 1860? Contrafactuals like those always carry a whiff of the ridiculous, but they point up how, maybe even more than sheer talent, it’s how that talent interacts—or doesn’t interact—with the time and place it’s launched into that determines the historical standing of the bearer. If I end up rating only a cursory mention in the 2200 edition of the New Grove, I may be able to claim the same excuse as Brian Wilson: I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.

I got to thinking about this after Adam and Daniel were talking last week about musical innovation.

Another highlight from The Boston Symphony Cookbook: how Andrzej Panufnik liked to cook peaches.

Peaches Panufnik

6 large, perfectly ripe peaches (“must be fresh”), peeled
1½ cups heavy cream or crème fraîche (or a combination)
½ to ¾ cup soft brown sugar

Slice the peaches into a buttered shallow 10-inch pie plate or baking dish, leaving ½ inch room at the top; the peaches should lie as flat as possible.


Whip the cream until very thick, and smooth it over the peaches.
Place in the freezer for 2 to 3 hours, until the cream is very firm but the peaches are not frozen solid.


Preheat the broiler (or a salamander) about 15 minutes before serving. Let your guests wait—they will be rewarded. Just before serving, sift some of the brown sugar over the semifrozen cream in a layer no more than ¹⁄₈ inch thick, covering the cream completely. Broil quickly until the sugar caramelizes. Add another layer and repeat the process, but work fast. Allow a few moments for the melted sugar to harden, and test the topping with taps of a tablespoon. When the properly percussive sound is achieved, rush it to the table, and serve immediately.

I took Andrzej at his word and used the broiler, but next time, I’ll use the blowtorch—faster, more even, and far more dangerous/fun. The editors of the cookbook reassure the timid that, in spite of his adamant insistence on fresh peaches, canned peaches will do in a pinch. But with all those summer peaches just lying around, you’d be a fool to break out the can opener; just dunk them in boiling water for thirty seconds, then into a bowl of ice water, and the skins slip right off. While you’re at it, you can take a listen to Panufnik’s Piano Trio played by its namesake.

For a true Panufnik experience, stay up all night eating the peaches and drinking cup after cup of strong black coffee while listening to ancient Polish chant, then, in your heart-racing caffienated state, fail your army physical the next morning. (Yes, that is how Andrzej avoided military service.) One of the better desserts I’ve come across in a while. Even critic-at-large Moe was sitting without being told in anticipation of more bits of crunchy topping.

Romantic music had Gothic landscapes. Symphonic jazz had Art Deco. Postwar serialism had Abstract Expressionism. (Bebop had it, too.) Hip-hop had graffiti. Surf rock had Ed “Big Daddy” Roth; psychedelic rock had Rick Griffin. Minimalism had minimalism. Expressionism had expressionism. Impressionism had impressionism.

So here’s today’s exercise in prognostication: what will be the visual artistic style that history will glue to the current era of new music, post-minimalism, non-pop, the new eclecticism, whatever you want to call it? Keep in mind that there doesn’t necessarily need to be any direct connection (many of the early graffiti artists in 1970s New York weren’t even aware of hip-hop or rap) and that, yes, today’s plethora of styles will inevitably be shoehorned into a crude generalization (the association between the 1950s and serialism, for example, ignores Barber, Poulenc, late Hindemith, early Rorem, Cage, etc., etc.). So what’ll it be? Conceptual installations? Video? Graphic novels? Damien Hirst? Komar and Melamid? Gerhard Richter? Jeff Koons? None of the above?

You could also probably divide musicians, composers especially, into those of us who like to think about this sort of thing and those who couldn’t possibly care less. I personally enjoy pondering the historical perception (and future historical perception) of music because that’s part of what attracted me to classical music in the first place: the idea that there was a repertoire that was completely of its own time and place, but had the possibility to be reinterpreted for each subsequent era and yet remain vital. And yet so much of the music I love was created by artists who regarded the past as deadweight baggage to be pitched overboard in the interests of speed and navigability. It works the other way around, too: the scorched-earth Boulez took his cues from the early-music-editing Webern, for instance.

It’s odd that music and the plastic arts are always paired up in terms of stylistic designations—the relationship between music and literary movements has always struck me as both temporally and intellectually closer. Then again, music is pretty odd all by itself, so what’s the use of getting worked up about it at this late date, right? So make a frame out of your fingers and see what you see—Gehry or Grand Theft Auto?

Régine Crespin died on Wednesday—with the passing of Beverly Sills, that makes two representative national heroines in one week. Crespin didn’t have nearly as high a profile on this side of the Atlantic, but this committed Francophile was in awe of her unfailingly elegant tone and her absolutely effortless way with the language. This is a 1964 performance of Fauré’s “Soir,” a lovely object lesson in rich, intimate mélodie singing.


She’s shamefully underrepresented on YouTube; here’s hoping some of her Berlioz interpretations will turn up.

Joe Bedrosian: Yankee Doodle (MP3, 280 Kb)

“Yankee Doodle” played on the zurna. Recorded in 1939 by Sidney Robertson Cowell for the WPA California Folk Music Project.

Every time a larger-than-life artist passes away, particularly in the tradition- and history-conscious world of classical music, it’s customary to dust off the “end of an era” line, but in the case of Beverly Sills, it really does seem like the end of a certain era, and not just because it seemed like she would always be around, forever coming out of retirement to take another set of reins somewhere.

There’s one era, I think, that she actually outlived. Most of the obituaries and tributes I’ve been reading today make a point of contrasting her down-to-earth personality as a singer with her success as an administrator, particularly at steering the New York City Opera through a notably difficult period in the 1980s. Tim Page spelled it out clearest in his tribute:

She was the telegenic “diva next door,” a friendly redhead from Brooklyn whose friends called her Bubbles; she was an aggressive Manhattan snob who never let it be forgotten that she did hold grudges. She was the warmest and most brilliant American coloratura soprano of her time; she was a high-culture power broker and adept political infighter. Those who knew her slightly liked her enormously; those who knew her better were sometimes a little afraid of her.

Beverly Sills, who died of lung cancer yesterday at the age of 78, was a complicated person, and any attempt to sum up her life and work will necessarily turn into a string of contradictions.

Sills always struck me as someone whose ebullience sprang from an absolute comfort in her own skin, which is perhaps the best political defense one can have, and throughout her career, though just as demanding as any diva, those demands came with a distinctly non-temperamental, cool assessment of risk and reward. (Anthony Tommasini relates the famous story of her landing the role of Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, as much a Napoleonically deft flanking maneuver as a prima donna‘s ultimatum.) Besides, anyone who makes a career out of classical music by necessity develops a certain amount of determination and thick skin; Sills just had it to an unusual degree. So why the surprise? Sills herself thought it was her gender; in 1986, having stared down one musician’s strike and succesfully avoided another, she took stock of her NYCO tenure in a New York Times interview. ”What I really resent is that people underestimated me,” she said. ”I was naive when I took on this job, but I was not stupid. I think if I was a man, I wouldn’t have taken the abuse I took here.”

So as you peruse the recorded legacy, it’s also worth considering the way society has changed in the past half-century such that Sills strikes us as contradictory. Back in the 1940s, when Sills was just starting out, her combination of grit, savvy, and vivacity wouldn’t have been hard to reconcile. She would have been called a tough dame. It would have been a compliment.

No blog today—making sausage.


With that out of the way, I’m off to work on a wurstfagott arrangement of “Der Tambour.”

On the heels of research that shows that music you find pleasant does, in fact, reduce pain (although, given what I find “pleasant,” I’m going to need a private hospital bed) comes this bit of fun: “Musical Intervals in Speech,” by Duke University neuroscientists Deborah Ross, Jonathan Choi, and Dale Purves. Ross et al. analyzed the vowel formants of everyday speech and found, more often than not, that the frequency relationships correspond to the intervals of the 12-note chromatic scale.

To test the hypothesis that chromatic scale intervals are specifically embedded in the frequency relationships in voiced speech sounds (i.e., phones whose acoustical structure is characterized by periodic repetition), we analyzed the spectra of different vowel nuclei in neutral speech uttered by adult native speakers of American English, as well as a smaller database of Mandarin.
…
… [We calculated] the distribution of all F2/F1 ratios derived from the spectra of the 8 different vowels uttered by the 10 English-speaking participants (i.e., the relationships in 1,000 utterances of each of the vowels). Sixty-eight percent of these ratios fall on intervals of the chromatic scale (red bars), and all 12 chromatic intervals are represented over a span of 4 octaves.

In other words, the 12-note scale isn’t so arbitrary after all. Interestingly, there’s preference for tuning systems in speech as well:

In so far as the observations here inform this argument, the observed ratios in speech spectra accord most closely with a just intonation tuning system. Ten of the 12 intervals generated by the analysis of either English or Mandarin vowel spectra are those used in just intonation tuning, whereas 4 of the 12 match the Pythagorean tuning and only 1 of the 12 intervals matches those used in equal temperament. The two anomalies in our data with respect to just intonation concern the minor second and the tritone.

That minor-second/tritone anomaly brings up a good chicken-egg question, given that composers who work with more chromatic than diatonic sounds tend not to explore alternate tunings so much: does a preference for crunchy dissonance mean that just intonation sounds “wrong”? Or is it that, in our predominantly equal-temperament world, it’s those clashing seconds that sound the most “natural,” so that’s where the preference comes from? As someone who likes the sound of diatonic music in pure ratios, but opts for equal-tempered dissonance in my own, I’m inclined towards the latter, but I would imagine this is a highly personal impression.

Anyway, turns out Harold Hill was right: singing is just sustained talking.