Beloved Christmas carols: The Christmas Song

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In a web environment, someone can write an article or record a song and put it online immediately. Conventional publishers must work months in advance of publication. Whatever new magazine articles on Christmas, Christmas record albums, etc. appear this month were probably written some time last summer. Once upon a time, selling sheet music made at least as much money as recordings. Publishers often had song-writing teams under contract to provide new music. On a hot July day in 1946, lyricist Bob Wells was not thinking of songs for Christmas or otherwise. He only cared about cooling off. Swimming didn’t help. Neither did taking a cold shower or anything else he could think of. So he decided to think about a wintry scene and conjure up something cold in his imagination to see if that would help. After he had written a few lines, beginning “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose,” his partner Mel Tormé dropped by and asked about them. Hearing the explanation, he suggested they write a song. Over the forty-five minutes it took them to complete the words and the music, a winter song had become “The Christmas Song.” The publishers … Continue reading →

Did Sax invent the saxhorn?

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[ad name=”Google Adsense 728×90″] (Saxhorns are the top row of instruments in this 1872 advertisement) In1845, French military music reached the bottom of a long decline. The war ministry, desiring to reorganize it completely, arranged for a contest among bands with various instrumentation. The band led by Adolphe Sax won. The Belgian-born Sax had only moved to Paris and set up shop three years earlier. His quick success (largely due to the superior craftsmanship of his instruments but also to notable supporters such as Hector Berlioz) annoyed established French makers. That this upstart should win the right to reorganized French military music added insult to injury. That his instrumentation was built around a family of instruments he had named for himself and patented enraged several of them so much that they banded together and brought suit to nullify Sax’s patents. That suit eventually ruined both Sax and his rivals  financially. The instruments in question, saxhorns, are valved bugles, that is, brass instruments with a conical bore. Sax was hardly the first instrument maker to add valves to bugles. He copied his valves from the German maker Johann Gottfried Moritz. Two things set saxhorns apart from anyone else’s valved bugles. First, … Continue reading →

Franz Liszt at an artistic crossroads

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In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a social division arose between two kinds of music. Some loved what they called classical music. They quarreled with people who preferred what William Weber has called high-status popular music. Classical music specifically meant the masterpieces of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and a few others. High-status popular music included popular operas by Rossini, Meyerbeer, and others. It also included traveling virtuosos who performed largely in salons. That is, they performed before invited guests in the homes of aristocratic or upper-middle-class hosts. Robert Schumann began his career as a critic specifically to protest against the emptiness of most of the piano virtuosos. They specialized in dazzling arrangements of operatic tunes or variations on popular melodies. These pieces had little musical substance. They did not reward repeated hearing. But the audience for them preferred novelty. They had no interest in hearing the same pieces over and over. Schumann recognized greater musical substance in some of them, including Franz Liszt. In his early career, then, Liszt represented high-status popular music. But without the musical emptiness and technical gimmicks that Schumann so despised. Weber points out that the old aristocracy and upper middle class essentially merged around … Continue reading →

Guillaume de Machaut: the gaps in his biography

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Our knowledge of history is limited by the accident of what kind of documentation exists. Even for recent people and events, historians cannot always find information about what they most want to learn. Given roughly equivalent fame and importance, the earlier a person lived, the sparser the documentation. The great medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) provides a good illustration. No other fourteenth-century composer left behind as much music as Machaut, and possibly none other provided so much detail about his life and times. While many prolific composers over the course of history have produced vast quantities of music of mediocre quality or worse, Machaut’s reputation, both in his lifetime and in the estimation of scholars, places him in the top rank not only of composers of his time, but also poets. He also had a very sophisticated understanding of mathematics. Machaut the poet wrote about current events and about himself. From him we know that he was short, blind in one eye, had gout, and, as an old man, became involved in a platonic relationship with a teenaged poetry lover. He preserved her letters to him, too. History records a great deal of information about his patrons. He … Continue reading →

Vienna, 1800: the divergence of classical and popular music

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Revised February 27, 2017 What kind of music do you think of when you think of Vienna? Classical music, of course. Extra credit if you thought of Johann Strauss and realize that his waltzes aren’t classical music. But did you know classical music was hard to find in Vienna in 1800? Mozart had been dead for nine years. Haydn was an old man close to retirement from composing. The young Beethoven had made a strong start in establishing his reputation. Schubert was only three years old. And most of the public idolized musicians you’ve probably never heard of. In fact, the concept of classical vs popular music is only about 200 years old. It is foreshadowed by the 18th-century phrase “Kenner und Liebhaber,” or “connoisseurs and music lovers.” Up until about 1790, many European cities enjoyed an active and varied concert life. Popular music and art music mingled on every concert, but no one yet thought in those terms. Music lovers without much knowledge or training could enjoy the art music, because its style was familiar. Connoisseurs found something to like in the less sophisticated music. Between 1790 and the middle of the 1810s, concert life ceased entirely in London … Continue reading →

The buccin: a dragon-headed trombone

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In the early nineteenth century, some  French and Belgian instrument makers manufacturered a fanciful adaptation of the trombone known as the buccin. In place of the standard bell section, it had a widely curving tube  ending with a gaudily painted serpent’s or dragon’s head.  The same makers also put monster’s heads on serpents, serpent bassoons, and other precursors of the ophicleide. Judging from the trombone parts in French music during or after the Revolution, the was played loudly, primarily in the lower register.  As the French used a very small-bore trombone, its sound must have been coarse and at times entirely unmusical.  Charles Burney once described a badly-played serpent as “exactly resembling in tone, that of a great hungry, or rather angry, Essex calf”. Putting a dragon’s head on either instrument could only emphasize the worst aspects of their sound.  Henri Castil-Blaze, writing in 1821, observed, “This form, picturesque for the eye, essentially harms the results of the instrument, of which it hinders and curtails the vibrations.  The sound of the buccin is duller, harsher, and drier than that of the trombone.” The gaudy head was not intended for sound, however. The primary customers for this model, military bands, cared … Continue reading →