108: Too Many Notes
New Mozart, new feature, new disturbing internet paradigm
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: this piece is likely the only piece of this scope in its language, but the composer is not particularly obscure.
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 107
Richard Strauss, Ophelia-Lieder, op. 67: 1. “Wie erkenn ich mein Treulieb?”
Spirited game play this week! I think it was mainly to do with the fact that I (Will) entered into the chat so early with such a wrong answer. I couldn’t discern the Germanity of the language, so I headed east (Janacek, Shostakovich, Mussorgsky.) I committed the huge rookie error of not paying attention to Joey’s clue. We all have bad days!
Those who took the contrarian view did well. Listener Gregor knew that it was German (though, mercifully, he admitted that it was hard to make out) as did Jeremy. But neither of them struck on the answer, with guesses including Webern, Berg, Schoenberg, Orff, and Hindemith. Listener Eric went with Bartok and Kodaly.
But! We had some interesting inbox submissions. Listener Sean knew that the year was 1949 from the clue, and so he correctly identified Strauss. Listener Kevin also correctly identified Strauss, but you’ve got to give him major credit — he sussed out the composer from the fact that the singer on the recording was Elisabeth Schwartzkopf!
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
Wolfgang Returns
A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was probably in his early teens has been uncovered at a library in Germany. The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.
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Researchers discovered the work at the city’s music library while compiling the latest edition of the Köchel catalogue, the definitive archive of Mozart’s musical works. The piece is referred to as Ganz kleine Nachtmusik in the catalogue, according to the Leipzig libraries.
The piece was performed by a string trio at the unveiling of the new Köchel catalogue in the Austrian city of Salzburg on Thursday. It will receive its German premiere at the Leipzig Opera on Saturday.
Well Listeners, wait no longer: you can hear the trio today, in a truly awful recording from the Salzburg premiere:
When I (Will) say “awful recording,” what I mean is that the microphone placement is criminally bad and the sound quality is marred by neverending pops in the stream. I don’t know what these people were doing, but this is not up to the normal technical standards of the Germanic lands.
The other thing that annoys me is the inclusion of the harpsichord. I happen to be reading a collection of Tovey’s essays right now, and he has a very interesting proposition: “It is not too much to say that one half of the problems of instrumentation, both in chamber music and in the orchestra, since Haydn began to work, up to the present day, lies in the distribution of the continuo-function among all the instruments.”
To translate that into layman’s terms: during the Baroque period, you had keyboard instruments that played from chord symbols, much like a piano does in a jazz trio, filling in the harmonies. The project of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, was to create a composition technique that allowed a group of instruments without backup keyboards to play full, rich, complete sonorities. That’s what Mozart did in this trio, and the harpsichord is superfluous.
The Apple Gets Closer to the Tree
Apple Music Classical, the classical music streaming service introduced in early 2023, received a version 2.0 update today that brings a couple of worthwhile new features to the iPhone and iPad app.
This latest version of the app adds album booklets for thousands of albums. Album booklets offer multi-language liner notes, composer biographies, information about the orchestra, conductors, and soloists, plus where relevant, sung texts and opera libretti, enriching listeners' understanding of the music.
I (Will) would say this is a welcome development, since the loss of liner notes is one of the major drawbacks of the streaming era. But I wonder if they’ve been supplanted by the rest of the internet. When I’m listening to a new piece or composer via streaming, I just pop open a Wikipedia tab, or if I’m feeling frisky I’ll google program notes. And let’s be honest, the quality of published liner notes varies tremendously, from first-rate musicological scholarship to boilerplate copy from outdated sources.
Do any Listeners use Apple Classical? If so, has this new feature got you excited? Do you anticipate making much use of it?
Creepy AI Mahler
This instagram post from BR-Klassik made me (Will) feel extremely uneasy:
Tone Praise
Grażyna Bacewicz, Overture for Orchestra
I (Will) have a concert coming up, and this is the opening number. There’s a wild story behind this piece too: Bacewicz was a successful violinist and composer mainly living in Paris at the outbreak of the second World War, but when the fighting got intense, she returned to her native Poland. There, she got trapped in Warsaw, but she gave underground concerts to raise money for the resistance. She was able to escape the city during the Warsaw uprising, but she didn’t manage to bring this overture with her. She reconstructed the piece from her memory and that’s how we have it today.
Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
Will here with a note to say that I'm keeping my lips zipped on this week's NTT. Good luck!
NTT: Can't tell what the language is, so the clue is not of much help. The beginning strikes me as Scriabin-esque, though some of the later material not so much. I'll still put him in my basket, as well Shostakovich for a later Russian.