71: Sing We and Chant It
Copyright Shenanigans; a New Vlogger; the Oldest Melodies
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: this work’s opus number is a wild misrepresentation of its place in the composer’s chronological output.
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 70
Johannes Brahms, Ave Maria, op. 12
This was a diabolical entry from First Mate Joey, and nobody guessed except me (Will). I was leaning contemporary with John Taverner and Arvo Pärt, but in fairness to me, I also guessed Schubert and Bruckner, and what is Brahms if not a midpoint between those two Austrian giants? (That’s tongue-in-cheek; Brahms is anything but that.)
Anyway, Joey offered the bait, and I took it — hook, line, and sinker. Where were the rest of you all when I needed you?? Our streak is now broken. It survived the Jean Cras string trio, but it couldn’t survive a simple Ave Maria.
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.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
You might have seen in the news last week that 2024 is a banner year for the expiration of copyright protections due to the fact that Steamboat Willie (aka Mickey Mouse) has at long last become part of the U.S. public domain. (Wasn’t it just a few years ago that we were all talking about how Mickey is hugely problematic, part of the long legacy of blackface minstrelsy? Have we all just forgotten that now that you can’t get sued for drawing him??)
I (Will) am of the opinion that the copyright system in America (and, indeed, in much of the rest of the world) is totally broken. It’s something that a lot of people don’t have to think about, but if you’re a creative artist — or, more to the point, an interpretive artist working in a medium that recreates works from the past, while struggling to reinvigorate your artistic canon — you think about it alot.
And this is why my jaw dropped when I received the following email from the G. Schirmer publishing house:
IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING “ROMEO AND JULIET” and “CINDERELLA” (“Cendrillon”) SCORES BY SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to you today with some important information regarding the ballets ROMEO AND JULIET and CINDERELLA, composed by Sergei Prokofiev. These dramatic stage works, having been conceptualized and created collaboratively by their composer and librettists, are co-authored and receive copyright protection as “joint works,” as do the derivative compositions created from the complete ballets.[...]
While your organization may own a legally purchased set of score and parts of an earlier edition of these works, we are obliged to inform you that G. Schirmer, Inc., and the Wise Music Group have prepared new performance editions of both ballets as well as their derivative works. These new editions of full scores and instrumental parts are the only editions authorized by the Prokofiev Estate and must be used for all future performances.
The sheer gaul, the grift, the legalistic loopholing here is enough to set one’s brain on fire. Sergei Prokofiev is long dead and buried, but as long as the publishers can squeeze a few extra bucks out of “The Dance of the Knights,” that’s what they intend to do. Honestly, it’s worse than Disney, and they should be downright ashamed of themselves.
Elly Ameling has a Vlog
Pardon my (Will’s) amusement, but I just find this so delightful. The Queen of the Lied is now doing direct-to-camera analyses of Brahms and singing and other music stuff. I’ll be honest: I had no idea she was still alive. But alive she is (a young 90) and cranking out content to edify the masses.
Schola Cantorum
The internet long ago figured out that the content I (Will) want most is Serious Europeans with Revisionist Opinions on Musical Interpretation. Those of you who came to Tone Prose from the Classical Gabfest might remember back to Episode 1, where we discussed the truly insane “double beat” metronome theory of Wim Winters, the Dutch keyboard enthusiast and YouTube musicologist.
Now it’s an Instagram account that has sucked me in, specifically ecole_gregorienne, in which an extremely intense young man, Bruno de Labriolle, shares his research in, opinions on, and guidelines for performing Gregorian chant, not the way it is commonly heard today, but in a restored, authentic medieval practice.
The difference between Bruno and Wim is that Bruno is right. How do I know this? Well, I’ve just read a great little book that I got for Christmas (thanks Mom!) called Capturing Music: The Story of Notation, which I’d highly recommend, even to those of you who don’t read music.
The book looks at the long history of Western musical notation, from the earliest scratches on vellum parchment to our contemporary designs and symbols. The book explores the theory and concept of what it means to translate sound into writing, and the author, Thomas Kelly, goes to great lengths to explain how there are conceivably many ways you could notate music, and that all of them will necessarily prioritize certain features of music, and leave out others.
Which brings me back to young Bruno, who directs the schola of Saint-Bruno-des-Chartreux in Lyon. His style of singing chant is not going to be to everyone’s taste. To my ears, it sounds much more like Arabic, or Hebrew, or Byzantine music than the Gregorian chant I’m accustomed to. But of course, that’s just the point: the Christian church is a Levantine creation, and its musical tradition stretches back to deep antiquity via First and Second Temple Judaism.
When Guido d’Arrezzo invented what would become “square notation,” notation was suddenly able to communicate pitch with an unprecedented level of specificity. What was lost in this new way of doing things was inflection. The pre-Guidonian notation system wasn’t at all clear about which notes were to be sung (it took a lot of deciphering to even figure out what the shape of the melody should be) but it did show inflection and ornamentation.
When Thomas Kelly wrote Capturing Music in 2014, there were still elements of pre-Guidonian notation that had yet to be deciphered. Young Bruno is part of the generation that is deciphering those symbols, and he’s sharing his discoveries in the most humorously humorless way possible.
Tone Praise
Michael Nyman, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover: “Memorial”
I (Will) can’t remember if I’ve recommended this piece before, but whenever I need a Gothic metal neo-Baroque dance track to give my day a little jolt, this is the one I turn to.
Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
You’re right the piano may be a special case. Pianists often engage in agogic trickery to substitute for other effects that are difficult or impossible to achieve. Bernstein has marshaled enough evidence to convince me that hairpins may sometimes indicate rubato, sometimes with dynamics, sometimes alone. But I am not convinced that this is always the correct way to interpret hairpins, even in the piano music of the composers he cites.
NTT: This is extremely familiar to me - I think I've sight read it at some point! My first idea is that it's a Mozart sonata with a late K number, but the hint specifically says "opus"... and my backup guess is that it's one of the late opus bagatelles of Beethoven!