Tone Prose 56: Façonnable

A stimulating new garment; Unfinished; The ambiguously gay duo

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey special. Here’s your hint: Will’s orchestra & chorus, Harmonia, is programming a work by this composer this season! (Take a look if you want that hint!)

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 55
CPE Bach, Duo for Two Clarinets

OK, here’s where I have to admit that I got totally owned at my own game, and in the best way possible. Listener Chris, proving himself a mighty contender in the NTT space, used his golden-plated ear to identify the hint of “Empfindsamkeit” lurking in the unexpected silences in this duet—a *hallmark* of CPE Bach’s style—and thus was able to nail it. Bravo to you sir!

I thought it could be CPE, but I was two steps ahead in my ongoing psychological battle against Listener Jeremy, and I got too cute by guessing Johann Christian Bach. Listener Laurie went along with me, but she should get credit for having CPE in her basket.

This clip certainly made for a spirited round of listening analysis, and that’s the whole point!

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.

Sound Shirts

Speaking of Listener Jeremy, he brought to my (Will’s) attention this article from the Chicago Sun-Times about a new “sound shirt” technology being tested at the Chicago Lyric Opera which can stimulate musical sensations for deaf listeners:

... for the first time, the SoundShirt, a new wearable technology to assist hearing-impaired patrons, debuting Oct. 1. at the Lyric Opera.

For someone who is deaf, the pilot program — Lyric is the first opera company in the world to offer the technology at live performances — possibly provides an unexpected delight.

Only 10 shirts are currently available — in sizes medium and large — and only for one show during the run of each production in the current season, except for “Champion,” a production that will have shirts available for two shows. The shirts are dry-cleaned between performances. More shirts, in different sizes, are on their way, according to Lyric.

The shirt itself is made of a lightweight synthetic material — almost like something a runner or a cyclist might wear. It retails for about $1,500.

The technology utilizes tiny motors — 16 of them — embedded in the fabric, like those that make cellphones vibrate, Dunn said. Seven special mics are positioned above different sections of the orchestra. The different sections correspond to different vibrating patches of the shirt.

Unfinished

1. At roughly the same moment that last week’s Tone Prose hit inboxes, our friends at VAN Magazine published an in-depth bit of reportage about the ongoing situation at CCM. As I (Will) said in my write-up, I’m no journalist, just a take-haver, but Jeff Arlo Brown is very much a journalist and he has the receipts. I will say that everything that has been professionally reported out in his piece corroborates exactly with the original info that I included in last week’s Tone Prose, but there are some *jaw-dropping* additional details that beggar belief.

2. A podcast recommendation. You may recall that in Tone Prose 24, we included a video segment from 60 Minutes concerning the abysmal state of Sydney’s iconic opera house. Well, if you’re curious to learn more about the history of how that building came to be, I would strongly recommend giving a listen to this episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast, which opens with a laugh-out-loud story about Sir Eugene Goossens that, somehow, I did not learn in my music history classes!

A Night on Brokeback Mountain

Following up on Joey’s generous linking of my (Will’s) upcoming Harmonia season in the NTT, I’d like to offer a little reflection on some research I’ve been undertaking in preparation for my first concert of the season, which will feature Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in the orchestration by Maurice Ravel, naturally.)

I went to college in the early 2000s, and it turns out it was an interesting time to be studying a discipline in the humanities. Queer Theory had asserted itself in the early 90s and by the middle of the decade it was cross-pollinating with fields across academia. Ten years hence, the queer reading of music history had leapt species and was now finding its way into popular media.

All that’s to say, when I was in my early 20s, I read confident assertions in various music history-related materials that the following composers were gay: Jean Baptiste Lully, George Frederick Handel, Franz Schubert, Modest Mussorgsky, and Maurice Ravel. Sometimes the authors were honest enough to admit that a bit of reading between the lines was required to reach these conclusions, but just as often this information was presented as confirmed historical truth.

That would mean that, ostensibly, Pictures at an Exhibition is a work composed by one gay man and orchestrated by another. In the 80s, the understanding was that Mussorgsky lavished such care and attention on this piece because he was depressed over the loss of his close friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann. By the 2000s, the story was that Mussorgsky was depressed over the loss of the man whom he had hopelessly been in love with.

As I’ve gotten to be a better historian (an amateur one, of course) I’ve come to be more critical of my sources, and if you read actual books by actual researchers and scholars, you’ll find that there’s just no validity to this claim. Incredibly, the source of the rumor seems to be from a footnote in a book called Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue by freaking Richard Taruskin of all people!

But if you google “Mussorgsky gay” (and believe me I did) you’ll find plenty of articles like these two:

In the past years, I’ve come to the same finding about the four composers I mentioned on that list: the historical data just isn’t there. (The circumstantial evidence about Ravel is probably the strongest.) And as a kicker, I just learned this crazy bit of biographical info about Francis Poulenc, whom by all accounts was an avowed and flagrant homosexual:

And that was just sitting in plain sight right on his Wikipedia page! Oh what a world...

Tone Praise

Lera Auerbach, Prelude No. 7 for Theremin and Piano

This piece is kind of two pieces in one. You listen to the first half of the piece and you think “what a poignant, melancholy Rachmaninovian melody!” And you think it’s over.

But then the piece restarts, and it’s like Alfred Schnittke picked up the pen where Sergei Rachmaninoff set it down, and the whole thing restarts in a bizarro rendition, a sort of anti-prelude to the prelude that just preceded it.

Anyway, I (Will) think it’s neat, and you can listen to all ten of Auerbach’s theremin preludes on this album: Spotify.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)