While many pianists from around the world, without lifting a finger, would sit at the piano to give their audience the novel work 4'33'', its author, John Cage, was making an effort to compose a musical piece whose score was going to show in its short pages a cluster of half notes, crotchets, quavers and semiquavers, in the traditional way.
It was 1948 and quite a few years had passed since Cage had taken lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, after which the latter told to the former that he should have a feeling for harmony. Cage answered; "Yes. I have no feeling for harmony". Schoenberg then said: "You will always encounter an obstacle, and that it would be as though you came to a wall through which you could not pass." I said: "In that case, I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'
In a Landscape
John Cage (1912 - 1992)
So, when some years after he was asked to write the musical accompaniment for the choreographic work "Dream", for the dancer Louise Leopold, the composer recalled the words of maestro Schoenberg and, against all odds, there was no need to beat his head against the wall to give birth to the piece In a Landscape, an unmistakable composition of musical modernism, which incidentally brings to mind the memory of Erik Satie and which was complete to the taste of Louise, the dancer.
The piece, around eight minutes long, was composed for piano or harp.
The rendition, here, is by Israeli pianist Shira Legmann, during a live concert in Boston.
The American avant-garde philosopher, poet, painter, pioneer of aleatory and electronic music, and composer, John Cage, was not the first to invent a musical composition that contained not a single note. Before and after him, there were breakthrough composers who worked on silence as musical material. But undoubtedly, his work titled 4'33 '' is the one that has survived the longest. Furthermore, it is considered his masterpiece, and the most controversial, far surpassing other works that gave silence a leading role.
4'33 ''
The piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds long – as it will have been noticed – was composed in 1952, It can be played by any instrument or set of instruments, although it was originally conceived to be performed on the piano. Despite its short extension, it is structured in three movements. His score only contains the Latin word "tacet" which is customary to use to indicate to the orchestra musician that his contribution is not required for a considerable period, for example, during a complete movement. In this case, tacet instructs the interpreter to remain silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
John Cage (1912 - 1992)
The music "of the environment"
In Cage's own opinion this was his most important work and with it, he attempted to show that any sound or set of sounds can be music, if we agree. The four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence are intended for the audience to listen to the sounds of the environment while the piece is "performed", sounds that neither the author nor the interpreter nor the audience is in a position to control, which, for true, is an irrefutable truth.
The various versions
There is an online version played on the piano, apparently by John Cage himself, but it is somewhat old and the video is a low-resolution one. The sound, moreover, is poor.
I've preferred to show here an orchestral version with soloist, which Cage devised a few years later due to the enthusiasm that the original piece aroused in the public, a project that meant some good years of work for the composer. As rarely before, at the end of the piece, the audience knew how to keep the overwhelming silence that the end of every musical manifestation requires.
To the benefits already described, 4'33 '' adds an unmatched feature: it can be heard both with and without headphones.
Gioachino Rossini not only laid the foundations for the bel canto that would dominate the panorama of Italian opera in the early nineteenth century but was also the one who inaugurated the surprising behaviour adopted by the musicians of his time of getting hold of a mistress older than themselves (his loyal followers will be Franz Liszt, who fell in love with Marie d'Agoult, six years older; and then Chopin and Sand, who was seven years older than her "Chopinski"). Indeed, in 1815, when Chopin was only five years old, and Liszt was only rising above four, the precocious Gioachino, at twenty-three, would find love in the Madrid-born singer Isabella Colbran, seven years older.
Isabella, soprano and mezzo
A high-class soprano and mezzo, at the time of meeting Gioachino –whose comic operas have brought to fame only four years after his career began–, Mme Colbran was a singer whose tessitura and register were the polar opposites of the typical flourishes that, at that stage, the music of Gioachino exhibited. Therefore, she will urge the young composer to work in more serious operas, in order to perform heroines where her voice could display her full potential.
Isabella Colbran (1785 - 1845)
Gioachino fulfilled her wishes as far as possible. Along with a Barbiere, a Cinderella and a Thieving Magpie the young Rossini (blessed are you) wrote for Isabella various dramatic roles specially created for her voice features.
The decline
But as time doesn't pass for nothing, by 1822 the voice of the Colbran had begun to decline. Rossini was forced to adapt the arias to her failing voice, until there was the last opera written for her: the drama in two acts, Semiramis. A year before its premiere they had been married, but the marriage would not be for life as their relationships will always be tangled and thorny. The rupture would come in 1837 when Isabella had spent many years without singing and Rossini turned eight composing absolutely nothing.
Semiramis
The two-act opera Semiramis took its script from Voltaire's tragedy, "Semiramis", based in turn on the legend of Semiramis, queen of Babylon. Premiered at the La Fenice theater, Venice, in February 1823, it is rarely performed today but is survived by its Overture, one of the most beautiful written by Rossini, and the most extensive of all.
The rendition is by the outstanding Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he has been the holder since 2009, and with which he won a Grammy Award in 2012 for the best orchestral performance, with the Symphony No. 4 by Johannes Brahms.
The familiar and overwhelming Rossini's crescendo rehearses a first song at minute 4:10. A second theme begins at 6:00, which will be resumed at 10:30 to lead to the climax and then to a thunderous finale.
Johann Strauss Sr. never said to his eponymous son "I hope you will go further than I do" or anything like that. There was no need. Naturally, the son's talent would soon surpass the father's. Thus, the relations within the Strauss Orchestra, founded by Strauss Sr in 1825, would be complicated. To the point that Strauss Jr later decided to create his own orchestra, vying with his father in the battle to gain the favour of the audience, the nascent Viennese bourgeoisie, who in those years was in need of dancing.
The invention of the "Viennese waltz"
Over the years, the son's fame overshadowed that of the father. This reality, however, is petty with Strauss Sr. Although it was his son who in his time earned the title of "the king of the waltz" in Europe, Johann Strauss Sr. was the author of the idea. From the elaboration of simple peasant dances, it was he who managed to introduce a danceable piece in triple time into the halls of Vienna, which until today is known as the "Viennese waltz" and which, of course, the son upscaled. And it was the father who, for the first time, decided to designate the pieces composed with a descriptive title and not simply with a number, so that the son did not need a focus group to decide between The Blue Danube and Vals N ° 7, or 15, or 31.
Joseph Wenzel Radetzky
(1766 - 1858)
Joseph Wenzel, Graf Radetzky
In the exaltation of the waltz, the son performed brilliantly, by the way, but it resulted. unexpectedly. in that only one piece by the creator of the Viennese waltz is heard on today's stages. This is the extraordinarily famous Radetzky March, composed in honor of the Austrian Field Marshal, Joseph Wenzel, Count Radeztky, whose glory at the time would consist in safeguarding Austria's military might during the clashes of 1848-49, in the framework of the Italian independence wars.
The "New Year" March
The father was far from the brilliance of the son, but his ingenuity was enough for his rightfully famous march to be heard every morning of the first day of January in the Musikverein Hall of Vienna. The Radetzky March is the jubilant piece destined to proudly close the proverbial New Year's Concert in that city.
During the performance of the piece, tradition prescribes that the conductor turns to the audience and invites them to clap out the rhythm. This is what we see the young and remarkable Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, doing on the occasion of a tour of Europe, leading the no less outstanding Venezuelan group, the Simon Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra.
In 1924, jazzband director Paul Whiteman conducted the premiere of a composition he had requested from George Gerswhin and which was intended to link jazz with classical music. The released piece was Rhapsody in Blue. Twenty-five years later, already retired from the stage, and perhaps sure that he would never again establish relationships with a top-ranking musician, Whiteman had to welcome – in his role as a TV host in a show promoting young talents – a five-year-old boy who played the piano leaving the audience astounded.
Boulanger's invitation
The boy's name was Keith Jarret and he had started studying piano two years earlier. Some time after his first formal performance at age seven playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Saint-Saens, an invitation was issued to him. He was invited to Paris to continue studies with the most important music pedagogue of the time, Nadia Boulanger, who had taught Daniel Barenboim and Dinu Lipatti to play the piano, to name just two of his talented students. Keith's mother was delighted with the news, but the adolescent Jarret was beginning to feel more inclined to jazz than to the classics, so he respectfully declined the invitation.
A great improviser
This is how, at twenty years old, we have Keith enjoying life and music in clubs in Boston and New York, in his role as a cocktail pianist. In the latter city, he joined a jazz group and soon after recorded his first compositions. Despite being part of numerous jazz trios and quartets in the seventies, it is also the time when he began to perform alone, just him, his music and his piano. In 1975, a very young seventeen-year-old German businesswoman encouraged him to give a concert with a "repertoire" consisting exclusively of improvisations.
The Köhln Concert
The concert was held at the Köhln Opera House on January 24, with the venue packed with enthusiastic audiences. Almost as enthusiastic as Keith, who at that time gave remarkable samples of his brand, accompanied by murmurs, foot taps on the floor and movements around the bench; as well as his extraordinary ability to improvise, of which it will suffice to note that in this Part I of the concert the pianist stays for twelve minutes improvising on the basis of only two chords: G major and A minor. Then, it takes a breather and "expands" its harmonic base by adding one more chord: A major.
The improvisation, one hour and ten minutes, was recorded in its entirety, and it became, until today, one of the best-selling records of solo piano music in history. A few years ago, and after persistent challenge, Jarret finally agreed to make a transcription of what he played in Cologne and publish it, but with the compulsory advice that what was heard that night has the last word.
