Lectionary Of Music

Excerpts from the entertaining music reference guide.

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Noise.

A collection of tonally unrelated simultaneous sounds of different frequencies and intensities, meaningless to musical or even unmusical ears. In radio transmission, noise is called static, and a similar electromagnetic disturbance in television is called "snow." White noise is an integral assembly of sounds of various frequencies.

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Geomusic.

A term herein proposed to define a relationship existing between soil and soul, between land and life. One of the most remarkable geomusical facts is that an area of some 75,000 square miles (about a third of the size of Texas) and comprising such culture centers as Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Leipzig, Salzburg, and Vienna, embraces the birthplaces of so many of the world's greatest musicians: Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn, Wagner and Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, Smetana and Dvorak, Mahler and Schoenberg. The most accomplished violinists of the 20th century came from Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania, among them Heifetz, Elman, Isaac Stern, and father and son Oistrakh, all of them being Jewish. What is the secret here? What is this peculiar affinity between young Jews of Eastern Europe and the violin? The economic factor is a dubious explanation.

The small peninsula of Italy generated the finest flowering of opera, a stage form that was born as an art in Florence and produced through its course of three centuries such masters as Monteverdi, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, and such great singers as Caruso, Adelina Patti, and Pavarotti. It also produced the greatest opera conductor, the uncontrollably temperamental Arturo Toscanini. Italians, in fact, have been in charge of most opera houses; the Metropolitan Opera of New York has been in Italian hands ever since its foundation. The most popular opera composer living in America and writing his own libretti in English is Gian Carlo Menotti (who for some reason has never applied for American citizenship).

If Italy produces great tenors, Russia is the land of great basses, the grandest among them being Chaliapin. The Russians did not enter the world scene as composers until the second half of the 19th century. The names of Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky testify to the natural gift of Russia in all musical fields. And despite the political upheavals of the Revolution, the Russian achievement continued to be great. Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich remain dominant figures in new Russia; Russian pianists, violinists, and cellists continue to win prizes at international festivals.

France contributed to music in a less heroic, less grandiose way. The French of the modern age, Debussy and Ravel among them, provided the music of sensual beauty, leaving the field of symphony and grand opera to the Germans and the Russians. It is the task of geomusic to account for these selective pursuits within particular nations. Besides the music of these nations are the totally different musical arts of North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Who could imagine until recently that the two greatest American orchestras would be led by Orientals, namely Seiji Ozawa and Zubin Mehta, that the finest cellist after Casals would be a Chinese named Yo-Yo Ma? And it must not be omitted in a study of geomusic that the most vital type of folk music of the 20th century was a product of the United States - Jazz.

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Barrelhouse.

A type of early ragtime, in vogue in the most squalid recesses of New Orleans and later Chicago. Barrelhouse rhythms are set by barrelhouse pianos, with the main beat in quickstep time and with the pedal used for percussive effects rather than for the enhancement of harmony.

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Paris Symphonies.

The traditional generic category for Haydn's six symphonies, Nos. 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, and 87, written especially for performance in Paris in 1786.

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Maggot.

Far from being the repellent legless larva that infests putrefying bodies, in old English poetry maggot signified a pleasing whim. In music the word was attached to pieces of pleasurable content, often with a lady's name, as in My Lady Winwood's Maggot.

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Locrian mode.

The church mode corresponding to the scale from B to B on the white keys of the piano keyboard. Because its dominant F stands to its tonic B in the relation of a forbidden diminished fifth, the Locrian mode was not used in Gregorian chant.

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Hymnen.

An electronic work by Karlheinz Stockhausen that combines the tunes of the national anthems of many lands as a vision of a metaphysical union of all nations. It was first performed in Cologne on November 30, 1967.

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Diapason.

As applied to Greek music, this term meant the interval that "ran through all the tones," that is, the octave. In subsequent centuries, it acquired the meaning of the range of the voice and is used in this sense in French and Russian theory books. The French word for the tuning fork is diapason. The diapason is also the principal pipe of the organ, usually 8 feet long; the double diapason is a pipe 16 feet long.

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Caresse dansee.

A short piano piece written by Scriabin in 1908. Scriabin was at that time infatuated with the idea of writing music for all five senses; he preferred to call the sense of touch a "caress."

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Wait (Wayte).

A town watchman in the Middle Ages whose duty was to keep order in the streets at night and announce the time. The waits figure in the Bible, in the repeated query, "Watchman, what of the night?" Waits often serenaded incoming travelers in their stagecoaches; they were also employed to provide music for ceremonial occasions.

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Zingaro.

A male gypsy; zingara is a female gypsy. The word is used mostly in such derivations as zingaresca, "gypsy tunes"; alla singarese, "in the gypsy manner"; and so on. Liszt, who identified Hungarian folksongs with those of wandering gypsy bands, used the notation alla zingarese in a number of his pieces.

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Universe Symphony.

An unfinished project of Charles Ives for which he made sketches between 1911 and 1916. It was intended, in his words, to be a "contemplation in tones of the mysterious creation of the earth and firmament, the evolution of all life in nature, in humanity, to the Divine."

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Torch Song.

An American slang term for a ballad of despair and lovelorn lamentation, usually sung by a "thrush" or "canary" (female singer) with sobbing cadenzas. The term came from the expression "to carry a torch," to care for someone deeply, especially without reciprocation. Torch songs were the creations of the jazz and swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. They were revived in 1970 with a more explicit sexual content, often reaching hysterical extremes at constantly recurring climaxes. The term wilted, melted, and went into innocuous desuetude when sex became open.

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Scat.

A type of jazz singing in which meaningless syllables or vowels are inserted into the vocal line. It must be rhythmical, and the need to maintain a certain beat or syncopated phrase prevails over the requirement of verbal sense. The scat technique became amalgamated with bebop, itself a word that consists of two meaningless scat-like syllables.

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Rebec.

A precursor of the violin that originated in Islamic nations in Asia. It found its way to Spain and France where it remained popular until the violin displaced it. It had only three strings and was rectangular or trapezoidal. This instrument was also known by the Arabic name, rabab.

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Psalm.

One of the most important categories of prayerful biblical poems to be sung with instrumental accompaniment. The word comes from the Greek word meaning "to pluck." Innumerable works, from the simplest plainchant, have been set to texts from the Book of Psalms. Biblical tradition holds that King David wrote the Psalms and sang them; he is therefore known as the Psalmist.

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Olla podrida.

"Rotten pot" in Spanish. The term is sometimes applied in the same meaning as the French potpourri (which also means "rotten pot") or olio - that is, a miscellany or medley of musical or comic dialogues and "exotic" dances at a burlesque show.