Recognizing Rossini

Once upon a time, I saw this commercial in a movie theater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiMf5cCDy1I

After a couple more chance encounters, it became my favorite commercial of all time. I love Charlie Brown, and the music was fantastic (I always love it how Coke tags on the Coke jingle at the end of a commercial in the style of the music of that commercial. "Coke is the master of advertising," Dad always said. Think about it -- how many Coke insignia do you see in a day?)... but I wasn't sure what piece it was, or whether or not it was even extant before the commercial was made. I had a hunch that it was edited to fit the commercial for a couple of reasons: (1) there are two I - vi - I6/4 - V chord patterns near the end. The first one starts at 0:40 and repeats three times, and the second starts at 0:45 and repeats five times. These numbers are a bit odd -- we expect things to repeat four, two, or maybe three times... but not three times and five times (?). With this in mind, when you watch the commercial and listen for this pattern, it kinda sounds like a deliberate vamp. Also, (2) there are other, shorter versions of the commercial with cuts in the music. Yet, I am left with an unsolved mystery.

Life goes on.

A year and change later, the Baylor Symphony 2009 audition material is announced, and I start listening to recordings. I soon happily discovered that the music in the Coke commercial was a very cleverly edited rendition of Rossini's Overture to the Barber of Seville. 8^D Awesome!!!!

I was also excited to learn recently that we (the Baylor Symphony) will indeed be playing this piece. I'll have to resist adding the Coke jingle at the end every time we play it!! (I also have to resist thinking of Bugs Bunny dancing around with a comb and a pair of scissors.) That is such a fun piece to play; I'm lovin' it.

~~~~~~~

For another interesting rendition, check out this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O-hCtPfef8

Yes, I agree, after the first five seconds, you're already thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is terrible. A travesty!" but keep listening. It gets totally cool.

~~~~~~~

For closure, watch the Coke commercial again, and look for a quick shot of a girl holding a football. Then, click the "Charlie Brown" link above and note any similarities. 8^)

Charlie succeeds at last; all's right in the world.

Music and Lectures

Hello, all,

Here's your required listening for the weekend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuMhhIJ3T3M

(This video looks a bit funny because the video is a smidge ahead of the audio. Also, there's a brief hiccup in the video a few minutes in... pay these things no heed!)

This piece has been stuck in my head recently.

Tchaikovsky originally wrote this piece as a movement of one of his string quartets. This means that this piece was part of a group of relatively short pieces that form a collection generally called a "string quartet." Note that the word "quartet" refers to the fact that there are four musicians in the ensemble (two violins, a viola, and a cello), not to the number of movements (sub-pieces) in the larger work. By technical / dictionary definition, a "string quartet" is just a four-person ensemble (the instrumentation of which varies historically, of course), but the term has long since taken on the meaning of a suite written for such an ensemble.

Anyway, the movement turned out to be a big hit, and Tchaikovsky arranged it a few years later for solo cello and piano (or string orchestra).

The piece is known as the "Andante cantabile" movement. Musicians translate "andante" as a tempo marking indicative of a "walking" tempo -- it's not slow, but it sure ain't fast, either. "Cantabile" means in a singing style, or "singing-ly," to construct an adverb.

I discovered this piece because I randomly found a bass transcription of it in my sheet music collection. I'm not sure if I'll learn it and perform it for anything, as the arrangement isn't centered in a very soloistic register for the bass... which is almost indubitably the reason I had a hard time finding a recording. (I might try getting funky with the key, though; we'll see.) After spending a couple of hours scouring Baylor's electronic resources directory and the internet at large looking for a bass recording of the piece, I presented my quest to a friend who immediately suggested YouTubing it. I hadn't really thought of that. There was no bass recording, but we did find this (and other) recordings. For a dramatic (and awesome) string ensemble recording, check out this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEsgZ_KYPv8

What a melody! I hope it gets stuck in your head a little bit, too, so that you may carry it around and enjoy it throughout your day.

~~~~~~~

(This segment of this post was written a few days ago in a state of extreme tiredness. Please excuse any odd linguistic choices.)

So, I attended a lecture earlier this evening. The event was held in a spacious room inside the Honors College. I, however, am not in any of the Honors programs here, and I do not live in the Honors College building, so my campus ID card does not grant me access to said building. I was a typical nerd in junior high and high school, and I did all that that implies -- good ol' academic competitions, calculator programming, computer science / programming, over-extensive AP testing... Been there, done that, still wear the t-shirts. (My TICalc.org profile still exists, too. Should you have a need for a Hearts scorekeeper for TI-83+, fret no more.) As high school ended, though, I knew I had to make a choice between music and math/science. Reasoning that I would miss music more than I'd miss math and science, I chose the music path. I do believe that this was the correct choice to make... but believe me, I do miss math and science. As a non-Honors student, lacking the unique flavor of academic rigor that those Honors kiddos taste every day, I tailgated my way into the building with a faint, faint worry of being a fish in a foreign pond. I don't know too many people in the Honors College / programs, but I've seen a lot of them around. Upon entering the lecture room, I grabbed some seats to help establish a Brooks College (that's my home!!) base near the front. The room filled shortly afterwards, and the lecture began.

An hour and change later, my legs were feelin' it from the harsh limitations that the chair in front of me placed on their degrees of freedom. I was also past the point of tiredness, somewhat hungry, and almost cranky. I stood up to stretch my legs and look at the crowd in motion around me.

Generally, I'd say that I tend to be fond of crowds. Blessed with the bird's-eye view that I have, navigation is never a problem, and I like the feeling of being part of something big. It's like going to a midnight movie or book release, when you're able to tune into and sync with the energy of everyone else there. Having said that, though, you should know not to expect me, upon being released into a crowd, to go around and try to learn everyone's name or extract the life story of whatever hapless bystander I run into first.

So, after briefly contemplating the scene, I drifted towards the refreshments table at the back. That's when... it happened. Dun-dun-duuunnnn!!!!!! (Mind ye not my midnight melodrama.)

I started running into people I had seen before. I saw a girl whose name I had forgotten, but I knew she was in the School of Music with me. I chatted briefly with her and her friend (I didn't know his name either), until I finally gave in and asked if she could remind me of her name. She kindly did, and asked if I knew her friend. "No," I replied, and in perfect unison with the Mystery Man, I added, "But I've seen you around a lot." Mystery Man immediately called jinx, and all traces or hints of potential grumpiness gone, I laughed with them. Moments later, I joked with strangers about where the line for the refreshments table was (or wasn't) and who was cutting in said line, and soon after that, I was spontaneously aiding a group effort to determine what exactly the mysterious, carbonated, non-water punch-like beverage was.

In these brief moments, I experienced something that I do not often feel nowadays -- something from an earlier time in my life. I have my dear friends, of course, who I love very much, but this was something different... a unique flavor of camaraderie, but more than just a feeling of general chumminess -- it was like an instant identity. It was like meeting an old friend, or a whole bunch of old friends all at once.

At times like those, I miss math, I miss science, and I miss being around people who feel the same way.

~~~~~~~

I love, value, appreciate, enjoy, and am thankful for my training as a musician. I am proud of the choice that I made.

Just for fun...

While going through some old papers (and I mean old papers), I found this cool "Instrument Scramble" puzzle. The premise is simple -- unscramble the names of the instruments -- but I think this one has a twist!

It looks like all these "words" might have been hand-scrambled. Whereas a computer could scramble a list of words and spit it back out in a millisecond, I think the letters of these words were intentionally scrambled to create "words" that look like they could actually be real words. This makes unscrambling them extra-tricky, since one's brain will try to accept a real-looking word more fervently than it would a "word" that is obviously a randomized jumble of letters. Capitalizing the first letter in each scrambled word makes it even more challenging!

(Arguably, it is not at all farfetched to say that an algorithm could be instructed to similarly create scrambles that look like words... but, given the apparent age of this paper, I'm not sure that's the case.)

Enjoy!!

~~~~~~~

Sanctanbosoro

Hoxopaens

Rochefrhnn

Bromunaite

Eboo

Copolci

Prah

Momtot

Grano

Nivoli

Lenoxpoyh

Batu

Sabdoulebs

Osabons

Chamorina

Aponi

Bylascm

Remtupt

Ovial

Shicem

Litacern

Cadicrona

Lolce

Utriga

Riculdem

Numsadrer

Teful

Glinater

Mascraa

Ipimtan

Orphichards

Shilognenhr

Marsudbs

Slebl

Nobomret

Public Domain Music Resources

In search of sheet music? Check out these sites!!

IMSLP.org

The International Music Score Library Project is a treasure trove of freely-downloadable public domain scores and sheet music. Copyright laws vary from country to country, so what's public domain in Europe might not be okay here in the States. IMSLP takes no responsibility for monitoring who's downloading what from what country, so check the warnings on each file's page before downloading. If it's anything before 1923-ish, you'll probably be okay in the US. Search away!

They do have a ton of music, though -- looking for a four-hands piano transcription of your favorite Brahms symphony? Got it! How about a solo piano reduction of my favorite piece ever, the Enigma Variations by Sir Edward Elgar? Yes!!

CPDL.org

The Choral Public Domain Library, aka "ChoralWiki", does the same with choral music.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Bogoroditse Devo - Sergei Rachmaninoff

Hodie Christus natus est - Jan Pieters Sweelinck

O Magnum Mysterium - Tomás Luis de Victoria

I looked these up a while ago because I thought they had the potential to make great string arrangements someday. 8^)

The first two pieces on the above list were performed a few years ago, in December 2006, at the Baylor Symphony and Choral Union's Combined Christmas Concert... a concert I remember as the best Christmas concert ever. There were so many wonderful pieces; I'll never forget it! The cd that I ordered of that concert contains several of my iTunes' "Most Played" songs.

Enjoy the music resources!!!

Perchance, to Dream

When I sleep reasonably well, I dream.

I enjoy the good dreams and appreciate the bad dreams. Good dreams let me know what's on my mind and are usually fun. Bad dreams remind me of my fears as they leave me rolling over and wanting very much to wake up and get away from where I was moments ago.

Often, I dream something and then can't remember the next day if the dream was a memory or just a dream. Sometimes, I dream music -- I hear it in my mind, and it usually seems to be fully-formed. Invariably, it slips away when I wake up, and when I remember that I dreamt, I wish I could remember the music.

I did dream once, in high school, that I was making a short speech from a stage, and I managed to wake up and write it all down. It was kind of funny -- it made sense, mostly, but it read like I was making inside jokes with myself, linking from sentence to sentence in bizarre ways that only I would understand.

~~~~~~~

Last night, I had two short dreams.

In the first, I had just volunteered myself to be the student conductor of a high school full orchestra during class one day. I went into the band hall, and walked up to where they were rehearsing. They were playing a piece I really liked, though I can't remember what it was called or what it sounded like. As I entered the classroom, my phone rang, so I answered it. (Bad idea.) It was one of my friends, wanting to hang out. I told her, "No, I'm in rehearsal," and hung up. The head teacher saw me hang up my phone, and seemed to give me a slight glare. When I got to the podium, though, he handed me his baton, and I started the piece from the beginning. For some reason, I was wearing those shoes with rollers in the bottom (you know, the kind where you can kick back to pop the wheels out and coast for a short while), and as I conducted, I kept sliding all over the place, rolling uncontrollably, almost falling over backwards, and then almost falling into the students. No one seemed fazed, though, and we continued on. Everyone was sitting strangely close together, and the teacher and assistant teachers hovered around the edges of the ensemble, conducting in unison with me as we played the first few phrases of the piece. One of the woodwind parts was lagging behind a bit, so I turned around to ask the director if I could stop the ensemble to correct it. He nodded, so I turned again to face the orchestra.

The next dream was a fantastic, picaresque vision. I was sitting on a school bus -- the kind you ride in high school -- on the way home one day. I had the seat to myself as we stopped to pick up a few more students. (Picking up students on the way home? I guess so!) A few kids got on the bus, and most of them sat up front, but one girl walked past me and sat down in the empty seat behind me. I quickly gathered the necessary courage and turned around to ask her if I could sit next to her. She assented, so I swung around and plopped down next to her with my backpack. She had some kind of oddly-shaped pocket dictionary or thesaurus, and was holding it open in her beautiful hands. I looked over at it, and we spent the rest of the short dream taking turns picking out long words and making up silly phrases for which the words could be acronyms. She smiled brightly, and we laughed at each other's imaginative, meaningless creations in the calm afternoon sun that was streaming through the window. I had the time of my life.

The Secret Life of the Camp Counselor

In the summers after my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I attended Baylor University's High School Summer Full Orchestra Camp. I don't remember much about my first visit, but my second week of living at Baylor was one of the best weeks, I think, of my entire life. Those camps served their hidden purpose well -- recruitment!

And now, five years later, I'm a Baylor Bear and a music student, spending time as a camp counselor for the very camp that drew my attention here. (I'm actually writing this in the hall outside a friend/counselor's door... I don't get the campus wireless in my own room, but I have signal here for some reason. It's after lights-out, and everything is quiet and still... except for the Dr. Pepper machine down the hall.) Kudos to the School of Music and all those involved for running so many awesome camps. There's also a piano camp going on, and a choir camp coming up later, then All-State workshops... wow!!

Anyway! Last week was high school camp, and this week is junior high camp. The younger kids need a little more looking after, but the great thing about them is that (as a friend/counselor said) they're not "too cool for school" yet. Most of them are very enthusiastic. Yeah, they need a little direction, but they're good kids... and they go to bed at lights-out time, and they always wake up SUPER-early and are ready to go like pros!! The other great thing about this week's camp is that lights-out is an hour earlier than it is at the high school camp... which means more sleep / free time... hence the blogging.

During a meeting, one of my campers asked, "Has anyone ever told you that you sound like Kermit the Frog?" I was surprised, though pleasantly so -- a Kermit the Frog impression is one of the few items in my bag o' tricks, along with the Gollum cough, the Tauntaun squeal, and the growls of Watto. (Hmm... maybe I should work on expanding my lineup outside of the scum of sci-fi / fantasy movies.)

One of our evening activities for both camps was an optional Guitar Hero tournament in which students and counselors / staff were welcome to participate. I managed and oversaw the tournaments, which was a fun (though somewhat demanding) job. Juggling four brackets (one for each difficulty) over four TVs with students hopping up onstage to ask you how long it is until they play (or if they can go to the bathroom) will really take it out of you!! It was definitely a blast, though.

Another evening activity is our faculty recital. This week's faculty recital is tomorrow, and I'll be playing the Rossini duet for cello and double bass with another counselor. That piece is sure a good 'un -- I'm looking forward to it!!!

~~~~~~~

I don't have a picture for this post, but I do have something cool to leave you with...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoDTjaw-ZUA

This is from last week's talent show. We didn't announce what song we were playing before we started... hence the rock concert-esque cheering at the beginning. Enjoy!!

Medieval Music Mystery in the Armstrong Browning Library!!

The Armstrong Browning Library on the Baylor University campus is such a real treat. It's so cool, and yet so often sparsely populated, I often feel like referring to it as one of the best on-campus "secrets", even though it's not really secret. For those unfamiliar with it, the ABL is a library dedicated to the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is also said to house the world's largest collection of secular stained glass windows. It's a beautiful building... you feel epic just walking around on the inside.

On a seemingly-unrelated note, I was in one of the School of Music's required music history courses last semester. This time, it was The History of Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance... or as I called it, "From Way, Way Back to Way Back". I was also in British Literature. When we got to the poetry of the Victorian era, we took a class field trip to the Armstrong Browning Library and got an official tour. The "Treasure Room" (also known as the "E.B.B. Salon") on the second floor contains a room full of Elizabeth Barrett's furniture behind a crowd control rope and hidden don't-cross-this-line sensors. I had seen the room before, so my eyes wandered as I listened to our tour guide... until something caught my eye in the back of the room, behind where we were all standing:

Is that...

...medieval chant notation?!?

I couldn't believe it!! If I hadn't been in Music History 1, I would have never noticed or recognized those strange markings across the top of the bookcase. Our tour group soon moved on, out of the room, but as soon as the tour was over, I scurried back upstairs for an unhurried examination. As I went over the music in my head, I was hit with another surprise -- I had seen and heard this music before!

So, I went home, dug out my Norton Anthology of Western Music, and flipped to the Mass for Christmas Day, and there it was:

(image source)

The full text in Latin:

Puer natus est nobis,

et filius datus est nobis:

cuius imperium

super humerum eius:

et vocabitur nomen eius,

magni consilii Angelus.

And a translation that will be very familiar:

A boy is born to us,

And a son is given to us,

upon whose shoulders authority rests,

and His name will be called

"The Angel of Great Counsel".

(Isaiah 9:6)

Where did this bookcase come from, and what was that medieval melody doing carved across its front? Well, an inscription across the bottom of the case reveals that it was a gift from the English Department. Examination of an old black-and-white photograph in the upstairs hallways shows that it might have been around for several decades -- there are several bookcases like it, though, each with different carvings, and it's hard to tell which exactly are the ones in the photograph.

It was only while working in the Crouch Fine Arts Library and looking for Charles Ives' "Robert Browning Overture" (at an hour well-past the closing time of the Armstrong Browning Library) that I realized that the cabinet might contain sheet music. Sure enough, I looked around on the Armstrong Browning Library's website (which I guess I could have done in the first place), and found a description, complete with date (c. 1930), maker (William A. French Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota), and purpose ("one of two mahogany cabinets specially built to house over 1,500 pieces of sheet music").

Well, that solved most of the mystery, but I still wonder why, if there was a specific reason at all, that that specific chant was chosen (and who chose it) to adorn the bookcase.

~~~~~~~

As I mentioned earlier, there are other bookcases similar to this one in the ABL, most of which have interesting (if not cryptic) inscriptions on them as well. I looked around at most of them for clues on one of my visits... interested folks should check them out! Have fun exploring!!!