Week 2: Crafting the story, and finding your intent!

My heart hurts too much to post anything for this week but this, and I hope you accept it as an offering of love... sincerely. The name of the hymn, what is it? :-) 

Merry Christmas!!! xx

I always have trouble with putting music into words. Most music to me seems a journey through different keys, or a play on contrasting sections, or more generally a creation of sound worlds.  The keys and harmonic progressions, rhythms, melodic lines, structure - all tell a musical story and set an atmosphere but rarely suggest a concrete "program" to me. The attached comes to mind ...

For my piece the Lark, the narrative is found in the poem which forms the lyrics to a song by Glinka, the 10th in a series of 12 songs of Farewell to St Petersburg he wrote in 1840. Then came along his friend the composer Bakakirev who transcribed it for solo piano and made it more :

famous than the original song! I attach the lyrics here 

Between the sky and the earth a song is heard
An unending stream of sound pours louder, louder.
Unseen is the singer in the field where sings so loudly
Above his mate the sonorous skylark.

The wind carries the song, to whom, it does not know.
She to whom it is sung, she will understand who it is from.
Pour on, my song of sweet hope
Someone remembers me and sighs furtively.

One hears in the opening a call-and-answer sequence, followed by the lark singing the main melody that starts simply but repeats with greater momentum and intensity. The poem suggests that the song is a message of love, longing and hope from a ‘someone’ to a girl, a soulmate. Playing this piece, I try to imagine the lightness, the delicacy, the fluttering, the freedom of flight that lifts the spirit and yet the sadness over the distance that separates 2 people. It has tumultuous moments but ends in calm and quiet resoluteness  (or resignation?)  It sounds like Glinka’s music might have been based on a Russian folk tune, a tune that plumbs the depths of the Russian soul. It is ironic that a people who knows only too much sorrow in it history should now choose to inflict it upon another. At this time, one also cannot forget the families and loved ones separated by conflict and force migrations. The Lark is a sad song that conjures up multiple meanings as I write, but one lives in hope and hope is what the song also bears. (How to express all of that in my playing may be something beyond me!) Here’s wishing everyone peace and joy, Merry Xmas! 

Crafting a story about two Scarlatti Sonatas as K27 and K141 leads us to a time travel. I imagine Scarlatti walking through the streets of Madrid -after have accomplished his duties as Music Master of the Spanish Court, especially with his pupil and friend the Queen (María Bárbara de Braganza), an excellent keyboard player-. And it is very clear that those walks were not trivial, since Scarlatti stopped here and there; he stopped and listened very carefully to the many boisterous street musicians.

A world of melodies and rhythms populated the alleys of Madrid, a mishmash of singers, dancers, guitars, castanets... All his infiltrated the mind of Scarlatti, who created a personal style, fresh and multicolored, appreciated by many great composers and performers of the following centuries. That world can be found in the K27 and K141 Sonatas: rhythmic and harmonic sequences, repetitive melodic turns and evident popular dancing spirit. A joy to play.