Music History Monday Robert Greenberg

Gaston Leroux’s Paris Opera House (today the Palais Leroux) in 1875, the year of its inauguration





Before we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage.  Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909.







On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779).  We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured.







Installing the six-ton chandelier





The disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927).  The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux.







About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that:









“When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. [Christopher Mead, author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism] was mesmerized by [the opera house house]. ‘You can see why it inspired Leroux,’ he said. ‘You could invent a whole world there.’”









Which, of course, is precisely what Gaston Leroux did.







Onwards to the star attraction of today’s post!







Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38





With our heads bowed, we mark the death – 128 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.







She was among the great pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her adult contemporaries.  She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons we will discuss in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise.  She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the spiritual muse of her best friend, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  Most of all she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.







No One Escapes This Life Unscathed, But When it Came to Clara . . .







Next time one of us gets into a self-pitying funk (at which I am a particular virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Clara Schumann and her life as a cautionary tale, as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side.  If such reflection doesn’t temper our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.…









Continue reading on Patreon









a href="https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?

World Cocktail Day! Whoever wrote the copy for this notice was clearly well into their third, perhaps fourth cocktail





We recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day!







National Days, Weeks, and Months!







Who creates these damned things?







We’ll get to that in a moment.  But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month).







In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President.  There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off.  However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month).  The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning.  Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals.







A different sort of “cocktail” day, May 13 is also National Fruit Cocktail Day!





According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day.  May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of Dementia Awareness Week; Water Savings Week; American Craft Beer Week; National Salvation Army Week; National Stationary Week; and National Smile Month.







I am oh-so-tempted to call this list of promotional idiocy, well, idiocy.  But that today is both World Cocktail Day and the first day of American Craft Beer Week has gratefully given us the hook for both today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post: the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers, and drinking songs we should all know (and love).







A Disclaimer and a Necessary, Pre-emptive Point







First the disclaimer.  While I like my dry, gin martinis as much as the next guy – hell, probably a lot more than the next guy – I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol in this post, especially in excess.  Rather, as is my usual m.o., my goal is to render as human as I can composers who are otherwise pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.







And now the necessary point. Today, some of us tend to be very judgmental about the regular consumption of alcohol.  And no wonder: given its potentially addictive nature and sometimes adverse effects on our bodies, moods, and minds, it is – for many people – nothing less than poison.  But for most of us it is a great pleasure in a life otherwise in short supply of such.







Now please: in the centuries prior to the twentieth, alcoholic beverages were more than merely recreation fluids but lifesavers as well, as the dearth of clean drinking water necessitated the consumption of far more alcohol than many of us, today, would consider healthy.  But given the choice, say, between a mug of ale or a pilsner glass of cholera-infected water, I do believe every one of us would choose the ale every time.







There’s a tendency, then – today – to call all sort of historical figures “alcoholics,” despite the fact that the word and the concept behind it only came in to being in 1852.  Today, we can read that Mozart was an alcoholic, Beethoven was an alcoholic, Schubert was an alcoholic; Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.: all alcoholics.







Please.

We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).”







Royal Society Open Science





Scoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London.







Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways.







The study’s abstract is as follows.  I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than to offer up a watered down and abbreviated version of the abstract by yours truly.









“In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyze the musical properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”









Fascinating, yes?







Methodology







The actual paper – “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)” – is rather lengthy; 4614 words (FYI: I let my computer do the word count).  Overall, the paper is characterized by the sort of technical jargon we would expect to find in a scientific journal.  For example: in the course of their introduction, the authors lay out their methodology as follows. 







“We adopted an approach inspired by recent advances in text-mining. We began by measuring our songs for a series of quantitative audio features, 12 descriptors of tonal content and 14 of timbre. These were then discretized into ‘words’ resulting in a harmonic lexicon (H-lexicon) of chord changes, and a timbral lexicon (T-lexicon) of timbre clusters. To relate the T-lexicon to semantic labels in plain English [“plain English”; if only!], we carried out expert annotations. The musical words from both lexica were then combined into 8+8=16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a hierarchical generative model of a text-like corpus, in which every document (here: song) is represented as a distribution over a number of topics, and every topic is represented as a distribution o...

John Wayne as Genghis Kahn (1956); not one of his finest cinematic moments





We mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C. 







By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States.  







Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer.  In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!).







Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House.  His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people.  Theirs was a musical household; both of Ellington’s parents played piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper middle classes at the time.)







Ellington as a child





And let us make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed of the upper middle class: sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, proud of their racial heritage and unwilling to allow their children to be limited by the Jim Crow laws of the time.  According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2nd edition, 2002):









“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.”









It was that noble bearing that prompted Ellington’s high school friend Edgar McEntee to come up with the nickname that Ellington wore so very well for so very long.  According to Ellington himself: 









“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke.”)









For the young Ellington, piano lessons were a must; it was, for children of his generation (and mine as well!) an inevitable childhood rite-of-passage.  Having said that, like so many red-blooded American kids, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled.  In his autobiography he recalled that:









“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would come on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play.”









(For our information: Ellington’s love of the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)







(Because we all should know: the Senators, also-known-as the “Nationals,” played in D.C. from 1901 to 1960.  It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its District fans and moved to Minnesota, there to become the “Minnesota Twins”: “twins” as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)







Ellington’s first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make such a name up?). As a teenager, he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, though as a teen his growing love of music shared equal time with a real talent for painting and design. …

I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna.  As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses).  I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here.







We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith.  Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States.  Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:









Read on Patreon









Become a Patron! 







Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday Podcast













The Robert Greenberg Store

Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)





We mark the death on April 8, 1858 – 166 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, editor, and music publisher Anton Diabelli in Vienna, at the age of 76.  Born on September 5, 1781, his enduring fame is based on a waltz of his composition that became the basis for Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations for piano.







Quick Work







We are, fairly or unfairly, going to make rather quick work of Herr Diabelli.  That’s because, with all due respect, what I really want to write about is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.  







There’s a powerful ulterior motive at work here as well.  In a field of great recordings, my numero uno favorite Diabelli Variations is the recording made by the Milan-born Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in 1998 and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000.  Pollini passed away at the age of 82, on March 23, 2024: 16 days ago.  As such, we will honor Maestro Pollini in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes even as we celebrate his unequaled performance of Beethoven’s variations.







Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)







Despite his Italian surname, Anton Diabelli was Austrian born-and-bred.  







He was born in Mattsee, a market town just outside of Salzburg.  He was a musical child, and typical of almost every musically talented boy of his time and place (and by “place” we’re referring to Catholic Europe), he was musically schooled as a chorister in a boys’ choir, in Diabelli’s case at the Salzburg Cathedral (where he almost certainly studied composition with Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Michael Haydn [1737-1806]).  







By the time he was 19 years old – in 1800 – Diabelli had composed a number of large-scale works, including six masses.  It was in that year that Diabelli, who had been trained for the priesthood, was packed off to the monastery at Raitenhaslach, in the southeastern German state of Bavaria. …







Important Programming Note







A scheduling note before I leave you.  I will be in Vienna leading a tour starting on April 13, which – sadly – will preclude me from posting Music History Monday Podcasts on April 15 and 22.  I will, however, be posting daily reports from Vienna on my Patreon site.  I would be remiss, then, if I didn’t invite everyone who is not already a subscribing member to join me at Patreon and partake in the fun. 







Continue reading, and listen, on Patreon!







Become a Patron! 







Listen to the Music History Monday Podcast













Related Robert Greenberg Courses