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This is day 23 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m
giving the story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for
ballet classes. All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD

Christmas picture quiz: What London landmark is pictured left? Click on the pic for answer.

Waltzes for ballet class have a number of inherent problems (see? I told you this would be a recurring theme).
 

• They are nearly all one-in-a-bar, so if anything steppily significant happens on any other beat, the chances are the beat won’t be there in the music to support or give impetus to it
• They are nearly all effectively in 6/8, and hence tend to waddle and sway (which is why people in Bierkellers sway inanely from side to side). Not much use if you want something to happen on 2, 4, 6 & 8 as well as 1,3, 5 & 7.
• They tend (and indeed, are intended to) convey the kind of Gemütlichkeit you’d feel if you were an upperclass Austrian in the 19th century. Not much use if you want to be a swashbucklng pirate or contemplate a crime passionel while you jump.
• They are subject to so many formal constraints that it’s difficult to depart from well-worn harmonic paths

That’s why this dance with mandolins from Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet is such a wonderful piece. It’s in 3 and in 8 bar phrases, but it avoids all of the problems I’ve noted above.  Best of all, Prokofiev’s harmonic language creates moods and emotions which (excuse the pun) strike a chord, but at last, after all that waltz schmalz, it’s a different damn chord.

There’s something so clean and edgy about this music, to play it is like opening a window, or taking off a layer of clothing on a hot day. Suddenly, a sissonne isn’t just a sissonne, it’s a gesture, part of a story. This music gives dignity and style to steps, and to the dancers dancing them – and what more could you ask of dance music?

By the end of this Advent calendar (sorry to jump back to the barre, by the way, but I forgot this variation ealier), I think there’ll be a recurring theme of ‘things which are in three but aren’t waltzes are much better than waltzes, most of the time’.

This is a prime example.  Instead of just lumbering from one oom-pah to another, this gorgeous, magical variation writes its tune in the air like sparklers swirled by  invisible hands on firework night.  It’s so rhythmical and stylishly articulated, you can’t help but feel impelled to do things on the music (like a rond de jambe en l’air or two, for example). And yet the metre is all implied by the rhythmic gesture, not by chords which serve the function only of establishing metre (i.e. an ‘oom-pah-pah’).  It makes your average waltz look like a building where the builders never turned up to take the scaffolding away.

There are a hundred other reasons to include this: it’s another example of a piece which is so well known you’re tempted not to play it for class, but when do, you wish you’d done it before.

But I have to own up that Coppélia is also a score that I love unconditionally and eternally, as it was one of the first records I ever heard as a child.  I could listen to it and play it every day for the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t tire of it. The mazurka happened to be in my  Standard Album of ballet tunes as a child, and I played it so many times that I can still play it from start to finish from memory today. In Music & Movement at school, we had to jiggle around being washing machines to the ‘musique des automates’ in Act II, which I thought (and still think: I can’t help it) was the most thrilling and magical music I’d ever heard, even though it was coming out of a mono speaker on the school radio at 11 o’clock in the morning. There were fleeting chords in the Dawn solo which seemed to express everything I wanted in the world at that age, and if I had to choose eight chords to take with me on Desert Island Chords, I’d be happy if six of them came from this piece.

This is day 21 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m
giving the story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for
ballet classes. All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD.

In my kitchen cupboard I have, or have had, a set of Hungarian chocolate moulds in the shape of hazelnuts; some individual Madeleine moulds, a coconut scraper, an iddly steamer, a packet of petits fours cases, a julienne slicer, a melon baller, a pasta machine, a džezva, a hot-water crust game pie mould, an easter egg mould. Whenever I’m in the kitchen section of a foreign department store, particularly a central European one (they are by far the best), I get an uncomfortable yearning to buy every strange mould, device or implement I can see, just in case.

I’m a bit like this with music for class, too.  When you find something like Purcell’s 3/2 Hornpipe from Abdelazer (recorded in the 9th edition of Playford as ‘The Hole in the Wall’), you snap it up and put it in the cupboard for those occasions, however rare, when you want to make iddly, bake a Gugelhupf or eviscerate a fresh coconut.

Through lack of use, we have become unaccustomed to the metrical and rhythm patterns of this kind of dance, so you scrabble around trying to make do with ill-fitting polonaises or triple jigs. That’s when it’s great to be able  to open that bottom drawer, dust off your 3/2 hornpipe and say ‘There. I knew I had one somewhere’.  The other way of looking at it is that having a muffin tray is an incentive to make muffins – and having a 3/2 hornpipe to hand (on this CD) might inspire someone to make an enchaînement in 6 on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

It’s a pretty tune with an infectious rhythmic bounce, but it’s the metric/rhythmic design that I love. It’s like the rose window of Winchester Palace in the picture above, which is essentially a triple structure (a star of David) but it seems to conceal its own tripleness the more you look at it. Put that structure with an enchaînement in a six, and you have a little formal miracle in front of your eyes and ears.