Think of the scene in Nutcracker where all the guests go to bed, and in particular the tune in the bass that repeats and fragments until everyone’s gone. Then listen to this:

and look at this:

From The Genleman's Musical Companion (179?)

And now compare it with this:

The Nutcracker (Taneyev reduction)

Coincidence, or borrowing?  In his article On Meaning in Nutcracker, Roland John Wiley remarks that there are more borrowings of tunes in Nutcracker than the other ballets, despite being much shorter. Tchaikovsky was, by his own admission, in a rut. He needed tunes. This hardly sounds like a tune, and it’s simple enough that it could be just musical waffle.

But it does match almost note for note a line  from ‘Le Reveil du Peuple‘, reprinted in The Gentleman’s Musical Companion as ‘The celebrated French air’, which is a song against the excesses of the Revolution. Since Tchaikovsky’s sympathies were monarchist, this has potential as a theory, and it’s a nice touch that this reveil is played as the people are in fact all going to bed. It also occurs just after the comedy battle in the party scene with all the toy trumpets.

Is Tchaikovsky having a private joke, saying ‘Calm down you lot’, or is this apparently meaningless transitional material perhaps the key that connects the reality of the party scene battle with the dreamed one that is about to occur? Is Clara’s mind beginning to turn boys and their toys into revolutionaries? Two of the characters in the party scene are called ‘incroyables, after all.   There’s a book on Tchaikovsky’s ballets which runs with a theory of Nutcracker as an allegory of the French Revolution (Petipa even wanted a carmagnole in Act II) – can’t remember what it’s called, but I will.  If this borrowing is what I think it is, then the story has more legs than you might think.   I’ve googled but I can’t find any evidence online that someone has found this tune before. Do I win a prize, or am I the last to find out?

This is probably the most interesting video I’ve ever seen on a musical question. If you want to know why, read on below the clip. As it happens, I’ve posted this on Robert Burns Day/Burns Night, so the Scottish theme couldn’t be more appropriate.

Philip Tagg and his articles have kept me sane since the day I discovered him somewhere around 1999.  He gets inside the same questions that perplex me about music, and is one of the few musicologists that make much sense when it comes to understanding dance and music.  One of the things that has intrigued me for years and years is the ‘Scotch snap’.

I’ve probably thought about it daily for about 10 years, mainly because of the Waltz in the ballet Giselle (1841) and that Mozart minuet in E flat, both of which exhibit scotch snaps in 3/4 time, and because my yearly trips to Prague have given me occasion to overhear Scotch snaps in Czech music, or at least folk music that’s played in Prague (which might be Slovakian or Hungarian, or Romanian, depending on who’s playing it, and when your maps were drawn).  One pianist I know deliberately plays the scotch snaps in the Giselle waltz as if they’re before the beat. When I asked him why, he said he’s always thought that bit ‘sounded silly’ if you play it like it’s written. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether some scotch snaps in classical music are  just notational errors:  I seem to remember reading that there are  instances where copyists would write a dotted rhythm using the semiquaver first as a kind of shorthand meaning the opposite. Can’t remember where I read that, unfortunately.

And there’s more: as a student of living in Zagreb, I remember being fascinated by the comment of a Croatian translator who noted that since all stress in Croatian was tonic, there was no iambic poetry in that language. Considering that iambs are so common in English (think of all those children’s skipping songs) the idea that a language could just exist without an iamb to speak of seemed bizarre. But I speak Croatian, so I know that it’s not.  Then there’s the added fact that Croatian/Serbian have accents of length as well as of stress, sometimes it’s really difficult to tell whether someone’s elongating a vowel, or stressing it – so someone could tell you that the accent is on the first syllable of a word, but to me it sounds like it’s on the second, because it’s a long vowel (the same is true of Czech sometimes).

The great thing about this video is that Tagg has done all the work that I knew needed to be done, but I wondered if I’d ever live long enough to start doing it. It’s a wonderful advert for the kind of interdisciplinarity that makes me get up in the morning, and which Tagg himself advocates in his 2011 article Caught on the back foot.  By the end of the video, there are just even more questions to ask, which to me is what good research is all about. And Tagg’s conclusion – that you should be looking for class divisions before ethnic ones if you want to understand issues like this in music – resonates hugely with a great article I read yesterday on the concept of the ‘ballet boy’ (Time to confront Willis’ lads with a ballet class?) – in which the author says that it’s class, not gender that’s the issue in ballet & Billy Elliot, but gender’s an easier issue to tackle if you’re trying to pretend that you live in a classless society.

What a fantastic resource this is: a truly whistle-stop guide from the Victoria Sings programme to everything that is current and trending in the world of interdisciplinary music studies (not that this even does justice to the range of things covered here). Thinking about musicking? The origins, purpose, function, results and value of music is one of the best guides I’ve seen to the array of disciplines and authors that are relevant to my subject area of music and dance in educational and training contexts.  The longer I work in this field, the more remote I feel from many of my colleagues, because it’s not a field, it’s a federation of fields like Suffolk seen from above. But suddenly, looking at this page, I don’t feel weird any more, and it’s nice to know that others are trying to draw it all together too.

The main part of the page is a very accessible, concise glossary of terms used across the disciplines (like rhythm, music perception, amusia etc.). But each one is hyperlinked to relevant sources -  currently contains 96 keywords, 185 cited individuals, 160 institutions where research is carried out, 79 periodicals, 55 conferences and 1,922 articles.

Congratulations. This is going straight on one of my reading lists.

I thought I might have been alone in applauding the actions of a NI police officer who played music through the tannoy of their vehicle to defuse an attack by 15 kids throwing bottles (see earlier post, Phronesis and musical policing). But I’m delighted to report that Basil McCrea from the NI Policing Board (the independent scrutiny body for the PSNI) praised the approach much in the same way as I did:

If police are to engage with the community they need to find appropriate ways to do it and need to be creative, thoughtful and resourceful,” said the Ulster Unionist Stormont Assembly representative. This officer I think demonstrated those qualities with considerable aplomb. While this isn’t likely to become standard practice, this officer showed initiative and should be commended. [source]

An extraordinary story from the BBC: Police ‘cool’ Belfast trouble with ice-cream van music. Fifteen  youths start throwing bottles at a police Land Rover in Lisburn. One of the officers  inside has an idea: to play ‘ice-cream van music’ through the vehicle’s tannoy system to try and defuse the situation with a bit of humour. Guess what – “The youths stopped throwing the bottles.”

“However,” continues the spokesperson, “police accept that this was not an appropriate action.”

Now, call me stupid, but in what way is this not appropriate action? You’re surrounded by 15 kids throwing bottles at your car, and you use whatever resources you can to defuse and end the situation. You do that without even raising your voice, let alone using any physical aggression. Surely to achieve that peacefully shows imagination, resourcefulness, calmness under pressure and intelligence.

So what would the Belfast Police Service consider appropriate action’? To get out of the car and start acting like they’re in The Bill? Would have been better if the officer had used music as an instrument of torture instead? Perhaps there’s a whole bit of this story missing, but on the surface, it looks to me as if the officer’s only ‘inappropriate’ action was undermine the macho aura of traditional policing by showing that music – ice cream van music no less  – does indeed have ‘charms to sooth the savage breast‘.

That’s how it seems when you listen to Sinn Fein councillor Angela Nelson, who told a local newspaper that she thought the officer’s actions “beggared belief…The PSNI are put on the streets to do a serious job and that is to keep order on the streets and face down anti-social elements. This is like a sick joke.” Don’t look to Angela for the traditionally feminine approach: she wants her policing the good old bad old way: serious, authoritarian, combative, punitive, humorless – oh, and unmusical.

In Aristotelian terms, the officer’s action was surely an example of phronesis, and if anyone in this life should be capable of phronesis, of acting appropriately according to your knowledge and experience but guided by ethical considerations, it’s a police officer. And if in the 21st century, your average police officer has evolved far enough to understand that music has a role to play, as it always has done, in reducing tensions and defusing difficult situations, and can apply that understanding effectively under threat, then surely that is a matter for celebration?