Maqam Şehnaz is a mode in Ottoman classical music, which is also known as maqam music, after the term used for mode in this tradition (maqam).
While homophonic performance has remained an essential part of its aesthetic to this day, maqam music started incorporating tertian harmony at some point in the 18th century, and the process was complete by the 1850s. This transformed the harmonic structure of the traditional modes to a significant degree, so that even the still bare, unaccompanied melody, now effectively implies tonality, chord progressions, cadences, and resolves melodic ideas (sentences) logically within the timeframe provided by rhythm and form.
The resulting harmonic structure is unmistakably tertian, yet it is heterodox with respect to traditional tonality, often breaking the strict rules of functional harmony. It is shared with maqam-influenced musical styles of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, such as klezmer music, the only difference being that in these modern idioms it is explicated by virtue of chords and bass lines. By inferring rules for harmonic development from the various polyphonic practices in these styles, it is possible to detect the trail left by the modern maqam melody to reveal a very intricate and dynamic harmonic canopy.
Şehnaz Saz Semaisi by Kemençeci Nikolaki
This late 19th or early 20th-century composition is an instrumental concert piece in the saz semai form, written in the aksak semai rhythm (10/8, notated in the score below as 5/8). The Şehnaz mode uses A double harmonic major as its primary scale:
A Bb C# D E F G# A
However, the mode exhibits a complex melodic development outline, starting above the octave with A harmonic minor.
E F G# A BC D E
Bars 1-4 (1. hane)
The first four bars (of 10/8) of the piece make up the first hane (one of the four non-repeating parts). They effectively conclude a typical A harmonic minor progression using the V-i cadence, albeit with the melody landing on the fifth degree (E).
Bars 5-6 (teslim)
The teslim (refrain, repeating part) then immediately modulates to the key of D, at first implying D major. Then, a surprising development in the second bar (of 10/8) of the refrain: the fifth degree in the key of D major, the Mixolydian finalis(A) is tonicized using a secondary dominant (E7) for the complete Gm-E7-A cadence. To understand where this solution is coming from in this modal context, one important aspect of maqam music must be considered, and that is its unique tone system, which accommodates neutral intervals. These are neither major nor minor, and the thirds formed with them, being exactly in between major and minor thirds, are unusable within a tonal framework. One popular melodic structure provided for by this tone system is a type of tetrachord (4-note sequence) with a neutral second degree (e.g., between F and F# in the score below, which doesn’t use a unique symbol for it like F+). Since the D-F+ neutral third makes for an unusable chord on D, Serbian and Bosnian musicians have found an ingenious solution to harmonizing this tetrachord which doesn’t even need to undermine its traditional intonation:
They treat it as a sequence of four notes (5-6-7-8) on the fifth of the Mixolydian scale.
Since the neutral second interval here (F+) is a neutral sixth of the implied Mixolydian tonic (A), it snuggly fits into the tonic’s harmonic embrace as its natural 13th, which is about a quartertone flat of the F# in equal temperament. Moreover, due to the principle of enharmonic equivalence between acoustically similar intervals, it even fits into an extended chord on the dominant (E7), being roughly equivalent to a pure major third of the dominant chord’s natural minor 7th.
Whether the neutral second is tempered or not, it is a key part of the history that led to the development of this unique harmonic solution.
Bars 7-8 (teslim)
After this momentary tonicization of A Mixolydian with a finalis on its V, the refrain now returns to the A double harmonic scale with the harmonic tetrachord on A, though the upper part changes to A Phrygian dominant. The harmonic backdrop for such a melodic movement is D harmonic minor V, where the half-cadence Gm-A with respect to the D minor tonic resolves the melodic movement, which has its finalis on A.
Note that the unusual key signature, which implies D harmonic minor,features both the flat Bb and the sharp C# as the leading tone. This is due to minor tonality as such not being a recognized entity in the theoretical system of this modal music tradition, wherefore subordinating the scalar structure A Bb C# D E F G(#) A… to the scale of F major would not make sense.
While some Western audiences might perceive this cadence as unresolved, this is the standard way that melodies implying harmonic minor V are harmonized—the internationally famous example being Hava nagila—and they feel perfectly resolved to the Balkanic, Middle Eastern and Eastern European audiences.
Resolved half-cadences are an important innovation of Eastern tertian harmony.
Bars 9-10 (2. hane)
Now the same principle of Mixolydian V tonicization described above is used in the beginning of the second hane to modulate to the key of G major (b7), which allows for a harmonization of the A B C D tetrachord, with a neutral second heard between A and B in practice. Now the finalis of Mixolydian in G (D) becomes the implied tonic as the melody rests on A, being tonicized with the same II-V suspended cadence in the key of G: (Cm)-A7-D.
Bars 11-12 (2. hane) & Final Remarks
In the conclusion of the second hane starting from bar 11, the melody reverts to the A double harmonic major scale, heard in full in a single melodic phrase for the first time in the piece. It straddles the line between two tonalities: D Gypsy minor V (D harmonic minor with a #4 and a finalis on V = A) and A harmonic minor IV (b2 #3), since these are the two tonalities that accommodate the two harmonic tetrachords and lend the chords for cadences.
Bar 11 ends with a suspension on the implied tonic of D Gypsy minor (or A harmonic minor IV). Then, bar 12 goes back to the tonicized Mixolydian finalis A in the key of D major, ending in the E7-A cadence.
In only 12 bars, this piece of music from an originally purely homophonic tradition without tertian harmony outlines a very complex harmonic progression with its melody, which moves quickly yet gracefully through three implied keys, using tonal devices like cadences to logically conclude melodic sentences. It makes use of harmonic devices unique to Eastern music, such as the resolved half cadence in harmonic minor V and the tonicized Mixolydian finalis ending in an authentic cadence using the secondary dominant of the key. Such harmony is also able to accommodate neutral melodic intervals alien to Western music in a simple yet ingenious manner, by distancing the implied tonic from the modal finalis.
From indie rock to SoundCloud rap, artists are combating the hell of modern existence with blank detachment in their voices, written by Jayson Greene
Graphic by Marina Kozak (Photos via Getty Images)
Everyone is “dissociating.” Over the past few years, it’s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out. One woman I know is currently dissociating via a series of increasingly eccentric hobbies—bead necklaces, candle making, metal-detecting. She’s hardly alone. A go-to pose on Instagram is the “dissociative pout,” where you assume the blankest expression you can muster. The cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann, who coined the term, also gave a name to the larger aesthetic—“lobotomy-chic”—and trawling TikTok or Twitter you can find countless riffs on the idea, from fake Claire’s ads advertising “self-care” lobotomies to Doomer memes about the hopelessness of escaping late capitalism. Lack of affect is the new affect.
So what’s happening? The easy answer is: everything. A pandemic, school shootings, the climate crisis, looming recession, the collapse of democracies and the existing world order—the response that many have to all of this is to crawl inside a safer space, to find refuge from the chaos. The world is teeming with threats to our physical, psychological, and emotional well-being, and in order to feel safe and secure, we’ve had to get a bit more resourceful than usual. Enter dissociation, the response at the root of so much trauma.
Anytime a cultural phenomenon spreads this far, you can be sure those neurons are firing in music, too. And sure enough, once I started looking for it, I realized I’d been hearing this hollowness across genres and styles, from British post-punk to West Coast street rap.
There are many ways to communicate spiritual shell shock in song form. For Mitski, volcanic emotions are forever at war with chilly clarity, with chilly clarity forever getting the last, suffocating word. Although she has the lung capacity to unleash operatic wails, she often chooses to sing about abject emotional states clearly and vacantly, like someone demonstrating the proper workings of a life vest. On “Fireworks,” from her 2016 album Puberty 2, she sang wistfully about dissociation:
One morning, this sadness will fossilize And I will forget how to cry I’ll keep going to work, and you won’t see a change Save, perhaps, a slight gray in my eye I will go jogging routinely Calmly and rhythmically run And when I find that a knife’s sticking out of my side I’ll pull it out without questioning why
It’s a vision of complete stupefaction, and there’s no mistaking the dreaminess in her voice when she ponders it; on her latest record, 2022’s Laurel Hell, she seems to have achieved this dream. “Here’s my hand/There’s the itch/But I’m not supposed to scratch,” she sings on “Love Me More,” and her music has increasingly come to feel like a dramatization of this detached dynamic. She lets her voice quaver occasionally before smoothing it, giving the sensation of barely smothered dread, of bad feelings gulped down hard.
The chorus to Laurel Hell’s “Stay Soft”—“You stay soft, get beaten/Only natural to harden up”—suggests a motive for this kind of behavior: self-preservation. If your voice constantly betrays your inner self to the outside world, leaving you frightened and exposed, then one natural reaction would be to turn your voice into its own kind of mask, advising everybody to look elsewhere.
All singing, of course, is a mask. Even the most trembling and overheated vocal takes are usually the result of at least a little advance planning. But dry, dispassionate singing asks you to notice the mask, to ponder that there will always be emotional truths that will be hidden from you.
If you prefer your blank detachment with top notes of mordant, self-defeating wit and a bone-dry finish, Florence Shaw is your woman. “I just want to put something positive into the world, but it’s hard because I’m so full of poisonous rage,” drones the singer for the London post-punk band Dry Cleaning on “Every Day Carry.” Imagine reciting this line into a mirror, testing out inflections—anguished, pleading, terrified. And then listen to how Shaw delivers it, speak-singing like someone you’ve just rescued from the site of a natural disaster. She doesn’t sound defeated or depressed, because those are scrutable emotional states. She simply sounds absent, her voice a sign at the door reading “No one’s here.”
She does this all throughout Dry Cleaning’s 2021 debut album, New Long Leg, performing her lack of feeling as if it were a lead instrument. The approach reminds me of the BuzzFeed essay “The Smartest Women I Know All Are Dissociating,” which went viral in 2019, inspired in part by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag character. Shaw’s voice sounds for all the world like one of Waller-Bridge’s monologues set to music, minus the glamorous self-destruction. She’s like an anti-David Lee Roth, committed to sucking the color out of the surroundings, and her presentation is so oddly compelling that the antsy guitars backing her seem to exist to serve her anhedonic persona. The closest her singing comes to a lilt is in the line “brain replaced by something”—the music of her phrasing suggests she’s never heard a more enticing prospect in her life.
If you prefer your numb remove to be of the more saucer-eyed variety, listen to Cate Le Bon. On her 2022 album Pompeii, the Welsh singer-songwriter sounds Zen, impenetrable, the surface of her singing egg-shell smooth. “I quit the earth/I’m out of my mind,” she croons on “Moderation”—presenting the desperate sentiment with the patient distance of someone teaching a song to preschoolers. On the title track, she sings about literally fossilizing her emotions: “Did you see me putting pain in a stone?” The surface of her music is shiny, chitinous, insectoid, recalling another masterpiece of dissociation, David Bowie’s Low.
Le Bon puts an eerie emphasis on her elocution, which is an excellent social-distancing measure to avoid communicable emotion. When we emphasize consonants, it’s usually to put up a bland facade, like when a customer service representative leans into the “s” and “t” sounds of “I certainly understand your frustration.”
The singer-songwriters Caitlin Pasko and Wendy Eisenberg both enunciate carefully, scattering fricatives and plosives in their wake like little land mines. “You know you are a horrible person/I shouldn’t have to explain it to you,” sings Caitlin Pasko on “Horrible Person,” and the pointed calm of her delivery is even harsher than the lyric itself. Mitski weaponizes elocution, too, inflicting this instrument of cruelty only on herself. “Fury, pure and silver/You grip it tight inside,” she sings on “Stay Soft,” mouthing the words “grip it tight” with exacting precision, as if each finely placed plosive might help arrest internal free fall.
The term “dissociation” was coined by Pierre Janet in 1889 in the book-length scientific study L’automisme psychologique. For Janet, “dissociation” defined how the memory of trauma split itself off from the rest of the self, where it could not be internalized or assimilated. Patients suffering dissociative episodes might find that they were reenacting the trauma in any number of alarming or humiliating ways. One of Janet’s patients was so traumatized by watching her mother die of tuberculosis that whenever she saw an empty bed, she would enter into a trancelike state and begin caring for an imaginary person—her nervous system going through the motions of the last act her memory could recall before the shock of the death.
“Unable to integrate the traumatic memories,” Janet wrote, “they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences.” In this definition, dissociation describes what happens to memories, not to people. Modern usage of the term fills in that behavioral gap, describing a strategic numbing. As a survival strategy, dissociation of this kind is ingenious, serving the precise function for our nervous system that a circuit breaker does for your house. Unfortunately, human minds don’t flip back on so easily. When they do, the process of “reintegration”—reconciling the traumatic memories with the preexisting self—can be painful and lifelong.
In the absence of treatment or in the face of repeated trauma, however, dissociation can lapse into depressive anhedonia, or the inability to derive pleasure from life experiences. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher coined the term “depressive hedonia” in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism to describe the patterns he saw among his twitchy, listless college students, who went about their motions of partying and consuming with a persistent feeling that something larger was missing from their lives. Depressive anhedonia is the moment in this cycle when once-reliable pleasures—food, company, music—begin to yield diminishing returns, until soon they give you no pleasure at all. Or, as Florence Shaw puts it in “Scratchcard Lanyard”: “Do everything and feel nothing.”
Flat affect is spreading in rap, too. Monotone delivery has been present in rap at least as far back as Rakim in the late ’80s, but even taking that into account, there is a particular proliferation of dead-eyed cool right now. The late South Central L.A. rapper Drakeo the Ruler spent years hounded by the justice system, cycling in and out of prison as the D.A. filed and refiled increasingly trumped-up charges. While this gruesome carnival ground forward, he released mixtape after mixtape of surgical, completely emotionless rap music.
His rap style was a surreptitious mutter, the sort of voice you might use to crack bleak jokes to yourself under your breath. When he rapped, you found yourself leaning forward, squinting, turning up the volume. His lyrics often mocked overt displays of emotion as meaningless, performative, pointless. One of the hooks on 2020’s Thank You For Using GTL was “do a backflip or somethin’, bitch,” sneered as a rejoinder to whatever might excite you. Three hundred thousand in the duffle? Back-to-back Ferraris? You know what to do. Remble, a protege of Drakeo’s from the same L.A. neighborhood, finds a novel spin on this style: He enunciates every syllable with pedantically funny emphasis—instantly legible, emotionally inscrutable.
Drakeo didn’t insist on his emotionlessness, or place it front-and-center like Chief Keef did in the 2010s. Back then, styling yourself as someone unfeeling turned you into a notable character, a sort of supervillain within the rap landscape; today, it’s often simply a given. There’s an entire generation of Detroit rappers— Peezy, Veeze, Baby Smoove, Shaudy Kash, DaeMoney—who adopt this voice as their baseline, who don’t so much rap as narrate their lyrics in an exhausted monotone. They rap in voices out of which all traceable emotion has been burned away, and the truths that emerge from voices like these are the hard, spare, lonely kind.
Then, there are the mumblings of Swedish rapper and SoundCloud progenitor Yung Lean, a man with a kid’s face who has called himself a “human mannequin.” Alienation and dissociation have been central to his music ever since he first got noticed, in 2013, with “Ginseng Strip 2002.” Back then, he was a curio, a teenager with a fumbling, vacant flow that most people chalked up to amateurism or incompetence. Nine years later, his glazed, drifting music sounds less like an outlier and more like a blueprint: “Ginseng Strip 2oo2” blew up all over again at the beginning of this year on TikTok. His lyrics, full of empty signifiers—AriZona Iced Tea, Mario Kart, cocaine, pizza—point to the hole at the heart of late-capitalist existence. He coined the term “sad-boy,” but he narrates in such a burnt-out monotone that it’s a stretch to even call it “sad.” It feels empty, even sickened, like consuming 10 bags of Cheetos before realizing it isn’t a proper substitute for food. If there were any bottled feelings in Yung Lean’s music, they gave up the struggle long ago.
Yung Lean has frequently collaborated with the like-minded Drain Gang collective, and though that crew’s artists don’t always adopt his bored vacancy, they make dissociation music just the same. Bladee and Ecco2k express a similar numb disorientation, but with flutey, high, fairy-like voices flitting about the mix. Ecco2k, who named himself after the ’90s video-game dolphin, sounds less like a human and more like a pixelated sprite. Whether he’s admitting to feeling “like I’m being pulled from below and from above, in every direction, at once” or alluding to extreme dysphoria (“Every time I look in the mirror I feel nauseous/Every time I look in the mirror I see monsters”), he uses that same high-pitched voice. The immersion in smoother and more hospitable worlds than the real one is everywhere in their music. Bladee named a 2020 song “Reality Surf,” a term that is a decent euphemism for dissociation itself.
The not-so-sublimated wish in all these visions of the beyond—sparkling skies, rainbows, and beams of light—is the release of death. But Drain Gang’s vision of death is neither nihilistic nor glamorous, just inevitable. A lot of it bears a striking resemblance to Buddhist philosophy. “Suffering stops, bodies drop/Flowers sprout, bloom, die, and rot,” Bladee sings on “Faust,” his voice dissolving like a beam of light into an N64 sky.
In some cases, this disassociated style can have a subtly political dimension. The British artist Dean Blunt puts the “dead” in “deadpan” when he sings. Whether he’s droning about a woman who won’t leave an unworthy man, as on “ZaZa,” or boasting how he’s “always ready in the cut, shooter dirty” from “SEMTEX,” both from 2021’s BLACK METAL 2, the signifying emotion, the rise and fall and tremble that would tell the listener the true meaning of the words, has been vacated.
As an artist, Dean Blunt is fundamentally anti-disclosure. “You don’t have to do interviews, you haven’t got to do shit,” he once told NPR. “You just do what you’re doing, and it does what it has to do.” The most forthcoming Blunt allowed himself to be in that interview was on the subject of being unforthcoming: “Too much discourse is pointless,” he said, when asked about the advent of Black Lives Matter in America. “When you have a lot of people together […] at some point, it’s all going to fuck up.” Overall, he doesn’t seem paranoid about his disclosures, just careful; lurking behind his wariness you sense the steely conviction that “sharing” might not be the cost-free act everyone always makes it out to be.
The only way words interest Blunt is as symbols of meaninglessness, yellow traffic lights blinking down an empty road. Like Florence Shaw, who assembles her lyrics from articles, comments sections, advertisements, and overheard conversations, he stitches together bits of language from disparate sources. These snatched thoughts meet each other in the marooned, alien environment of Blunt’s music, inside of which everything is an echo. On 2013’s “The Redeemer,” he samples Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Daddy” and Puff Daddy’s screaming; the only thing uniting them is Blunt’s own disinterested gaze. As he drifts through the emptiness, all of it resembles flotsam lost in the drift, newsprint floating down a post-apocalypse street.
He does the same thing on his latest collection of freestyles, covering “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” by Queens of the Stone Age and PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me,” taking two songs full of combustible emotion and stripping them of all signifying marks. What’s left is the curious shape the song makes on the page. The words themselves are mere husks, dried spit on a page, all the air that animated them gone.
Geordie Greep, of the British prog-punk group black midi, often treats words with the same forensic distance. Sometimes, he sings in a croon florid enough to suggest irony or mockery underneath. But just as often, he declaims in an acrid monotone, mimicking an auctioneer, a figure whose speech is purposely devoid of affect, just a strafing of data. On the recent single “Welcome to Hell,” Greep assumes the sardonic demeanor of a military captain sending a soldier out on shore leave. “Don’t tell me of your troubles, your emotional grief,” he barks, before advising that “the painless plainness of military life resumes tomorrow night.” As the rhythm section pistons away, you can’t reliably say if Greep is angry, sarcastic, or horrified. He’s completely implacable.
Maybe this style of singing makes sense for an age when reality itself seems to speak to us in angry riddles, when glimpsing the “news” feels like peeling open a portal directly to hell. Maybe, at hellish moments in human history, emotional illegibility starts making more intuitive sense.
After the Nazi death camps were discovered in 1945, and with all the horrors that unfolded in World War II, Western culture became exhausted with itself, with its will to dominion, its appetites, its capacity to destroy. Extravagant emotional gestures suddenly seemed inappropriate, even dangerous. The critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that tonality itself betrayed a will to fascism, and even the faintest whiff of capital-R Romantic string writing was suddenly suspect. After Beethoven was played in the gas chambers, what sort of music could a composer make that might escape being made to serve humanity’s most vile ends? Maybe we needed to put some safeguards on our emotional impulses.
The answer came in 12-tone writing, a dense and forbidding composing style that Arnold Schoenberg had pioneered in the 1920s, following World War I, in which composers had to employ each of the tones in the 12-note chromatic scale before repeating one. In its time, 12-tone writing was known for its fanatical adherents as well as its reputation for clearing audience halls, but it had survived the Nazi era without the taint of totalitarianism. An entire school of composers—Americans like Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, Europeans like Pierre Boulez—seized on Schoenberg’s language as a sort of moral path forward, employing and expanding it in service of music so difficult to parse for emotional content that the work of interpreting was left to composers themselves, organized in pseudo-scientific guilds. This music was “safe,” clinically proven to not incite any dangerous passions.
In general, whenever human history darkens, this impulse—to obscure meaning, to flatten affect, to don expressive masks—emerges. Chaos erupts, entropy spreads, mistrust multiplies. There’s some occult math at work: Overturn enough treasured assumptions at a proper velocity, and we will begin to doubt even our most basic impulses. If the current situation is a verdict on humanity’s ability to interpret reality, maybe our interpretation was the problem all along. Maybe there is virtue in remaining inscrutable.
Genius Musicians Are Making Songs That Play When Children Yell “Poop” at Alexa
Children just… do that a lot, okay
Many kids — and their parents — have stumbled on a fascinating discovery: that yelling “poop” at their Alexa devices made a certain song play.
New reporting by BuzzFeed about the defecation-themed songs reveals that the artists behind these gross and hilarious childrens’ songs found that as the streams have accumulated, so too have the royalties. In other words, hoping that children will yell “poop” at smart home devices is a sound business model.
The first artist profiled — Oregon music teacher Dan Helpish, who plays under the name Dandyland — told BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos that he was shocked to discover his song “Poopy Stupid Butt” had become a pandemic favorite.
Helpish said that the song was written collaboratively between himself, his partner and music school co-runner Kristen Muir, and their special needs students when they prompted three students to come up with a phrase that had five syllables. One girl hollered “poopy stupid butt!” and the rest was history as the kids began riffing off of the theme, with Helpish writing down their muses’ every word.
The result was “Poopy Stupid Butt,” which Helpish uploaded to Amazon Music and subsequently forgot about until COVID-19 lockdowns began and kids were stuck at home alongside their parents and devices. The song that once garnered about $100 in streaming revenue per month suddenly began racking up plays, and ultimately the couple earned more than $10,000 in revenue from more than 10 million streams.
As Notopoulos notes from “lived experience,” children love to yell “poop” at Alexa devices, and when they do, songs like “Poopy Stupid Butt” tend to play. Another Alexa favorite, she found, are those written by SEO expert musician Matt Farley, who has a bunch of goofy songs about poop under the stage names “The Toilet Bowl Cleaners” and “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee.”
Though Farley suggested in 2021 that his poop songs were hits due to kids having fun in their parents’ Spotify accounts, he added in his interview with BuzzFeed that Amazon Music does account for his main streaming income, which lends credence to Notopoulos’ theory. (Amazon didn’t respond to BuzzFeed’s request for comment.)
“Amazon is at least 30% of my income, and the others go down from there,” Farley told the reporter. “It’s gotta be from Alexa. Amazon Music isn’t something big music fans use.”
Until Amazon confirms or denies that children yelling “poop” at Alexa devices has resulted in a huge streaming uptick for artists who publish potty humor songs on its streaming service, there’s no way to know whether or not the theory is correct.
But given that kids love yelling about poop and that these artists have made money from their poop-themed songs for kids, it’s not a far stretch.
Inside the Extraordinary Experiment to Save the Stradivarius Sound
An entire town went quiet so the world’s most iconic violin could be immortalized by Chuck Squatriglia
The masterpieces that Antonio Stradivari created three centuries ago will not live forever. One museum hopes digitizing their melodious voice will save them for future generations. Photo by Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures
Antonio De Lorenzi takes a seat onstage in the concert hall of Museo del Violino in Cremona, Italy, and carefully tucks a Stradivarius under his chin. The violin, crafted in 1727 and called Vesuvio, gleams red in the soft light of the auditorium. Through an earpiece, the soloist hears a metronomic beat as a voice says, “Go.”
De Lorenzi draws his bow across the lowest string and plays G for half a beat. He pauses, then follows with A-flat. Then A. He moves up the scale, never changing his pace as he works through all four strings. Once he finishes, he repeats the exercise, this time sounding each tone just a bit faster.
Clearly, this is no ordinary concert—or a typical practice. Outside, police have cordoned off the street to traffic. Inside, workers have shut down the heater despite the January chill, dimmed the lights, and unscrewed any buzzing bulbs. As each solitary note reverberates, an audience of 32 microphones dotted throughout the auditorium silently listens.
De Lorenzi’s performance is part of a campaign to preserve the Stradivarius sound. Although many of the approximately 1,100 stringed masterpieces that Antonio Stradivari and his sons handcrafted in this town have endured for some 300 years, they are still mortal. Almost half have been lost to accidents, haphazard repairs, or the wear that comes with age. Of the 650 or so that survive, some have grown too fragile to play, their wood too thin or joints too weak to take the string tension or bowing pressure. Even those that still see regular use may change over the decades, as time and vibration slowly alter their mellifluous tone.
Stradivari remains the defining figure in violin-making, a name on par with Chanel or Ferrari. He fashioned instruments for kings and cardinals, and his creations bring their distinctive voice to the repertoires of modern soloists like Itzhak Perlman and Anne-Sophie Mutter. Musicians, luthiers, and scientists have tried for decades to figure out what gives a Strad its beautiful sound, yet no one has ever quite replicated it. And so the dream is to create a digital archive that will survive long after the last Stradivarius falls silent, allowing composers and artists to continue making music with them.
De Lorenzi proceeds, working through scales at varying tempos, intensities, and volumes with the precision and passion he’d bring to a Dvořák symphony or Verdi opera. In a stuffy, soundproofed room tucked beneath the auditorium’s seats, audio engineer Thomas Koritke, whose company will create a virtual version of the instrument, listens through speakers as his computer records it all. He will do this every day for five weeks, meticulously documenting thousands of variations of the sounds Vesuvio and three other masterworks of its era can produce.
The museum hopes this painstaking exercise grants the rare treasures a degree of immortality so they might enchant future generations. “These instruments have been played for 300 years,” says Fausto Cacciatori, a curator there. “We are committed to making them play for another 300.”
Recording the instruments required an array of 32 mics placed throughout the concert hall. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures
The Museo del Violino, which opened in 2013 to celebrate the work of Stradivari and others, sits in the heart of Cremona. The ancient city, about an hour outside Milan, began as a Roman colony in 218 B.C. and developed a rich, cosmopolitan culture under Spanish, French, Austrian, and Italian rule. By the 17th century, the town was home to a thriving community of instrument-makers. (Even now it boasts some 250 luthiers.)
Historians credit craftsman Andrea Amati with creating the modern violin here in the 1500s. But it was Stradivari, born around 1644, who combined three key innovations that helped accelerate the instrument’s transition from the chamber rooms of the Baroque period to the concert halls of the Classical: He designed his offerings slightly larger than his contemporaries. He flattened the arch of the top plate, called the belly, and made the piece lighter than was customary. He elongated the f-shaped holes that permit the belly to vibrate freely and allow the air resonating inside to more easily radiate as music. These changes provided the powerful sound and projection musicians sought. “He perfectly understood the new requirements of the violinists of the time,” Cacciatori says.
At base, the material used to craft any stringed instrument determines its sound. Violin-makers have, since Amati’s time, considered spruce ideal for the belly; its grain has the strength to endure the tension of taut strings, yet provides enough flexibility to vibrate freely. The best of it comes from Alpine regions, where cold weather slows tree growth, creating the tight grain that maximizes resonance. “If you choose a very good piece of wood and understand how to work with it, you’ll have a very good violin,” says Massimo Lucchi, co-founder of the Academia Cremonensis, a violin- and bow-making school in Cremona. Luthiers favor maple for the body and neck for its ideal mix of strength, resonance, and aesthetics.
The Museo del Violino preserves and celebrates the work of Stradivari and other masters. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures
Given the importance of wood, it’s natural that any effort to understand what gives a Stradivarius its storied voice would begin there. In 2003, researchers suggested that the lumber Stradivari sourced from forests in the Val di Fiemme in northern Italy’s Dolomite Alps was the beneficiary of an unusual cool period in history. For 70 years, beginning in 1645, average temperatures dropped as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit throughout Europe and North America. Trees grew slowly during this time, called the Maunder Minimum, resulting in denser structure with tighter grain that, the thinking goes, made Stradivari’s instruments more resonant. A radiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands bolstered that theory in 2008, when his CT scans of two Stradivari creations, three by his peer Giuseppe Guarneri, and eight modern ones revealed that the old masters’ handiwork featured slightly more-even grain. Skeptics like retired biochemist Joseph Nagyvary of Texas A&M University discount the idea, however, arguing that luthiers throughout the continent relied upon the same forest, yet their results do not rival the Strad tone.
Nagyvary, who also builds violins, has spent four decades seeking Stradivari’s secrets. He has used tools like electron micrographs and infrared spectroscopy to argue that a variety of substances altered the structure of the craftsman’s spruce and maple. He believes Cremonese luthiers used borate and salts of copper, iron, and chromium to prevent woodworm infestations, and that some of these materials bonded with polysaccharides in the wood, stiffening it and improving its resonance. He also suspects that Stradivari took the added step of smoking the timber in his chimney. Beyond killing pests, the practice would have reduced moisture, giving his instruments superior tone. “You cannot have a Stradivari sound unless your wood is preserved and restructured by chemical manipulations,” Nagyvary says.
Researchers led by Hwan-Ching Tai, a chemist at National Taiwan University, bolstered that idea in a paper published in 2017. His team tested maple shavings taken from several Stradivari instruments during repairs. Ionizing them with plasma and analyzing the atoms released by that process revealed traces of many elements that Nagyvary claims the master used to treat his wood.
Chemists have also scrutinized the red varnish that Stradivari started using in the 1690s. Researchers have claimed that the coating, made with the cochineal beetles of Mexico, contained everything from eggs and animal protein to myrrh and amber. But an analysis of five Stradivarius creations by French chemist Jean-Philippe Échard found nothing more than finishes widely available to luthiers at the time.
All of this speculation stems from the fact that Stradivari didn’t share his methods. He left no notes, no diaries, nothing to reveal how he built his instruments or what gave them their tone. Science can provide clues, but few believe we’ll ever solve the mystery. We are left only with the sound.
Vesuvio, crafted in 1727, is one of 650 or so remaining Stradivarius instruments. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures
One night in February 2019, Koritke was sitting in his small control room when he heard an odd noise. It took a moment to realize what it was: the soft snoring of the armed guard who always accompanied the prized instruments. A kind word from the musician gently woke the fellow. “We all had a good laugh,” Koritke says.
The idea for Koritke’s endeavor, dubbed the Stradivarius Sound Bank, started about five years ago with sound engineer Leonardo Tedeschi. The former DJ was working on a project using a software program from Koritke’s company e-Instruments that replicates an 11-piece string ensemble. Tedeschi found it so impressive that he wanted to create a similar tool for Stradivarius violins, which he was surprised to learn no one had ever sampled in detail. He pitched the idea to Koritke. As a fan of acoustic music, Koritke immediately saw an opportunity to preserve an irreplaceable masterpiece.
The museum’s auditorium was an ideal venue. Its designer had tuned the shape and dimensions to perfectly reverberate the sound of stringed instruments. “When I saw the concert hall, I thought, This is something really extraordinary ,” Koritke recalls. Yet he worried about ambient noise, and proceeded only after city officials promised to mitigate the interference.
Koritke planned to record a lone Stradivarius violin, but after discussing the project with museum staff, chose a string quartet. In addition to Vesuvio, the combo included a Guarneri violin named Prince Doria, the Amati viola known as Stauffer, and a Stradivari cello also called Stauffer.
His team spent three years planning the undertaking, mapping out the thousands of articulations required to create a database of every sound those instruments can produce. “It was all written out as music on sheet paper,” Koritke says. “This is quite a challenge. Most of the musicians had never done that kind of an exercise.”
Koritke’s crew spent a day setting up all the recording equipment and another three arranging the array of microphones. “It became quite difficult because there were so many in quite a small area,” he says. During each phase, the musicians would run through scales and arpeggios at varying volumes and tempos, performing dozens of intonations of every note. They repeated these routines for hours at a time, using different bowing techniques or by plucking the strings, playing thousands of transitions with exacting precision. “Sometimes the musicians would stop at a certain note because they weren’t happy, but we thought it was OK,” Koritke says. “They would say, ‘No, I don’t like this part; let’s do it again.’”
Outside noise frequently disrupted the process. Although the city closed two streets near the concert hall and a nearby parking lot, bicycle tires rolling on cobblestones, barking dogs, and clinking glasses in the museum cafe all interrupted the sessions. That prompted the mayor to urge the city’s 70,000 residents to keep quiet in the area, though there wasn’t much anyone could do about the peal of church bells or the drone of airplanes occasionally passing overhead.
In the end, Koritke captured 1 million individual audio files, totaling 8 terabytes. His team will cull the trove to create virtual versions of the instruments that anyone can add to off-the-shelf recording programs like Pro Tools. That means choosing the most musical and precise instance of every tone, a process he expects will take until early 2020 [this article was written in Winter 2019]. “You must listen to all of them and decide how they match,” Koritke says. “How does the G match to the G-sharp, the C match to the C-sharp, and so on.”
Tedeschi is eager to see what musicians create with the digitized string quartet. He sees the software, which should be available for purchase by mid-2020, introducing the instruments to new audiences through entirely new styles: “Maybe Skrillex will do crazy stuff with a Stradivarius violin,” he says. “You can use it in a lot of genres.”
The question is, will anyone realize it’s a Strad?
Audio engineer Thomas Koritke recorded 8 terabytes of data during a project that took five weeks. Isabella de Maddalena for The New York Times / Redux Pictures
The premise of the Stradivarius Sound Bank rests on the idea that nothing sings as finely as the original. Joseph Curtin isn’t sure that’s true. He took up the violin at age 10 and started making them about a decade later, in 1978. Like many luthiers, he developed an abiding fascination with Stradivari and his peers, and hoped to replicate the renowned tone of their masterpieces. In time, Curtin began pondering theories to explain their superiority until a physicist friend suggested he first prove that Strads truly do eclipse all others. “That’s when I realized there was no scientific evidence suggesting the old Italian instruments sounded better than modern ones,” he says.
That prompted Curtin and Claudia Fritz, who studies psychoacoustics at the Sorbonne in Paris, to conduct a double-blind study. In 2010, 21 soloists meeting in Indianapolis for an international competition donned dark welding goggles, and each played two Stradivariuses, a Guarneri, and three modern violins. Thirteen of them preferred new instruments, and seven liked one of the Strads least of all.
The two researchers drew criticism for their methods, which included holding the test in a hotel room. So the pair ran a more rigorous study in Paris in 2012 involving six violins crafted by Italian masters (five of them Strads) and six by present-day luthiers. They used new instruments that were weathered to appear old, and the 10 professional soloists once again wore goggles. Each used their own bow while playing during 75-minute sessions in a rehearsal space and a small concert hall. Six preferred the sound of the modern models. On average, the musicians favored the playability, articulation, and projection of contemporary violins, and none could identify the Strads with better than coin-toss accuracy. “We have yet to find that players can discern old from new,” Curtin says.
That, of course, does not diminish the quality of Stradivari’s masterpieces, or his contributions to the art of making violins. “I don’t have one whit less reverence for his work,” Curtin says. “I am challenging the assumption that they are necessarily better-sounding than modern instruments.”
All of this might be beside the point. Strad’s unique voice and historical importance alone make them worthy of preservation. Around the world, institutions and archivists conserve paintings, sculptures, and documents like the Magna Carta and US Constitution. Those behind the recording project say sound deserves similar consideration. “When you look at museums all over the world, digitizing their content is standard,” Koritke says. “Why not do that for instruments? It is a bit of a departure from traditional thinking to preserve the sound of something. This could open the door to that.”
He envisions museums allowing patrons to use a tool like the Stradivarius Sound Bank to hear what these masterpieces sound like. He believes that the pipe organs of Europe’s great cathedrals are likewise worthy of saving. You could make a case for digitizing icons like, say, Trigger, Willie Nelson’s battered acoustic guitar. Tedeschi favors recording the offbeat, even outlandish, musical creations of avant-garde musicians like Björk or Martin Molin. “There are,” Koritke says, “so many other famous instruments in the world that would benefit from being digitized.”
What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest.
By Maria Popova
Fungi are the evolutionary cardinals of the Earth — the first to conquer it and the last to inherit it, composing the living substratum beneath every forest and every field and every backyard ecosystem. Each cubic inch of mycelium compresses eight miles of fine filaments folded unto themselves — the original superstrings of this terrestrial universe. Wildly unlike us, they are inseparable from our creaturely inheritance. Since the dawn of our adolescent species, they have been touching our cuisine and our consciousness in ever-evolving ways, the underlying mystery of which we are only just beginning to unravel.
In the early 2000s, a series of groundbreaking studies began revealing yet another facet of that mystery — the way mushrooms respond to sound, despite having no auditory organs. One [PDF] found that high-frequency sounds inhibit spore generation and mycelial growth. Another [PDF] affirmed the correlation from the other side, finding that low-frequency sound waves stimulate mycelial growth.
The aptitudes and abilities of every organism — ours included — are puppeteered by evolutionary adaptation. This means the curious relationship between sound vibration and mycelial growth must confer some substantive evolutionary advantage upon mushrooms, honed over the eons.
Amanita muscaria from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)
In an episode of musician Matt Whyte’s altogether wonderful podcast Sing for Science podcast, Stamets offers a possible — and deliciously plausible — hypothesis.
In that peculiar and recurring way indigenous wisdom has of anticipating the discoveries of science, the folkloric traditions of many first nations across Europe, North America, Japan, and Russia hold that lightning strikes mushrooms more readily than other organisms. Stamets observes that we now know this to be true in measurable ways that contour a measurable evolutionary advantage — the 50,000 volts of electricity a log incurs when struck by lightning greatly stimulates the yield of the shiitake mushrooms growing on it.
This is where Stamets’s deduction gets interesting: Before lightning strikes, thunder sounds — a rolling tide of low-frequency waves unspooling from the horizon. Having had hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary training and triumph by harnessing the elements and the environment, mushrooms would want something to awaken them to the impending rain event in order to get ready to absorb the water and electricity so beneficial to their propagation. Low-frequency sound waves, under this hypothesis, act as a warning bell — a mycelial clarion call for duty.
Satan’s bolete (Rubroboletus satanas) from Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux, 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)
Stamets reflects on the deeper undertones of this interdependence:
Nature is always listening via mycelium. Mycelium is like strings on a violin, strings on a piano, strings on a guitar — these are filaments that are sensitive to vibrations.
Sensing these low-frequency sound waves, the mycelium begins “responding with joyous, bountiful nutrients” — compounds that nourish not just the fruiting body of the mushroom above, but the entire forest ecosystem — which, as we now know (thanks to pioneering forester Suzanne Simard, who appeared in the inaugural episode of Sing for Science), is undergirded by a complex mycelial communication network carrying simple electrical and chemical signals between trees and other plants. The healthier the mycelium, the happier the canopy, and the more plentiful the flowers and berries beneath it.
Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) from Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux, 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)
Returning to the consanguinity between science and music the show celebrates, Stamets reflects:
People coming together and celebrating with music: nature is responding with the mycelial networks being invigorated and inducing upchannel nutrients benefitting the commons.
The key change has been used by musicians like Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Michael Jackson for decades. Nowadays, it’s getting harder and harder to find in top songs.
Kevin Winter/The Recording Academy/Getty Images; Rick Kern/Getty Images; Ron Galella/Getty Images; GARCIA/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Many of the biggest hits in pop music used to have something in common: a key change, like the one you hear in Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
But key changes have become harder to find in top hits.
Chris Dalla Riva, a musician and data analyst at Audiomack, wanted to learn more about what it takes to compose a top hit. He spent the last few years listening to every number one hit listed on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958 – more than 1100 songs.
“I just started noticing some trends, and I set down to writing about them,” says Dalla Riva, who published some of those findings in an article for the website Tedium.
He found that about a quarter of those songs from the 1960s to the 1990s included a key change.
But from 2010 to 2020, there was just one top song: Travis Scott’s 2018 track, “Sicko Mode.”
How the key change is used in pop music
According to Dalla Riva, changing the key – or shifting the base scale of a song – is a tool used across musical genres to “inject energy” into a pop number.
There are two common ways to place a key change into a top hit, he says. The first is to take the key up toward the end of a number, like Beyoncé does in her 2011 song “Love on Top,” which took listeners through four consecutive key changes. This placement helps a song crescendo to its climax.
The second common placement, Dalla Riva says, is in the middle of a song to signal a change in mood. The Beach Boys took this approach in their 1966 release “Good Vibrations,” as did Scott’s “Sicko Mode.”
“The key is just a tool,” Dalla Riva says. “And like all tools and music, the idea is to evoke emotion.”
Key changes falling flat
According to NYU professor and author of “Dilla Time” Dan Charnas, the key change has faded out of popularity alongside the often slow and emotional ballad, which he calls a “bastion of key changes.” Meanwhile, hip-hop has taken center stage.
“Hip-hop is a rejection of a lot of the tropes of traditional musicianship,” Charnas says. Music composition has also changed, prioritizing rhythm and texture over individual notes and chords.
There are some numbers from the late 80s, like Michael Jackson’s 1988 hit “Man in the Mirror,” where the key change can be seen as both a mark of beauty and a cliché.
“You can look at that song in two different ways. On one level, it’s a perfectly constructed song, a beautiful piece of songwriting. A lot of craft goes into it,” Charnas says. “In another view, it’s tropey, maudlin and completely manipulative.”
While the key change was once a mark of musical sophistication, many now consider it a crutch. Dalla Riva says a lot of his peers think using the key change is lazy.
“It’s just like you get to the last chorus and you’re like, all right, we need to inject some more energy. Let’s just shift the key up a half-step or a whole step.”
Where pop music is headed
Some fans and pop music experts might be inclined to mourn the “death” of the key change, but Charnas says musical tools and composition techniques are constantly evolving.
“There’s lots of ways to get dynamics in a song and in a composition,” Charnas says. “Key change is just one of the ways.”
In the absence of key changes – and in a time where hip-hop and electronic music have gained popularity – composers have turned to varying rhythmic patterns and more evocative lyrics.
And if you’re one of those folks who wants the key change to come back, Charnas believes there’s one way to do it: fund music education.
“You want to know why Motown was such an incredible font of composition? Three words: Detroit Public Schools.”
Though it can be cliched, Charnas says he does miss hearing a key change when it’s used at its best.
“Do I miss good key changes? Absolutely. Do I wish more people could rock a key change like Stevie Wonder? Absolutely.”
The divine origin of music and flute in Greek Mythology
by Yulia Berry
The ancient Greeks thought music was of divine origin. The gods and Muses were connected with music, and some even invented musical instruments: the lyre by Hermes or Apollo, the simple flute by Athene, the shepherd’s flute by Pan.
The Greeks cultivated music at a very early epoch. They used it not only for entertainment and all kinds of events, but also gave it a great importance in refining the feelings and building the character. Numerous myths tell us how powerful the music can be. (Remember the beautiful and sad myth of Orpheus and Euridice?)
At the public festivals, such the Pythian games the Greeks also held music contests. Athens, the home of Greek dramatic poetry, in its golden age was the main city where professional musicians met each other. Public concerts became common towards the end of the Republic and formed a part of the musical contests. By the time of the Persian Wars the music got to its highest point of the development, which completed the ancient system.
Dancing and music entertainment became common at the meals of aristocratic families. Younger family members took instruction in these arts, as it was a part of higher education.
It’s interesting to note that the flute playing was limited to certain occasions, as its sound seemed to the ancients to arouse enthusiasm and passion [Aristotle, Politics, viii 3]. For example, dramatic music was introduced with the Greek Drama, but limited to flute-playing.
Let’s review some mentions to flute and music in Greek mythology.
Euterpe
Euterpe is one of the nine muses, fathered by Zeus. All the muses were assigned various roles and Euterpe became Muse of Music and Lyric Poetry. She is almost always depicted holding a flute.
Eustache Lesueur 1626-1656 Paris Clio, Euterpe et Thalie 1655 Louvre.
Composers often drew inspirarion from the Greek myphology. Below are a few pieces that any flutist, who loves myphology, can add to their repertoire:
Euterpe: Greek Muse of Music by Kevin Kaisershot. Composed in a moderate 4/4 time, the flute soloist gets a chance to show their technical ability intertwined with ornamentation in a light and lilting melody.
Athena
The goddess Athena was the goddess of wisdom, strategy in warfare, and crafts. She was the patroness of the city of Athenes and helped Greek heroes, such as Hercules and Odysseus on their adventures.
Athene invented the flute, but discarded it after discovering that her face is distorted while playing.
Hyginus included a great story about Athena’s flute in his book, written in Latin around 300-400 A.D.
“They say that (Athena) was the first to fashion a flute out of deer-bone. She came to the gods’ banquet table to play it, but (Hera) and (Aphrodite) made fun of her because she turned blue and puffed out her cheeks.”
Athena ran to a forest and tried to play it again by herself. Suddenly she caught her reflection in a stream and realized that her fellow goddesses were right.
“There was every reason for them to poke fun at her,” wrote Hyginus.
Athena got so upset that she threw out the flute and cursed it. The curse would severely punish anyone who picks up the flute.
The satyr Marsyas found the discarded instrument and learned how to play it.
Marsyas
Marsyas became so skilled in flute playing that he challenged Apollo, the god of music (!), to a musical duel! It was judged by the Muses and King Midas (who later got the golden touch). The terms of the duel stated that the winner could treat the defeated side any way he wanted.
First, Marsyas played such a wild and coaxing tune that the birds hopped from the trees to get near, the animals came up closer, and the trees swayed as if they wanted to dance. Then, all living creatures started dancing wildly, and Midas thought it was the sweetest music in the world.
When it got to his turn, Apollo rose, holding a golden lyre in his hands. He touched the strings of the lyre, and suddenly the music mesmerized them all. Never before gods or mortals heard anything as beautiful and emotional as Apollo’s music. The wild creatures stood still, the trees kept every leaf from rustling, and the earth and air went utterly silent. When Apollo stopped playing, it took some time for the spell of his music to break. Finally, the listeners fell at Apollo’s feet and proclaimed him the winner.
All but Midas, who alone would not admit that the music was better than Marsyas. “If thine ears are so dull, mortal,” said Apollo, “they shall take the shape that best suits them.”
Apollo touched the ears of Midas, and they turned into the donkey ears.
Karel van Mander, 1548-1606, Amsterdam. Landscape with the Judgment of Midas.
However, several versions tell us more about how it all went at the end.
The most notable are found in Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History, Hyginus’ Fabulae, 165, Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke i.4.2, and Pliny’s Natural History 16.89.
According to Hyginus, Marsyas was departing as the victor after the first round, when Apollo turned his lyre upside down and played the same tune. Marsyas could not do with his flute, so he succumbed.
According to Diodorus Siculus, who admired Marsyas for his intelligence and self-control, he was defeated when Apollo started singing along playing the lyre. Marsyas protested, arguing that it is not fair because he can’t sing while playing the flute. However, Apollo replied that by blowing into the flute, Marsyas was doing almost the same thing himself. Thus, the Muses supported Apollo and announced his victory.
Yet another version states that Marsyas played the flute out of tune! Out of shame, he accepted the defeat and Apollo’s punishment, which was absolutely cruel. Apollo had the satyr strung up by a tree and flayed alive. The legends describe how his skin was nailed to a pine tree and moved joyfully when a flute was played.
Guido Reni, 1575-1642, Bologna. Apollo flaying Marsyas, 1633
Marsyas’ brothers, nymphs, gods, and goddesses mourned his death. Their tears, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia, which today is called Çine Creek. A bridge on the river Marsyas, built towards the end of the Roman period, is still called by the satyr’s name, Marsyas.
The contest symbolizes the eternal struggle between two aspects of human nature and has been a favorite subject in art.
Paintings taking Marsyas as a subject also include “Apollo and Marsyas” by Michelangelo Anselmi (c. 1492 – c.1554), “The Flaying of Marsyas” by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), the Flaying of Marsyas by Titian (c. 1570–1576) and “Apollo and Marsyas” by Bartolomeo Manfredi (St. Louis Art Museum).
There are beautiful music compositions that will make a great addition to any flutist repertoir:
Lorenzo (1875-1962) was an Italian virtuoso flutist, composer for the flute repertoire, researcher and prominent flute pedagogue. Among his students was Julius Baker. He was a soloist of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Gustav Mahler and had a very successful flute career.
Pan and Syrinx
One of the most famous myths about Pan told us about the origin of his pan flute. A pan flute is also known as panpipes or Syrinx. It consists of multiple pipes without lateral holes, which are fastened together and gradually increasing in length. The pipes are typically made from local reeds, giant cane, or bamboo. Other materials include wood, plastic, metal, and ivory.
Pan was the god of the wild and patron of shepherds. He was half-goat and half-man. The Romans identified Pan with the Italian Faunus.
Ovid included the story of Pan and Syrinx in Book One of the Metamorphoses.
The story begins when Pan fell in love with a nymph named Syrinx. One day while romping through the forest of Arcadia, Pan saw a beautiful nymph Syrinx, a daughter of the River God, Ladon. Pan immediately felt a desire and determination to have the beautiful nymph for himself. Syrinx was used to being pursued because her incredible beauty brought her lots of unwanted attention from both gods and men. Syrinx was a skilled huntress who could move fast through a forest and could endure a long run. She could easily elude her pursuers in the past, but unfirtunately not this time. Unlike the other men, Pan was able to run for long periods of time through the forests and mountains without tiring. He chased Syrinx for days through the hills, mountains, forests and valleys of Arcadia. Syrinx was exhausted and desperate to escape Pan’s chase. She ran to the river, where she begged her father, river god Ladon to help her. A moment before Pan’s grasp, she was turned into wild marsh reeds.
Syrinx by Rubens, Peter Paul; 1577–1640, and Brueghel, Jan the Younger; 1601–1687.
“Landscape with Pan and Syrinx”, undated. (Figures painted by Rubens, landscape and birds by Brueghel)
Enraged, Pan smashed the marsh reeds into pieces. As he sat at the river bank distraught over his lost “love,” the wind picked up and blew through the broken reeds. It made a magical sound, which reminded Pan the sweet melody of Syrinx’s voice. Desperate to hear her voice again, Pan gathered nine different sizes of broken marsh reeds, tied them together in a line from smallest to largest, and named the instrument Syrinx in honor of his reluctant love.
In the end, Pan got what he wanted – he never spent a day without his love.
Pan playing his pipes by Walter Crane, 1883
The legend inspired some of the greatest composers to write incredibly beautiful music and flute solos.
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy
In 1894 Claude Debussy wrote a beautiful symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). It is based on the poem by the famous French poet Stephané Mallarme.
At the premiere in Paris, the flute solo was played by Georges Barrère.
Gustave Doret, the conductor who premiered the piece wrote in his memoirs, Temps et contretemps, 1942:
“There was a vast silence in the hall as I ascended to the podium and our splendid flutist, Barrère, unfolded his opening line. All at once I felt behind me, as some conductors can, an audience that was totally spellbound. It was a complete triumph, and I had no hesitation in breaking the rule forbidding encores.”
Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez even declared that
“the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music.”
There are many available arrangements for flutists who would like to perform the solo at concerts.
Syrinx by Claude Debussy
In 1913 Debussy wrote a piece for solo flute Syrinx, expressing Pan’s sadness over losing his love. The work became incredibly popular and is an indispensable part of any flutist’s repertoire.
La Flûte De Pan, op.15 by J.Mouquet
In 1904 Jules Mouquet composed sonata La Flûte De Pan, op.15 for flute and piano. It includes Pan et les Bergers, Pan et les Oiseaux and Pan et les Nymphes. There is also a version for flute and orchestra. The sonata is dedicated to French flutist and teacher Léopold Jean Baptiste Lafleurance, who had been a student of Paul Taffanel. Jules Mouquet taught at the Conservatoire de Paris in the early 1900s as a professor of harmony and composition.
Roger Bourdin (1923-1976) was a French flutist. He was a professor at the Versailles conservatory. He founded a flute quartet with Pol Mule, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Eugène Masson in 1945. Bourdin had a successful carrier as a performer, teacher and conductor.
Jacques Charpentier (1933-2017) was a French composer and organist. Pour Syrinx was published in 2002.
Daphnis
In Greek mythology, Daphnis was a Sicilian shepherd who was the son of Hermes and a nymph who created the genre of pastoral poetry and was taught by Pan to play the shepherd’s flute. In the later legends, he was named a teacher of Marsyas.
Pan teaching Daphnis to play the flute
In the second century A.D., Greek novelist Longus wrote Daphnis and Chloe. The story tells us about a girl and a boy, abandoned at birth and brought up by shepherds. They fall in love at an early age, but soon get kidnapped and separated. After several adventures, they reunited.
“Daphnis et Chloé” by Baron François Gérard, 1824-1825
Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) refers to Pan and Syrinx’s story. Pan is described throughout a flute solo after he appears to rescue Chloé from pirates. At the banquette in his honor, he plays a passionate and tender melody, remembering Syrinx, while Chloé dances. The flute solo became one of the most important solos in the flute orchestral repertoire and is often included in audition requirements.
There is an arrangement for flute and piano Daphnis et Chloe, Suite no.2 and more various arrangements for flute ensembles on the same website.
Orpheus and Eurydice
Ovid opened the Book 10 of Metamorphoses with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice (c 1814)
Orpheus loses the love of his life Eurydice after she is bitten by a poisonous snake. He mourns his loss and the whole world mourns with him. Heartbroken and desperate, he starts begging Hades, the god of the underworld to give her back. Moved by his love Hades agrees to this, but with one condition: he must not look back to his beloved before they are safe together again in the world of men.
Edward Poynter (1836–1919), Orpheus and Eurydice (1862)
He fails at the end, and loses Eurydice this time forever.
After three years a group of female worshipers of god Dionysys, called Maenads, blind hatred, teared him alive to pieces for refusing to entertain them while mourning the loss of his wife. His soul floats down to Hades, where he is finally reunited with Eurydice.
Dance of the Blessed Spirits
In 1762 Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote opera Orfeo ed Euridice. It was the first of Gluck’s “reform” operas in which he attempted to replace the complex music and plot from the traditional ‘opera seria’ for more clean and simpler structure.
Since the premiere happened for the birthday of Emperor Franz of Austria, Gluck was forced to change the bloodthirsty end.
In 1774 Gluck revised the score for a production by the Paris Opera and included a ballet part Dance of the blessed spirits, which contains a famous flute solo.
Hector Berlioz wrote in his Treatise on Instrumentation (1843):
“When listening to the D-minor melody of the pantomime in the Elysian-Fields scene in Orfeo, one is immediately convinced that only a flute could play this melody appropriately… The voice starts almost inaudibly, seeming afraid to be overheard; then it sighs softly and rise to the expression of reproach, of deep pain, to the cry of a heart torn by incurable wounds; gradually it sinks into a plaint, a sigh, and the sorrowful murmur of a resigned soul. Gluck was, indeed, a great poet!”
The flute repertoire has more beautiful pieces, based on Greek mythology.
Polymnia is the Muse of sacred poetry, sacred hymn, dance, and eloquence as well as agriculture and pantomime. Tersicore (Terpsicore) is one of the nine Muses and goddess of dance and chorus.
Different from other goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as divine spirits who animate nature, and are usually depicted as beautiful, young nubile maidens who love to dance and sing; their amorous freedom sets them apart from the restricted and chaste wives and daughters of the Greek polis. They are beloved by many and dwell in mountainous regions and forests by springs or rivers.
Other nymphs, always in the shape of young maidens, were part of the retinue of a god, such as Dionysus, Hermes, or Pan, or a goddess, generally the huntress Artemis.
Nymphs tended to frequent areas distant from humans but could be encountered by lone travelers outside the village, where their music might be heard, and the traveler could spy on their dancing or bathing in a stream or pool, either during the noon heat or in the middle of the night. Nymphs were the frequent target of satyrs.
I hope this article made you inspired to dive into the incredibly beautiful, dramatic and intense world of Greek Mythology and explore the available flute repertoire.
