Ice Moon Prison

Tag: classical music

  • So Sad They Had to Fade It

    This article was first published in Crank Magazine from Pinknantucket Press in 2014.

    Back in a previous life, I fancied myself as something of a musician. I was self-taught, so I would play on the family piano what I heard on the radio. When my listening skills weren’t up to the job I would spend hours in the basement at Allans on Collins Street, leafing through the sheet music and memorizing chord progressions—something I was genuinely good at—for me to practise when I got back home. The sheet music was way too expensive to actually buy.

    So many songs on the radio would end the same way: Repeat And Fade. This would be what the sheet music said: 𝄆 eight bars 𝄇, then, as if it was helpful to me on my 1927 Becker upright grand, Repeat And Fade. In case you younger readers didn’t know, no, analogue pianos don’t have a volume control. The best I could manage was to play ever softer, poco a poco piano, until I was barely touching the keys.

    When I was older, I started taking music theory lessons. One part of the syllabus was “cadences”, with peculiar names for the different chord progressions that end a piece of music: perfect, imperfect, pluperfect, plagal, interrupted. Cadences seemed to me at the time pointless. Who uses them? Surely everyone just ends with Repeat And Fade!

    Apparently not, I was to learn as i broadened my musical tastes. Classical music hardly ever ends with Repeat And Fade1. Classical music is full of proper, perfect (or imperfect, or past perfect) cadences. And it hardly affected sales of their albums at all! When Mozart was writing his Requiem, he didn’t just toss together “Kyrie eleison” (Repeat And Fade). He stuck a proper plagal cadence onto it, sung to the now-famous lyric: “Amen!”

    So how did we lose the art of The Ending? When did composers decide, “screw it, it’s too hard to end this song properly, I’ll just turn the volume down”? Or was it the sound engineers, concerned about job security, putting their inimitable touch onto the recording process? Or was it the performers, too absorbed in their jam sessions, to remember how many bars they’d played? Is all modern music written by Stephen King? I don’t know, but I think it’s a cop-out, and it has to stop. All songs should end properly. Heck, even “99 Bottles of Beer on the wall” has an end.2

    My plea goes out to all musicians everywhere: Shun Repeat And Fade! Spend five minutes wrapping up your songs properly. Use a cadence if you need; there are plenty to choose from. Kids with their analogue pianos will thank you from the bottom of their too-cheap-to-buy-the-sheet-music hearts.

    Plagal cadence to that!

    Deborah Pickett (@futzle), like everybody, wants to rule the world.

    1. One well-known exception was the last 15 seconds of John Cage’s 4′33″ ↩︎
    2. Imagine if it didn’t: zero bottles of beer on the wall / take one down, pass it around / minus one bottles of beer on the wall. ↩︎
  • Peer Gynt quilt, Part 4

    Peer Gynt quilt, Part 4

    Number four! The home straight. While I was working on the first three Peer Gynt quilts, I was contemplating and tweaking the quilt design for the fourth movement of the Peer Gynt Suite 1, In the Hall of the Mountain King. This movement is one of the most well-known pieces of classical music and easily evokes a mental image. This is mine.

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  • Peer Gynt quilt, Part 3

    Peer Gynt quilt, Part 3

    Of the four movements in Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite 1, three have titles which immediately put an image in the mind. The second movement, Åse’s Death, was the most problematic to express as a quilt.

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  • Peer Gynt quilt, Part 2

    Peer Gynt quilt, Part 2

    Hot on the heels of my quilted interpretation of Edvard Grieg’s classical composition Anitra’s Dance from the Peer Gynt suite, chronicled in Part 1, I wanted to get stuck into the next quilt in the series. My next quilt would be the first movement, Morning Mood, a piece of music known even to people with only a passing acquaintance of classical music. Morning Mood epitomizes Romantic era music, painting a picture in the mind. I intended for my interpretation to do the same.

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  • Peer Gynt quilt, Part 1

    Peer Gynt quilt, Part 1

    There we were: me, my partner, and my mother, having breakfast in the Savoy Hotel in London before our river cruise, and the conversation drifted to Maurice Ravel‘s Boléro, as it so often does.

    An inset from Unraveling Boléro
    Anne Adams’s Unraveling Boléro (1994, detail), showing the last few bars and the rousing final crescendo.

    I recalled a painting by Canadian artist Anne Adams, Unraveling Boléro, inspired by this evocative orchestral piece. This painting represents the music as a series of rectangles, one per bar. Each rectangle is coloured according to the dominant note in the bar. The height of the rectangle corresponds to the volume of the music. Other embellishments correspond to the rhythm and the instrumentation. It’s rightly regarded as Adams’s masterwork.

    The three of us at breakfast that day all do quilting, and Unraveling Boléro looked a lot like something that could be quilted. But copying someone’s art didn’t excite me. Mum suggested another well-known piece of classical music, something out of copyright. How about Edvard Grieg‘s In the Hall of the Mountain King, from the Peer Gynt suite?

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