TWO THINGS TO NOTE EVEN IF YOU DON'T READ MUSIC:
(1) The portion of the music that precedes the entrance of the piano, which I can tell you is a mere 15 bars, which isn't a lot of bars at all, takes us to the minute-and-38-second mark in our first performance, to 1:56 in the more gradual second one, but only to 1:52 in the overall-still-more-gradual third one. (I can tell you that the three performances are interconnected.) This is kind of a lot of playing time for a mere 15 bars of music on the page -- and this is going to be significant for our purposes today.
(2) What's called the "key signature," the stuff that appears at the left of every section of score and in this case is a cluster of "#"-looking things (representing "sharps"), numbers five sharps, which is a lot of sharps, placing us in the key of B major -- not a rarity, exactly, but still kind of "out there" as tonalities go, lending itself to the kind of muted, shaded quality that's so striking in the music; in fact, the marking "con sordino" instructs both first and second violinists to play with their mutes in place. Meanwhile the cellos and basses are playing "pizz." -- i.e., pizzicato, or "plucked," providing a strummed rather than sustained bass accompaniment. I can add (something we can't see or hear from the evidence before us here) that B major is about as startling a wrench as the tonal ear can imagine from the tonality of the movement that directly precedes this one.
by Ken
For reasons we don't have to go into, I have been trying to take in at least enough of the FX(-via-Netflix) series Pose to feel okay about abandoning it. There's enough about it that I do find interesting that I've been able to summon the patience to watch in spurts as long as about 15 minutes. In this fashion I've already managed to get all the way through Episode 2 (of Season 1, of course (the chances of my ever making it to Season 2 aren't looking good). This may not sound like much, but was I ever proud to get two whole episodes logged in!
At one point in Episode 2, for maybe a full minute and a half, I was all but mesmerized. It's when Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), the sweet 17-year-old boy who has been thrown out of his home for wanting to be a dancer (and of course for being gay -- pretty much the same thing, no?) and has made his way to NYC to pursue the dream and almost immediately (and utterly believably) had his backpack with all his meager belongings stolen while sleeping in the park, has nevertheless found a home of sorts and struggled his way into a place into a proper dance program, has so impressed his teacher that she has invited him to attend a ballet performance.
What caught me short was the music, which as danced has a mesmerizing effect on Damon but at the same time did a number on me. It's not just that it was such a relief from all the other music littering the soundtrack, but that it was both heart-stoppingly and heart-racingly sublime.
And it isn't even ballet music. I don't doubt that it has been choreographed, and possibly to good effect, but this just isn't music that I would have thought of as "ballet music." I think this becomes more obviously true once the piano joins the proceedings -- I think you can hear that the music generally takes on a somewhat different character once it does, which again becomes important in terms of our purposes today.
Significantly, this is music I know that I do know well, and yet don't remember ever being so powerfully grabbed by. We're going to be doing a fair amount more listening to it, and some pondering upon it, and also some consideration of a kindred piece, when we get to the main post later today. First, though, I've got to make a whole bunch of audio clips, and maybe do a bit of thinking.
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