No excuse for lazy....Pictures at an Exhibition

M Moussorsorsky

What you learn later when you don't read far enough as a kid!  

I started playing the trumpet over half a century ago and did OK with it over my life. Certainly had a lot of fun.  My sister found a recording by the Chicago Symphony of Pictures at an Exhibition by Moussorgsky (picture above) and gave it to me because the work features a lot of brass and, particularly trumpet solos played in the record by Adolph Herseth who was a legend then and now.  Back to the story.

The music "Pictures" were little short descriptive works written for piano by Moussorgsky loosely depicting a gallery exhibition of works by an artist name Victor Hartmann.  There is

M. Ravel

even a little promenade theme as one would shuffle from on picture to another.  For pianists, it is something of a hair-raiser technically.  Ravel, the French composer, took the piano score and set it for orchestra (we've talked about "orchestration" in here a bit) thus giving the black and white of a piano keyboard some color.  Pianists of course are quick to point out that their sense of touch draws colors from a piano but that isn't what I meant as orchestration of a piano work results in something of an entirely new work rather than just coloring a piano score.  Back to the story.

The record cover talked about the various paintings depicted in the "exhibition", one of which translates from the Russian as "Балет невылупившихся птенцов:Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks".  I always somehow imagined, spurred on by the record jacket, that this was about chickens or chicks inside eggs...dancing around as they gained strength to peck out and emerge.  Even though I conducted the work perhaps half a dozen times in my life, my little brain didn't really imagine what was what here because it had stopped learning or inquiring after that record jacket.  In this particular instance I stopped being curious about things because I'm 1. lazy  2.  thought I knew and 3. as I had no incentive to climb into the thick grass and think about such trivia, I stopped wanting to know something new (see #1 - lazy).  Back to the story.

C. Nodier

I stopped wanting to discover that this movement was inspired by a sketch Hartmann made for a scene from a ballet called "Trilby or The Demon of the Heath, a ballet with choreography by Petipa, music by Julius Gerber, and décor by Hartmann... produced in 1870".  And in looking around it seems that Julius Gerber wasn't Julius but Yuli as Julius Gerber was a founder of the American Socialist movement and not the composer Yuli and the two are sometimes confused in articles.  The Trilby work came from the 1822 novel Trilby, ou le lutin d'Argail by Charles Nodier (picture to the right).  The chicks are canary chicks...and on it goes.  Anyway,  Nodier felt that dreams were something of an art form in themselves; a story waiting to be told, which explains canary chicks dancing around.  Back to the story.

I'm pretty sure this is all way too much for a Wednesday morning, but sometimes it is important to start to find out what we don't know; what is "outside our little shells" so to speak.  We have such marvelous tools to change the black and white of surface knowledge into something that is more colorful and plays well to all our senses.  As my father always said, "There is an excuse for stupid but there is no excuse for lazy".  End of story.