Theme and Variations

Back to my home city and besides being back with friends and family, my piano, Golden Gate Park and more, two grand pleasures:

 

1)   Choosing and cooking my own food.

2)   Singing with the folks at the Jewish Home.

 

I like to have some reason to choose the songs and pieces I do, so freshly returned from my trip, I started with a few songs related to Tennessee in general— Chattanooga Choo-Choo, The Tennessee Waltz, to Memphis in particular—Memphis Blues, Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin' On (recorded at Sun Records), to the Mississippi River—Proud Mary, Old Man River. 

 

Having just been to Stax Records in Memphis, I also sang Sam Cooke’s You Send Me and realized that this song joins a long list of others based on the same chord progression. (For your musicians, that’s I vi.  / IV  V and for just about everyone, it’s the bass pattern that you played as a kid on the piano to the song Heart and Soul.)  So off I went, seamlessly from one to another. A short list: 

• You Send Me

• I Love the Mountains

• Blue Moon

• Silhouettes on the Shade

• Dream, Dream, Dream

• Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man

• The Way You Look Tonight

• Heart and Soul (with the actual words)

 

After singing each one, it’s fun for everyone to pick one and sing them all together at the same time. (That’s called a quodlibet). Not convinced my choir in their 80’s and 90’s was quite ready for that, I gave it to them as a homework assignment and maybe we’ll try it next week. But fun to treat them like they were my music students in my class. On a roll, I continued the class’s focus of “Theme and Variations.”

 

This approach to artistic development is a powerful one. The artist is restricted to a set form or theme and within those constrictions, it turns out that creativity really thrives, as does intelligence in general. The aspiring poets try their hand at sonnets or haiku or sestinas, following the strict forms of meter, syllables and rhyme. The artists paints dozens of still lifes of the same arrangement or like Hokusai, 36 views of Mt. Fuji. (Poet Wallace Stevens combines two art forms in his poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.)

 

 From Bach through Mendelssohn and beyond, stating an opening piece and then spinning out variations following the chord progression is both an honored practice to help develop compositional skills and a means to creating some memorable music. And so off I went to the piano to play some of these examples (the first, for example, includes 32 variations so I only did a few):

 

• Bach’s Goldberg Variations

• Handel’s The Harmonious Blacksmith

• Mozart’s 12 Variations on Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman (what we know as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star)

• Beethoven’s Six Variations on a Theme ( from the opera La Molinara) 

• Chopin’s Berceuse

 

On I went into jazz, where the two famous chord progressions that have spawned hundreds of tunes are the 12-bar-blues and the Gershwin song I Got Rhythm (referred to in jazz as “Rhythm changes”). The latter were a particular potent springboard in be-bop compositions. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were particularly prolific in their variations. A short list includes: 

•Anthropology

• Shaw Nuff

• Moose the Mooche

• Salt Peanuts

• Dizzy Atmosphere

• Dexterity

 

(FYI, the song The Flintstones also is based on these chord changes.)

 

Of course, the most important thing in my visits to the Home is to give pleasure and comfort to the residents simply by playing (as best I can) good music. But it was fun to feed the thinking mind as well as the feeling heart and include a little lesson in history, harmony and the power of structure and form in housing creative impulses. As well as showing the variety of the same impulses with examples from popular music, jazz and classical music. 

Next week’s class? We shall see…