January 27 Start of
Mozart’s last piano sonata,
K. 576, in honor of
Mozart’s birthday
January 29 Closing theme from Mozart’s violin concerto #5, first-movement orchestral exposition [the tempo marking is “Allegro Aperto”, with the rare modifier “aperto” meaning “open” — the topic for the day was open sets]
February 3 Start of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue [the clarinet glissando at the start, as opposed to the approximation that the piano’s discrete chromatic scale provides, illustrates the notion of continuous function, which was the day’s main topic; also gave an occasion to talk up the first of Herbie Hancock’s Norton Lectures.]
February 5 “King of Kings” sequence from the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah [the topic of the day was sequences, though the musical sense of “sequence” is much more restricted than the mathematical usage: a musical “sequence” roughly corresponds to what would be called a nonconstant arithmetic progression in mathematics…]
February 7 Intro to Eubie Blake’s Charleston Rag (Blake was born on February 7, 1887, so exactly 127 [the Mersenne prime 27−1] years ago, though many sources give his birth year as 1883. He claimed to have composed the Charleston Rag melody in his teens, though the written score dates back only to 1915.)
February 10 Olympic fanfare
February 12 Hail to the Chief, in honor of Lincoln’s actual birthday (though this year Presidents’ Day will be celebrated on February 17; as of early May, Harvard’s own academic calendar still misplaces the apostrophe!)
February 14
John Williams’ Olympic fanfare
February 17 Presidents’ Day — no class, and thus no music
February 19 Chariots of Fire theme [Papathanassiou, a.k.a. Vangelis — I couldn’t come up with any winter-Olympics-specific tune]
February 21 Generic 8-10-1 finishing gesture [to mark the end of the Topology section of the class]
February 24 Opening fanfare of
Monteverdi’s
L’Orfeo, one of the first operas
ever written, and the earliest one still regularly performed today
(and also the first topic of Prof. Thomas Kelly’s
“First Nights”); premiered 24 February 1607,
i.e. exactly 407 years ago. Monteverdi reused this fanfare in the
opening movement of his
February 26 Trill in parallel 3-6 chords
(from the end of the usual cadenza for
Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto),
suggested by Giuseppe
Tartini
who died on this day in 1770 and is known today — and even gets his
name inscribed in the illustrious company of Palestrina, Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Chopin, et al. in our own
Paine Hall — largely on the strength of his
“Devil’s Trill Sonata”.
February 28 Opening of
Largo al Factotum,
the famous aria from
The Barber of Seville
by Gioachino Rossini. Rossini, like the unlucky (but fictional)
Frederic of
March 3 Main theme of the
Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op.53, by
Chopin.
Chopin was born March 1; the only musical connection I could find for
3/3 was the death of Johann
Pachelbel,
and I figured that Pachelbel’s
one famous composition
might be unwelcome despite the better fit with the date.
March 5 End of the first movement of the
First Piano Concerto by
Sergei Prokofiev,
who died March 5 of 1953, ironically the same day as
Stalin.
[This music, which also ushers in the pianist’s entrance
at the beginning of the movement, was heard in the ads for the 1980 film
The Competition.]
March 7
Opening (and ending) two bars of the Rigaudon from the suite
Le Tombeau de Couperin
[“Memorial to Couperin” — Couperin’s name
happens to be next to Tartini’s in
Paine Hall], by Maurice
Ravel, who was born March 7 in 1875.
March 10 Second Midterm exam: no music
March 12 Harry Potter theme (since March 13 will be Housing Day,
which is as close as Harvard comes to a
Sorting Hat)
March 14 no class (I was in New York City, and thus missed
both Math 25b and HUMA’s
Pi Day celebration)
March 17,19,21 Spring Break
March 24 Opening of
Vivaldi’s “Spring” concerto from
The Four Seasons
(this is our first day of class during Spring, though it might still
feel like Febrrruary 52 here in Cambrrridge…)
March 26 Beginning of the overture to
Délibes’ opera
Lakmé,
which opened that evening in the
Lowell House Opera.
March 28 Beginning of the Promenade (in the unusual
11/4 time signature) from
Pictures at an Exhibition by
Moussorgsky,
who died March 28 in 1881 (a hard choice between him and
Rachmaninoff,
who died March 28 in 1943, even though he’s not usually
thought of as a 20th-century composer; but it turns out Rachmaninoff
appeared a couple of weeks later).
March 31 Start of the Toccata from the
Toccata and Fugue in D minor by
J.S.Bach,
who was born 31 March 1685 (unfortunately losing
Haydn,
who was born exactly 47 years later)
April 2 The
“You won’t have any problem with that” tag from
the patter-song “Rigid Body Rotation” in
April 4 Start of the recapitulation of the first movement of
Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto
(a rather tenuous connection — a piece numbered 4 in 4/4 time
for April 4, but it is glorious music…)
April 7 The waltz by Anton(io)
Diabelli
(died 7 April 1858) on which Beethoven based his
Diabelli Variations Op. 120.
April 9 Start of the 18th of Rachmaninoff’s 24
Paganini Variations,
which is a musical inversion
of Paganini’s theme
(though alas not in the sense of the Inverse Function Theorem: the graph
of a function of one variable and its inverse function are related by
reflection about the diagonal y=x, while musical
inversion corresponds to reflection about the x-axis;
the other kind of inversion is used in some of the more esoteric examples
of musical Serialism, but is not musically comprehensible).
April 11 Start of Beethoven’s
sonata #5 for violin and piano, Op. 24,
a.k.a. the “Spring” Sonata (now that it actually feels like
Springtime weather). [No, I’m not about to try to play
Boulez’s Intégrales
for our introduction to integration, any more than I’d attempt his
…explosante-fixe…
for our discussion of fixed points…]
April 14 Echad Mi Yodea (“Who Knows One?”,
a counting song usually sung towards the end of the Passover
Seder, which this year falls the evenings of
April 14 and 15.) Another iterative Seder Song,
Chad Gadya,
is said to be the source of
This Is the House That Jack Built;
it also has just the right number of iterations to make
this parody possible
(Here’s another version).
April 16 Adir Bi-Mlukha, a.k.a.
Ki Lo Na’eh, another Seder song, this one
an alphabetical acrostic (apparently also called an
Abecedarius).
April 18 Second Midterm exam: no music
(in any case I’m told that music is traditionally muted at
Good Friday observances,
the better to celebrate Easter two days later).
April 21 Vangelis: Chariots of Fire (in honor of
today’s Boston Marathon, but forgetting that I already
used this two months ago for the Winter Olympics…).
April 23 Start of the
Dies Irae from
Verdi’s Requiem,
to be performed Saturday in Sanders Theatre by hundreds of
Harvard students with professional soloists.
April 25 Start of the
Marseillaise, written exactly 222 years ago,
and also prominently quoted in the Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
which will have its traditional Lowell House performance 9 days hence.
April 28
“I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” —
I found no good musical connection for
April 28,
but apparently it is the 145-year anniversary of the all-time
track-laying record). At end of class: recap with transition to
1E4 Men Of Harvard for the
Visitas prefrosh.
April 30 Start of the coda for the 1812 Overture
(now only four days away; finish the class by playing the ending).