Over the weekend I saw an awesome performance of Chopin's Preludes. The full piece is about 45 minutes, and it's made up of 24 short pieces. The shortest one is only 12 bars long! I really loved listening to these pieces, and I think the short (episodic?) structure contributed to this -- each one is like a taste of some particular thing, kind of like a multi-course meal.
I gather that a lot has been written about the Preludes from a musical point of view, but the thing that caught my eye was that preludes before Chopin's were almost always literal preludes to longer pieces, introductions to fugues or improvised (?!) introductions to other compositions. (When did improvisation stop happening during classical music performances?) Chopin's Preludes, on the other hand, weren't written to introduce anything, or were just introductions to one another. Chopin's Preludes apparently elevated preludes' status to an art form in and of themselves.
This reminded me of haiku, which I learned in the excellent book Bashō and his Interpreters used to be just the opening stanza of renga, a form of long collaborative poem created at poetry gatherings, before being elevated to stand-alone pieces. No great moral; I wonder if there are other opportunities to split off prelude-like things into forms of their own? Maybe movie trailers?
Incidentally, that Bashō book is pretty great! The author, Makoto Ueda, gives a selections of poems from throughout Bashō's life, interspersed with biographical context about what Bashō was up to (including maps of his travels!). Each poem is given in its original Japanese, a word-for-word English translation, and Ueda's personal translation to idiomatic English; Ueda gives notes explaining the context of the poem's composition and any references you need to understand the poem, e.g. to Japanese plays or traditions or puns; then Ueda lists some commentary from poetry critics throughout history. I'd love to read more poetry books that do this, since otherwise I'm not in a position to really understand the poems. I think it's probably the best overall introduction to haiku I've seen, and I definitely composed some after reading it.
I am reminded of David Byrne's "The Knee Plays", interstitial bits between larger plays that actually work great on their own: http://kneeplays.com/ (starting points: Tree, The Sound of Business, Social Studies, In The Future)
ReplyDeleteI feel like this has been done a lot: "tasting menu" restaurants have split appetizers into their own art. And tapas, I guess. And animated shorts are also an art, and short stories for that matter.
But there's still a lot of places this could go: I would watch a show that is just the brilliant pilot episodes of shows that then went on to not live up to their promise. Or go to the movies for 90 minutes of trailers.
(And now I'd totally listen to Chopin's Preludes :)
Thanks for the Knee Plays pointer! And yes, tasting menus / flights of beer / tapas are great examples.
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