A Tenor's Look at Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms

Igor Stravinsky was, in my opinion, the coolest composer of the twentieth century. Whenever I think of him and his music I'm reminded of that famous photograph showing him speeding his motorcycle (a '57 Vincent) through the traffic circling Paris's L'Arc de Triomphe - the wind sweeping his hair back, a cigarette clenched between his teeth. His eyes squint at the photographer. And who, I wonder, is the blonde riding pillion whose face is just barely visible behind his right shoulder, her arms wrapped around his black leather jacket, hanging on for dear life? The man was cool, no doubt about it.

I have to wonder how the composer of the Rite of Spring (completed in 1913) reacted to the earnest but amateur music in which he was suddenly immersed when he began attending religious services in Nice during the mid '20s - the period of his return to the Russian Orthodox church. We can be thankful that he left us the answer to this question in the Symphony of Psalms and his other great works of religious devotion. The Psalms are, to Stravinsky's mind, poems of exaltation, but also of anger, judgement, and curses. Stravinsky conveyed the spirit of the poems masterfully through the highly contrasting tempi and harmonies.

I. Hear my prayer, O lord
This is the shortest of three movements and also, in my opinion, the easiest on the chorus. It was composed in a "state of religious and musical ebullience." Some of the notes in this section are just above the top of my range and so I and my tenor colleagues will often sing in a falsetto (false) voice. This is just a tricky way of working with your voice to produce notes outside your normal range. A male falsetto has much of the tonal quality of a female soprano voice - a very pure piercing sound. You can hear it when we sing the phrase remitte, remitte mihi (O spare me...) toward the end of the movement. Actually, truth be told, we do have some altos singing along with us there. (One of the difficulties with amateur choruses is that male voices are often in short supply and creative uses of available resources is necessary.)

You may, if you speak any Latin, notice that the final word of the first movement, ero, is split by the chorus taking a breath between the first syllable and the second. This is deliberate. in fact the last word of each movement is similarly split.

Stravinsky took a lot of flack for this practice. He answered his critics by saying that "in setting the words of this... hymn, I cared above all for the sounds of the syllables.... I really do tire of people pointing out that Dominum is one word and that its meaning is obscured by the way I respirate it.... Do such people know nothing about word-splitting in early polyphonic music?"

II. I waited patiently for the Lord
Patiently the psalmist waits for a new song of praise from the Lord. This movement is a fugue. A fugue is sort of like a round and, if you've ever sung Row, Row, Row Your Boat or  Frere Jacques, you know what a round is. The first voice enters singing the melody or theme. After the first phrase has been completed the second voice enters with the same theme while the first voice continues presenting new material. Subsequent voices enter with the theme after the same pause. A fugue is somewhat more complicated. The first voice enters with the subject, a short melody, which is 'answered' by the second voice. The answer consists of the subject transposed up a fifth or, as here, down a fourth. In this piece Stravinsky also modifies the subject slightly for each voice. Still, if you listen carefully you will hear the phrase Expectans expectavi Dominum sung by the sopranos and then answered by the altos. The tenors then sing the subject, and the basses answer in the same phrase sung by the altos. I should point out here that the movement begins with another, completely different, subject introduced by the instrumental parts. Complex and difficult but also quite lovely.

Once again, the final word of the movement, Domino, is split by a breath between the first and second syllables.

III. Alleluia, Praise ye the Lord
This is the new canticle of praise which the Lord has put into the mouth of the psalmist in answer to his prayer in the second movement. Stravinsky began work on the Symphony of Psalms with the fast sections of this movement. He then went back and composed the first and second movements before returning to complete his work on this psalm. Once again his devil-may-care attitude is instructive: "...at first, and until I understood that God must not be praised in fast, forte, music no matter how often the text specifies 'loud,' I thought of the final hymn in a too-rapid pulsation." Instead the third movement begins with a slow and stately Alleluia which is followed by an exciting and stirring Laudate Dominum "inspired by a vision of Elijah's chariot climbing the Heavens." The triplets (three notes in a single beat) in this section suggest the horses galloping into the sky.

Singing Laudate is quite tricky. The au sound is a diphthong (two 'pure' vowel sounds articulated one after the other). In this case ah is quickly followed by oo - so quickly that you might not notice it while speaking. It's just a single syllable, that's all. Unfortunately you can't sing it the way you speak it. Suppose you have a half note to sing Lau followed by a whole note to sing da followed by a half note to sing te (as happens in this section). If you slide between the ah and the oo too quickly (say a quarter note each) the effect is unlovely. Instead you must hold the ah for the duration of the half note and then quickly hit the oo before beginning the da. Music is an illusion.

A confession: I made up the part about the photograph of Stravinsky riding his motorcycle through Paris. It's just such a lovely image that I couldn't resist sharing it with you. I hope you enjoy tonight's concert despite my deception.

Copyright 1994, Bernard Vachon

Sources: Dialogues and a Diary, Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1963

As previously noted, the call number for "The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments" by Anthony Baines is 784.1903. Why is that? How do you come up with a Dewey classification number for a book? This one is actually pretty straightforward. It is built by combining 784.19 Instruments with the standard notation 030 Dictionary. Since no classification number is allowed to end in a 0 we end up with 784.1903. Of course this one was easy since I already knew the answer.

How do you organize your books so they can be found when you need them? For a "small" library almost anything goes: colour, size, alphabetically by author, alphabetically by title, etc. I have a modest number of scores and books about music acquired gradually over the last 20 years. For the longest time they were sorted alphabetically by author or composer or editor. Recently I looked through this collection and found forgotten treasures. Scores for recorders were filed next to scores for cello. Vocal music was next to string quartet music. My memory of what I owned was so degraded that I had no recollection of the pieces or where I'd bought them. Music that would be fun to play was lost in my filing system!

At this point it became clear that I needed to reorder my collection so it would be easier to find items of interest. Realistically my collection is so small that I could just come up with my own cataloging scheme and be done with it but, being a good programmer, I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. Why not stand on the shoulders of giants? This led me to the web.

A search quickly led me to a blog post by one of the librarians at the San Francisco Public Library about using the Dewey Decimal System to categorize scores. This seemed like a good way to go. If I could figure out the proper class number for each book or score, then sort them numerically, related items would be right beside each other. Also, I could use the SFPL's online catalog to my advantage. If they have the same books I have then I can just use their call number. No thinking required!

If only life was that simple.

Since I had to start somewhere I chose "The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments" by Anthony Baines (ISBN 0-19-311334-1). Many books include the Dewey class number on their copyright page and this is one of them. According to the OUP, this book should be filed under 784.1903. As a check, just to be sure that my technique was viable, I looked it up on the SFPL web site. To my surprise they gave the call number as 781.91. Why the discrepancy? Which number is right?

After hitting this roadblock my enthusiasm (and progress) slowed somewhat. Finally, in desperation, I wrote to the librarians at the SFPL via their Ask a Librarian web page. I said,

I wish to use the Dewey Decimal System to arrange my personal library of books about music and musical scores. Your page of Musical Scores Call Numbers (http://sfpl.org/librarylocations/main/art/scoresearch.htm) is a great resource. However, I have noticed discrepancies between the numbers you assign books and the numbers others assign them. For example "The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments" by Anthony Baines is given the DD# 784.91 by the publisher. In your library it is 781.19. Which number is correct and why? Any information you can provide would be much appreciated.

(Note that I jumbled up the numbers. Sheesh.)

One of the librarians there very quickly (and kindly) responded,

A radical revision was made to the music numbers of the Dewey classification in the 20th ed. (mid-1980's). It was decided at that time that SFPL would not start applying the new numbers, but would continue to use the (19th ed.) old schedule - in fact, a "customized" version of the old schedule.

Aha!

I imagine this was a difficult decision to make. Suppose your library has 20,000 music books and scores categorized using the the old schedule. How much would it cost to re-catalog all your books? Say it takes 15 minutes to figure out a new number. (This is obviously a wild guess. In future blog posts I will discuss how I compute a Dewey class number for a book and you will see that 15 minutes is probably an underestimate when you're striving for accuracy.) That means a librarian could classify four books in an hour. So it would take 5000 hours to reclassify all your books. In one year, if you take two weeks holiday, you work 40x50 = 2000 hours. That means it could take a single librarian two and a half years to reclassify all those books. You can start to see why they decided to stick with the old schedule. (According to the blog post referenced earlier, the SFPL may have as many as 45,000 actual items to catalog.)

Of course, on the flip side, now whenever a new music book or score is acquired you cannot use the publisher's determination of the Dewey class number. For each new book you need to return to first principles to figure out where it belongs. Suppose over time your library doubles in size from 20,000 to 40,000 books. You have now spent as much money re-categorizing new books using the old schedule as it would have cost to switch all your old books over in the first place.

When money is tight this is a tough call to make. How do you balance a huge upfront cost against an long-term, ongoing one? I suspect the latter is easier to hide in the budget.

Although I would like to use the SFPL call numbers as a labour-saving tool, it is pretty clear to me that I should use the new schedule for my music library. As luck would have it, my local library has the 20th edition of the "Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index" reference manuals. Now all I have to do is learn how class numbers are calculated.