Georg Friederich Handel: Israel in Egypt

In my last post, I wrote about Mark Z*, a guy down the hall in the French House at Indiana University where I lived in 1975. Mark was majoring in Art History, and had a particular fascination for the Byzantine empire. You will remember that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century and then moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, later renamed Constantinople–the present-day Istanbul.

The Byzantine empire lasted over 1000 years and once stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Constantinople, sitting on a peninsula overlooking the Bosporous toward Anatolia, was a cosmopolitan gateway for Europe to Asia and vice versa. Unfortunately, that made it a prime target and, though the seat of a Christian Theocracy, Constantinople was conquered by the Crusaders and eventually fell to the Turks. During Byzantine era, art, architecture, and philosophy all flourished. The Christian liturgy was formalized in court and religious rituals. In Byzantium, modern harmony actually started to develop.

A few years ago, I attended a conference on Byzantine Eschatology (death rituals and views of the afterlife) at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. One of the presenters, Diane Touliatos from St. Louis University, delivered a paper in which she described how the three types of events around death–expressions of grief, consolation and joy in the defeat of enemies–turned into musical traditions. When someone died, back then, it was quite common for members of the families, especially women, to pull their hair, claw their cheeks and keen, that is wail and scream. This practiced became formalized and one could even rent groups of women to perform this function. Eventually their vocal expressions became chanted or sung.

Another tradition was the dirge or lamentation. These types of music grew out of the mass in which the priest would sing a phrase and the men would respond. That type of singing became the traditional Gregorian chants, which were not harmonic, because the different voices simply sang the same notes but at intervals of a full octave. Chants started to become harmonic, with the addition of a drone. Some men sang a single base note while the rest of the choir sung the lamentation. This type of singing was also employed for singing the Psalms, kind of like shown in this video:

At some point, someone started letting the professional wailers into the church to participate in the ritual mass for the dead. One can imagine the cacophony when that happened. Originally the church fathers tried to prevent the participation of the “keeners,” but eventually someone, the first choir master, no doubt got them all working together. Still, if you listen to this early harmony, it sounds very odd to our ears. Recently there have been some recordings of this type of music, and you can get an idea of the old harmonies in listening to that Bulgarian shout-singing, which became popular about 30 years ago.

Mark Z* loved Byzantine art and the ritualized melding of religion and authority implicit in a theocracy. He came from a devout polish family that lived near Chicago, and eventually left school and now paints icons and crucifixes as a sideline. Mark once told with great relish the story of one of his more outrageous local priests, who, during an Easter pageant, went overboard and actually brought sheep into church.

In my previous post, I said that Mark refused to listen to anything later than Renaissance music, but I was wrong. He stopped at Baroque. One of his favorite works was a piece by Handel, that I have never heard in its entirety, Israel in Egypt. This oratorio covers the story of Moses and his attempts to free the Jews from Pharaoh’s slavery. One would think it pretty serious, having been brought up watching Cecil B. DeMille’sTen Commandments with a stone faced Charleton Heston (Mister NRA spokesman for a while) as a grizzled Moses. The oratorio, however, contains what I consider to be one of the funniest pieces of music ever written, and so I put it on the list of my favorites.

The aria is called “The land brought forth frogs.” It comes from the scene in the Bible where Moses calls on God to visit a number of plagues on Egypt to get Pharaoh to release the Jews. The music, is one of those thrilling baroque choruses that Handel was so good at, full of pomp and righteousness. The words, however, put us all in stitches, when Mark played it for us in his dorm room:

“The land brought forth frogs.
He gave their cattle over to the pestilence blotches and blains…”

To make it even more ridiculous, Handel gave this aria to the counter tenor, which is a man’s bass voice sung in falsetto. To hear a man singing the words, “blotches and blains” in a woman’s soprano range, was too camp for words.

Another screamingly funny aria was, “He spake the word.”  Used when Moses called up another plague which brought down “all manner of flies and lice.”

And these phrases became sort of a password for our group for a while. What can I say? You had to be there.

Haendel’s Biography

Download MP3 or buy CD of Israel In Egypt from Amazon

George Frideric Handel: “Every Valley” from Messiah

During my senior year of high school in 1973, I began to make plans for college.  My friend, Paul M***, was a year older than I. He got accepted to the University of Chicago and after he left, I spent my senior year hunting for the kind of intellectual stimulation that he had offered. Once I went to visit him.

Now, I had gone to Chicago on many occasions before then. My aunt lived near Midway airport, and the town was full of museums to which our schools arranged field trips. Chicago had a huge Art Institute and museums left over from the World’s Fair: The Museum of Science and Industry, The Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum of Natural History. But my trip to see Paul was the first time I traveled to Chicago as an adult.

My friend Gary Endicott and I bundled ourselves into my mother’s little black Volkswagen beetle and I drove the 90 miles from my home one Friday afternoon. The campus sat on the South Side of Chicago, an area that the whites of Chicago had fled after the riots in 1968. It looked a little like a war zone, with run down brownstones, derelict cars, and huge pot holes in the streets. Paul lived in an apartment on the upper floor of one of these old buildings just off campus. As in all male college kitchens, the refrigerator was stuffed with the local cheap brew and little else.

Paul was a great host, though. He took us to a wonderful bookstore that had a huge poster of Lenin, which I thought was so daring coming as I did from a virulently anti-Communist environment. We ate lunch at a place called the Medici Restaurant and Art Gallery, which served excellent Chicago style deep-dish pizza. The walls were adorned by some local artist’s etchings–very classy for me. Paul also took us to the Oriental Art institute, which held extensive collections of Assyrian and Egyptian artifacts collected by U of C’s archaeologists earlier in the 20th century. One room had massive winged, bull-man gates from Babylon and another held huge Egyptian column/statues, painted in bright polychromes.

We also drove by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Robie House” and visited a friend of Paul’s who cooked us an exotic lunch–Ramen, which had just been introduced in the market. On Sunday morning we went to a very ethnic bagel place and overheard a conversation between two middle-aged women, who were talking about how “Sammy” had just got “his tubes replaced.” We ended up our trip sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan drinking Chicago beer before driving home.

Paul had done of good job of being Virgil to my Dante. I came away knowing that this was the life for me and I would love being in college.

One of the best places he took me on this trip was to a record store in the Loop. In my town, the classical music section of most record stores was miniscule. Some department stores had better selections than the record stores in the malls. Sometimes, you had to hunt in three or four stores before you could find what you were looking for. For example, I bought my copy of The Barber of Seville in Robertson’s department store in South Bend, which for some odd reason always had a good collection of opera.

I was completely overwhelmed by the record store that Paul took me to. We parked in an ominous part of the Loop, which had a subterranean feeling because of the loud, El train that ran overhead and obscured day light. The store was in one of those narrow old two story shops that was about as long as half a city block. There was a huge neon sign in the shape of a 33 rpm LP in the window. Inside, the ground floor room shot all the way back and was lined on both sides with bin after bin of popular records. Paul pointed me to a stairway that led to the upper floor beside which hung a sign that said “Classical.” At the top of the stairs, I’m afraid my jaw dropped to see more classical albums that I could even imagine existed. The whole floor was given over to them. I seem to remember an entire wall devoted to boxed sets of operas. Stack of records sat on the floor with signs on them saying “Sale!” I felt like a kid in a candy shop. I didn’t know what to buy and certainly didn’t have enough money to buy everything I wanted.

Paul showed me a stack of records–a nice box set that contained highlights from the Messiah conducted by Thomas Beecham, with Jon Vickers singing tenor. He said it was a good buy, so I bought it. Now because of the overplaying of “Hallelujah Chorus” at Christmas, I normally would have passed up this record. But I’m glad I didn’t. It turns out to be full of wonderful choruses and arias, which don’t get the air play of “Hallelujah” but which are beautiful and stirring. The orchestra is wonderfully bright and full of baroque charm, reminiscent of the composer’s Water Music. The tenor’s voice lilts along and has wonderful trills and runs.

I love the simple words to this aria, Every Valley: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low: the crooked strait and the rough places plain.”

And basically, that is how I felt-exalted-after having visited Paul and getting a taste of Chicago and college life under his guidance.

Biography

Download MP3s or Buy CD on Amazon

Georg Friederich Handel: Israel in Egypt

Yesterday, I wrote about Mark Z*******, a guy down the hall in the French House. He was majoring in Art History, and had a particular fascination for the Byzantine empire. You will remember that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century and then moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, later renamed Constantinople-the present-day Istanbul.

The Byzantine empire lasted over 1000 years and once stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Constantinople, sitting on a peninsula overlooking the Bosporous toward Anatolia, was a cosmopolitan gateway for Europe to Asia and vice versa. Unfortunately, that made it a prime target and, though the seat of a Christian Theocracy, Constantinople was conquered by the Crusaders and eventually fell to the Turks. During Byzantine era, art, architecture, and philosophy all flourished. The Christian liturgy was formalized in court and religious rituals. In Byzantium, modern harmony actually started to develop.

A few years ago, I attended a conference on Byzantine Eschatology (death rituals and views of the afterlife) at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. One of the presenters, Diane Touliatos from St. Louis University, delivered a paper in which she described how the three types of events around death–expressions of grief, consolation and joy in the defeat of enemies–turned into musical traditions. When someone died, back then, it was quite common for members of the families, especially women, to pull their hair, claw their cheeks and keen, that is wail and scream. This practiced became formalized and one could even rent groups of women to perform this function. Eventually their vocal expressions became chanted or sung.

Another tradition was the dirge or lamentation. These types of music grew out of the mass in which the priest would sing a phrase and the men would respond. That type of singing became the traditional Gregorian chants, which were not harmonic, because the different voices simply sang the same notes but at intervals of a full octave. Chants started to become harmonic, with the addition of a drone. Some men sang a single base note while the rest of the choir sung the lamentation. This type of singing was also employed for singing the Psalms.

At some point, someone started letting the professional wailers into the church to participate in the ritual mass for the dead. One can imagine the cacophony when that happened. Originally the church fathers tried to prevent the participation of the “keeners,” but eventually someone, the first choir master, no doubt got them all working together. Still, if you listen to this early harmony, it sounds very odd to our ears. Recently there have been some recordings of this type of music, and you can get an idea of the old harmonies in listening to that Bulgarian shout-singing, which became popular about 10 years ago.

Mark Z******* loved the Byzantine art and the ritualized melding of religion and authority implicit in a theocracy. He came from a devout polish family that lived near Chicago, and eventually left school and now paints icons and crucifixes as a sideline. Mark once told with great relish the story of one of his more outrageous local priests, who, during an Easter pageant, went overboard and actually brought sheep into church.

Yesterday, I said that Mark refused to listen to anything later than Renaissance music, but I was wrong. He stopped at Baroque. One of his favorite works was a piece by Handel, that I have never heard in its entirety, Israel in Egypt. This oratorio covers the story of Moses and his attempts to free the Jews from Pharaoh’s slavery. One would think it pretty serious, having been brought up watching Cecil B. DeMille’sTen Commandments with a stone faced Charleton Heston (Mister NRA nowadays) as a grizzled Moses. The oratorio, however, contains what I consider to be one of the funniest pieces of music ever written, and so I put it on the list of my favorites.

The aria is called “The land brought forth frogs.” It comes from the scene in the Bible where Moses calls on God to visit a number of plagues on Egypt to get Pharaoh to release the Jew. The music, is one of those thrilling baroque choruses that Handel was so good at, full of pomp and righteousness. The words, however, put us all in stitches, when Mark played it for us in his dorm room:

“The land brought forth frogs.
He gave their cattle over to the pestilence blotches and blains…”

To make it even more ridiculous, Handel gave this aria to the counter tenor, which is a man’s bass voice sung in falsetto. To hear a man singing the words, “blotches and blains” in a woman’s soprano range, was too camp for words.

Another screamingly funny aria was, “He spake the word.”  Used when Moses called up another plague which brought down “all manner of flies and lice.”

And these phrases became sort of a password for our group for a while. What can I say? You had to be there.

Haendel’s Biography

Download MP3 or buy CD of Israel In Egypt from Amazon

George Frideric Handel: “Every Valley” from Messiah

During my senior year of high school, I began to make plans for college. My friend, Paul Mankowski, was a year older than I. He got accepted to the University of Chicago and I spent my senior year hunting for the kind of intellectual stimulation that he had offered. Once I went to visit him.

Now, I had gone to Chicago on many occasions before then. My aunt lived near Midway airport and the town was full of museums to which our schools arranged field trips. Chicago had a huge Art Institute and museums left over from the World’s Fair: The Museum of Science and Industry, The Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum of Natural History. But my trip to see Paul was the first time I traveled to Chicago as an adult.

My friend Gary Endicott and I bundled ourselves into my mother’s little black Volkswagen beetle and I drove the 90 miles from my home one Friday afternoon. The campus sat on the South Side of Chicago, an area that the whites of Chicago had fled after the riots in 1968. It looked a little like a war zone, with run down brownstones, derelict cars, and huge pot holes in the streets. Paul lived in an apartment on the upper floor of one of these old buildings just off campus. As in all male college kitchens, the refrigerator was stuffed with the local cheap brew and little else.

Paul was a great host, though. He took us to a wonderful bookstore that had a huge poster of Lenin, which I thought was so daring coming as I did from a virulently anti-Communist environment. We ate lunch at a place called the Medici Restaurant and Art Gallery, which served excellent Chicago style deep-dish pizza. The walls were adorned by some local artist’s etchings–very classy for me. Paul also took us to the Oriental Art institute, which held extensive collections of Assyrian and Egyptian artifacts collected by U of C’s archaeologists earlier in the century. One room had massive winged, bull-man gates from Babylon and another held huge Egyptian column/statues, painted in bright polychromes.

We also drove by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Robie House” and visited a friend of Paul’s who cooked us an exotic lunch–Ramen, which had just been introduced in the market. On Sunday morning we went to a very ethnic bagel place and overheard a conversation between two middle-aged women, who were talking about how “Sammy” had just got “his tubes replaced.” We ended up our trip sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan drinking Chicago beer before driving home.

Mankowski had done of good job of being Virgil to my Dante. I came away knowing that this was the life for me and I would love being in college.

One of the best places he took me on this trip was to a record store in the Loop. In my town, the classical music section of most record stores was miniscule. Some department stores had better selections than the record stores in the malls. Sometimes, you had to hunt in three or four stores before you could find what you were looking for. For example, I bought my copy of The Barber of Seville in a Robertson’s Department store in South Bend, which for some odd reason always had a good collection of opera.

I was completely overwhelmed by the store that Paul took me to. We parked in an ominous part of the Loop, which had a subterranean feeling because of the loud, El train that ran overhead and obscured day light. The store was in one of those narrow old two story shops that was about as long as half a city block. There was a huge neon sign in the shape of a 33 rpm LP in the window. Inside, the ground floor room shot all the way back and was lined on both sides with bin after bin of popular records. Paul pointed me to a stairway that led to the upper floor beside which hung a sign that said “Classical.” At the top of the stairs, I’m afraid my jaw dropped to see more classical albums that I could even imagine existed. The whole floor was given over to them. I seem to remember an entire wall devoted to boxed sets of operas. Stack of records sat on the floor with signs on them saying “Sale!” I felt like a kid in a candy shop. I didn’t know what to buy and certainly didn’t have enough money to buy everything I wanted.

Paul pointed to a stack of records that was a nice box set that contained highlights from the Messiah conducted by Thomas Beecham, with Jon Vickers singing tenor. He said it was a good buy, so I bought it. Now because of the overplaying of “Hallelujah Chorus” at Christmas, I normally would have passed up this record. But I’m glad I did. It turns out to be full of wonderful choruses and arias, which don’t get the air play of “Hallelujah” but which are beautiful and stirring. The orchestra is wonderfully bright and full of baroque charm, reminiscent of Water Music. The tenor’s voice lilts along and has wonderful trills and runs.

I love the simple words to this aria, Every Valley: Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low: the crooked strait and the rough places plain.

And basically, that is how I felt-exalted-after having visited Paul and getting a taste of Chicago and college life under his guidance.

Biography

Download MP3s or Buy CD on Amazon