welcome home

The earsense home page is now "super dynamic" with constantly fresh content. Each visit delivers a random featured work including audio, scores, glossary etc. as well as a random featured program note. Each day features a new set of composer anniversaries, an up to date calendar listing and a daily lesson in counterpoint. I hope you all know about the random quote: one of many hand picked aphorisms about music in general. Check it out.

Wonder what earsense is really all about? Read more.

earsense radio!

earsense will be launching a 1 hour LIVE web-based radio broadcast featuring a thought-provoking sample of works, commentary and interviews each week hosted by Kai Christiansen. Stay tuned for more news. It will be LIVE. Projected launch date: July, 2009

pass it on

Tell your friends about earsense and especially encourage them to register for the periodic earmail. We would love more interested chamber music friends to join us at earsense. If you are reading this but not on the list: Join now!

chamberPod

earsense will be coming to the iPhone soon. What does that mean? You can look up chamber music just like your friends in the phonebook. Useful for pre-concert ruminations, parties and geekfests. You can also listen to chamber music on your iPhone as if earsense were a web-based iPod beamed into your portable device. I love the name chamberPod; it makes me laugh and think of Beethoven. What about the blackberry? We'll see . . .

dashboard

The earsense chamberbase is a rather vast library of composers, works, program notes, videos and scores. Database-driven, it provides the opportunity for rich queries as well as interesting tabulations. As part of the public integrity of earsense, a measurement tool as well as an invitation to explore, earsense maintains a dashboard of statistics about chamberbase that you may find interesting or at least exciting. Check it out.

blow-up your computer

The earsense YouTube player has a little button on the lower right to "maximize" the video. Let chamber music take over your whole computer! Try it!

donate

Interested in donating to earsense? Contact Kai Christiansen immediately. More on this will follow.

quote

"Sense refines with experience, from cotton candy to hollandaise, from nursery rhymes to symphonies. Meaning occurs gradually over a lifetime, as the covenant between inner and outer matures."

W. A. Mathieu
The Listening Book

dedication

This issue is dedicated to Nicholas Kitchen of the Borromeo String Quartet. His website Living Archive has inspired earsense and is a source of ideal chamber music performances available for us all to enjoy on the web. Kitchen's music, his fine verbal presentations and his enthusiam for new modes of expression using technology amaze me. Visit MusicKitchen.org as well.

Here is a blistering bit of Beethoven from the Borromeo Quartet: Listen. A great contrast to the Schubert: one of the most intense and thorny pieces of chamber music ever written. A nuclear collision between Bach and late Beethoven, it was the inscrutiable, "ultra modern" composition featured in the amazing film "Copying Beethoven." If you look closely at this video, you will see Nicholas using an electronic music stand (a Macbook!) with Foot Time. Thank you Nicholas Kitchen!

Fishing with Schubert

Note: I wrote this last new year's eve but never sent it. To commemorate the new earsense earmail upgrade, I thought I would finally share it. Enjoy!

Franz Schubert
1797-1828

Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 114, D. 667, Die Forelle (The Trout)

1819

This is my last earpage email for 2008. It's been a wonderful year for earsense.

Before going any further, I want to thank you all for your marvelous replies and queries regarding these emails. Feel free to respond; I welcome it. I also want to beg for your forgiveness if you have been receiving these against your will or desire. You can now formally "unsubscribe" if you wish (see bottom of email). Finally, if you know of other musical travelers that may wish to receive these earpages, send them to earsense to register.

As New Year's eve approaches, I recall my evening last year: I queued up all of Franz Schubert's chamber music from the "Trout" quintet onwards and passed the final hours of the year in a Schubertiad of escalating intensity and bliss that culminated at the midnight countdown with the String Quintet in C major, a singular pinnacle in the entire history of chamber music (with *2* cellos!). That might sound lonely or geekish for a New Year's Eve, but I can only suggest Robert Browning's words "He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once." And what a wild party it was.

Postscript: several fine recordings of Schubert's ineffable String Quintet in C have made it to earsense via YouTube. If you want the seminal chamber music experience, reserve 1 hour of your best time and die a thousand deaths.

Music, and especially melody, poured out of him in an unabated torrent of great art that got better and better until Schubert took his last breath.

I have recently been researching an early Schubert string quartet and my mind turns again to "The Trout." Schubert was one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He wrote over 600 of them during his shockingly brief existence of 31 years including one named "The Trout." Music, and especially melody, poured out of him in an unabated torrent of great art that got better and better until Schubert took his last breath. Schubert also wrote in most of the other flavors of classical music including symphonies, piano sonatas and string quartets, etc. The final chamber music works (the quartets, the piano trios, the two quintets) are ravishing, deep and dreamy works of inexpressible beauty, complexity and polish. They are utter masterworks, unique for their place within the very special subgenre of Franz Schubert's chamber music.

The so-called "Trout" quintet (or, in German, "Die Forelle") is a work for "piano quintet" meaning a piano and four stringed instruments which, in this case, is not a string quartet but the four different members of the orchestral string section: violin, viola, cello and double bass. Schubert's trademark qualities include rich sonority, exquisite texture and sparkling color—all foretold merely in the contemplation of this relatively unusual chamber ensemble of instruments. The nickname "Trout" is a reference to the 4th movement which is a "theme and variations" on Schubert's own song of the same name. Here is Schubert the song-writer, the chamber composer, and, literally, the DJ for a convivial gathering of friends in Vienna around 1819.

In a previous earmail, I mentioned the "theme and variations" form as a standard structure for many classical movements as well as the standard Jazz song. Here it is again with Schubert. The idea: begin with a neat and trim musical "theme", then repeat it over and over with creative variations so that the musical journey is rich and varied yet always beholden to a recognizable essence of the original theme. In a single movement of this style, Schubert shows us nearly every aspect of his musical craft and personality as his lively musical creativity orbits around the gravity of "the trout." The music is beyond delight.

The earpage includes multiple complete recordings of the Trout (all five movements) with a particularly sparkling video performance by Rachlin, Maisky, Ursuleasa, Imai and Watton. The default video is the theme and variations. The first violinist even looks somewhat like Schubert. There is also a video of an amateur singer and professional fireman from the midwest who was passionate enough to post a video of his own performance of "The Trout", the original song. See "Mr. Smallwood."

For me, Schubert's "Trout" quintet is a perfect candidate to wrap up this year of thinking so much about chamber music. It is one of classical music's "greatest hits", supremely accessible as well as a brilliant piece of chamber music that Schubert essentially wrote for friends to perform at a party. It is rich and congenial in the greatest spirit of Austrian serenades yet is rife with music of the highest order. It is also the portal through which one enters the rarefied world of Schubert's "mature" masterpieces comprising several hours of epic music that fit well within a marathon new year's evening that builds to an unforgettable peak.

May the wealth and marvel of Schubert reach you in good health with sparkling prospects for the coming new year.

May your list of new resolutions include a bit more time "gone fishin'."

Postscript: Both of Schubert's quintets are exquisite. As a pair they are fascinating: the ever-popular "Trout" inaugurates Schubert's final masterpieces and the String Quintet is Schubert's very last work. The latter is inexpressibly treasured by lovers and connoisseurs. Given Schubert's short life, his imponderable gift, his unceasing improvement and his very special musical personality, the String Quintet safely belongs in the inner sanctum of chamber music alongside Beethoven's late quartets. The Alban Berg, Schiff recording is truly stunning. If you add Schubert's 2 piano trios and his last 3 string quartets, you have your desert island Schubertiad. Why the young kids aren't doing a rave, chillout or even a burning man event around this kind of bliss fest is beyond me. (Maybe they are and I am just too square to know about it.)

Kai Christiansen, Founder and Creative Director, earsense

with thinking heart and feeling mind, i'll seek your muse, thy soul divine