If I had words

Smed has proclaimed this “Music Week.” Given my temporary disappearance over the holiday weekend, I’m a little behind, but I thought I put in my two cents worth and try to do some extra music blogging this week. I encourage you all to do the same.

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Smed invited me to join him in blogging about music this week, and I happily agree. I’ve been giving some thought to what I’d like to accomplish and I’ve decided to try to blog about one song/piece a day. My model is the interesting, if somewhat annoying, Songbook by Nick Hornby. Each chapter of Hornby’s book talks about one song and its impact on some aspect of his life (impact being fairly broadly defined). Hornby writes exclusively about pop songs and seems, at least to me, to want to demonstrate something about his coolness or manliness or identity in a way that I find irritating a lot of the time. But I like the premise – it’s something I’ve definitely used in this space before – the idea of song as representation. I’m going to start, though, not by talking about a song but about a symphony and maybe not so much about representation as a day in the life.

AJ and I were talking about Camille Saint-Saëns at the breakfast table yesterday morning. It happened like this: The radio announcer put on a piano work and then announced the composer as being Saint-Saëns and that today was his birthday. I happen to find Saint-Saëns to be one of the most fun things you can say with an exagerrated French accent. It sounds like a fabrication designed to exploit the sound of Frenchness. I was overarticulating it, repeating it over and over again and trying to make AJ laugh. AJ, however, had other ideas.

“Stop that, Mommy! I want to ask you something!”

“I’m sorry. What is it?”

“What did you say Mommy?”

“Saint-Saëns!”

“Stop that! That’s who we’re studying in music class.”

Instantly, I knew what he must be talking about. “You’re learning ‘The Carnival of the Animals,’ aren’t you?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“I’ve got a recording of it around here somewhere. Maybe we can listen to it together sometime. Did you know I teach that piece to my college students?”

AJ got wide-eyed. He likes the idea of learning something that college students learn.

“Do you really teach it to the college students?”

“Yes, I really do. It’s a good way for people to learn about what different instruments sound like and about musical style, how to make different pieces sound like they’re different kinds of things or like they’re from different times and places. Or like they’re different animals. Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Which one’s your favorite?”

“I can’t remember.”

I turned the radio off and walked AJ to school and came home and turned the radio back on to keep me company while I did the breakfast dishes. The radio was playing the second movement of Saint-Saëns’ third symphony, better known as the “Organ” symphony, which the composer wrote concurrently with the Carnival of the Animals. I realized that AJ knows this piece too, although he doesn’t know its name. He knows its main theme as the theme from the movie Babe, which, coincidentally, they watched in part at school last week as part of a unit on farms. Babe is one of my favorite movies of all time. I rented it a gazillion times before I finally bought myself a copy, and this was well before I had children. AJ now loves it almost as much as I do.

The “organ” symphony, from which Babe’s theme is drawn, is technically a two movement work, although really, it has four distinct parts, two in each movement, and is thus more like a typical symphony of its time than it might look at first blush. It is Beethoven-like in scope and structure (although written three quarters of a century later in the heart of the romantic era), with its theme built up from small parts. He kind of does what Beethoven does in his 5th symphony in reverse. Beethoven starts with a theme and takes it apart. Saint-Saëns begins with the parts and gradually pulls them together, so that when you finally get the whole tune in one place, an event that is announced by the sudden and surprising entrance of the organ, you feel like you’ve climbed a mountain. The tune itself, though, is much different from Beethoven 5 and more like Beethoven 9 – it sounds like a chorale, which is why it was such a great choice for a movie theme. And Saint-Saëns’ construction is not nearly as complicated. But hopefully you get the idea.

The lack of complication is part of why Saint-Saëns is often decried as a lesser composer, which may be true, or may be because he is French (or more particularly, that he is not German in an era where German music was king). In any case, Saint-Saëns is known for being tuneful. He knew how to write a good earworm. And the chorale theme from the Organ symphony is a great one.

In Babe, the theme appears throughout the movie, but it is showcased in a scene that, like the entrance of the organ in Saint-Saëns’ symphony, also brings tears to my eyes. It is the moment when Farmer Hoggett, desperately afraid that his pig, whom he adores, is going to die, sings him a song set to the Saint-Saëns theme:

If I had words to make a day for you,
I’d sing you a morning golden and true,
I would make this day last for all time,
Then fill the night deep in moonshine.

I used to sing it to AJ when he was a baby, it was the exact thing I wanted to say when caught in the wonder of holding such a perfect, tiny creature, magic and true.

The original Saint-Saëns version is much less sentimental and ends in outright grandeur with brass and tympani and a mammoth chord on the organ, nineteenth century extravagance at its best. The version in Babe is more closely derived from the first iteration of the symphonic theme, at the beginning of the Maestoso where it plays in slightly hushed tones with an odd and compelling twinkly ostinato in the piano. The ostinato is well-suited to the fairy-tale atmosphere of the film.

In the movie, the song, sung softly in a voice cracking with emotion, is followed by a moment of celebration when the normally stoic Farmer Hoggett notices that not only has Babe finally gotten up, but he is eating. The song morphs into an Irish reel and Hoggett dances for the pig, leaping up into the air at the end. This moment is shown in slow motion, and every time I see it I think something bad is going to happen when he hits the floor. But it is not that kind of movie. Hoggett hits the floor and grunts. The camera pans to the window where all the farm animals have been watching Hoggett’s antics. What looked to be a moment of stress turned out to be a joke, and the friendliest kind of joke. Surprise!

There is something joke-like about the end of the organ symphony too. That first organ chord always makes me leap out of my seat, it is so unexpected. The organ then disappears for a moment as the strings start a fugal texture. It returns twice more before the theme comes in as a chorale before introducing an orchestral fugue, another Beethovenian gesture. The tune tries to come back in, but is twisted into a chromatic descending scale in a sequence that keeps climbing every upward until it comes tumbling to a halt on a solo flute.

The surprises in the organ symphony are all about setting up expectations and thwarting them. They are about sudden contrasts and broken patterns. They are based on repetition that at a crucial moment fails to repeat. A sort of musical joke. Much like Farmer Hoggett, the symphony comes crashing to the finish, never quite completing the tune in the way you expected, but still satisfying.

Over the closing credits of the film, we hear the song version of the theme again, this time sung in a reggae inspired arrangement and sung by the three blind mice, who serve as a sort of Greek chorus for the film. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks smoking weed. You can hear this version of the song here. Note that the video is a montage from the movie, but does not actually appear in this form in the film.

When AJ got home from school, I told him he knew another song by Saint-Saëns and that he should try to guess what it is. I started to hum it for him.

“It’s Babe!”

“That’s right.”

“I love that song. Tell me again how you used to sing it to me when I was a baby.”

“I used to sing it to you when you were a baby and you would grab your toes with your hands and wiggle and smile.”

For the rest of the day, I kept catching him humming snatches of the tune. And me too. It is one of those tunes that sounds like all is right with the world.