Unity and Variety for Clarinet and Piano

Recently I had to relearn a personal lesson about being a composer. Of course I'm not a composer any more - I gave up using that term. I prefer to call myself 'someone who makes up music'.

The lesson I had learned during my 'called myself a composer' days was: "Don't enter competitions."

With one exception, I never won any.  (I'll get to the exception in a minute.)   Every time I did enter, in spite of myself, I started to imagine the positive rewards of winning.  Fantasizing like this inevitably made losing extra bitter for me.  I was bitter enough already.  I reasoned that if the only result of entering a competition was feeling bad then I shouldn't enter in the first place.  Who needs that?

Earlier this year I became aware of a particular competition asking for works not unlike my video Solstice Lights which I was just then finishing.  Of course I knew the moment I read the email that if I entered I would not be chosen.  I also immediately knew that if I entered, in spite of my best efforts not to, I would let myself fantasize about the benefits of winning.  And I knew that once I was informed of my loss I would feel like an idiot for entering in the first place.

In spite of all this prudent rationality, I somehow convinced myself to enter.  (Yeah, I'm leaving out lots of details.  You're welcome.) Turns out, I was right.  Solstice Lights was not chosen and I feel like an idiot.

This experience reminded me of that exception, my one and only competition-winning piece.  I wrote it nearly 40 years ago when I was in college.  It was one of my first compositions.  (Gosh, I've been writing music for nearly 40 years.)  I was in my early twenties.  What did I know?

I'm not even sure exactly who awarded the prize - some organization with a name like Minnesota Association of Music Teachers.  I was chosen in a particular age group.  I don't remember there being a prize, maybe I received a small check, maybe not.  I do remember that there was an awards ceremony.  I chose not to attend the ceremony.  I guess I had a bad attitude even then.

The piece is for clarinet and piano.  I called it Unity and Variety.  There are two movements - the first one is entitled "Variety", the second is called "Unity".  "Unity and variety" were concepts I had learned in my composition lessons - two opposing qualities which good composers were supposed to balance in their work.  The music seems particularly enthusiastic to my older ears.  Maybe I'm just projecting that onto the music because I remember how naive I was.

I'm posting a performance of Unity and Variety should you be curious about how an award-winning Ocker composition might sound.  Be careful, the performance is strident, not terribly accurate or inspired.  If you only have heard my music from the last few years it might come as a surprise - or maybe not.  Everyone has to start somewhere.

Winning that award probably affected my career decisions right after college.  Today, of course, it's totally insignificant, laughably so.  I still think it's a pretty good piece - especially for a college kid who barely played the piano and who had virtually no experience writing music.  I imagine that it would be fun for me if someone wanted to play this music again - except I'm not even sure where the music is.

Click the picture (that's me about 1978) to hear Unity and Variety (I. Variety, II. Unity) by David Ocker, © 1973 and 2011 - 571 seconds

Some previous Mixed Meters clarinet-related posts.

Award-winning Tags: Unity and Variety. . . clarinet and piano music. . . composition competitions

Music for a Horned Helmet

Recently I was surprised to hear operatic singing from a television commercial.  There was even a bass voice. You never hear basses sing on television. The ad was for a big financial firm which has figured out how to make money from people who can't wait to be paid. On YouTube I discovered three such opera-mercials - all with the same music but different voices.

The first commercial spoofs an actual opera on stage:

The second focuses on the uses of cash now - like home repair, car repair, newborn quintuplets:

And the third is everyone's favorite setting for opera music - a city bus:

Watching all three of these, I was struck by the recurring use of one particular image: the horned helmet - sometimes called a Viking Helmet. I guess nothing says "Opera" like a metal hat with horns on it.

If you really care whether the Vikings wore Viking helmets and how this particular headgear got to be associated with opera, this Straight Dope article Did Vikings Really Wear Horns On Their Helmets? is for you.

If you think there might be a better music/horned-helmet association, you'd be correct. Here's a picture of Moondog:

The Moondog picture came from here - where you'll find a link to some radio interviews on WBAI.  For a while - a few years ago - certain of Moondog's compositions were being used in automobile advertisements.  (Couldn't find those on YouTube.)

Do yourself a favor. Listen to some Moondog.

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Previous MM posts about classical music in television commercials:
Selling With Vivaldi "These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit."

Advertising with Disney Hall  "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming  "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway  "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"

Horned Tags: horned helmet. . . Viking helmet. . . opera. . . J G Wentworth. . . Moondog

Selling with Vivaldi

(If you have time to watch only one of these videos, definitely watch the last one, Beer Vivaldi.)

In the museum-like world of classical music one of the most revered and oft-displayed masterworks is a set of violin concertos, The Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi.  These pieces easily evoke meteorological images in the minds of listeners who, after all, have come to believe that music is really just like a movie - but without anything to watch.

But these pieces are among the very few which have a life as part of contemporary pop culture.  They aren't as well known as the Ode to Joy or the Ride of the Valkyries.  One doesn't have to look too hard to hear them in unexpected places - for example, as a soundtrack to a television commercial.

This short advertisement, running currently on television, shows a fearless stunt every-man jumping out of his luxury car onto an auto carrier, in hopes of acquiring an even better luxury car. The exciting derring-do music is the end of the first movment of Vivaldi's Winter. Perfect images for baroque music, don't you think?

Lest you think Vivaldi can only be used to sell automobiles, here's an ad for Hewlett Packard computers. The music is from Vivaldi's Summer and the guy waving his hands, creating fantastical images in mid-air, is none other than Joshua Bell, a violinist most famous perhaps for his performances in the Washington Metro. If he really could make visuals like these, live on stage just by waving his hands, Bell could probably become a really big star.

Lest you think that Vivaldi can only be used to sell autos and computers, here's another ad, with the very same Joshua Bell performing the same movement from the same Vivaldi concerto. The only difference is that in this one he is selling perfume, not that you can tell until the very end.  Listen for the horrible cut in the music, just before the voice over.

Lest you think that Vivaldi's Four Seasons can only be used to sell high cost, high tech or high prestige items, here's an example of it being used for a different type of product. We see a scruffy college student amidst piles of forbidding obscure tomes, apparently translating an oriental language. In his notebook he writes "The divine truth one must find lies within." This idea provokes him first to deep thought and then to begin a quest through the stacks of the library. What he finds is ... a package of noodles. (Actually it finds him.) The remainder of the saga involves fancy kitchen prep work - the kind performed nightly by inscrutable Japanese chefs at your local Benihaha.

If you're paying attention, however, this commercial should make you want to buy an Audi. Yes, this noodling music comes from the same Vivaldi movement so perfect for jumping out of your car on a busy freeway.

These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit. Our last example is much more interesting, vastly more creative, much more focused on Vivaldi's music - it's another performance of the same Winter movement which we've heard twice already. Alas, it is also much more forgiving of over consumption - in this case the item being promoted is beer. The image we see is a creative inebriate, an otherwise anonymous person called Pianobloke who must be a big fan of beer, creating pitches on a wide selection of beer in bottles, cans and glasses - the last of which he performs like a glass harmonica. These recorded snippets are assembled into Vivaldi using fancy video editing.

This video is chock full of visual imagery. There's no way to catch everything the first time.  Go to YouTube and watch in high definition if you can.  Notice that the first note is performed on a bottle of Duff, the beer of the Simpsons. After the music finishes each bottle of beer gets a cameo shot. Then our hero passes out. Congratulations, Pianobloke, a job well done.  If you can turn out something like that I guess you weren't really that drunk. Why would you want us to think you were?

Other Mixed Meters pieces discussing classical music in advertising:
Advertising with Disney Hall  "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming  "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway  "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"



Violin Concerto Tags: Antonio Vivaldi. . . The Four Seasons. . . television advertising. . . beer. . . capitalist realism. . . Joshua Bell