Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🎶 🎶 It’s 9/8, Anton Dvořák’s birthday (1841), which will serve as a lead-in to a fabulous performance of music (by Purcell, not Dvořák) that Ellen Kaisse e-mailed to me as a (9/6) birthday present, stroking one of the passions — for music — that animate my life (two others I have recently posted about: the multiplicity of languages, cultures, subcultures, and life histories; and moral purpose — yeah, that one sounds like swaggering, but I really mean it)

Before I leave AD, a note on him from my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”:

let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)

But I will now put you off for a bit longer, to explain a bit about how I create these blog essays — because today I’m going to jettison that routine and just reel out a conversation between two musically enthusiastic friends, in which bits of informed analysis get folded into an envelope of powerful emotions.

What I do here. I have a gigantic list of topics to post about, added to by ten or more new ones every day (so I will never ever catch up, especially at my advanced age; I just resign myself to that). I then pick a topic, whatever looks shiny at the moment, and dive in. Assemble a file of everything that might be relevant, and things those things lead to, and so on for several iterations. Look for a hook to start the piece. Do a long exercise in free writing; all my blogging, like my class lectures, turns on riffing, improvisation, like jazz (or Schubert, who was famous for never playing a piece of his music twice the same way), so you prepare for the actual performances by playing with the possibilities and pulling out the ones that sound good (trust your instincts; and your experience — I’ve been working on my writing style since I was, oh, 12 years old).

Then comes the long exercise in polishing and editing down. Making its form clear, but also introducing brief playful or curious bits as relief (remember that you’re doing this for an audience; be kind to them). Around 10 revisions is routine for me; but I’ve sweated through 20 to 30. Sometimes calling for reworking the ideas from the ground up in a new way.

Since the final product is an essay in print, it’s fixed in form, no longer riffing. But if it’s good, it’s a bright jewel, like one of the Chopin Etudes.

Side note. Every so often in the writing-as-riffing stage, I spontaneously hit on some inspired idea welling up from god knows where, and I disconcertedly go, whoa, I had no idea that I knew that! (Similarly in my class lectures — an experience somewhere between a light bulb moment and being struck by lightning). Unlike the bright (but utterly worthless) ideas that sometimes come to me in dreams about linguistic analysis, these ideas are in fact the Right Stuff.

And now. From EK in e-mail, announcing: Purcell for your birthday:

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1VfAcmWwrQ&list=RDa1VfAcmWwrQ”

I suggest that you watch the YouTube video before EK and I go on to discuss it.

The conversation:

— AZ: A thousand wows. This is one of the funniest, cleverest, most engagingly staged, danced, and acted, and, incidentally, beautifully sung and played, performances I’ve ever seen. Pure genius, it had me weeping with pleasure.

— EK: I knew you would love it. I can’t take credit for finding it. The orchestra / chorus I sing with, Harmonia, is performing it on a program of  Baroque Bangers next month, and our director, Will, posted it as a video we could watch in preparation. There will in fact be dancers — Baroque dancers, no break dancing or gymnastics that I know of — and I sure hope he doesn’t intend for us choristers to dance. I thought the singers did remarkably well, but I suspect Les Arts Florissants hires people with multiple stage talents (and good looks as well).

I get a different mix proposed by Facebook than you do — it says it’s chosen for moi — which allowed me to discover that YouTube has several pieces from that outdoor performance (and its indoor rehearsal) available. There went a large portion of the afternoon…

— AZ: I’ve got the production details. Almost all young people, from Julliard and the like. In companies that deliberately embrace a wide variety of (attractive) physical types. So: pleasing to the eye and also satisfying my DEI idealism.

DETAILS

– extract from “Now join your warbling voices all, Sing while we trip it” from The Fairy Queen” [Titania as Queen of the Fairies] by Henry Purcell

— production of Les Arts Florissants

— musical direction: Paul Agnew

— stage direction and choreography: Mourad Merzouki with the young singers of Le Jardin des Voix

— and the dancers of the Compagnie Käfig & The Juilliard School

(video extracts from the première at the Festival Dans les Jardins de William Christie (August 19, 2023), filmed by Amazing Digital Studios)

— EK: I get a different mix proposed by Facebook than you do — it says it’s chosen for moi — which allowed me to discover that YouTube has several pieces from that outdoor performance (and its indoor rehearsal) available. There went a large portion of the afternoon…

— AZ: I saw hints that this stuff might be out there, decided that one small jewel of a performance should suffice.

And, wow, do I like Purcell’s forward-driving syncopations in the dance numbers. (Handel does some of that in Acis and Galatea, and I’ve posted about it in some Sacred Harp songs)

Previously on this blog. From my 4/27/26 posting “Let’s dance!” on the trio and chorus “They shall be as happy as they’re fair” from The Fairy Queen — also with forward-driving syncopations in a Les Arts Florissants production

This entry was posted on September 8, 2026 at 10:04 am and is filed under Dancers, Events and occasions, Language and the body, Music, Teaching, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.