Three oddities, part 1

After a series of posts on seventeenth and eighteenth century music, I am moving back, so to speak, to the nineteenth century. Before tackling still another dozen tunes from a country-dance collection, to be followed by numbers from Charles Lecocq's great success (and one of the best known opéras bouffes/operettas from the latter half of the century) La Fille de Madame Angot, I will present three pieces I am characterizing as "oddities," though each for a different reason. Today it is a set of variations and character pieces on the tune most people know as "Chopsticks." After that, I will look at a set of variations by Paul Dukas on a theme by Rameau, and then a short sacred choral duet by Cécile Chaminade.

Whether the "thème favori" of Paraphrases: 24 Variations et 15 petits pièces sur le thème favori et obligé (1880) was influenced by the piece called "The Chop Waltz" (Glasgow 1877) [as claimed in the Wikipedia article] is highly doubtful, nor am I inclined to hunt further to clarify the matter. But it should be said that the tune as Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, and Liadov use it is in 2/4 meter, not 3/4, uses ^6 as well as ^5, and was already well known in Russia as "tati-tati."

Because the upper voice in the wedge figure that makes up the tune ascends, it is perhaps not surprising that the added material for the variations tends to descend--indeed, we can see this already in the harmonization of the theme, which doubles the lower voice to end. Asterisks show that upper voice notes G5 and A5 don't fit their harmonic support; lower voice notes always do.

In the first variation, A minor: ^3 is reached in both upper and lower voices. Note again that the new material mostly plods on downward.

Since "tati-tati" is not much of a tune at best, in most of the variations it is reduced to a covering descant. That status is plain from variations 4 and 8, below.

Overall, the set of variations -- and the character pieces (including *two* fugues!) -- are notable mostly for their cleverness and mechanical compositional skill.