Andrea Bocelli, My Christmas (Verve, 2009)

Andrea Bocelli, My Christmas / Mi Navidad (Verve, 2009; re-release re-mastered, 2015). David Foster, producer and arranger; William Ross, arranger. Link on Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Verve. I was introduced to this five years ago (December 2013), when we took a weekend vacation on Siesta Key, near Sarasota, and ate dinner at City Pizza Bar and Italian Grill. The endings caught my attention, I asked the waiter, and he replied that this recording was the owner's seasonal favorite.

Disc list: 15 tracks. The eight upper-register endings are indicated with an asterisk (*).

  *1. "White Christmas"/"Bianco Natale." A line goes down, as in the original melody, in the first verse. Bocelli then turns it upward in the closing cadence -- and holds the final ^8 cleanly for a nearly impossible length of time.

  *2. "Angels We Have Heard On High." Two halves: straightforward presentation by him, then choir enters -- two (or three?) half-step key slides -- he joins and completes with the same closing figure: essentially ^5-^8 leap with quick ^6 & ^7 -- but these are clearly articulated; it's not a gliss.

  *3. "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." With children's chorus. At one point he sings a descant to their melody. Later it's reversed. Twice he closes by lifting ^2-^1 to ^9-^8.

  *4. "The Christmas Song" with Nathalie Cole. He's doing Sinatra/Crosby in this one. So is the arranger (slow 1950s? ballad style and chord changes). He lifts the final notes up to ^8-^9-^8. He even goes a third higher in the coda.

  5. "The Lord's Prayer" - with The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Sounds like you would expect it to.

  6. "What Child Is This" - with Mary J. Blige. Gospel-tinged soprano. They go back and forth. She seems too constrained by the arrangement to be convincing. The Italian band interlude doesn't help.

  7. "Adeste Fidelis." With full orchestra and trumpets and timpani, and a somewhat subdued chorus; sounds like a Baroque/high Classical orchestra. He substitutes a prolonged ^5 for ^2 in the final cadence.

  8. "O Tannenbaum." Pastoral setting with drones, later a flute solo, guitar, four horns. He sings in three languages. No rising line or leaping figure at the end.

  *9. "Jingle Bells" - featuring The Muppets. Obvious but still funny opposition of a (too) slow lyrical tenor and the upbeat Muppets (he joins them). Simple inversion of melodic direction in the cadence:

  *10. "Silent Night." Children (?) in intro, wordless -- most movie-music-like sound on the album. They reappear between verses and at the end. After a deceptive cadence (vi rather than I on the final chord), he repeats the phrase and goes up in a leisurely ^6-^7-^8. One of the easiest to manage in terms of voice leading -- same as in "Jingle Bells":

  11. "Blue Christmas" - with Reba McIntire. Similar to "The Christmas Song" but without the '40s-'50s tones.

  12. "Cantique De Noel." Consistent sound of a tenor aria throughout. Even a little ornament on the final dominant.

  13. "Caro Gesu Bambino." Perhaps simplest of the lot; song, not aria. Relatively low tessitura for him; almost baritone sound.

  *14. "I Believe" - with Katherine Jenkins. Very movie-ish duet, mostly string orchestra behind. A key shift halfway through. At the end she is on ^3, he is on ^5, then leaps cleanly up to ^8.

  *15. "God Bless Us Everyone." Full-throated version of a song from Disney, A Christmas Carol, by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard. The tune itself ends in the upper register (see this page: link; click on the "piano" image for a readable view of a full verse). At the end (coda): he manages to overtop with a ^10-^9-^8. Here is the beginning of the song (a clear fifth frame is boxed) and the verse ending in the upper octave:

Chaminade, The Flatterer, Op. 50

Chaminade, La Lisonjera / The Flatterer, Op. 50 (1890). Design is ABA with an extended coda. Section A, below, is literally repeated.

Because this is in the "thumb region" of the right hand, I have removed the left hand's bass clef in order to trace lines. An octave-line runs through the eight-bar antecedent phase of a sixteen-bar period, from Gb4 at the beginning to Gb5 in bar 9. If one hears that as the Schenkerian initial ascent, then what follows in the consequent phase is a mirror Urlinie: down from Gb5 to Db5 and then returning at the end.

Here is the "mirror" again, with the bass restored.

Chaminade, Piece Romantique, Op. 9n1

Chaminade, Piéce Romantique, Op. 9n1 (1880).   The design is ABA, where A is a 16-bar theme closing on V rather than I--see below-- and is then repeated, B is briefly contrasting but turns out to be an 8-bar transition, and A is an altered reprise of the theme with a close on the tonic.

Here is the altered reprise.

Chaminade, Berceuse, Op.6

Chaminade, Berceuse, Op.6 (published c. 1878). The main theme, section A, is a 24-bar double period (12 bars each in the antecedent and consequent). Here is the consequent. The upper note Bb5 reached to begin the second 6-bar phrase might be taken as a focal note.

Section B ends with a partial return -- beginning in the third bar below. Note that the flourish has now been extended upward to Eb6.

Section C is in D major (= Ebb major). A full reprise follows, where only the latter part of the consequent is altered, as below. Here Eb6 has become Eb7 in the flourish, and the figure is now an arpeggio rather than a scale. In the eighth bar of the excerpt, the harmony A 6/5 pulls the close in a different direction. The trills maintain the register of the previous closes: so A-natural4, G-natural4, Ab4, Gb4. Above that, E-natural5, ornamented at first, turns into a sustained half-note, then F5, then Gb to close--suggesting that the prominent Gb5 from the main theme may be the best choice if one is looking for a focal tone overall.

Chaminade, Mazurka, Op. 1n2

Cécile Chaminade, Mazurka, Op. 1n2 (1869). In the multi-strain with reprise design typical of 19th century dances, here as ABACDCAEA, where C, D, and E are in the subdominant. The A strain is shown below. Using Schenker terms and following one of my 1987 articles, I would call this a three-part Ursatz, with soprano descant (^3-^4-^4-^3) and alto Urlinie ^5-^6-^7-^8. Bars 5-8 repeat 1-4.

Reference: Neumeyer, David. "The Three-Part Ursatz." In Theory Only 10/1-2: 3-29.

Schenkerian analysis guide published

Not entirely germane to this blog, as the Guide is very traditional pedagogy, but I will nevertheless announce a compact online version of A Guide to Schenkerian Analysis, originally published in 1992. Susan E. Tepping was my co-author. It is available on the Texas Scholarworks platform: link.

Here is the abstract:

This essay is an introduction to Schenkerian analysis, one model for linear analysis/interpretation of music. This condensed version of an out-of-print manual, co-authored with Susan Tepping, provides the basis of an efficient learning experience and includes only the material from the original book necessary to that end. Two supplementary files contain appendices (File 2) and text and figures from the original book deleted from this file (File 3).

Update 18 December 2024: I have published A Guide to Schenkerian Analysis, Early 20th Century. Here is the link.

Shaw's Musical Olio (1814)

An interesting item found on IMSLP: Oliver Shaw (1779-1848), Musical Olio. Comprising a selection of valuable Songs, Duetts, Waltzes, Glees, Military Airs, &c. &c. adapted to the Piano-Forte, with an accompaniment for the Flute or Violin. Selected and published in numbers, by Oliver Shaw. Providence: H. Mann & Co. Of these, four issues are available on IMSLP: March, June, September, and December 1814. The pieces are consecutively numbered. Five of them are presented below.

The term "olio" may seem odd-to-humorous today, but it was a common 19th and even early 20th century term for miscellaneous incidental pieces intended for vaudeville, minstrel shows, and similar kinds of entertainments. More generally it meant "miscellany" or "hodge-podge" (link to dictionary definition). (An internet search will show that "olio" is still very much alive, in periodicals with the older sense of miscellanies, in a food-sharing app, the Anglicized version of the Spanish dish olia, a Los Angeles based rock group, etc.)

9_contentment. The figure is in the 1st voice and might be read as an incomplete mirror, where ^8 drops directly to ^5 (bars 3-4), then returns by line (bars 5-8) -- or as a double neighbor figure about ^8.

17_Belles. A 6/8 country dance that might well have been called a reel. Complicated though this might seem, I hear a principal voice rising from ^1 to ^3 (bars 1-2, again in 5-6 and 13-14), answered by ^6-^7-^8 in the same part in bars 3-4 but in the "discant" in bars 7-8 and 15-16.

19_Himmel waltz. Dance and trio (at the dolce), with the rising figure in the former.

39_Moore. Music repeated for a second verse. Small ternary form in the verse. From ^9 to ^8 in the voice's opening (bar 5), then focus on figures in the tetrachord, ^5-^8.

49_Cottage dance. A simple 2/4 contradance, the music (not the suggested figures) having some of the character of a schottish. Equally simple in design: mirror Urlinie in the first strain, same but leading on the dominant in the second strain. Ends with reprise of the first strain.