After a few nights finishing up some Mozart, I get back to some new music tonight. A stack of Tchaikovsky, some Telemann and Tallis. The Telemann is a disc of Keyboard Fantasias played by John Butt. I actually had the chance to see Prof. Butt play these live once, and the week before the concert I found a Dover edition of these pieces. When I got to the concert (a Wednesday noon concert at UC Berkeley) I saw him sit down with the same Dover edition. I’m not positive, but he may have been picking and choosing what pieces to play as he went along. He is an amazing harpsichord player, and part of me wonders if he did the same thing for the recording session of this disc.

Most of the Tchaikovsky is chamber music (and the six disc Haitink orchestral works set). But the first thing I listened to tonight was the first string quartet and a common-tone chromatic third related chord immediately jumped out (the beginning is in D-major, and the phrase has settled onto an A triad that is decorated with an F-major chord for part of a beat). I forget how refreshing this harmonic trick is. I haven’t listened to much later romantic music lately (and while these relationships show up in Beethoven and Schubert they usually become a new key area rather then a momentary highlighting kind of effect). The place where I usually hear this now is in a Radiohead song every now and then and while it is surprising in that context also, Tchaikovsky knew how to use it to wake up the listener. That chord appear just a few moments after an F-sharp minor chord which fits in well with its surroundings. But that sudden F major chord seems to come out of almost nowhere harmonically.

Now, it’s not that this kind of harmonic writing is daring or risky. No one risks death here, and if someone gets up and leaves an audience upon hearing something like this then there just aren’t enough worries in that persons life. So I don’t like using words like daring or risky to describe that kind of composing. But when I heard it just now the first thing that came to my mind was ‘Damn… Tchaikovsky is quite the badass”. And really, he was. Not just for that chord, but for some very dramatic and elegant and beautiful music that he put down on paper. And when I heard it, it made me think that it has been some time since there is something I had put down on paper that really surprised me, and I think it is time to make that a goal again. I need to do some things in my music that surprises me again.