Week 20: 18 March 2024 – “O Mensch bewein”: Lent 4

Plus: Bach In the World, 10 years of "Catallena," and more!

As always, we recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices. 

Picking up from last week: Ansley Simpson’s more famous sister Leanne, who seems to be one of those people. Write a bestseller one minute and get shortlisted for the Polaris Prize the next, working as an academic and activist all the while. As you might expect from that description, the music is pretty “literary,” mostly consisting of storytelling and poetry recitation over rock and blues backdrops. 

It’s a good idea. Songs like “I Pity the Country” and “Under Your Always Light” are really quite effective, letting the activity of the instrumentals mediate between the intensity of the words and the breathy, half-whispered voice in which they’re recitated; “Always Light” and “Head of the Lake” are gorgeous songs, and there are harder-hitting numbers like “Pity” and “Viscosity.” There’s enough singing to break things up, but really there’s no danger of the music getting stale or monotonous. Theory of Ice certainly deserved its Polaris shortlist placement, and arguably more.

All of that, to be sure, is thanks to the musical team: Simpson built these tracks in collaboration with her band, who get most of the composer credits. Among them: who else but Ansley Simpson? The sisters work fantastically together. And Theory of Ice makes a great pairing with She Fell From the Sky.

Week 20: 18 March 2024 – “O Mensch bewein”: Lent 4

Please save applause for the end of each set

O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross, BWV 622

Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537

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O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 618

Christe, du Lamm Gottes, BWV 619

O Jesu, wie ist dein Gestalt, BWV 1094

O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 1095

Jesu, meines Lebens Leben, BWV 1107

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O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, BWV 656

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“O Mensch bewein” inspires praise bordering on hysteria. Take the following sampler of adjectives from Russell Stinson: “exalted,” “sumptuous,” “ravishing,” “most beloved.”¹ This piece was played at the funerals of both Charles-Marie Widor and his student Marcel Dupré; Widor is alleged to have called it the greatest piece of music (not organ music: music) ever written.²

Who am I to disagree? This is a piece covered in sheer ornamental and harmonic beauty, interspersed with increasingly expressive dissonant moments. Take the opening:

Forgive me for putting these bars under the microscope for a moment. (Or skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t like harmonic analysis.) This opening is surprisingly unsettled. Immediately, with the third note of the piece, Bach pulls away from the home key of E-flat major: the first chord sounds like the upbeat to a piece in A-flat. But the following A-flat major chord is hardly stable either. First, the bass pulls away from the tenor to hold a throbbingly dissonant minor second; then we get an even harsher series of B-natural vs. F-natural tritones, which take us to C minor. That’s all within one measure; in the next, Bach restarts in E-flat, but now drifts into the harder, more intense key of B-flat—followed immediately by another jolt toward A-flat. 

I usually try to avoid this kind of dry play-by-play announcing, but hopefully it gives some sense here of just how “wandring” (it is a piece about sin after all) this opening is. It’s only as the piece proceeds, and especially in the repeat of the tune’s first phrase, that the harmony begins to settle down, falling into more typical (if lushly decorated) ways of elaborating E-flat major.

It’s only a temporary respite. The second half of the tune begins an octave higher and returns to the language of unstable harmonies and glimpses of minor keys. Now we can take lunges at F minor and G minor, with whole measures left dangling harmonically—the pedals’ leap down an octave here sound like the bottom falling out of the texture:

And then the most famous part of all, the ending. Twice (mm.18 and 22), Bach drops us into an unusually “flatward” key and climbs out of the hole with a slow chromatic ascent in the pedal:

The first of these climbs culminates (mm.21–22) in a triumphant, almost straightforward major-key climax. So it’s heartbreaking when this high point is immediately undercut with the second lurch flatward (second half of m.22). And given all that, it’s impressive that the famous C-flat-major plunge at the end (last chord of m. 23) still sounds so astonishing; even with all of this preparation, it’s a stunning moment, one that Bach insists we savor as long as possible. “Adagissimo”: you know he’s serious.³

Even one of those flatward swerves would be unusual for Bach; three is exceptional. In other pieces, that kind of harmonic move is reserved for special or even transcendent moments. To me, a close comparison is the ending of the “Et in unum dominum” from the Mass in B Minor:

Diving from G major into E-flat major is an effective way to illustrate “descendit de coelis.” But it was originally written to go with the words “et incarnatus est.” These harmonies are what Bach uses when he wants to depict divine mysteries.

Don’t leave yet—the C-minor fantasy and fugue is pretty great too; in another week it might get “above-title” billing. And it’s an unusual piece in many ways. The Fantasy has all the trappings of a piece of orchestral or chamber music. Like the first movement of a trio sonata or the slow movement of a concerto (and uniquely for a “...and Fugue” piece, if we believe in that title), it ends with a half cadence that makes it flow directly into the fugue. The texture, starting out with a bare, rumbling low C in the pedal and gradually adding more and more motion, almost resembles a chorus with woodwind soloists. It sounds much more like the “Qui Tollis” from the B-minor Mass than it does like the “Dorian” Toccata or the “Wedge.” 

Partly, that’s because this Fantasy doesn’t bother showing off at all. Instead, it focuses on maximizing expressivity and cohesion. It’s written in a tightly-wound fugal texture, but the result is far from dry. The subject begins with a jump up a minor sixth, as wide and dramatic a leap as traditional counterpoint rules allow; meanwhile, the countersubject consists entirely of musical sighs. All of which is bound together in the rhythms of a slow dance: an ingenious musical idea, but a nightmare for the performer. This piece doesn’t need flashy runs to be difficult; finding the balance between “singing” and “dance” styles is challenging enough. I think I might have gone too far to the “dance” side last Wednesday:

Edward Elgar, of all people, understood this challenge well. His arrangement of the fantasy includes (among other less tasteful additions) a harp part in slow waltz rhythm, which really helps to buoy the rhythm along. (He also cut the time signature in half, from 6/4 to 3/4.) It’s kind of a trashy orchestration, but I think he clocked the piece pretty well.

That said, I have to admit it: Elgar actually did a pretty great job with the Fugue. His incomplete reinforcements of fugue subject entrances produce an effect somewhere between Beethoven’s eccentric orchestration and Webern’s pointillism. I like the intensity and even the tempo and articulations he picks. I should fess up: I stole some of Elgar’s ideas. Although, I sadly couldn’t figure out how to add in the glockenspiel and triangle parts.

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In an effort to avoid a total logjam of Passiontide chorales next week, I’ve shifted a couple to this recital. You might have recognized “O Mensch bewein” from the St. Matthew Passion, where it ends Part I. So here’s its bookend: “O Lamm Gottes” is the chorale sung by the “extra” choir in the opening chorus.

One of the interesting things about that guest appearance is that it’s a major-key chorale interpolated into a minor-key movement. So “Kommt ihr Töchter” may not be very good indication of what chorale preludes on this tune sound like. Nor, for that matter, would Bach’s Latin setting of the Agnus Dei.⁴ In contrast to those somewhat grim minor-key pieces, the German Agnus Dei is almost a lullaby, and Bach’s settings are typically warm and comforting—at least to start. 

The least pretty-pretty one is BWV 618, the Orgelbüchlein setting. That’s partly due to its formal construction, a double canon that interleaves two iterations of the tune with a long string of musical sighs in the other voices. Those sighs themselves sometimes enter harsh, chromatic territory (where the text turns to “Our sins Thou bearest for us”), and even begin with archaic hints at the Mixolydian mode. But I think the thing that makes this piece sound most austere is its harmonic language: I can’t think of another F-major piece that makes such frequent and prominent use of A minor chords (iii) this side of LOONA’s “new.”⁵ To me, the result sounds oddly brittle. It’s a mysterious and vaguely unsettling soundworld; perhaps a more introverted invitation for sinners to self-examine.

“Christe, du Lamm Gottes” is (obviously) about the same subject matter, and (less obviously) also built around a canon. This time it’s a musical Big Mac: there are three parts surrounding the canonic voices, relentlessly walking up and down midtempo scales against the long notes of the tune. And if “O Lamm Gottes” hinted at archaic modal harmony, this chorale embodies it: try to hold the first note in your head, and see how far you’ve gone when the piece ends a minute later. 

I’ve been pretty harsh about some of the Neumeister Chorales, especially recently. (“Amateurish” is maybe putting it too nicely—Prince Johann Ernst was an amateur.) Of course, being too critical of these pieces is sort of missing the point. I remember Ton Koopman once repeating a reviewer’s comment that “even Koopman cannot save the Neumeister Chorales”: his counter was that it’s not about saving or redeeming these pieces, but rather presenting what’s there. That could imply that at least a few of these pieces are musically “beyond saving” (which I think is honestly true of “Nun laßt”), but it’s also a call to suspend judgment for a moment, to be willing to listen for different things than usual.

That’s helpful for “Jesu, meines Lebens Leben,” which is also somewhere between strange and mistake-ridden in terms of harmony. But it’s also delightful, yet another example of how much more fun Bach was when he was young and undisciplined: the piece changes its mind roughly every two measures about what accompaniment texture to use—or what voice the tune should be in—and halfway through it switches things up entirely and turns into a jig.⁶ “Saving” this piece would surely entail sucking all the fun out of it.

Still, sometimes it’s nice to hear early Bach pieces that nobody would say need “saving.” “O Jesu” and the Neumeister “O Lamm Gottes” are both very pretty pieces with much more uniformity of texture; Bach figured out the slow, expressive style pretty early on. You can tell he was enjoying himself, and maybe getting a bit carried away: the first phrase of “O Lamm Gottes” is eight measures long with a repeat; Bach adds a nine-measure interlude between the repeats, making for a first ending that’s almost a third as long as the entire piece. It may not have the canonic intricacies of the Orgelbüchlein chorales, but this piece isn’t too far off from their style and level of execution.

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I hope I didn’t sound unenthusiastic about “O Mensch bewein” above. I’ve gone gaga for that piece too, and I certainly get where Widor and Dupré are coming from. It’s gorgeous and extraordinary. 

Maybe my temptation to put the brakes on the “O Mensch bewein” hype train is just jealousy on behalf of this piece, the “Great Eighteen” setting of “O Lamm Gottes.” Where are the breathless superlatives for this piece? It’s hardly unknown or underplayed: Russell Stinson asserts that it’s “one of Bach's most popular organ chorales” (although I personally haven’t seen it programmed very often). But I don’t think it’s usually considered to be in the top class of Bach’s organ works. After all, in the very same paragraph, Stinson calls it “uneven,” “conventional,” and “monochromatic.”

Well, the first two verses of the chorale are conventional and very uniform in texture—but so is a heck of a lot of Bach’s best music. It’s about what you do with the conventions. In this case, Bach weaves a brocade of eighth notes around a richly and beautifully harmonized setting of the chorale tune. It’s not flashy music, but it’s wonderfully vocal and perfectly paced. There are enough flirtations with the relative minor and other “neighboring” keys to keep me happy in terms of harmonic variety. In other words, there’s plenty of subtle “coloration”; and really, it’s less texturally monotonous than the opening preludes of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the First Cello Suite.

And those preludes don’t end like “O Lamm Gottes” does. Bach has the chorale tune gradually descend throughout the piece, starting in the soprano, continuing in the alto for the second verse, and ending up in the bass. So the final stanza (“Bring us peace”) begins with the first pedal entrance of the whole piece, almost six minutes in. At the same time, the rhythm switches to something like a majestic, slowed-down jig. It’s a massive entrance and an unforgettable moment. Really, maybe that’s why the first two verses are monotonous for some people who know the piece: I can imagine it being hard to wait for the drop. (Even though, of course, its impact depends largely on having been prepared by several minutes of quieter music.)

After this initial shock, the pace of change picks up throughout the last verse. Halfway through (“Our sins” again), the parts with the jig rhythm switch to a repeated-note motive that I’ve heard compared to the hammering of nails into the Cross. And Bach follows that up with one of the crunchiest chromatic imbroglios in his whole output:

“Else must we have despaired” indeed. (The tuning of that long C-sharp-major chord on a Bach-era organ should make anyone despair.) When the music returns to streams of eighth notes to round out the piece, it gives a profound sense of relaxation. Context matters: by itself, this ending might not be much to write home about, but after all that came before, it’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of “Dona nobis pacem.”

Bach In the World

For long stretches, Markus Rathey’s new book had me thinking that it’s the best book on Bach ever written. It may still be, even if it’s a bit uneven. 

Rathey is an unusual combination of a few strands of Bach scholarship. One is probably what the word “musicology” conjures for most musicians: manuscript studies, endless poring over archives and other documents, detailed studies of “minor” musical and other figures in the Bach orbit. It’s the music equivalent of Erwin Panofsky’s gymnasium teacher, who was so proud to have published a paper correcting the placement of a single comma in Plato. I do mean to imply that this is a particularly Germanic brand of scholarship, represented by the kind of scholars who make critical editions like the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. But some of the best scholars in this vein have been Japanese, most notably Yoshitake Kobayashi. 

Another type would be scholarship that focuses intensely on “the music itself,” a brand of musicology increasingly being ceded to “music theory,” at least when it comes to post-Bach repertoire. There’s some continuity here with the first type: this kind of scholarship typically includes at least some discussion of “compositional process” and version history, as well as the musical background provided by Bach’s mentors and contemporaries. It’s also, along with biographical material, typically the scholarship that’s most often presented to the public. Think George Stauffer, Ruth Tatlow, or Eric Chafe. (American scholars tend to think more about what non-academics might actually read.)

Chafe also fits into the third type, who put Bach “in context.” This is now the dominant style of American musicology in general—at least, the kind that centers on familiar repertoire at all, as opposed to other historical aspects of music and sound—but it’s still depressingly underrepresented in Bach studies. And what there is is almost exclusively (like Chafe’s work) devoted to theology. Bach and God. David Yearsley is probably the biggest exception to that rule Sex, Death, and Minuets. (As of course, is Susan McClary.)

Rathey has variously published in all three of these modes: his first books are German publications on Bach’s predecessor at Mühlhausen (Johann Rudolph Ahle), while more recent publications include the public-facing music+theology survey Bach's Major Vocal Works. Bach in the World covers all these bases, with lots of detailed manuscript observations, dug-up documents, musical analysis, and theological context.

It also goes significantly farther than a lot of other Bach scholars are willing to. It’s not obvious from the title, but Rathey’s Bach's Christmas Oratorio, far from being a simple “companion” to the piece, actually inaugurated a deeply historicizing project: not only to place Bach in his theological context, but to really live in that context and get a feel for how unfamiliar—or even uncomfortable—it is. Since I’ve variously endorsed the accusations that Bach was a religious extremist, Anti-Jewish, sexist, etc., it’s probably not a surprise that I’m a fan of this approach.⁷ And at least the title of Bach in the World does a better job of advertising it.

Within this broader programme, Bach in the World mostly focuses on demolishing the already shaky wall between Bach’s “secular” and “sacred” works. It’s a familiar enough idea—Lucien Febvre’s Problem of Unbelief is a curious omission from Rathey’s bibliography—but still needs reinforcing. That’s especially true when it comes to Bach’s cantatas, where the line between “sacred” and “secular” is longstanding and seemingly clear. Yet, given how many of the “secular” cantatas were written for court or civic rituals of various kinds, it’s missing out on a large part of their significance and function to ignore their sacred dimensions. (Just as it’s important to remember how “sacred” music could be used in paraliturgical and court contexts.) We all know about the Divine Right of Kings, but it can be a bit hard to internalize what that meant for cultural forms associated with courts; and it’s not like religious dimensions of public life have disappeared, or even diminished.

The first few chapters of Rathey’s book do a great job of laying out these issues, and how Bach’s cantatas for civic ceremonies like elections simultaneously engaged dimensions that we might now call purely “sacred” or “secular.” Even better, these chapters do so through a discussion of how these cantatas produced public space. (Lefebvre, unlike Febvre, does get his namecheck.) Sort of like Reinhard Strohm’s famous opening chapter for Music in Medieval Bruges, these chapters of Bach in the World thoroughly imagine the audiovisual aspects that would have gone into these ceremonies, and how the cantatas produced, quoted, and otherwise engaged with them. (Including some lovely and convincing accounts of how Bach’s writing uses the resonance of church acoustics.) Yes, it’s obvious enough that trumpets and drums were instruments for grand occasions; but we are rarely asked to consider their impact on listeners who were not accustomed to the sounds of the post-Industrial Revolution world. Early modern trumpet fanfares, even (especially?) in Bach cantatas, were awe-inspiring and more than a little scary; they were tools of social control.

The remaining chapters diverge a bit from the “sacred/secular” argument, focusing more instead on issues of representation, especially gendered representations, in the secular cantatas. There’s still some great material here—the analysis of just how tangled up gender ideologies get in the Hercules Cantata is excellent—but the book does start to feel a little diffuse by the end. The later chapters also have more of a tendency to wander in the musical weeds.

Really, that tendency is the biggest thing that would stop me from recommending this book to “anybody.” I am not entirely sure that the first chapter gains a ton from ten pages of background material on Johann Georg Ahle. Some of the visual material in Chapter 5 is only weakly connected to Rathey’s arguments there. In other words, there’s some stuff that’s mostly there because he did the research and it’s relevant enough.

That’s not an issue at all if this is a book purely for scholars. But I don’t think this one is. Certainly, Rathey has taken pains to be accessible; he introduces the protagonists of his historiographical sections in ways that would hardly be necessary in a book for eighteenth-century music scholars. The writing is mostly lively, with very occasional Germanicisms. (There is one untranslated German quotation in the main text, although it’s not really necessary to read it.) And really, the big project, although broadly relevant, is hardly a novelty to scholars at this point: the foreignness of Bach’s intellectual milieu, and the untenability of the sacred/secular distinction are mostly points that need to be hammered home in a public setting. 

To be fair, I think Rathey has mostly succeeded in doing so. I’d certainly encourage anybody even vaguely interested in Bach to give the book a go. Just with the caveat that there may be some passages of musical analysis and historical background that it’s OK to skim. Hey, at least it’ll get you listening to the Hercules Cantata.

What I’m Listening To

Vojtěch Semerád and Cappella Mariana – Flemish Polyphony in Central Europe: Tourout, Isaac, & Weerbeke

European nationalisms have had a lot of negative effects on the practice music history—everything has to be understood in terms of modern borders, and research often gets siloed accordingly—but if you like fifteenth-century music, it’s hard to complain. Once Belgians discovered that Flemish composers lead the field in early modern Europe, truckloads of money poured in, bringing us a bounty of editions and recordings. Bonus points if the Flemish composers in question moved to (what is now) a country with relatively few name-brand early composers: a recording like this one can get Czech government support as well as money from the shockingly well-funded and productive Belgian Alamire Foundation.

That should give some clues for answering “who on earth is Johannes Tourout?” If you missed Cappella Mariana’s previous album of his music, you’ve likely never heard of this guy: since Tourout worked for the Holy Roman Emperor, his work shows up in sources from what’s now Poland, Hungary, and Czechia, rendering it “peripheral” to the story of composers based in France and Italy like Ockeghem and Josquin. It doesn’t help that apparently nobody in Central Europe knew how to spell his name. (You may have encountered him before as “Johannes Touront,” e.g. on this excellent album.)

It’s certainly interesting and very nice music: to put things in terms of the big brands, Touront is pretty close to Ockeghem (albeit less flashy and with slightly more old-fashioned harmonic taste), but with a decent number of the devices (extensive imitation, melodic sequences) that Josquin would later rely on. And these aspects of his style are nicely highlighted by contrast with the later music by Ghiselin, Isaac, and Weerbeke that studs the album. (Without the liner notes, it’s hard to know too much, but the anonymous motets included on the disc seem like slightly later pieces from the same area.)

Maybe I shouldn’t assume that you’re in it for the decade-by-decade minutiae of Franco-Flemish polyphonic style. Luckily, aside from the novelty value of this music, this is also just a wonderful recording. The audio is both clear and spacious; the imitation is all audible, which isn’t always a given when audio engineers start reverbing-up early modern music. And the singing! Cappella Mariana don’t advertise it, but the soprano you’re hearing is Hana Blaziková, who you’ve heard sing and play music from Bach to Hildegard.⁸ Semerád is a wonderful tenor himself, and the ensemble is in great voice throughout, with strong tone, reasonably lively tempi, supple melodic shaping, and precise diction. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s awfully nice when music this obscure can be represented by such a good recording. Make sure to thank the Belgian ambassador after you listen.

Pissed Jeans – Half Divorced

MASON HOME – The Nostalgia with My Little Ecstasy

The last week of February into the beginning of March this year has to have been one of the best stretches of rock releases in years. Consider the field:

• Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive, a beautiful and earnest folk-rock (“folk-punk” they say?) concept album about addiction, the Great Plains, and trains. It gets a little samey by the end, but it’s very nice and often quite moving.

• Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven, which seems to put every version of early 2000s indie rock in a blender and add a tambourine part. (“Loud Bark” is the best Interpol song since 2002; “Nothing Like” is a better version of Wilco’s “Heavy Metal Drummer”. You will be shocked to learn that Pitchfork ate it up.) It’s a little bit too much stylistic whiplash for me to go from that stuff to the (post-?)hardcore songs on the second half of the album, but basically all the song are pretty great.

• Sheer Mag’s Playing Favorites, an entertaining if weirdly safe-feeling album that you might love to death if you’re an aging British rock critic.

Still, the two albums above stood out pretty easily to me. Half Divorced is probably my favorite rock album since Girl with Fish. For starters, it rocks hard, giving a delightful tour around various corners of the grunge-metal-hardcore-punk continuum that avoids the stuck-in-the-mud tracks that plagued their past few albums. About half of the tracks are straightforward hardcore tracks (well under 2 minutes), interspersed with “sludge metal” (“Helicopter Parent”), straight punk (“Everywhere is Bad”), pop-punk (“Moving On”), and whatever “Junktime” is. (Let me know, I need keywords to google for more.) And good lord, the lyrics are hilarious. “Everywhere is Bad” is unbelievably goofy (if you think the first verse is silly, just wait), and the grievance songs (“Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt,” “(Stolen) Catalytic Converter”) are wonderfully sardonic. Even more serious songs like “Seatbelt Alarm Silencer” don’t take themselves too seriously. (In case the song title—or really the band’s name—didn’t give that away.)

On the other hand, if you like this kind of music, you don’t really need me to tell you to listen to Pissed Jeans; just about every outlet covering rock at least reviewed Half Divorced. On the other hand, good luck finding anything about MASON HOME; this interview (the auto-translated subtitles work OK) is the best I can do:

I don’t usually get too caught up in “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”-type thoughts, but listening to something like this, it’s hard not to wonder what we’re all missing. Still, I’m glad this music found its way to me.

Bizarrely, MASON HOME is mostly a rapper and producer. Suffice it to say that this album is…not rap, although some of the tracks (“Drunken Compressor”; title track) do come across as a hip-hop producer just stringing some beats together. But the rest is pretty shockingly great rock, a lot of it also in the 2000s-ish, New York-ish mold. (“Lee” will sound especially familiar.) There are some ideas from shoegaze (“The World Will Be End”) and what the kids these days call “math rock” (but why are the rhythms so simple?), but above all I keep hearing shades of Radiohead. Across the album, the drum loops and atmospheric sounds will bring to mind The King of Limbs, but there are more direct homages (?) in the two tracks based on synthesized voices, which really do sound like updated versions of “Fitter Happier.” For crying out loud, one of them is even called “For a Film”! No idea if MASON HOME will go back to hip-hop or continue on this track, but I’ll definitely keep listening regardless.

Chris Potter – Eagle’s Point

There’s a certain segment of mostly White, mostly music-school types who just absolutely lose their minds over Chris Potter. I get it—he’s got a great sound, excellent pacing, and can sit awfully deep in the pocket. He also works with pretty amazing collaborators. The quartet for this album reunites a bunch of guys he worked with in the ‘90s: so we get Potter, John Patitucci, Brian Blade, and Brad Mehldau. It would be just about impossible for this record to suck.

It definitely doesn’t suck: they all sound great and play off each other really well. It’s 100% worth a spin. But the whole here is maybe less than the sum of its parts. I blame Potter’s compositions, which are mostly pretty safe, or even bland. There’s not very much sense of risk-taking anywhere, and some of the songs feel kind of square. 

The ones that don’t feel square—“Cloud Message,” “Horizon Dance,” and especially “Málaga Moon”—bring some great things out of Mehldau in particular, and get Potter to make some wilder sounds. Blade is great on the title track. And even for the more by-the-book songs, I get the feeling that a live version of this set could be pretty great; I hope I get the chance to see it. Or better, playing some more exciting songs.

Ten Years of “Catallena”

Start, of course, with that video:

It’s only 78 seconds, and you only hear about five seconds of the song, but the video says an awful lot—probably more than you realized. While you were busy keeping track of Nana’s fifty different ways of shouting “Hah!”, you may have missed this backdrop:

Or this disco ball:

Or this costume (look at both the hat and the dress, then the background):

For that matter, you might not have listened very closely to the actual music. When you turn it back on again, you can hear that, not only is it disco, but very by-the-book Eurodisco, both in scoring and harmony. Most modern pop songs (including or even especially disco-derived dance-pop) don’t use plain V-i cadences like this; and the tonic pedal over top is even more old-fashioned. 

So: zany performances with weird food-inspired costumes (the MV’s mermaid sushi isn’t even the strangest), of a song that combines weirdly old-school pop sounds with dance-pop production. That’s pretty much Orange Caramel for you. 

A lot of older K-pop fans are nostalgic for Orange Caramel, and “Catallena” in particular. And yes: this stuff is fun as hell and I miss it too. But I get a little suspicious when people hold them up as examples of a “bygone era.” We don’t have more groups like Orange Caramel anymore because there never were other groups like them. To be Orange Caramel, you have to do too many things at once:

First, and most obviously: the sense of humor. It’s not like current groups don’t make funny songs and videos anymore: MAMAMOO used to do that kind of thing, and Moonbyul still does;⁹ Red Velvet fans can still remember their “colorful food-themed videos” era; hell, even BTS have “Spine Breaker.” (G)I-DLE are increasingly leaning into humor. And PSY is still alive and well. But you also have to pull off the joke. To state the obvious, that’s not easy, and there are actually a decent number of awful attempts at humor that you hopefully just didn’t hear. Maybe Nana and Lizzy’s acting skills helped Orange Caramel’s punchlines to land.

Then there’s the much-vaunted sonic creativity. “Catallena” most famously interpolates a Punjabi folksong (when they sing “Jutti Meri”) alongside its Italo-disco sound, but that kind of thing is the norm for Orange Caramel songs. “Lipstick” interpolates (lord help me) the “Arabian Riff” in its chorus, and along with songs like “Abing Abing” (yes, it’s a Baskin-Robbins ad) and “My Copycat,” it draws on both old-school Korean trot sounds and European dance genres. 

It’s one thing to mash a bunch of stuff together to make a “creative”-sounding product; it’s another to make a result that actually works as a song. For Orange Caramel, that’s partly owing to a canny choice of genres to blend. Trot and Eurodance, instrumentation aside, actually have a lot in common: both have pretty straight-laced oom-pah rhythms (both in the melody and in the accompaniment) and very by-the-book harmonies (an awful lot more i-iv-V-i than you’re used to hearing in pop music). Folksongs are great choices to interpolate in this framework, since they have similar rhythms and are often harmonized the same way.¹⁰ But even with all of these musical compatibilities working in your favor, you have to make sure that the resulting song doesn’t sound dated, boring, kitschy, or trite. When using European pop styles, there’s a fine line between creating ABBA and creating Eurovision songs.¹¹ And goodness knows not all folksong interpolations work equally well.

Orange Caramel songs don’t just avoid these problems. They’re also catchy. Incredibly catchy. Even if “Lipstick,” “My Copycat” and “Abing Abing” recycle some ideas from each other—producers Iggy and Youngbae had a bit of a tendency to repeat themselves (just as they would later with GFRIEND)—it’s worth it when each of those ideas is guaranteed to be stuck in your head forevermore. So now we’re asking for creative and unusual, but also coherent and instantly memorable songs. Small wonder it’s a formula that’s been hard to repeat.

It also helps to be well-liked enough to bring fans and a certain level of public interest along despite all the wackiness. Nana’s popularity as a model and actress in particular surely helped provide some cushion for Orange Caramel’s exploits. It’s easier to take mermaid sushi-level risks when you know people will follow. 

…To the extent that they even did. Frankly, these songs likely mostly existed to promote the members for endorsement deals; they charted well but not spectacularly, and sales were abysmal, despite the group actually being a household name. The answer to “Why has there not been another Orange Caramel?” is probably just “because labels want more commercially successful groups.” (Even if Pledis’s legendarily questionable marketing strategies probably didn’t help.)

All in all, it’s really not hard to understand why there aren’t more songs like “Catallena.” Or, for that matter, like their other singles, which are basically all better (“My Copycat” has to be somewhere in my top three or so dance songs). Even the other Orange Caramel songs couldn’t be “Catallena”; they didn’t have this:

Then again, even “Catallena” didn’t have that going for it: there are no “hah”s in the actual song. In the end, “Catallena” itself was never “Catallena.” We’ll never see anything quite like it again.

Also liked…

Sara Wakui – Into My System

Rob Cope – Gemini

Jonas Kaufmann, Elina Garanča, and Ludovic Tézier with Philippe Jordan and the Wiener Statsoper – Wagner: Parsifal

Amaro Freitas – Y’Y

Daymé Arocena – Alkemi

Ghvstclub – Enfant terrible

Kim Gordon – The Collective

What I’m Reading

That’s enough book talk for this week, but here are a few others: 

• Science – Are your earliest childhood memories still lurking in your mind—or gone forever?

• The Honest Broker/Ted Gioia – How Miles Davis Hired John Coltrane

• New York Review of Books (Eric Foner) – A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts

• Bloomberg – LVMH’s Loro Piana Relies on Free Labor in Peru for $9,000 Vicuña Sweaters

• Fangraphs – In Defense of Command

Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!

1. Elsewhere in the same book, Stinson makes the creative argument that Felix Mendelssohn must have liked and played this piece because all organists do.

2. I know it’s tempting to discount that statement due to the person who made it—still, even if Widor was a pretty mediocre composer, he was by all accounts a splendid organist, and one who knew Bach’s organ music very well as editor and performer.

3. Although I prefer the spelling “Adagiosissimo” from the Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother.

4. Look, three links to the B-minor mass in one post is exercising restraint if you ask me.

5. To those who care: don’t worry, the link is to a boycott-safe version.

6. Hold that thought for the last piece on the program.

7. That should all sound familiar to readers of Michael Marissen too, but I find that Rathey waffles less than Marissen.

8. Presto Classical did make a point of highlighting her. I can’t say that hurt when I was going through new releases to listen to.

9. Is it a coincidence that MAMAMOO’s branding can evoke aspects of a song (“Catallena”) about falling for a woman from a woman’s perspective?

10. Or rather, those pop genres are from a musical environment closer to when modern ways of performing folksongs arose.

11. Sure, there’s overlap, but are you telling me “Waterloo” is one of the good ABBA songs?