Music To Help You Score With Smart People

Out of my league.

I am a selfish man. I am an unattractive man. I am a wrestling fan and an internet geek. I am not tall, nor am I wealthy. Yet, somehow, I have almost always had an attractive, kind, and intelligent girlfriend. Check out my profile. That’s actually me and she’s really my girlfriend. That’s not a very flattering picture of her, either.

Why am I exposing my personal life to you like this? I am doing it because I really want you to believe what I am about to tell you:

KNOWING A LOT ABOUT GREAT MUSIC WILL HELP YOU SCORE WITH SMART PEOPLE!

I mean “smart” in both the American English sense of being intelligent, and the British English sense of being well dressed. I do not mean that learning something about Blues, Jazz, and Classical Music will help you to score with people who have insider knowledge of Pro Wrestling, although it might not hurt. I don’t want to put to fine a point on it, but you can use great music to set any kind of mood you want, and setting the right mood is more than half the battle.

Great music can change your life in other ways as well.

Where to begin?

The greatest music in history is easily available to anybody with access to the internet or a music store. The problem for most people is knowing where to begin.

Just walking into the Jazz or Classical section of a large music store can be intimidating. There are literally hundreds of composers and musicians writing and playing in a bewildering variety of styles for dozens of combinations of instruments.

Maybe a friend has suggested that you check out a little Bach. So you go the shop, and find rack after rack containing CDs of music composed by several different guys named Bach. These racks will contain everything from dance suites written to be played on a single keyboard to St. Matthew’s Passion, which requires a double chorus and a double orchestra. Even if your friend specifically recommended that you pick up J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, there are likely to be more than a dozen different interpretations available, some as part of a collection of the complete Concertos, others with different compositions filling out the disk.

There are a quite a few books available that can help make the decision easier, but the vast majority of them were written by experienced collectors for experienced collectors, and they aren’t really helpful unless you already know a lot about the subject. I know that there are already at least a few Jazz and Classical Music fans who visit this site, and my hope is to come up with a column that will be interesting for them while also being accessible to total newcomers. What I’m trying to accomplish here is a serious music column written by a wrestling, football, and punk rock fan for other wrestling, football, and punk rock fans.

If it seems like there’s enough interest to justify a regular column, I will write about a different composer, musician, piece of music, or musical style every week with the idea being to help people build up a collection of the greatest versions of the greatest music ever written.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.

The Composer: J.S. Bach was a hard working and God-fearing professional musician whose compositions were underrated in his own time and largely forgotten about until almost hundred years after his death. Now, of course, he is generally considered one of the three greatest composers of European Classical Music to ever have lived, along with Beethoven and Mozart. Unlike the majority of the great composers, Bach spent the vast majority of his life within 50 miles of his birthplace, although he was literally willing to walk for hundreds of miles to hear the great musicians of his day. His other hobby outside of music was making babies. He had 7 children with his first wife and 13 with his second. A lot of them grew up to be musicians and composers, too. Surprisingly, considering that Bach apparently did nothing but work and screw, the range of emotions that is communicated by his music is pretty much unlimited. He was the absolute technical master of every form of music that existed in Baroque (approximately 1600-1750) Europe. If you take a look at the guy and think about how many kids he had, you can see how Bach’s existence supports my theory that musical knowledge can help anyone score.

Bach: Gimme some suger, baby!

The Musical Form: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 is a concerto grosso, which is a kind of piece for orchestra that is broken up into three movements, with the first and last movements usually being fast and lively and the middle movement being slow and expressive. It is different from the solo concertos of the Classical era and later in that in a concerto grosso a larger group of instruments alternates with a smaller group of instruments. The smaller group of soloists is called the concertino and the larger group is called the ripenio. The two groups usually play contrasting tunes in a call and response style.

The Piece: There are six Brandenburg Concertos, and they were written as a kind of over the top job application. Bach is showing off what he is capable of here, and the result is some of his showiest and most entertaining music.
Concerto No. 5 is my favourite because of the great harpsichord part. Before Bach wrote this concerto, the harpsichord was almost always limited to a supporting role as part of the continuo, which was pretty much the same thing as the rhythm section. With this concerto, Bach pioneered the idea of using a keyboard instrument in a feature role. Near the end of the first movement, the harpsichord is given a long solo, or cadenza, which means that the rest of the orchestra shuts up and lets the harpsichordist go wild. The cadenza takes the form of a long and impressive build to a shattering climax. If you can’t see how this might help to set a mood, I feel badly for you. The rest of the concerto is not bad either. The other concertino instruments are a flute and a violin, and their sound contrasts beautifully with the larger group of strings and continuo. In most performances, the piece lasts 21 – 23 minutes, about the same as that other great masterpiece: The Bret vs. Benoit Owen Hart Tribute match.

The Version to Get: There are, as I’ve said, a ton of versions of this piece available. I’d recommend getting a 2-disc set of all six concertos, they are all written for different combinations of instruments and they are all good. I really believe that the Brandenburgs work best with the more transparent textures of a smaller instrumental group. To get the most out of No. 5 it is necessary that the harpsichordist be an amazing musician.
The English Concert are a brilliant ensemble who get the most out of this music by playing on instruments that were built in Bach’s day, and in the style that scholars believe musicians used back then. Conductor Trevor Pinnock also takes the harpsichord part, which is a good thing because Pinnock is truly one of the great musicians. I love to play this version for friends who are already familiar with the piece, and watch their jaws drop in amazement.

If you like this: You might also want to check out The English Concert playing Handle’s or Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, Pinnock Playing Bach’s Goldberg variations, or a version of Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 played using modern instruments. Benjamin Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra is particularly good, Sir Neville Mariner’s version with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on the Phillips label would probably be my second choice.