A cadenza shrill and sharp
Pizzicato from the harp
Andante and legato
Swan song from the cello.
Clefs, chords and counterpoint
From fiery exposition to development
Magnificent muti-tonal orchestration
Tumultuous recapitulation.
Finally four last songs
Lamenting loss, lyrical and forlorn
Musical maverick Strauss is gone
The garden mourns.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
This is for Real Toads, where the theme is Chaos. Bjorn talked of physics and mathematics, and it brought me round to music. Music is very mathematical and can be very precise and beauty and precision is borne from weaving together many delicate strands. It reminded me of two great twentieth-century composers who pushed music to its chaotic and mathematical limits. Alban Berg and Richard Strauss. Alban Berg’s Violin concerto is a masterpiece of mathematical precision, but I opted for Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The final line is from these and is the first line of September, written by Hermann Hesse.
These are my late September images…
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Hues of Hankinson 
I am completely blown away by this gorgeous piece. Bravo. And encore.
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Many thanks. Much appreciated.
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Music of the spheres: our precise imagining. our calculated yearning. It’s an added bonus for poets that the Srauss piece is sung — a human voice there, flinging wide into the chaos of the modern. I’m not deeply read in the history, but wasn’t Strauss of a fin-de-siecle temperament, waltzing wild toward the void? A chaos, held gorgeously together … anyway, great read.
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There were 2 Strauss, this one was Richard Strauss, the waltzing one was Johann. Richard Strauss wrote magnificent huge operas, he fought hard to keep his daughter in law Alice and his grandchildren out of the concentration camps as they were Jewish.
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Yikes, apologies for the error – again, I’m lightly read – I just listened to a version with Jessye Norman and the Holocaust backdrop sure puts this at a frightening height.
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That is okay. I am glad you listened to it. I might look for that one too now, it sounds interesting.
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I marvel at what music can do.. and yes I think you can feel the complexity of mathematics in that music… maybe we will have computer generated music on algorithms at one time… I hope it will involve at least one butterfly.
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Alban Berg’s Violin concerto is completely mathematical, but sounds as graceful as a butterfly.
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Lovely, nothing but.
Anna :o]
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Lovely weave of music and poetry. “…Musical maverick Strauss is gone / The garden mourns…” Great ending!
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Great response to the prompt, given the connection between mathematics and music……..I didnt know that about Strauss. I, too, love your closing lines very much.
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many thanks. XX
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Wow Alison! You are so right about music and you have expressed it so beautifully! I love:
‘Swan song from the cello’, one of my favourite instruments, which I think always sounds mournful – reminds me of Truly, Madly, Deeply, when Alan Rickman, as Jamie, plays Bach.
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I was tempted by the path of music but the muse had other ideas. I enjoyed your exploration of the idea.
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Really well done. I love the direction you took the prompt.
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A beautiful descriptive blend of music terminology —-woven expertly.
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