CONCERTO
I am listening to Alessandro Marcello's Concerto for Oboe in D minor played on trumpet instead of oboe. I really like it. The sound of the trumpet is magnificent, and even though the concerto was originally written for oboe, the trumpet does it justice. What a treat!!!
The Adagio is the famous movement, and I can understand why. It has one of those melodies that grabs you by the collar and demands that you pay attention. It's beautiful, melancholy, and completely unashamed about it. So naturally, I started looking into the piece and the composer himself.
Alessandro Marcello was a Venetian composer and aristocrat who lived from 1673 to 1747. He was also a poet, writer, diplomat, painter, and all-around busy man. He wasn't exactly sitting in a room composing music all day. He wrote relatively little, but this concerto became the work for which he is best remembered.
There is an interesting little complication, though. The concerto has had something of an identity crisis over the years. It has been attributed to other composers, including Vivaldi and Marcello's brother Benedetto. But Alessandro is now generally accepted as the composer of the D-minor concerto.
And then there is Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach liked the concerto enough to make his own keyboard transcription of it. His version of the Adagio became famous in its own right, which means that generations of people could enjoy the music without necessarily knowing that Alessandro Marcello had written it in the first place.
But that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is what happened to the Adagio after all these years. We have taken this beautiful piece and turned it into an emotional Swiss Army knife. Weddings, funerals, graduations, movies, quinceañeras... if an occasion requires three minutes of sadness, romance, or solemnity, Marcello is, by all means, available.
I don't want to give anybody bad ideas, but now that we organize those horrible gender-reveal parties. I can just picture it: Marcello's Adagio playing while everyone waits for the big announcement. The music begins, the beautiful melody fills the room, and then—
PINK SMOKE APPEARS. "It's a girl!"
Somewhere, Alessandro Marcello would be tossing and turning in his grave. I know music doesn't come with a little instruction card saying, "This piece is only to be played under these circumstances." Once music leaves the composer's hands, people are going to perform it, rearrange it, record it, and find their own uses for it. Fine. But as a composer, I find this slightly offensive.
In the baroque period, people seemed to care a little more about context. Take for example Handel's Messiah. When Messiah was first performed in London, there was controversy over presenting sacred Biblical material in a theater. A theater! People actually stopped to ask whether the setting was appropriate.
These days, I suppose we could perform Handel's Messiah at the Parthenon, with Apollo sitting in the front row, happily humming along to the powerful lyrics of Hallelujah.
But I digress.
Marcello's Adagio has become something we pull out whenever we need an emotional response. We need romance? Marcello. We need sadness? Marcello. We need something dignified? Marcello again. The music stops being something we listen to and becomes something we use. And that's what gets me.
I love the piece. I love that trumpet version. I love the fact that music written more than three hundred years ago can still sound magnificent today. But as a composer, I can't help wondering, if Marcello would be alive, what he would make of all this. He wrote a concerto for oboe, and three hundred years later, if things get any worse, we're on the verge of playing it while waiting for the fucking pink smoke.