When Classical works
Classical after midnight was the strangest of the station's eight streams and it is the strangest page here. It has no business on a dial otherwise made of soul and downtempo, and once you have sat up past two with it on, the logic is obvious.
The constraint is dynamic range. Most of the canon is built on getting loud, and at three in the morning getting loud is a betrayal. What is left is a narrow and very good repertoire: solo piano, slow movements, and the twentieth-century composers who decided quiet was a subject rather than a setting.
Six pieces would have been easier than five. Something had to go, and the Goldbergs nearly did.
Where it came from
The form on this page has the hour in its name. John Field published the first pieces he called nocturnes around 1812 and Chopin took the idea over so completely that most people now credit him with it.
The second thread is French and starts with Satie's Gymnopédies in 1888: three pieces that withhold almost everything a nineteenth-century composer was expected to supply, and that nothing written since has made unnecessary. Debussy and Ravel built on the same refusal.
The third is recent. From 1976 Arvo Pärt wrote in what he called tintinnabuli, a method with so few moving parts that the music stops sounding composed at all. That is the repertoire this page is made of: not classical music in general, but the narrow part of it that treats quiet as a subject rather than a setting.
Classical: five records
- Erik Satie, 1888Gymnopédies.
Three pieces, almost no information in them, and nothing written since has made them unnecessary. Satie marked them slow and gave almost no other instruction, and the three pieces differ from one another by a few notes.
- Frédéric Chopin, 1827–1846Nocturnes.
Twenty-one of them. The form is literally named for this hour. Field invented the form and Chopin kept the left hand's wide arpeggios from him; the right hand is where Chopin is doing something nobody had done.
- Maurice Ravel, 1899Pavane pour une infante défunte.
Ravel later dismissed it as poor in form. He was wrong, and it is six minutes long. He wrote it for piano at twenty-four and orchestrated it eleven years later; the piano version is the one that stays out of its own way.
- J. S. Bach, Gould, 1955 and 1981Goldberg Variations.
Written, by legend, for an insomniac count. Take the 1981 recording at this hour; the 1955 is too awake. The 1955 recording is fast, dry and twenty-six years younger; the 1981 is slower by a third and was taped as Gould was preparing to stop performing altogether.
- Arvo Pärt, 1978Spiegel im Spiegel.
Piano and one other instrument, ten minutes, no event. The last thing to put on before you give up on the day. The piece has three notes in the piano part and a melody that only ever rises or falls by step, and it is ten minutes long because that is how long the idea takes.
The honest objection
Calling a page "classical" and then filling it with five of the quietest things in the repertoire is not classical music, it is a mood with a wig on. The honest title would be "quiet piano". I kept the old name because that is the address the station used, and changing it would break the one thing this site is for.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
