O ur piano quintet is looking for new ideas for encore pieces. Any suggestions?”
— Anonymous.
The usual objective is a sparkling, novel, jewel-like ‘character piece’ that is shorter than 3 minutes in length and that is ‘approachable’ and does not make heavy demands of the listener. It should read like pungent
microfiction. Additionally, you want something that conveys an intense presence—show-stopping emotionality.
One serious option is to treat the encore as a ‘tag’ or a synoptic ‘capstone’ for your program—melding with the other pieces. You choose for an encore a character piece that is light and simple, something composed about the same time as other pieces on the program and preferrably by someone whose style and compositional methods and worldview are coherent with the rest of the program. If it has those features, it can serve as a ‘tag’, and its tagness/epilogiality will be immediately evident to the listeners.
A whimsical option that aims at surprise is to choose something wholly unexpected (a polka or mazurka, if the rest of your program has been heavy going) or something that embodies a counterintuitive, dramatic contrast against the other pieces (much slower or faster tempo; different articulation or timbre)—possibly composed in a different period or by someone of disparate worldview and methods, yet arriving at a similar result or addressing a similar compositional challenge as the other pieces had done.
You can go for drop-dead flash virtuosity. You can tug on the audience members’ nostalgia. You can ‘plug’ your most recent recording or an up-coming performance with a short selection. You can capsulize your ensemble’s namesake [composer] if you’re one of those eponymously-named ensembles, provided your eponymic was thoughtful enough to write a short, sweet piece. And so on.
In any case, a good encore piece should be the musical equivalent of a bespoke chocolate truffle. [The foregoing was just a brain-dump for the anonymous question-asker (and for others who struggle with similar challenges), on
‘How We Search for Suitable Encore Pieces’.]
For sheer bon-bon-ness, you might try Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘The Aquarium’.
S aint-Saëns] invents various kinds of musical masquerade and cross dressing. Furthermore, many aspects of the work suggest that it is a musical farce to be put on by the very people who are supposed to get [the jokes], evoking the spirit of carnival as described by Bakhtin... [The] musical depictions demand that the instrumentalists performing the piece impersonate themselves as ‘characters’ in the salon, just as the instruments they play represent particular animals. Essential to the work is this kind of performing ‘about’ performance, a notion that in effect literally materializes immaterial aspects of music such as melody and timbre and allows Saint-Saëns to subvert the Romantic surface-depth paradigm by taking up instrumental materiality as one possible ‘substance’ to be revealed within the context of late nineteenth century chamber music.”
— Erica Scheinberg.
Carnival of the Animals’ nominally is a set of orchestral character pieces, each of which is meant to describe a particular animal, usually by mimicking the sounds it makes or characterizing the way it moves or carries itself. But, as musicologist Erica Scheinberg has written, it contains many ‘inside jokes’ about composers and music. There are passages mocking Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can’, wry liberties taken with Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, mocking the turgidness of several Rossini arias, parodying then-current dance-hall tunes, and mocking Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’.
It is extremely
‘meta’—today, just as it was during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime—and so is just waiting, ready to serve your own meta-purposes!
What’s more, ‘Carnival of the Animals’ has for many years been a prime vehicle for music outreach and education programs for kids (see, for example,
this, from a kids’ program at
Music Institute of Chicago). Consequently, performance of the piece triggers for many adults today intense and instantaneous memories of their musical childhood—of everything that has led them now to be sitting in their concert hall seats listening to
you. This is a bonus that you cannot get with just any old encore selection—instant [Freudian] flashback and epiphany. To be honest, my own response to these pieces is like this—primitive and immediate, as though I were five years old once more.
That alone is enough to make these Saint-Saëns movements good encore material—and it exemplifies some of the qualities that you might look for in other suitable material.
The 7
th movement, ‘The Aquarium’, is wonderfully atmospheric. For the image of water splashing (brighter, compared to deep rumbling of the sea in the cello part and the flutey undulations) we have the glass harmonica’s and two pianos’ (or glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, or small cymbals) movements. A realistic evocation of moving water involves varying and controlling the dynamics on a short time-scale and the contrary-direction voice-leading in the different parts. Irregular intervals represent the erratic swimming of fish. Saint-Saëns creates florid kinesthetic/synaesthetic ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels.
Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) likewise convey ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels, and likewise mostly via short time-scale timbre changes. The Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) is sometimes translated to English as ‘Color Music’, ‘Morning on the Traunsee’ and ‘Summer Morning at a Lake’ by authors like Boretz and Cone. The musical progressions move in a slow and undulating manner throughout, which is similar to the ‘quivering reflection of the sun on a sheet of water’ (Dahlhaus, 1989). Schoenberg acoustically mimics the changing light on the waves by the changing timbre of instruments; the colors of the changing brightness lie in the differing timbres of the instruments. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Aquarium’ is like this, although the voice-leading in the Saint-Saëns’s string parts represents, I think, rays of light filtering down to the depths, from the point of view of the fish. The flute and pianos and glass harmonica manifest most of the surface watery features, including the sparkly play of light up top.
Insofar as ‘Aquarium’ has been used in many film soundtracks, it has the added advantage of being especially familiar to general audience members (compared with other of the ‘Carnival of the Animals’ movements). The Nash Ensemble has a particularly nice rendering of ‘Aquarium’.
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