Unexpected celebration
My favourite holiday song is Leroy Anderson's Sleigh Ride. Nothing quite gets me in the celebratory holiday spirit like hearing it come on the radio (so much so that I once even talked about it myself on CBC!).
Now, the perfect article on Sleigh Ride already exists, so that won’t be the subject of today’s post. But in a year that has been uniquely challenging, listening to this tune again helped me remember how it's important for us to still find things to celebrate.
Last week I got an email from my alma mater, the Paris Conservatoire, letting me know that a project I had been a part in my student days had finally achieved completion. It was a project that I had rarely thought about since leaving school, and so I got to enjoy that feeling of delight when you get completely unexpected good news. So today, in the holiday spirit, I want to share the story of this recent and unexpected celebration.
It starts just over 6 years ago, when I signed up for a music engraving job at the Conservatoire (basically, copying the illegible scribbles of composers into a computer program). The goal was to eventually digitize all of the sight-reading pieces written for Paris Conservatoire exams before 1925.
I know, I know… it doesn't sound particularly exciting. Trust me, when I signed up to be a part of it, it was mostly to make a little side money. The days spent at the French National Archives scanning folder after folder of manuscripts offered a bit more interest — I’ve always found it exhilarating to be handling sheets of music that are hundreds of years old — but it could also get pretty tedious.
What was interesting, was how this job allowed me to connect with the history of my school and of music in general.
The Paris Conservatoire was founded in 1795, making it one of the oldest continuously running music conservatories in the world. This fact alone explains the accumulation of many of the weird and unique traditions that have become part of life at the Conservatoire.
One of these traditions is the commissioning of new "sight-reading" pieces for student exams. As the name suggest, these were pieces meant to be played on first sight, to test how well a candidate could read music that they had never seen before. Originally, they were part of the public final exams, and it must have been terrifying to be a student at the time, playing something you had never looked at before in front of an audience! Thankfully, today these pieces been relegated to the close-door entrance exams only, which has made them only slightly less stressful.
Since the Conservatoire was constantly in need of new music for sight-reading, before long there were hundreds of these short pieces, and many major composers would contribute including Fauré, Massenet, Cherubini, and even Debussy. I’ve always found it amusing to think of these composers taking time away from writing their great masterpieces to jot down a few lines of music that no one would even spend time practicing!
A couple times, the other participants of the project and I would try our own hand at sight reading some of the pieces. It was fascinating way to experience the change in style over the course of the 19th century (which more or less evolved from imitations of Beethoven to imitations of Debussy). Although some pieces were pretty terrible, every now and then there would be a real gem.
Today, over 2000 sight reading pieces are now available online. Last night, I took the time to read through a couple dozen of them. It reminded me again of how even seemingly trivial subjects can sometimes be hiding the greatest stories.
I'll be taking next week off from writing, so Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone! Looking forward to finding out what 2021 has in store.
For further reading (in french) on this project: https://larevue.conservatoiredeparis.fr/index.php?id=1247