Multimedia Schubert

Introduction

For a while, multimedia was flavour of the month in computer circles (it's now been overtaken by the ubiquitous internet). In essence it involves putting a pretty ordinary CD player and a sound card in your pc and adding a couple of speakers. A sound card is very similar to the devices that you get in electronic organs which can play notes in lots of different 'voices', and also acts as an amplifier. Armed with this setup on a reasonably powerful pc, you are able to see words, animations and pictures (including video) and hear sounds. A multimedia application is one which takes advantage of several of these different media. CDs are, of course, a digital way of recording information, and a typical CD can hold as much data as 500 or so floppy disks!

Multimedia Schubert is a pc CD from Microsoft in their 'home' series, which also covers things like baseball, dinosaurs, art galleries, encyclopaedia and other composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky etc.). It's been around for a while now, so whilst the original list price was very expensive (£60-70), you can pick it up mail order for under £30. The CD was originally developed for the Macintosh by The Voyager Company.

So what is it then? The easiest way to describe it is as some sort of electronic 'coffee table book' about Schubert and the Trout Quintet. It was actually constructed by an American 'critic of uncommonly broad tastes' called Alan Rich. I find the 'coffee table book' analogy quite accurate, as it is exactly the sort of thing you will dip into in an idle 10 minutes or so. The experience consists of a number of chapters:

A Word from the Author

In this chapter, we get a 4 minute long talk about the Schubert and the quintet, full of throw away sound bites ("nobody doesn't like the trout quintet", "explaining the particular joyousness of the trout quintet is no more simple than explaining the beauty of a rainbow"). It does contain a few snippets of information (e.g. references to his 10th symphony) which may be unknown to the casual listener, but doesn't really tell the Schubert fan anything he doesn't already know.

The Pocket Audio Guide

This is where it starts to get a little technical, and may be quite instructive and useful for someone learning music theory, particularly if the glossary is also used to help to explain things. The guide is a simple chart which shows the 5 movements of the quintet, broken down into their major sections. When you point with the mouse and click on a section, it gets played. So if you are not sure what the 5th movement transition, second theme or recapitulation sounds like, just click and find out. For someone as ignorant of musical theory as I am, this chapter is quite interesting.

Die Forelle

Of course, no introduction to the trout quintet would be complete without reference to 'Die Forelle'. This chapter lets you play a recording of 'Die Forelle' (by Barbara Hendriks accompanied by Radu Lupu - interestingly I've not found a reference anywhere as to who is playing the quintet on the disc), whilst showing the words (in German or English), and providing a commentary on what is happening. For example the commentary explains that "...the last two lines are repeated to end the first stanza, and the piano ripples ahead with its tone painting of the brook's rise and fall..." In this the words 'Stanza" and "tone painting" are hot spots to the glossary.

Close Reading

This chapter is something of a mixture of the previous two. We are back with the quintet, with the chapter broken down into 5 sections, one for each movement. Each movement can be viewed in two different ways. The first is very like the representation of 'Die Forelle', with a commentary about what is happening against the position in the major sections of the movement. The commentaries vary from simple descriptions of repeats and key changes, and pointers about cadences, canonic passages, trills and countermelodies, to remarks like "...but that is chopped off by a sudden WHOOMP from the cello and bass...". Wonderful stuff. The second representation, which I find less interesting, shows the progression through the sections of the movement in a 'movement chart' which maps out the key changes.

A Classical Background

This chapter is pure 'coffee table book'. It consists of 43 pages in 4 sections, 'The classical ideal', 'The sonata form', 'Schubert as a classicist' and 'Charting the trout quintet'. The pages mix text, pictures and snippets of sounds. It tries to briefly explain music of the classic period, and in particular sonata form. It has many small examples from a variety of composers, and, in particular, compares Mozart's 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' with the quintet.

Inside Schubert

This is very similar to the previous chapter with 88 pages in 4 more sections, 'Schubert's Vienna', 'an unfinished life', 'the tone poet' and 'a trout is born'. Very nicely done, with lots of pictures, and snippets of sound, but it doesn't tell us anything particularly revealing.

Other bits and bobs

As I've previously indicated, there is a glossary of terms, and there is also a bibliography and a 'find' feature. The final little gizmo is a game. Its actually just pelmanism dressed up with pretty pictures. There are a few stones in a brook. Click on a stone and a random 'trout' phrase is played, from the song or one of the variations in the quintet. Find a matching pair, and they vanish, with cute graphics.

Conclusions

Well, its not going to become a key reference in the Schubert scholars library. But it's nicely done, and if you have the pc to exploit it, you really should get it - if only to show off to your friends. It could also prove to be a useful source of learning for children as well.

Richard Morris, April 1995