This Thursday I am going to the Opera. In 2012 this statement makes perfect sense. The only question to ask is, ‘what are you going to see?’ This weekend I am going to the footy. This statement is a lot more confusing. What sort of footy am I going to? Soccer, AFL, League, Union? Only by telling you which stadium I am going to would you have more of an idea. This analogy may seem strange on a blog about music history –but in the 19th century making a blanket statement about going to the opera would have made no sense. People’s next question would have to be ” what sort” – Grand Opera, Opera Comique, Bel Canto Rescue Opera, just to name a few. Saying what opera house you were attending would help the situation, just as mentioning the footy ground today would. Grand Opera at the Paris Opera, Opera Comique at the Opera Comique…. Throughout the 19th century new types of opera evolved to suit the tastes and ideals of the new wealthy middle class. Opera was no longer being written to emphasis the prestige of the monarch but to reflect the values of the bourgeois. They demanded to see themselves portrayed on stage – and in a positive light. Composers and libretti who had once been the voice of the aristocrats were now the voice of the Middle Classes. If one traces the development of opera in the 1800′s, starting with Rescue Opera at the end of the 18th-early 19th century ( the most famous being Beethoven’s Fidelio), to Puccini’s obsession with Verism (the truth) at the turn of the 20th century, the changing landscape of this turbulent period becomes obvious. The new educated masses fall in love with Bel Canto – beautiful singing, flock to the Paris Opera to hear and see the next spectacular composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Lloyd Webber of the day, celebrate the concept of Italian unification with Verdi and finally become entranced with Wagner’s Music Dramas. More operas were written between 1815-1860 than any other period in history. This class on Romantic Opera is the last class in the series Reaction, Revolution and Romanticism. I thought my cake needed to be something rich, dense and creamy – like so many Romantic Operas. How could you go past cheese cake!! Fortunately or unfortunately my mother – in –law makes the world’s greatest cheese cake and my mother make the most impressive (she has made this cake – my favourite all time cake – once in the last 15 years!!). So deciding to make one was really like taking a leap of faith. Luckily for me Frank Camorra (the chef and owner of Mo Vida Bar de Tapas Melbourne) had a recipe in last weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald. It looked too easy not to try and I have to say it was OMG amazing. Next time, I think I will make 2 cakes out of the one batter as it is HUGE. It was still quite blubbery in the middle when I took it out, but mine solidified (not a great word to use in a cake recipe!) La Vina’s Famous Cheese cake Grease 1 or 2 tins and line with baking paper on base and sides 7 whole eggs 1kg Philadelphia cream cheese 400g castor sugar 1 tablespoon flour 500g cream Method Preheat oven to 220C Crack eggs and mix Using an electric mixer mix cream cheese until smooth (harder than it seems) Add beaten eggs slowly making sure all egg is incorporated into the cheese before adding more. Add sugar, flour and cream – blend well Pour into lined cake tins and bake for 50mins (this will be less if making 2 cakes) Leave to completely cool before taking out of the tin. Frank Camorra warns that the cake gets a dark look but don’t be scared, it gives it a yummy caramel taste. Enjoy, Love me

Hello and welcome to my first blog! I am a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to technology but I’m willing if you are…… So what is Coffee Cake and Culture, you might ask? Well CCC is a music appreciation/ history course I give in my lounge room. My first series comprises six classes, each covering a different topic exploring invented developments in music rather than those which evolved – Major Musical Milestones. My second series looks at the Romantic period and how world events in the 19thcentury changed so many musical norms for all time – Reaction, Revolution and Romanticism. My students’ say the beauty of my course is that it feels like you are coming to a friend’s home for a chat rather than being lectured in a class situation. Why the name? As a mother of 3 young girls, I am fully aware of how important a little treat is..so I serve delicious homemade cake and a good cup of tea or coffee before the classes start, and sometimes even during it! In this blog I intend to divulge my secret cake recipes as well as giving some interesting and maybe quirky bits of music trivia. Tomorrow I am giving a class on Beethoven, (the second class in Reaction, Revolution and Romanticism) looking at how his life mirrored the political situations in Europe at the time. It’s quite amazing how often you can follow Beethoven’s musical output against the victories or losses of the Holy Roman Empire during the time of Napoleon. Beethoven wrote his Symphony No 3 (the Eroica) initially for Napoleon – at that time being a stanched Republican and Francophile. When he heard about Napoleon accepting the French crown in 1804, Beethoven flew into a rage changing the original title of the 3rd Symphony from “Bonaparte” to Eroica. BUT I’ve also made a Jaffa cake (chocolate and orange for those who think Jaffa is a place in Israel!) The standard chocolate recipe I use is one my Auntie Bern gave me probably 30 years ago. It is an indestructible cake and I add all sorts of crazy things to it. Sometimes I just try and see how far I can push it before it doesn’t work! It’s written on a ripped and holey piece of paper and a few months back I had a real toddler tantrum when I thought I had lost it! Good eating Love me x Andy Bromberger Chocolate Cake Recipe ​ 4 eggs 2 cups sugar 1cup milk 2 heap cups self raising flour 4 dessert spoons cocoa 250 g melted butter ​ Beat all ingredients except butter. When mixed add the butter Pour into a prepared cake tin and bake at 180 degrees for about 1 hour or until a skewer comes out ALMOST clean when you insert it into the middle of the cake. My extra tip: At the melted butter stage I added a whole lot of homemade orange jam, then iced the cake with Lint orange dark chocolate ganache ( very easy…just melt chocolate and some butter in a heavy bottom saucepan over low heat until its melted and glossy)

Sometimes I just have to believe in Serendipity! (and I don’t mean the ice cream!). And last Friday was one of those times. Firstly I sat down at my kitchen table and read the newspaper. This might not seem like a big deal but as we get it delivered daily, and rarely actually read it, it is. Not only that but I made it all the way to the Metro or ‘what’s on’ section. I can honestly not remember when I last did this! While flicking through something caught my eye – Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo being performed by the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra in a few weeks time! I could not believe my good luck, squealed, and immediately bought tickets. Why the excitement with this opera??? Well this is the first real opera ever written. The two previous attempts were by the Florentine’s Jacobo Peri and Ottavio Runuccini in 1598 and1600. These men wanted to write music which encompassed all forms of the arts and told a complete story – ‘opera’ meaning ‘the work’. By all accounts the first, Dafne, was met with favourable critic but Euridice was not a great success. This may have had something to do with the subject matter – man’s arrogance and subsequent doom, to be performed at the marriage of Maria de Medici to Henri IV. Probably not the best choice for a festive royal wedding! This new form of music may have died out then and there if it wasn’t for two guests at the wedding Alessandro Striggio and Vincenzo Gonzaga. Gonzaga was not only the most powerful man in northern Italy but a lover of the arts, a womaniser and a dueller who had killed both his organist and interpreter. A scary place to be employed! His family had ruled Mantua since 1328 and for some reason he thought his new musical concept might have legs! When he arrived back in Mantua he arranged for his head court musician to have a go at writing an opera – and who was his court musician? The greatest musical genius of the day, Claudio Monteverdi. And what was his first opera??? L’Orfeo. Written in 1607. Monteverdi pushed the boundaries of music so far in this piece. He used designated outside instruments to be played inside, used recitative to move through the action and as a tool to make this poignant story plot not overly melodramatic, started the tradition of using a castrato (I don’t think the ABO will use one of these this time!) and finally having the whole drama being told through the music; every thought, emotion, action and event expressed through song. I can’t wait to hear this production, I’m sure it will be sublime. And I recommend anyone who can get there to go! 19, 20, 21, 25, 26 September You’ve got to love Serendipity! Love me

EQUAL WHAT?!?! Have you ever heard of it…equal temperament? And if so, do you know what it is and what it does?? If the answer is ‘No’, don’t worry, you’re not the only one! Equal temperament is the thing that makes our western music different from all other world music – it is the difference between Japanese Shakuhuchi flute playing and a Chopin nocturne. It is something that most people do not know about or find too hard to understand. So what is this difference? A Shakuhachi is totally bound in nature; the instrument’s construction, its music and its symbolism. The Chopin nocturne on the other hand, is a piece for piano – a manmade instrument bound by artificial constraints and tuned to equal temperament. But let’s go back to the beginning- to Pythagoras – 2 ½ thousand years ago. It was Pythagoras who discovered the relationship or ratios between notes. Legend has it that Pythagoras heard a blacksmith strike 2 pieces of metal and was stunned by the relationship between them both. On inspection he discovered that one piece of metal was exactly half the size of the other. What was even more fascinating was that the smaller of the two sounded the same note as the larger, only higher; a ratio of 2:1( if you are visual think of it as red and light red – the same colour just a different density). He then decided to experiment further with these different sized bits of metal and came to the conclusion that if you strike a piece of metal two thirds the length of the original a new note will sound (green) but one that is 5 notes higher than the first (2:3). He then proceeded to see how many different notes he could discover by making each bit of metal 2/3’s smaller. All was very good for the first 12 but after that the notes were excruciatingly close to already discovered notes, but not quite (think of a clock where the nighttime hours are not quite in alignment with the day time hours.). This is called the Pythagorean Comma and didn’t cause much trouble for musicians until we became greedy and decided we wanted music which was more lush, textural and complex than just a single line of music (think Gregorian Chants). When this happened and voices started to sing together (polyphony), the church insisted that only a few perfect intervals could be used, the 4th, 5th and octave. This was because these intervals are close to the beginning of the Pythagorean Comma and work nicely together. But once again this was not good enough for us; we wanted to add new sounds. In the early 15th century an English man called John Dunstable started adding intervals of a 3rdand 6th to his music. The problem with was that to make these sound nice, people had to move their perfect intervals a little up or down to accommodate for the 3rds and 6ths. The second you change the purity of these notes you take the music from being totally organic and natural to being man-made. Musicians thought it was worth it though because the musical results were beautiful chocolaty harmonies which enticed the listeners of the day. Once composers heard these harmonies, a plague of them spread across Europe where everyone was adding 3rds and 6ths and by the Renaissance they were common place. What was the effect of all of this? Well let’s use our clock analogy again. Just say we have the 12 hours on the clock face but the distance between each of those numbers is not exact. The first few are quite well spaced but as we go further around the dial the distance becomes less exact. Some hours may consist of 60 minutes but some maybe 57 and some 64. And let’s make it even more tricky and say that everyone has a different clock face. Although they are similar to each other, they are in no way universal. This is what musicians had to put up with in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Every composer had a slightly different tuning system to fit all the 12 notes into an octave. This was called ‘mean temperament’ and musicians had to tune their instruments (especially difficult for keyboard and fretted instruments) to the specific tuning of whoever they were working for at the time. Composers, instrumentalists, instrument makers and scientists knew what they needed to make this situation better. It was to somehow have a system where the 12 notes of the octave were arranged so they fitted into the octave perfectly (equal temperament) not just ‘well’. This would take their music as far away from the organic music of the Shakuhachi as possible but would allow composers to write precisely what they wanted to and have it sound the same everywhere it was performed. And everyone had a try, including Galileo, Boyles and Stevin. In fact Stevin discovered the precise mathematical formula to have this perfect spacing between every note. It was 1.059463094 times the frequency of the note below!! This is great in theory but hopeless in practice as the only way to tune instruments was totally aurally- there were no electronic tuners to give you the exact distances only a very well-tuned ear! So thank goodness for J.S. Bach!! In 1722 he wrote the 48 Preludes and Fugues while working for Count Leopold in Cothen castle, East Germany. What was so amazing about these pieces was that somehow Bach (or one of his students) had managed to tune his clavier so that at one sitting Bach could play in all the major and minor keys. Now this wasn’t an ‘equal tempered’ keyboard but as the title says a “Well Tempered” one. And once discovered people across Europe were not suddenly being able to tune their instruments to well or equal temperament but what it did do was open the door for people to know that it could be done. Once the unobtainable 4 minute mile was achieved it gave people the inspiration to push it even further- so with tempering. But the final turning point in making our tuning in the West totally different from all other ethnic or world forms of tuning came about in the 1800’s with the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Engineering. With the explosion of technology, machinery and factories, new instruments like accordion’s, clarinets, valved horns and pianos etc could be made, or partially made, on the production line of factories to the specific measurement set down by Stevin all those year before. And what is even more amazing about the complicated and difficult story is that by the mid 1800’s equal temperament was the ONLY form of tuning. All the strange tempering of the previous 100’s of years had disappeared. I suppose the obviously question is why? Why did we in the West go out of our way to change our form of music form being natural to being totally man made? And the reason is simple; all the beautiful harmonies, exotic sounds, strange man made instruments that we have today could have only come about with equal temperament. In fact almost every piece of music written after the 19th century could not have been conceived without it. I for one have been grateful that equal temperament has come about to give me music by composers such as Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, Mahler and the like.

Have you ever thought about the make-up of the orchestra? Why certain instruments are included and others not? And when did the orchestra as we know it evolve – or had it always been around? I didn’t know the answer to these questions until I started writing my latest course, although I had spent so much of my professional life in an orchestra, and I have to admit the answers astounded me. So what is an orchestra? Is it just a large body of instruments playing together? If so, can an orchestra be a concert hall full of 3yr old Suzuki violinists playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or a Javanese Gamelan? Does it have to do with the instrumentation, the balance or how these elements interact with one another? An orchestra is a very specific beast. When you go to an orchestral concert you pretty much know what you are going to see in front of you on the stage. You know the instrumentation, their placement and the sounds which will be produced. But has this always been the case? And if not, how did it evolve and how did it differ over time to have the instrument combinations and set up that we now associate with an orchestra. Here is the set-up of a late Classical Orchestra like Mozart or Haydn would have used. If this is our basic orchestra, how and when did it get to look like this? Let’s start with the Renaissance period (from about 1400-1600). In the Renaissance, instrumental music was very much broken up into string music and wind music with very little music written for a combined group. The reason for this was that the wind instruments were very rudimentary and had little or no ability to tune themselves or with other instruments. As a result groups often had only one player per part. Tuning was such a big issue. Then in 1607 Monteverdi wrote Orfeo. His inclusion of both bass, woodwind, strings and keyboards in the one work would have astounded Gonzaga’s audience. On the face of it, it looks like we could call this ensemble an orchestra. But we need to see how it worked together. And that is just it; it didn’t work together or even sit together. Each instrument group had its own set role in the ensemble and as a result never worked together. For example, keyboards and plucked strings accompanied the songs, while bowed strings and winds (not working together) accompanied the dances and the brass were used for fanfares. So, although there were instrumental groups in the Renaissance we can see that they didn’t really constitute an orchestra. By the Baroque period things were slowly changing. Composing for instrumental ensembles became much more popular as great improvements in instruments took place. This meant that wind and brass instruments became easier to tune; winds started to be made in sections which fitted together which could then be lengthened or shortened to tune with other instruments. Instruments including oboes, flutes and recorders started being regularly included in string music although the Basso Continuo (usually a sole keyboard instrument at this stage) was still de riguer. Renaissance instruments which couldn’t be altered to fit the new tastes of the Baroque period simply died out. In France, Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) made incredible strides towards what we would consider an orchestra with his Vingt-cinq violons du Roys (25 violins for the King). This group worked together as a unit playing for Louis XIV’s ballets, operas and his general entertainment. Lully (who was apparently a task master) insisted that techniques such as bowings be uniform throughout the group. His 5 part concept of string writing spread throughout Europe and became the norm. The Baroque period is a very long time – from about 1600-1740. At the beginning of the period instrument groups were still, on the whole, playing separately. In the case of opera, musicians often sat behind the stage, in boxes by the stage and sometimes actually on the stage itself. By the end of the period, music was being written for combinations of instruments from various instrument groups. They were beginning to work as a cohesive unit and were positioned at the front of the stage for operas and on the stage for ensemble playing. So we move into the Classical period, from about 1740-1820. During this time other wind instruments were added to the strings like the newly invented clarinet and heavily altered horn. They were included in pairs (a little like Noah and his ark!). So we now have flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets being regular members of a ‘thing’ called an orchestra – a word that was actually being used to describe this group! In this period winds are not only being used to add tone colour and double the string parts, like the Baroque period, but also being used as solo instruments within the ensemble. And most importantly specific pieces called Symphonies were being written for this body of musicians. As the Romantic period dawns, new instruments are added, the size of the orchestra is very much increased and people like conductors are added to the mix. With all the modifications and changes that have taken place with the orchestra since the Classical period it has still remained the same beast at its core. Orchestral music gives audiences abundant pleasure and has so for over 250 year. It may have taken many centuries to be established but I don’t think it is going away any time soon!

With the Olympics dominating all our lives at present it’s amazing how patriotic we have all become. And it co-insides beautifully with my latest class which looks at patriotism, or nationalism as an important musical movement throughout Europe in the 19th century. It’s amazing how songs like Rule Britannia and G-d Save the King in England, Ca ira and the Marseille in France, operas by Rossini, Bellini and especially Verdi in Italy, and all the musical societies in Germany helped galvanise the national spirit. I could never say that music was the catalyst for the nationalist movements; but music, especially song, was definitely a way for the illiterate to pass on information, spur the military to fight for COUNTRY rather than King, and spread information throughout non-unified countries. And the cake for this class? Unfortunately I didn’t make something shaped in the Olympic rings which might have been very apt, but I did make a special cake. A couple of people in this class are on a special health diet which excludes them from eating dairy, egg yolks, oils except olive and a whole lot of other things besides! It’s one of my missions to find cakes – other than meringue based cakes- for them to eat, and this is one of them!! I try to ice the cake just before they come so the chocolate is still running down the sides of the cake and it is still warm. I’ve also started a little side line business with Coffee Cake and Culture. You can now order my cakes either by phone or on line. This was my 9 year old’s idea, who said as payment, she doesn’t want 5% from each sale (my husband’s suggestion) but to lick the utensils when I have finished…a girl after my own heart!! Enjoy. Love me. EGG FREE, DAIRY – FREE, NUT – FREE CAKE 1 1/2 cups flour 1/2 salt 1 cup white sugar 1/4 unsweetened cocoa powder 1 teaspoon baking soda (I sometimes use self-raising flour with the same results) 5 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon white vinegar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup cold water 1/2 cup dark choc chips 200g Lindt chocolate – any dark choc flavour ​ DIRECTIONS Preheat oven to 180 degrees Grease a baking pan. In a large bowl combine flour, salt, sugar, cocoa powder and baking soda (just self-raising flour). Mix well with a fork, then stir in oil, vinegar and vanilla extract. When dry ingredients are thoroughly moist pour in cold water and stir batter until smooth. Stir in choc bits and pour into prepared pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes until skewer comes out JUST clean -do not overcook! cool on rack when the cake is cool melt chocolate either in a microwave on a low heat checking and stirring regularly or on a double boiler on the stove pour over cake just before serving so the chocolate is still runny ​ YUM!