Finally, we get to Tiny Tim’s last studio album, Girl — from the first song on the album, an excellent cover of the Beatle’s tune of the same name. I think it is the best thing he ever did. That’s most especially true because he was paired with the great Brave Combo — a band that defies classification, but that can apparently play anything at all. This was the band that Tiny Tim always deserved.

It contained some familiar tunes that he had been doing for years like the wonderful, “I Believe in Tomorrow.” But I want to focus on some of the new material. And it’s hard! There are 14 songs on the album and they all deserve to be listened to. In fact, you should just click on that album cover there and buy the CD. You’ll be glad you did.

Let’s start with a simple one, the Carole King and Gerry Goffin classic “I Want To Stay Here.” I especially like Tiny Tim when he works with other vocalists. It’s probably because he has such a unique voice, that it is nice to have something standard to tie it to. Also, I love the Richard Nixon vocal here. Regardless, this is a wonderful version of the song.

In the Jim Carroll song “City Drops Into The Night,” there are a couple of lines that I really like:

It’s when the body at the bottom
That body is my own reflection
But it ain’t hip to sink that low
Unless you’re gonna make a resurrection

That’s a reference to drugs and the drug life. But the words are eternal, because everyone has their low points. It’s nice to end strong. And that was very true of Tiny Tim. He went through a couple of decades of nothing much — at least in recorded music. But then he came back in the 1990s and showed that he had plenty left to offer the world.

In 1995, he released I Love Me. It is such a great album that it really is hard to pick one. For example, you really should hear, I Saw Mr Presley Tip-Toeing Through the Tulips. It’s hilarious and could well have been recorded by Mojo Nixon. There is “The Laughing Policeman” — which sounds like it could have been written for him, even though it is from the early 1920s. The title song is fantastic. It even has a charming (and sad) song of his own, She Left Me With the Herpes.

But we have to listen to his cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).” I just lover it. He has an amazing ability to interpret other people’s music. We are going to see that for the rest of the week. Be prepared to be impressed:

In 1969, Tiny Tim put out his third album, For All My Little Friends. As it’s title suggests, it was a children’s album. And it is delightful. But it is perhaps a specialized taste. Mark Deming at AllMusic described it in a way that probably has wider resonance, “Ultimately, this album suffers from a severe case of the cutes.” He says that like it’s a bad thing.

What’s interesting about this album is that Jonathan Richman spent several years trying to make this album, and generally failed (although it led to better later albums). There is a natural fit for Tiny Tim in this material. But I don’t even know where most of these songs come from. There is “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” And there are a couple of Bing Crosby songs from the 1940s. But the rest are not well know. A number are like public service announces: “Two Times a Day” (brushing your teeth); “They Always Pick on Me” (bullying); and “Remember Your Name and Address” (just what it says).

Most of the songs, however, are about animals. I’ve picked “Mickey the Monkey,” mostly because I really like the production on it. But other favorites are: “Chickery Chick” and “I’m A Lonesome Little Raindrop” and “Bill The Buffalo.” You can listen to the whole album with a YouTube playlist. It’s a pleasant way to spend a half hour.

It isn’t my intent to go through Tiny Tim’s recorded career. The truth is that he started strong and he ended strong. And I really want to get to his last studio album, Girl, which he did with Brave Combo, the band he always deserved. But let us linger in his early days a bit longer.

We are going to listen to two songs off Tiny’s Tim’s second album, cleverly titled, Tiny Tim’s Second Album. The first song on the album is, “Come to the Ball.” It is from the a 1910 musical, The Quaker Girl. Songs from this period really were the focus of Tiny Tim’s career. He always mixed it up, but songs of the first half of the 20th century were what he seemed to most love.

In this performance, he also does the 1945 Doris Day hit, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” The music for the song was written by Vic Mizzy — known for writing the themes for Green Acres and The Addams Family. The lyrics were written by Manny Curtis, who is known for writing the lyrics to Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” and the English lyrics to “Je t’Appartiens” as “Let It Be Me.”

Last week, I realized that I had to do a week of Herbert Khaury. You know him better as Tiny Tim. But if you are like most people, you really don’t know him at all. He was an amazing talent — not just the novelty act that he was reduced to on so many television shows. To begin with, he was something of a musicologist. He had a great knowledge of popular song history and was reputed to have a working repertoire of over a thousand songs.

What’s more, he actually had quite a nice and deep voice. This will be well on display this week. But I want to start at the beginning with God Bless Tiny Tim. It really is an amazing album. It is filled with great tunes and something that was fairly rare on most of his albums: great production. I encourage you to check out his version of Irving Berlin’s antiwar song, “Stay Down Here Where You Belong.” But I want to highlight the duet (he sings both parts), “On The Old Front Porch,” which is just unbelievably great:

To me, the Romantic period really ends with Brahms. Clearly it did go on, but even by end of his life, the Impressionists had come to dominate classical music — at least as a going concern. And you can hear the continuity between Brahms and Claude Debussy, our featured artist today.

I don’t want to get far into his career — he really came into his full power in his early thirties with pieces like, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. And he created great works up to shortly before his death of rectal cancer at 55, like arguably the greatest piece ever written for solo flute, Syrinx.

Debussy is really were classic music starts to become un-linked from standard tonality. Harmony becomes much more a matter of setting an emotional tone. He is also the first composer that I know of who really understood chromaticism, and was able to make it work in the context of the larger work. We see some of this in the following early work that he wrote around the age 25, Petite Suite — a work for piano with four hands. It’s also be transcribed for other groups of instruments. I think it is notable just for having such a broad range of colors. It’s a gorgeous work.

And here again, we get to enjoy Martha Argerich on the piano. She is joined by the Romanian pianist Cristina Marton.

The Romantic period brought out the worst in mediocre composers. Pretty much any Classical composer could grind out an acceptable piece of music. But that just isn’t so in the Romantic period. I blame Beethoven who inspired many people who shouldn’t have been inspired. Although in a fundamental sense Beethoven was the greatest composer of this period (transitional though he may have been), I prefer to listen to Johannes Brahms.

Brahms was a protege of Robert Schumann, who was probably the biggest influence on the young composer. They became friends when Brahms was only 20 years old. This may be why Brahms was considered a conservative composer, at least compared to the other dominant composers of the time. But this gets to my general problem with Romantic music. The excesses of the period are well on display in Wagner and Liszt. What’s more, I find Brahms constantly innovative, just not in such a flashy way. His Symphony No 1 is a great example of restrained brilliance. Not that he couldn’t be more ostentatious as he is in the Violin Concerto in D.

But of the most interest to modern listeners is probably Brahms’ work with folk tunes. That’s especially true of the Hungarian Dances. And since I know from experience that people will not listen to hour long symphonies or concertos, here are numbers 5, 6, 7, and 17 — used in the Merrie Melodies classic, Pigs in a Polka:

I guess we have to discuss Robert Schumann. To me, he is the Romantic period. He is also the reason that I don’t like the period. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great composer. What’s more, he was a huge influence on Johannes Brahms, who I like rather more.

For the first ten years of his career, Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano. He had intended to be a pianist, but injured his hand and so turned to composition. At the peak of his abilities, he composed the Piano Concerto in A minor. I have to admit, it is an exquisite piece. At the same time, you can hear the kinds of things that bother me — its overly dramatic parts. But his use of the full orchestra for all its colors really is masterful. And you can certainly hear the beginnings of impressionism that would come with later composers.

This performance features one of the greatest pianists alive, Martha Argerich.

It may be of interest to you to know that Robert Schumann came by his music honestly. He was manic-depressive and slipped into paranoia later in life. He died at the age of 46 in an insane asylum.

Now that we enter the Romantic period, things fragment. It is a lot harder to see clear progressions. And since from here on out I’m going to pick pieces more or less randomly, I might as well start with a composer that I greatly admire despite his emotional excesses: Franz Schubert. He’s still very much in the Classical tradition. But by the end of his life — he died at only 31 years old — he was certainly a Romantic composer.

Today we listen to a personal favorite of mine, the String Quartet No 15. It could so easily have been written to accompany Wuthering Heights — even though it was written two decades before the novel. Harmonically, it is riveting. It starts with alternating major and minor chords that sounds totally different from anything we’ve ever heard. Of course, Schubert was an experimenter. It’s surprising that he doesn’t have a bigger reputation. But that seems to come from the fact that academics have tended to disregard him for the reason they have disregarded so many great composers: the man can write a melody!

Listen to this. Really, it is beautiful. Orchestral music never gets better than this. And it is performed by the exceptional Belenus Quartett.

Look at that Joseph Karl Stieler portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven. If that was all you had to go on, you would say that Beethoven was a Romantic. Indeed, he was a revolutionary force in the Classical period, and effectively the beginning of the the Romantic period. In fact, I’ve long had this idea that Beethoven was the cause of so much that I don’t like of that period. Because it is relatively easy to be overwrought like Beethoven but without much of his talent. And the Romantic period is indeed filled with with that kind of work.

But I don’t want to look at his later work, because that, it seems to me, is clearly Romantic period stuff. But even at the beginning of his career, he was making important changes. In fact, I’m presenting his Symphony No 1 — which he probably started when he was 25, but wasn’t first performed until he was 30. There are a couple of things to note here. First, the harmony is more complicated. In fact, I think Beethoven liked messing with the listener’s expectations. You can especially here this in the beginning of this piece. Also of interest is the expanded use of dynamics — it gets louder and software than Mozart generally did. And then there is much more use of the wind instruments, which adds a lot of color — something that becomes more clear as time goes on.

Many classical music fans think of it as being summed up with the Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — cleverly skipping my two favorite periods of classical music. But there are three towering figures of the Classical period: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (although as you will see later, he’s more of a transitional composer). Yesterday, we listened to some early Haydn. We could now very easily listen to some late Haydn. But there is no way I am getting through the Classical period without Mozart.

One of my big complaints with the way many people treat Mozart is to assume he was some kind of composing machine. Clearly, this has much to do with Amadeus. It would make an interesting week of music to show Mozart’s progression throughout his life. He was always hugely talented, of course. But his juvenilia is very clearly that. If you want to get an idea of this, check out his very first symphony, which he wrote at the age of 8. It’s a fine piece of music — and shockingly great for someone that young. But compare it to his Symphony No 40 — written three years before his death.

The really tragic thing about him is that the last six years of his life were stunning with regard to his production. Just in terms of opera: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute. But today, I want to highlight an instrumental work that he wrote at the beginning of this incredibly productive period, the Piano Concerto No 23. What’s interesting here is the way that the modulation from one key to another is seamless. It’s particularly exciting in the third act. It is the Platonic ideal the Classical period music:

Since I feel like I’m a little less crushed for time with the new schedule, I thought it might be a good idea to return to our survey of classical music. When last we left it, we were at the end of the Baroque period, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. You can check there for a full list of the week’s posts. And so today, we start at the beginning of the classical period.

As you can no doubt understand, the periods are not exactly clear. Obviously, people were still playing and composing Baroque music well into the classical period. Interestingly, one of the very greatest Baroque composers, Antonio Vivaldi, was all but forgotten until the 20th century, when the great violinist Fritz Kreisler wrote a violin concerto and attributed it to Vivaldi. But what you will notice is that there is not a huge difference between the best work of the late Baroque and that of the early Classical period. In fact, my late Baroque composer CPE Bach is really more of a Classical computer.

The first great composer of the Classical period is Joseph Haydn. (Let’s set aside Gluck for now.) In fact, other than Mozart, there is no one I like as well. In fact, the two men were very close friends. I think that Haydn was kind of a father figure to Mozart — but one who wasn’t a total prick like his real father. I wrote about their special relationship last year, The Son Joseph Haydn Never Had. But Haydn lived such a long time that it would be wrong to think about him only with regard to the early Classical period.

So let’s listen to an early quartet. It was composed in 1763, when Haydn was just 31 years old. As time goes on, it gets harder to be clear about what is changing. There are a few things that stick out to me, however. First is the lack of ornamentation. In the same way that the worst of Romantic period music mindlessly uses chromatic scales, Baroque often ornamented melodies out of existence. There’s also more harmonic structure, with phrases driving to resolution. But it is also, and most importantly I think, less academic — more emotional. This is his Quartet No 8 in E major. I’m sorry, but I could not find a professional live recording of it. Understandably, professionals tend to stick with his later and more refined work. This is still quite beautiful: