Music about Transportation, Day 1 – Short Ride In A Fast Machine by John Adams

This week’s theme is…Music about Transportation!  When we hear the word “transportation” in the twenty-first century, we imagine many modes of moving people and things from place to place, over sea, land and air.  This is largely a modern set of images, although people and things have moved from place to place throughout all of history.  Because of this, the theme of transportation is present in music to varying degrees through its history.

Music about Transportation, Day 1 – Short Ride In A Fast Machine by John Adams

The modern musical style known as minimalism is an essentially American style, and a living one, even aging as it is.  As of this writing all of its most influential creative leaders are still with us, many of them still at work.  Younger composers look to the minimalists for inspiration and many have tried their hand at creating their own minimalist works in the mold of their heroes, even if there has not been anyone who has emerged to continue the movement as forcefully as its current luminaries.  Here is my own attempt.  Written more than a decade ago, it is heavily indebted to Philip Glass and remains to this day one of my best-received works:

Many music historians see minimalism as a response to the overly cerebral and inaccessible assault (forgive me!) of serialism that popped up after the Second World War and dominated Western art music for more than 3 decades.  American composers began to experiment with the styles and techniques that would become minimalism in the mid-60s, with more fully mature efforts by the three most successful composers of the style, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams, coming in the 70s and 80s.  It is easy to understand why minimalism is often regarded as an “opposite” of serialism; it is everything that serialism is not: diatonic, repetitive, consonant, accessible, easy even.  Its simplified tonal and rhythmic elements share many commonalities with much popular music and so the membrane between the two styles was easily permeated.  For minimalists sounds you can look to bands like Can, Velvet Underground and even, some might say, odd later works from the Beach Boys.

Observers from my vantage point, and those similar, have had the opportunity to watch the stylistic movement grow and morph within our lifetimes, and to see the “big 3” (Glass, Reich and Adams) flourish and develop into unique artists with quite distinctive voices, even if there is still ample reason to group them together under the same minimalist umbrella.  Fans of minimalism could easily distinguish by ear music from any of the three, so different are they in their characteristic procedures and idioms.  Of the three, John Adams is most often described as taking minimalism as a “foundation” but not always sticking to it strictly.  If you listen to anything, even recent music, from Glass or Reich (Glass’ film scores excepted) you will see how it sticks more or less to the highly repetitive mold, almost obsessively so.  But Adams, while his music certainly bears marks of minimalism, seems more comfortable to mix it with other moods and romantic gestures.  It is just a little less certain what you will hear from Adams than the other two.  I’ve even heard a nifty all-electronic album from John Adams, and you can listen to this interesting NPR story which notes many points of confluence between John Adams and Beethoven’s music.  You just wouldn’t see anyone make that comparison with Glass or Reich.  But Adams is able to compare Beethoven to minimalism for his amazing economy of means- Beethoven’s ability to suck the marrow out of tiny, motivic ideas.  I have noticed that there is a fair amount of obsessive repetition in Beethoven (listen to the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony).  It seems Adams might say that he was influenced by minimalism, even if he was never a bona-fide minimalist like other composers.  And this distinction would allow him to remain flexible, with a broad stylistic base from which to pull at various times depending on the intent and situation.  Some of Adam’s works are quite genuinely minimalist, and most effectively so (like Shaker Loops, for example, a terrifically affecting work for string orchestra).  But from the very beginning Adams incorporated minimalism into his general tapestry with far more diversity than those with whom he is commonly lumped together as the “minimalists”.

One of his most famous works, still popular today, 30 years after its creation, is the orchestral fanfare Short Ride In A Fast Machine.  This brief fanfare is a great way to become acclimated to John Adams’ “postminimalist” style, in which he combines elements of minimalism with a broader orchestral scope and class of gestures.  If you enjoy this, I would encourage you to explore some of his larger orchestral works, of which there are quite a few, and quite varied.

The tapping woodblock which pervades the first half of the piece is its most obvious feature, but try to listen past that to the brilliant woodwind flourishes that fill the air and the chugging brass syncopations which are gradually passed to the strings and serve to elevate the piece to its first climax in energy, punctuated by a martial statement of percussion.  After the opening energy dies down a most intriguing section begins in which the lower instruments of the orchestra, trombones, bassoons, cellos, double basses, take on a greater agility than to which they are typically accustomed and begin to create a rising, insistent musical line that eventually carries the piece to its turbulent climax.  And then, something truly stunning: with about a minute of the remaining, the woodblock finally stops, and the orchestra produces a new texture, evoking a new landscape.  Broader, calmer, peaceful.  Still fast-moving, but more like the eye of the storm.  Or gorgeous flat terrain that opens up about the traveler in the fast machine.  The strings play a steady ostinato of short, repeated notes, as the brass play a chorale-like tower rising out of the ground, higher and higher, just before a reprise of the opening fanfares brings the piece to an abrupt conclusion.

I have long listened to this piece and marveled at the immersive pictures it has created in my imagination.  I have been enraptured by abstract, colorful panoramas that seem to fly by as I levitate in some kind of floating craft to which the laws of physics simply cannot apply, and the final placid minute evokes the most magically-textured landscapes.  I must confess a tinge of disappointment in recently learning of Adams’ actual experiential model for Short Ride In A Fast Machine…

I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like it fits to me.  He may say he didn’t like the ride, but I don’t think the music does.  It is constantly full of wonder, excitement, elation, amazement.  So, I think I’ll stick with my original concept as described in the previous paragraph, because that’s still where I go in my imagination as I engage with Short Ride In A Fast Machine.  And I don’t think I’m the only one.  Watch Victor Craven’s splendid animation and see if you don’t think his abstract and beautiful take fits like a glove and follows the pacing most precisely, no sports cars necessary!

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Music about Poultry, Day 5 – With the Wild Geese by Hamilton Harty

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 5 – With the Wild Geese by Hamilton Harty

It seems that the British Isles did not need an artistic avant-garde like many other cultures in Europe.  While the conflicts between England and Ireland, with the latter state yearning for independence in recent centuries, is well-known, the United Kingdom remains to this day the one and only monarchy left from the old world order that concluded around the time of the First World War.  France’s monarchy had more than a century prior in the French Revolution and the country had barely managed to restabilize after its turbulent series of revolutions and wars over the course of the nineteenth century.  The German and Austro-Hungarian Empires both met their terminus after World War I, the unbelievably brutal and globe-spanning arm conflict that had seemed to begin innocently enough, resembling at first countless other provincial conflicts between various European states.  But this one turned out to be different, the uncontainable reaction of a confluence of modern cultural forces and currents that couldn’t help but to destroy the old world order.  All except for Great Britain, that is, who had come out on the right side of the conflict.  Even Russia, Britain’s ally in the Great War, found its monarchy overthrown by an internal force unrelated to the belligerents it faced on the Eastern Front as Lenin’s Bolshevik uprising succeeded in its aim to seize the Russian nation and impose its Marxist doctrine on the nation’s politics and economy.  Only Great Britain’s monarchy remained.

While it may be a coincidence (which I doubt), most of the great currents of modern music happened to occupy the same time as societal collapse and seemed to reflect the uncertainty that accompanied it, or elements of the new regimes that took root.  All of these movements are unified in their abandonment of traditional harmony and form.  In France it was Impressionism (probably the gentlest of all of them), in Russia the dehumanized and even tortured works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, et al, in Hungary the barbaric primitivism of Bartok, and in Germany the strident intellectual pursuit of serialism, all developing around the times of their respective monarchical disruptions.  But that did not happen in Britain.  Its monarchy in tact (even if increasingly symbolic in actual power), its musicians seemed to have no need to dissolve their traditional musical language in favor of an avant-garde grammar.  Britain was threatened, certainly, by the German blitzkrieg, but it was not broken.  And its composers’ forays into avante-garde seem almost a formality, or an act of admiration.  Holst was clever in many ways, bending conventions more than his contemporaries, but always friendly to common ears.  Britten, a bit later on, admired those who pushed the envelope on the continent, but deep down may have felt that ultimately British composers had no philosophical reason or drive to do it themselves to that extent.  And so, while the Germans, French, Russians and others on the European mainland were venting existential fears through their musical arts, the contemporary musicians of the British Isles, secure in their service to king and country, expressed their comfort in lush, conservative musical idioms that would never cause any ears the slightest discomfort or philosophical uncertainty.

Elgar is the best-known British musical figure of this inter-war period, but there were many others active at this time, composing in a similar, if not quite so distinctive manner (after all, Elgar is the name we still mention the most from this group).  Highly melodic, conventional and even sentimental but very proper sounding harmony, large orchestras, folk-song like themes to contrast those gorgeous outpourings of soaring melody, and a general celebration of the cheerful propriety of the British experience.  This is the general style of interwar art music in the British Isles.  And one composer who fit this mold to a T is the Irishman Hamilton Harty, which is a name I wager you have not heard before now.

Hamilton Harty was born in Hillsborough, County Down, in what is today known as Northern Ireland.  His childhood musical experiences were shaped by his church-organist father, William, gave him an early musical foundation in piano, viola and compositional technique.  He quickly followed in his father’s footsteps, himself securing posts at church organs in various Irish locales.  He came to study with Michele Esposito, an expatriate Italian pianist and composer, who, with his teaching post at Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy of Music, had been busy shaping and cultivating the classical music scene of the Irish lands.  Perhaps encouraged by Esposito, Harty set sail for the English main island, headed for London, to pursue his musical career in whatever shape that would take, and he remained outside of Ireland for the rest of his life, save a year or two toward the end of his life while he was recovering from a major operation.  Harty gained renown as a piano accompanist, composed steadily, and had appointments conducting orchestras.  His early position with the London Symphony Orchestra ended shortly when his concerts met with limited success and it was discovered that he did not have the knack to direct operas.  But it was during this time that he wrote some of his major orchestral works, including the sweeping symphonic poem With the Wild Geese, which was the first work he conducted with the LSO.  The bulk of his career was spent in the northern city of Manchester, conducting the their Hallé Symphony Orchestra, which had been established in 1858.  Harty enjoyed his tenure conducting the Hallé from 1920 to 1932 at which point he seemed to develop other interests.  But under his baton the orchestra became among the best in England and there are amazing stories of the rapport he developed with the players.  He also used his position to champion works of his favorite composers, and many of the underappreciated and emerging composers of that day, including Mahler and Shostakovich

While Harty must have appreciated some of the more jagged and adventurous harmonic experiments from various places on the continent, his language remained utterly conservative.  He is among the last generation of Irish musicians to live and work prior to the turbulent political and sectarian conflicts which resulted starting in the 1920s when long-simmering animosity between the Anglican British and largely Catholic Irish finally bubbled to the surface after building for centuries.  The unpredictable eruptions of violence that dotted Ireland’s timeline spanning the from the War of Irish Independence in 1919 to the Good Friday Agreement, generally agreed to have ended “The Troubles” as recently as 1998, disrupted Ireland’s cultural scene and made it difficult for any artistic movement to take root or flourish.

My guess is that Harty, with his Anglican religious roots, his attraction to the cultural centers of England, and his knighting in 1925, would have been sympathetic to the interests of the British Crown as far as Ireland was concerned, although I’m not sure how I would confirm this.  The “Wild Geese” of this symphonic poem’s title often refers to Irish soldiers who enlisted with the French army to fight British forces, so celebrating that heritage indicates sympathy with Irish sentiments against its long-occupying imperial force.  But his emigrating from Ireland in favor of English centers indicates an affinity for English culture, if not its power and authority.  Also, I might speculate that his music, staying as conventional and uncontroversial as it did, seems to demonstrate no sympathy with the underdog Irish, instead producing a comfortable synthesis of British elegance and Irish heritage.

Take his symphonic poem, With the Wild Geese of 1910, for example.  This was the first work he directed with the London Symphony Orchestra and, according to accounts of the event, the performance was well-received.  It is an immense, stirring, thickly-orchestrated essay synthesizing the British spirit, both hearty and sensible, with the joviality of Irish folk song, painted on a grand symphonic canvas.  It is youthful, with high ideals and a rollicking sense of adventure as it evokes the rolling landscapes of the British Isles from the view its titular foul (or soldiers?):

I think that last performance, benefiting from the superior audio technology of recent decades, gives a good sense of the orchestrational depth and detail of Harty’s symphonic poem.  But, we are also fortunate to have access to this recording of Harty himself directing the Hallé Symphony Orchestra, which responded to him so well.  I think it actually captures the flow and scope of the piece better and, as such, is more captivating.  Everything just makes a little more sense.  Many music historians with experience in Harty’s story say that his brilliance is well captured in early recordings such as these.

 

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Music about Poultry, Day 4 – Symphony No. 83 “The Hen” by Franz Joseph Haydn

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 4 – Symphony No. 83 “The Hen” by Franz Joseph Haydn

Franz Joseph Haydn’s reputation as the “Father of the Symphony” rests more or less on the last 12 specimens of his gigantic symphonic output.  104 symphonies have survived in the history of our age, but the last 12, all written for visits to London toward the end of his life, most successfully anticipate the symphonic form the composers of his successive generations, starting with his student Ludwig van Beethoven, would use for their own statements in the genre.  So, it is these 12 works of refinement, perfection, and orchestral and formal adeptness, which had delighted the sophisticated audiences of London during the final decade of the eighteenth century that are most frequently performed, recorded, and heard in our own age.  For further reading about one of Haydn’s London Symphonies, see this post.

But the London Symphonies are only 12 of his surviving 104, barely 10%!  Aren’t you at least a little curious about the other 90%?  Well, fortunately for you you’re not alone, and in recent years many music historians, performers and record producers have shared your interest, happily generating a significant body of scholarship, performances and recordings of his earlier symphonies as well.  And aren’t we the lucky ones?  Yes, we most certainly are.  As much as I enjoy Haydn’s 12 London Symphonies for their mature voice and flawless balance, the earlier ones, written all across his life, are a positive treasure trove of fresh, inventive and appealing music, especially when performed with the sonorous clarity of a great period instruments ensemble.  The man just never ran out of ideas, and a lot of them are insanely creative.  And in exploring his earlier symphonic output, even a little bit of it (I mean, 104 symphonies – who, besides H. C. Robbins Landon of course, has time to get into all of that?!), you will discover amazingly inventive, almost cheeky, ideas that he would never have put in front of the stuffy London audiences.

Haydn had struggled through his 20s as a freelance musician, cycling through various roles of teacher, performer, composer, and assistant to other composers.  While he studied, observed and learned much during this time, he was only too happy to abandon the uncertainty of the freelance lifestyle for a regular appointment, funded by his wealthy patrons, the aristocratic Esterhazy family, as he approached his 30th year.  It was in this position, running the extremely busy musical activities of the cultivated Esterhazys, that Haydn happily lived out his remaining years.  Unceasing as it was, Haydn took the opportunity in service of his patrons to develop into one of the finest and most consistent composers in Western music history.  While he worked in many genres during his time with the Esterhazys, including solo piano, string quartet, opera, other chamber music like piano trios, and sacred music like settings of the mass, his most significant contributions to the history of music are a result of his captive orchestra for which he continually produced new symphonies.  60 of his symphonies, more than half of his total, starting with number 20, were written for his orchestra at Esterhazy.

Over the course of this continuous production Haydn developed his very clever and inventive manner of creating 4-movement symphonies that perfectly balanced wit, elegance and depth of feeling.  These middle symphonies are delightful, filled with infectious melodies, zesty rhythms, wistful slow movements, crystalline orchestration, and governed by a general tightness and efficiency of motivic development that worked with the musical material in a most pleasing and captivating manner.  Symphony after symphony he created in this mold and by the time he hit his stride he probably could not write a note or phrase that felt at all out of place.  These middle symphonies are also filled with numerous features that are extremely clever or unexpected, and they fit perfectly within his idiom.

Another aspect of Haydn’s middle symphonies composed for the orchestra at Esterhazy is their tendency to exhibit some characteristics of a style that came to be known as Sturm und Drang, German for “Storm and Stress”.  Originally a movement of literature which, in reaction to Enlightenment philosophy, emphasized a highly emotional and subjective approach, many musicians working in the late Classical era, in anticipation of the more romantic manner of music-making just around the corner, created works that feel agitated, panicked, and even depressed or gloomy.  I don’t know if Haydn’s character ever quite allowed him to get all the way there, but a large handful of his symphonic movements from the 1760s and 1770s seem to illustrate the stylistic tendencies of musical Sturm und Drang with minor keys, fast tempos, agitated and syncopated rhythms, jagged and disjunct melodic lines, and a general stormy and excitable feeling.  But many of his major key works exhibit these tendencies also, and those just feel peppy and enthusiastic.  Whatever the reason for these tendencies, I think there are other composers who more fully realize the vision of Sturm und Drang, like CPE Bach, for example, but it is notable to point out this influence in Haydn’s works of this time.

While Haydn stayed in the employment of the Esterhazys for his entire life, a change in his contract of 1779 allowed him to accept commissions from parties outside of that family, which opened up many great opportunities to him that were previously impossible.  Haydn’s fame, owing to the prolific and finely-crafted nature of his output, was rapidly spreading throughout Europe and many other patrons were happy to have the chance to commission him themselves.  The London visits of the 1790s that resulted in the 12 great London Symphonies are the most important example of this, but another notable instance is the 6 symphonies, numbered 82 through 86, known as the “Paris Symphonies”, commissioned by the management of one of the French capital’s largest and finest orchestras, Le Concert de la loge Olympique in the mid 1780s.  The commissioning party was not disappointed, and the fine set of 6 symphonies Haydn produced in fulfillment of his charge seem to crown his middle symphonic style, with the clever and efficient writing, clear orchestration, clever touches, and often zippy Sturm und Drang feeling.

The second of the six, Symphony Number 83, is nicknamed “The Hen”.  Listen to the first movement (which is quite Sturm und Drang) and see if you can figure out why:

 

Do you hear it in the second theme, the peppier, major key passage that contrasts with the stormy opening, starting at 1:10?  Listeners of this movement have noted a distinct hen-like image that is evoked by that theme.  Like so many of Haydn’s nicknamed symphonies, it is very hard to know whether this image was intentionally evoked, or if the witty guy just felt like it was the right thing to write.  Whatever he was thinking, it’s almost comical the way that second theme contrasts with the stormy first movement, but delightfully so.  And on the whole it sure is a fresh, crisp symphonic movement, packed to the gills with engaging twists and turns.  You can listen to the complete 4 movement symphony, from a different orchestra, here:

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Music about Poultry, Day 3 – “Olim lacus colueram” from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 3 – “Olim lacus colueram” from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

Have you ever eaten swan?  What would it mean to do that?

So, apparently people used to eat swans?  http://modernfarmer.com/2014/05/come/  Not for a while though.  But they were once a real delicacy, only considered suitable for aristocratic mouths.  I have to figure this accounts for the thinly veiled symbolism of a certain poem written almost a millennium ago and set to music by one of the most morally enigmatic composers of the twentieth century.  

The collection of poetry known as Carmina Burana was unearthed in 1803 at a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria.  It was quickly recognized as a window into the soul of the Golliards, a sort of displaced and, as a result, disillusioned, second class of medieval clergy.  Trained in theology and monastic disciplines at a time of overabundant applicants for a limited number of ecclesiastical positions, a large number of these seminarians found themselves adrift and questioning their place in the social order.  These were the Golliards.  Educated, lacking apparent purpose, world-weary, and observing around them a deep and prevalent moral corruption in the Church, they themselves gravitated toward a carnal lifestyle and expressed their frustrations over the moral degradation they witnessed in Latin verse.  The Protestant Reformation was still a few centuries off, and the biting satire of their poetry was the only way the Golliards had to express their discontent.  These morally charged forces would continue to build pressure under the dome and eventually explode in revolt and revolution once Martin Luther broke the camel’s back in 1517.  The Golliardic poetry that survives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries exposes many of the currents that would eventually place Luther at the door of All Saint’s Church in Wittenberg with a hammer in one hand, 95 Theses in the other, and a few nails held between his lips.

I imagine that the Golliardic poetry contained in the Carmina Burana was fascinating to many artists, historians, philosophers, and other sensitive souls in Europe during the era of the World Wars.  It must have been disorienting in the extreme to experience the long reliable and effective structures of societal order and authority disintegrate around them over a matter of just a few decades.  If the Dadaist art and music of the 1920s is any indication, many could relate to what the Golliards had endured almost a millennium earlier, that had resulted in their disillusionment and moral laziness.  Add to that a sense of underlying dread, even approaching nihilism, and you can easily arrive at the Dadaist sensibility with its absurd and disturbing imagery.  Germans in the 1920s were disheartened, depressed, uncertain, and in need of something new to believe in.  Their music and art expresses this all too clearly.  In addition to the age of Dada, it was also the age of the cabaret with its gleeful and exhibitionistic disregard for conservative morality, and also the bracing, cerebral music of composers like Hindemith and Schoenberg which commented on the feeling of the time in its own way, with equal measures of academic rigor and angst.  As we know Nazism all too easily slipped into social void and began to develop a new and powerful style of authority that quickly began to rebuild the shattered nation, which most of its citizens were all to happy to go along with, even without fully realizing what was in the movement’s heart and how it would be tragically expressed over the decades to come.

Carl Orff occupies a place in all of that that I find frankly difficult to judge definitively.  He lived through that most disorienting time, and seemed to support the aims of the Nazi regime, which ran its entire course during his adult years.  While Nazism had its detractors, both societal and artistic (those who refused to create art in line within the regime’s accepted guidelines) Orff was not one of them.  But how harshly can we judge him for this?  How harshly can we judge anyone for not speaking out, especially when it is so hard to say how clearly people saw the appalling fruits of Nazism on a day-to-day basis?  People need to live, after all, and it is so easy to become wrapped up in the pursuit of getting along.  And who isn’t suspicious or distrustful of their governing authorities from time to time?

There are those stories that make one wonder if he should have taken notice and committed to greater self-sacrifice in the name of social justice.  When the Third Reich banned Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (because he was born Jewish, even though he later converted to Luther’s sect) and called for German composers to create new, comparable works, Orff answered their call.  And then there was the time that Kurt Huber’s wife asked Orff to defend him.  Professor Huber was one of the founders of The White Rose, a college-based organization that secretly resisted Nazism, and he was eventually caught and captured.  Shortly after that Huber’s wife pleaded with Orff to use his influence and favor with the Reich to advocate for him, but he refused and Huber was executed.  Should he have complied?  Would he have made a difference?  Would he have been hurt by the scandal himself?  Hard to say.  And hard to ultimately judge him definitely on this matter, although people keep looking deeper in an attempt to do so.  He was deeply remorseful over this later on.

We could have similar discussions about other figures like Richard Strauss.  These artists, working within the Nazi Party’s accepted practices, survived because they toed the cultural line, and their reputations survive because they kept their compliance and support for the regime ambiguous enough to escape definitive judgement.  Still, it is not without certain irony I realize that I spent so much time in my elementary school music classes playing Orff instruments under teachers devoted to Orff Shulwerk while, just a handful of decades before, many of my ancestors had suffered and died in Nazi camps.  I’ve even composed music for Orff ensemble, which I enjoyed very much, but in thinking through the way these things interrelate it is easy to become conflicted.

However we judge figures like Orff and Strauss, their music is still with us and delights its listeners.  I wonder, though, what it was exactly about the texts of the Carmina Burana that attracted Orff’s attention and caused him to deem them suitable for a musical setting in Germany during the late 1930s.  Was there some part of him that was suspicious of the rising regime?  Did he sense a similar hypocrisy to that observed by the Golliards centuries earlier?  Was he reacting to the moral degradation of the Dadaist age?  It’s hard to say, but in listening to Orff’s setting of Carmina Burana, in addition to the powerful Germanic force that so clearly pervades certain movements, and would have resonated with the Nazis (like the immediately recognizable opening chorus, although it is clear the Nazi party was not receptive to the intended lesson of the text), I hear an almost grotesquely ironic, and even cabaret quality in others.  Like this one:

Once I lived on lakes,
once I looked beautiful
when I was a swan.

(Male chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
The servant is turning me on the spit;
I am burning fiercely on the pyre:
the steward now serves me up.

(Male Chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

(Tenor)
Now I lie on a plate,
and cannot fly anymore,
I see bared teeth:

(Male Chorus)
Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely!

Do you hear that chiding chorus, sympathizing with the Swan’s demise?  The swan was once a thing of sublime beauty, gracing the lakes upon which it swam.  But was it too prideful?  It is now in misery, roasted black on a spit.  And the chorus echoes the tenor swan “Misery me!”, but in the most ironic and parodistic way.  The Golliard’s message is clear: pride goeth before a fall; beauty and honor inevitably end up in ruins, a pattern that plays out again and again in our fallen world.  Of course the Third Reich thought itself immune, quite mistakenly.  Could Orff see into the future, even in 1936 before any of that would have been clear?

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Music about Poultry, Day 2 – “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 2 – “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky

Do chicken legs ever strike you as grotesque?

It seems the Russian art composers have always had a penchant for incorporating their national folk music into their creative output.  Russian classical music is a newer kid on the block in comparison with other great cultures of the West (the only significant body of classical music that is younger is American music), finding its first footing during the 19th century and bounding onto the international stage in a full flowering of intense, national romanticism.  Starting right then and there Russian composers have worked the folk traditions of their cultural heritage into their music in blatant and unapologetic ways that would have made other traditions blush.  I’m not sure what it is about the Russian character that embraced this tendency so completely, but you simply don’t see it expressed that fully, even at all, in the musical sensibilities of the other great European national cultures of classical music, German, Italian, French, English.   Most composers can probably be found to have quoted at least a little of their native folk music from time to time, or made reference to a national story or hero here and there.  But all that occupies a pretty small percentage of an art that is usually governed by high ideals and the quest for pure art.  

Many music lovers with an affinity for the Russian music of the nineteenth century are attracted to its dirtiness and rough edges, its unabashed digging into the murky past and mining the treasuries of both folk melodies, exploited liberally for melodic material by even the most refined Russian composers (like Tchaikovsky), and an evocative body of stories and legends that seems to stretch backward deep into a past obscured by fog and mist.  This mysterious past shaped the musicians of Russia’s romantic present, yielding figures that often came across as primal and unfinished, their music almost reveling in these qualities and even relying on them to sing in their distinctive voice, as many of these nationalist Russian romantics worked, sometimes awkwardly, to make their contributions to the modern West to which they had only recently awakened.

While all of the great Russian composers evoke this coarseness and unqualified embrace of their folklore to varying degrees, the most uneven of them all is Modest Mussorgsky.  What he lacked in formal training and rigorous technique he made up for in the forcefulness and originality of his ideas and musical vision; this is a widely held consensus among those who evaluate Mussorgsky’s music and, indeed, many think that his lack of formal technique is an essential component of his freshness and impact  And it is this freshness that has allowed a small handful of his works to take hold in the concert repertoire and enjoy the magnitude of performances they do.

One of the “Mighty Five” of Mily Balakirev’s musical circle, of the other 4 he competes only with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for current fame and popularity.  It’s interesting to compare them.  Both of their careers reflect the self-taught reliance on instinct that characterised Balakirev’s philosophy and mentoring, but it’s almost like Mussorgsky chose the path of the disaffected starving artist, never comfortable financially (he was from aristocratic lineage, but the liberation of the serfs crippled his inheritance), prone to heavy drinking, and always striving after authenticity and realism in his work, no matter the cost.  His last few years are are a sad and difficult story to discover.  Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, was elevated to the status of professor at the rather new St. Petersburg Conservatory, which inevitably tempered his “writing by ear” approach, forcing him to adopt a new academic rigour even if he was only a step or two ahead of his students on certain days.  But it is interesting to consider what would have been had a member of Balakirev’s “Five” not come into such close contact with the academic establishment.  Professorship forced Rimsky-Korsakov to polish his harmony, orchestration and form.  It’s rather at odds with the Five’s early and oft-stated mistrust of the academic sensibility.  Still, to have a human resource trained as Rimsky-Korsakov editing works of his fellow blood-brothers has certainly affected the editions that have come down to us.  Perhaps much of what we know of Mussorgsky has been retouched by Rimsky-Korsakov’s refined hand.  And not just by him; there has been a tendency for interpreters and editors to all but re-write much of Mussorgsky’s music.  This ranges from full-out reharmonizing, as has been done with his great opera Boris Godunov, to a more respectful orchestrating of solo piano works, as is the case with his well-known Pictures at an Exhibition.  The original version for solo piano, while popular, is not as famous as Maurice Ravel’s colorful orchestration.  And there’s a version by Leopold Stokowski which is a little less…French, but it’s Ravel’s orchestration that you will hear the most often.  And in spite of the history of retouching and reorchestrating, Mussorgsky’s vision muscles its way through, delivering with primal force the often grotesque mystery of the Russian folk tradition.

Less than a decade prior to Mussorgsky’s untimely death (he was barely 40), his friend, colleague, and fellow Russian, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, died suddenly at the age of 39.  A year after Hartmann’s death a major exhibition of his paintings was organized in his honor, including some examples on loan from Mussorgsky’s personal collection.  The experience of visiting the exhibit and beholding the wide range of subjects that inhabit Hartmann’s works inspired Mussorgsky to craft a personal tribute to his friend, which became the virtuoso piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.  Tied together by a meandering prelude which illustrates walking from piece to piece, composed in 11/4 time (itself a nod to Russian folk song in which irregular meters abound), that reappears between movements, Mussorgsky created a wide variety of images, colors and moods, all related to different paintings by Hartmann.  The most grotesque, which is the penultimate movement, is based on a subject from Russian folklore, the frightful witch Baba Yaga.

Descriptions of Baba Yaga’s nature are ambiguous and hard to pin down.  Fantastic stories about her are populated with conflicting details regarding her malicious or helpful nature, and the whole story feels like a vestige from a more primitive and pantheistic time.  But what seems certain is that she was very ugly and you probably did not want to be caught alone in the forest near her hut.  Oh, and her hut can walk because it has a pair of chicken legs.

Isn’t that a bizarre and unsettling image?  I think chicken legs are ugly enough when they’re on chickens, but in this context they’re positively nightmarish.   Based on his musical depiction, I think it’s safe to say that Mussorgsky agreed:

This short and ferocious scherzo captures the hen-like movements of the hut’s legs and the generally terrifying nature of Baba Yaga’s presence in equal measure.  It feels to me like a precursor of Shostakovich’s savage and feverish symphonic scherzo movements (the one from his Tenth Symphony, said to be a brief, furious, and unrelenting musical portrait of Joseph Stalin, is my absolute favorite) but with a touch of Danny Elfman atmosphere laid on top.  The end of the movement cuts out here because it transitions seamlessly to the completely different and utterly grand finale depicting Hartmann’s design for the front gate of Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev.
This movement from Mussorgsky reveals him to be a most important figure in the flow of the rather young Russian romantic musical tradition.  While his imperfections seemed to invite later musicians to refine his works, maybe this actually helped them to internalize his manner and strengths more deeply, allowing his voice to echo within their own.  I think there’s probably some truth to that as Mussorgsky’s raw, primal quality continued to resonate through Russian music a century after his death.

Want to listen to Mussorgsky’s original version for solo piano?

 

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Music about Poultry, Day 1 – Sonata Representativa by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry!  Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption.  While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles.  We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history.  Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.

Music about Poultry, Day 1 – Sonata Representativa by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber

This is one of my favorite scenes from the Simpsons:

I think it sums up the difference between learning history out of a textbook and really understanding it in a mature way.  But, textbook learning, in spite of its inevitable dearth of nuance and real-world understanding, is so often an important way for students to start learning.  So, as much as I despise dividing music history into the neat and tidy style periods typically taught in music history classes, it is often useful to establish these points of reference, even if much is lost in drawing lines that cleanly.  The world is a nuanced and fluid place, after all, and anyone who has lived a few decades regards history as a completely different subject than a school student who is memorizing names, dates and places for the next exam.  The basic style periods (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern) go a certain distance in helping students to get their heads around it all, but you lose so much nuance in doing so, and it is easy for certain figures to be eclipsed simply because they don’t fit comfortably into one of the cut-and-dried divisions.  The older I get the more I enjoy looking into those spaces that don’t comfortably fit and understanding what they were all about.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber is a great example.  Living from 1644 to 1704, I guess you would technically call him a “Baroque” composer, but it hardly does him justice.  While the Baroque era lasted from 1700 – 1750 (so nice and round, right?!) most of the music that we have come to associate with that period’s typical style actually comes from the last 50 years or so, maybe even less.  This period of time, from approximately 1700 – 1750, is often referred to as the “high baroque” to distinguish it from the music of up to a century beforehand, which had not quite developed into the clean forms and pristine tonal harmony that characterized the high baroque.  But do you suppose anyone ever regards himself as a “transitional figure” during his lifetime?  It’s kind of absurd.  Stuff happens in the moment, and everyone is more or less trying to make their way through life, no matter how “developed” historians consider their work to be.  So I’m content to call Biber a Bohemian violin virtuoso of the late seventeenth century who successfully navigated the various and often intermingled structures of civil and ecclesiastical power, contributing in equal measure to virtuoso instrumental and sacred vocal music, both of which he could create with ease.  I’ve read that you could consider Biber’s style to be the finest example of a brand of violin virtuosity and composition that was overshadowed by that of Corelli, which arose about half a generation later, and would prove to be more historically “significant” and impactful to later musicians, but let’s let that go for now.  Listen to this, and try to imagine that you have never heard of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, that you are living in Austria of 1669, and hearing this with fresh ears:

It must have been really dazzling to see Biber play that in person.  Can you tell how virtuosic and eccentric he must have been to create and perform something like that?  What was that anyway?  What was with those weird, not-always-terribly-musical-sounds throughout?  Glad you asked!  It is the Sonata Representativa, which I would translate roughly as “Sonata in which a handful of animals are imitated”.  This fun, showy 10 minute piece is actually made of 9 teeny tiny little movements.  Some, like the first and last movements, are what you might label as “conventional seventeenth century virtuoso concert music”, if such a thing exists.  The sonata opens with an fantasia-overture and ends with a dance.  Everything in between those conventional outer movements you might label as “eccentric and highly imaginative sonic experiments regarding the violin’s ability to imitate various small animals to the pleasure of a patron Count who enjoyed such things”.  All the middle movements are written in imitation of some kind of small animal and I think they are variously successful, but always entertaining, if only for the odd sounds you get to hear.  Watch this video and follow the score.  You can also see in the description what each movement seeks to imitate:

You may have caught the cat before following along like that, but I bet that was the only one.  That’s the nature of programmatic music – even when music is imitating or representing something concrete the listener usually has to be told, and then it all makes sense.  But it really all makes sense now, right?  I think Biber captured some of them better than others.  I’m particularly impressed by the cat, which really meows and pads along like a cat, and the cock and hen.  We have chickens on our property right now and I would say that Biber really got their motions and mannerisms.  The intervals kind of magically evoke their range of motion as they look forward and then to the ground, forward and then to the ground, and those pattering repeated notes make it seem like they’re rooting and pecking about.  There’s even that presto episode in which they seem to be spooked and running madly.  I think that’s a great little movement!  The quail I’m not sure about, not having much experience with them.  How about you?  Do you know what quail are like?  Here’s a video:

What do you think?

Heinrich Biber made his interesting and inventive mark on the history of violin virtuosity, although it’s not known as well as Corelli, who dwarfed him just a little later.  But exploring his violin repertoire is a fascinating study.  He was a little like a mad scientist, pushing the limits of the instrument, and able to do it because of his supreme command of violin technique.  Biber’s imaginative experiments are a constant source of intrigue and delight.  His violin output reflects the merged ecclesiastical and temporal authorities to which he answered, constantly mixing sacred themes with the secular genre of the sonata (he wrote plenty of “straight” sacred music too; his masses are gorgeous and quite inventive specimens in the manner of Heinrich Schutz).  His Rosary Sonatas are one continuous essay in scordatura, intentionally changing the conventional tuning of a string instruments (and a maddening thing for anyone playing that way for the first time!).  For Biber this kind of exploration was commonplace, comfortable, and enriched with deep symbolism.  Each sonata in the Rosary set is written for a different violin tuning, and the different scordatura tunings allowed him to express the qualities and character of the various Rosary episodes, even going so far as to visually create a cross on the instrument for the Resurrection sonata as the D and A strings are routed to endpoints on different sides from when they begin:

Virtuosity and experimentation could be a source of deep and resonant mystery for Biber.  He must never have ceased inventing manners of musical expression that were at once clever, profound and technically marvelous.  The Sonata Representativa represents a lighter, more entertaining manifestation of that sensibility that flourished in this little-known corner of Baroque instrumental virtuosity.

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Weekend Gems #2 – Robert Schumann and the Wizard of Oz

Weekend Gems #2 – Robert Schumann and the Wizard of Oz

I’m sure you’ve heard this song:

It was written by a songwriter named Harold Alren with lyrics by Yip Harburg.  Everyone knows Dorothy’s now-classic daydream about a land she imagines, anywhere but here.  And you probably also know that she gets her wish within about a half hour of singing that, becoming magically teleported by a fierce storm to a vibrant land of Technicolor, and other wonders, called Oz.

But, do you know this tune?

This little piano piece, written by the German composer Robert Schumann in the late 1840s, is part of a collection of short, easy pieces that he wrote to help his daughters learn to play the piano.  It’s called Album for the Young, and he published it as his Opus 68.  This particular piece is roughly translated as “The merry peasant returns from work”, although you see various translations in different places.  Can you imagine the exhausted but happy serf of the title tripping briskly down the road, back to his home, whistling a happy tune?

Many violinists, pianists and cellists know this song as “The Happy Farmer” as that’s how it is titled whenever it appears in the repertoire of the Suzuki Method.  I learned to play it in middle school while my violin teacher guided me through some of the Suzuki books.  I was not Suzuki trained myself, but many violin teachers pull music for their students from the Suzuki books even if they don’t use the precise method.

When I started learning The Happy Farmer I could have sworn I had heard it before.  And then I remembered.  Watch this scene from The Wizard of Oz:

There, at the end.  Did you hear it?  It starts right at 2:30, just as Toto hops out of the basket.  Unfortunately  this clip doesn’t go on for much longer, but it’s enough to hear Schumann’s tune, written into the score by composer Herbert Stothart, and souped up in grand orchestration to fit the tone of the glittery, fast-moving film.  I don’t know why he thought to use Schumann’s song, but it fits pretty well, doesn’t it?  A good leitmotif for Toto.  I haven’t watched the whole movie lately, but I bet you will hear it in a couple other places when you see Toto running in the opening black and white scenes.

Herbert Stothart is a great example of an unsung film music hero of Hollywood’s golden age.  There are other composers whose names are a little more famous, but here is Stothart’s masterful underscore helping The Wizard of Oz to move along convincingly from beginning to end and I bet you’ve never heard his name, even if you love the movie.  Watch that scene where Dorothy pleads for Toto’s life again and listen to how subtle and effective the music is, establishing characters, enhancing the constantly shifting mood, amplifying psychological intentions, and foreshadowing upcoming events in the film.  Listen closely to the music, a constant element in this scene, and you will be rewarded with greater insights into the dramatic structure of The Wizard of Oz.

Robert Schumann’s voice, from almost 100 years earlier, sings clearly and integrates seamlessly with the rest Stothart’s score, alongside the melodies from all those wonderful songs by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg.  And the Academy recognized the merit of their efforts.  All three of those creative minds won Academy Awards for their efforts in 1939.  Unfortunately, Robert Schumann was unable to accept his award in person…

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Music for The Hunt, Day 5 – Violin Concerto, Op. 8 No. 10 by Antonio Vivaldi

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt!  In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall.  It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters.  Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries.  If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.

Day 5 – Concerto for violin and orchestra in B-flat, Op. 3 No. 10 “The Hunt”

I guess Vivaldi knew he was on to something.  It would be a little like a baker inventing the cookie, tasting it, loving it, seling a bunch, and then proceeding over the course of his baking career to produce more cookies than anyone ever would after him even if subsequent bakers made them bigger and bigger and baked them in different ways with different ingredients and frosting designs.  Because he knew a good thing when he tasted it.  And maybe it’s not quite fair to say it that way.  Afterall, less than a generation after Vivaldi composers like Mozart were writing concertos fully 3 times the length of Vivaldi’s, so you could say that in a way each of Mozart’s concertos is worth 3 of Vivaldi’s, that each of Beethoven’s is worth 4 times, and that each of Brahms’ or Rachmaninov’s 5 times.  And that’s probably about as long as they got, at least the ones that followed Vivaldi’s model.  But even in light of that, Vivaldi left them all in the dust.  He wrote…so many concertos.

And maybe “invented” is too strong.  To be sure, there were composers prior to Vivaldi who wrote concertos.  Fellow Italians whose names ended in “-ini” or “-elli” (there’s always more of them to discover; have you ever taken that silly “Italian Composer or Pasta Quiz”?  It’s harder than you might think…go ahead and post your score in the comments, and it’s more fun if you don’t cheat) who crafted sparkly concerti grossi filled with busy and delicate string writing during the time before and during Vivaldi’s life.  But no one did them like Vivaldi, and he wrote…so many concertos.  Vivaldi’s concertos, mostly for soloist and orchestra, as opposed to a group of soloists as was the case for the concerto grosso (and Vivaldi wrote those too, but they feel different than, say, Corelli’s – they have sharper edges and are somehow more soloistic than those of other Italians), have this formulaic nature, a true recipe for success.  But this is about concertos and not cookies, right?  Have you ever heard that old joke?  Vivaldi didn’t write 500 concertos (or 600, or 700, or whatever the official count is these days), he wrote 1 concerto 500 (or 600, or 700) times.  Do you buy that?  To be fair I would say it has the ring of truth.  I hate comparisons like these, but are there really 300 episodes of Scooby Doo ?  The answer probably depends on how much you like Scooby Doo.  Here’s another one: are there 50 items on Taco Bell’s menu, or is it the same item 50 times?  Again, it probably depends on how much you like Taco Bell.  Or maybe not.

But we all know the cast.  3 movements, fast-slow-fast, each between 2 and 4 minutes long.  The outer movements bristle with the rapid interplay between orchestra and soloist, shot through with energetic and acute motives that go from key to key.  Long soloistic episodes are drawn out over circle progressions with just a few too many sequential links (the most I’ve ever counted is 9.  I was like, “really Vivaldi?”  It’s actually a pretty famous one) with violinistic (usually) figuration that is idiomatic yet challenging, and a generally vital spirit that feels…just kind of pointed and crystalline to me – it’s hard to put my finger on that feeling.  But even the slower middle movements, cantilena as they may be, exhibit this hard, brittle quality.

However original and distinct Vivaldi’s concertos were from one another, Europe loved them.  His Opus 3 (for more reading on opus numbers, see this post) set of twelve concertos for 1, 2, or 4 violins, L’estro armonico (if you ever hear a translation of that title that makes sense, give me a call!), published in 1711, took the continent by storm.  It’s been described as the most influential set of instrumental works of the eighteenth century; I might even go a little further than that and say all of musical history, but that’s debatable I suppose.  The concerto came to dominate eighteenth and nineteenth century solo virtuosity and we have Antonio Vivaldi to thank for that, so I would say that his influence certainly extends far beyond his own century.

I think you can draw a lot of close parallels between Vivaldi’s concerto production and Haydn’s symphonies.  Both Haydn and Vivaldi were somehow drawn to these genres that were more or less in their infancy and waiting for a focused and almost obsessive creative mind to bring them to their initial maturity.  The models of both forms developed by Vivaldi and Haydn served as foundation and inspiration for creative artists of subsequent generations to expand and deepen significantly.  While any knowledgeable music lover would credit Vivaldi and Haydn for their brilliant seasoning of the concerto and symphony, respectively, I doubt you will find many of the same music lovers who would count either of their concertos or symphonies among their absolute favorites, probably preferring concertos of Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Brahms or Mozart, and symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Mahler.  But, and this is a crucial “but”, without the copious efforts of Vivaldi and Haydn to establish their prefered forms, none of these later, deeply expressive statements would have been possible.

And there are other parallels between Haydn’s symphonies and Vivaldi’s concertos.  They were prolifically produced, astoundingly so.  No artist since either has come close to matching Haydn’s 104 symphonies or Vivaldi’s 500 to 700 concertos.  Not by a longshot.  And for both bodies of work, mixed in with the mostly abstract, absolute examples, are a large handful of named works that seem to have extra musical or programmatic content.  See this post for a related exploration this phenomenon in Haydn’s symphonic output.  Like Haydn’s symphonies, many of Vivaldi’s concertos bear non-musical nicknames which reflect the character and content of those specific concertos.  Glance at this list.  If you scroll down and watch the right hand column you can see the names in italics.  If you do anything enough times (like, say, five hundred times), you will probably try to find ways to spice up your experience and break the tedium.  The names and extra musical associations of both Haydn’s symphonies and Vivaldi’s concertos are, I would submit, evidence of this.

Of course we all know the 4 most famous examples of this in Vivaldi’s oeuvre, often found together in concert and recording as a set, The Four Seasons.  They’re an interesting experiment in program music before it was cool, and it is rare to find the programmatic content illuminated with the specificity that Vivaldi has indicated in the score, labeling little vignettes of each season as the various movements progress.  Have you ever read along while listening?  Vivaldi was supremely efficient in constructing each movement from episodes corresponding to events, weather patterns, and activities appropriate to each season, and I always find it most impressive that he was able to illustrate all those images and still stay within his concerto conventions.

But The Four Seasons are actually just the first four of his twelve concertos Op. 8, The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, a set of solo violin concertos, which includes other programmatic concertos like “The Storm at Sea” and “Pleasure” and, No. 10, “The Hunt”.  And the 3rd movement of Autumn is about the hunt too, so Vivaldi’s Opus 8 is a veritable hunter’s delight!

Or maybe he was cheating a little?   However you feel about him “double dipping”, perhaps you can think of Op. 8 number 10 as a fun 3-movement interpolation of the single movement hunt from the Autumn concerto that so many people know and love.

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Music for The Hunt, Day 4 – Hunter’s Mass by Orlando di Lasso

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt!  In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall.  It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters.  Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries.  If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.

Day 4 –  Hunter’s Mass by Orlando di Lasso

Okay, I’m going to be honest here.  Maybe a little too honest, so apologies for any offense, because I love you all!  But here goes…

I often feel like I live in a land of 2 dominant faiths.  And I don’t mean that 50% of people I meet practice religion A and the other 50% practice religion B.  These two faiths are often practiced simultaneously by the same people.  It’s either a Midwest phenomenon or an American one, but I bet you can also find different variations of the same thing in other countries and cultures.  Have you figured it out yet?  The two faiths are Christianity and Football.

A little too close to home?  Sorry, but I’m not going to take it back because I stand by that observation.  And I know in Wisconsin, with Green Bay Packer pride, that may be especially sensitive.  I want to tread gently here because I think the Packers are doing, and have always done, a benevolent thing with the whole collective ownership thing and all.  It feels more like a social good than the hugely profitable franchises owned by insanely rich people and I certainly don’t begrudge Wisconsinites the community spirit that comes with that manner of doing business, even if it’s never exactly been my thing.

And it might not stand out as much if the two practices didn’t share a sabbath as often as they do.  So often there is church on Sunday morning and football on Sunday afternoon.  And for this reason they can easily bump up against one another, forcing difficult choices.  Many are the church services I can recall in which Packers attire mixed evenly (or not) with Sunday best, often on the same worshiper, and I would speculate that given the choice between church and a football game if the times overlap, football would win more often than not.

Okay, end of commentary.  You can stop squirming now.  I was trying really hard to be gentle there, but I also suspect that many of you would agree with that assessment.  And we’re not so special in this day and age.  Cue Morpheus:

“Nothing new under the sun” as the saying goes.  And human nature, being what it is, often  struggles between the duty of obligation and the pleasure of indulging worldly pursuits.  The modern contest between football and church attendance is merely a recent manifestation in a long history of variations on that basic theme.  And a similar contest is suggested by a curious work from one of the greatest masters of Renaissance polyphony.

If you’ve studied western music history at all and I ask you to name a great composer of Renaissance my guess is that you would come up with Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina (usually called “Palestrina” for short) and you would certainly be right to do so.  Palestrina is awesome; one of my favorites.  While it’s not exactly the kind of music I would listen to every day (although I’m sure there are some who would), I am always a little awestruck by his success at consistently creating a sense of the utter sanctity in every single work of his I’ve ever heard (and there are lots.  Lots).  Palestrina’s characteristic textures are paradoxically busy with polyphony, yet serene with holiness; you could say they are a fitting musical companion to religious iconography that is both dense with colorful imagery, but somehow peacefully reverent.  The towering composer of the Counter-Reformation quickly emerged as the uniform creator of the most perfect works of Renaissance polyphony, hence his continued influence on the study of harmony and counterpoint to this day.

But if you’re acquainted with a few more great Renaissance masters you might offer up names like Dufay, Obrecht, Ockeghem and Willaert, figures extracted from a long succession of Franco-Flemish musicians whose work advanced the art of polyphonic vocal music little by little over the course of 2 centuries, bridging the gap between the stark kaleidoscope of Notre Dame Organum and the crystalline perfection of Palestrina’s radiant aura.  And one name that I have left out until now is that of Orlando di Lasso, a near exact contemporary of Palestrina’s.  Lasso’s style is close in many ways to Palestrina’s; glorious and moving, technically exacting if not quite as flawless.  His writing exudes a tender serenity that is all its own.

A key difference one senses between the two great polyphonists is varying levels of comfort in integrating secular influences into their sacred works.  The impression I get is that in his music Palestrina strove to maintain the image of aesthetic and, some might say, doctrinal and moral perfection, which keeps in line with his status as musical figurehead of the Counter Reformation.  The vast majority of his works are liturgical.  While he did produce a significant body of Italian madrigals (secular vocal works), their style is conservative compared to the daring harmonies and text painting of his contemporary madrigal composers, and the output simply pales in comparison to the volume of his sacred music.  Many of his madrigals are also sacred in nature, which is to say they were composed on religious and devotional themes but not suitable for performance during a liturgy; still, a secular output heavily colored by religious devotion.

Lasso, on the other hand, was much more comfortable with and practiced in all secular genres of the day.  A quick glance through his catalog reveals a healthy sampling of all the prominent secular vocal forms in their native languages: the Italian madrigal, the French chanson, the German lied.  Lasso was quite cosmopolitan and at home in all three languages.  These secular forms occupy a much greater proportion of Lasso’s body of work than of Palestrina’s, and Lasso was also more comfortable letting those secular forms mix with and influence his sacred works.  One illustration of this is Lasso’s affinity for the “parody mass”, a kind of setting of the Catholic mass which takes a secular song as the thematic foundation for some or all of the movements.  The most extreme example of this in Lasso’s catalog is probably the mass based on a French chanson called “O, you fifteen year old girls” written by a composer half a generation his senior, Jacob Clemens non Papa.  Palestrina, with his close ties to the papacy, would not have dreamed of applying a ribald secular text so scandalously to a liturgy.  That’s probably a special case, and there are also numerous, tamer examples among Lasso’s parody masses, but it is an obvious and important difference between Palestrina and Lasso.

Lasso’s more profane sensibility also comes through in his willingness to assist his patrons in balancing their religious duties with more worldly interests into a sort of compromising, everyday kind of faith that I suspect is rather common across the millennia.  An example of this can be found in a work written at the behest of the Bavarian Duke Albrecht V.  

Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria

If football is a competing religion during our time, in Duke Albrecht’s it was hunting, the perennially popular aristocratic pastime and bonding activity.  But Lassus crafted an ingenious solution to balance the rigors of the court’s religious devotion with their more worldly affection in the Missa Venatorum, or “Hunter’s Mass”.

It was not uncommon for complete polyphonic masses of the Renaissance to last 20 minutes, often more.  Much of the art was in extending the briefer texts into long-breathed movements which formed a sublime and expansive space for religious introspection.  The 6-word kyrie, for example, while easily spoken in less than 10 seconds, was commonly broadened into a 5 minute musical cathedral with soaring melismas and endlessly repeated words.  Wordier movements like the gloria and credo could reach the 8 minute mark.  All that time adds up.  For the Hunter’s Mass Lasso dispensed with all that fancy melisma and repetition, opting instead for a largely syllabic setting that hardly repeats any text at all.  None of the movements last more than three minutes, the longest being the wordy gloria, which clocks in at just over two and a half minutes.  The whole Missa Venatorum takes barely 10 minutes to perform from beginning to end, which would have allowed the Duke and his court to be on their merry way and get to tracking the day’s prey.  What is really extraordinary about the work, I think, is how lovely and balanced it is in spite of its directness.  It may be brief, but is so well-proportioned that it never feels abrupt or lacking.  Lasso clothed the single statements of text in some fine garments, on par with the best in Renaissance polyphony.  Indeed a craftsman of his caliber would settle for nothing less.

 

So, should modern church composers write more Missa Pedifollium? 😉

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Music for The Hunt, Day 3 – BONUS POST! – Hunters’ Chorus by Carl Maria von Weber & Royal Hunt and Storm by Hector Berlioz

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt!  In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall.  It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters.  Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries.  If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.

Day 3 – BONUS POST! – Hunters’ Chorus by Carl Maria von Weber & Royal Hunt and Storm by Hector Berlioz

A lot can change in 30 years.  That’s about as long as I’ve been alive.  I was born right around the twilight of the disco era and now…what are all the kids listening to these days?  Pug?  Bulldog?  Oh, right.  Pitbull.  Well, maybe sometimes not enough changes.  But sometimes it really does.  In studying music history I am often astounded at how close together the major figures and style periods actually are.  We tend to think of the different style periods as these isolated, self-contained blocks of time floating out there in space, but it’s really all continuous.  And during certain of the style periods there is simply a phenomenal amount of stylistic development over a short period of time.  Do you realize that Beethoven’s 9th symphony premiered only about 75 years before the turn of the 20th century?  I don’t always realize these things.  We talk about people like Beethoven as if they’re these mythical figures who were never earthbound, never existed in time and space, but it wasn’t actually that long ago, and they really were just humans like us, grappling with the same daily stuff that we do.  And a lot of the really prominent figures knew each other, interacted, and shared mutual admiration (or disgust).

The Romantic era is a great example – lots of development in just a little bit of time.  The era tends to be book ended in music history texts by middle Beethoven at its beginning and the lush writing of Richard Strauss and Mahler at its end.  The time between is barely a century and boy do things look different from one side to the other.  We’re going to look right in the middle of that frame and make an interesting comparison between excerpts from two romantic operas that deal with hunting in different ways to observe a fascinating course of development.  On the surface they seem to share a handful of things in common: both from the Romantic era, both from operas, both symphonic in their orchestration, both involving choral singing (kind of), both incorporating the theme of hunting, and both acting in a rather diversionary role within their respective opera plots.  But the similarities end there and the spirits that animate them could hardly be more different.

Many musicians point to Carl Maria von Weber as European music’s first truly Romantic figure.  A bold and daring artist who strove to do everything, and do it well, he was a Romantic to the core, persevering over the course of his life to move German art and music forward whether they were ready or not.  It’s his operas that many point to as a summation of his aesthetics, and Der Freischutz is the most famous of his 10 or so, considered by many to be the first Romantic opera.  In works like this one, completed around 1820, you can observe the German romantic spirit taking root, but still somewhat caught between worlds.  Der Freischutz contains music that is actually quite Classical in its tonal grammar, found side by side with episodes of much more colorful harmony and orchestration.  Just listen to the overture and you can hear this fascinating duality as material from all across the spectrum between those poles fills an enchanting 10 minutes.

And it really works in Weber; he is somehow able to take the bold, but still essentially Classical, melodic style of middle Beethoven and juxtapose it with the murkier harmonies and orchestral colors of the impending Romantic sensibility that would come into its own a couple decades hence.  But even with these new harmonic and orchestral colors, the melodic grammar never really breaks out of of the Classical mold’s rhythmic squareness and diatonic pitch space.  Beethoven was able to imbue this Classical mold with incredible urgency and epic gestures; we hear a continuation of that in Weber’s Freischutz.  The Hunter’s Chorus from the third act could be a German folk song (and many have speculated that it and other melodies in the opera are based on them) supplemented with grand orchestral gestures a la Beethoven which seem to elevate this merry band of hunters, singing lustily about their love of the chase, into the realm of the heroic:

Der Freischutz was immediately popular.  It was also influential.  Richard Wagner would probably have pointed squarely to it as one of his early influences.  And it was staged in Paris with a few characteristically French alterations by another great Romantic figure also deeply taken with the opera, Hector Berlioz.  He too recognized that the beginnings of the artistic movement in which he found himself working were vested heavily in this opera and those like it.  Berlioz’s staging was in 1841, a full two decades after the work’s premiere and about fifteen after Weber’s death.  Berlioz was an advanced teenager at the time of Freischutz’s premiere and poised to become a key transitional figure squarely in the middle of European Romantic music.

Hector Berlioz’s unprecedented configuration of gifts, skills and cultural inheritance allowed him to wrestle with music and affect its development in an unusually fresh and striking way.  A native Frenchman who devoured all the outstanding models of German music imported into his land, he was able to digest the Saxon grandeur and express it in characteristically Gallic ways with softer edges and pastel shadings, effectively bridging the space between Rameau and Debussy, at least to my ear.  His fascination with literature infused his art to the core, constantly motivating him to strive for the noblest and also most intangible artistic ideals.  I think it is this idealistic devotion to the literary that fueled his search for a new manner of orchestrating (and perhaps it was his opium use that fired his imagination to conceive of such a vision).  He continued to develop the tradition of the tragedie lyrique transmitted to him by his dramatic heroes, Gluck and Mozart.  He could probably play a little piano and flute, but certainly not enough to perform on either, and as such he was one of the first European musical artists to declare only the art of orchestration and the conductor’s baton as his primary instruments of expression.

Put all of these influences and predilections in a blender, bake at 350 (although you might measure that in Celsius) for about 50 years and you probably end up with something quite a bit like Les Troyens, “The Trojans”, the 5-act French grand opera that many consider to be Berlioz’s magnum opus.  In this full-flowering of all of Berlioz’ passions and sensibilities we experience a very French telling of Virgil’s epic, a Romantic-scale tragedie lyrique orchestrated as only Berlioz could.  He was obviously inspired by Weber’s Freischutz and so without that Les Troyens would not have been possible.  But listen to even a few seconds and we are clearly in a different world with a much different outlook, with melodic style and orchestral colors to match.

Go ahead and listen to the Hunter’s Chorus from Weber again.  You can sense the earthy folksiness and an air of merriment even if the orchestra blows it up to a heroic scale.  And Der Freischutz isn’t all like this (there are episodes of demonic darkness that will make your hair stand up), but in Weber’s world we’re never that far from laughing your cares away with the family in the village, no matter what kind of unsettling supernatural incidents are experienced on the way.  Not so in Les Troyens.  Berlioz takes the tragic heroes of the Aeneid at their word and casts his entire setting in a kind of foreboding, almost existential, dread (granted, that tone does tend to fit the subject matter – stores of Dido and Aeneas never end well!).  Listen to this hunting scene, as the heroes Dido and Aeneas are separated from the rest of the royal party and take shelter in a cave as a violent storm rages about them.  From just the transparent opening string lines you can feel how different Berlioz’s sensibility is from Weber’s, just a little more than 30 years later (in other words, Berlioz is as long after Weber as we are after the end of disco!):

This “Royal Hunt and Storm” is like am orchestral poem set at the beginning of Les Troyens’ fourth act (out of five).  Berlioz was eager to showcase his orchestration, almost like its own character in the drama, and this would influence the similar practice of Richard Wagner, and those he in turn influenced.   

Berlioz’s hunting scene and ensuing storm is turbulent, transparent, nuanced, and evanescent in a way that Weber is not.  More a mass of colors in the air than a tune, including that eerie contribution from the choir, it does not quite reach the level of musical impressionism, as Debussy would a few decades later, but are you able to sing any melodies or motives from that work?  Not as easily as the Weber I’ll bet.
Comparing the hunting scenes from Der Freischutz and Les Troyens encapsulates in a fascinating way just how quickly musical thought and style were moving and changing in Romantic Europe.  And so many of the great figures knew each other, talked with each other, performed each other’s music.  It really seems to be a tightly-knit club of artists drawing inspiration and ideas from one another.  As different as they are, the latter would simply not be what it is without the former.

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