Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Here’s something you may find a little stilted…

Prince John: “Have your men close in.”

Sir Guy has his men close in.

Little John: “They’re closing in!  I hope Robin sees them…”

Cut to a very alert-looking Robin Hood, who obviously sees them.

Bishop of the Black Canons: “I must commend your highness for the subtlety of your scheme!”

Well, I like to think that since that production script writers, and filmmakers in general, have honed their subtlety just a touch.  But it’s fun to watch, isn’t it?  This is from a very colorful 1938 film by Warner Brothers based on a story that everyone knows, Robin of Loxley.  What’s your favorite Robin Hood film?  Is it Disney’s?  Or Kevin Costner’s gritty “Prince of Thieves”?  How about Mel Brooks’ bawdy and hilarious “Men in Tights”?  Fortunately for us we can choose whichever style fits our mood, and I have met some people who prefer the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckling classic to all the rest.  Its official title is “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.

The film is gorgeous – a feast for the eyes.  It was created just as the Technicolor process was finding its legs and Warner Brothers’ costume and set designers were clearly only too happy to take advantage of the bold new medium, just as the designers of Oz were also keen to do for similar reasons (for more about the Wizard of Oz, see this post).  Another point of interest in this version of Robin Hood, one that fascinates me and many of my music-loving friends, is the score.  Listen to it again and see if you can follow the underscoring.  Do you notice how rich and, yet, nuanced it is?  Whatever the dialogue and acting may lack in understatement the music more than compensates for.

If you had played me the score and told me it was taken from a Wagner opera, I may very well have believed it (for more about Wagner see this post and this one).  The composer of this score, Eric Wolfgang Korngold, is one of a number of Austrian musicians who eventually settled in the United States and contributed their considerable talents to entertaining Americans.  Other musicians who follow that pattern include Max Steiner, who arranged music for Broadway shows and then contributed music for hundreds of Hollywood films (most notably Gone With the Wind), and Frederick Loewe who, in collaboration with librettist Alan Jay Lerner, created Broadway shows like My Fair Lady that endure in popularity to this day.  Incidentally, all three of these musicians with Viennese roots were child prodigies of some degree or another and all three came from Jewish backgrounds.

Steiner and Korngold have both gone down in history as incredibly formative to the art of film music scoring, inspiring countless film composers and setting a very strong precedent for lush, late-Romantic orchestral music in American films.  But in spite of these similarities, their professional aims were rather different.  Steiner seemed content to be a “work-a-day” composer for major studios, churning out hundreds of well-wrought scores.  Korngold on the other hand was able to be quite selective about the projects he accepted, scoring only 13 over the course of his career.  But, they are fantastic and distinctive scores, written at such a level of quality that their influence transcends their relatively scant quantity.  Korngold was not content to settle into a long, steady career as a film composer as Steiner was.  It seems that Korngold accepted film scoring as a unique and formidable challenge, but was still mostly focused on creating music for the concert hall in a way that Steiner was not.

Film scoring may have been a detour for Korngold too, encouraged simply by serendipity, or lack thereof.  Shortly after Korngold travelled to the United States at the invitation Warner Brothers to score The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he won an Oscar (the first film composer ever to do so), the Anschluss imperiled the Jews of his native Austria and he remained in Los Angeles, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1943.  He would never return to his native Austria.  He sought to resume his writing for the concert hall and stage in America with several notable concert works written after he left film scoring.

Before his travels to America to become involved with Hollywood, Korngold was having a ball (so to speak – see this post) working the scenes of musical Vienna, crafting operas, ballets and concert works.  He scored major early critical successes with a ballet composed at age 11, and two operas composed shortly after that.  Early admirers of Korngold included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini.  In addition to these stage works he was also at the same time creating chamber music and short orchestral works.  And he seems to have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Paul Wittgenstein, having written three pieces for his masterful left hand: a concerto, a piano quintet, and a concert suite for piano and strings.  The young and flourishing Korngold was in fact one of the first composers Wittgenstein approached about creating works tailored especially for him.

The suite for piano, two violins and cello, opus 23 (for more about the opus system, see this post) was the latest of the three works Korngold composed for Wittgenstein.  It is for the fewest forces and arguably the most elegant and direct in its communicative power.  Its collection of five movements could only have been assembled by an ambitious German or Austrian composer writing between the World Wars, so peculiar is its selection of movements to the sensibility of the musicians inhabiting that time and place.  In opus 23 Korngold creates a pastiche of musical procedures which seem to pay homage to the finest and most prominent figures of the German and Viennese persuasion.  But if I had to compare it the work of one composer, I would probably describe it as a Mahler symphony cast for a crisp and transparent chamber group.  There is a significant scale and sweep to many of the movements, five in number as was often the case with Mahler’s symphonies, exploring incredibly varied areas of the human experience, sometimes sincere (as in the beautiful Song fourth movement), sometimes biting and cynical (as in the sarcastic Groteske third movement), and always with an inspired and engaging melodic invention.  The opening Prelude and Fugue is a nod to pure German rigor.  The Waltz appeals to the Viennese, however Second Viennese (see this post) the disjointed and angular melody may be, and the Rondo Finale once again evokes the influence of Mahler who crafted similar finales himself (see this post).  That Mahler pervades Korngold’s Suite is unsurprising – Mahler served as an important champion for Korngold, having pronounced him a genius early in the prodigy’s career.  The Song is the shortest movement, the most direct, and the easiest to digest.  It is also sublimely moving and beautiful:

While Korngold is known to many music lovers as one of the greatest film composers in history, a reputation that is richly deserved, his heart never left the concert hall.  After his string of remarkable film scores Korngold returned to writing concert works even as he remained in the United States, sharing the invention and craftsmanship that shaped this early work, designed to showcase Wittgenstein’s ambitions, with American concertgoers.

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Yet More Syndication, Day 4 – “Washington’s Birthday” from New England Holidays Symphony by Charles Ives

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 4 – “Washington’s Birthday” from New England Holidays Symphony by Charles Ives

There really isn’t anyone else with a story like Charles Ives.  Not that I can find anyway.  And I don’t think it’s a story anyone would think to write.  Growing up in late 19th century New England with all its hearty folk, his father George was firmly integrated within the established structures of the American military and Protestant religion, as band leader and Methodist church musician, respectively.  From George’s example Charles learned to respect and honor the cherished traditions of American civility, but with odd twists.  George may have inhabited contexts that valued proprietary and conservative expressions of artistry with the square, stodgy hymns and marches of his professional appointments, but he had a deeply eccentric streak that constantly threatened to bubble over, filling the corners of his family life with unpredictable yet exacting techniques, and inundating the young Charles with an abiding interest in coloring outside of the conventional lines.  Charles drank deeply from George’s encouragement to find the fun between the cracks of traditional music, harmonizing melodies in the wrong key, listening for quarter tones, putting different and contrasting musics together in cacophonous ways, and simply observing how music and other sounds behaved in their natural habitats, free of musical aesthetics overlaid in order to constrain their innate reactivity.

Charles took his father’s guidance to heart, and began to capture the quaint America that he knew in odd and original music that seems avant-garde to our ears, but is revealed to be sincerely American if we look a little closer.  It is not exactly right to label it as “avant-garde” as you might do with the music that was written simultaneously across the Atlantic Ocean; Ives’ music comes from a much different impulse, one that seeks to combine the lyrical American folk traditions he knew with a musicality that is simply unconstrained by traditional tonal boundaries.  And so, if you are able to hear past what sounds off-putting and difficult at first, you may find yourself unexpectedly rewarded by a sweet and unassuming voice that could come from the lad next door, taking you on a buggy ride through a village in New England, passing through picturesque snapshot after snapshot, each with its own kind of music, and all of them quaint and charming.  When we are out and about, hearing the sounds of our environment commingled into a cacophonous row it is not displeasing to us; Ives’ genius is that he takes this idea and works it into his music.  If you can hear that, his works become enjoyable, vivid, even entrancing.  You realize that what sounds harsh and assaulting at first as actually incredibly warm, inviting, and distinctly American in the best way.

Washington’s Birthday from the 4-movement Symphony of New England Holidays is a terrific example.  After getting to know this movement just a little bit, I find it surprisingly comforting, well-paced, inventive, and most enjoyable.  The first few minutes of the movement are made of cloudy, shifting harmonies and bleary orchestration.  Washington’s Birthday is on February 15th, always snowy in New England, and these first few minutes depict the slowly drifting snowy landscapes Ives would have trodden upon at this time of year.  I have to say he really captures something about a peaceful, if bitterly cold, snowy evening.  I can clearly picture the still drifts of snow, bathed in the dusty light of street lamps, with the occasional gust of wind which slightly changes their shape every so often.  As the cold intensifies and we tire of the walk, the nagging flute seeming to echo the discomfort of the cold, we eventually discover our destination: a festive barndance filled with fiddlers and Jews’ harp players.  In this section Ives, as he so often did, sought to illustrate multiple events in space, much like a musical 3-ring circus.  While you may think that anyone can layer different music together and call it a sonic experiment, the rhythmic vitality that pops out of the texture reveals Ives to be a masterful technician with solid craft.  Not just anyone could do this, even if you may think that 😉  Do you hear any songs you recognize?  It is a good exercise to listen for the different events that commingle into the cacophony and this helps to make it more enjoyable than you might think at first.  After an unexpectedly gorgeous and lyrical episode, “Good Night Ladies” eventually brings the dance to a close with the now somber revelers leaving the party.

While the sensibility that drove Ives to create his sonic adventures is not really like that of the European avant-garde, it resonated with them.  Schonberg, among others, greatly admired Ives’ imaginative, deeply personal and most uncompromising approach.  While this doesn’t surprise me, I think it is worth pointing out that Ives was responding to much different impulses than the European avant-garde musicians.  Musical invention for Ives seemed to be a game and challenge to constantly top his previous flights of fancy, all drawn from an eccentric and personal inner landscape.  It is not wrought with existential struggle or dread as I often note in the music of Schoenberg, Debussy, Hindemith, and their ilk.  Ives is always writing from a place of great optimism and good cheer.  And when he didn’t care who listened, it was not out of any indignant prophetic vision, but rather from a rugged, individualistic smugness.  Distinctly American, isn’t it?  Ives was not preaching doom on a street corner, urging repentance; he was encapsulating his America in a series of cheeky and affectionate puzzles that he worked through as a hobby on the weekends.

Had he been true blue avant-garde, writing out of apocalyptic philosophical convictions, he probably would have acted the part of the starving artist, forgoing the comforts of the good life in order to unleash his prophecy on humankind, no matter the cost.  But that was not Ives.  Instead, he made a fortune as president of the largest and most successful life insurance company in America, steadily producing his distinctly American music all the while.  He watched his work gain acceptance, praise, recognition and performances very gradually over the course of his life, but he was clearly not one so convicted to sacrifice the American Dream in protest of the public’s slow acceptance.  And it makes sense; his society did not demand an avant-garde.  It remained stable and optimistic well past the end of his life.  While we can listen to Schoenberg, Hindemith, or Shostakovich and have our souls darkened by existential angst, Ives may sonically affront us at first,but it does not take long to listen past the dissonances and hear the playful, optimistic American spirit at work just below the surface.

 

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Yet More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony N0. 3 “Eroica” by Ludwig van Beethoven

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony N0. 3 “Eroica” by Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven could never do anything small, could he?  Practically his entire significance is ensconced in the way he expanded the musical forms inherited from the Classical era.  Beethoven was an artist who made what he found larger and considerably deeper, and then left as it a challenge for those who came after him .  He was larger than life.  His passions, his temper, his ambitions, his superhuman willpower, his opinion of his artistry (not entirely undeserved).  He dreamed big dreams, thought big thoughts, achieved big goals, and wrote big tunes.

And he loved his coffee in a big way.  Have you ever heard about Beethoven’s taste for coffee?  Let me tell you!  Each and every day, Beethoven would brew himself a cup of coffee made with exactly 60 beans.  Exactly.  Does that seem like a lot?  That’s the commentary I most often find about Beethoven’s coffee formula, that it sounds like a strong cup.  At first I thought it did, too, but once I counted it out and measured it I discovered that 60 beans amounts to a little less than a heaping tablespoon, which is about the strength I brew at home.  

60 coffee beans, believe it or not…

And I’ve had a hard time finding out exactly how big his cup would have been, so I can’t speak to the precise strength of Beethoven’s brew.  I also don’t know what the general strength would have been among his contemporary coffee hounds, so again, not sure how his would compare.  But it seems fair to say that the strength wasn’t so phenomenal.  It must have been good though.  I have read that his guests spoke highly of his coffee preparation and that he became extra-exacting about the recipe with company present.  And actually, his neurosis for counting out exactly 60 coffee beans per cup speaks more to OCD, which some people speculate that he was, than caffeine dependence.  I also don’t know how much he drank throughout the day, a statistic which is recorded for other figures such as Voltaire (40 – 50 cups of a coffee and chocolate mixture), Balzac (50 cups a day, and later on in life he just ate the grounds) and Theodore Roosevelt (a gallon per day), but as Beethoven’s consumption not written about in such figures I suspect it was moderate.

Anyway, let’s just say Beethoven loved coffee, and in a big way.  I think we can agree on that.  The method and attention to detail he lavished upon its preparation suggests to me that it was an inextricably significant component of the daily ritual that allowed him, and so many other artists, to create as they did.  And, interestingly enough, he wrote one of his biggest, grandest, and most-admired musical works in honor of another larger than life-kind of guy who also loved his coffee, Napoleon Bonaparte.  I bet you’ve heard of him.  He figured prominently in the history of France.  And he loved his coffee.  I guess a guy doesn’t wake up and set out to conquer the world without a good slug of morning joe.  

Napoleon is recorded to have made statements which indicate more than a passing interest in the beloved liquor, and they range from glib and practical to waxing most poetically.  Statements like:

“I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless.”

and

“Strong coffee, much strong coffee, is what awakens me. Coffee gives me warmth, waking, an unusual force and a pain that is not without very great pleasure.”

Still not quite sure what that last one means.  But, whatever.  He liked coffee.  So, behind every great man is his coffee.  I think that’s how the saying goes, right?  Well, pretty sure.  Anyway, those two larger-than-life coffee-lovers, Ludwig van Beethoven and Napoleon Bonaparte, are metaphysically entangled through the pages of one of Beethoven’s greatest works, the Third Symphony in E-flat major.  Most people know it today by Beethoven’s imposed nickname “Eroica”, which means “heroic” in Italian.  And it certainly fits.  But the moniker “Eroica” actually replaced Beethoven’s previous nickname for the symphony, which was “Bonaparte”.  That’s right.  Beethoven’s Third Symphony, which many would call his greatest, and even more would call his most influential, was originally named after, and dedicated to, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Beethoven, in the customarily idealistic manner of a true artist, was a fan of the liberal democracies that were popping up in the Western world during his day as a result of the Enlightenment (which some speculate was fueled in large part by coffee-drinking and the exchange of ideas that resulted from coffee house culture).  His life coincided with the revolutions of both America and France, and the long wake of France’s tumultuous political upheaval rippled through the events of Beethoven’s later life.  He observed the rise of the Napoleon, first shrewdly stabilizing the turbulence of France’s disarrayed government while bolstering his own political power in the process, and then crowning himself Emperor of the new French Empire, before setting about conquer as much of Europe as he could.

Napoleon’s self-styled coronation infuriated and disillusioned the idealistic Beethoven, who removed the dedication upon learning of the ambitious Corsican’s true motivations for seeking political power.  

The title page of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, upon which can be seen the dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte scratched out

He redubbed the symphony “Eroica” with the subtitle “Dedicated to the memory of a great man”.  15 years later, when Napoleon died, Beethoven remembered the dedication, noting that he had already written a funeral march (the Third Symphony’s dour second movement) for the occasion.  I think you could also interpret the subtitle as Beethoven’s continued dedication to the man he once thought Napoleon was, standing for the ideals of equality, liberty and democracy.

The Eroica Symphony is Beethoven’s shot across the bow, launching the Romantic era of music in one fell swoop.  It was the longest symphony to date, and by far the most powerful.  Beethoven is the first musician in recorded history to so unabashedly express his idealistic nature in his works and the Eroica Symphony seems to convey that clash of civilizations, especially the titanic opening movement.  It is Beethoven’s telling of the benevolent forces he once believed to animate Napoleon and the endeavor of the French Revolution.  While both of those complicated forces have major skeletons in their closets, existing as they do in our real and imperfect world, Beethoven never lost his sight of the ideals that purported to animate them.  Indeed it seemed to grow stronger the longer he lived, culminating in his most idealistic statement of all, the Ode to Joy of his final symphony.

 

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Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

Listen to this:

Does anything strike you about it, or does it just sound like jazz to you?  I have to admit that jazz is not exactly my cup of tea, not as much as other things (just being honest!  To each their own), but I certainly have respect for it, those who appreciate it, and those who perform it well.

There is an interesting and, many would agree, sad story around this recording.  First, let’s point out some details.  You can hear that it features a small combo playing a very rapid and intricate chart.  The rhythm section of drums, bass and piano supports two highly virtuosic soloists playing trumpet and alto saxophone.  They are both blazing in their technique, weaving convoluted and intricate melodic lines around the rapid chord changes laid out by the rhythm section.  All of these elements – the small combo, the fast and complicated harmonic rhythm, and the emphasis on a fiercely intelligent and intensely refined virtuosity – are marks of a style of jazz music called bebop, and these musicians were among the most important innovators and early champions of the style which has demonstrated remarkable staying power, essentially transforming jazz music into an artform appreciated by sophisticated aficionados, in contrast to the big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, a genre of very entertaining music that has such popular appeal.  Today the solos of bebop are the subject of intense analysis and academic scrutiny, and its major figures are heroes to jazz musicians in all ranks of the study and profession.

The trumpeter’s name is Howard McGhee, and the alto saxophonist’s is Charlie Parker.  Howard McGhee was an influential trumpeter during the early days of bebop and inspired the next generation of trumpeters, but has not become the household that Parker has (well, more so anyway).  Charlie Parker was really a visionary, an unbelievable talent of the highest order, a melder of technique and artistry, practically an idol to students and fans of jazz music, and was, it seems, all of this in spite of his best efforts to destroy himself.

Listen to the first minute of Bebop (the track) once again.  You may be struck by the density of musical events which fills that brief amount time – again, the bebop style is incredibly virtuosic, requiring its performers to control countless notes over short spans of time, and all bebop performed by competent practitioners of the style will exhibit this feature.  But, did a certain event stand out to you?  An event that didn’t quite fit into the expected orchestration?  Go to 0:38.  Do you hear it now?  A one-syllable vocalization that pops out of the instrumental texture?  That is the trumpeter, Howard McGhee, exhorting Charlie Parker to “blow!” because he is not confident that Parker will continue his solo, or at least not with any coherence.  What does this mean?  Here’s the story…

During the late 1930s, a very driven and focused, teenage Charlie Parker was mastering the art of jazz improvisation as it then existed and beginning to work out his innovative technique of effortlessly modulating between distantly related keys using chromatic transitions and altered chords.  During this time Parker reported practicing 15 hours per day for a stretch of several years; no wonder he developed such facility.  And around this time, the 17 year old Parker was also in an automobile accident, which left him with painful injuries.  During his recovery in the hospital he was treated with morphine to manage his pain and he became addicted.  From there, it was a short jump to an all-consuming heroin habit, which he sustained, for better or worse (mostly for worse, probably), for the rest of his tragically short but very creative life.  Parker died, largely due to the stress of his lifestyle, at the age of 35, just as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a century and a half earlier (for more about Mozart’s colorful and unconventional life and upbringing see this post).  Because of the toll taken by Parker’s abuse of narcotics, alcohol, and food, the coroner who tended to his body at the time of death estimated that he was between 50 and 60 years old.  By his time of death he had suffered cirrhosis of the liver, bleeding ulcers, and a heart attack, all at age 35.

His habit made him professionally unreliable and must have caused his personal finances to be incredibly volatile.  But other musicians still looked up to him and regarded him highly for his unrivaled contributions to the advancement of jazz artistry.  Toward the end of 1945 he and Dizzy Gillespie, a famous jazz trumpeter and fellow bebop innovator, traveled from New York to Southern California to give performances showcasing their new style.  They received a lukewarm reception (due to its dense and intellectual nature, bebop was slow to catch on with audiences – some might say it still hasn’t entirely; Glenn Miller is always an easier sell) and while everyone else hopped planes back East, Parker, in a characteristically short-sighted stroke, sold his return ticket for cash to procure heroin, forcing him to remain in California for a while.

But heroin was generally more difficult to come by there, and so Parker ended up using copious amounts of liquor for his highs when he couldn’t find his drug of choice.  Just before the 1946 recording session in which Parker and Howard McGee laid down Bebop and a few other tracks, he had consumed an entire quart of whiskey.  He was so drunk that he had to be physically supported during certain tracks, and his disjointed solos bordered on unintelligibility at times.  McGhee, apparently concerned that Parker would simply stop playing during Bebop, urged him on, and that is the reason for his exclamation.

But, amazingly, even hampered his alcoholic incapacitation, the tracks recorded during that session do exhibit Charlie Parker’s musical brilliance, in spite of their inconsistency.  Some fans consider them to be among his greatest recordings, and they are fascinating to listen to.

Charlie Parker was incredibly influential to his contemporary boppers, with regard to both music and lifestyle.  Many jazz musicians thought that his intoxication must be inextricably fused with his musical inspiration and so, largely because of his prominence, heroin addiction afflicted a disproportionately high number of jazz musicians during the 1940s and 1950s.  Just look at this list:

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/headphonian/jazz_artists_who_were_heroin_addicts/3/

There was a sense that Parker’s incredible spontaneity was a result of the narcotics sweeping away his inhibitions, and helping him to find his zone of comfort and inspiration on stage, helping him to overcome the intimidation and discomfort he would have experienced travelling so much and playing for different people every night, and so many of his fellow musicians figured it could help them to do the same.

But not everyone was taken in.  The aforementioned Dizzy Gillespie managed to contribute as brilliantly as Parker and stay clean.  He took a no-nonsense approach, firing any musicians in his employment if he caught them using heroin.  He also became quite practiced at dealing with the police, who tended to pick on his black musicians whether they deserved it or not.  Instinctively he must have known that succumbing to the ravages of addiction himself would have shattered his credibility with structures of authority, depriving the musicians in his care of an important protector and advocate.  Gillespie, who lived twice as long as Charlie Parker, used his full, rich life to promote jazz music and musicians, producing in numerous styles, and becoming what is often described as an “elder statesman” for the cause.  It is difficult to imagine a musician of Parker’s personality and appetites fillings such a role with the dignity that Gillespie did.

Other musicians, most notably Miles Davis and John Coltrane, went through episodes of addiction only to clean up after they realized it was not at all helpful to their artistry.  Indeed, musicians reacted all sorts of different ways to intoxication; some could perform that way, and some could not.  If you are interested to read a detailed account of heroin and the bebop jazz scene, see this very interesting panel discussion between jazz musicians, a lawyer, and a doctor, and a moderator from Playboy magazine conducted in 1960.  It is an article that corroborates Playboy’s literary quality, beyond the pictures, and touches upon many themes that are still most topical including racial inequality in the treatment by police, the ineffective nature of the American penal system, and the counterproductivity of what is today known as the “war on drugs”, among others:

http://www.cannonball-adderley.com/article/lapin01.htm
The heroin epidemic which swept through jazz culture in the middle of the 20th century is a testament to Charlie Parker’s role as an artistic reformer.  Everything about him was imitated, however much it related to the music he made.  Parker would probably have told you that the heroin was one thing, just something that happened after that car accident that he could never shake, and that his music was another.  And we’ll probably never know how inextricable they were.  People are complex, after all.  But, we shouldn’t forget how much he practiced, how driven and focused he was even before his fateful car accident, and just how keen his intellect and artistic vision were, whether or not narcotics were flowing through his brain.

 

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Yet More Syndication, Day 1 – “Sunday Traffic” from The City by Aaron Copland

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication! I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 1 – “Sunday Traffic” from The City by Aaron Copland

Have you ever been to a World’s Fair?  They’re sometimes called “World Expositions” or “Expos” and I didn’t even know they are still around.  But they are.  The last one was in May of this year (2015), in Milan, and they actually happen pretty regularly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_fairs

And I had no idea they were still going on!  So if you find yourself in Alanya, Turkey in 2016 or Astana, Kazakhstan in 2017, you should definitely drop by and check out the World Expo.  Sort of like a mix between a state fair, the Olympics (which moves from world city to world city) and Disney’s Tomorrowland with its better-living-through-chemistry kind of theme, there’s nothing else quite like them.  If you are fortunate enough to catch one, I imagine you can expect to be overwhelmed, fascinated and inspired by a colorful mix of exhibitions and forward-thinking ideas.

One of the most famous World’s Fairs was that of 1939 in New York City.  It was also one of the largest and longest lasting in history.  Over the course of its 18-month run, it attracted just short of 45 million visitors from around the world to its array of exhibits and monuments which covered more than 1,000 acres in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, located in New York City’s borough of Queens.

While the intention of the masterminds behind the 1939 World’s Fair was to revitalize America’s sagging spirit and economy, both hampered by the Great Depression, the event and its distinctive architecture have transcended their original intention to become iconic of the American sensibilities that gave rise to the Baby Boomer generation, technologically forward-looking yet culturally retrospective.  The famous Trylon and Perisphere structures, evoking a naive sci-fi feeling, set the visual tone for the fair’s theme, The World of Tomorrow.

The fair was full of evocative architecture, events and exhibits in accordance with that theme, including: “Futurama” (no, not that one!), the Westinghouse Time Capsule (not to be opened for 5,000 years), an enormous ceramic sculpture of an atom, and the world’s first science fiction convention.  One of the lesser-known exhibits was a short film created by the American Institute of Planners, a professional organization for urban planners, called The City.  Created in 1939, this 30 minute black-and-white film is, by many an evaluation, closer to a propaganda piece than a true documentary.  But it is a fascinating piece of vintage filmmaking.  Cast in 3 acts, it celebrates the farm life of yesteryear, decries the dehumanizing effect of the sprawling, unplanned industrial-age cities that have grown out of control, and finally suggests a wholesome alternative in planned communities that are able to harmonize modern conveniences with the tranquility of the past, very much keeping in line with the 1939 World’s Fair’s theme of The World of Tomorrow.  Actually, these planned communities celebrated by the AIP’s film were not entirely in the future.  Examples of these “Greenbelt” communities (so named for the ring of public-held forested land encircling the towns that would keep the landscape green and ensure a perpetual size and shape to the urban landscape) had been established during the 1930s with one each in Wisconsin, Ohio and Maryland.

Carefully planned to balance residential and commercial zones, and always encircled by a belt of green to insulate from the surrounding urban jungle, these small towns were created by New Deal bureaucracies that set income levels for for their residents and and designed them to run as cooperative communities.  The concept is highly idealistic, but it seemed to work for these towns.  After about a decade the lands, initially owned by the federal government, were gradually sold to the towns’ inhabitants.  These communities really could not have been built during any other decade or in any other political climate.  In learning about them one senses they are permeated through and through by New Deal philosophy.

This functional idealism comes through very clearly in The City, with its stiff but florid narration, and especially the filmmakers’ choice of composer, a highly significant American musician who, at this time, was busy establishing a populist manner of composition for American listeners, Aaron Copland.  Coming to maturity in the 1920s, Copland at first gravitated to the spiky avant-garde stylings popular in Europe around that time, but eventually tired of it and, after settling more permanently in his native land, began to create a more accessible and distinctly iconic American style of music starting in the 1930s.  All of his best-known Americana works are written in this style and were created during the late 1930s and early 1940s.  These include Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and the stirring Lincoln Portrait.  All of these beloved scores successfully fuse the lyricism of American folk song (either authentic or keenly imitated) with an infectious rhythmic drive, broadcast through remarkably clear and astringent orchestration, even during the busiest passages.  There are also noble sections of calm, flat terrain that seem to simultaneously evoke both the sweeping amber waves of grain, and the clean, imposing monuments of Washington D.C.  And the small group of film scores that Copland composed during the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood and otherwise, presented one ideal venue to present this new American aesthetic.

The City is a fine showcase of all of Copland’s colors and moods.  You can watch the full 30 minute film here and get a sense of everything he could do:

One of the most infectious sections of the score is called “Sunday Traffic” and it comes right at the end of the second act.  While the beginning of the act is demoralizing, drab and depressing (intentionally so), this section seems to add comic relief, illustrating the foibles and frustrations of driving on crowded urban freeways:

Copland’s musical accompaniment to this scene is a scherzo, placing madcap and tuneful motives above rhythmic vamps.  The variety of orchestral textures is really clever and this little episode of the film score sparkles with with wit and finesse.  It also contrasts brilliantly with the Americana nobility that follows as we are shown the soaring images of technological advancement which leads to the third act, begun by the narrator describing how science can help us build cities well-suited to our human nature.  Copland’s music for this final act is idyllic but also fast-paced, effectively capturing the onscreen subjects.

Copland was not the only composer to have music featured at the 1939 World’s Fair.  Ralph Vaughn-Williams and Arthur Bliss both received commissions for original concert works in association with the fair.  But Copland’s contribution, while less centrally-featured, is arguably better suited to the flavor of fair than either of the others.  Distinctly forward-looking, toward a bright new generation, Copland’s emerging Americana is congruent with the theme of the fair in ways that the other musics simply could not have been.  And, given that this film would have been screened continually, Copland’s score would have had the added benefit of being played nonstop over the course of the World’s Fair’s run of almost two years.  This fascinating little film presented itself in so many ways as an ideal vehicle for Copland’s distinctive musical voice.

 

 

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More Syndication, Day 5 – Einen Jodler hor i gern by Franzl Lang

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 5 – Einen Jodler hor i gern by Franzl Lang

What do you think of yodeling?  Everyone’s heard it, but it’s probably one of those funny little things occupying the recesses of your brain that you don’t bring out very much to occupy your conscious thoughts.  You may find your immediate association with yodeling is one of ridicule, like it’s one of music’s laughing stocks.  And a few weeks ago that’s probably about how my mind would have reacted to the idea of yodeling.  But there’s a pretty serious art there, and in researching and learning more about it I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for yodeling and those who master it.

It’s one of those skills that has probably been around as long as people have been singing (a very long time).  If you research it yourself you will find that, while there are certain nations and cultures that we tend to associate with yodeling, related practices are spread wide across the world.  And it’s not as though yodeling originated in one place and spread to all the others, at least not that I’ve found.  It seems to be one of those human practices that, like speech, song, dance, architecture, religion and agriculture, springs up naturally wherever and whenever humans live in community, slipping into their vocal music.

In principle the skill is simple: a rapid, clear, and complete alternation between chest voice and head voice.  Both sexes can yodel convincingly, but it is more compelling when done by males due to the distinctive timbre of the falsetto register that pops out every time the break is crossed.  It is thought that the yodeling know best today, that originating from Switzerland and Austria, was originally a practical skill, used to communicate across vast expanses of the Alpine mountain range.  I’ve also read that it may have had an application for herding livetstock.  Singing styles akin to what we call yodeling can be found on all the inhabited continents among peoples who have discovered the beauty of navigating the vocal break with speed and clarity.

And yodeling has impacted many styles of folk and popular music.  Influences of yodeling can be found in blues, country music, vaudeville, and more.   There are a handful of popular singers working today who can yodel well, for instance the Alaskan singer Jewel:

And maybe you’ve seen this funny bit?

Chances are you have already seen that, since more than seven million people have watched that on YouTube, which is to say nothing of the live viewing audience which saw that back around the time of the premiere of World War Z.  I’m reasonably sure that those Jimmy Fallon and Brad Pitt’s actual yodeling voices.  But…the end is not quite accurate.  While yodeling is as old as human verbal communication, it developed into a much more elaborate art in Switzerland starting around the 1830s when yodelers began to entertain audiences in performance settings.  Soon yodeling groups, and even entire choirs, formed to present ensemble pieces based on yodeling, often majorly improvised.  So, double yodels and beyond are not exactly unheard of.

That’s quite haunting and beautiful, isn’t it?  It’s a Zauerli, just one of the choral genres based on yodeling models.  It feels a little like yodeling in slow motion with a bunch of other parts filling out the chords beneath it, all in a very atmospheric and ambient way.  Another one, usually for a smaller ensemble, is the Juuzli, which has a somewhat different feeling:

You can find out more about Switzerland’s history of yodeling here.  Switzerland’s noble and historic tradition of yodeling privileges it to be the location of the triennial National Yodeling Festival, held in Davos, which is in the Eastern knob, just south of the tiny nation of Liechtenstein.  The next one is in 2017, and if you want to go you should book your flight and hotel today since the event usually attracts more than 200,000 visitors.

http://www.carnifest.com/events/switzerland/davos/577/switzerland-s-national-yodeling-festival-2017.aspx

A master yodeler is a marvel, a most impressive spectacle to behold.  The best I’ve been able to find is the Bavarian Franzl Lang, known as the Jodelkonig or “Yodel King”.  Here he is singing one of his flagship hits, Einen Jodler hor i gern, “I like to hear a yodel”:

Isn’t that infectious?  I can’t help but to smile in delight whenever I see this clip; he’s obviously so completely at home in his persona as the Yodel King.  My German from high school is a little rusty, but in the very beginning the hostess in the pink dress asks the accordion player whom he considers to be the best yodeler in the world and he, without a hint of hesitation, strings together every German superlative he can think of in praise of Franzl Lang, who is then welcomed by the host.  And the accordion player is not alone: Franzl Lang is widely regarded as the best Alpine yodeler in the world, hence his uncontested title.

In addition to yodeling, Lang played the guitar and accordion, and also wrote his own songs.  He is clearly a darling of the German folk, happily spreading good cheer with his numerous performances at festivals and television variety shows.  These strike me as the German equivalent of Lawrence Welk and I notice tendencies that seem to common to all of Lang’s performances as I watch them on YouTube.  His yodels are always set to fast-paced polka-style music, mostly consisting of tonic and dominant harmonies (with perhaps the occasional subdominant at the end of major phrases).  He is constantly walking toward an ever-receding camera.   And he is always in the midst of an audience who is clapping along while sitting at tables, drinking beer.  It’s always Oktoberfest when Franzl Lang sings!  Blazing yodel technique aside, he is the very image of a good-natured German fellow who has had his share of lager and schnitzel.  He just seems so warm, inviting, and utterly without pretense.  And he’s a great showman, quite comfortable on stage and on camera.

Isn’t his yodeling breathtaking?  Always clear, always in tune, always placed exactly in the intended register, rhythmically accurate, and incredibly fast.  And there’s never any break for relaxation; just when you think the phrase is ending he tags on another little motive in a different register, which keeps his listeners captivated.  Lang’s technique is an art and a science.  Here’s one more, even more impressive than the last.  And in this one he sports a killer hat:

There’s plenty more on YouTube if you want it.  Franzl Lang is not always yodeling.  Sometimes he is just singing German ballads or drinking songs in his sweet and lively voice.  But more often than not, he is showcasing his stunning and world-renowned skill, the culmination of centuries of Alpine tradition.

 

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More Syndication, Day 4 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 4 – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Felix Mendelssohn

If you hear the words “child prodigy” in association with classical music, I bet you would think of one name in particular, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his full name is actually even longer!), and you would certainly be right to do so.  Mozart’s background as a rigorously disciplined, and some would say, exploited child prodigy most assuredly contributed in a major way to the amazingly mature and technically assured composing musician he would become in his adult years.  For a reflection on Mozart’s prodigiousness and sometimes fraught relationship with his father, Leopold, see this post.  But there is another child prodigy in the classical tradition, a composer whom some say was capable of even greater feats even earlier on than Mozart.  The similarities don’t end there; he had a musically gifted sister also, just like Mozart.  And he led a tragically brief but productive life; Mozart lived to only 36, the other prodigy to 38, although much less is made of his untimely death than is made of Mozart’s.  This composer began his childhood a mere two decades after Mozart’s death, and looked to the prior master for inspiration and model work during his childhood and throughout his life.  This lesser-known child prodigy is Felix Mendelssohn. 

As prodigious as Mendelssohn clearly was, his family was careful not to exploit his gifts in the was Mozart’s father, Leopold, is often accused of doing.  So Mendelssohn was raised at home, much more privately, although his friends, family and other community members did have abundant opportunities to hear his early musical works in concerts organized on the grounds of the family estate.  But Mendelssohn was not paraded about Europe, performing for heads of state and traveling to exhaustion as his elder prodigy had been forced to do.  Perhaps the Mendelssohns looked to Wolfgang’s experience and, recognizing the potential for psychological harm, preferred to keep Felix better-grounded, but still provide a first rate classical education, at which he worked most diligently.

But some say Mendelssohn’s early development was even more impressive than Mozart’s, allowing the creation of works that demonstrate great imagination, grace, and technical perfection during his teenage years (indeed, this was, unbeknownst to those close to him, middle age).  While Mozart did not start to generate works that have entered the standard repertoire until his twenties, Mendelssohn composed at least three during his teenage years that have.  This trilogy includes one of his most significant works, one that pioneered his most important contribution to symphonic music, the Midsummernight’s Dream Overture.  Composed at age 17, this monumental orchestral work, which brilliantly captures the fantasy and ethereality of Shakespeare’s play, is still recognized as one of his greatest achievements.  And 16 years later he composed other movements to round out the suite, including the famous Wedding March which runs the serious risk of cliche whenever it is chosen as a recessional (I play a lot of weddings these days; it is selected by brides on occasion), but the overture is quite sufficient without the other movements, and as such is the first example from Mendelssohn’s pen of a concert overture, that is a significant movement for orchestra, usually but not always programmatic, which is a self-contained work and not accompanied by other movements.  Your typical symphony will have 4 movements, all intended to be played together in one performance, and doing so will create a sense of balance and completion that you might find lacking in omitting any of them.  But a concert overture is just one movement, lasting usually between 9 and 15 minutes.  As such, Mendelssohn was pioneering a significant expression of orchestral music which formed the basis for the later symphonic poem, used to such great effect in succeeding generations by Franz Liszt, and later Richard Strauss.  These work in much the same way as the concert overture, but also tend to incorporate newer ideas of thematic development that Mendelssohn had not quite envisioned. 

Over the course of his career Mendelssohn wrote four symphonies that  were more or less conventionally plotted (and one other one with an extended choral cantata at the end – I tend not to include it in the count for that reason) and seven of these concert overtures (and I do include the charming Overture for Wind Instruments in that count).  I have to say that if I was stuck on a desert island and only able to bring either Mendelssohn’s symphonies or his concert overtures, I would take the latter (except for the Hebrides overture; my wife, Heidi, can have that one all to herself), and I’ve felt that way for a while.  There’s just something that I find more satisfying about them than the symphonies.  Maybe it’s the way that Mendelssohn was forced to ingeniously pack his subjects and stories into a briefer, more concentrated form.  Maybe this more concentrated form forces everything in the concert overtures to be more impactful and less wasteful.  But whatever the reason, I tend to gravitate toward that collection over the symphonies.  And if I had to pick one of Mendelssohn’s concert overtures as my favorite, a very tough choice, I think I would probably end up going with Meeresstille und glückliche Fährt, which translates to “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” (that’s a tough choice – I could listen to Ruy Blas for hours, and I like the Trumpet Overture quite a bit; also The Fair Melusine).  I love this piece!  I’ve listened to it many times over the years and it always moves me in a most exuberant way.  Even bringing a better developed sense of harmony and aesthetics to the listening experience in recent years, I feel similarly enthused by it as when I first heard it a decade ago.

Calm Sea and Prosperous voyage was composed when Mendelssohn was 19 years old.  One fruit of his very well-rounded humanistic education was a love for poetry, most especially his older compatriot Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  The feeling was mutual – when Goethe experienced Mendelssohn’s musicianship at the tender age of 7, Goethe compared him to Mozart, but much more favorably.  And Mendelssohn wasn’t the only one inspired by the elder poet; many Germanic musicians of the nineteenth century incorporated texts by Goethe into their works.  In 1815, when Mendelssohn was just 6, Beethoven had composed a cantata for choir and orchestra using the texts of two poems by Goethe: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.  I find the cantata nice, the first half emanating the German choral “glow” and the second with a rousing Beethoven finish, but not particularly memorable.  Mendelssohn, on the other hand,  is a man after my heart:

 Can’t you feel the excitement at the end as the ship approaches harbor and the crew and spectators on the pier celebrate?  I find the fast section constantly topping itself with one deeply fulfilling and celebratory gesture after another, always clothed in Mendelssohn’s utterly natural and brilliantly clear orchestration.  Once the trumpet fanfares start to layer on top of each other you will know the end of the work is near, and its final progression is a great plagal cadence, like a contented “a-men” as the ship moors.  

How did you find the first half of the work, the evocation of the calm sea?  Very peaceful, isn’t it?  But listen again, and listen deeper, for there is an edge, a base level of anxiety.  Why would this be?  A calm, glassy sea is such a tranquil image, isn’t it?  Well, it’s important to remember that during the era of sailing ships, a calm sea worked against productivity, providing no fuel for the sails.  It was only on choppy, or even rough seas, that sailing ships could progress along their course and ultimately deliver their cargo.  Listening in light of this, we can hear the initial active gestures of wind and wave to be beacons of hope cutting through the calm; the second half, Prosperous Voyage, is simply manic in the joy of its relief to finally be pushed along toward harbor.  19 he may have been, but Mendelssohn clearly had a very adult understanding of the commercial seaways, and was mature beyond his years is his ability to capture its psychology in perfect orchestration and flawless musical pacing.  

Mendelssohn may have gained an early lead on Mozart’s development, creating enduring works of maturity a good half decade in his life before the elder prodigy, but critics also point out that Mozart’s development, once it began, was continuous and culminated in works of astounding depth toward the end of his life.  This was less so with Mendelssohn; some would say his development plateaued and could have gone further.  This is, of course, a complex thing to analyze, and can easily become mired in armchair speculation, as all alternate histories are wont to do, but I understand the criticism.  Still, I am happy that Mendelssohn’s rapid early development yielded fantastic works such as Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which continue to inspire listeners with their breadth and perfection.  That he was so young at the time of writing them is a bonus.

 

 

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More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony No. 45 by Franz Joseph Haydn

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 3 – Symphony No. 45 by Franz Joseph Haydn

You never quite know what you’re going to find going through Haydn’s symphonies.  He wrote many, 104 cataloged, and that’s to say nothing of those which have been lost to history, of which there are certainly at least a handful.  Any body of work that extensive will have a few items that fall through the historical cracks, especially with composers as prolific as Haydn continually churning out new music all the time.  The impulse to write for posterity is a Romantic innovation and Haydn and his contemporaries would not have been driven by this mindset, hence neither he nor his librarians felt the great need to preserve every jot and tittle from his pen.

Because he wrote them so often, it seems that Haydn was always on the lookout for clever and creative tricks and twists to enliven the four hundred-some movements of his symphonies.  Haydn was exceedingly intelligent, and not just intelligent, but also obviously concerned that his numerous symphonies transcending mere academic exercise.  If you are at all familiar with his symphonic output, particularly his middle symphonies, than you have probably come to expect the delightful games Haydn plays with his audience, and perhaps even enjoy imagining the reactions of their original listeners who would have been, for the most part, the educated and sophisticated members of the court of Esterhazy in what is today Hungary.  For a particularly clever game, seamlessly integrated into the fabric of one of his symphonies, see this post.

And sometimes the games go beyond mere academic tricks.  On at least one occasion, Haydn used a symphony to communicate, sending a subtle but unambiguous message to his patron.  

It is the last movement that sends this message.  Listen to it now, and see if anything strikes you about it.  Go to 3:00:

What did you hear?  Did you find any of its characteristics unusual?  Well, here’s a few hints.  First of all, it was almost unheard of for symphonies of this time to end with a movement as slow and tranquil as this one.  You would expect to find it as a second movement, possibly a third.  But a finale?  Finales were always quick, bold, and filled with busy agile passages to end the symphony with a flourish.  So what’s the deal with this slow movement?  Also, did you notice that the orchestration became progressively thinner as the movement progressed?  The downbeat is richly scored with strings, winds and horns, but the movement ends with two violins playing a dainty duet.  The melodic material is consistent, unifying the movement, and the form is exquisitely balanced, easily satisfying all of our cognitive expectations with regard to form and development, which is why the movement works so well.  And Haydn really uses the orchestration brilliantly – it actually adds considerable variety to the movement as it thins out over its course.  But, again, this was unheard of at the time.  If you started the movement with a full orchestra, you ended it with a full orchestra.  If your movement ended with a violin duet, it probably began that way.  During the twentieth century, it became more acceptable for composers of art music to play with the orchestration in this way, but the conventions of the eighteenth century strongly discouraged it.  So, again, what’s the deal with these unusual features?

The story goes like this…  Prince Esterhazy, Haydn’s musically cultured patron, enjoyed spending time at his summer palace in the country.  Naturally, he brought along his favorite composer and orchestra to provide musical enrichment on his holiday because, well, you don’t find a composer as good as Haydn producing as he did in an environment which did not value and encourage his contributions.  So Nikolaus would have symphonies in the countryside.  The only problem was that the musicians were separated from their wives and children, who remained at the palace proper.  The excursion ended up being extended beyond the original projections, and the members of Haydn’s orchestra became inordinately homesick, longing for reunion with their loved ones.  And so they needed a plan.  Haydn acted on their behalf, adding this ingenious fifth movement to what is today known as his 45th symphony.  The symphony was all set to follow convention, ending with a quick and stormy fourth movement which would really put a cherry on things.  But Haydn must have burned the midnight oil, designing this pointed musical statement, which the musicians started up right as the final strokes of the original finale were clearing the air.  Can you imagine the Prince Nikolaus’ reaction to hear this surprisingly lyrical encore placed where the applause should be?  And it was presented with its own staging too.  As the musicians’ parts ended, one by one, they each blew out their desk candle and left the stage.  Some modern orchestras have fun with it and present it in a similar way.  This performance really helps you to see how it works:

If you were Prince Nikolaus, how would you have reacted to that stunt?  I wonder what he did after Haydn and Tomasini, the two remaining violinists, walked off stage.  I can imagine him with his fist against his pursed lips, amused by the cheekiness of his kapellmeister and amazed at the quality of the execution, which is exactly why Haydn was there, after all.  Well, according to legend, Nikolaus read his message loud and clear, and the court returned to the main palace the next day.
If you really consider this story, it illuminates the nature of what must have been a most unusual and wonderful relationship between Haydn and Nikolaus Esterhazy.  This was a patron who truly valued his music and those who created it for him.  Haydn may have been a servant, wearing livery and eating at the low table, but Nikolaus knew his worth and would undoubtedly have regarded him as an intellectual equal.  The fact that Haydn felt comfortable expressing this, and that the Prince responded so quickly, and with no hurt feelings, indicates a high level of mutual respect between the two.  Of course, I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the delivery of the message was so artful; simply approaching the powerful patron and asking would surely have met with an entirely different reaction.  The musicians in Haydn’s orchestra seemed to know that he would be able to find a way to persuade the prince using the fiercely intelligent and ever-resourceful tricks that he dispensed in abundance from up his compositional sleeve.  In a body of work already rich with clever and enchanting tricks, this one manages to stand out, yielding what is still one of Haydn’s greatest hits, even two and a half centuries after it was written.

 

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More Syndication, Day 2 – Malambo from Estancia by Alberto Ginastera

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 2 – Malambo from Estancia by Alberto Ginastera

Have you ever seen this movie?

I must confess that I have not, and have few strong intentions for remedying that condition in the near future.  Although the trailer was funnier than I thought.  Maybe I’ll watch it with the kids someday if the right opportunity presents itself, but given the critical response it has garnered it’s not exactly on my short list these days.  But, it would probably be fun to watch and consider the mix of history and psychology upon which it is based, which has made such an impact on the history of the New World over the last few centuries.

El Dorado refers to a mythical tribe/city/empire in what is now Latin America that was inordinately rich in gold, to the point that it could be rather wastefully incorporated into religious and tribal ceremonies.  As European explorers began to mix with the indigenous peoples of the New World they started to hear about this and other related legends.  And, well, many of the Europeans who caught wind of this just knew they could make better use of the precious stuff than the indigenous folks were, and so legends like El Dorado (which roughly translates to something like “The City of Gold”; it literally means “The Golden”) inspired something akin to a gold rush for Spanish and Portuguese explorers who threw in their chips and mounted exorbitantly expensive expeditions across the ocean and through the vast and varied terrain of what is today South America.  Of course, the influences and causes of expeditions like that are manifold and nuanced, with numerous political, imperial, industrial, commercial, and religious aims depending on whom you would have asked, but I’m sure the lust for gold was on many of their minds.

A similar legend involves the “Mountain of Silver”, or Sierra de la Platta, which supposedly enriched an indigenous tribe and their ruler, the White King, named for his entirely silver throne, near the present-day Andes Mountains.  This fantastic story fueled no fewer than four ambitious expeditions in search of the Mountain of Silver carried out by different explorers from Spain and Venice over the course of the sixteenth century.  While many of the conquistadors did indeed discover precious metals in varying quantities, the Sierra de la Platta itself was never found.  The legend was strong enough, however, to attach to one of the regions in present-day South America a related name: “Argentina” comes from the Latin word argentum, meaning “silver”.

Like so many of the Central and South American nations, Argentina’s history is a disjunct story which includes episodes of tribal Indian cultures, Iberian colonization, and then a long series of governments, variously democratic or dictatorial, which has only recently stabilized, in spite of the best intentions and efforts of many along the way.  The story of Evita is one such episode, covering the life of president Juan Peron.  

One consequence of this kind of history is that a stable environment well-suited to the cultivation of art becomes elusive, and a flourishing scene which combines rigorous training and native colors in equal measure must fight to develop, sometimes never really blossoming.  You can read about another such nation here.  And so there are not many prominent Argentinian classical musicians.  The only ones I know to have come from Argentina are Daniel Barenboim, Martha Argerich, tango master Astor Piazzolla, and one of Latin America’s greatest composers, Alberto Ginastera.

A young hotshot, Ginastera scored one of his first major commissions fresh out of his conservatory training in Buenos Aires, the ballet Estancia, written at the order of Lincoln Kirstein, a New York City-based ballet impresario who was traveling through South America around the time of Ginastera’s graduation.  For his first ballet, Panambi, Ginastera had focused on various aspects of the indigenous Indian peoples of South America, a subject that all South American composers seemed to gravitate toward at some point.  For Estancia, his second ballet, Ginastera chose a thoroughly Argentinian character to portray, the gauchos.

If you were to make a Western movie set in Argentina (for more about Western movies, see this post), the gauchos would be central characters and it may very well be set entirely, or at least in part, on an Estancia.  The flatlands of Argentina and Paraguay are called pampas, after an Andean word meaning “plains”.  After the Spanish and Portuguese began to colonize the New World, wealthy landowners set up ranches on the pampas, which they called estancias, in order to raise the cattle they had imported from Europe.  The rugged farmhands who worked the estancias were, and are still, called gauchos.  The spirit of the gauchos runs deep, and once you are a gaucho, well, I gather nothing else quite satisfies:

In his Estancia Ginastera celebrated the gauchos, their culture, and their work.  The ballet is rich with movements illustrating various aspects of life and work on the estancias, including different kinds of workers, livestock, crops, and leisure.  The story is about a city slicker who falls in love with the daughter of an estancia master.  The daughter is only interested in gaucho suitors, and so the boy from the city must convince her that he too is worthy of her affections.

Ginastera’s Estancia, coming as it does from early in his career, is full of Argentine folk influences.  He would use less and less of them as his music became more abstract and formalistic over the ensuing years, but Estancia pulses with the raw and irresistible dance rhythms of Argentinian folk music.  Unfortunately the ballet company with which Kerstein intended to introduce Estancia broke up before it could be premiered and Ginastera had to wait many years to witness the first production.  But in the meantime he, as so many composers of ballet have done, extracted a suite of four movements, which are often presented on orchestral concerts.  You can hear the four movement suite here:

But, if you only get to know one movement, make it the finale, the malambo.  A malambo is a traditional Argentine “step dance”, which is to say a dance that focuses on fancy footwork over all else.  It’s a little like Riverdance I would think.  The malambo was intense, and often the source of good-natured competition on the estancia as the gauchos competed to out-dance one another.  The malambo is the finale of Estancia, and it is here that the young city boy makes his final plea to defeat his gaucho competition for the hand of the estancia heiress.  Listen to this astounding and energetic performance led by the up-and-coming Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel as the Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony shows its South American pride.  Can you hear the episodes which represent the different dancers having their say, one at a time?  Listen to Ginastera’s remarkable orchestral colors and rhythms.  If this doesn’t get you dancing, I don’t know what will.

 

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More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

 

Do you recognize these guys?

You may have seen them like this…

…or, this…

I’m positive that almost anyone reading this will have come across Tweedledee and Tweedledum, most likely in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories about Alice.  But these characters in Carroll’s stories are references, derived from nursery rhymes and other epigrams that circulated through the British culture of his time.  Here’s a common version of one of their rhymes:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

   Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

   Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

   As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

   They quite forgot their quarrel.”

Carroll, with his penchant for the absurd and whimsical, took great delight in incorporating such ridiculous and quasi-nonsensical characters and situations into his stories and poems.  And I suspect that he usually had some kind of good reason or commentary behind his sublimely strange choices.  Have you ever felt like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so fixated on your agitation and itch for a fight that you may have forgotten to think straight?  Or maybe you know someone else like that…  It seems to me that Carroll was probably commenting on people who so love to perpetuate drama that they will fight and argue about the silliest things.  That’s more or less what Tweedledee and Tweedledum represent, isn’t it?

Here’s another, most fascinating poem about the silly, cantankerous twins:

“Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!”

Unexpected, no?  Some people just love to have something to argue about (but not me!).  And if you are fortunate enough to currently be occupied with the middle or upper levels of Maslow’s insightful hierarchy, then you may see fit to use your abundant free time to argue about books, movies, music, or some other accouterments of comfy life.  And so, the London opera-going folk of the eighteenth century just couldn’t let you go without expressing their allegiance.  Some preferred Handel’s art, and others, that of Giovanni Bononcini.

I probably don’t have to tell you which of those composers posterity has come to favor.  Simply ask yourself which of those names you have heard before, or most often if the answer is both.  And of course history is lived in the moment; you never see the future until it happens, so the Handelian Tweedle-dees never got their chance to gloat!  Too bad.  But not knowing how things turn out is part of the fun of life.  Well, you are probably happier if you think so anyway.

The reasons for Handel’s dominance in posterity over Bononcini are both historical and artistic.  Handel and Bononcini were similarly cosmopolitan, moving between major cities in Europe to make their careers, albeit different ones.  But once Handel made it to London in the 1710s he was able to stay there, becoming the darling of the British, and pivoting from Italian opera to English oratorio, which the English ADORED after the imported art form fell out of favor.  For more about that process see this post and this one.  Bononcini was a very accomplished opera composer, and met with similar success as Handel in London (he even has the dubious distinction of having written the opera during which a long-standing rivalry between competing superstar sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni came to blows on stage, a cat fight of cat fights, in 1727).  But his Catholicism and resulting Jacobite acquaintances somewhat stigmatized him from the London public and he eventually found it difficult to be hired to write operas, even by companies with which he had earlier scored major financial and critical successes.  Handel’s uncomplicated and uncontroversial Protestantism certainly helped to facilitate his social cohesion with the British and allowed him to more sensitively tailor the oratorios to their national and religious tastes.

But most historians acknowledge Handel to be the stronger composer also, more capable of filling the lengthening arias of their day with complex and propulsive musical textures.  Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to compare the artistry of Handel and Bononcini in a very direct way.  There survive from both composers settings of a libretto called Xerxes, or Serse or Xerse at is is also sometimes spelled.  It was written by Nicolo Minato and first set by the Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi’s most notable pupil, in 1654.  Through the magic of YouTube we can compare all three versions: Cavalli, Bononcini, and Handel:

Here is Cavalli:

What really impresses me about Cavalli’s setting is the superhuman grace and lyricism that pervades the texture.  It just flows and never stops.  You can hear the proto-tonality, almost fully developed in Cavalli’s language, but still with some remnants of the Renaissance harmonic language, which is almost a little exotic at times.  It does not quite fit our musical grammatical expectations, calibrated by the music of more than three intervening centuries, but it is lovely, isn’t it?  You can read about a contemporary of Cavalli’s with a similar style here. Cavalli is earlier than both Bononcini and Handel, is therefor a little hard to compare with either of them.  

So, on to Bononcini:

Also lovely, and fully tonal.  This one completely satisfies our musical grammatical expectations.  It is charming and melodic, and fits the language quite well.

And here is Handel:

And that’s one of classical music’s greatest hits, famous as “Handel’s Largo”, played in countless instrumental combinations, even though the actual tempo marking is “Larghetto”.  But whatever.  Do you hear how much depth, propulsion and focus Handel’s setting brings?  It’s qualities like this, in addition to his historical serendipity, that have helped his music endure through history, overtaking composers like Bononcini, and so many of their now lesser-known contemporaries.

And Handel’s Serse was not well-received at the time of its premiere.  It is often surprising to modern day listeners, but that glowing, lyrical aria is actually a comic statement.  It features the noble, practically immortal Persian emperor in a moment of personal reflection, singing a heroic love song to a tree that has sheltered him after a wearisome battle.  It’s a bizarre, almost surreal image, and it fit better into Cavalli’s style of opera, in which comedy and tragedy were more or less equally mixed.  For more on another opera in which that was true, see this post.  By Handel’s time, the practice was to separate comedy and drama into completely different channels.  Touches like this, which happen often in Handel’s Serse, made the opera confusing and difficult for its first audiences to comprehend, even though most modern listeners acknowledge it for the masterwork of operatic characterization and pacing that it is.
It’s just another example of our human difficulty in comprehending the sweep of history while we are wrapped up in it, the same difficulty that caused a wry wit to write a few lines of satirical verse about the absurd nature of the argument between supporters of Handel and Bononcini, comparing them to ridiculous and childish characters in equally ridiculous and childish contemporary nursery rhymes.  The author probably thought the argument was just silly, but from our historically advantaged perspective we can see that fashion often obscures our perception of true artistic quality.  And so we’ll always have arguments like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and necessarily defer to future historians to see the truth clearly.

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