Music About Fireworks, Day 1 – Fireworks by Igor Stravinsky

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 1 – Fireworks by Igor Stravinsky

I’m a fan of dystopian film and literature.  There are of course classics in this genre (see this post).  Reading the “big 3” in high school (Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin) I sort of came under the impression that those were the only ones that there were.  Now I know that any genre will be full of examples and it’s really the best that rise to the top and win a spot in the canon.  There are always new films and books released based on this literary model.  A Google search of “Recent dystopian movies” conducted in June of 2016 brings up the following list:

Quite a few over the last few years, and that’s just in America.  To be fair, 2 of those are from the same series, The Hunger Games (which I enjoy), but obviously it is a proven concept, and I can’t keep up with everything that comes out.  But I usually like them, and enjoy the experience engaging with the clever and imaginative futures that storytellers come up with in the process of extrapolating the worst tendencies of our cultures and human nature.

One of my favorite dystopian stories is called THX-1138.  Ever see it?  If you haven’t, and you’re into that kind of thing, you definitely should.  It’s creepy in the best way, well-paced, logically consistent, with a constant sense of adventure and drama.  And its configuration of dystopian elements may remind you of others, but manages to be unique enough to stand on its own feet, particularly as they are bolstered by clever production value which makes effective use of the film’s low budget.

Does the title ring a bell?  Even if you haven’t seen THX-1138 it may seem familiar, particularly the “THX” part.  You may know it from this:

 

George Lucas named his audio standard, THX, after that movie.  THX-1138 is his first feature-length film for a major studio.  Of course we all know George Lucas.  But the question becomes, would we know George Lucas based solely on his efforts in THX-1138?  I tend to doubt it.  What if we threw in American Graffiti, the next one?  Maybe…  But again, probably not.  What about his next film?  Bingo.  That’s Star Wars, and the rest is history.  The fact that George Lucas wrote and produced films as successful and iconic as the original Star Wars trilogy completely transforms our view of his earlier works.  Without Star Wars my guess is that we would not know of THX-1138 or American Graffiti, in spite of their considerable merits.  Since George Lucas went on to do something truly significant, his earlier works, which formed his path toward that significance, assume academic as well as aesthetic interest for many film lovers.

While the comparison is not exactly direct, I think parallels can be drawn between the story of George Lucas and that of a towering creative figure of the early twentieth century, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.  Both were well-educated, Stavinsky by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lucas at the University of Southern California.  Both found powerful collaborators, Stavinsky in the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and Lucas in the film director Francis Ford Coppola, and both later produced significant trilogies which essentially sealed their future careers, thereby elevating interest in the earlier, less significant works which brought them to that point.  Well, maybe some of it is a stretch, but I am surprised to find so many points of confluence.  

It is not exactly right to compare Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy with Stravinsky’s trilogy of ballets for Diaghilev.  But, if we can grant that, comparisons can be made between Stravinsky’s early output and Lucas’ early films like THX and Graffiti.  Stravinsky studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and his graduation piece was a sparkling symphony in E-flat major, Opus 1, the style of which is heavily indebted to his teacher.  After that, a cantata for mezzo-soprano and orchestra called Faun and Shepherdess, Opus 2, and then two orchestral scherzi, Fantastic Scherzo and Fireworks, Opp. 3 and 4, respectively.  Stravinsky would not label his works with opus numbers for much long after this; once he became established as a ballet composer he saw fit to stop doing that (for more about the opus numbering system, see this post).  Stravinsky’s breakthrough came shortly after composing these.  Sergei Diaghilev, present at the Russian premieres, invited Stravinsky to work with his company, the Ballets Russe, after hearing them.  Their first major collaboration was The Firebird of 1910 (see this post) and, like Star Wars 67 years later, the rest is history.

 

Had it not been for Diaghilev’s invitation, we probably wouldn’t know about Stravinsky’s Fireworks, a short, colorful scherzo for symphony orchestra.  As fireworks music often is, it was an occasional piece, written as a wedding gift for Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter, Nadezhda.  While Stravinsky’s Opus 1 Symphony is squarely (and I do mean squarely) Russian, Fireworks reveals a growing French influence on his music, particularly his orchestration.  In the years between the two works, Stravinsky had experienced, formatively, the music of French orchestral masters like Claud Debussy (see this post) and Paul Dukas.  The impact of hearing this is evident in his subsequent writing – passages in Fireworks even seem to quote Dukas’ famous Sorcerer’s Apprentice almost verbatim.  This French influence most certainly caught Diaghilev’s attention as he scouted for talent in order to package his exotic Russian delights for the pleasure of Parisian audiences; you might say Stravinsky was exactly the droid he was looking for.  The trilogy consisting of the first fruits of their collaboration, which includes Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, is all an amalgam in some way of Russian lore and French musical dressing.
When artists make significant and earth-shattering contributions, their earlier works often become the subject of study beyond their own merits.  Indeed, it is often difficult to truly judge them as they stand on their own feet, so deep is the gravity of their later successes.  But one of the happy results of the later successes is increased exposure to these earlier works, which we may enjoy, if not for their own merits, then at least for the interesting steps they provided along the path necessary for the artists to reach their significant successes.  Still, there is usually much merit to be found in these early works; they reveal the artists’ stylistic journey and show us the line of development which culminated in the more significant works.  And quite often they merit a closer look for their own artistic merits as well.

P. S.  Happy Independence Day to all my American readers!  In honor of this, I submit Stravinsky’s arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner…

 

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Get Your Exercise, Day 4 – Four Etudes for Orchestra by Igor Stravinsky

This week’s theme is…Get Your Exercise!  If you want to get stronger, you’ll go to a gym and work out.  But musicians can get stronger too, and to get their exercise, they practice might practice an etude, which is a French word for a piece of music written to strengthen a particular skill.  Etudes run the gamut from dry technique builders to stunning, complete musical statements that are worth hearing beyond their use to improve musicians’ aptitude.  This week look at some such examples.

Get Your Exercise, Day 4 – Four Etudes for Orchestra by Igor Stravinsky

Most of the time, if you see the word “etude” as the title of a piece of music, it is a performance exercise.  In other words, the music was written for the benefit of the performer, in order to strengthen a certain aspect of his physical agility or musical sensitivity.  Many etudes become beautiful music in their own right, presentable for the edification of audiences, but if that is what it is called, the study component is one of the major motivations for its existence and features.

Any growing instrumentalist should learn etudes of different varieties; they are typically the second item to be crossed off of a daily practice checklist, right after scales, and just before repertoire.  They inhabit the space between those two worlds, usually half pedagogical and half musical (sometimes that balance is shifted).  Having studied the violin and piano myself I have tackled etudes for both instruments, and many of my students do also.

One set of etudes I remember learning on the piano as a kid were those from a collection called The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises written by a French piano teacher named Charles-Louis Hanon, who died in 1900.  If you have spent any kind of significant time learning the piano, you may find their style of figuration familiar:

Over the course of these sixty exercises Hanon puts pianists’ hands and digits through every conceivable configuration in the interest of developing strength, independence, and dexterity.  Hanon’s etudes are world famous, and Sergei Rachmaninov once identified an emphasis on Hanon’s exercises as the reason for the Russian conservatory system’s impressive production of piano virtuosos, required as its students were to memorize all sixty of them and perform them at high speeds in every single key.  But Hanon’s exercises have their critics; they are most often criticized for their stiff, unimaginative and mechanical nature which, some say, hampers musicality in contrast to more artistically crafted etudes.  For some of the latter variety, we can look to a crucially important figure in the piano pedagogy of the Western tradition, Carl Czerny.

Czerny’s life spans the remarkable window between the creative lives of Mozart and Wagner (what a time to be alive!).  He was born less than a year before Mozart’s death and died as Wagner was beginning work on The Ring of the Nibelung and Tristan and Isolde, the operas that would seal his legacy into the present day.  Czerny’s story is remarkable and little known; he was a formative figure within the dense network of musicians inhabiting Vienna during the first half of the nineteenth century, practically Classical Music’s solar plexus (see this post).  He contributed a variation on Anton Diabelli’s Waltz along with his teacher, Beethoven, and his student, Liszt.  As such, he was the link between the two; Beethoven was passing away as Liszt came into his own, and Czerny served as a resource to the younger composer, conveying everything of value he had learned from the old German master.  Liszt would later return the favor, dedicating his first significant collection of piano exercises, his monstrously difficult Transcendental Etudes (see this post) to his teacher and link to Beethoven.

Czerny was massively prolific, leaving more than 1000 published works, many of which were pedagogical etudes that masterfully distilled the idioms of the best piano playing of the day, having been digested by Czerny’s calm, keen vision of the musical world surrounding him.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Carl_Czerny

His exercises are of a different musical order than Hanon’s, sublimely musical and sensitive:

 

But not every etude is written to benefit the performer.  What if you encounter an etude written for orchestra?  Is it an exercise in orchestral ensemble technique?  Possibly.  But probably not.  More likely it is an etude for the composer, a study in some element of technique such as orchestration or harmony.  They are considerably less common than those written for the technical benefit of the performer, but they are out there.  Here’s a colorful example:

 

In 1929 Igor Stravinsky compiled some short movements he had written for string quartet and pianola (player piano) and orchestrated them for more considerable forces.  The Four Etudes for Orchestra is the result.  Here are the three movements for string quartet…

 

…and here is the etude for player piano…

 

Hard to know exactly why he called the movement for pianola an etude (what exactly would that be exercising?), but Stravinsky, who frequently rearranged, revised, and reorchestrated his own works throughout his life, saw an opportunity to compile these four short movements and repackage them for different forces.  The resulting short orchestral sketches channel the voice of Stravinsky’s massive ballets and other notable works into concise miniatures, microcosms of his distinctive sonic mannerisms.  At times we feel the rhythms of Petroushka, at others the lyrical discomfort of The Rite of Spring, and still at others the quirky neo-classicism of Pulcinella and Dumbarton Oaks.  When Stravinsky calls these movements “etudes”, we can think of them like the “studies” of a visual artist, the rough, preparatory sketches that painters and sculptors often make to sharpen their vision of the detailed masterwork ahead.

Sometimes composers write etudes for themselves.  They are rare, but provide an interesting glimpse into their creative lives.  More often, etudes are written for performers, and Stravinsky has these too:

 

While many do not know his name, Carl Czerny is practically the Abraham of Western pianism, influencing generations of pianists, and transmitting Beethoven’s charisma forward through time like an apostolic succession:

He was not above criticism even if his etudes stand out from the likes of similar works by Hanon – Robert Schumann accused him of being unimaginative – but he was greatly admired, and not just by his students.  Stravinsky is on the record as expressing his admiration, and for more than his pedagogy:

“As to Czerny, I have been appreciating the full-blooded musician in him more than the remarkable pedagogue.”

Claude Debussy, too, paid homage to Czerny in his own piano etudes:

His name has become synonymous with the essence of the etude to many musicians in the Western tradition, so prolific and admired was he in their production.  One could easily, and without exaggeration, call Czerny the father of the etude, and not just of those for the performer, but also of the rich and interesting variety in which composers exercised their craft.

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Music for Going to Sleep, Day 5 – Lullaby of the Firebird by Igor Stravinsky

This week’s theme is…Music for going to sleep!  We undergo the nearly mystical process of going to sleep every single day, even though we never truly understand the experience.  In spite of recent scientific methods of illuminating the activity it remains incomprehensible to us.  This has made fertile ground for musicians who attempt to represent or otherwise comment on the mysterious transformation from waking to sleep.  This week we explore some of these works by composers who saw fit to represent our daily, universal journey across the veil of consciousness.

Music for Going to Sleep, Day 5 – Lullaby of the Firebird by Igor Stravinsky

In 1847 the French choreographer and dance master Marius Petipa emigrated to St. Petersberg.  If not at first, he obviously became content to settle there, eventually assuming directorship of the Russian Imperial ballet in 1869.  

Under Petipa’s directorship the Russians found their inner Gallic buoyancy, defying gravity in a long series of ballets that elevated the nation’s choreographed art to a bona-fide golden age.  Today it is Tchaikovsky’s collaborations with Petipa – The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty – that are the best known , but he was far from the only composer to be commissioned by the brilliant and uncompromising French choreographer.  Here is a post about the fruit of another such collaboration.  As one might expect, it was the more “academic” Russian composers whose music seemed to provide the most natural soundtrack to the floating gestures of classic French Ballet, and not the raw creations of the scrappy nationalists who uttered the nation’s first notable art music.  But it certainly makes sense; “lighter-than-air” is not at all the first description that springs to mind when considering the music of Mussorgsky, Borodin, and even Rimsky-Korsakov.

But it was Rimsky-Korsakov, at first one of Balakirev’s nationalists, who provided an unexpected link between Petipa’s Franco-Russian ballets and those of the next great impresario, Sergei Diaghilev.  Diaghilev, something of Petipa’s inversion, had emigrated from his native land of Russia to Paris and set up shop in 1908, just four years after the premiere of Petipa’s final ballet in St. Petersberg, with the aim to exhibit exotic and sensational examples of Russian art and music to the Parisian public.  While Petipa was interested in the most exquisite, uncontroversial and finely-hewn musical expressions to fit his immaculate choreography, Diaghilev understood he would find the greatest success in challenging the foppish Parisians with the primal, coarse folk influences of the recent Russian nationalists.  For more on Russian Nationalism, see this post.  So his presentation heavily favored music of Balakirev’s Mighty Five.  Borodin and Mussorgsky would have been ill-suited to Petipa’s impeccable grace, but the Parisians of the 1900s found the style fascinating, barbaric and exotic.  He did not program them exclusively, also incorporating works by the likes of Tchaikovsky and Glazunov, as well as Schumann and Chopin.  But it was probably a particularly successful staging of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, including the poetic and savage Polovetsian Dances, able to stand on their own as a short balletic show, that turned Diaghilev onto the potential of presenting original Russian-themed ballets to the Parisians, and so his enterprise morphed in the Ballets Ruses.

 

The Ballets Ruses started to make true history in 1910 with the first ballet of an, at that point, unknown composer.  The ballet was The Firebird and the 28 year old composer was Igor Stravinsky.  It almost didn’t happen that way: Stravinsky was actually Diaghilev’s second choice after another Russian, Anatoly Lyadov.  

Lyadov is something of a cautionary tale, at least according to the legends, some of which are most certainly spurious.  But his reputation seems to precede him, even to this day.  Much beloved by his fellow Russian musicians and students, and in possession of a high level of technical skill, his unreliability and lack of follow-through constantly interfered with his professional success.  For this reason he seemed to occupy an uncomfortable limbo between the fancy-free world of Balakirev’s nationalists and the rigorous, albeit not always imaginative, world of the Russian academics.  He failed to produce the score requested by Diaghilev, who then moved on the young Stravinsky whose orchestral Fireworks, written just a couple years earlier as a wedding gift to Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter, had made an impression on the impresario.

 

 

Some say that Stravinsky’s Fireworks feels like an imitation of his most important teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, and if you listen closely you may hear echos of the French Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the middle.  But you can hear his spiky self starting to emerge.  Still, nothing Stravinsky had written up to this point exhibited maturity.  The Firebird was his first score to move seriously in that direction.  Stravinsky delivered, and the ballet premiered in 1910 to considerable critical and public acclaim.  Stravinsky, as Diaghilev had predicted shortly before the first performance, became an instant celebrity, just beginning to make his manifold contributions to twentieth century music, and he was retained as the primary composer of the Ballets Russes, providing scores for the next year’s Petrushka and 1913’s scandal, The Rite of Spring, which is a long and interesting story for another day.  While The Firebird is not a fully mature work from Stravinsky either, it shows him well on his way, and the next two ballet scores demonstrate the realization of his distinctive voice.

Harold Schonberg calls Igor Stravinsky a “chameleon”.  He had this slick way of imitating his models, all the while filtering them through his own nature.  Had he studied with Tchaikovsky or Glazunov, both of whom he was well aware, and influences of whom managed to seep into his concoction, he may have ended up writing lyrical, mellifluous, sparkling works for Petipa and the Imperial Ballet, but Rimsky-Korsakov’s strong nationalistic influence ensured that Stravinsky would be better-suited to accompany Diaghilev’s exotic, sensational Ballets Russes, singing (or screaming) forth the primal and unpolished voice of evocative Russian legends, like Firebirds, rich with folk song.

The tranquil lullaby comes at the climax of the ballet, its story an ingenious melding of two Russian folk tales, the leprachaun-ish firebird and the immortal ogre Koshai, who is a bit hard to get along with (Baba Yaga is sometimes known to make an appearance in the retelling; Russian folktales are like Lego bricks – quite interconnectable), during which the firebird lulls the ogre to sleep and then directs the hero, Prince Ivan, to break the magic egg which holds the ogre’s soul, thereby rendering him mortal.  You can hear this dramatic development during the jagged fanfares and low-string rumblings that come immediately after the lullaby.  The very Russian theme is lazily spun out by the bassoon, a favorite instrument to present Russian folk song melodies by both Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, amidst very Impressionist-sounding colors of the strings and harp.  The Firebird, while not sung in Stravinsky’s most fully-developed voice, is the most Debussy-colored score he ever wrote, and for that reason alone is worth hearing.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes represents a fitting culmination of the long, symbiotic history between Russian music and French dance.  Had Lyadov delivered his version of Firebird, and Stravinsky either found a different vehicle for his talents, or not found one at all, we probably would not have heard of it very much.  But it has become one of those supporting characters of music history, incubating the art of a most significant figure of recent history, Igor Stravinsky, who proceeded from his work with the company to shape the style of the twentieth century through his music and writings at every point in his life.

—

Would you like this featured track in your own personal collection to listen to anytime you want?  Support the Smart and Soulful Blog by purchasing it here:

Or purchase the whole album, an exceptional value, here:

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!