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 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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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 1 – Journey to the Center of the Earth by Bernard Herrmann

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 1 – Journey to the Center of the Earth by Bernard Herrmann

 

Music is a mysterious and wonderful thing, isn’t it?  If you don’t believe me, spend some time contemplating where the definition of music begins and ends.  This is the domain of philosophers and aestheticians who of course study and ponder these matters in a disciplined and systematic way, but most of us come up against these questions at least occasionally in some form over the course of our day-to-day thoughts and judgments.  I might boil the question down to a spectrum that looks like this:

 

NOISE ——————–MUSIC ——————– SPEECH

 

This is a bit simplistic, but it will move us in the direction of considering music’s nature.  If sound is disorganized and without clear intention, we tend to call it “noise”.  When a critic calls music mere noise, it is because he has not discerned enough organization to cross the threshold between them (whether the failure is on the part of the listener or the musician remains a matter of spirited and sometimes heated philosophical debate).  You can read more about a musician who delighted in blurring the definition of this threshold in this post.  On the other side of the spectrum we encounter the question of which characteristics distinguish music from speech.  Have you ever considered this?  Here are a couple items to show you how blurry that distinction can be:

 

You may also wish to see this post.  So, obviously speech and language are very intimately connected, and a discrete point of difference is probably not really possible to discern.  You can further muddy these waters by considering tonal languages, of which Chinese is probably the most famous example.  In Chinese, you can change the meanings of words and syllables by speaking them at different pitches.  How could you possibly point to a clear separation between speech and music in light of that?  Still, philosophers of music try, and everyone acts as such a philosopher at some point.  It is probably a valuable exercise simply to stimulate deeper thought about art, its possibilities, applications, and techniques.

What is clear is that music (however it is defined), like speech, is a human birthright.  I haven’t done exhaustive research to this end, but I would speculate that in at least 9 out of 10 cultures (if not 10 out of 10) you would discover an original musical tradition of some sort, that is a form of organized sound that is clearly distinct in some way from their manner of speech.  In most of these cultures you will also find tools designed to create elements of this music.  We call these tools “musical instruments”.  The word instrument is probably used in this context more than all of its others, to the point that the musical ones are those which most people think of first upon hearing that word, even though there exist instruments for a wide variety of technical purposes, from surgery, to flight, to carpentry, to food preparation.  An instrument is simply a refined and delicate tool designed for the purpose of executing a task to a high level of precision.  Musical instruments are such tools that allow humans’ innate musicality to be expressed through a variety of timbres and approaches.  We can blur the distinction between “musical instrument” and “human body” in considering the sonic capabilities of our larynxes, hands, feet, tongues, lips, fingers, and parts.

Due to our acculturation we tend to think of musical instruments as a firmly set palette of colors, shapes, and mechanical operations – ask anyone in the West to name some musical instruments and they will almost automatically list some of the instruments associated with our traditions of rock or classical music: violins, pianos, drums, clarinets, trumpets, guitars, etc.  But a musical instrument, itself, is an incredibly broad category with essentially infinite potential for variety.  Those that have crystallized and remained in common use, such as those in the previous list, have demonstrated an extraordinary combination of ease of operation, ergonomics, effective projection, flexibility of musical expression, pleasing timbre, and technological innovation.  Musical instruments are always being created, innovated, improved, refined, and retired.  There will always be new musical instruments, and improvements to existing ones, and it is the job of performers and composers to stay abreast of these changes in order to apply them to their work.

The scholarly study of musical instruments is called organology.  It is not the most widely-known discipline outside of the academy, but it is illuminating and often fun to engage with.  It reveals to its students the inherent flexibility and infinite variety within the medium.  Musical instruments are really just some combination of acoustic stimulus, amplification and (sometimes) pitch control.  That’s an almost absurd reduction, and of course it’s the nuances and details that make individual instruments interesting enduring, but when you come right down to it, that’s the essence of a musical instrument.  We tend to think of them in those neat, tidy categories given the families of the Western symphony orchestra, but it has not always been so cut-and-dry, and we can probably expect some kind of shift again in the near future.  

There are brass instruments, made of shiny metal, and using a solid, detachable, cup or cone-shaped mouthpiece into which the player buzzes their lips to stimulate the sound.  The pitch is controlled by the embouchure which kicks the pitch up through the harmonic series of the tube’s fundamental frequency, and also through a system of valves which changes the length of the tube and, consequently, its fundamental frequency.  And then there are woodwind instruments, played (usually) by a vibrating reed or two, thereby exciting a column of air within a wooden tube, the harmonics of which are filtered via a system of holes and keys.

We tend to think of those two families of instruments as discrete and separate, but there have been instruments which hybridize the two systems and which seem strange to our sensibilities, shaped, by decades of orchestral standardization.  A notable example is called the serpent.  Developed in the late 1500s to bolster the volume of monks’ chanting, the curious serpent quite resembles its name, with a curved tube that snakes to and fro.

 

Visually and aurally, it may strike us as a musical platypus, neither fish nor fowl.  One could say that it is half brass, given its brass-like mouthpiece, and half woodwind, given the wood that forms its tube and the system of holes and keys with which the player controls the pitch.  Sonically as well it exhibits elements of both families, like a cross between the trombone and bassoon (and maybe a little shofar thrown in, if you know what that is):

 

The mid-low range of much of the orchestral music that we know from the eighteenth and nineteenth century was once played on instruments like the serpent, although it is no longer.  But some recent composers have enjoyed unearthing and employing sonic resources like the serpent from the recesses of the distant past.  A great example is Bernard Hermann’s colorful and evocative score from “Journey to the Center of the Earth” of 1959.  Hermann mixes the raw, earthy color of the serpent in with the lower palette of this score, yielding some hair-raising orchestral sonorities:

 

 
Like speech, music is a human birthright.  And mankind has shown a propensity to make music with objects of all kinds.  We can’t help it because it seems to be our very nature.  The study of musical instruments reveals a never-ending set of possibilities to this end, limited only by human imagination and ingenuity.  While we tend to think of musical instruments in highly segmented categories from our current 21st century vantage point, deeply informed by the dominance of the symphony orchestra and rock band, there are fascinating colors to be found and fascinating music to be made between the largely arbitrary boundaries of these categories.  The serpent, now mostly forgotten, is an example of this, ripe with otherworldly colors ideal for invoking the colors of other worlds.

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Music About Animals, Day 4 – “All the Pretty Little Horses” from Old American Songs by Aaron Copland

This week’s theme is…Music About Animals!  Our animated companions on Earth, animals have been our friends, food, foes, and fascination.  They constantly populate the art of humans, from literature to sculpture, poetry to music.  This week we listen to music inspired in some way by animals.

Music About Animals, Day 4 – “All the Pretty Little Horses“ from Old American Songs by Aaron Copland

When J.S. Bach came on the musical scene in Northern Germany, he did so at a time during which there was a significant and noble treasury of songs in the cultural vocabulary, the Lutheran hymnody.  One of Martin Luther’s many reforms implemented during the sweep of the Protestant Reformation, the musical aspect of his vision, is often overlooked even in detailed accounts of his life’s work and descriptions of the changes he implemented and inspired.  But for Luther, the music of Christian worship was intimately related to the manner in which the congregation participated in the music.  Over the course of about 500 years the music of the Church had evolved from floating, single lines of Gregorian Chant to a dense, florid, tightly-woven polyphony for many parts.  It was beautiful, but difficult to understand.  Even though all of the words were related to theology, most listeners would have found the words almost impossible to discern, even if they could understand the Latin.  Also, its performance was so challenging that only trained experts could execute it to the level it deserved and demanded, and so the congregation ended up just listening to the liturgy and music.  There are still churches in which the mass is very much like this – some Catholics prefer the pre-Vatican II style of liturgy, which they find calming and prayerful.  But most churches have been affected by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which was in turn influenced by Luther’s reforms.

To Luther, music was an essential component of a Christian’s relationship with God, and not just listening, but singing.  It was unacceptable that so many Christians only heard beautiful music, but took no part in making it themselves.  Luther’s solution was the chorale, a simple, easily-sung, single line of melody in multiple verses, with clever poetic texts about theological tenets, set in the vernacular, the language that the congregants spoke on a daily basis.  Luther wrote many of these chorales himself, but there were other musicians sympathetic to his cause who also contributed examples to the treasury of Lutheran chorales.  His most famous chorale is A Mighty Fortress is our God:

 

Ironically, it didn’t take long for the Lutheran chorales, so carefully designed to be simple and direct, to undergo a process of musical development similar to that undergone by Gregorian Chant.  Musicians in the Lutheran Church, being creative artists, and so always looking for opportunities to leave the world a little more beautiful than they found it, quickly began using the chorales as the basis for more elaborate polyphonic musical works, somewhat akin to Catholic polyphony.  It’s not exactly the same, but some musical settings became very elaborate.  Still, they are animated by a different spirit than Renaissance polyphony, always set in the vernacular, and touching on a much wider swath of theological issues and feelings.  The pinnacle of the art of using Lutheran chorales as the basis for complex music is without question the church cantatas of Bach (see this post).  The chorales run through them like thick, sturdy fibers in a tapestry.  If you are listening to a Bach cantata, chances are it will not be long before you hear a chorale.  They stick out a bit, generally sung or played in long, broad note values over the busy figuration of the rest of the ensemble, which is essentially playing its own piece of music, complete even without the chorale.  Bach was transcendentally good at incorporating chorale tunes into beautifully-crafted works of monumental art.  Here’s a great example, a movement from Bach’s cantata based on A Mighty Fortress is our God:

 

The strings begin with a chugging motive, accompanying the bass aria, and then the soprano and oboe chime in with the chorale tune, almost out of nowhere, but weaving it into the texture with grace and beauty.  And yet, the strings and bass singer could have continued without the chorale and it would have sounded complete.  Bach was certainly not the only one to do this kind of thing with his musical heritage.  Here is Arthur Sullivan, the composer of all those comic operettas to libretti by William Gilbert, embedding the stirring English hymn O God Our Help In Ages Past within the busy texture of his Festival Te Deum.  Sullivan weaves the hymn into an orchestral texture featuring a very proper sounding British march:

 

Many composers have looked to the treasuries of hymns and folksongs within their heritage for material to animate their music.  In the middle of the twentieth century, Aaron Copland looked to the hodgepodge of songs which formed the body of American folk songs for inspiration.  His Old American Songs, composed in the early 1950s, draw from lullabies, minstrel songs, revival songs, hymn tunes, shaker songs, and more to populate two rich and wonderful collections of short songs for solo singer and orchestra.  Copland doesn’t so much weave the melodies into new compositions as provide elaborate and colorful orchestral clothing.  But his arrangements add considerable richness, enhancing the feeling and message of each song, while managing to stay true to their authentic spirits.  I think my favorite song from either collection is Zion’s Walls, a song of the Great Awakening, which Copland calls a revival song.  Here it is as it would have been originally sung by a religious congregation:

 

Now here is Copland’s version, broad, sweeping, filled with the bold spirit of America:

 

In this setting, Copland pulls out motives and melodies, combining them polyphonically, shading with imaginative orchestration, and carefully controlling the energy level for well-designed ebbs and flows, all of which adds up to a stirring rendition indeed.

Another lovely song from Copland’s collection of Old American Songs is a lullaby called All the Pretty Little Horses.  Here is typical performance of that song:

 

Copland brings it to life, reflecting the various moods of the song’s different phrases and, rather than staying at just one tempo, crafts a chugging accompaniment for the list of horse breeds, before returning to the original lullaby mood with a pensive, bittersweet arc of sighing strings.  Copland’s imaginative control of so many musical elements ensures that we hear all of these artifacts of Americana filtered through the musical sensibilities of a genius, and they are all the better for it.

 

So many cultures have their treasuries of folk music, and clever and expressive composers always have and always will delight in using those materials within their finely-wrought works.  The simplicity and sweetness of the folk traditions soothes our souls like a rich cream amidst the tangy flavors of learned compositional technique, always a perfectly tasty combination.

 

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Get Your Exercise, Day 1 – Tremolo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk

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 1 – Tremolo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk

If you ever watch the television show House, then you are somewhat familiar with the art and science of the medical investigator, a sort of combination of medicine and detective work focused on difficult pathological puzzles in order to get to the bottom of what is going on.  One of history’s most significant medical investigators is the American Walter Reed.  If you ever hear stories about medicine in the American armed forces, chances are you that you have heard his name before.

Walter Reed, one of history’s most significant medical investigators

The reason for this is that he is the namesake of a major hospital in Washington D.C., and also of a huge army hospital.  The first one was in Washington D.C. and operated between 1977 and its closing in 2011 when it was reopened in a different form in Bethesda, Maryland.  Today, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center combines the medical wings of both the United States Army and Navy into one extensive program inhabiting an enormous campus, offering treatment to military personnel, American presidents, and members of congress:

Walter Reed’s most important contribution to the history of pathology was his discovery of how yellow fever is transmitted.  In 1896 he investigated an outbreak among US army officers in Washington D.C.  It was thought by some that the disease was contracted by drinking the water of the Potomac River, but Reed’s investigation pointed to transmission by mosquitoes found along the swampy trails that many of the infected officers frequented at night.  (House could have totally done a period episode where he dreams that he is Walter Reed – wouldn’t that have been fun?!  I think it would have…)  This discovery largely secured Reed’s reputation and continued success; he continued to research yellow fever and other diseases until his death, less than 10 years later.  Reed’s discovery was a critical part of successfully preventing and eradicating yellow fever in the civilized world.  Germ theory was just starting to be taken seriously at this time and the medical industry was on the brink of a golden age of epidemiology.  Without Reed’s work, it is quite probable that the Panama Canal (see this post) would have remained unfinished as many workers in the tropical climate succumbed to the ravages of the disease.

Had Reed lived and worked half a century earlier we may very well speak differently of a certain American pianist and composer who succumbed to yellow fever, or whose death was at least certainly hastened from his contracting it.  The pianist is the New Orleans born Louis Moreau Gottschalk.  He spent a considerable part of his career in tropical climates like Brazil and Puerto Rico, so it should not be altogether surprising that he would have contracted tropical diseases like yellow fever, among others.  Gottschalk’s death cut his life and career short – he died at 40 – and it would be interesting to know what he would have accomplished had he had an additional 20 or 30 years.  He had such a promising start, but quickly faded into insignificance due to the shallowness of his output.  Would he have found a more substantial voice over the coming decades?  It’s hard to say.

And make no mistake – his music is charming and rambunctious.  Gottschalk was a rare bird, and his influences are as checkered as his heritage, truly a musical creole, and the music that resulted from this is just a little bit unlike anything else in the Western classical canon.  Born to a Jewish father and a “mulatto” mother – that’s not so politically correct anymore, even “creole” is probably a stretch – in New Orleans.  A prodigious talent (he made his public debut as a pianist at age 11), Gottschalk fought against the prejudices of the musical establishment of Paris, then a mecca for virtuoso pianists, to gain admission into their world.  The powers that were looked down upon the infant nation, skeptical of the possibility that a country occupied as it was with exploration and expansion could have the resources and patience to raise artists worthy of their hallowed tradition.  But eventually Gottschalk was able to massage his connections and gain admission to the piano studios of Charles Halle and then Camille Stamaty.  A fellow pupil in Gottschalk’s class under Stamaty was an even younger prodigy named Camille Saint-Saens (see this post and this one).

Once Gottschalk got his foothold into the world of Parisian virtuosity and began to play his original works, he found his champions, including Chopin (see this post) and Berlioz (see this post, this one, and this one).  Critics compared him to Liszt (see this post) and predicted a rosy future for the young virtuoso.  European audiences were fascinated by Gottschalk’s flashy concert works, the only ones to come out of Paris infused with the exotic plantation songs of New Orleans and the infectious, pre-jazz polyrhythms of the Caribbean.  One of his enduring works from around this time is a most entertaining keyboard original called The Banjo.  Over the course of its brief 4 minutes, the pianist imitates banjo strumming patterns deployed by African American pickers, and also quotes Stephen Foster, America’s beloved minstrel!  The Banjo is immediately irresistible and evocative of Southern American culture:

 

After his time in Europe, Gottschalk would not sit still.  It is difficult to get a sense of whether he had any kind of personal mission; he essentially became itinerant.  He toured extensively throughout the United States and the West Indies, including a visit to the rich musical culture emerging in the newly founded San Francisco (see this post).  A San Francisco newspaper credited him with having traveled 95,000 miles by rail and giving 1,000 concerts.  His touring pace was grueling during these years.  Eventually he succumbed to the steamy climate and relaxed lifestyle of the tropics, living in Cuba and then Brazil.

Given the such climates, it is natural that Gottschalk would have contracted tropical diseases, like yellow fever.  The story of his death is often told, and probably romanticized a bit.  In December of 1869, at the age of 40, he contracted a bout of yellow fever.  The disease is not inevitably fatal, but it seems to have heralded the beginning of the end for Gottschalk.  During his final recital he collapsed during one of his original works, called Morte!!  Actually, this is not entirely true – he collapsed during the next one, a ferociously challenging concert etude called Tremolo:

 

But Morte!! Makes a better story 🙂  It was not the yellow fever that ultimately killed Gottschalk.  The general consensus is an infection like peritonitis, often the result of a burst appendix, and the same thing that Walter Reed succumbed to.
Had Walter Reed pulled his Gregory House a few decades prior, perhaps Gottschalk would enjoy a more substantial legacy, possibly becoming America’s first true creative genius.  Toward the end of his life he was starting to move in that direction, promising to deepen beyond the glittery but superficial manner of his virtuoso piano output.  As such, America would have to wait a bit longer for its first great composers, in spite of efforts by others to stimulate a golden age (see this post).  Sometimes circumstances play out as they do and it’s just not meant to be.  Still, Gottschalk is a fascinating story, a true original in the histories of both Europe and the Americas.

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Sublime Stillness, Day 4 – The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives

This week’s theme is…Sublime Stillness!  The mysterious art we call music refers merely to frequencies that fill the air around us, controlled in a specific way by its performers.  Technically this may be true, but we sense feelings and motions of intense clarity.  Sometimes the incredibly high density of musical events creates furious, busy textures.  And at other times achingly long-breathed sustained notes create a sublime impression of meditative stillness that seems to suspend time itself.  This week we look at some examples of this.

Sublime Stillness, Day 4 – The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives

 

One aspect of getting to know music that always astounds me is the value of repeated listenings.  The study of music history sometimes makes reference to the idea of “music literature”, which compares musical creation to the comparable art of crafting profound statements out of words.  I recently had a talk with an adult music theory student of mine who also takes organ lessons; he said that sometimes his friends can’t understand why a musician would devote so much time to analyzing, understanding and practicing one line of music that barely lasts 10 seconds.  What his friends don’t understand is that a great musical mind can pack even a brief passage full of incredible events and unexpected relationships.  Just as we sometimes need to repeatedly read a passage from Chaucer, Aristotle or Melville to draw out all of the layers of meaning and implications for the human condition, we must study, practice, perform and listen to great music to the same end.  Phenomenal minds have much to teach us, and some people do so by leaving their thoughts encoded into this mysterious language that we call music.  When enough people agree that a musical utterance is profound for some reason, we tend to call that music “great”; and if a composer produces enough of this kind of utterances and does so consistently, we tend to call that composer “great”.  The “great” composers and their “great” music form the study of what is called music history or music literature, and there is abundant treasure to found there.

I had a sense of this years ago, and sought to collect and listen to as many of the great classics as I could starting from a very young age.  I think that effort was marked by a certain immaturity, as I would often count the act of simply occupying the same room as the stereo while a compact disc played to the end as a listening.  But I realize now that it wasn’t necessarily; some music I listened to very attentively, but for much of it my mind was truly elsewhere, reading something, playing a computer game, or engaging in some other distraction.  Really listening to something is an all-consuming activity which requires 100% of your attention.  And when you are able to give that much, music that is really well-written, imaginative, and profound will always reward you somehow.

But it doesn’t often stop there.  If a great piece of music is really nourishing, it will reward repeated listenings.  Do you have a song, film, book, poem, restaurant, painting, or natural spot that you can revisit again and again, rewarded each time with a feeling of pleasure or a new insight into what makes it the wonder that it is?  Or maybe you more clearly discern the underlying structure with each new exposure, gaining appreciation for the brilliance of its construction.  All of these are the benefits of repeated exposure to art.

And people grow, mature, change.  If you listen to a piece of music now, and then listen 10 years later, it may as well be a different piece given how much different your experience will be in light of your experiences and education which have transformed you in the interim.  I have musical recordings that I listened to once in high school, but never since.  I can’t count the number of times that I have revisited something I listened to a decade ago to be astounded by some aspect I either didn’t notice, didn’t appreciate, or simply didn’t have the cognitive framework to understand back then.

Want to try an exercise in repeated listening with me?  Fantastic!  We’re going to listen to a very famous piece by the American Composer, Charles Ives (for more about Ives, see this post).  It’s called The Unanswered Question.  It lasts about five minutes and this particular video shows the score so you can follow along if you want:

 

What are your initial impressions?  Kind of bizarre, right?  If you know anything about Ives, then you know to expect the unexpected, and I would say this certainly delivers.  You were probably struck by the arresting stillness of the pervading string instruments, and the odd angularity of the trumpet and woodwinds.  Okay, let’s listen again…

It’s a little clearer now, right?  Starting to become a little more than a puzzling, shapeless mass of sound.  Did you notice that the trumpet has discreet entrances, answered by the woodwinds every time?  Great!  Good listening.  Let’s listen again…

At this point perhaps you have realized that the trumpet plays essentially the same motive every time it enters, and the response of the woodwinds, while similar each time, becomes more agitated and frenetic with each passing iteration.  And have you started to discern the texture of the strings with more clarity?  Okay, one more time…

At this point perhaps you have noticed that the trumpet plays 5 pitches in each motive, some ending on one note, and some on another, always completing almost half a tone row, but before they were cool.  Also, is the harmony of the string chorale becoming clearer to you?  Are you starting to notice a cohesiveness behind all of this, so that it doesn’t feel so disjointed and alien?  In my experience, Ives takes a few listens, but it almost always happens.  With literature of any sort you often have to trust your teacher, that there is deep value beneath the surface, waiting to be uncovered with enough investigation, just as so many prior appreciators have done.

But it’s always a little odd, isn’t it?  And it was written during the first decade of the twentieth century, half a world away from the place where you would expect musical experiments of this nature, although even these would only come a little bit later, most especially after the First World War.  That Ives was ahead of his time is well-known, but I think it is fascinating how warm his musical language actually is if you listen a little bit past the surface which is often so off-putting at first.

What is the “unanswered question”?  Naturally, it’s a little rhetorical.  But the trumpet insists on asking, even if the woodwinds’ answer fails to satisfy and becomes too stridently dogmatic.  The strings just play on, like a deistic universe, containing, but not ever really interacting with the questioner or its unsatisfying answers.  Was Ives searching for meaning himself in spite of living through America’s most stable years, and prospering himself?

Ives is one of those composers who essentially demands repeated listenings to even begin to make sense.  But so many others demand repeated listenings to unearth their full richness.  Whatever the nature, great literature, musical or otherwise, always rewards repeated exposure, within minutes, or over the course of a lifetime.

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Mountains, Day 3 – Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain” by Alan Hovhannes

This week’s theme is…Mountains! The stoic, majestic guardians of Earth’s geography, mountains have long inspired musicians with their monumental presence.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Mountains, Day 3 – Symphony No. 2, “Mysterious Mountain” by Alan Hovhannes

I once had a composition teacher who told me, and his other students, to write a lot of music and to write it fast.  The philosophy behind that instruction is that you will make your mistakes quickly, learn from them, and move on to the next thing, where you will make more mistakes.  And so, your technique will be refined continually and you can expect to grow rapidly and perpetually.  This teacher tended to notice that many composers today do not write that quickly and so do not grow as much as they could since they don’t make mistakes fast enough.  I think that’s probably true, in some approaches at least, although certain commercial approaches necessitate writing quickly, particularly producing music for film and television scores.  The rate at which John Williams, for example, is able to turn out a new score is astounding, particularly given the quality of the music.

Because of the advice of this teacher it is perhaps true that I wrote more and faster than I would have otherwise, but I don’t think I really ever hit my stride, and I think many of the pieces I completed were too badly flawed to operate within the spirit of that advice.  I think he meant that, whatever you produce, you should do it often, quickly, and to a high level of perfection.  And it is true that it is easy for composers today to produce less than they are really capable of.  It seems to be a lost art to produce music at the rate and quality of the common practice masters.  But maybe not entirely.  Although it is surprising, it is still possible to find an extraordinarily prolific modern composer from time to time.  One such composer lived until 15 years ago, and his name was Alan Hovhaness.

I wish I could have met Alan Hovhannes, had coffee and cake with him at one of the little cafes where he liked to write.  He died just as I was starting my professional music career, beginning my undergraduate degree, and I doubt I would have known his name at the time.  But he left 434 opus numbers (for more about the opus system see this post) – I’ve never heard of a composer with that many numbered opuses – and 67 symphonies – I’ve never heard of anyone besides Haydn who even came close to that (for more about Haydn’s rate of symphonic production, see this post).  And the gentle, whimsical character that emanates from the films of him belies a ruthless self-criticism; whenever a formative teacher or mentor would criticize his craft he would destroy reams of previous scores.  So his actual production is speculated to be much closer to the 1,000 mark, much like Johann Sebastian Bach.  Like the masters of old, we must be content to live with the partial story of Alan Hovhaness’ working history, surrendering much of it to the fog of history.

Gustav Mahler once described Anton Bruckner as “half simpleton, half god”.  That description has always made me smile; given Bruckner’s music, and what I’ve read about him, it seems incredibly apt.  Bruckner, as I understand, came across personally as pious, timid and humble; but his music speaks with an awe-inspiring power at all levels, from the macro to the micro.  Hovahness, I think, cries for his own summary a la Mahler.  What what his halves be?  I would submit “half everyman, half mystic”.

Everyman for his soft-spoken, unassuming kindness, which often found him composing in diners sitting next to bemused truckers.  Everyman for his supreme approachability.  Everyman for his slight, tender meekness.  And mystic for his attraction to psychics and the spirit world.  Mystic for his odd, off putting comments about past lives and fantastic, surreal images.  Mystic for the connection to the angels he claimed to sense when he composed.

Hovhaness described his state while composing, which he did easily and fluidly while sitting at desks or tables with symphony after symphony gracefully issuing from his pen, almost as a form of communion with the spirit world, a delicate place of balance which could neither be forced nor left unattended.  And as long as he was there the music came.  It was a mystical music, warm and magical, radiating with the mysterious murmur of dreamscapes and myths.  Hovhannes’ music is so often soaked in blurred, hazy colors, animated by slow, circular melodies.  His ouevre seems to drift to listeners from beyond a foggy veil, creating a still, tranquil and ecstatic space.

And Hovhannes felt a deep connection to nature, particularly mountains.  They were his main inspiration and he moved from Boston to Seattle to be in their presence daily.  He described mountains as “pyramids, between two worlds, that of the earth and that of the gods”.  Images of mountains abound in Hovannes’ extensive catalog, dotting it like the peaks of a range, including his best-known work, the Second Symphony, Opus 132, subtitled Mysterious Mountain.

Although this was early in his output of symphonies, it remains Hovannes’ best-known and most often-performed work, still the best known of his more than sixty symphonies.  The title was almost an afterthought, encouraged by Leopold Stokowski to make it more marketable, but it fits the three-movement odyssey, which feels like a spiritual voyage upon the titular mountain.  The outer movement of the symphony glow with enchanting, placid colors.  The middle movement is a vigorous, busy fugue which starts out very much like a familiar hymn:

 

Hovhaness was American-born, but early in his life found himself drawn to the Armenian heritage of his father.  He used this influence with its exotic, modal melodies to craft music unlike any other American composer.  It is true that Copland and Gershwin have won the American music title, but Hovhannes has his devoted followers, and they know they beauty of his mystical atmosphere.  I suspect that one such Hovhannes fan was the prolific and masterful film composer Jerry Goldsmith.  If you listen to the final movement of Mysterious Mountain with its oddly-modulating chorales here…

 

…and then listen to this stunning excerpt from Goldsmith’s score for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier here…

 

…I bet you will note a resemblance.  Hovhannes is still with us, even if other American composers are more readily named before him.  This half-everyman, half-mystic left a bewitching legacy which still resonates deeply within the American subconscious.

 

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Stormy Scherzi, Day 3 – Scherzo for X-Wings from The Force Awakens by John Williams

This week’s theme is…Stormy Scherzi!  A scherzo is traditionally defined as a “musical joke”, that is, a light-hearted movement that lacks the weight of a good sonata form essay.  And often that’s how they feel.  But, have you ever listened to a “scherzo” that seemed to fit the description of a musical joke, but darkly?  Some scherzi paradoxically combine lightness with intensely determined feelings, sometimes even bordering on malice and despair.  This week we examine some such examples.

Stormy Scherzi, Day 3 – Scherzo for X-Wings from The Force Awakens by John Williams

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers regarding elements of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  If you have not yet seen the film and wish to have a fresh experience when you do, I would advise waiting until you have to read this post.

If you have been at all curious about my reaction to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, then today is your lucky day!  I can’t imagine why you would, but maybe that comment demonstrates unwarranted self-effacement.  I suppose my opinion is as valid as anyone’s.  So here goes.  I’ll start with my general experience of the Star Wars franchise…

I was born in the early 1980s, and my dad had a way of showing me trendy movies that I may not have been psychologically mature enough to process.  I remember being fed a diet of Star Wars and Top Gun, all prior to the age of 6, definitely too young for Top Gun and probably too early for Star Wars.  The earliest memories of my experience with Star Wars are two-fold: one is being terrified of Ponda Baba’s severed arm in the Cantina scene in A New Hope…

…and the other is entering a movie theater to see a shot of C-3PO and R2D2 framed by the trees of Endor in Return of the Jedi.  Between the islands of that memory archipelago are certainly abundant other experiences, but they have since been covered by the ocean of age.  Those two isolated images are my earliest memories of Star Wars.

About a decade or so later my brother and I began to take an interest in the film franchise, fueled largely by the effusive praise of a teenage babysitter.  This was around the time that the films were remastered and re-released on VHS, including extensive interviews between George Lucas and Leonard Maltin which preceded the films, and ended up being fast forwarded through rather often:

And that was mostly how we watched them during my teenage years.  We enjoyed them, and were definitely fans, although not fanatically so (insert your interpretation of “fanatical” here).

And then the prequels came out in the early 2000s.  I retain strong memories of two qualities of that whole experience: one was that I was underwhelmed by the films in general, especially for their acting, the cold CGI, and also the materialistic shattering of the mystery of the Force (midi-chlorians and all that), and the other is being struck by how consistent John Williams’ musical score felt with the original trilogy (Dual of the Fates aside; I wasn’t crazy about that number).  I remember having discussions with fellow musicians, and probably reading articles, that expressed sentiments to the effect of “George Lucas seems to have lost something, but John Williams still has it!”  That seemed about right to me.  I may revisit the prequel trilogy in the coming months if I get a chance, just to see if there is any room for re-evaluation, but I wager that most people can agree that Williams provided a crucial glue to mesh the two trilogies in spite of the inconsistencies many members of the audience noted in other aspects of the film making.

John Williams’ work in all of the scores of the Star Wars canon is often compared to the orchestral music of Wagner’s Ring tetralogy, a thick, overarching, blanket of connective tissue rich with symbolic musical motives associated with characters and philosophical themes which serve to captivate listeners/viewers and reinforce the semiotic interrelatedness of the story and its actors.  For more on Wagner’s artistry see this post and this one.  The comparison is apt – Williams has clearly been a keen student of Wagner’s leitmotiv technique and instinctively knew to apply it to the Star Wars films, even before he was certain that sequels were in the cards.  The difference, I suppose, is that Wagner’s creative vision remained consistent in all aspects of the Ring over the course of the few decades he took to complete it, be it libretto, characterization, dramatic pacing, music, etc.  But in the Star Wars films the consistency of Williams’ music exceeds that of many of the other elements, particularly as you look from trilogy to trilogy, and now beyond.  Whoever ultimately owns the Star Wars brand ought to be very thankful for Williams’ ongoing involvement and the continuity it has helped to facilitate between films.

I would assert that Williams’ contribution is indeed the strongest element of The Force Awakens, just as it is in the prequel trilogy.  I viewed this trailer many times in anticipation of the return to the good ol’ days of the original trilogy that it promised:

 

Even in this brief trailer it is the music that evokes the most powerful response of any of its elements.  After an extended layering of the initial harmonic progression (E: I – iv – N6 – I, or E – Am – F6 – E for all you theory geeks in da house) during which the arguments of the drama are presented, a significant theme first heard in Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back, known as the love theme between Han Solo and Princess Leia, peals forth measuredly and deliberately from violins in their lowest register, just as we see the dogfight between tie fighters and the Millennium Falcon and hear Han Solo, grizzled with age and life’s adventures, affirm the veracity of the legends of the Jedi and the Dark Side.  This was the very moment that sold me on the film and I still remember my internal emotional response as I viewed this trailer for the first time in December of 2015.  In fact, I still respond to it in much the same way now.  After that, we hear two other leitmotivs: the stoic Force theme, first heard in Episode IV, A New Hope, which plays as we catch our first glimpse of a battle-ready Kylo Ren, wielding his distinctive cross-shaped lightsaber, and finally a hushed statement of the Star Wars main theme just as the trailer ends and the title of the film drifts away before us.

Would the trailer be as effective without Williams’ well-placed musical cues?  I’m sure I don’t need to answer that question.  The compelling themes and motives of the Star Wars universe are probably the best tool at its marketers’ disposal.  Even as new characters are added, to varying degrees of success, Williams comes out on top with brilliant themes that manage to sum them up, and this is true of both the prequel trilogy and The Force Awakens.

I was similarly underwhelmed by The Force Awakens as the prequel trilogy, but for different reasons.  I felt, as did many critics, that it more or less told the story of A New Hope and pandered to fans of the original trilogy with heavy-handed references, and quickly became frustrated and disinterested.  But at least the music provided much-needed continuity with the other films.  And Williams even managed to have a little fun with the material.  What a clever touch to include a playful and turbulent “Scherzo for X-Wings” for some of the final dog fighting, rife with contrapuntal maneuvering of the Star Wars Fanfare:

 

 

The title is almost like a packaging, earmarking it as an obvious choice as a self-contained concert number for accomplished bands:

http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.action?itemid=4004661&lid=4&promotion=1014&subsiteid=6&

Does the Scherzo for X-Wings take its place among classic Star Wars set pieces like “Here They Come!” or “The Asteroid Field”?  Hard to say, and only time will tell.  But it is a fine example of the crucial cohesion provided by John Williams’ solid contributions over the course of a decades-long effort to produce a coherent universe of storytelling which has come to be filled with other elements that have fallen short of the original in that regard.  Williams truly speaks to the souls of Star Wars fans; he seems to understand and acknowledge the gravity of the covenant he made with his current and future audience back in 1977 and continues to honor it to this day with his considerable abilities of orchestration and musical characterization.

 

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A Musical High, Day 4 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

This week’s theme is…A Musical High!  Countless music lovers experience a “natural high” from listening to their favorite things.  Music’s ability to change the chemistry of our moods is renowned.  But musicians and other artists have long been associated with less natural highs, and the link between intoxication and creativity is strong, if somewhat ambiguous.  This week we explore music related to the theme of intoxication, or created by musicians who regularly induced that state upon themselves.  Disclaimer: The subject of intoxication as it relates to artistry is complex and ethically fraught; none of the writing on Smart and Soulful is meant to condone intoxication by any substance, legal or otherwise, in the pursuit of creative productivity.  Enjoy your music responsibly!

A Musical High, Day 4 – 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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