Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

Have you ever been to Disneyland?  For as long as I can remember I have had relatives living in Southern California, and so I have had a handful of opportunities.  I even have step grandparents who live in Anaheim, the same city as Disneyland.  I must confess that I have enjoyed my time at Disneyland – I know some people don’t like it.  I also went to Disney World once, although it was a bit more overwhelming.  Disneyland has sort of a small-town charm about it in comparison with its behemoth cousin in Orlando.  One fun story about Disney World though…

We went for a week and stayed in one of the resorts there.  Since we had a few days to kill, we ended up going to the Magic Kingdom a couple times.  One of the times we went must have been a weeknight or some other low-traffic time because there was barely any line for Thunder Mountain, that terrific train roller coaster with all the campy mining town scenery.

It’s a really fun ride and, to our delight, there was hardly any line for it that evening.  Every other experience I’ve ever had with a Disney park saw us waiting at least a half hour to board the high-demand rides, but that night we must have ridden Thunder Mountain at least 5 times.  With a wait time of barely 10 minutes, we delightedly passed a considerable amount of that evening riding Thunder Mountain again and again.

One of the things that I find so enchanting about Disneyland is the creative and ingenious mix of mechanical rides there.  If you exclude the simulators (Star Tours, Body Wars) and the child-oriented rides (teacups, carousel, flying elephants), I would say the remaining rides fall into two categories: roller coasters and dark rides.  Thunder Mountain is a roller coaster.  So are Space Mountain and the Matterhorn.  Roller coasters use a buildup of potential energy to unleash a thrilling and intense ride which affects you viscerally, at the core level.  On all roller coasters you strap yourself in and surrender to the unrelenting physical forces which you feel in your gut.  Some parks, like Great America, form their image based on roller coasters of extreme speed, height, and special features like inverting.  Disney’s roller coasters are fun, but for different reasons.  They are less intense physically (they are still very effective) and more immersive.  But they are roller coasters, and achieve their effects mostly through physical forces.

Opposed to roller coasters are dark rides.  The effect of the dark ride is achieved through carefully crafted ambiance and the development of a story line or succession of scenes.  The ride itself is tame and slow, but the enclosed scenery through which it winds is captivating.  Some of Disneyland’s most famous attractions are dark rides, including Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and It’s a Small World.  

The Magic Kingdom features other enjoyable dark rides like Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.  Universal Studios has a dark ride based on E.T. in which passengers board cars that resemble bicycles and experience E.T.’s flight across the sky.  Part of the beauty of the Disneyland experience is the very even mix of roller coasters and dark rides; in my opinion no visit to a Disney theme park is complete without plenty of both – the roller coasters for the physical thrills and the dark rides for the enchanting scenery and animatronic storytelling.

After Franz Liszt (for more about Liszt, see this post) invented the Symphonic Tone Poem, writing a dozen of them in the 1850s, many other European composers adopted the form for their own use.  In my experience, some of these composers of tone poems treated them more like roller coasters, and others treated them more like dark rides.  Those of Liszt himself are indisputably the roller coaster variety.  If you listen to Les Preludes or Mazeppa, you will find yourself reacting, almost physically, at a visceral level as the music finds its way to your core.  Liszt’s symphonic poem roller coasters rise and fall to great heights and profound depths, just like a roller coaster.  Another composer who wrote tone poems, the Frenchman Camille Saint-Saens, wrote roller coasters too.  Listen to this tone poem based on the tragic story of Phaeton and see if you don’t agree:

 

The first time I heard Saint-Saens’ Phaeton I found the climax to be simply overpowering and undeniably thrilling.

But the tone poems of the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana feel much more like dark rides.  In a dark ride the passenger is able to relax, sit passively and observe the different images that come his way.  This is essentially how Smetana’s tone poems work.  The 6 symphonic poems of his epic cycle My Homeland, each of them based on some story or image from Bohemia, are gentle, and do their work largely without penetrating the listener’s viscera.  Listening to Smetana’s tone poems is much more like watching a succession of rich, beautiful, immersive images pass before and around you than being inside a thrilling adventure.  His most famous tone poem, The Moldau, about Bohemia’s greatest river (called “Vlatava” in Czech) treats the listener to a beautiful and placid ride through a series of images from the river’s story:

We start at its springs and then take in the river’s fluid shape in the flowing main theme.  We then pass through a festive peasant wedding with merry polka dancing, then nymphs playing gracefully in the moonlight, imposing fortresses which echo with the sounds of ancient battles, and finally the widening of the river into the noble metropolis of Prague.  All of these images are quite clear from the music and they do not thrill us so much as act like a series of immersive paintings, much like being inside one of Disney’s dark rides.  You could easily make a similar ride out Smetana’s Moldau.  For another of Smetana’s tone poems which works in a similar way, see this post.

Disney also has at least one ride which exhibits features of both kinds of rides, Splash Mountain.

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It is quite immersive at times, moving slowly for the most part through rich and enjoyable scenery, and then there’s that thrilling drop at the end.  If anyone wrote tone poems that were sort of a mix, I think it was Richard Strauss – his are thrilling at times, and also passive and picturesque at times.  You can read more about his tone poems here.
Walt Disney understood that roller coasters and dark rides each worked their own special kind of magic, and that a day of leisure would benefit from both kinds of experiences.  Similarly, we have both kinds of symphonic poems to enjoy, depending on our mood.  Perhaps we would like Liszt or Saint-Saens to tug on our guts, or perhaps we would like Smetana to immerse us in an ever shifting diorama of rich imagery.  Fortunately, we have the choice as all of these composers gravitated to their preferred approaches.

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Music About Trees, Day 1 – From Bohemia’s Forests and Fields by Bedrich Smetana

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 1 – From Bohemia’s Forests and Fields by Bedrich Smetana

I often tell music history students that composers enter our historical canon for one of two reasons: either they did something really innovative or they did something(s) really well.  Rarely do you find an artist who did both, but a few come to mind: Debussy, Wagner, Schoenberg, maybe Vivaldi.  I would say most of the composers you hear about regularly did things really well.  Bach and Mozart, for example, really did not innovate that much, but instead inherited forms and genres from their immediate ancestors and elevated them to transcendently well-executed levels.  Maybe you could say Mozart was an innovator in the field of the piano concerto, but not really anywhere else, and I can’t think of anything Bach did that was incredibly novel.  He was just regularly mind-bogglingly good!  Beethoven may be somewhere in between.  Again, he did not create anything new; all the forms in which he excelled – symphony, piano sonata, string quartet – were inherited from his predecessors, but he imbued them with unprecedented life, heroism, idealism, and scale.  It’s why many music historians consider him to be a one-man transition between the Classical and Romantic eras, and I would say that’s pretty well true.  But he was not an innovator, in that he did forge new ground on which later composers worked.

Most of the composers who did this, that is innovated, are distinctive more for their ideas than for their music, which tends to be not all that extraordinary.  For example, the Florentine Camerata, who essentially invented the opera around 1600, produced these intriguing little experiments which feature solo vocalists singing with only orchestral accompaniment, or even less, which was a novel idea of musical texture and form.  But you would probably find the very first operas rather boring, and it was up to much better composers like Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and others to take those novel ideas and make them presentable in ways that are inspiring and fascinating.   You could somewhat see a similar pattern in Haydn and Beethoven, in that Haydn was largely solidifying the forms of the symphony and string quartet which Beethoven would later make amazingly good.  It’s not quite like the opera example, because plenty of people, myself included, find quite a bit to like in Haydn’s examples of both.  But most would tend to admit that Haydn was more of an innovator and Beethoven a perfecter in that sense.  Like any historical theory, it’s not without its weaknesses, but I think it’s apt enough.  Music history textbooks are packed with minor names, whose music we do not tend to find all that interesting, but whose ideas and innovations were essential in laying the groundwork for music written by the composers that we do.

Nineteenth century Bohemia can be said, I think, to furnish us with another such pairing.  The composer who has come to represent all that is great about musical Bohemia is Antonin Dvorak.  Through a brilliant and meticulous melding of his native Czech flavoring within the German symphonic tradition, he created a body of work that is still admired and frequently performed today, more than a century after his death.  Dvorak represented a Bohemian who, although completely nationalistic and heavily colored by his heritage, truly managed to transcend that heritage and become a bona-fide contender on the great stage of world ideals.  This was recognized by Johannes Brahms, himself a consistent advocate and aspirant for idealized art, who championed Dvorak as long as he lived because of this quality which he observed.  Had Dvorak not transcended his time and place in Brahms’ worthy estimation, this would not have been so (read more about Dvorak and Brahms in this post).

But, had Dvorak not been the beneficiary of the work of a pioneer who had blazed a trail in the service of creating a distinctive Bohemian voice in European art music a few decades earlier, Dvorak probably would not have developed as he did.  The pioneer is Bedrich Smetana, often called the father of Bohemian Art music, and recorded in history as the first notable Bohemian composer to create in a manner which convincingly, and even impressively at times, places Czech idioms and flavors within European forms and genres.  Without Smetana having taken his first steps about 20 years prior to Dvorak’s activity, Dvorak probably would have lacked the orientation, inspiration, and just plain comfort that he exhibited to move the process further ahead as he did.

Smetana’s most notable music is, in many ways, an artifact of a political agenda, an agenda that guided the course of his life, goals, and musical style.  Growing up in the Austrian Empire, a checkered conglomeration of diverse ethnic groups tenuously held together within a unified political border, he experienced the national furor which fueled the 1848 uprisings of many of these groups, including the Bohemians, motivated by the desire to have their own state.  This would only happen after the turbulence of the First World War concluded with the Treaty of Versailles, creating Czechoslovakia among other infant states, but Smetana became wrapped up in the uprisings, and was exiled to Sweden for a decade before he felt the time was right to return to Prague.  After this he redoubled and strengthened his revolutionary efforts, using art music of a distinctly Bohemian character to channel his nationalistic zeal, crafting notable operas and tone poems which somehow breathe the landscape and feeling of his land, in spite of never quoting the native folk song or dance explicitly.

If you hear music from Smetana today, chances are it will be one of the six symphonic poems that make up the noble cycle that he called My Homeland.  Each of the six formidable orchestral essays explores programmatically some element of Smetana’s prized Bohemian heritage from the River Moldau, to the great castle Vyserhad, rich with history, to the mythology of Sarka.  Smetana used the format of the single-movement symphonic poem pioneered by Mendelssohn as the concert overture (see this post), and later brought to maturity by his friend Liszt (see this post).  The symphonic poem would reach new heights of opulence under Richard Strauss in the coming decades, and Smetana saw that is was the ideal vehicle to illustrate the rich images and textures of his native Bohemia.  Smetana’s symphonic poems are truly poetic, and not weighted down by the heaviness to which the German orchestral tradition is sometimes prone; they float along like a vapor of transparent orchestral color that is lighter than air, moving gracefully from one theme to the next.  See if you don’t agree when you listen to his evocation of Bohemia’s majestic forests in From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields:

 

 

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“New” Music, Day 1 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 1 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak

Jeannette Meyers Thurber had a dream.  

Jennette Meyers Thurber

Born in 1850 in a small New York town, she had studied music at the Paris Conservatory in her teens and then returned to the United States.  Her marriage to a wealthy grocery wholesaler endowed her with the resources, connections, and freedom necessary to champion the cause of creating a distinctive American music, a commodity she sensed to be lacking in the culture of the young but precocious nation.  This quest motivated her to found the National Conservatory of Music of America in 1884, intended to be a haven of education for gifted American music students.  She continually sought federal funding for this project so that the students could attend based on their artistic merits and not the depth of their pockets.  While the egalitarian vision was realized, it was not through federal funding, which Thurber was never able to secure, but the philanthropy of herself and other wealthy patrons who funded the school’s operating budget and instructor salaries.

There are several European cultures which boast incredibly rich and formidable musical legacies, legacies which nourish disproportionately large swaths of the world’s population in relation to the quantity of creative minds who worked within them.  These legacies vary in strength, but they resonate richly for both the efforts of their geniuses and also for the unique configurations of idiosyncratic cultural mannerisms that define them.  The German legacy, for instance, is rich with polyphonic rigor, formal clarity, and existential introspection.  The Italian legacy is recognizable for its dazzling sparkle, attractive flamboyance, and unabashed heart-on-sleeve emotion.  The French, British and Russian legacies are also strong, and there are other legacies that are perhaps a tier below those in significance (like Dvorak’s native Bohemian legacy).  But Jeannette Thurber began to worry that, at the rate they were going, America’s musicians may not have gotten around to solidifying a legacy of their own capable of competing upon the stage of world history without a little push, and she thought her Conservatory was just the force that was needed to provide it.

While Thurber founded and guided the National Conservatory, she did not participate in its daily operations.  For this, she needed instructors and a director.  The first director hired was the Belgian baritone singer Jacques Bouhy, who held the position from the Conservatory’s opening in 1885 until 1889.  Bouhy main claim to fame was his singing of the role of the toreador Camillo in the premiere production of Bizet’s Carmen 10 years before the Conservatory opened.  While the school grew and operated well under Bouhy’s directorship, Thurber understood that in order to realize her vision of catalyzing the creation of an American musical legacy, she may have greater success with a composer who had performed a similar feat himself in another culture, and so she found the Bohemian Antonin Dvorak to be the next director beginning in 1892.

The Italian and German musical legacies owe much of their strength to good timing, and also to strong patronage systems that fostered the generation of numerous works of art, musical and otherwise.  Both Italian and German artists were provided with continuous opportunities by courts and churches to produce prolifically, all the while steeped in the culture of the Renaissance which encouraged rigorous learning and mastery of skill.  The German and Italian musicians began their path of creating distinct national legacies as early as the 1500s, and, during the ensuing centuries in which the patronage system crystallized and provided a previously unheard of level of stability, their national musical cultures flourished to an unimaginable degree.  Not every culture in European history was so fortunate to experience this perfect storm.  Russia, for example, began to develop its musical legacy more than 300 years after the Renaissance of Central Europe.  For more about that process, read this post.  The scrappy and oft-occupied Bohemians were another such culture whose musical championship did not start until the mid 1800s.  The first notable composer to work in a distinctively Bohemian manner was Bedrich Smetana, inspired initially to create his works by revolutions against the occupying Austrian Empire.  Smetana was a child prodigy, gifted on the piano and violin.  He created lovely concert works and operas that seem to be inspired by the sounds and flavors of Bohemia.  It is thoroughly nationalistic music, never quite attaining to the glory and grandeur of the German tradition.

Bedrich Smetana

To make that leap required a genius the stature of Antonin Dvorak, who came a mere two decades after Smetana, but was somehow able to fuse his elder Bohemian’s sensibility with a German grandeur, creating works that operate on multiple levels and therefore have a greater claim to international interest and posterity.  And this was acknowledged by one German in particular, Johannes Brahms, who, after judging one of Dvorak’s symphonies in an Austrian competition, recognized his genius and quickly came to regard him as an artistic equal.  After that the two began a lifelong friendship, with Brahms helping to open some major doors in order for Dvorak’s career to take off.  Dvorak became steadily prolific, creating works that emanate a carefree Bohemian take on life, all the while clothed in the masterful orchestration and formal mastery of the German symphony.

This is exactly what Jeannette Thurber was looking for, and she enticed Dvorak to assume directorship of the American Conservatory with a generous salary and the promise of 4 months of vacation from teaching each year in which to pursue his own creative efforts.  Dvorak was fascinated by the American music he absorbed, although it is sometimes hard to tell exactly from which sources he would have consumed it.  But he and Thurber were united in their opinion that a robust American music would be best based upon the music of American Indians and Negro spirituals.  I’m not sure how much authentic American Indian music Dvorak could ever have been exposed to, but he did have a very direct and reliable source of Negro spirituals, his student Harry Burleigh.

Dvorak’s student Harry Burleigh, who taught him everything he knew about Negro spirituals

Harry Burleigh had stored a treasury of spirituals from his ancestors and sang them beautifully in his baritone voice.  He captivated Dvorak with his singing, and his collection of melodies helped to inspire Dvorak’s most successful and best-known work, the Ninth Symphony, “From the New World”, which was written during his time as the director of the American Conservatory.  Listen to the sweeping second movement Largo and pay especially close attention to the beautiful melody, first played by the english horn, which starts at about 50 seconds:

 

It could be a spiritual, couldn’t it?  But it isn’t.  It is an original tune written by Dvorak, very much based on the melodic style of the spirituals that he learned from Harry Burleigh.  Dvorak here demonstrates his knack, in common with Smetana, of assimilating a body of musical style and then expressing it in original music utterances.  Smetana breathed Bohemian folk music deeply, but never actually quoted it.  Here is Dvorak doing the same thing with Negro spirituals.  Perhaps you’ve sung this song?  It was recast by another one of his students, William Arms Fisher, who added words in the 1920s, turning it into the hymn “Goin’ Home”, which is still commonly sung in Christian worship today.
The National Conservatory of Music of America had its day, but didn’t really take hold.  It petered out in the early twentieth century and American musicians had to look elsewhere for their inspiration, with many traveling to France in order to drink from the fount of Nadia Boulanger’s phenomenal teaching, which pulled from all the great European music legacies and assisted many a modern composer in fitting their voices into those contexts.  As such, Jeannette Thurber’s goal of sparking an American musical legacy did not ultimately succeed, but not before Antonin Dvorak, already so successful in the same task regarding Bohemian music, could show the Americans how it might be done.

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

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

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

This is one of my favorite scenes from the Simpsons:

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

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

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