Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

It seems that listeners love to discover musicians’ sources of inspiration, the events, objects and feelings in their lives that are responsible for the music sounding as it does.  Perhaps you can relate to this.  Have you ever listened to a piece of music and found yourself thinking “Gosh, this seems deeply felt or unusually evocative; I wonder what this is based on.”  As a composer I have been asked questions like these.  I remember a lady, upon hearing something I wrote, asking what had inspired it, as if some kind of extramusical impetus was necessary for something that struck her so beautiful and human.  It’s only natural given the human penchant for meaning, relatability and understanding.  And like anything this personal, it will vary widely from musician to musician, informed by a diverse array of factors ranging from personality and life experience to aesthetics and historical era.

Sometimes it’s patently obvious, like when a singer-songwriter tells you the precise story upon which a particular song is based.  We all know that most songwriters perpetually probe their lives and experiences for fertile lyrical material.  It is probably the exception to find a contemporary song that is not based in some way on an experience or feeling from the songwriter’s life in some way.  But in classical music it isn’t usually so clear.  Part of this stems from the tendency to simply refer to “classical music” as a monolith rather than parsing out the finer distinctions which constitute its body of work.  The fact is a European composer working in 1700 will have had a much different notion of “inspiration” than one working in 1890.

Students of music history, professional and amateur alike, are often astounded to learn about the production rates of Baroque and Classical composers.  The concertos of Vivaldi, the cantatas of Bach, the operas of Handel, the symphonies of Haydn (the marches of Sousa – see this post – not a Baroque or Classical composer, but animated by a similar creative impulse, I think).  Prolific to the point of boggling our modern minds.  But why?  Obviously these feats are possible within the human experience, and not even extraordinary since their less famous contemporaries produced at similar rates.  But it’s only possible because they weren’t sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike.  They had solid and reliable methods and techniques for inventing and polishing their musical works, even if their results seem inspiring to us.  But the notion of inspiration would probably have seemed foreign, and distastefully self-indulgent to them.  They saw their role in the social order as sonic decorators for hire, illuminating the great myths of their societies into affective form fit for human consumption which supported their social order and structures of power (see this post).  Certainly this can be argued as a form of inspiration, but not as we typically think of it.

The attitude which cultivated the modern idea of inspiration, which I would summarize as autobiographical, can be seen to have emerged, like so many of these significant aesthetic shifts, with Beethoven and his legacy.  Suddenly listeners and scholars were scrutinizing his strong, powerful music for influences from his life and the forces which shaped the world around him.  The music seemed so deeply personal that it must have had a different impetus than the dry, stodgy patronage system!  I have read about analyses of his Eroica Symphony (see this post) which border on extravagant, even zany, and reach far to account for every moment as owing to some kind of inspiration.  My feeling is that Beethoven was not as autobiographically motivated as his commentators and fans like to think, but perhaps more than his predecessors.  At any rate, the feelings of his music became deeper and seemingly more personal; his rate of production dropped below the previous common practice norm, and he either anticipated or motivated later trends in which composers used their music to tell personal stories and/or promote ideological agendas.  And certainly in Beethoven’s late music, so bizarre and wonderful (see this post) he seems to be working out his personal existential questions, reconciling his life, philosophy, eternity, and the world.  Later musicians most certainly looked to this as a model for their own similar processes.

Was this shift a benefit to Western art?  Rhetorical question of course.  It depends on your evaluations of the results and the needs they fill.  For some the earlier paradigm with its clear, principled and disciplined aesthetic is the very definition of artistic purity, a bonus to which is the the diversity of voices which managed to individuate within its framework (in other words, Bach, Vivaldi and Haydn have clear, distinctive, and distinctively clever voices even though their musical languages and cultures were shaped by similar societal forces and values), while the latter paradigm is messy, neurotic and uncomfortably self-indulgent.  For others the older model is sterile and impersonal while the newer, autobiographical model is passionate and intensely meaningful on an emotional level.  As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to lay teleology upon the flow of history and see a goal where none may in fact exist (see this post).

At any rate, after Beethoven musicians saw greater liberty to explore their personal places in art music, and we tend to call this sensibility Romanticism.  In my estimation the neuroticism and intimacy of this approach reaches its absolute zenith in Gustav Mahler, the great Austrian conductor and symphonist who expanded the symphony to its absolute peak breadth and personal significance.

Over the course of his career Mahler had worked to expand the symphonic form to unprecedented length (see this post) while also developing a very unique manner of orchestration and harmony.  Like Beethoven, he seemed to use his final utterances as a way to explore his inner landscape and work out the philosophical implications of his troubled life.  Many see his final symphonies, particularly his sprawling 9th (which Alban – see this post – Berg called the most extraordinary thing he had ever written) and what exists of the 10th as deeply autobiographical, grappling with his roller coaster of marriage, his often turbulent career, his impending death and the losses of his life.  There was perhaps no Western composer more neurotic or death-obsessed as Mahler, and his late music speaks this in abundant volume.  Mahler sought the advice of Sigmund Freud in 1909 to deal with his wife, Alma, and her affair with the architect Walter Gropius.  The advice of the great psychoanalyst seemed to provide a way forward, but the damage of the ill-advised marriage was done and ran deep.  During the next couple of years Mahler began to work on what would be his Tenth Symphony but succumbed to a bacterial infection of the blood in 1911, not even two decades prior to the discovery of penicillin.

Mahler completely orchestrated the first of five movements and left sketches for the others.  Some musicians and scholars have completed it in various versions, but many purists are content to confine their experience of Mahler’s Tenth to the aching and dissonant first movement, the only completed by him, an adagio that takes the listener on a deeply personal journey of neurosis and longing over the course of 30 minutes:

So go ahead and speculate about the inspiration for the music you hear.  Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not.  Sometimes the societal and aesthetic framework of the musician’s experience supports the idea of inspiration and sometimes it doesn’t so much.  But if you hear late music by Mahler, you can be sure that the inspiration is never far below the surface.  In listening to movements like these you become like Freud in a sense, witnessing Gustav as he works through his life, reconciling pain and triumph.  In his late symphonies we hear it all, fighting to make sense.  Even though we would all love to have heard Mahler’s final version, many of us are content with the tears, pain and, ultimately, resignation that the surviving first movement speaks, a fitting epitaph to the most neurotic, but also one of the most pathetic, characters in the history of Western music.

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Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapuntus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapunctus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

 

Do you have an “elevator speech” prepared?  An elevator speech refers to a pithy sales pitch or description of services that is brief enough to deliver to a captive audience during a short elevator ride, but substantive enough to give a complete impression of doing business with you and persuasive enough to move a prospect toward closing a sale or referring someone else to do the same.  Business professionals of all stripes are encouraged to prepare such elevator speeches with the aim of turning any short meeting into closed business.  You can think of an elevator speech as a personal abstract, a concise summary of what you are about that gives the broadest overview as clearly as possible.  A good elevator speech should provide a vivid image of what working with you is like, but leave enough to the imagination that the prospect is intrigued to take further steps to making this a reality and filling in the outlines it draws.

Sometimes when I read articles about notable composers in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the gold standard for general research about practically any topic in Western art music, I note that the authors are, in many ways, creating elevator speeches for them.  Actually, they are not so much about the composers themselves as their legacies.  If you had met Handel on the street his description of services would be somewhat different than the way we have come to describe the legacy left by his life and body of work.  When the Grove’s authors write their introductions they are essentially summarizing why we value these musicians and the benefits acquaintance with their work can offer to us, even after multiple centuries.  While the gigantic articles about significant composers are packed with interesting biographical and artistic detail, I often find the little abstracts which precede them to be the most clever and carefully written parts of the article.  And I think my favorite abstract in the Grove’s, one to which I return again and again out of admiration, is that about Johann Sebastian Bach.  His article warrants 55 pages, and its author, Christoph Wolff, summarizes the old master’s legacy thus:

His genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. 

While it was in the former capacity, as a virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that have earned him a unique historical position.  His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, styles and general achievements of his own and earlier generations which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.

It is densely written and requires considerable study to unpack and appreciate.  But it is also very effectively summarizes what we value about Bach.  Can you imagine him walking around with business cards on which are printed:

Johann Sebastian Bach, organist and composer

My genius combines outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative posers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced

Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous!  Like I said, that’s his legacy.  But let’s take that apart:

Outstanding performing musicianship – I think what this means is that for Bach there was little distinction between performing, improvising, and composing.  As a performer and composer, he was constantly inventive and completely at home, going between them with ease and grace.

Supreme creative powers – That’s a strong word, even a superlative one.  What Wolff is saying here is that no one in the history of music was more creative than Bach, who could create quickly and consistently, and with astounding inspiration, any time any place.

Forceful, originally inventiveness – If you have listened to any amount of Bach and paid attention, perhaps you have been struck by the cascade of remarkably vigorous and finely-wrought musical ideas which are always distinctive, but always speaking clearly in Bach’s voice.  It never ends, nor does the strength with which they are asserted.

Intellectual control – Bach is still heralded as the most intelligent musician ever to live.  Had he been a mathematician or physicist, he would have rivaled Newton and Einstein.  As an author he would have contended with Shakespeare.  Once you know a little bit of how music works it is simply mind-boggling how controlled Bach’s music is on every single level, and consistently so.

Do you get the picture?  It is easy to divinize Bach, but the image I often carry of his music is like that of a god (or a demigod at least), creation full of beauty, detail and inner consistency springing from his mighty finger (see this post).  Bach’s music really does feel like some kind of eternal stream flowing from the source of the very forces that bind the universe.  I think that is what Wolff is saying in his summary.

But Bach was not a god; he was mortal.  And in one particular piece we hear his god-like stream of creation come to a very human halt.  At the end of his life Bach created a collection of fugues and canons all on the same subject, something of a catalog of contrapuntal techniques.  The resulting Art of Fugue, if not necessarily loved, is respected by musicians for the feat of superlative craftsmanship and invention that it is.  Bach did not live to complete his vision.  He came very close, but the final fugue, which promised to work upon four different subjects, evokes the image of Bach’s life force finally and completely ceasing:

 

Can you hear all the elements of Wolff’s description, working in full-bodied force, and suddenly stopping?  From this it seems that Bach’s musicianship sprang complete from his spirit with no necessary refinement by his ears or external editor of any kind.  In a way it is almost a blessing for this to stay unfinished, a fitting image of the valve that closed when Bach died and stopped the flow of the consistent eternal creative force which he had learned to channel.
I’m not sure what Bach’s elevator speech would have been during his lifetime, but I think Christoph Wolff came up with a pretty good one for his legacy.  The qualities Wolff describes are constantly present in every single bar of music composed by the mature Bach.  I once played a chamber piece by Bach, coached by a university professor.  I was astounded by the constant inventiveness of the music and he noticed this.  He said something like “Yeah, there’s just constantly amazing things happening.  The guy was from another planet!”  He wasn’t, but it can often seem that way.  He was mortal after all, and the final fugue of the Art of Fugue shows us this plainly, if tragically, placing the god-like Bach in real space and time.

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Shuffling Off, Day 1 – Symphony No. 3 by Edward Elgar

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 1 – Symphony No. 3 by Edward Elgar

Classical music is susceptible to what might be termed the “monument syndrome”.  What I mean by this is that it is very easy to regard the music and musicians who created it as somehow different and separate from you and me, different in historical era, different in worldview, and different in human potential.  While some of this is true, we should remember that the facts of human potential have not changed, and all of these musicians were human, grappling with the world into which they were born just as we are today.   But the quality of their work can seem intimidating, superhuman with regard to technique and, perhaps ironically, human expression.  And it seems so long ago doesn’t it?  The veil of the past feels heavy and opaque, the music materializing through it, offering tantalizing clues regarding a way of life we can’t really comprehend.

But it wasn’t that long ago, nor was the culture terribly far removed from ours.  I’ve recently gotten to know a Chinese family.  The husband and wife hail from different provinces and speak with different dialects.  I get the impression that this is a more pronounced and dramatic difference than comparing a speaker from Maine and Alabama, two states in the United States which feature rather different dialects.  The provinces of China are massive, and geographically diverse with their own dialects (or even languages) and cuisine.  Mandarin was eventually promoted as a lingua franca in order to unify the nation and remains so to this day.  In the United States our history extends back a mere 250 years before merging with the history of another nation.  For other Western nations the scale is longer, but the age of even the oldest European nation (with the exception of Greece, a special case), San Marino, founded around the year 300, is best measured in centuries rather than millennia.  As with the geography, the history of China is on a different scale, with scant evidence of its first clear dynasty predating the Bronze Age.  Since then there has always been some kind unifying line within Chinese history, be it dynasty or political state. Can you conceive of all this?  I daresay it is impossible, and Americans take excessive pride in their mere three centuries.

In relief to the phenomenon of Chinese history, the scope of Western art music is dwarfed, literally occupying the final 5 minutes of the proverbial clock face of temporal comprehension.  It isn’t as old as we usually think or feel that it is, nor is the veil that separates us from their minds and conceptions of the world as thick or opaque as it often seems.  And some stories demonstrate this to us, bringing the glory of classical music to our temporal threshold, effectively bridging the generations and closing up the gap.  Edward Elgar was Great Britain’s greatest post-romantic composer, emerging as the first native figure to dominate British musical history since the Renaissance (see this post) and Baroque periods, just a few hundred years ago.  His lush, melodic gift, mastery of orchestration and impeccably British sensibility managed to capture his nation’s attention and heart, as well as exporting it to the rest of the Western world.

His incredibly fertile period of composition was rather cut short by the death of his wife; he was one of those rare handful of composers, along with Rossini (see this post) and Sibelius (see this post) who, at a point in their lives, long before their deaths, decided that their previous creative statements were sufficient, and essentially stopped, although their personal reasons for doing so were certainly diverse.  Elgar’s reasons seem to be the death of his beloved life and a falling off of public demand for his music.  His cello concerto of 1919 is often recognized as his last major work.  But he lived 15 years beyond this and still picked away at things.  During this time he started a third symphony, left incomplete at his death.  Accounts of his feelings about the symphony seem to conflict regarding his opinion of its legacy, as to whether his remaining sketches should be left alone or brought to fruition.  This was barely a century ago.

His surviving family proved indecisive about the best course, but realized the sketches, having been published in a biographical work in 1936, would eventually enter the public domain, allowing anyone to have a go, and so the Elgar family, in conjunction with the BBC, permitted the English composer Anthony Payne to reconstruct an authoritative version, which you can listen to here:

 

I am always impressed by reconstructions such as these, in which someone of modern sensibility must so thoroughly inhabit the mind of a bygone era.

Incidentally, there is another example of Payne performing a similar function, but on a much small scale.  Elgar left five complete marches in the series known as Pomp and Circumstance, including the famous first march, ubiquitous at graduation ceremonies.  The other 4 are less well-known, but certainly worth hearing.  He also left sketches for a sixth, which Payne also realized:

 

I must confess that I am less convinced by his realization of this than the symphony; in listening to the marches in order I feel he does not quite capture the nuances of Elgar’s orchestration and lush nobility and he does for the Third Symphony.  Not that I could do better though 🙂

Elgar died in 1934, barely a century ago.  There are people alive today who were alive then.  Just 40 years later, Anthony Payne became interested in completing the Third Symphony; my parents were alive at this time.  The completed work premiered in the late 1990s, when I was in high school, and just beginning to become interested in music history.  This history is still being written.  While we often regard classical music as having ended long ago, it hasn’t, and the truth is that none of it was all that long ago, even if the great figures seem to us as gods.  The story is still being written, for stories never end, only their telling.  The history of the Western world is not as vast as we often feel, and we are very much a part of it ourselves, even if we don’t realize it.  How will your chapter read?

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

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

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

Here’s something you may find a little stilted…

Prince John: “Have your men close in.”

Sir Guy has his men close in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

60 coffee beans, believe it or not…

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

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

Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

Listen to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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