I’d love to visit Japan. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, so for now, I’ll just listen to Japanese music. We’ll start with one of Japan’s first major composers of the 20th century, Kosaku Yamada.
Yamada lived 1886-1965, during some of Japan’s most tumultuous history. In that time he saw his country open up to the west, go to war multiple times with just about everybody, suffer the horror of the atomic bomb twice, and have to rebuild from the total rubble of defeat in World War II. Yamada studied music in both Japan and Germany, and thus he had his feet firmly planted in the musical traditions of both countries. His music therefore reflects that fusion. He took this role, this “musical ambassadorship”, very seriously; in addition to prolifically composing almost 1600 works that reflect the fusion of Japanese and Western musical traditions, he also worked hard to introduce Western works to Japanese audiences. Yamada conducted the Japanese premieres of many important Western works.
This piece is an early work of Yamada’s. It is a symphonic poem called The Dark Gate, and it casts Japanese modalities in a brooding and impressionistic work that evokes Debussy and Ravel while still being something of its own.
YouTube recently served up a bunch of clips from the 2000 movie The Patriot, the Revolutionary War epic starring Mel Gibson. It’s a movie I’ve always had problems with…it is historically bad to an appalling degree, and it’s one of those movies that spends so much time and effort making its villain hateful that it isn’t really satisfying at the end when he finally gets what’s coming to him. And yet, The Patriot is really watchable, and parts of it are really very good.
One of those parts is the score by John Williams. Here’s the end credits suite, which captures the main themes from the movie. Is it kind of cliched, particularly in the middle when it goes to literal drum-and-fife? Yes…but the whole movie is like that.
When I got in my car today, WNED was playing a piece called Suffolk Suite by Doreen Carwithen. I liked what I heard, so here it is!
But wait…who was Doreen Carwithen?
Carwithen was a British composer who lived 1922-2003. She is perhaps better known, sadly, as being the second wife of composer William Alwyn; her role for him seems to have been similar to Clara Schumann’s with Robert, as it fell to Carwithen to care for and advocate on behalf of her husband’s musical legacy. But Carwithen was very much an accomplished composer in her own right, and there has been renewed focus on her work in Great Britain. The Suffolk Suite is reminiscent of the kind of pictorially pastoral work, tinged with folk sounds, of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Given when she wrote it, it’s likely something of an anachronistic work…but a fine and tuneful work it is, full of life.
OK, this is the final one of these test posts. (If it works, I’ll come back and add the explanation after it publishes.)
All right, here’s the update: I have been unable to access my site on the back end for over a week, because the database was full. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think it’s that after over 24 years of blogging, I finally filled up the space I’ve been paying for here. (Well, I was on BlogSpot for years and years, but I ported all of that content over here.) I didn’t get any warning that this was a bit of impending doom, or at least I don’t think I got any warning, until one morning I went to log in to write a post and I couldn’t even do that. After some back and forth, I realized what had happened; but unfortunately, there was no fix I could affect without actually contacting customer service at Ionos, my host service. That I finally did today, and here we are, finally back online.
I promised a longer post about the Artemis II mission that successfully splashed down some days ago, but…I don’t know that I have a longer post about it, really. I do have a pretty short one: I’m thrilled to confirm that even as so much about the world seems to be going wildly wrong–and it’s doing so because a lot of people that we have chosen to run things openly want the world to go wildly wrong, as long as they’re benefitting from it–we humans are still at heart a species that is always looking over the next hill, around the next bend in the road, and up at the stars to wonder, “Where are we going next?”
Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot:
Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines :
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes.
Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift. (via)
Montgomery’s website has three bios available, marked Long, Medium, and Short! Here is the short bio:
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.
I have found Rounds a fascinating work to hear as its sounds cycle back and forth. It’s a work that hovers around the edges of rhythm and melody in a particularly abstract and atmospheric way. I love works like this! At times it’s almost Ravelian in its impressionistic color, at other times it’s purely modern.
