Today we conclude the exploration of Music Inspired By Water, with a gigantic work by English master Ralph Vaughan Williams. From what I’ve learned, I could keep doing Music Inspired By Water for months! But I think it’s time to move on for now, and we’ve heard a pretty solid selection during this focus period.

So, Vaughan Williams: what a wonderful composer he was! He lived a long life, from 1872 to 1958, dying at age 85. He lived through the end of Romanticism in music and well into the rise of Modernism and the avant garde; he also lived through the height of the British Empire and its fall, and the collapse of the one-time world order through two cataclysmic world wars. All these events played out in Vaughan Williams’s musical life, heavily influencing his development. Vaughan Williams should also be seen as a patron saint for the late-bloomers in life: where many of the greatest composers were prodigies from whom music poured in their earliest years, Vaughan Williams did not really blossom as a composer until he was in his 30s. The work we have today premiered when RVW was 37. It is his first symphony, of an eventual nine. RVW’s first symphony arrived when RVW was older than Mozart had been when he died.

The piece is called simply A Sea Symphony. Is it really a “symphony” in the most formal sense? Maybe not…but I think Hector Berlioz would have heard this work and been proud. It is scored for large orchestra, full chorus, and soprano and baritone soloists. The text is various poems by Walt Whitman (whose work was apparently quite popular with this generation of British composers), each about the sea or some aspect of it. The work’s four movements are titled A Song for All Seas, All Ships; On the Beach At Night, Alone; Scherzo: The Waves; The Explorers.

A Sea Symphony is captivating right from the opening bars. Just listen to the intro! For sheer power, that’s a hugely grand and vast a start to a work as any I know; it’s even more direct and to-the-point than Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. I, for one, can’t hear that opening fanfare, followed by the chorus declaiming “Behold the SEA!”, with the full orchestra crashing in on the word “sea”…as much as I try to avoid visual parallels when writing about music, it’s virtually impossible not to hear this as RVW’s depiction of a wave crashing against the rocks. The remainder of the work is often every bit as grand as that again, though there are also moments of intimate introspection…like the sea.

I’ve always had a fascination not just with waters around the world in all forms–lakes, rivers, streams, forest pools, and the oceans–but hanging above all that is the concept of the sea, which is somehow a larger concept, isn’t it? The sea seems a characterization of a vast part of the entire world and how it all comes together. When we think of the sea, I’m not sure that we’re envisioning a specific part of a specific ocean. The sea is a larger thing, a vaster thing. It’s a concept, an idea, a feeling, as much as it is a place. And that, for now, is where I’ll leave things.

Here is A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The recent theme here, Works Inspired By Water, will be wrapping up next week…not for lack of works to continue presenting, but because I want to move on to other things! This particular theme, which occurred to me almost randomly one day, has proven even more fruitful than I expected. It turns out that water has inspired a lot of wonderful music!

But how about a work that isn’t just inspired by water but which literally uses water as an instrument?

Enter the always fascinating Chinese-American composer Tan Dun.

Tan is a prolific composer of whose work I have both heard a lot and not enough. Throughout his career he has written a great deal of music utilizing mixtures of traditional orchestras and instruments and very, very different non-musical sound sources to create some amazing soundscapes in his work. For this piece, called Water Concerto, he incorporates sounds using water that are captivating and enervating as the piece progresses. Just looking on the scene at the beginning here, before the work even begins, is preparatory: there’s a standard orchestra there, but in front, surrounding the conductor, is a wide variety of percussion instruments along with large basins of water. The “water performer” does amazing things throughout, making this piece one that you watch as much as hear. If you are tempted to turn this off because of the lack of traditional melody, please don’t! I promise you will hear something amazing if you stick it out.

Water is an element you can’t block. You can block land, you can say this is China and this is Russia, but water has no such frontiers.

What I want to present… is music that is for listening to in a visual way, and watching in an audio way. I want it to be intoxicating. And I hope some people will listen and rediscover life’s elements, things that are around us but we don’t notice.

—Tan Dun (via)

Here is Water Concerto by Tan Dun. Next week, we conclude this exploration of Water In Music with a gigantic work indeed.