Well, my mood hasn’t been great this week, for what are probably obvious reasons. But there is still music to fall back on and to remind oneself what is good in the world.
Like, punching Nazis.
Punching Nazis is good.
Punching Nazis is very good.
Here’s the theme music for a character who punched a lot of Nazis.
I could also title this post “I listened to it, so now I’m gonna make you listen to it too!” Because it’s a piece whose existence I learned about after I watched a video on YouTube called “Reacting to One of the Worst Pieces of Classical Music Ever“.
“Ooooh!” thought I. “He’s gonna rip on Ravel’s Bolero!”
Erp…no. He did not.
What did he rip on?
A piece called The Battle of Prague by Frantisek Kotzwara.
You are now no doubt wondering just who on earth Frantisek Kotzwara is or was. And I’m here to help! Kotzwara was an itinerant musician who played viola and double bass in addition to composing, and he traveled all over Europe after being born in Prague. He eventually settled in England, where he lived out the rest of his life before dying peacefully in 1791, either 60 or 61 years of age.
When I say “died peacefully”, I’m being nice. I’ll leave the details to the reader to search out, but according to Wikipedia, Kotzwara was “one of the first recorded instances of death by erotic asphyxiation”.
And you thought the folks of the “powdered wig” era were a bunch of no-fun types.
The Battle of Prague was originally written for piano primarily, but apparently it includes secondary parts for violin, cello, and percussion. The work memorializes a battle that took place near Prague (obviously), and it falls into a kind of mini-genre of “battle music”, not unlike Wellington’s Victory, a fairly silly potboiler of a piece that gains almost all of whatever cachet it has by virtue of its having been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Well, Kotzwara was no Beethoven, and I have to admit that I found this work (it’s been orchestrated here) entertainingly silly in a way that the Beethoven work also possesses. It’s hard to describe. The tunes are relatively catchy, and there’s some surprisingly impressionistic work here for a piece written in Mozart’s day.
Could it actually be good?
Well…no. Not to me, anyway. But it’s also not bad in the worst way, either. Apparently, from what I’ve sussed out online, The Battle of Prague was quite a popular piece in its day and after, and it’s got a certain crowd-pleasing weirdness to it. It’s a weirdly fun little listen. Here, you be the judge!
NOTE: This is a repost of an old item from the BlogSpot days of this site. For whatever reason, I’ve seen a rather dispiriting resurgence on social media the last few days of the old chestnut that John Williams is basically a hack of a composer who steals his melodies from anywhere and everywhere, and that he recycles his own music, and so on. Every time I hear this I wonder about the listening skills of the people involved. And do give the Bernstein lecture below a listen! It’s a very enlightening look at how superficial similarities between works are often just that: entirely superficial.
Comments are turned off on this one, for the reason stated below.
UPDATE 2/18/2022: Broken link fixed.
REPOSTING 2/16/2022 because…see addendum to text.
UPDATE 2/7/19: This post, for some reason, must rank highly on some Google search index or something, because it’s been a relatively consistent driver of traffic to this blog ever since I posted it, nearly four years ago. I have closed off commenting for this post because the only discussion that has ever really occurred here has been people showing up to assure me that yes, John Williams really does rip off everybody under the sun, and in all honesty I’m not interested in entertaining those discussions anymore. That said, it does strike me as interesting how many different composers of wildly varying background and voice Williams is accused of “blatantly stealing”, and how many times a specific piece by Williams is said to be a clear rip from half a dozen specific earlier works. It’s a heck of a composer who can clearly steal four or five different pieces (or so I’m told) just to craft one theme for a Harry Potter movie, innit? Anyhow, here’s the post.
This is one of the trustiest of annoying old chestnuts. What happens is someone hears Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (titled “From the New World”) for the first time, encounters the opening bars of the fourth movement, and immediately races to the computer to post the revelation for the ages that “OMG! John Williams totally ripped off Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” for the theme from JAWS!” This is the most common example of a thing that John Williams has ripped off, but there are a lot of them. A partial list of composers from whom Williams is obviously a plagiarist includes Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold, Steiner, Prokofiev, and Penderecki — in addition to the afore-mentioned Dvorak.
By comparison, here’s the Dvorak, and here’s the Williams. The similarities between the two are, to put it kindly, extremely superficial. Both start with low strings intoning a note, and then the note a half-step above it, and then the motif is repeated a few times. But Dvorak repeats it loudly and uses all the lower strings and goes at a quick tempo, building quickly and bringing in the rest of the orchestra before getting to his main theme. He also stays quite clearly in the same time signature.
Williams, however, starts off with similar notes…but slower, and much softer, and lower — I’m not even sure if he uses the cellos at all. It might be just the double basses at first. And then his insistent rhythm starts with those punching chords at off moments, so you’re not even sure what the time signature of the piece is. Williams’s sound is insistent and mysterious and somehow both mechanical and not — pretty much the opposite of what Dvorak does. And yet, “Williams ripped off Dvorak!” is one of those zombie nonsense notions that always comes back, despite being complete nonsense to anyone who bothers to pay attention.
ADDENDUM: I just saw this on YouTube. Clearly Williams was actually stealing the JAWS theme from Beethoven!
In cases like this, for years I’ve been recommending a wonderful essay by Leonard Bernstein called “The Infinite Variety of Music”, which appears in the book of the same title. The essay is actually the script of one of the wonderful episodes he used to do for the educational teevee program Omnibus. In this particular episode, Bernstein described how composers are able to create an astonishing variety of musical works from just thirteen notes of the Western tuning system, by reducing things even further and showing how a number of great composers wrote amazing pieces, many of which are very familiar, by using as their main motif the exact same four-note melody. It’s a worthy reminder that there’s a lot more to music than just what the notes are, and I’ve always found that essay to be a good remedy against the over-used canard that this composer or that composer ripped someone else off.
Of course, the problem with recommending an essay like that is that it’s in a book that isn’t always readily available…but I’ve recently discovered that the audio of that very program is on YouTube, with the musical examples helpfully included so you can see what’s going on as Bernstein speaks. I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s certainly worth the 48 minutes to listen through. No, Bernstein doesn’t specifically address Dvorak or Williams (in fact, this program was likely recorded while Williams was still a studio musician and Steven Spielberg was a kid), but it does suggest a good way of listening to music to evaluate such silly claims.
Here’s the video:
Really, give it a listen. It’ll make you better at listening to music!
Jim Croce would have been 82 years old last Friday.
There’s a very special magic at work in Croce’s songs. The blend of lyrics, guitar playing, and his slightly gravely tenor voice with his expert way of not always hitting the note dead on but rather sliding into it…damn that plane crash.
The live performances really get to me nowadays. I don’t know his life story, but every time I watch him perform, it looks like every note of every song is engraved on his heart someplace.
We have been members at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum for over a year now, and as wonderful as the rotating exhibits have been (two close this month!), I’ve found myself developing relationships with specific works in the permanent collection. Occasionally I have heard people refer to their favorite paintings or sculptures at a given museum as their “old friends”, and damned if I’m not starting to understand that phenomenon. This is about one of mine.
This is The Hammerman, or more properly, Le Marteleur, by Belgian scupltor Constantin Meunier. This is not the original work, which I believe resides in Lausanne, Switzerland. Several casts of the statue were made, though, and one resides in Buffalo. It looks tall and forbidding, but in reality it is only about four feet tall, with only its pedestal bringing the subject to eye level.
From the National Museum of Fine Arts (Lausanne)’s website:
The hammerer is a contemporary of the Walloon uprising of 1886, a wave of workers’ strikes that were fiercely repressed. Meunier treats his subject in a realistic vein that conveys the arduous nature of a job that requires strength and dexterity, close to the suffocating heat of the large furnaces and exposed to the dangers of handling molten materials. The body, gestures and attitude of the hammerer at rest benefit from his live observations in the Cockerill steel foundry in Seraing, as do the characteristic clothing with the visor, the large leather apron, the overshoes and the pliers. By associating this realism with a posture from the classical repertoire, the contrapposto, left hand placed on the hip and right foot forward, Meunier elevates the metalworker to the dignity of a modern-day hero.
I always find something stirring and moving about this sculpture…its realism, not quite in the level of detail, but in the stance and the posture. The figure conveys physical strength, but also a kind of dogged weariness. I also wonder what exactly it is that he’s looking at; his head is turned to the right and he is turning his stern eye on…something. What? Who knows?
This statue has become one of my favorite subjects in Buffalo, and I take a few shots of it every time I’m in the AKG. I think it’s a good thing to have a few favorite things to shoot when you’re around them; it’s a good way to test one’s increasing (hopefully!) skills and develop the creative eye. Here are several of my photos of The Hammerman over the last year.. The last couple are from our most recent visit. I loved the effect of shooting the distant couple through The Hammerman‘s elbow and arm, and I took several of those shots, with this one being the most successful, in my opinion. The painting they’re discussing is a Monet.
This really does seem as good a time as any to delve as deeply as I can into art….
Another new composer to me: Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee, who lived 1900 to 1964. I’m not sure what he is “best known” for, because his influence seems to be more behind-the-scenes than anything else, but McPhee did undertake some of the first serious study of the music of Bali, which he encountered when he and his wife moved there for several years (she was an anthropologist). McPhee brought that music back to the United States, where he shared it with Benjamin Britten, leading to several later works by Britten.
The work featured below, Tabuh-Tabuhan, is a three-movement work for orchestra with extensive percussion and two pianos. It’s apparently McPhee’s best known work, and having just heard if for the first time, I am amazed by its degree of color.
Here is a program note written by the composer himself (via):
Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936, and performed before the ink was barely dry by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had already spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technic. The title of the work derives from the Baliness word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat – the drum, a gong xylophone or metallophone. Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive.
Although Tabuh-Tabuhan makes much use of Balinese musical material. I consider it a purely personal work in which Balinese and composed motifs, melodies and rhythms have been fused to a symphonic work. Balinese music never rises to an emotional climax, but at the same time has a terrific rhythmic drive and symphonic surge, and this partly influenced me in planning the form of the work. Many of the syncopated rhythms of Balinese music have a close affinity with those of Latin American popular music and American jazz – a history in itself – these have formed the basic impulse of the work from start to finish.
To transfer the intricate chime-like polyphonic figuration of the gamelan keyed instruments and gong-chimes, I have used a ‘nuclear gamelan’ composed of two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel. These form the core of the orchestra.
In form, Tabuh-Tabuhan is more or less that of the classical symphony- there being three movements, Ostinatos, Nocturne, and Finale. There is no place here to point out all the purely Baliness motifs. The flute melody in the Nocturne is an entirely Baliness flute melody, taken down as played. The syncopated finale is based on the gay music of a xylophone orchestra which accompanies a popular street dance. This is heard in its most authentic form at the beginning of the work and given the grand treatment at the end.
Here is Tabuh-Tabuhanby Colin McPhee.
In another quasi-regular attempt to get my browser’s open tabs under control, here’s some stuff!
:: Amplifying: A short film described as “A love letter to Buffalo” is looking for support. The crowdfunding project for this has ended, but I’m excited by the project and hope to support it in other ways.
:: How will 2025 turn out? The life of Jimmy Carter offers unexpected clues.
:: Al-Jazeera looks into climate change and the California wildfires.
:: Trad-wives, Incels, and Cat Ladies: The Year MAGA Broke Heterosexuality
:: No recall how I found this collection of “Best albums of 2024” stuff, but here it is. Some possible items of interest here, if you’re looking for new music!
:: If you like spicing up your coffee, here’s a nifty spice blend to try.
:: If you watched action movies in the 1980s, you saw Al Leong in something. Here’s an interview with him.
:: The Eco-Legacy Complex: On Ancient Monuments and Modern Malaise
:: Finally, be aware: this is a deeply disturbing and detailed article about the allegations against author Neil Gaiman. Read at your own risk, and be prepared to need at least one shower after you read it. Still, it’s important. (It may be paywalled…it wasn’t when I read it, I’m not sure if that was a gift link or something else.)
All for now…let’s go open more tabs!
From the Buffalo AKG, a painting Picasso titled “La Toilette”. Here’s the entire painting:
Larger version here.
Of course, the title of this post comes from the famous (infamous?) exchange from the movie Titanic:
CAL: [scoffing as Rose’s paintings are unpacked] God, not those finger paintings again. They certainly were a waste of money.
ROSE: The difference between Cal’s taste in art and mine is that I have some. They’re fascinating. It’s like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.
TRACY (a servant): What’s the artist’s name?
ROSE: Something Picasso.
CAL: [scoffs again] Something Picasso? He won’t amount to a thing. He won’t, trust me! [to his manservant] At least they were cheap.
Never forget:
Everything that is to come is what we wanted.
That is all.