Month: August 2004

Marine Band Showcase

The United States Marine Band

Colonel John Bourgeois, conductor

Ever since my days in the concert band both in high school and college, I’ve felt that the concert band (occasionally called the “wind ensemble”) tends to be unfairly treated in classical music circles. Many think of it as a symphony orchestra minus the strings, with the woodwinds “beefed up” to take over those parts in transcriptions of symphonic repertoire. The truth of the matter – that the concert band is its own animal, with advantages and disadvantages of its own, and is capable of musical expression to a greater degree than just about any other possible ensemble with the exception of the full symphony orchestra – isn’t often granted, and this seems to me a pity. There’s a lot more to concert band music than Sousa marches and the music for those wonderful competitive British brass bands. (Not to slight either genre, there, for both are fascinating.)

The “Gold Standard” for wind bands in the United States is the United States Marine Band, which is actually the oldest continuously operating musical ensemble in our nation, having been established by an Act of Congress signed into law by President John Adams in 1798. Often called “The President’s Own”, it is the Marine Band that provides the music for Presidential Inauguration ceremonies, receptions of foreign dignitaries on the White House South Lawn, state dinners, and more, including public concerts. This is no organization of “second-rate” musicians; performers are selected by an audition process as rigorous as that employed by many professional orchestras, and the members of the Marine Band are career professionals, as well as members of the United States Marine Corps.

The present recording was once available through the Musical Heritage Society, which is how I acquired it, although I have no idea if it is still available as such. According to the Marine Band website, the Band’s recordings aren’t for sale but are instead distributed to public institutions like libraries and schools (so check your libraries; the Marine Band has a lot of fine recordings.) I actually bought it because it is, to my knowledge, the only recording available on CD of a particular work (more on that in a bit), but as is often the case with CDs I buy for a single work, there’s a lot of music on here to treasure aside from the piece I wanted. (Which is, by the way, a big reason why I reject the “Why should I buy an entire CD for one song!” argument in favor of digital distribution.)

There is a Bach transcription here, Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564, that is the only transcription on the disc. The other seven selections are music specifically written for wind band, and there isn’t a single Sousa or K.L. King march in evidence. There is one by Beethoven, the March in D Major, that the great composer wrote for the bands of his day, and there is Percy Grainger’s wondrous Children’s March: Over the Hills and Far Away, which is one of the most charming pieces of music ever composed. Grainger’s Marching Song of Democracy is here, and it’s an interesting work in its own right. There is Camille Saint-Saens’s work for wind band, Orient et Occident, which is a standard of the band repertoire. And there are several “modern” works, one of which is the reason I sought this disc out. That work is Elegy, by Mark Camphouse, and it is one of the most moving pieces of music I have ever heard.

I was fortunate enough to get to perform this work in my freshman year of college, and I still remember how stunning I found the piece. It opens with a solo flute, sounding a motif that recurs throughout the piece, and very, very gradually the rest of the woodwinds enter. One barely notices when the brass arrive, and the overall texture of the work never really becomes strident except for one section in the middle. The meter changes fairly often, if I recall correctly, and there are many solo passages for the various instruments in the band (including two gorgeous parts for solo trumpet, which I sadly was not lucky enough to get to play, being as I was a freshman behind two better players). The work seems to never really make a full melodic statement, until the very end; instead, melodies come and go, are suggested and toyed with, and each time we think we know where the melody is headed, it goes someplace else – until an amazing climactic section when Camphouse allows the full melody to sing forth before the work fades out, again with the solo flute that started it and a mis-matching note sounded by the bells. The liner notes to the CD include these words:

In addition to being an elegiac tribute to the composer’s late father, the work serves as a sincere musical memorial to the heroic sacrifices made by men and women of the armed forces in the defense of freedom.

I’ve always wondered how my college band director happened onto this piece, which we began rehearsing in fall of 1989, little more than a year after its premiere by the President’s Own Marine Band in July of 1988. I’m very glad that he did, though.

One more postscript about Elegy by Mark Camphouse: it was the first piece of music I could bring myself to listen to after the horror of 9-11-01, three days later.

For a limited time, Elegy can be heard here. This is a big file (just under 7 MB), since the work is over fourteen minutes long, and I had to use the lowest compression rate available, so it’s not the best sounding file. But I do hope it gets heard a bit. This piece seems to me to deserve better than to simply show up on college wind ensemble programs as the “modern work” of the night. A concert band is capable of far more than martial music.

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Only in the bizarro-world of film music fandom could you have a message board thread like this one, wherein Jerry Goldsmith’s score to King Solomon’s Mines, a movie that is remembered by no one except for film music fans, and then only because it’s got a Jerry Goldsmith score, is placed alongside John Williams’s near-classic score to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The effect is not unlike if a thread raged on some classical music board somewhere, comparing, say, the symphonies of Berwald to those of Brahms.

And for sheer “God, I can’t look away!” lunacy from the film music world, there’s the guy who wrote this piece about Goldsmith, and the various threads in which he pontificates on the FSM boards (like here — in which Our Hero reposts his entire front-page article to the message board because a few words he’d meant to be italicized weren’t — and here, in which persons digging deeply enough will find a familiar name mixing it up — I just chalk it up to something in the water that day — and there are many more). This guy blends his idolatry of Jerry Goldsmith with his idolatry of Ayn Rand, with all of the humility that lovers of the latter are so often known for.

(In fairness, Dan — the Objectivist Goldsmithian linked above — does a pretty interesting job of describing Goldsmith’s general approach to scoring. Where he flies completely off the rails is in his insistence that Goldsmith’s approach is the only valid approach to film scoring, and that therefore all other film composers are inferior.)

On the off chance that there are any lovers of classical music out there who avoid film music because the fans are so, well, weird, all I can say is, Don’t blame the music. It’s not the music’s fault. Really.

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Somehow, in the crush of other stuff going on, I totally forgot to update the masthead image for August. I have now rectified this, revisiting the tale of the Lady of Shallott.

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Sara Donati — whose books The Wife really enjoys, and whose blog I really enjoy although I forget about it for weeks at a time — provides an interesting analysis of a sex scene from another author’s novel.

I don’t know if this makes me a prude or something, but I simply cannot write stuff like that, and when I encounter sequences like this in books in my own reading, I tend to gloss right by it. There’s just something about the sexual act that is, to my mind, searingly private*, and in my own writing, when “the act” occurs, I generally avoid it entirely by leading up to it and then cutting to sometime after it. Sort of like the scene in When Harry Met Sally… when Harry and Sally finally make love: we see them kissing a bit, then more passionately, then we cut to afterwards (with the best cinematic juxtaposition of two entirely different facial expressions that I have ever seen).

I don’t really have a point here except to note that I tend to approach eroticism from the standpoint of suggestion than from the standpoint of expression. That’s just a matter of taste, though. The passage that Sara illuminates really is well-done, for the reasons Sara gives.

* Invariably, my most embarrassing work-place experiences involve moments when co-workers discover my general discomfort with this kind of thing and proceed to draw much pleasure from the fact that I blush incredibly easily.

UPDATE: Upon further inspection, Sara is spending some time over multiple posts, starting here, examining the forensics of the sex scene. I’ll try to quell the voices of my inner Beavis and Butthead as I read her blog for a bit!

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Oh, boy. Via John Scalzi I see that Roger Waters, once of Pink Floyd fame (and, in my view, the dominant creative force behind Floyd, whose efforts after Waters’s departure are really unimpressive), is adapting The Wall for Broadway.

I don’t know what to think about this. On the one hand, hey, I’m sure someone once thought something along the lines of “An entire show drawn from T.S. Eliots Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats?! That’ll never work!”, so there’s no a priori reason why a show based on The Wall can’t work. But just the same, I can’t see how the, shall we say, psychedelic qualities of the album and the film can really be captured on Broadway.

I mean, look at this quote by Waters:

“Great!” said Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters in a statement Thursday. “Now I can write in some laughs, notable by their absence in the movie.”

Maybe he’s just joking here, but on the off chance that he’s serious, well — the last thing that The Wall needs is laughs. For my money, the only emotional response to The Wall involves sitting back, going all slack-jawed, and saying “Du-uuude!” a lot. (Where the hell would Waters inject some yuks, anyway? Before or after the sequence when the schoolkids are fed into the meat-grinder? Or maybe the sequence when Pink shaves every single hair off his body?)

Which brings me to my real objection. The Wall seems to me to pretty much require an “altered consciousness” upon viewing. Now, I’ve never sampled marijuana (and I’ve never even come close to dropping acid), so I don’t know, but I have it on good authority that the film The Wall is quite the experience when one is stoned. I have, though, seen it several times while “three sheets to the wind”, so to speak (it was college; what did you think I was doing on Saturday nights at three a.m.?), and when I finally watched it again while sober years later, it just wasn’t the same. Those incredibly funky animations are merely intriguing when you’re sober, but when you’re drunk — well, let’s just say that after a sufficient number of beers, all those marching hammers and copulating flowers take on an iconic status that I don’t think will translate easily to the staid Broadway stage.

Of course, a Broadway version of The Wall might just constitute a new reason to push for legalizing pot. Now we can say, “Legalize it for art!”

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I read this Michael Brooke post about a promotional offer by the London Zoo, in honor of the birth of their new monkey, and I learned something new: not about monkeys, but about language, which is all-the-more useful to me. I did not know that the word “ginger” can be used to describe persons (and non-humans) with red hair. This is good news to me, because my store of adjectives to describe red hair has pretty much been limited to “red hair” and also “auburn hair” (along with the occasional metaphorical euphemism, such as, “Her hair was the color of the hills in late September”). So now I have a new option. Cool!

(This is no small thing, since a quick perusal of the Move Over Britney! archives will reveal a predilection on my part for redheads, to the point where the recently-rejected novel‘s heroine sports long, auburn hair. In fact, a beta-reader of an earlier manuscript actually pointed out that I had no fewer than four “ginger-haired” characters in the thing, a goofy happenstance that I have since rectified by making one of them chestnut-haired, one yellow-haired, and the third one bald. The heroine kept her auburn hair, because she just doesn’t look right in my mind’s eye with anything else.)

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I made note of this a bit ago but totally forgot to link it: Michael Blowhard offers a fascinating intro to film noir, for those who are interested but don’t know where to start. I’m not the biggest noir fan, but I do enjoy a dip into that genre now and then.

And if you’d rather read some noir, grab one or both of the Library of America’s noir collections, here and here.

(Speaking of the Library of America, I wonder when on Earth they plan to acknowledge Science Fiction as a genre worthy of its efforts. I love the Library of America volumes, and I wish I could still afford to be a subscriber.)

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A couple of celebrity passings came to my attention today — one Buffalo-related, one not.

First was today’s death of Rick James, the “Superfreak” guy who was a Buffalo native. I didn’t really know that much about him at all, but he’s from Buffalo, which gets him a mention here.

Second, I learned a bit ago that character actor Eugene Roche passed away recently. Roche had a long career, and if you watched TV or went to many movies in the 70s and 80s, you no doubt saw him. (Filmography here.) I remember him for two roles: first, as the Archbishop and the Archbishop’s twin brother in the Chevy Chase/Goldie Hawn flick Foul Play (which is still an old favorite of mine, before Chase turned into a giant flake); and second, as Luther H. Gillis, a gumshoe detective he played as a recurring role on Magnum, PI. (Now there’s a show I’d love to have on DVD.)

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I think that God, or some simulacrum thereof, decided to kibitz me a little in the writing department today. Remember my offhand mention of writing a script drawing on my experiences at The Store? Well, today saw the entry into The Store of both a squirrel and a bird, both of which resulted in scenes of High Farce in Real Life.

I almost think that my Muse, annoyed at my current state of sloth, finally said, “Hey, dumb-ass, here’s some material! Now write, dumb-ass!” Yeah, I know, but there’s not much you can do when your Muse looks like this guy.

(BTW, the research request I floated in the earlier post linked above is no longer active, since I’ve decided that by virtue of the replies I received, the scene I had in mind would be highly improbable, for several reasons. Oh well.)

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Lynn Sislo always finds interesting quizzes, so hey, why not:

1. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life. False. I am a Democrat. (I have also voted for Republicans, albeit not very often. I believe that my former Congressman, Amory Houghton, is a fine public servant.)

2. I think my taxes are too high. Well — I’d love to be able to rant and say “Of course they are!” but the fact is, in my current financial situation (i.e., not very good but not disastrous either) taxes are not even close to being the prevailing concern. The fact that I don’t make as much as I would like, especially at this point in my life, is a concern.

But generally, I’ve never complained about my taxes, really. I see taxes as a necessary annoyance. Sure, I’d love to live in that beautiful Libertarian dream world where there are no taxes, but I actually live in the real world and while government is hardly perfect, I don’t believe that the Market can do everything better. Here’s how John Scalzi once put it:

I like the idea that some of the money I send to my government goes to keep a library open in the little town I live in. I like the idea that somewhere in my little town, a kid who’d otherwise go hungry is eating dinner bought with food stamps that I paid for. I like the idea that a sailor on an aircraft carrier goes on shore leave with money I put in his pocket. I like the idea that people are researching diseases and robots are exploring space with money I chipped in to pay for them. As I mentioned, there are lots of things our government is doing with my money I wish it wouldn’t do, but that’s the trade-off and overall I think the balance is worth it.

Amen.

3. I supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment. No. It was the culmination of years of idiotic, partisan hatred. It didn’t come anywhere near what I consider to be a “high crime or misdemeanor”. It was “We’re gonna get that SOB for something, if we gotta spend eight years and a hundred million dollars to do it.”

4. I voted for President Bush in 2000. I have never voted for any member of the Bush clan, in any election. Nor will I.

5. I am a gun owner. No. I have nothing against gun ownership, but personally guns give me the willies.

6. I support school voucher programs. No.

7. I oppose condom distribution in public schools. No.

8. I oppose bilingual education. I confess I’m not sure what’s being asked here. Is it teaching kids foreign languages? Or is it conducting classes in Spanish for Hispanic-descended students? I don’t favor complete separation, and I think that as a general starting point, we should ensure that kids are all learning English. But I do not support making English the “official language” or prohibiting the use of Spanish in classrooms.

9. I oppose gay marriage. No. I support gay marriage. And gay adoption.

10. I want Social Security privatized. No.

11. I believe racial profiling at airports is common sense. I’m going to duck on this one, simply because from one minute to the next I take either position. I really can see why it’s a good idea — but it’s a good idea that I hate. It seems obvious now, but when do we stop profiling? When the ratio of Arabic-initiated terrorist incidents to non-Arabic-initiated terrorists incidents drops below a certain level?

12. I shop at Wal-Mart. I stopped several months ago. There is nothing Wal-Mart has that I can’t get somewhere else, and I’ll deal with paying a buck or two more. (As a corrolary to the tax question above, it seems to me that someone who genuinely doesn’t have the necessity of shopping at Wal-Mart should also not be complaining about their taxes.)

13. I enjoy talk radio. NPR and sports talk shows, yes. Limbaugh/Hannity/O’Reilly/Savage? They make me want to vomit.

14. I am annoyed when news editors substitute the phrase “undocumented person” for “illegal alien.” Hmmmm — I confess it hadn’t occurred to me. But “undocumented person” is definitely a clunky, PC-type euphemism.

15. I do not believe the phrase “a chink in the armor” is offensive. Well, until I read this question, I had totally forgotten that “chink” can be a slur for Asian persons. So no, I guess I don’t think it’s offensive. I don’t like it, though, because it’s not very specific — I prefer “hole” or “gap”.

16. I eat meat. Yes. I understand the arguments for vegetarianism, but I decided long ago that something never eats that another thing doesn’t die. I try to look at it from that “circle of life” perspective. You know, like The Lion King.

17. I believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. Personally, I do, but I don’t really know a whole lot about the case.

18. I cheered when I learned that Saddam Hussein had been captured. My first response was, “Holy Crap, really?!”, followed by happiness. And at some point I laughed at the fact that the great Saddam turned out to be too much the coward to commit suicide in the face of capture. (Not that I took Saddam’s capture to be any kind of great turning point in anything.)

19. I cry when I hear “Proud to be an American” (God Bless the USA) by Lee Greenwood. No. Truth be told, I don’t like the song, and it’s not because the Republicans have somehow managed to claim it as their anthem. I just don’t like it. I don’t really care all that much for God Bless America either. But I do like “The Star Spangled Banner”, and I love “America the Beautiful”. And I think we don’t hear “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land” nearly enough anymore. (And I have to be honest: “O Canada” is such a good song that it always makes me wish I was Canadian, for just a moment.)

20. I don’t believe the New York Times. Oh, because it’s a liberal paper, right? I don’t read it much, actually.

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