Month: April 2013

Time for an experiment, as promised yesterday: a work that I have never heard before, by a composer I’d never heard of until yesterday. The composer? Andres Isasi. Who is he? Well, here is the biographical information on Isasi from Wikipedia. As of this writing, this is all that is written on Wikipedia about this composer:

Andrés Isasi Linares (Bilbao 1890-1940) was a Basque composer.[1] He studied with Humperdinck in Germany and was better known there than in Spain.[2] He was made a citizen of honour of Getxo district of Greater Bilbao.

That’s it. He lived fifty years and studied with Engelbert Humperdinck (who is now pretty much known for one work, his opera Hansel und Gretel), and after doing further research, I found the following fleshed out information on Isasi:

Andrés Isasi y Linares (known as Andrés Isasi) was born in Bilbao on 28 October 1890. Towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century he went to study with that ardent Wagnerian, Engelbert Humperdinck in Berlin. He returned to Bilbao in 1914 to a musical scene obsessed with song and the musical theatre. He stuck doggedly with romantic orchestral music and the style he had evolved while in Germany. The public were not supportive. Although his Second Symphony was performed throughout Spain during the period 1915-19, he found it increasingly difficult for his music to makes headway. Like Bax and Vaughan Williams he was not dependent on music to make a living. When his orchestral works found a lukewarm or cold reception he moved to the family home in Algorta where, in addition to acting as a Maecenas to various Basque artists, he continued to write orchestral works that found more success abroad than in Spain. His Second Symphony did well in Budapest in 1931. In total there are two symphonies, three suites, various tone poems, a piano concerto, many songs, choral items and piano solos. He died at Algorta, without the consolation of any musical revival, on 6 April 1940.

So he was basically like a lot of second-tier composers of that era: mildly prolific, and not much remembered today, outside of a few recordings. Composers like Isasi are really well-served by recording labels like Naxos, which put out cheaply-priced CDs by the armload; the ‘premium’ labels aren’t going to put a lot of effort into having the great orchestras of the world record repertoire like this. I doubt very much if Isasi is going to turn up on any program by the Berlin Philharmonic any time soon.

Composers like Isasi represent a long-standing difficulty in classical music. Simply put, there’s been more music written than can really be expected to be heard as much as it deserves to. Many, many composers languish in obscurity, their works either completely forgotten or only dusted off occasionally. That’s a shame, but it’s just the way things are. And it’s not just in music; there is literature that doesn’t deserve to disappear from bookshelves forever except for a few libraries where it only gets read by scholars who then lament its obscurity.

The ‘test of time’ can be a bit on the capricious side. When you dig into the history of classical music, you quickly learn this. The best example is Johann Sebastian Bach, who may well be the Isaac Newton of music, so towering was his genius and so long a shadow does he cast. But the thing is: Bach died in 1750 [edit — error fixed], and then his music went mostly unperformed and unknown until 1830 or so, eighty years later, when Felix Mendelssohn championed a Bach revival. Eighty years, during which Bach was known to musicians but not to the main public. Eighty years have not yet passed since the death of Andres Isasi.

None of this is to argue that Isasi is a neglected genius, but rather just to note that the cream does not rise inexporably to the top. Sometimes it languishes, and after enough time has passed, the ‘top’ has calcified somewhat, which means that there’s just no more room for more cream. This is why many works which people ‘in the know’ agree are works of true greatness never quite find their way into the standard repertoire. And it’s also why it can be frustrating to thumb through the programs of major orchestras and see yet more performances of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the Wagner overtures and so on. Try some music you’ve never heard before! You never know what you’ll hear.

As for the work in question today, the Symphony No. 2 by Andres Isasi, it’s a perfectly agreeable work. There’s nothing earth-shaking here, and in all honesty, there’s nothing about it to mark its composer’s land of origin. There’s nothing nationalistic here at all; this is just a nicely solid symphony in the Germanic tradition. The most interesting movement, for me, is the Scherzo, which starts with a fascinating segment for pizzicato (plucked) strings. There’s really nothing much ‘new’ here…but I’m glad I’m hearing it, nonetheless.

Here’s the symphony.

Tomorrow: Back to Czechoslovakia!

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No, not the former boy band from the 1990s. We’re talking about composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981), one of the more important American musical figures of the 20th century. A great deal of American musical culture over the last half century owes a huge debt to Hanson, who, in his forty years as director of the Eastman School of Music, presided over an institution that has become one of the premiere music schools in this country.

Hanson was also a noted composer and conductor. I first encountered his work at a summer music camp, when the concert band played a transcription of the second movement of his Symphony No. 1. A few years later, in college, I was blessed with the opportunity to play the Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Romantic”. And Romantic it is: despite living in the age of Modernism in music, Howard Hanson’s heart clearly beat with lyrical Romanticism, and it’s that quality that shines through in nearly everything he wrote.

The Symphony No. 2 in addition to being loaded with gorgeous melodic material, is a dramatic work that employs a cyclic construction. When listening to the work, you’ll hear in each movement references to what has gone before, especially in the third movement, when the entire piece builds to one of the more moving conclusions to a symphony that I know.

And speaking selfishly as a former brass player, I loved this piece from the standpoint of the principal trumpet part. So did our principal horn player, next to whom I sat. Each of us got a lot of cool stuff to do, which is always nice. One of the first things any brass player does when encountering a new piece in an orchestral setting is thumb through their part and say, “What do I get to do on this one?”

Here is Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2. (UPDATE: I replaced the recording that I had used originally, because the third movement of the original recording had so many skips it was like listening to a worn LP.)

Tomorrow: a work I have never heard before. Seriously! I’m not even going to listen to it for the first time until tomorrow morning. That’ll be fun!

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I couldn’t decide which ‘G’ composer to do, so since it’s my blog, I’m doing both!

Percy Grainger was the very first composer I encountered when I got to college. I’d never heard of him before, but there on the music stands on Day One of concert band rehearsal was something called “Irish Tune from County Derry”. Just two bars in, I fell in love with this guy.

At first listen, that sounds like just a lovely setting of a somewhat maudlin tune, but the more you hear it, the more the Grainger touch stands out. By using such a gorgeous melody and by utilizing such a rich sound, Grainger manages to sneak some really wild dissonances right past the listener.

Grainger was Australian by birth, but the major part of his legacy is his exploration and commitment, via settings for orchestra, wind band, piano, and others — of English folk music. He was highly idiosyncratic, and he had a wonderful gift of brevity: there are Grainger pieces that are scarcely more than a minute or two long, and they’re perfect in that scope. Here’s Grainger’s “Shepherd’s Hey”:

In terms of his settings of folk tunes, Grainger’s masterpiece is the Lincolnshire Posy, which sets six different folk tunes over the course of six movements. I was lucky enough to perform this amazing work in my junior year of college. Note how Grainger makes little effort — no effort at all, actually — to push these folk melodies into any kind of regular form. Grainger noticed that regular people singing folk tunes tended to trouble little with things like regular meter or rhythm, so that’s what he tried to recreate in his settings. The result is a work that takes a lot of effort in rehearsal to pull off. I’d have to show you the sheet music to really make it clear, but there are dual entrances that are offset by several beats. There are places where there are no bar lines at all, and the conductor just hammers out each note. And then you have Grainger’s dynamic and tempo instructions: he didn’t like the traditional Italian music terms, so instead of marking ‘Crescendo’, a Grainger piece will direct the performer to ‘Louden Lots’.

I always found something deeply refreshing about Grainger, and it’s probably from him that my fascination with Celtic music began. It’s really a short line from Grainger to the Chieftains, after all.

Finally, here’s an original piece by Grainger. This is not a folk tune, but it has that character. It’s one of my very favorite marches of all time, from the opening, which sounds, to paraphrase Salieri from Amadeus, ‘like a rusty squeeze box’.

And then there’s George Gershwin, with whom I share a birthday. My perception of Gershwin has always been colored by Leonard Bernstein’s writings about him, in which Bernstein opines that Gershwin’s prodigious gifts for melody and the feel for American jazz and its new rhythms were his major gifts, and that Gershwin was just beginning to plumb the depths of his compositional gifts when he died at too young an age. Bernstein’s view was that when it came to composition, Gershwin was lacking; the Rhapsody in Blue, according to Bernstein, is a collection of wonderful tunes that are stitched together loosely and so unconvincingly that the piece can literally be edited and re-edited and not lose much in translation. That’s probably right. As Bernstein says: “What’s good about the Rhapsody is so good that the entire piece is irresistable.”

For Bernstein, the true Gershwin masterpiece was Porgy and Bess, which he viewed as Gershwin starting the process of melding opera and ‘Tin Pan Alley’ into something uniquely American — a truly American music drama, developed here out of American traditions and musical vocabulary and less dependent than ever before on the entire Germanic tradition of musical development that shows up in the transitional passages in earlier works like the Rhapsody.

Here’s the Rhapsody in Blue, performed by Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (a wonderful recording, by the way).

Tomorrow, we’ll stay in America.

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