Month: April 2020

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Tone Poem Tuesday (Wednesday Edition)

No excuse, I just didn’t get to it yesterday. You get what you pay for, folks!

But anyway, a repeat of a favorite work of mine. This twenty-minute concert overture by Edward Elgar is lyrical and exciting. It reminds me of the grand old film scores, in all honesty, with its muscular opening that would accompany the giant “Warner Bros.” shield, followed by a big-hearted opening them that would soar as the film’s title appears onscreen. Remember when movie titles were GIGANTIC and would take up the entire screen? They don’t do that much anymore, do they? And credit montages that set the tone…films nowadays almost never have opening credits at all anymore, saving all credits for the end.

Anyway, Elgar wrote this overture, which he called “In the South (Alassio)”, after a winter’s holiday in Italy and a village called Alassio. The piece is pure sunlight from start to finish (well, there’s a bit in the middle that might be a summer storm, if we’re pushing our musical metaphors farther than perhaps we should), and to me it’s always a wonderful delight. I don’t know why the piece isn’t better known, in all honesty; it’s one of those works that always leaves me feeling like I’ve just spent twenty minutes in the company of a master.

Here is Edward Elgar’s “In the South” overture, subtitled “Alassio”.

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Words, and a bird

After a long period–more than a year!–in which I have been mainly focused on editing drafts of various manuscripts, I am finally back to actually drafting one. It’s Book Two of Seaflame!, which you may remember by its old not-actual-title of The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy. This one is likely to take most of the rest of the year to draft, because this one is my Alexandre Dumas-inspired doorstop of an epic fantasy (with no magic at all, because I’m weird).

More on that another time, but for now, here’s a photo I took a couple weeks ago while walking The Dee-oh-gee at Chestnut Ridge Park. I saw a big crow sitting in a nearby tree, and I went to take his picture, hoping it would turn out. Instead he took wing just as I tapped the shutter release, and…this.

Crow #ChestnutRidge #wny #orchardpark #spring #nature #hiking #trees #bird #crow

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Sorry to be a day late, but I had my regular shift at work yesterday, combined with my weekly grocery shopping, combined with having to go back in to work to assist with an overtime job (installing a new refrigerated case). I didn’t get home for good until 8:30pm, by which time I figured, “Meh, wait ’til tomorrow.”

So here, without a lot of extra comment, is Jimmy Durante. Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Baroque music hasn’t always been my cup of tea, but I’ve made strides in its direction over the years. And even when I wasn’t a big Baroque fan, I’ve always rather liked the music of George Frideric Handel. There’s a flashy ostentatiousness to his work that I find appealing, and never moreso than in this piece, which Handel literally wrote to accompany a fireworks display. King George II of Great Britain commissioned the work for a grand fireworks display that was to take place on 27 April 1749, in commemoration of the end of some war or other, and the signing of some treaty or other. The particulars don’t seem that important now, as back then some war was always starting or ending and some treaty was always being signed or something, and in any event the weather on April 27th was poor enough to make a general mess of the fireworks, with misfires aplenty, a pavilion catching fire, and several spectators actually being set ablaze. Ouch.

Handel’s music, though, provides fireworks aplenty! It starts with joyous drums and fanfares and proceeds from one flourish to another, before we arrive at the more lyrical inner movements and then come back to full-on flourish. If you need a musical boost of enthusiastic pageant in the current crisis, you can’t do much better than Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.

In this particular performance, take note of the ensemble itself. This is a French ensemble called Le Concert Spirituel, and they specialize in the performance of early and Baroque music on period instruments. This is as close as we can get to what the audiences would have heard in April 1749, minus the rain and miscues from the pyrotechnicians. Note the keyed woodwinds, the valveless horns with their bells held aloft, the drums placed smack in the middle of the proceedings as opposed to being stuck in the back or off to the side. And of course, note the trumpets! Valveless natural trumpets, long and regal, and held one-handed as the trumpeters stand with their other hands on their hips.

Note, too, the flamboyant leader of all this! Herve Niquet looks like a man who just stepped out of the pages of history to conduct this work. The video is worth watching just for the ensemble…but also watch it for the music. Here is George Frideric Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.

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Poetical Excursion: “The Ruin”, from the Anglo-Saxon

This poem is fascinating in that it seems to anticipate Shelley and Ozymandias by almost a thousand years. It describes in some depth the ruins of a Roman city, which has fallen into decay and disrepair, and juxtaposing that imagery with the thoughts of life that must have once flourished there. By the time this poem was written in the 8th or 9th century, the ruins being described (it’s not entirely clear which ones specifically are in the poet’s heart, or if they’re even meant to) had probably been abandoned for centuries already. It’s often worth remembering just how much time really passed during the Middle Ages, and how distant a memory the glory of Rome truly was.

The Ruin comes to us from a manuscript called the Book of Exeter, and unfortunately the poem as we have it is incomplete because of fire damage to the book itself. This translation comes from one of my favorite poetry collections. The poem itself is anonymous.

The Ruin

Well-wrought this wall-stone which fate has broken:
The city bursts, the works of giants crumbles.
Roofs are fallen, towers in ruins,
The gate is gone, frost on the mortar,
The shelters in shards, open to showers,
Eaten by age. Earth has in its grasp
Ruler and workman, removed now, perished,
Held fast in the ground while a hundred generations
Went from the land. This wall remained,
Stood under storms, will all around perished.
Bright were the buildings, many bath-houses,
High-gabled homes, and the sound of soldiers,
Many a mead-hall where men enjoyed themselves
Until mighty fate overturned all.
Many men fell in the days of wrath;
Death took all the valor of earth.
Bulwarks became wrecked foundations,
A fortress in fragments. The builders perished.
Defenders gone unver. The courtyard is dreary;
The arch of red stone, the roof with its rafters,
Shed their tiles, and they slip to the earth,
A broken mound. Once many men
Glad and gold-bright, in gleaming array,
Proud and wine-flushed, shone in war-apparel;
Saw the treasure, the silver, the well-set jewels,
RIches, possessions, precious stones,
In the bright fortress of a broad kingdom.
Stone courts stood, the hot stream came
In its broad whelm; a wall enclosed all
Within its bosom. There the baths were,
Hot in the midst. It was a haven.

Translated by Michael O’Brien,
Printed in World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse From Antiquity To Our Time

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Something for Thursday

I’ve always loved Loreena McKennitt’s music, although I did lose track of her for a while. It turns out that she had a new album in 2018, called Lost Souls. Here is the first track from that album, “Spanish Guitars and Night Plazas”. I’ve heard the album all the way through just a couple of times, but I plan to listen to it a lot more, moving forward. Apparently it is comprised of songs recorded or written earlier in McKennitt’s career, songs that ended up not included on albums for which they were originally intended; this makes it all vintage McKennitt, and quite wonderful for that.

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Beethoven: the “Hunt” Sonata

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 (Op. 31, No. 3) has been a favorite piece of mine for years…and for years I didn’t know what it was.

I first heard part of it–not the whole work, but a single movement–at my piano teacher’s annual end-of-year recital, when a former student of hers returned from college to offer up a quick surprise encore. He play the second movement of this sonata, which is one of the most infectious pieces I know. The movement is a rambunctious and, dare I say it, playful march in a brisk 2/4 time, with one of those Beethovenian melodies that sticks in the head as soon as you hear it.

This sonata is unusual in its construction in that it is in four movements and not the usual three, and that none of the movements is a proper slow movement. The entire work is warm and almost humorous, which is not something one typically expects from Beethoven. However, Beethoven’s cultural image is often unfair in itself. This sonata clearly comes from the same mind as the Seventh Symphony and even the Sixth before it, especially that wonderful dance in the Sixth where the bassoon keeps making off-beat entrances.

This performance is excellent, although if you’re a traditionalist in your views on deportment in the concert hall, the fact that the pianist is wearing overalls may be distracting. If that’s the case, turn your screen off and keep listening, because he performs this sonata wonderfully. As for me, I’m trying to ignore that he’s wearing his overalls incorrectly.

Enjoy!

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From the Books: A MAN ON THE MOON (Apollo 13 at 50)

Fifty years ago today, a Saturn V rocket blasted off from Cape Kennedy Spaceport. The destination of the three-man crew–astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert–in the command module perched atop the rocket was the Fra Mauro Highlands on the moon. They never got there. A faulty wire in the service module’s oxygen tanks sparked during a routine stirring operation, and the resulting explosion forced the deactivate of the service module’s engines and the reliance on the lunar excursion module as a de facto lifeboat, as NASA shifted from a lunar landing to an earthbound rescue operation. Even though the mission’s stated purpose of landing on the moon was a failure, the space agency’s brilliant work in overcoming one obstacle after another in order to bring the three astronauts safely back to Earth was one of the great success stories of teamwork and technical know-how in history. The mission was Apollo 13. You may have heard of it.

Here’s an article from Space.com about the Apollo 13 mission, and here’s an excerpt, profiling mission commander Jim Lovell, from Andrew Chaikin’s wonderful book about the Apollo moon missions, A Man on the Moon:

At age forty-two, Jim Lovell was the most traveled man alive. With three spaceflights under his belt, he had racked up 572 hours and nearly 7 million miles, more than any other astronaut or cosmonaut. For many men that would have been enough, but not for Jim Lovell. From the day he joined the astronaut corps in 1962, his ultimate goal had been to command a lunar mission. Command was even more important to Jim Lovell than landing on the moon, and most veteran astronauts felt the same way. When [Frank] Borman turned down Deke Slayton’s tentative offer to fly the first lunar landing it had everything to do with the fact that he had been the commander of Apollo 8. If Lovell had any disappointment about his commander’s decision, it vanished when Slayton assigned him to lead Neil Armstrong’s backup crew. Within weeks after Armstrong’s team came back from the moon, Lovell and his crew were training for their own landing.

By the spring of 1970, most of Lovell’s colleagues from the second astronaut group had moved on to other things. Neil Armstrong had disappeared into the world of postflight P.R. that greeted him on his return from Apollo 11; it seemed unlikely that he would fly again. Jim McDivitt had traded the demands of flying Apollo missions for the equally demanding job of preparing for them, as manager of the Apollo Spaceflight Program Office in Houston. Tom Stafford, though, still on flight status, had replaced Al Shepard as chief of the Astronaut Office, and wasn’t scheduled for another mission. And Frank Borman had begun a new life as a vice president with Eastern Airlines. One day Borman came by for a visit while Lovell was in the simulator, and he seemed glad to be free of the training grind. “Jim,” he said, “aren’t you tired of this? I wouldn’t want to go through this again.”

Lovell couldn’t have felt more differently. This was his seventh time around, counting the stints on backup crews, and even now his appetite for spaceflight was undiminished. He himself described it as an addiction. He could have gone on until NASA said he was too old to fly ano more, but he know that when he came back from Apollo 13 he would face a long wait, perhaps several years, before he flew again. Well aware of the astronauts still waiting for their first flights, he decided he would not get back on line for a fifth. Apollo 13 would be a great finale to a long spaceflight career.

Like every commander, Lovell wanted his mission to stand out, but he couldn’t see why people would remember the third lunar landing. And that was fine with him. He wanted badly to land on the moon, and he was glad for the chance to make a contribution to science. The Apollo 13 mission patch read “Ex Lune, Scientia”–From the moon, knowledge–and Lovell thought of that when he christened his lunar module Aquarius, after the god of the ancient Egyptians who brought life to the Nile Valley (not to mention the popular song from the Broadway musical Hair). The command module Odyssey, meanwhile, took its name not only from Homer’s epic work but from Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction vision of space travel. When Lovell was back on earth, he would find irony in odyssey’s dictionary definition: a long voyage with many changes of fortune.

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Something for Thursday

If you’ve ever been around piano students or piano teachers, you’ve heard this work of Beethoven’s. The Sonata No. 8 in C minor, also known as the Pathetique, is often a young pianist’s first entrance into the world of the Beethoven piano sonatas, and for good reason: it’s highly technical but not so demanding as Beethoven’s later sonatas, which require very high levels of skill if not outright virtuosity to perform well. The Pathetique also offers a lot of drama, brooding passages, stormy melodies, and drama a-plenty for a young student who is just beginning to engage the last of the Classical composers and, possibly, the first of the Romantics. The work has become almost a cliche, in much the same way that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has, and it’s worthwhile to come to it again once in a while with refreshed ears. Here is the Pathetique Sonata, performed by Daniel Barenboim, one of the greats.

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