If you were anywhere north of, say, whatever latitude it is that the Pennsylvania’s northern border sits on, you were under instructions to get outside and look at the northern sky because the sun was blasting out magnetic particles that would result in potentially spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis, or more commonly, the “Northern Lights”. The last time I saw a truly stunning display of the Aurora was back when I was in college; a bunch of us were inside doing whatever and another friend bursts in and says, “You gotta come outside and see this!” It looked like the entire sky was a blue, green, and red swirl of tie-dye. I’ve never forgotten that.
Last night’s Aurora was much more muted, at least where I live; I didn’t make any attempt to drive out into a darker spot, and while my own street is quiet and not super brightly-lit, directly north of my street is a two-mile-long stretch of car dealerships, which are brightly lit. But I went out around 9pm and looked up .The sky was clear (maybe a Karmic make-up for getting screwed on the eclipse?), but there was still some night-glow from the car dealerships to contend with, and initially I thought, “Nope, no Aurora here.” The Big Dipper was directly overhead, and the Moon was a lovely sliver as it is just starting to wax again. I thought about coming back in, but I stayed out just long enough for my eyes to adapt a little, long enough to see a few wisps of cloud directly overhead, making an interesting radial pattern. I’d never seen wisps of cloud in that pattern before, and they were actually shifting as I watched them…and that’s when I realized that I was actually looking at the Aurora Borealis.
A forever-lesson there: when going outside to look at the night sky, always wait at least five minutes. Give your eyes time to adapt!
I took a few photos with my phone, using the “Night” mode, and this one turned out best after some editing in Snapseed. I’m going to try a couple of my other shots later in Lightroom to see what I can do, but the Samsung S21 Ultra’s night mode did come through for me. I made no attempt to use my Lumix FZ1000ii for this event, as I didn’t want to break out the tripod and all of that jazz and I haven’t done any research as to what settings one needs to use to capture the Aurora. But that’s fine! Photographers like to say that “The best camera is the one you have with you,” and in this case, it was my phone.
The Big Dipper, shining through the Aurora Borealis. One of its stars isn’t bright enough to overcome the Lights.
Specifically, in this case, when your mechanic tells you: “Your car’s inspection is all set! No issues.” Entering the weekend on that news is always great! (I wasn’t necessarily expecting issues, because everything’s been running fine, but I’ve had this vehicle for almost two years without needing any significant work done to this point, so I’m at the point where I start getting antsy every year at inspection time.)
But yeah: If you’re a New Yorker, you know the relief of “Inspection’s done, no issues!”
Two hundred years and two days ago, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor was heard for the first time, in Vienna. The bulk of this post is what I wrote about this symphony three-and-a-half years ago, and the performance I feature is the same, because it’s one of the greatest performances of this work I’ve ever heard–the energy this youth ensemble brings to this symphony is amazing–and because I can’t help thinking of this piece, with its themes of joy and universal brotherhood (and sisterhood!), played by this particular orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which includes Jewish and Palestinian musicians among its ranks. This music, in those hands, seems to me a far better thing than what is transpiring now between those same peoples elsewhere, and I hope the spirit of Beethoven triumphs in the end.
The post:
Whether or not the Ninth is Beethoven’s greatest symphony is a matter of debate, and I’m not going to join it here. The main contenders seem to be the 7th, 5th, and 3rd, each of which have strong cases to be made. For me it comes down to the 7th and the 9th, and I probably have a stronger personal attachment to the 9th, since it was my first real deep dive into Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonic world. Quite a starting point, eh?
It was when I was in high school and becoming keenly interested in symphonic music, to the point that I was examining orchestral scores in an attempt to unlock what secrets I could, with my level of training to that point. (Which was, ahem, not much. But I went ahead undaunted!) I remember the bookstore: A B. Dalton (remember those?) in the Monroeville Mall outside of Pittsburgh, when we were there visiting my sister, who was in college. There was a Dover edition of Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, in full score.
Dover Publications used to make wonderful copies of music scores in fine books…and apparently they still do! I just now Googled the folks at Dover to see if they were still around, and there’s an active website, so that may be a place that starts taking my money soon…but anyway, I remember picking up the book in that B. Dalton and thumbing through it. At this point I knew nothing at all about either work, so I was completely baffled when I flipped to the last movement of the Ninth and saw…music for voices?
Was this a choral symphony?
Indeed it was…and is.
My sister actually gave me that book for either my birthday or Christmas that year; I procured a recording not long after. My band director dubbed me a cassette of the Ninth, and off I went. The recording was Herbert von Karajan, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. You never forget your first Beethoven Ninth.
That the Ninth captivated me utterly is unsurprising, as it has been captivating its audiences ever since Beethoven wrote it. The premiere is one of the legendary events in all music, with the deaf composer sitting on stage as his work crashed and hummed all around him…and he heard none of it at all. Imagine the poignancy of one of the musicians, alto soloist Caroline Unger, at concert’s end, putting her hand on Beethoven’s sleeve to turn him toward the audience, that he might see what he could not hear: their applause. When you listen to the Ninth, as with all of Beethoven’s late works, you are hearing the musical realizations of a man who could only ‘hear’ the work in his mind.
Beethoven’s Ninth went on to become one of the most influential works of music ever written. He fired the imagination of many composers with this work, and indeed, the Ninth took on a nearly mystical air as the 19th century wound on. The Ninth was one of Richard Wagner’s favorite works, and it was deep inspiration to both Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, both of whom felt superstitious angst as they approached their own ninth symphonies, as if Nine was a sacred barrier beyond which a symphonist dare not tread. Mahler, having already written eight symphonies when he set out write Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), thought he might cheat the limit of Nine by not titling this work as a symphony, even though everyone believes it is. Even so, it didn’t buy Mahler much time: he would write his actual Ninth symphony and then die with only a few sketches written for his Tenth.
The Ninth is one of classical music’s true “event” works, often being programmed for concerts that are meant to commemorate specific events. One of the most famous of these was in 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the work in East Berlin, leading an orchestra and chorus drawn from many nationalities. For this concert Bernstein changed the fourth movement’s focus from “joy” (Freude) to “freedom” (Freiheit), in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months earlier. There really is a universality to Beethoven’s Ninth that lends itself to such things. It’s a deeply human work, encapsulating the tortured journey toward joy as imagined by a great composer brought low by deafness.
I thought about writing a lengthy annotation of the Ninth, but time didn’t allow, and besides, I’m not sure if such a thing is really necessary. But there are so many moments in the Ninth that are sheer magic. Here are some of the spots that capture my imagination:
:: The opening bars, with the strings in tremolo, playing only the tonic and the dominant, so we don’t even know if we’re in major or minor key. It’s an opening of total mystery, leading to a stormy march of a movement that is sheer musical relentlessness.
:: And that fiery scherzo, whose opening motifs echo the main theme of the first movement, but in a rhythm that drives, drives, drives forward. Even the timpani gets into the act, pounding out that rhythm in moments that seem to come out of nowhere, no matter how many times I hear the work. But wait! Halfway through the scherzo, Beethoven changes his original time signature and provides, charmingly shocking, a genial “drum and fife” section that eventually yields back to the original scherzo.
:: The double variation of the third movement? I used to have trouble with this movement, not really understanding what Beethoven was up to. It’s certainly a very long movement that leads us into the depths of Beethoven’s mind, as one of the great writers of variations in music history. Somehow Beethoven finds new and enthralling textures each time he winds his way through the long melody that sustains the movement, and then toward the end come the two sets of giant fanfares that are answered by the strings. The woodwinds sing throughout, and the time is marked by pizzicato strings. It’s an amazing movement that once bothered me.
:: And then we arrive at the fourth movement, that gigantic movement that is by itself longer than some of Mozart’s entire symphonies. A stormy passage opens, leading to a remarkable passage where Beethoven quotes each of the first three movements, almost questioningly, only to have the low strings reject each one. After one last declaration by the low strings, we finally arrive where the entire symphony has been leading all along: the famous “Ode to Joy” chorale theme, played first by pianissimo low strings. Beethoven repeats the theme four times, adding to the voices each time (my favorite is the second statement of it, before he adds in the violins but also writes the most wonderful countermelody for the bassoons).
Then the original stormy passage from the movement’s opening bars reprise, before we hear the first of our voices: the baritone soloist, declaring that it is time for a more joyful sound. “Freude!” he cries out, and the choral passage arrives, with the soloists leading through a set of variations on the chorale theme, variations which are answered by the chorus, all of this building to an immense chord that is one of the greatest single chords in all of music…and then the bottom drops out and a Turkish march begins, with Beethoven doing one of his favorite tricks of off-setting the beat.
I won’t describe more than that, save to note that the symphony’s closing moments are one of classical music’s true moments of magnificence. I have never heard the Ninth in a live performance, but I can only imagine that if performed well, it can be an almost overwhelming experience. There is a vastness to the Ninth that makes it a colossus in itself, but this is not at all unique to the Ninth: Beethoven’s greatest works all enjoy this expansive quality, but none are quite so big in their concept as the Ninth. Few works achieve this sense of containing a universe in itself. With the Ninth, Beethoven moved beyond composing music and instead created a world.
French composer Charles Gounod is probably the closest thing Hector Berlioz had to a successor in the musical world; Berlioz was too much the iconoclast to really found a “school” of composition reflective of his own thought. Gounod, however, counted Berlioz among his influences. Gounod was prolific and wrote a great deal of fine music, especially his operas–but for the most part, except for his operas Faust and Romeo et Juliette, Gounod is not much heard anymore. The apotheosis of French music was to come not in late Romanticism but in Impressionism.
When I was in high school, our band briefly toyed with the Grand March from Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba. Operatic grand marches are a particular delight, and this one is as grand as any. If memory serves we ended up putting this piece aside when the band director, Mr. Roosa, resigned suddenly mid-year and we ended up being rudderless as a band until a fresh face out of college, Mr. Fancher, arrived to take over in the last few months of my high school career. I remember that this Grand March was not much to his liking, and out it went. Pity, that…the trumpets have some really fun things to do in this piece.
There was news this week on the TRON front: Jeff Bridges is returning to the franchise for the third film that is apparently getting made soon. I’m a longtime TRON fan, all the way back to the original film in 1982, and I enjoyed the eventual follow-up, TRON LEGACY, which doesn’t seem to have been received terribly well, but who cares about those people, anyway.
The 1982 film featured a “futuristic” (for 1982) score, dominated by synthesizers, by composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos is a noted pioneer of electronic and synth music, and her work for TRON at this point in time sounds both groundbreaking in its approach to scoring a mainstream film with electronic music, and dated because of the state of the electronic gear at the time. But never mind the dated qualities; Carlos did an amazing job at suggesting the otherworldly nature of the World Inside the Computer, but she also composed music of genuine wonder and excitement.
I’ve just read that most of Carlos’s recorded music is unavailable for listening, in any format. This seems to me something of a cultural crime.
Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press.
Sheila outlines much of Miller’s life, and all of it is fascinating. I keep wondering: Why is this woman not a more household name? She was in Hitler’s apartment hours after his suicide. Her clothes were still spattered with mud from Dachau, and she wiped her feet on Hitler’s bath towels and took a bath in his own tub. Why had I never heard this?
Well, I’ve heard it now, and another name goes on my “Photographers to Study” list.
Another by Eric Whitacre, this one is called Sleep. Here it is for wind ensemble:
Lovely and meditative, isn’t it? But it’s not doesn’t end there. Whitacre actually composed this piece for choir first. The idea was to set a Robert Frost poem called “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening”, and Whitacre did in fact compose it that way at first…before learning that Frost’s poetry is still under copyright. So Whitacre had to get a new poem for the work, and he did, by Charles Anthony Silvestri. While Whitacre is happier now with the new lyric than with the original, to the point that he has no intention of releasing Sleep with the Frost poem even though the poem went into public domain five years ago, this still seems to me a very unfortunate use of copyright and a good example of how we’ve extended copyright to ludicrous lengths. Robert Frost has been dead for 61 years, after all.
Here is Sleep with its official choral text. I think I may actually prefer the vocal version to the band one!
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Tone Poem Tuesday
Last Sunday morning I ventured out to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite local place of mine, to walk and do some photography. I wasn’t all that excited at the prospect, though, because the morning was quite cold and it was the kind of overcast that makes the light just dull and uninspiring. And it was something like the eighth, ninth, or even tenth day like that in a row. I’ll spare my long-time readers my rant about how the worst season in WNY is not Winter but rather Spring, but I did post a whine on TikTok and as a YouTube short about it. Anyway, the walking was unpleasant and dismal, with a constant breeze that was just enough to keep you cold, and of course by this time of year the trees still are bare so you don’t even escape the unpleasantness by going into the woods for shelter from the storm.
In short, I wound up staying at the park less than an hour, and I only took a dozen or two photos, most of which I didn’t even bother editing in Lightroom.
But…
…there was this bird.
Is this the best wildlife photo ever? Of course not. It’s not terribly sharp, and one photographer I follow on YouTube sometimes jokes about the ubiquity of what he calls “BOAS photos”: Bird on a stick.
This little bird (no, I’ve no idea what kind of bird that is, feel free to let me know!) sat in the tree above me long enough for me to get two photos, and then he flitted across the path to a birdhouse on a pole. I watched him there and I was happy to have snapped its photo twice, but then I realized that there was another bird inside the birdhouse, sticking its head out.
It’s nice to step back and look at my progress in photography and notice that I’m reaching a point where even when I’m not really feeling it and am in fact going to pull the plug and go home early, I still stand a good chance of getting something good!
