Category: music

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Here is everything I know about Zoltan Kodaly: He was a Hungarian composer who lived from 1882 to 1967, and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind cites Kodaly as the inventor of the hand-signal method used in the film to accompany the musical tones with which humans begin communicating with the aliens.

That’s it.

I even did a search on this blog, because I’ve been known to feature an obscure (or lesser well-known) composer once, completely forget about them for years, and then feature them again with a “I’ve never heard of this person!” blurb. I can find zero mentions of Zoltan Kodaly in all of my blogging. I’m pretty sure that I used to conflate Kodaly with Khachaturian, because it’s not as if I have any expertise on Eastern European composers who start with K. (That could probably be a Jeopardy! category for the Tournament of Champions, eh? “This Russian composer of two symphonies might have been a big name if he hadn’t died of tuberculosis at 34.” “Who is Kalinnikov?” “Correct! Pick again!”)

So, what about Kodaly?

In a way he seems to have been a kindred spirit of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, in the fact that he toured the rural outlying areas of his homeland to record (on actual wax cylinders) folk songs and melodies, which he would later use as inspiration for his own compositions. Bela Bartok was another contemporary of his, and apparently the two men were friends who shared a passion for the folk music of that region.

Kodaly was also deeply invested in music education, and he left behind a significant body of work that, taken together, has come to be known as “the Kodaly method”. It is in this method that we find the use of hand signals to stand in for musical tones, with the specific hand signals having been taken from earlier work by an English musician and teacher named John Curwen.

I feel like I’m writing a research paper here: “Take a composer’s name out of the hat and write five pages on them by Tuesday.” But Kodaly is a pretty important name in twentieth century classical music, and yet I know so very little about him! This is always interesting to me: the gaps that exist in my knowledge, and why.

Anyhow, this piece is a collection of what Kodaly called “Gypsy dances”. I assume the Gypsies were Romani people (the word “gypsy” had not been exposed as a slur back then), and the work is a presentation of a number of their themes. In this way the work is most reminiscent of one of my favorite works of all time, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1. For all my admiration of the various musical forms at play in classical music–sonata-allegro, rondo, chaconne, passacaglia–there really is something to be said for the good old collection of tunes.

This piece, called Dances of Galanta, is just that: a collection of dancelike tunes, each one with touching rustic lyricism and rhythm. (Galanta is a small town, population around 15000, in Slovakia.) Like many such works, the entire orchestra is featured throughout, but the clarinet gets special focus, apparently standing in for an ethnic reed instrument that you wouldn’t find in the standard complement of a modern symphony orchestra. Dances of Galanta is an interesting piece from a voice I may well have never actually heard before. Kodaly sounds like an interesting voice, though.

Here is Dances of Galanta by Zoltan Kodaly.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Here’s an old favorite: Espana by Emmanuel Chabrier. This is one of the most delightful pieces I know, just pure delightful color for all of its six minutes. I got to play this work in college, and I’ve loved it since that very first rehearsal. For a work written in the Romantic era, Espana really seems to be anticipating the Modern era in some key ways: its rhythm isn’t just engaging or “catchy”, but it has that wonderful 20th Century sense of the bar line being made irrelevant.

 

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Something for Thursday

I didn’t have a chance to come up with a “Conversation Song” this week, so in the meantime–though I would never suggest that she’s a mere placeholder–here is Audrey Hepburn.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Maurice Ravel is a particularly fascinating composer, once one manages to get past the monument to terminal ennui that is Bolero. Here we have one his earlier works, the Rapsodie espagnol, in which a young Ravel turns his impressionistic eye on the sounds and impressions of Spain. Ravel composed the Rapsodie in 1907, and through its pages you can certainly hear Romanticism receding into memory and Modernism knocking on the door; this is 20th century music through and through, even if it maintains its grounding in the land of tonality. The work is in four movements, each one evocative of an exotic Iberia, so close and yet, thanks to the mountains, not quite so close as all that. Meditative song lives alongside exuberant dance here, and the entire piece ends in a riot of color.

Here is the Rapsodie espagnol by Maurice Ravel.

 

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The Soundtrack of Our Lives

It’s become a common enough experience in my life that I notice it: something notable happens regarding a particular musical artist whose stardom arrived during my younger years (sadly, it’s often a death, but not always), and as discussion about that particular artist revs up, a phrase gets used a lot: “the soundtrack of our lives”. This is used to describe either the ubiquity of that artist’s music, or the degree to which that artist’s work shaped the music we heard on a daily basis.

What I’ve also noticed is how frequently the artist in question was not a major part of my youthful music life.

An example: Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is now in its fourth season, which was released a few weeks ago. One episode features a song by Kate Bush in a major way (the song actually figures into the plot, as well as making a major appearance on the soundtrack). The song is “Running Up That Hill”. As people watched through the episodes, social media started to explode with people my age (or maybe a bit younger, or maybe a bit older) reacting with delight at the re-emergence of that song into collective musical consciousness, thirty-seven years after its release. Kate Bush and “Running Up That Hill” were part of “the soundtrack of our lives”.

Only…for me, it wasn’t. I can honestly say that my first full hearing of that song might well have come just a few days before we watched the Stranger Things episode, because I looked it up online out of curiosity. (It’s a good song, by the way.)

This morning, I read a new post by John Scalzi, who has been writing a series of posts exploring specific songs and what they have meant to him at various points in his life. This particular post is talking about a Madonna song (a song with which I am not familiar, while I’m quite familiar with Madonna in general), but at the outset, Scalzi says this:

For nearly all Gen-Xers, there are three artists who can reasonably be said to have been universal experiences, i.e., they were in the soundtrack to your life whether you went out of your way to listen to them or not: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. They were everywhere, the musical air that one breathed, there in the malls, in the schools, on MTV and radio. Even if you dove deep into heavy metal, goth or rap to escape their presence, sooner or later they were there, leaving you flabbergasted that, somehow, they found you.

This interests me because for me it’s only two-thirds right. Jackson? Sure. Madonna? Again, absolutely. But Prince?

For me, no. Not really. Prince was never a big part of my musical soundscape, intended or not; the only song of his I could have identified off the top of my head for years was “Let’s Go Crazy”. Prince was never a universal part of my musical life. I was aware of his existence, I knew he had fans, and…that’s about it. I never explored him much while he was alive because his music simply did not present itself to me in anything like the same ubiquitous way that Michael Jackson or Madonna did.

I don’t note this to pick on Mr. Scalzi’s point, because I suspect that far more people would agree with his summation than with mine. But it always fascinates me to consider the degree to which my movements in the cultural landscape have always been my own, and that while there were a lot of intersections between my landscape and the wider one, there are always large gaps. This leads to voids in conversations that I find awkward at times, as people enthusiastically discuss music with which I am almost completely unfamiliar. Or I find myself unaffected on those sad instances when prominent figures die, and I just don’t have that connection.

Why did I miss out on Prince? Kate Bush? All manner of other stuff? I can guarantee none of it was because of snobbery or distaste for “pop” music. I would hope that my years of musical writings on this site would make that clear! I did watch a lot of MTV in the 80s, but I also headed off to my room to listen to music on my own, and this was almost exclusively (almost, not quite, but almost) classical. This continued into my college years, with the additions of New Age and Celtic; I tried being a jazz listener for a time as well. If anything, my college years were an even bigger retreat from the “pop culture” world for me; if it was popular between 1989 and 1993, I very likely did not know about it. And it went on a bit into the 90s, leading me to mostly miss out entirely on grunge. Nirvana? Stone Temple Pilots? Smashing Pumpkins? All names to me. All talented. All major touchstones in recent music history. And all artists whose music passed me by. And I didn’t do much catching up after college, because in the late 90s and into the 2000s I went deeper into classical as well as into film music, which is one of the tiniest of musical niches.

I’ve never been able to work out just how I feel about all this. I do feel at times like I missed out, and many times I’ve found real enrichment and enjoyment when I take time to explore music now that I missed the first time around. Music is wonderful like that: you can come to it any time, much like books and movies–all art, actually. We focus too much on the new, don’t we? But at the same time, there is always a feeling of something I’ve missed, some shared context that I won’t be able to engage no matter how much I come to love a particular piece or song or work.

And others won’t have my context…lying in bed in the dark with a cassette in my Walkman after I’ve turned the lights out, but in my case it’s not Prince or Kate Bush but rather Berlioz or Wagner…in any event, my life had a different soundtrack than a lot of other people, and there are times I feel a real disconnect from others because of that.

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Judy Garland at 100

Sheila and Roger have Judy Garland posts up, and I could hardly fail to do the same. Garland was born 100 years ago today, and how much poorer our world would be without that voice, that marvelous alto of hers–full-throated, just this side of operatic, so marvelously resonant, her way of hitting a pitch just under and then sliding into it like a resolution all her own, and of course that perfect shimmering vibrato she used to equally perfect effect in song after song after song throughout her too-brief life.

Judy Garland was one of the greatest things about being human in the 20th century and beyond.

 

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Something for Thursday

Busy week in progress (more on that to come), but I can still get a song posted! This one might not quite be a “Conversation song”–while the singer is addressing their words to someone, it might be a kind of “open letter” sort of thing, a song meant not to converse but to express a one-way thought.

But perhaps it is a kind of conversation, but not the one that happens in “real time”, as in, two people talking to one another over coffee or whatever. Instead it’s the kind of conversation that takes place between the generations, the ongoing conversation that shapes the young as they hear the wisdom of the old.

Here is Cat Stevens, with “Father and Son”.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Just getting this in under the wire, here’s a bit of film music: Lee Holdridge’s wonderful love theme from Splash, the Tom Hanks-and-Darryl Hannah “boy meets girl who’s really a mermaid” movie from the early 80s. This is one of the more wonderful love themes from a period that produced a lot of them.

As I write this, Splash is free on YouTube…and no, I have not been dipping into it and reminding myself that Darryl Hannah was one of my celebrity crushes back in the day….

 

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Something for Thursday

Returning to our mini-series of Conversation Songs, where each song’s lyrics give one side of a conversation and leaves the other side un-heard, we have an appearance by Bob Dylan.

“Positively 4th Street” has nothing to do with 4th Street, anywhere at all, judging by its lyrics. And it’s not exactly positive, either; in fact, Dylan’s lyrics are angry and accusatory. The singer is calling out a one-time friend for betrayal, for letting the singer down, for not being there. But he does it in an oddly upbeat melody and tone that just repeat, over and over, with no variation. It’s a very strange song, pairing lyrical bitterness with upbeat-sounding music. Is Dylan mocking the way we often mask our relations with people we dislike in generic niceties and false pleasantry? Maybe. Maybe this is the case of when you run into someone you dislike but for whatever reason you have to play nice–so while you’re being outwardly nice, you’re really thinking, as Dylan sings, “What a drag it is to see you.”

 

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“My thoughts, I confess, verge on dirty….”

Dexys Midnight Runners. I cannot decide if they helped or hurt the cause of overalls.

Earlier I saw, somewhere online, a note that the song “Come On Eileen”, by Dexys Midnight Runners, was released 40 years ago this week. That’s…wow, that’s really something. I honestly don’t recall when I first heard the song, as I didn’t really start paying attention to pop music until several years after that, and even at that point I wasn’t much of a radio listener: albums and MTV were my avenue towards music, and even at that point, while MTV was still showing music videos, the older stuff–songs that had been off the charts for a while–were simply gone from their rotations, only popping up on “retro” days like MTV’s anniversary and that sort of thing.

“Come On Eileen” is often cited as a “one hit wonder” phenomenon, which like in many cases is only true if you consider US success. The band had more success in the UK, and stuck around for a little while; they produced enough albums and had enough body of work to produce a Greatest Hits album. I remember seeing that CD in the bins at Media Play once, in the early 90s, and it struck me as weird that they had a Greatest HitS album, which is when I learned that you can be a very successful band and not be big in the US. (See also: a-ha.)

As for “Come On Eileen” itself, it’s a strange kind of song, to be sure! It starts with a brief violin solo before the beat kicks in, and then the lyrics kick in. Singer Kevin Rowland sings with a lovely British baritone in a way that combines infectious exuberance with unintelligibility. I mean, really: I defy anyone to understand the words to this song the first time through. It’s one of those classic songs that makes me thankful for living in an era when I can Google the words. And then there’s the way the song blends several different styles in one, starting with a kind of retro folk-rock before breaking into the chorus, which is markedly different stylistically; it has an entirely different beat and nothing in the verses tells us anything about the Eileen of the title. I mean, we have the singer referring to Johnnie Ray and how popular he was, but now we’re hearing about Eileen and how she makes the singer all horny and stuff. This should not work, and yet, as both sections are cheery and upbeat, somehow this stuck-together-with-scotch-tape song works.

And then there’s the song’s video, which does the same thing! A black-and-white section at the beginning, set in the 50s–using footage of singer Johnnie Ray disembarking a plane while fans go crazy–contrasts with our mid-section, in which the band is performing on some London streetcorner. It’s all really weird, and honestly, this song and video shouldn’t really work, except for the fact that the constituent parts within work perfectly–so perfectly that the song has endured for forty years.

Of course, anyone familiar with the video will see a particular significance to me. I don’t know why this is the Official 80s Anthem Of Overalls; lots of bands can be seen rocking overalls in their videos from the era! And yet–maybe it’s because this is the only Dexys Midnight Runners song to endure in American consciousness–this is the one. Mention it and someone will usually say something like “Hey, that’s the band in the too-big overalls!” And yes, it is. I’ll be honest here: from the way they’re styled in this video, “Come On Eileen” does not exactly make the best case for overalls as a sartorial choice.

But anyway, I will admit to liking “Come On Eileen” a great deal. If we who rock overalls have to have an 80s New Wave rock anthem, we could do a lot worse!

See the official video here. (The video is not able to be embedded.) Meanwhile, you can listen to the song right here!

Damn…forty years of “Come On Eileen”. That’s wild!

 

 

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