John Adams’s first orchestral work, written in 1979, came well before the operatic work that made him well-known in the 1980s. It’s an interesting listen: solemn and meditative, and yet shot through with an odd kind of mystical optimism.
The music also concerns itself with registers, both very high and very low. Bass sound is witheld from the entire first part of the piece, making its appearance, when it finally arrives, a genuinely surprising and gratifying event. Likewise, long areas of similar figuration in the high winds or metallic percussion (glockenspiel and crotales) create their own feeling of formal unity. With its long “camera pans” and hints of aerial photography the music is very much influenced by film techniques. In no other work of mine is the dramatic impulse kept so consistenly reined in in favor of a natural progression of form and materials. “Common Tones in Simple Time” could justifiably be called “a pastoral with pulse.”
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and likely won’t until it hits a streaming service, but I’ve heard the music, and I can say that in that department at least, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Distiny fires on all cylinders. Of course, how could it not? The score is by John Williams, after all.
Here is the arrangement of “Helena’s Theme” for violin and orchestra. This is a complex and sophisticated theme, less obviously melodic than earlier lyric themes for these movies–Marion’s Theme, Willie’s Theme, and the Grail Knight Theme, for example–but it is no less heartfelt and moving, for all that. It sounds to me like a blend of an old-fashioned emotions and a new personality, as well as a complex musical introspection noting the difference between youth and age. That seems appropriate for this movie, which I do look forward to watching.
This is a repost of something I wrote some years ago. Back in my BlogSpot days this post was a regular driver of search-engine traffic to my blog; I’m not sure if that’s the case now or not, but it can always bear a repeating!
Anyhow, in my Something for Thursday series, I’ve lately posted several Grand Marches from various operas, and now I’m thinking a bit of the wide variety of music that falls under the general category of the “March”. You have Grand Marches, as I’ve noted above, that involve long musical scoring to big set pieces in operas. You also have the Funeral March, which are generally downbeat and sad-sounding, for obvious reasons. You have Processional Marches, with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches being prime examples. And there are the Military Marches, patriotic marches, circus marches, symphonic marches, and so on. Lots and lots of marches.
One of the most famous of all marches is, of course, John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. It’s a staple of nearly every patriotic-themed classical music concert you might ever attend, and the march is as central a staple in July 4th festivities as hot dogs or fireworks. In college, when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played a concert on our campus, their first encore work was The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Sousa wrote many marches — hence the moniker “The March King” — a number of which are very familiar to our ears now (Washington Post and Liberty Bell among them), but The Stars and Stripes Forever is by far his most familiar work. It can sound a bit clicheed these days, but like all works that have to a degree become clichee, when you blow off the dust and actually listen to the thing, you can hear anew those qualities that allowed it to become cliche in the first place.
The Stars and Stripes Forever is also a perfect example of the traditional American military march, which in their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to follow specific forms. If you were to join a concert band in rehearsing one of these marches, you would hear some odd-sounding terms: “Let’s begin at the second strain, first time through.” Or, “Just the trombones, please, starting at the dogfight.” You’d be thinking, “What’s a dogfight? Are there going to be planes flying in aerial combat above our heads?” Well, of course not! So what we’ll do here is go through The Stars and Stripes Forever, with my notations below indicating at which point each section starts.
(This is one of the niftiest musical videos I’ve ever seen, by the way.)
0:07 to 0:10: The is the Intro section. Most marches will have some kind of intro section.
0:11 to 0:24: This is the First Strain, which is will be repeated once.
0:24 to 0:39: The First Strain, repeated. Sometimes, but not always, a band or orchestra will perform a repeat of a strain differently than they did the first time: they’ll dial down the dynamics, playing the repeat softer, or maybe they’ll actually vary the instrumentation a bit. This is often at the discretion of the conductor. Marches in this genre tend to be “modular” in construction, making it easier to tailor the piece a bit depending on the demands of the performance. You might need to make it longer or shorter, depending on the situation, so a conductor might decide to repeat each strain twice instead of once; but then deciding to play the first repeat softer and the second repeat softer still, or some other kind of variation. Some conductors, with experienced ensembles, will even have hand signals ready so they can indicate to their ensemble such a change while in the midst of performance.
0:39 to 0:54: Here is the Second Strain, first time through. Note that it is more lyrical than the boisterous First Strain. In a well-written march, the strains will usually contrast in some way.
0:55 to 1:09: Now we repeat the Second Strain. Note in this performance that the brass join in the melody and it’s a bit louder and more boisterous than the first time through. This difference is why, in rehearsal, our conductor will say things like “OK, start at the second strain, second time through.” He has to let the brass know if they’re playing or sitting out.
OK. After we’re done with the first two strains — and there are usually just two — however many times we’ve performed them, with whatever performance variations our conductor has decided upon, we’re onto the Trio. Sometimes we’ll have a key change when we hit the Trio, along with some other way to differentiate the Trio from the Intro and the first two strains. In Stars and Stripes Forever, our relatively brisk sound of the first two strains yields to a longer, more lyrical melody — even more lyrical than what we heard in the second strain. Additionally, there is less syncopation now, although Sousa still puts key parts of emphasis on the occasional off-beat. A Trio section is often the longest part of a march, and it often revolves around a single melody or musical idea, as opposed to the first and second strains, which posit musical ideas briefly and then shuffle them off the stage. The Trio is the main attraction, as it were.
Now, with our Trio section, there’s only one main musical idea going on, but we’re going to hear it three times. Sousa doesn’t want to bore us, so he’ll change it up a bit each time. How? Let’s see:
1:10 to 1:39: The Trio, first time through. Sometimes we might call this the First Strain of the Trio, or we might just call it the Trio, first time. In any event, this specific case is one of the most recognizable melodies in musical history, and in terms of marches, it’s probably the most famous march melody ever. (It might be a close second to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1…or the Elgar is a close second to Stars and Stripes. Not sure which.)
By the way, note that Sousa doesn’t just give us this melody by itself; he continues to remind us that this is still a march by putting all those little staccato flourishes softly playing behind the melody. There’s always something going on in a Sousa march, something new or different or contrasting with the main thing at any given moment. Case in point: when the melody reaches its highest note at 1:24, note the descending arpeggio in the lower brass, or at 1:34 when we reach a high note again, a little “tweet” of a fanfare in the trumpets.
Note, also, that one time through the First Strain of the Trio takes as long as two times through each of the First and Second Strains.
1:39 to 2:02: Now, having heard the complete Trio strain one time through, we’re going to repeat it twice. But unlike the First and Second strains, which are repeated in immediate succession, we get a bit of contrast in a passage that stands in marked rhythmic and dynamic contrast to the Trio strain. This contrasting section, found in the Trios of many marches of this type, is called the Dogfight. We’ll hear it twice through; this is the first time. The Dogfight isn’t really a melody, per se; it’s more of a martial fluorish. Note that the Dogfight is, by itself, longer than either the First or Second Strain.
2:02 to 2:30: The Trio strain, repeated (or, alternatively, the Second Strain of the Trio). Sousa lowers the dynamics again, back down to a softer setting, but we get the first variation of the Trio here. The Stars and Stripes melody plays again in its entirety, but this time with a brilliant touch: a counter-flourish played by the solo piccolo. Note also that the little trumpet fanfares from the first time through aren’t there anymore, in favor of our piccolo solo.
2:31 to 2:55: The Dogfight, second time through. Many performances play the Dogfight a bit louder this time through, and have the Dogfight end with a crescendo into the Trio strain’s final repeat.
2:55 to end: Now we get the last repeat of the Trio strain (or, alternatively, the Third Strain of the Trio). After hearing the Trio strain played softly twice, this time Sousa lets it all hang out: everybody’s playing at full-bore, including our intrepid piccolo player. Now, a lesser composer might think that just hearing this great melody with the entire band playing forte might be pleasing enough to send the crowd away, but Sousa isn’t done giving new things to hear. Specifically, this last time, he gives a countermelody to the low brass that plays mostly on the off-bars of the main melody; when the main theme is holding a long note, the low brass are doing their thing.
And at the very end? That final punctuating note that the march ends on? That’s called the Stinger.
Most marches of this type derive their excitement from variations along the way, as described above: variations in dynamics (loud versus soft), variations in instrumention (who plays what and when), variations in backing detail (little fanfares versus that solo piccolo line). What doesn’t vary is tempo: a march of this type will always end at the same tempo it started. The only place I’ve ever heard a change in tempo in The Stars and Stripes Forever is at the very end of the Dogfight, the second time through, where some conductors — not all — will throw in a ritardando on that last descending scale before the Trio strain’s final repeat, and that’s about it. A march is not the place for the type of rubato that you might hear in, say, some Romantic symphony.
Anyhow, there you have it: a road map to The Stars and Stripes Forever. Next time you’re hearing this march while eating a hot dog and watching fireworks, note the march’s tight construction!
Having the Titanic on the mind for obvious reasons, here’s some music from a movie about the wreck…but not the famous movie. This is the rather less famous movie from 1980 or 1981 called Raise the Titanic. I watched this movie years ago when it was on a mid-afternoon matinee kind of thing, and…well, that’s probably the best way to watch a movie like this. I don’t even remember if I watched it before or after Robert Ballard’s famous discovery of the actual wreck itself, which rendered the movie even more inaccurate than it would have been to begin with. Raise the Titanic‘s plot involves, well, a plan to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor, because there was some kind of cargo that was somehow still very valuable many years later. (All this is from faded memory; I’m not looking it up and I only watched the movie once.) I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, yes, they do find the Titanic and raise her from the ocean floor in a big special-effect set-piece.
The music from the movie is by John Barry, who by this point in his career was starting to lean hard into his “big sweeping slow melody” phase that would peak ten years later with Dances With Wolves. Here is a suite from Raise the Titanic.
OK, fine, here’s the actual clip of the ship rising to the surface again. Note that at this point, most people still thought that the ship had sunk in one piece, rather than snapping in two before sinking.
No, I don’t recommend the movie…unless it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have some popcorn handy.
A longer post breaking this unplanned hiatus is coming, but meantime…here’s Franz von Suppe! This is not an overture, though: It’s a march called Fatinitza.
A two-fer, because I couldn’t decide which of these to post. That’s when I remembered, “Hey, it’s MY blog, I can post two things if I want!” So, here are two things:
The first track on the brand new album by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. It’s called “Fly”, and I like this song quite a bit! It sounds like something from a Cameron Crowe movie to me: gentle and acoustic, and quietly optimistic.
“Luckenbach, Texas” by Waylon Jennings. Sheila O’Malley posted today about Jennings, who was a constant part of the soundtrack of my youth. I don’t think I ever knew until I started reading Sheila that Jennings had been touring with Buddy Holly and the others on that last, ill-fated trip; he had survivor’s guilt all the rest of his life after he and Holly exchanged quips on the Night the Music Died: Holly said “I hope the bus freezes your ass,” and Jennings fired back, “I hope your plane goes down.” Imagine…pure chance, really, and not meant…and yet. And yet. Jennings had that whole “Outlaw” thing going on, but what I remember is his rich baritone and his way of finding his way vocally to the emotional heart of a song.
A piano concerto, today, and a very modern one at that: composed in 2018 and premiered a year later, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is the third piano concerto by composer John Adams.
Adams is best known for his operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, but he has been a prolific composer in many genres, and he may well be the best known contemporary American composer alive, aside from possibly film composers like John Williams. Adams has had a long career and thus his work has evolved over the years, but he is most often characterized as a “minimalist”, writing works that often rely on repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs. This piece is no different.
Cast in three movement-like sections that are played without pause, the concerto deploys a number of interesting effects, like giving the piano a kind of honky-tonk sound. The second movement uses a minimalist kind of lyricism, and the last movement returns to the upbeat feel of the first, but with a more care-free, dancelike character. The three sections are given these tempi by Adams:
Gritty, funky, but in Strict Tempo; Twitchy, Bot-like
Much Slower; Gently, Relaxed
Più Mosso: Obsession / Swing
That first is particularly interesting: “Twitchy, Bot-like”, as if to suggest a mechanistic feel in the first movement that slowly gives way throughout the work until the last movement takes on a more improvisational feel.
Here is Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, by John Adams.
Canadian (Toronto!) singer-songwriter Shannon Dooks released a new song recently, and last week she released the song’s official video, which is also partly a short film. I’ve been following Dooks online for several years now, and it’s nice to see her talents paying off.
