Here we have a student piece written by a young composer, when he was only 19 years of age. But not just any composer: it’s 20th century Russian great Sergei Prokofiev.
Prokofiev is, I admit, something of a tough nut for me. I don’t always respond readily to his music, for one reason or another. But this piece grabbed me immediately, perhaps because it is to my ears a fascinating blend of lyric Romanticism and of atmospheric Impressionism. I hear a wild melding of Tchaikovsky and Ravel here, and that is absolutely amazing to me. This work is called a “sketch”, and it is just that: a piece written by a student composer to explore some aspect of composition. In this case, I imagine it was to explore orchestral color and mood, and the mood is definitely dark and autumnal, in my ears.
It’s FALL, y’all! So here’s a fall song. No, the leaves aren’t turning yet, except for a single tree here and there where the color is starting to nibble around the edges…but Nat King Cole is never really out of season, is he?
I’m going to pause the exploration of Japanese composers for a bit, kind-of, because as I write this, the Autumnal Equinox is just under four hours away. The sun is scheduled to cross the equator at 8:05pm ET, and right now it’s–[checks watch]–[actually checks phone, I don’t currently wear a watch]–4:12pm. So, for the next bunch of weeks, I’ll be featuring autumnal music. I’ll likely be doing this up until Halloween.
But I don’t have to make the transition super sharp! I can feature Japanese autumnal music! Composer Toru Takemitsu wrote a lot of music inspired by autumn; apparently this season fueled his musical imagination quite a bit. So here is In an Autumn Garden, which Takemitsu wrote for gagaku orchestra. This is an orchestra comprised of Japanese instruments that was often used to perform the ceremonial music of court, as well as in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The work has the feel of religious chant to my ears.
I wanted to get back to Japanese music, but I didn’t get a lot of the pre-listening done this week that I like to do when I’m presenting music I’m not familiar with, so this week I’m going with something I’m very familiar with…but still Japanese! This is a cue from Kiki’s Delivery Service, music by the great Joe Hisaishi. It’s called “A Town With an Ocean View”. This is heard when young witch Kiki, on her first journey out into the real world, ends up in a city that’s much larger than anything she’s known before. She is amazed by its energy and bustle and beauty, and the music shows this so wonderfully.
I’ve noticed over the years that I gravitate toward stories that show cities as places of genuine magic….
Continuing our ongoing exploration of Japanese classical music, we have a work by composer Akira Nishimura.
Nishimura lived 1953-2023, dying of cancer just before he would have turned 70. He lived entirely, thus, in post-war Japan and saw his country’s rebuilding to an economic powerhouse (and then a protracted period of economic stagnation). Nishimura, like many of the other composers whose work I have been sampling, seems to have been mainly a Modernist in terms of his sound, specifically using a technique called Heterophony to great effect. This is when two or more voices perform simultaneously melodic lines that are very similar, but not identical. This results in a dense sound that presents at first like a wall of dissonant sound…but from which order can be gleaned through careful listening.
Here are notes on the work below, “Canticle of Light”, as written by the composer (from the YouTube description):
This piece is commissioned work by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, as their 50th Anniversary.
This piece was written with an image and an aim present to mind: The image: That a Light shines forth in the world as if an appearance were to emerge on the changing surface of a chaotic sea. From a beginning in silence, a multi-layered multi-textured structure of sound emerges. Oozing sound takes form and become Melody. Now taking on a certain shape, now another, it has the changing form of a Living Being. Then this chaos of sound converges into an Aura of the melody, indeed it surrounds and enfolds the melody. The Aura forms not only in vertical harmonic series but horizontally as well.
The aim: For the past several years, in my works I have sought to create an enveloping reality of sound, constructed by shaping musical texture from points and lines in a space of sound. However, at the point that I had completed my earlier work “Melos Aura” (1995) I founds that I had reached in the evolution of my works, a certain limit, or even a saturation point. Therefore for the present composition, I formed the intention to compose a piece which would use full orchestra, moving in both horizontal and vertical direction, to issue forth a melody, pouring it upward and out of the sweeping, massive sound of the orchestra.
This was accomplished because I was caught up in concrete desire to create a work in this particular way, yet I do not know whether this work can truly be said to be attached any longer to the concrete, physical domain from which it sprang. It has taken on a life of its own.
I find this work, “Canticle of Light” to be one created at a turning point. This piece represents a novel development my activity as a composer. (Akira Nishimura, 1998)
I have been finding a lot of this recent listening project to be an exercise in listening to abstract music that is mostly composed without the standard Western approach to melody. Mood without melody fascinates me, as much as painting without obvious representational subject does.
OK, I don’t have anything picked for today. I went back to work after a nice six-day vacation and I got nothin’. And now The Wife and I are home and I’m dinking around while she gets dinner ready. Her Pandora is playing on the Bluetooth speaker, so you know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to feature here the very next song that comes up on her Pandora, no matter what it is. So just hang tight a few minutes…
I wonder what it will be…
We need some quiz-show suspense music…
OK, here we go…the last song is winding down….
What will it be!…
(The current song is Neil Diamond’s “America”, btw)
(“Everywhere around the world, they’re comin’ to America!” God, I love Neil Diamond….)
Ooooh, here we go…oooooh! It’s a good one! You don’t get better than this. It’s an underappreciated subgenre that you don’t hear much anymore: the big rock power ballad.
I don’t think I’ve ever featured Air Supply in this space before. And you know what? I apologize for NOTHING!
Staying with our exploration of the classical and concert music of Japan, we have something pretty interesting: a concerto for marimba and orchestra.
The marimba is likely the most fascinating of the percussion instruments, with its range and its earthy tone that is much less strident and cutting than its sister instrument, the glockenspiel. Our composer here, Takatomi Nobunaga, uses the marimba to great effect in a work that is both impressionistic and virtuosic in its demands on the soloist. And this work puts those demands on the marimbist (I’m assuming marimbist is a word, I’m going with it) almost immediately as the opening bars send the soloist on a wild display that puts the instrument’s range right up front and center. The remainder of the work is at times haunting, at other times enervating.
From what I’ve read. Takatomi Nobunaga is mostly known as a choral composer. I’m glad he composed this concerto, though.
This latest letter was about my love of Yanni’s wonderful album Live at the Acropolis. Here is one of my absolute favorite tracks from that album. I don’t have anything much new to say about this that I didn’t say in the newsletter, so let me just get out of the way.
