When I do themed series in these weekly features, I usually try to avoid posting multiple works by the same composer. Why? Actually, I don’t know. It’s not like I’m working on any kind of limit here other than what I impose on myself, and I generally think limits are annoying enough without subjecting myself to them. So here we are, revisiting the music of Yasuji Kiyose (whom we heard just a couple weeks back).
In that earlier post, I featured a work for solo piano. Apparently Kiyose mostly worked in smaller forms for solo instruments or small ensembles, and this work appears to have had a similar genesis. As far as I can tell (real in-depth information about this piece is surprisingly hard to find), Kiyose arranged an earlier work of his for orchestra, resulting in Japanese Festival Dances. The result is colorful, energetic, and engaging. I enjoyed this work a great deal, and I hope you do as well!
A couple weeks back we made our annual trek to the Sterling Renaissance Festival, where we did all our usual things, including me taking over 200 photos over the course of the day. These are still forthcoming, but let me say…I am incredibly happy with some of the shots I got!
The Faire always puts me in mind of this band, and this song, which I know I’ve featured here before but I’m pretty sure it’s been six years since the last time, so we’re good. Here is Blackmore’s Night with “Under a Violet Moon”.
Oops! Something has come up for tonight (a dog walk in the next town over), so I didn’t have time to get this week’s real post (which would have continued our exploration of Japanese composers) done. Here’s an operatic grand march instead, from Charles Gounod’s The Queen of Sheba.
In shocking and sad news, singer-songwriter Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash the other day. This one hurts. As he did for many people, Hansard came to my attention via the wonderful movie Once, which I watched many years ago (and, oddly, have not watched since…I need to rectify that).
Below is the text of the post I wrote about Once back in 2009, but first, here’s the song that really put Hansard on the map from that movie. This song won the Oscar for Best Song, and it remains one of my favorite songs from the last twenty years. Even longer, frankly.
Thank you for the music, Glen Hansard. You are gone too soon and will be missed.
My original post on Once:
“Take this sinking boat
and point it home.
We’ve still got time….”
-“Falling Slowly”, song from Once
A vacuum-cleaner repairman in Dublin works on the side as a street musician, playing his guitar and singing his songs on the streetcorners for whatever change he can get from passers-by. Occasionally he does well, other times he does less well. He has to contend with the occasional thief who tries to run off with his guitar case and the money inside it, and he has to refrain from singing his own songs for night-time when foot traffic is lower, since most people are more rewarding of a musician playing songs they know, this even though his performances of his own songs are searingly emotional. There’s something eating away at this guy, though; we can see it, although we don’t know what. He looks young but weary, idealistic and cynical at the same time; his guitar is so old that it has a second hole worn through its face and the strings are not neatly trimmed but have lengths that dangle off the ends of the frets. He wears a black overcoat and a scarf tied around his neck, even oftentimes when he is inside.
Along comes a young Czech woman who also works the streets of Dublin, selling her own wares: magazines, individual flowers. She hears one of his songs at night, and compliments him; he is trying to end the conversation when he lets slip that he’s a vacuum cleaner repairman, and her face lights up because she has a broken vacuum cleaner! She vows to bring her broken cleaner to him tomorrow, and she does. They then begin a brief friendship that deepens quickly into love as they walk the streets together, him carrying his guitar and her pulling the vacuum behind her like a dog. She seems more open, more willing to smile, more idealistic than cynical, but it soon becomes clear that she is masking her own series of hurts as well; there’s a sadness in her eye that she hides except for when she thinks no one is looking, she has a two year old daughter with no father in sight, she buys her clothes at a cheap mens’ store, and she too spends much time wearing a heavy overcoat with a scarf round her neck.
It turns out that she is a piano player too, although she keeps that part of her life carefully secret, only playing an hour a day in the studio of a music shop while the owner closes for lunch. She offers to play for him there, and he goes to hear; after she plays him some Mendelssohn, she asks him to play, and he does, to her accompaniment, teaching her one of his songs. He seems slightly skeptical of this whole thing, until she begins to sing along with the lyrics he’s placed in front of her, harmonizing his own vocals. He smiles in pleasant surprise; he’s made a connection with this woman, a musical connection, the kind that comes when we discover entirely by accident that someone we’ve just met is, on at least one level, completely in tune with ourselves.
Is that when they fall in love? I’m not sure. But it starts there, with that smile of surprise and delight. It happens early in the movie Once, about twelve minutes in, and the rest of the film follows the guitarist and the pianist through the next few days as they get to know each other and to love each other and to make music together. (The scene is helped by the fact that the song, “Falling Slowly”, is a wonderful song that would eventually win an Oscar for Best Original Song.)
The feel of Once is very similar to Before Sunrise, another great romance film about two people in similar circumstances who find each other and get to know each other over a fairly short period of time. Here it’s a few days, but it’s still fairly brief. There is a girl in his past, and a husband in hers; both lean on the other in efforts to deal with their respective pain and find their ways to their respective next steps. Those steps make sense, in the end, and if I found myself hoping for a different outcome, the one the film depicts is still moving and satisfying and right.
A movie like this can’t possibly succeed unless its performances are good, and there’s not a false note of performance in the entire movie, from the leads (who are never named; the credits list them as “Guy” and “Girl”) all the way to the jaded soundbooth operator who first thinks he’s recording a bunch of yahoos but soon realizes different once he’s heard the songs. The leads are played by Glen Hansard and Markita Irglova, who have paired as a singer-songwriting duo, penning some of the songs used in the film. And the film’s songs, by the way, are really very good, with one, “Falling Slowly”, being a truly excellent song indeed, the best movie song I’ve heard in years. This song won the Oscar last year for original song, and this was richly deserved. (And I cited it as my song of 2008.)
Once is a beautiful, beautiful movie. This is what movies are for.
Yasuji Koyose (1900-1981) was, among other things, a teacher of Toru Takemitsu, who could well be Japan’s greatest classical composer to date. His music incorporates Japanese tonalities and elements of Japanese folk song. This piece is not orchestral at all: here we take one of our infrequent detours into the world of the solo piano. Fairy Tale of the North is a moody work, solemn and meditative, that was apparently inspired by the composer’s impressions of the darkness of Japan’s north country, that he experienced in Morioka, a city in the north of Honshu. The piece has a familiar sound at first, but as it progresses it seems to get, well, stranger and stranger.
Atsutada Otaka (1944-2021) was a Japanese composer and teacher…and that is just about all of the biographical information I have been able to find about him. A longer (but not by much) biography can be found here.
The work in question today is a large-scale piece for organ and orchestra. I’m always surprised that organ-and-orchestra is not a combination encountered more often; the organ is, after all, the only single instrument that can stand toe-to-toe with the modern symphony orchestra in terms of the sheer sonic output it can generate. If your main impression of works for organ and orchestra is Saint-Saens’s Organ Symphony, then this piece, with its fiery dissonances, massive crashing chords, and slicing sonorities will come as something of a shock. It doesn’t get more purely modern than this.
Singer Linda Ronstadt turned 80 yesterday. She’s been a fixture for my entire life, though I have to admit that I don’t know her musical output very well at all. In retrospect I kind of wonder why this is; she sang in genres of music that my parents listened to a lot when I was a kid, and she sang those genres very, very well…and yet, somehow, I don’t recall any of her music ever getting played much at home, so she was relegated to whatever got played on the radio when we were out and about. It’s a shame, then, that for me she’s always been a person of whom I think, “OMG, who is that singing?!” and the answer, supplied by a DJ, is along the lines of, “That was Linda Ronstadt.” Apparently she is now permanently retired from singing, due to an ailment that has rendered her unable to do so, which is very sad; we could use a musical elder stateswoman or two right now.
I am also belatedly discovering what a stunningly beautiful woman she is and always has been!
Linda Ronstadt
Here she is with one of her best-known performances. This song is just stunning.
And finally, how could I not feature this image? I think I need to track down a photo book of Linda Ronstadt’s looks in the 70s and 80s….
Continuing our exploration of Japanese composers, we dig back now to one of the early voices of Japanese classical music. (By “early”, I mean, the period when Japan, relatively newly opened to the influences of the Western world, started producing music in what we recognize as “Classical music”. None of this is to suggest that Japan was a culture devoid of music until the West came along.) The composers of that early period tended, therefore, to reflect that new Western influence in their music, perhaps to the exclusion of anything that would make it particularly and uniquely Japanese. Such is the case with today’s work, which to my ears sounds like it could have sprung from the pen of any of the fine post-Romantic or early-Modern composers.
Kosaku Yomada lived 1886-1965, so in his lifetime he witnessed a transformation of Japanese culture, for good and bad, that must have been a constant source of astonishment. Yomada studied music both in Japan and in Europe and the United States; among his teachers were Max Bruch, so the Western stamp upon his music was indelible. He did not completely eschew Japanese influence in his music, however; he was one of the first musical voices in Japan to start the work of expressing Japanese thoughts in a Western musical language.
This piece, the Chromatic Symphony “Maria-Magdalena”, is derived from a ballet Yomada wrote based on a play by a Belgian playwright. In this work you can hear most readily the European influences on Yomada’s early work: Wagner, Strauss, and even Scriabin seem to be the main influences here. This is not criticism, by any means; the work is dramatic and effective in a way that makes it highly compelling. The development of classical music in Japan seems to have followed, at least in part, a similar track to American music: heavy European influence before the indigenous and new elements arose to have their own influence.
Born this day, 1879: Ottorino Respighi, who after a slow musical development in his youth would become one of most notable Italian composers of the 20th century. Respighi’s music is wonderfully pictorial and lyrical, often with a sense of size that is nevertheless modern enough to sound removed from the traditions of Romanticism. Italian music tends toward the dramatic anyway, and Respighi’s work is certainly that.
For all that, I’m not nearly as familiar with Respighi’s music as I should be; I’ve listened to several of his tone poems (The Pines of Rome is one of the greats, and a favorite of mine), but not much else. So here, to honor his 147th birthday, I present a work for solo piano: “Notturno” from Sei pezzi prr pianoforte (“Six pieces for piano”). Apparently the “Notturno” is one of Respighi’s most popular piano pieces, all by itself. I can certainly hear why. Its pianistic tone painting is certainly redolent of Chopin, but with a decidedly modernistic twist to it.
Getting back to my exploration of Japanese music, here is a film score by one of Japan’s most noted and prolific composers, Toru Takemitsu. In his sixty-five years, Takemitsu produced hundreds of musical works, as well as nearly a hundred filmscores and he somehow also found time to write extensively about music. He was one of those creative people who seems to do nothing but spout creative work.
I’ve always found his music to be somewhat cool and distant, but also captivating in an almost hypnotic way. This particular score, for a 1977 film called Ballad of Orin, is a very good example of this. Minimalistic motifs recur throughout, with scoring that is intimate and itself minimalistic. I know absolutely nothing about the film itself, and I also don’t know if this video presents all of the music Takemitsu wrote for the film. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling listen, albeit–as mentioned–cool and distant. This is music for a day of cool rain, I think.
