At some point in the last ten-fifteen years, orchestras happened upon a new formula for a cash-cow event: performing the entire score to a movie as the movie itself played on a screen above them. These events have proven very popular, and thus have given orchestras a much needed series of events that draw big crowds.
And yet, as much as I adore film music, I had never attended one of these events…until last week, when The Wife and I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Buffalo Philharmonic. I bought the tickets several months ago, for The Wife’s birthday in February. We’ve been trying to give events as gifts more over the last few years, and when I started “event shopping”, this was the nearest one that made me go “Oooooh, yeah, that!” So on her birthday on February 25 I got to say, “Happy birthday! I bought tickets to this thing in twelve weeks!”
Luckily, she didn’t mind.
I don’t have much to say about Raiders as a movie, since it’s one of my favorite movies of all time and I know it as well as I like any movie ever made. It did occur to me that this was the first time I’ve seen Raiders on a big screen since it came out in 1981. The movie’s story pulled me in, to the point that at times I actually forgot that the BPO was right there on the stage.
And how did the BPO do? Brilliantly, as a matter of fact. This isn’t surprising, really. The BPO is a terrific orchestra, and they were more than up to the task at hand. Their sound is really suited to the big, lush romantic sounds of John Williams’s score, especially in the showpiece cues like the Map Room sequence and the “basket chase” in Cairo. They really excelled in the extremely technical action music during the airplane fight and the “Desert Chase”, which is one of the most difficult and complex movie action cues ever written. Here the BPO held up amazingly.
The event was an absolute delight, and I’ll be looking for more such concert-filmscore performances to come!
I’ve featured this before–in fact, it was my Song of the Year for 2015!–but I haven’t featured it here in a while, and lately I’ve been listening to it a bit. You might say that it’s even been wandering on the back road by the rivers of my memory, ever flowin’, ever…gentle on my mind.
Today we’re going to listen to three different versions of the same piece! But don’t worry, the piece is really short. Like, really short. It’s about a minute long. And if you have ever been a viewer of CBS Sunday Morning, you know this piece well.
It’s called “Abblasen” (or “Ablassen”, I have seen both spellings while I’ve been reading up on this piece), and it’s the brief trumpet fanfare that opens the Sunday Morning show each and every week. It’s weird that through all my days as a trumpet player I never learned about the piece at all, since it’s quite probably the most familiar piece for solo trumpet out there, except for “Taps”. But now I’m glad I looked the piece up, because it turns out to have a pretty fascinating route to its current immortality.
“Ablassen” was written by Gottfried Reiche, who was a composer and a trumpet player of great renown in Leipzig during the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. Most of Reiche’s music has been lost, and he is best known now as the chief trumpet player for Bach’s work. Since Bach’s trumpet writing that would have been played by Reiche tends to be very difficult, it’s generally believed that Reiche was an extremely adept player. (To my surprise, it’s highly likely that Reiche was not the trumpeter who played the first performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which is perhaps the “Mt. Everest” piece of virtuoso trumpet playing.)
I note above that Reiche’s compositions are mostly lost…and it turns out that the only reason we have this one isn’t because a manuscript survived, but because Reiche’s portrait was painted by a very exacting and precise artist, one Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Haussmann is best known for the famous portrait of J.S. Bach, but here’s his portrait of Gottfried Reiche:
As art, I love that painting! It captures a kind of defiant stern-ness in Reiche’s face, and I like that he has his collar open. Portraiture of that era always has a wonderful willingness to not be entirely formal. I wonder if that’s partly borne of an idea that if someone’s going to sit for a portrait for long hours, they should be comfortable while doing it…but I digress. (Also note the trumpet he’s holding: a coiled natural trumpet, from the era before valves. We’ll get back to that in a bit.)
The big focus here is that scrap of music parchment, that little fragment, in Reiche’s left hand. Many artists don’t bother to any sort of fidelity when they include written music in their art, but Haussmann did. It’s all there, mostly…there’s certainly enough there for musicologists to have been able to reconstruct that fragment into the fanfare we now know as “Ablassen”. So apparently the reason we have “Ablassen” at all owes to the meticulous reproduction of written music by a portrait artist. Imagine if Reiche hadn’t sat for this portrait…or if he hadn’t been holding that fragment of music. CBS Sunday Morning would be opening with something else.
Here are three performances of “Ablassen”. First is performed on a “natural” trumpet that has no valves. On a trumpet like this, changes in pitch are made purely with the muscles of what’s called the “embouchure”, which are basically the muscles of the lips and lower face. It’s these muscles that make the “buzzing” in the lips which then sets the air flowing through the trumpet to vibration, making sound. For reasons of musical physics, a natural trumpet can only produce scale-wise notes in its high register, where the overtones are densest; this limitation is why trumpet parts in the Classical era–Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven–are pretty boring. To get this level of chromaticism, you have to write for the trumpet in its very high register, where at the time few players could negotiate, and in any event, a trumpet playing that high tends to pretty much take over.
Second is a performance on a modern piccolo trumpet, played by Wynton Marsalis. Aside from specialists in historical performance, most repertoire like this these days is played on that kind of valved modern instrument. And finally, we have a nifty group performance of the piece. Enjoy!
The problem was that my Samsung Galaxy earbuds suddenly stopped producing audio with my Samsung laptop. They would connect and I could use the tapping motions to make videos stop and start, but the sound refused to come through the buds! It would only come through the main speakers. My buds still worked normally with my phone, so after a couple restarts and a re-pairing of the buds with the computer, I think we’re back on track. That was weird…I love tech when it’s working perfectly, but not so much when it ain’t.
(And yes, I could have just listened to this song on my phone and then posted here, or I could have posted from my phone directly, but I like my workflow and it annoys me when it’s screwed up!)
So anyway, the other night we were watching an episode of The Repair Shop, and one of the people who brought something in to be fixed was an old British folk singer named Ralph McTell. He brought in a large stuff kangaroo that had something to do with a kid’s show he did songs for, but what caught my ear during the “profile” section of the segment was that McTell had a big hit in the late 1960s called “Streets of London”. I gave the song a few listens, and it really hit me. Not only is it a beautiful song with a touching, lilting melody, but McTell’s voice is exactly the kind of deep baritone you would want for a song like this.
The lyrics at first seem to be thematically simple, though the imagery they use is definitely poetic. It’s easy to listen to “Streets of London” and hear a kind of “People have it worse off than you” message, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. The song seems to me a kind of statement about a society that allows these levels of loneliness and despair to exist at all. Anyway, here is “Streets of London” by Ralph McTell.
Some pieces of music, like Beethoven’s Fifth or the William Tell Overture, become so overplayed as to become virtual cliche. The same can be said of Mozart’s Serenade #13 in G Major for strings, which is better known for the title Mozart gave it: Eine kleine nachtmusik, or “A Little Night Music”.
What kind of night was Mozart thinking of here? Clearly he wasn’t thinking of the night itself, with its darkness falling over Vienna or its surrounding landscape. I think he was rather thinking of inside, with candles and fires burning. This music is too bright, too joyous, and too elegant to suggest an external darkness.
Eine kleine nachtmusik is likely best known for its opening movement and its opening bars in particular. Milos Forman uses those bars to convey how well-known Mozart’s music is known even years after his death, when a bitter Antonio Salieri plays that famous opening phrase for the priest who has come to hear his confession, after the priest has previously failed to identify any of Salieri’s own melodies, each one having been “very famous in its day”. The inner movements and the finale contain their own sparkle and magic, though.
Sticking with the theme for this month (which I’ve only just now decided was a theme for this month), here in National Poetry Month, I’ll continue exploring the intersection of music and poetry. Back when I was a serious music student, I sometimes thought about setting favorite poems to music, including what is likely my favorite poem of all time, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. This complex and meaning-laden poem has thrilled me ever since I first read it, likely in 11th grade:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
So when I went searching for settings of “Annabel Lee”, one of the first ones I discovered was…a bluegrass setting.
In keeping with National Poetry Month, here is one of my favorite poems: “The Splendour Falls” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who also happens to be my favorite poet.
The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story; The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O, sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river; Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
I don’t remember not loving that poem. And here it is, set for chorus by Frederick Delius. I love the way the setting captures the repeated “dying, dying, dying….” with falling chords and delayed resolution.
A tie-in to National Poetry Month today: Loreena McKennitt’s wonderful, evocative setting of one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. Here is The Lady of Shallott. Words by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Born this date. I remain as fascinated by and indebted to his music as I was when I first heard it way back when. I have written a great deal about Rachmaninoff here and elsewhere, including a big burst for his sesquicentennial two years ago. You can find a lot of that categorized here. Sometime soon I really need to write that big, epic essay about his Second Symphony.
Here is the Israel Brass Quintet playing one of his most famous works, Vocalise.
