The birthday of the great Jerry Goldsmith was the other day, on the 10th. And honestly, Goldsmith deserves a more poetic tribute than I’ve got in me right now, because it’s late in the work week and I’m tired and as I write this I have already consumed half of a beverage, if you take my meaning. So I’ll just let a selection of his music speak for itself. Luckily, Jerry Goldsmith was one of the greats of 20th century music (not just film music, but music in general!), and this is probably my favorite score of his. Here is a suite from The Wind and the Lion.
By the way, The Wind and the Lion is a good entry in the “What movie has the best closing line?” sweepstakes: “Is there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for?”
Nkeiru Okoye was born in New York City in 1972 to a Nigerian father and an African-American mother. She graduated from Oberlin in 1993, which is the same year I graduated Wartburg College. Okoye is almost entirely contemporary with me. I am less than a year older than she is. According to the bio on her website, Okoye has had an already-amazing career as a composer…and I only heard a piece of hers for the first time yesterday.
Sigh. There is so much wonderful music out there to hear! Would that I could do just that, and nothing else. Well, writing too. And photography. And….
I found this piece almost entirely accidentally on YouTube, and I listened to it over my lunch break yesterday. It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever heard, containing a mixture of styles and genres and techniques that blend together into something wonderfully old and new. Looking up Okoye’s work and trying to learn what her compositional style is, I found this profile which includes this:
With an output containing a plethora of orchestral, band, choral, and chamber works as well as operas composed over a career spanning nearly 30 years, Dr. Okoye has written across nearly every musical medium. Her genre-bending compositions draw from Classical, Gospel, Folk, Jazz, R&B, and African diasporic music, and are often infused with African American improvisatory techniques.
I don’t know how much of this piece is improvisatory, but you can certainly hear all of those influences in this piece’s pages. I thought this was wonderful, and I hope you will, too.
Today John Williams turns 93. His music stands as one of the undisputed bright spots and creative forces behind my own life; to recall a time in my life when I was not keenly aware of his music I have to dig back to memories that are mostly hazy and almost sepia-tinged. I don’t remember when exactly my sister took me to see Star Wars–it wasn’t in May of that year, it was later, probably sometime in the summer, when it came out we were still living out our one year in Wisconsin and then we moved to Oregon, which is where we saw it–but I’m pretty sure it was well before my late-September birthday, so I was still 5 years old when I first got my serious exposure to John Williams. And he’s been there ever since. It sometimes feels like I’ve kind of let him down as a fan, since I haven’t heard a lot of his post-2000 work beyond snippets here and there, but then I stop and re-cast that as seeing it as a gift to myself: I have many hours of new John Williams music to hear.
Below is the text of the post I wrote on this date a year ago, when Williams’s birthday coincided with Thursday so I was able to use it as the genesis of my weekly Something For Thursday music post. I’m reposting it now, because Williams is great on ANY day of the week!
Here is a wonderful tribute by the author of a forthcoming biography of Maestro Williams, and here below is my post from a year ago.
John Williams turns 93 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Buddy Holly died February 3, 1959, 66 years ago. That’s an entire lifetime, almost…possibly several lifetimes. Had he lived to this day, he would be 88 years old, certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
And he didn’t die alone. Richie Valens, born just three months before my mother, would be 83 now. The Big Bopper was the “old man” of the group who got on that plane; he’d be 94 now had he lived.
I went to college just an hour or so’s drive from Clear Lake, IA, where those three men boarded a small plane to make the journey to their next tour stop, and where the plane crashed in a field just a short distance away. The lore surrounding the crash–Valens “winning” his seat on the plane in a coil-flip, bandmate Waylon Jennings wisecracking to Holly about the plane crashing (a comment that would haunt him the rest of his life)–has taken on a life of its own over the years, especially the sense of what rock music history might have been had those three artists continued.
Certainly popular culture has never forgotten that moment. The sense of a world shifting informs all of George Lucas’s amazing American Graffiti, a world shifting when it had never settled in the first place. A biopic of Valens, La Bamba, came along in the 80s, introducing the world to Lou Diamond Philips and giving the band Los Lobos its biggest hit, a cover of the Valens title tune. (I remember the film’s rather heavy-handed plane-crash imagery throughout, which led Roger Ebert to note that the film’s version of Valens would have been surprised to not die in a plane crash.)
I never made it out to the crash location, which is like many such places a pilgrimage spot. I know that since it’s in the middle of a field you can’t just drive up to it; you have to park and then walk in. It’s a corn field, though, so it’s all straight lines. Just east of the crash site, Interstate 35 lies. I don’t know if you can see the site from that road, but I’ve driven by it quite a few times. It’s quite a thing, isn’t it–one of the most somber moments in the history of popular music is now the kind of place where a roadside historical marker stands.
The biggest cultural artifact of that awful day in Clear Lake, IA, is probably the eight-minute long masterpiece of impressionistic lyric energy that Don McLean penned about it. I don’t know if McLean coined the phrase “the day the music died” to refer to the February 3 crash, but that phrase has certainly come to mean that horrible event. The song unfurls in a wave of impressionistic verse that has had people scrambling to figure out the inner meanings ever since the thing came out in October 1971 (making it probably the first significant work of art of my lifetime!). McLean has resisted confirming any specific meanings for the various persons or events referenced in the song, though he has admitted some of the symbolic meanings contained within. The song is lyrically dense and eternally fascinating. It’s been present pretty much my entire life, and I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t at least passingly familiar with this tune about the guys in the Chevy down by the levee, drinking whiskey and rye. It wasn’t until the 90s that I really started to dig into the song and learn its words. I’ve always resisted all the “meanings”, including the insistence in the late 90s and early 00s, bolstered by an email chain letter (remember those?) that the plane was actually named “American Pie”. It was not.
I even have my own personal “mondegreen” with “American Pie”: late in the song McLean sings, “As the flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite….” I have always heard that as “As the planes climbed high into the night”, and you know what? I think that works. I’m gonna stick with it.
Yup, that’s what we’re calling this series now: Tuesday Tones, because it’s still going to be a music focus series, but it won’t just be tone poems. Not that it was before, really, because if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s put up boundaries for myself and then immediately break them, because boundaries are only fun when you’re breaking them, right? (I’m still going to use the “Tone Poem Tuesday” post tag, because my tags on this site are already out of control and adding new ones isn’t a great idea unless I really need to.)
Anyway, let’s listen to some music.
Wood Notes by William Grant Still is an orchestral suite of four movements: “Singing River”, “Autumn Night”, “Moon Dusk”, and “Whippoorwill’s Shoes”. The work was apparently inspired by poems by one Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, though I have as yet been unable to track down his actual poetry. The naturalistic writing in Wood Notes calls to mind similar approaches to depicting nature in music as Smetana’s Die Moldau, though the musical language here is pure Still, mingling the sound of spirituals with a decidedly American idiom.
I’m thinking about renaming this weekly feature, in order to make it into a more broad focus on classical music, but more on that later when I’ve thought of a name that I like. Meanwhile, today I have a piece of chamber music by Marcel Tyberg.
Tyberg was an Austrian composer, born in 1893. He was not highly prolific, but he left behind several symphonies, some songs, and a few chamber and sacred works that survived when Tyberg gave his manuscripts to a friend while he was living in Northern Italy in 1943. How prescient he was: his mother, abiding by Nazi law, registered that she did, in fact, have Jewish blood. On that basis, Marcel Tyberg was deported to the camps. He died in Auschwitz, December 31, 1944.
His scores remained with a family who later settled in Buffalo, NY, where decades later a descendant found the music and brought it to Buffalo Philharmonic music director JoAnn Falletta. She describes what happened:
One day, maybe a couple of years after I became music director; I remember it was a terribly rainy day in Buffalo, and I got off the stage after rehearsal and standing at the door of my dressing room was this older gentleman, just drenched, wearing a raincoat, dripping water, carrying a shopping bag. I had never met him before.
It was Dr. Enrico Mihich [the son of Milan Mihich, the friend to whom Tyberg entrusted his scores]. He said, “I have to speak to you. It’s very important.” He was the kind of person, when he said it was very important, you listened to him.
We went into my dressing room. He told me that story. He said, I know this is wonderful music. It’s great music. It needs to be played. I’ve tried with every music director and they haven’t been able to do it.
I looked at the music and I knew why they said no. It was almost illegible. The score had been handwritten, the pages were frayed, pieces were missing. It was almost impossible to read this European handwriting.
I realized this was going to be a daunting project but there was something about his urgency. He said to me, “I’m not going to live much longer. This is my life’s mission to bring this music to life.”
And I thought, how could you not be moved by the belief in this composer that this man had?
Marcel Tyberg is a musical voice that maybe would have flourished in the 20th century had other impulses not included his in the millions of voices that were marked for silence. Listening to music from artists like this is important, I think, for a number of reasons. First, those voices should never have been silenced and if we can hear them now, even many decades later, I think that’s a worthy thing. And second? It’s just plain good music.
This is Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F major. A piano trio typically involves a piano, a violin, and a cello, and that’s the case here. The work is energetic and lyrical with a middle movement that puts me in mind of Borodin, with its songful introspection and its insistent drive. And it can only be heard now because a man took his friend’s music and fled Europe with it.
Well, my mood hasn’t been great this week, for what are probably obvious reasons. But there is still music to fall back on and to remind oneself what is good in the world.
Like, punching Nazis.
Punching Nazis is good.
Punching Nazis is very good.
Here’s the theme music for a character who punched a lot of Nazis.
I could also title this post “I listened to it, so now I’m gonna make you listen to it too!” Because it’s a piece whose existence I learned about after I watched a video on YouTube called “Reacting to One of the Worst Pieces of Classical Music Ever“.
“Ooooh!” thought I. “He’s gonna rip on Ravel’s Bolero!”
Erp…no. He did not.
What did he rip on?
A piece called The Battle of Prague by Frantisek Kotzwara.
You are now no doubt wondering just who on earth Frantisek Kotzwara is or was. And I’m here to help! Kotzwara was an itinerant musician who played viola and double bass in addition to composing, and he traveled all over Europe after being born in Prague. He eventually settled in England, where he lived out the rest of his life before dying peacefully in 1791, either 60 or 61 years of age.
When I say “died peacefully”, I’m being nice. I’ll leave the details to the reader to search out, but according to Wikipedia, Kotzwara was “one of the first recorded instances of death by erotic asphyxiation”.
And you thought the folks of the “powdered wig” era were a bunch of no-fun types.
The Battle of Prague was originally written for piano primarily, but apparently it includes secondary parts for violin, cello, and percussion. The work memorializes a battle that took place near Prague (obviously), and it falls into a kind of mini-genre of “battle music”, not unlike Wellington’s Victory, a fairly silly potboiler of a piece that gains almost all of whatever cachet it has by virtue of its having been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Well, Kotzwara was no Beethoven, and I have to admit that I found this work (it’s been orchestrated here) entertainingly silly in a way that the Beethoven work also possesses. It’s hard to describe. The tunes are relatively catchy, and there’s some surprisingly impressionistic work here for a piece written in Mozart’s day.
Could it actually be good?
Well…no. Not to me, anyway. But it’s also not bad in the worst way, either. Apparently, from what I’ve sussed out online, The Battle of Prague was quite a popular piece in its day and after, and it’s got a certain crowd-pleasing weirdness to it. It’s a weirdly fun little listen. Here, you be the judge!
NOTE: This is a repost of an old item from the BlogSpot days of this site. For whatever reason, I’ve seen a rather dispiriting resurgence on social media the last few days of the old chestnut that John Williams is basically a hack of a composer who steals his melodies from anywhere and everywhere, and that he recycles his own music, and so on. Every time I hear this I wonder about the listening skills of the people involved. And do give the Bernstein lecture below a listen! It’s a very enlightening look at how superficial similarities between works are often just that: entirely superficial.
Comments are turned off on this one, for the reason stated below.
UPDATE 2/18/2022: Broken link fixed.
REPOSTING 2/16/2022because…see addendum to text.
UPDATE 2/7/19: This post, for some reason, must rank highly on some Google search index or something, because it’s been a relatively consistent driver of traffic to this blog ever since I posted it, nearly four years ago. I have closed off commenting for this post because the only discussion that has ever really occurred here has been people showing up to assure me that yes, John Williams really does rip off everybody under the sun, and in all honesty I’m not interested in entertaining those discussions anymore. That said, it does strike me as interesting how many different composers of wildly varying background and voice Williams is accused of “blatantly stealing”, and how many times a specific piece by Williams is said to be a clear rip from half a dozen specific earlier works. It’s a heck of a composer who can clearly steal four or five different pieces (or so I’m told) just to craft one theme for a Harry Potter movie, innit? Anyhow, here’s the post.
This is one of the trustiest of annoying old chestnuts. What happens is someone hears Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (titled “From the New World”) for the first time, encounters the opening bars of the fourth movement, and immediately races to the computer to post the revelation for the ages that “OMG! John Williams totally ripped off Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” for the theme from JAWS!” This is the most common example of a thing that John Williams has ripped off, but there are a lot of them. A partial list of composers from whom Williams is obviously a plagiarist includes Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold, Steiner, Prokofiev, and Penderecki — in addition to the afore-mentioned Dvorak.
By comparison, here’s the Dvorak, and here’s the Williams. The similarities between the two are, to put it kindly, extremely superficial. Both start with low strings intoning a note, and then the note a half-step above it, and then the motif is repeated a few times. But Dvorak repeats it loudly and uses all the lower strings and goes at a quick tempo, building quickly and bringing in the rest of the orchestra before getting to his main theme. He also stays quite clearly in the same time signature.
Williams, however, starts off with similar notes…but slower, and much softer, and lower — I’m not even sure if he uses the cellos at all. It might be just the double basses at first. And then his insistent rhythm starts with those punching chords at off moments, so you’re not even sure what the time signature of the piece is. Williams’s sound is insistent and mysterious and somehow both mechanical and not — pretty much the opposite of what Dvorak does. And yet, “Williams ripped off Dvorak!” is one of those zombie nonsense notions that always comes back, despite being complete nonsense to anyone who bothers to pay attention.
ADDENDUM: I just saw this on YouTube. Clearly Williams was actually stealing the JAWS theme from Beethoven!
In cases like this, for years I’ve been recommending a wonderful essay by Leonard Bernstein called “The Infinite Variety of Music”, which appears in the book of the same title. The essay is actually the script of one of the wonderful episodes he used to do for the educational teevee program Omnibus. In this particular episode, Bernstein described how composers are able to create an astonishing variety of musical works from just thirteen notes of the Western tuning system, by reducing things even further and showing how a number of great composers wrote amazing pieces, many of which are very familiar, by using as their main motif the exact same four-note melody. It’s a worthy reminder that there’s a lot more to music than just what the notes are, and I’ve always found that essay to be a good remedy against the over-used canard that this composer or that composer ripped someone else off.
Of course, the problem with recommending an essay like that is that it’s in a book that isn’t always readily available…but I’ve recently discovered that the audio of that very program is on YouTube, with the musical examples helpfully included so you can see what’s going on as Bernstein speaks. I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s certainly worth the 48 minutes to listen through. No, Bernstein doesn’t specifically address Dvorak or Williams (in fact, this program was likely recorded while Williams was still a studio musician and Steven Spielberg was a kid), but it does suggest a good way of listening to music to evaluate such silly claims.
Here’s the video:
Really, give it a listen. It’ll make you better at listening to music!
