In memoriam for Roberta Flack:
Tuesday Tones
I’m growing more and more attracted to the abstract, I’ve found. I think part of this comes from the greatly-increased amount of time we’ve been spending in art galleries and museums, particularly the Buffalo AKG Museum, with its amazing collection of modern art. But this interest in the abstract is also tinging my music listening. Works like the one I feature today are really appealing to me of late.
Jeffrey Mumford is a composer currently (I think) living and teaching in Ohio. From the bio on his publisher’s website:
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions.
Awards include the “Academy Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.…
Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and served as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.
Mr. Mumford is published by Theodore Presser Co. and Quicklight Music.
I snipped out a long list of honors and accomplishments by Mr. Mumford, just to keep this post at a reasonable length, but do go read through it. He is a very accomplished musician.
This piece is called “a garden of flourishing paths”. From the YouTube page, I believe these comments are by Mr. Mumford himself:
a garden of flourishing paths was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Contemporary Music Forum/VERGE Ensemble to celebrate the 100th birthday of the distinguished American composer Elliott Carter. This work would also not be possible without the generosity of Philip Berlin, Otho Eskin, and Nancy Dodge. Special thanks also to composer Steve Antosca, Artistic Advisor of the VERGE Ensemble and Stephen Ackert, Head of the Music Department of the National Gallery of Art, for their vision and support.
The work is cast in eight short movements, each featuring a particular instrument or group of instruments.
The title for me evokes the space for which it was written (the West Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). In addition, it refers to the expressive character of the developmental paths taken by the instruments in relation to one another.
It has been my pleasure to have known Mr. Carter for many years since being a student of his during in the early 1980s. I am pleased to add my small piece to the many that were written to honor this marvelous creative artist.
Hearing the work the first time, I found it striking in its blend of colors–just look at that combination of instruments!–and the way melodies and rhythms seem to briefly emerge, without ever taking over or forming a complete thought. The effect seems to me to suggest the kind of experience one has when walking a garden path: hints of color and splashes of sound, each obscured, each only perceived around the periphery. A brilliant blossom appears, but only seen through the branches of a tree in front of it; a snippet of conversation wafts from around the next bush, and so on.
You know what? Here’s another piece by Mr. Mumford. I love this man’s sound! This is “through a stillness brightening”. (Non-capitalization of his titles seems to be a thing he does, not unlike e.e. cummings.)
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Something for Thursday
It’s always struck me as a shame that as the trumpet became a fully chromatic instrument in the 1800s, with the invention of valves, it still languished in the back of the orchestra, getting few opportunities for feature solo work. Here’s one such piece, actually written for the cornet and a virtuoso of that instrument, Jules Levi. Jacques Offenbach wrote this, and it’s a pleasantly fun and lovely piece. A deep work it’s not. Depth in concerted music for the trumpet would have to wait until the 20th century, unfortunately.
Here is the American Eagle Waltz by Jacques Offenbach.
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Tuesday Tones
Here’s a piece I heard last week on my drive home from work. I was immediately transfixed by its color and energy, to the point that I sat in my car in the driveway while it finished. The composer is Black American Jessie Montgomery, and the piece is called Starburst. It is written for string orchestra. It’s very short, only about three and a half minutes, but what a vibrant three and a half minutes they are!
Program notes (via):
Composer-violinist-educator Jessie Montgomery hails from New York’s Lower East Side, where her father managed a music studio. She was, in her words, “constantly surrounded by all different kinds of music.” Thus, her own compositions have drawn from many diverse influences, such as African-American spirituals, civil rights anthems, improvisational styles, modern jazz, film scoring, etc. From those early years, she developed, chiefly as a violinist, to receive degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University. In her professional performing life, Montgomery has been a member of the Providence String Quartet and the Catalyst Quartet. The latter began as a project of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which creates opportunities for African-American and Latino string players.
As a composer, Montgomery was the resident Composer-Educator for the Albany Symphony during the 2015-16 season. In addition she has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Composers Orchestra, the Sphinx Organization, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization. Her reputation has been spreading steadily, mainly in North America, beginning in New York City, Providence, and Boston, reaching out to Deer Valley, Utah; Miami Beach, Florida; Birmingham, Alabama; and Toronto, Ontario. Montgomery’s debut record album Strum: Music for Strings (including Starburst) was released on the Azica Records label in late 2015.
Starburst was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and premiered by its resident Sphinx Virtuosi in 2012. About it, Montgomery writes:
This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst, “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly,” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble that premiered the work, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.
Program Notes by Dr. Michael Fink © 2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Here is Starburst. Enjoy! Play it twice! You’ve got time, and it’s good!
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Something for Thursday
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?”
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Tuesday Tones
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.
Here is Black Bottom by Nkieru Okoye.
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Happy Birthday, Maestro John Williams!
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.
Thank you for the music, Maestro Williams!
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Something for Thursday
Paul Le Mat in American Graffiti:
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.
Sheila O’Malley wrote about the song and its titular event the other day:
That song, without my even knowing it, introduced me to my own culture. And I think I understood that. Before I had language, before I knew anything.
Well, there’s an interesting question for another time: What introduced me to my own culture? Meanwhile, here is “American Pie” by Don McLean.
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Tuesday Tones
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.