French composer Charles Gounod is probably the closest thing Hector Berlioz had to a successor in the musical world; Berlioz was too much the iconoclast to really found a “school” of composition reflective of his own thought. Gounod, however, counted Berlioz among his influences. Gounod was prolific and wrote a great deal of fine music, especially his operas–but for the most part, except for his operas Faust and Romeo et Juliette, Gounod is not much heard anymore. The apotheosis of French music was to come not in late Romanticism but in Impressionism.
When I was in high school, our band briefly toyed with the Grand March from Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba. Operatic grand marches are a particular delight, and this one is as grand as any. If memory serves we ended up putting this piece aside when the band director, Mr. Roosa, resigned suddenly mid-year and we ended up being rudderless as a band until a fresh face out of college, Mr. Fancher, arrived to take over in the last few months of my high school career. I remember that this Grand March was not much to his liking, and out it went. Pity, that…the trumpets have some really fun things to do in this piece.
There was news this week on the TRON front: Jeff Bridges is returning to the franchise for the third film that is apparently getting made soon. I’m a longtime TRON fan, all the way back to the original film in 1982, and I enjoyed the eventual follow-up, TRON LEGACY, which doesn’t seem to have been received terribly well, but who cares about those people, anyway.
The 1982 film featured a “futuristic” (for 1982) score, dominated by synthesizers, by composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos is a noted pioneer of electronic and synth music, and her work for TRON at this point in time sounds both groundbreaking in its approach to scoring a mainstream film with electronic music, and dated because of the state of the electronic gear at the time. But never mind the dated qualities; Carlos did an amazing job at suggesting the otherworldly nature of the World Inside the Computer, but she also composed music of genuine wonder and excitement.
I’ve just read that most of Carlos’s recorded music is unavailable for listening, in any format. This seems to me something of a cultural crime.
Part mix tape, part sonic love-letter, the Open Ears Project is a daily podcast where people share the classical track that means the most to them. Each episode offers a soulful glimpse into other human lives, helping us to hear this music—and each other—differently.
I’ve been listening for a while, though I’m behind on episodes right now, and the most recent one I’ve heard is the episode with Tom Hiddleston in which he shares a work called Spiegel im Spiegel, by Estonian composer Arvo Part. Part is apparently the most frequently performed composer alive today, after John Williams, which is really saying something. I’ve heard very little of Part’s music, but what I have heard I always find hypnotic in its minimalism, and that’s certainly the case with Spiegel im Spiegel, which breaks from my usual habit of featuring orchestral music here. This is a chamber work featuring solo violin and piano, and it’s simply wonderful.
Spiegel im spiegel translates to “Mirror in the mirror”, and according to the notes on Wikipedia this refers to an “infinity mirror”, where two mirrors face each other and produce infinite reflections into the eternal distance. This makes me remember something as a kid, in all the department stores: the clothes sections had mirrors so you could see how something looked as you tried it on. The nicer stores had a three-mirror set-up so you could see how something looked from several angles. And if you were really lucky, the two angled mirrors on the sides were hinged so you could bring them in around you. I’d go up to one of those and enclose myself in a triangle of mirrors, and this was pretty trippy fun for a seven or eight-year-old kid. (My mother, for some reason, did not approve when I would do this. To this day I don’t see the problem.)
Spiegel im Spiegel is delicate and contemplative, and the sound is open and clear…almost infinite, like a perfectly mirrored pane of glass. Listening to it I can certainly hear an aural version of the imperfect infinity of endless reflections that bend slightly to one side, since you can never get the perfect vantage point to see all the way into infinity because your head is in the way. What a wonderful piece.
(And I heartily recommend The Open Ears Project. I won’t even accuse them of stealing my Tone Poem Tuesday idea for a podcast!)
We recently watched The Holiday, a rom-com written and directed by Nancy Meyers, and we liked it a great deal, despite our inability to quite buy into the idea that both Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz are lovelorn women with zero luck in love. I enjoyed the movie for many reasons, one of which is the score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is not always the first thought people might have when thinking about scores for rom-coms, but he has some chops in this regard! One of my favorite Zimmer scores is, after all, his wonderful work for As Good As It Gets, and now I’m enjoying this one. Here’s a selection.
Composer Eric Whitacre, whom I have featured several times in this space before, is an always fascinating voice to return to. I had, in fact, forgotten about him until the week before the eclipse, when I looked up classical music selections inspired by space (that were not Holst’s The Planets, which is a work with which I’ve had a strained relationship over the years). Whitacre’s name came up for a piece called Deep Field, which sounded interesting. It turns out that the background of Deep Field is even more interesting.
If you’re up on your Hubble Space Telescope lore, you’ll recognize the title Deep Field as referring to one specific image: the “Hubble eXtreme Deep Field”, and here it is:
Bigger versions are available here. By way of background:
This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009).
The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age.
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.
It’s one of the most awe-inspiring images of our Cosmos ever captured, particularly when you realize that (a) this comprises just the tinies part of what we can see from here, and (b) the Cosmos looks like that in every direction. The vastness of space-time captured here and implied by the strange smallness of this specific infinity is utterly humbling.
The XDF image inspired the making of a film celebrating the years of Hubble’s service to astronomy, and Mr. Whitacre was brought in to score the film. The result is an amazing ethereal work that builds and builds and builds with intensity, before subsiding with the entrance of a choir. The work is open and yet dense, peaceful and yet driving…it’s music that stands alongside our images of the depths of our universe.
Grammy® award-winning American composer Eric Whitacre’s symphonic work Deep Field was inspired by the world’s most famous space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope which celebrated its 30th year in orbit in 2020, and its greatest discovery – the iconic Deep Field image. The film – Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe – illuminates the score by combining Hubble’s stunning imagery, including never-seen-before galaxy fly-bys, with bespoke animations to create an immersive, unforgettable journey from planet Earth to the furthest edges of our universe.
The film is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Grammy® award-winning composer & conductor Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, scientists and visualizers from the Space Telescope Science Institute and multi award-winning artists 59 Productions. The score and film paint the incredible story of the Hubble Deep Field. Turning its gaze to a tiny and seemingly dark area of space (around one 24-millionth of the sky) for an 11-day long period, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed over 3,000 galaxies that had never previously been seen, each one composed of hundreds of billions of stars.
Here is Deep Field, first performed in concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and then the film with the work alongside it. This is amazing stuff.
We are currently entertaining a visit from my brother-in-law, so posting will likely be light here until the weekend. That being the case, it’s time for Franz von Suppe! Here is the Poet and Peasant Overture.
A work today by composer Nina Shekhar. The work is called Lumina, and rather than me introducing it, I’ll let the composer herself do it:
And here is Lumina. This is a fascinating listen!
I found this piece suggested in an article about space-themed classical music, which seems appropriate to me leading up to next week’s total solar eclipse. Shekhar herself indicates that her work is a study of contrasting images, light and dark, and if that’s not what we’re all hoping to see next Monday around 3:25pm ET here in WNY, I don’t know what is.
Born this date: Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of my very favorite musical voices in history. Last year was his 150th, and it seemed to me that we did not hear nearly enough about him back then. I wrote quite a lot on Rachmaninoff last year, but I still didn’t finish my project; the big long walk-through post of his Symphony No. 2 is still locked in my mind. But it’s coming. Someday.
Meanwhile, April should always include Rachmaninoff. Every month should include some Rachmaninoff, but particularly April. There’s something in the way Rachmaninoff exudes both optimistic hope and dark brooding, from one minute to the next, that seems particularly applicable to the reluctant Western New York springtime.
Here is the Second Concerto, because…the Second Concerto.
