I heard this piece when I got in the car yesterday to come home from work. It’s a piece by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, with whom I was entirely unfamiliar until I turned on the car and his music came out of the speakers. The fact that it was raining at that exact moment heightened the effect of this music, which has a droning and hypnotic effect as repeated motifs swirl in and out, ostinato-like, over orchestral effects of increasing density and beauty.
I’m going to have to explore Mr. Einaudi’s music more, I think. Here is “Experience” from the album In a Time Lapse.
When you get to the point of having blogged for over 20 years (sheesh!), you start to worry about repeating yourself. At least, I certainly do! I find myself looking for pieces to share here, and then I think, “Nah, I’ve surely shared that before.” Such as this one, which I have indeed featured before on this site (well, not this site, but the previous version of it), but it turns out it was twelve years ago! So, here we go: the “March of the Belgian Paratroopers” by Pierre Leemans.
This is the rare march that is almost devoid of martial bombast; instead it opens and closes in relative softness.
Belgian composer Pierre Leemans began composing the “March of the Belgian Paratroopers” while serving in the army during World Wars I. Left incomplete, he returned to it decades later during World War II at the request of a group of paratroopers. His most famous composition is meant to portray a military patrol, approaching from a distance, passing by, and then leaving.
That structure calls to mind the great In the Steppes of Central Asia, by Alexander Borodin. This march, like the Borodin, is curiously optimistic in tone.
A composer with whom I am very unfamiliar: Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), who is often considered Spain’s greatest composer. In truth, I’m not sure I ever listened to any of his music until the other day when I listened to his ballet El amor brujo. The title translates to “Love, the Sorcerer”, and the ballet tells the story of an Andalusian Romani girl who is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband even as she tries to move on to another love.
From the outside looking in, the classical music of Spain never seems to get a lot of love. There’s a stereotype of Spain’s music basically being a lot of classical guitar and not a whole lot else. I honestly don’t know if that’s the least bit fair or not, but it does seem that the Germanic symphonic tradition doesn’t seem to have really taken strong root in Spain, for whatever reason. Geographic? Cultural? Both? I honestly don’t know.
This ballet is deeply colorful and dramatic, as a ballet should be; I was surprised to hear voices in it, and of course, the dance rhythms are present throughout.
This would have been last week’s selection. I heard this song on a YouTube video, and I found myself liking it a great deal. I honestly don’t know much at all about the artist. Sometimes that’s the best kind of discovery!
Erich Wolfgang Korngold is an interesting case study in being born at the wrong time, but still making a good run of it.
Born May 29, 1897 in Austria, Korngold was an enormously gifted musician to the point of being a child prodigy; he was performing complex piano music and writing his own works before he was even ten years old. But his tastes as a composer kept him from embracing the actual trends in music; modernism and atonality were not for him. Korngold was forever at home in the late Romantic language of Mahler and Strauss, which meant that a lot of his music, while not rejected at the time, never really took hold while he was alive. In order to make ends meet, Korngold ended up writing music for movies, which at that time were moving beyond the silent era. In 1938 he traveled to Hollywood to write the score for the Errol Flynn adventure film The Adventures of Robin Hood, and while he was there, Germany annexed Austria and brought Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies along. Korngold was a Jew, so he stayed in America after he was done scoring that film. He never returned home, becoming an American citizen and living out the remainder of his life composing for film and then trying to re-establish himself as a composer for the operatic stage and the concert hall.
Korngold was prolific, but his music languished for many years, owing to what was seen as his rather dated style, and his reputation as a “movie composer” in a time when film music was not taken seriously much at all. It’s only in relatively recent years that Korngold’s work has seen a re-appraisal in the musical community at large, but he was always known in the film community. John Williams cited Korngold as an influence in the sound he adopted for his score to Star Wars, and listening to Korngold’s movie music certainly points the way to a lot of movie music that followed decades later when symphonic scoring returned to prominence.
Another interesting thing about Korngold was his willingness to repurpose material. He was one to revisit earlier works and mine them for ideas in newer ones, which makes for some interesting listening when you hear the ideas recurring. (Berlioz was another composer who had no compunctions about re-using his own catalog.) One good example of this is that very score to The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which Korngold won an Oscar. Here’s a suite from that score, and you can see here the degree to which Korngold’s music has risen in estimation: the orchestra is the Bavarian Radio Symphony, one of Europe’s finest ensembles, and the conductor is Sir Simon Rattle, one of the world’s finest conductors.
It must have been particularly rewarding for Korngold to win an Oscar for this score, not just on its own merits, but because Korngold reused material from an earlier tone poem he had written called Sursum corda. This piece doesn’t seem to have made much impression at all upon Korngold’s composing of it; it languished for nearly 20 years before Korngold lifted one of its themes for the Errol Flynn classic. Here is Surum corda, and listening to it now I can’t help thinking of what Korngold’s career might have been had he been born a couple decades earlier.
I had a song picked out for today, but I’m going to save that one. Instead, this seems appropriate for a certain bit of news. This country ain’t done yet, folks!
I make an attempt every now and then, maybe once every year or two, to acquaint myself with the music of Alan Hovhaness, and I invariably come up short. I don’t really know why, but I’ve yet to find a work of his that really speaks to me on some deep level. His music is often described as naturalistic and mystical, but ultimately I don’t usually hear that; all I find in his work is long meandering passages that sound like melody but…aren’t, tempos that never change much, and long pages of pizzicato work in the low strings. I know that this is probably unfair, given how amazingly prolific he was…and that’s why I keep trying every now and then.
Anyway, I tried this piece and honestly, I didn’t get anywhere with it, aside from some lovely writing in the middle for the horn and the trumpet. I did like that passage a great deal. If anyone out there wants to set me straight on Hovhaness, I’m willing to listen!
Here is the Symphony No. 6, “Celestial Gate” (a single-movement work that bears no formal resemblance to the classical symphony) by Alan Hovhaness.
I really like ABBA, and I do not apologize for this.
Jeff Tweedy, though–singer and guitarist for Wilco–once upon a time did not like ABBA, but he got better.
I am currently reading Tweedy’s book World Within a Song: Music that Changed My Life and Life that Changed My Music, in which he writes 50 short essays about one song each that has been important in his life or his musical development or both (plus some extra essays detailing non-musical incidents from his life, so the book is kind of a musical biography). I’m enjoying the book, though I’m only a third of the way through it, and it’s making me appreciate the songs he writes about that I’ve heard and he’s piquing curiosity about those that I haven’t.
Of course I’ve heard “Dancing Queen”. I’ve known that song for decades. I was a kid when ABBA was first huge, and I remember a resurgence they enjoyed in the late 90s via 70s nostalgia and movies like Muriel’s Wedding. When Tweedy gets to “Dancing Queen”, though, he writes first about how he hated it…until one day he heard it over the loudspeakers of a grocery store and realized that he’d been wrong.
Quoting Mr. Tweedy:
But before that day, I, along with many others, had denied myself undeniable joy. Countless fantastic records and deep grooves were dismissed and derided out of ignorance. Of course, this song and this music was always going to win eventually. Because it’s just too special to ignore forever.
There are wrong opinions about music! And to this day, “Dancing Queen” is the song I think of when I THINK I don’t like something. It taught me that I can’t ever completely trust my negative reactions. I was burned so badly by this one song being withheld from my heart for so long. I try to never listen to music without first politely asking my mind, and whatever blind spots I’m afflicted with today, to move aside long enough for my gut to be the judge. And even then, if I don’t like something I make a mental note to try again in ten years.
Melodies as pure and evocative as the one in “Dancing Queen” don’t come along every day. I’m sad for every single moment I missed loving this song. Playing it again right now. Making up for lost spins. I truly recommend spending some time looking for a song you might have unfairly maligned. It feels good to stop hating something. Music is a good place to start if you’re interested in forgiveness. For yourself, mostly, I assume. Because records can’t really change much over time, but we sure can, and do. Better late than never.
And as Mr. Freeman would later say in The Shawshank Redemption, “That is Goddamned right.”
Here is “Dancing Queen”. (And no, it’s not my favorite ABBA song. That would be “Fernando”.)
