Category: On Music

The recent theme here, Works Inspired By Water, will be wrapping up next week…not for lack of works to continue presenting, but because I want to move on to other things! This particular theme, which occurred to me almost randomly one day, has proven even more fruitful than I expected. It turns out that water has inspired a lot of wonderful music!

But how about a work that isn’t just inspired by water but which literally uses water as an instrument?

Enter the always fascinating Chinese-American composer Tan Dun.

Tan is a prolific composer of whose work I have both heard a lot and not enough. Throughout his career he has written a great deal of music utilizing mixtures of traditional orchestras and instruments and very, very different non-musical sound sources to create some amazing soundscapes in his work. For this piece, called Water Concerto, he incorporates sounds using water that are captivating and enervating as the piece progresses. Just looking on the scene at the beginning here, before the work even begins, is preparatory: there’s a standard orchestra there, but in front, surrounding the conductor, is a wide variety of percussion instruments along with large basins of water. The “water performer” does amazing things throughout, making this piece one that you watch as much as hear. If you are tempted to turn this off because of the lack of traditional melody, please don’t! I promise you will hear something amazing if you stick it out.

Water is an element you can’t block. You can block land, you can say this is China and this is Russia, but water has no such frontiers.

What I want to present… is music that is for listening to in a visual way, and watching in an audio way. I want it to be intoxicating. And I hope some people will listen and rediscover life’s elements, things that are around us but we don’t notice.

—Tan Dun (via)

Here is Water Concerto by Tan Dun. Next week, we conclude this exploration of Water In Music with a gigantic work indeed.

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Continuing our ongoing exploration of classical music inspired by water in some way, we have this short and lovely piece by Maurice Ravel.

It took me longer than I suppose it should have to “discover” Ravel, because my introduction to him was Bolero, and that’s just bad news for anybody. Ravel’s work is so much more wonderfully colorful and pictorial than the dreary Bolero, and that is certainly true of today’s piece, Jeux d’eau. 

This is an early work by Ravel, and it’s sometimes considered one of the very first Impressionist works for solo piano. The title doesn’t translate well to English; literally it’s “Water Games”, but I’m not sure that works. In any event, while I generally try to ascribe specific pictorial descriptive power to music, it’s very hard to listen to Jeux d’eau and not “hear” the light shimmering on the surface of a fountain’s pool or maybe dancing on the splashes of a brook.

Ravel wrote the piece for solo piano, but it did eventually get orchestrated (multiple times, if my brief Googling is to be believed), and so I present both. The piece is only about six minutes long, you’ve got time!

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Continuing with our exploration of music with a water theme or inspired by water, we look at the early days of American classical music.

America didn’t really “come of age” musically until the 20th century, with the arrival of jazz and the passing of Romanticism; those two events allowed America’s voice to finally develop into something that went beyond the standard Germanic style of music that most American composers of the 19th century produced. But to note the limited nature of that whole century of American music isn’t to downplay it or suggest it’s not worth hearing, because a lot of it is. Such is the case with this work (which I happened to catch on the radio when I left for work one morning).

John Knowles Paine was the first American composer chiefly noted for his large-scale orchestral music. His sound is typically dark and European, and so are his forms and his inspirations. Poseidon and Amphitrite: An Ocean Fantasy is a typical tone poem in the European style, with dense scoring that recalls Liszt. The inspiration is, of course, the Greek God of the Sea and his wife, who spurned his advances at first and fled before being convinced by a dolphin to return. Paine’s work is moody and evocative and at times thrilling; as with many such works, it doesn’t merit a spot in the standard repertoire…but neither does it merit its obscurity, either.

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The weekly music feature returns! As does the theme we were exploring before December took over: music inspired by water, or written with a watery “theme”. And today we have two works, by two titans of classical music, neither one of which I had ever heard of before last week when I listened to them for the first time. I feature these two works because they share identical inspiration: a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poems are called “Calm Sea” and “Prosperous Journey”, hence the two works Calm Sea and Prosperous Journey. The first is a cantata by Ludwig van Beethoven; the second is a concert overture by Felix Mendelssohn. The works date, respectively, to 1815 and 1828.

First, the poems:

“Calm Sea”

Deep stillness rules the water
Without motion lies the sea,
And worried the sailor observes
Smooth surfaces all around.
No air from any side!
Deathly, terrible stillness!
In the immense distances
not a single wave stirs.

“Prosperous Voyage”

The fog is torn,
The sky is bright,
And Aeolus releases
The fearful bindings.
The winds whisper,
The sailor begins to move.
Swiftly! Swiftly!
The waves divide,
The distance nears;
Already I see land!

Reading the first poem, one might wonder why the speaker seems so vexed by calm seas. Wouldn’t you want a calm sea? Well…no, you wouldn’t, because this was in the days of sailing vessels, and a calm sea means no wind…and therefore, no voyage. Calm seas were viewed with dread by sailors. Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner again for a good illustration of this: a calm sea means a ship floating along powerlessly. No, for a sailor, the wind is the key to a prosperous voyage.

Here are Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).

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Continuing our tour of music inspired at least in part by water, we have a bit of film music by the master himself: the title track from John Williams’s score to the 1984 film The River. The movie is about a family who struggles to maintain their farm and their lives beside a river in Tennessee. I’ve never actually seen the film, but the score is highly regarded. The main theme is optimistic Americana with a southern twang to it.

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