Well, I don’t know how often I do this. It’s not very often. Probably the last time was something like Ravel’s Bolero.
I’m about to share something I don’t like at all.
See, there’s this thing that’s been going around social media of late, particularly Tiktok, where you share what the Number One song was when you were born. I looked mine up…and my shoulders sagged. My stomach fell. My heart sank.
I had never heard this before, so I had to go listen to it, hoping against hope that maybe it’s not terrible.
Oh, it is.
Look, I have no problem with this particular artist, but I knew upon seeing this song title that I was not going to dig this particular song. And lo! I did not.
Here, folks, is what was Number One in the land on September 26, 1971. I’m not even going to name it! If I’d waited another week, I’d have arrived during “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart’s chart-topping success. Alas!
OK, I think we’re going to wrap up the short survey of classical works that either appeared, or were composed, in 1925, thus giving us an idea of where classical music was one hundred years ago. (I’m not bored of the topic at all, but there’s another one I’m wanting to explore, so time to move on!)
One of the great symphonists of the twentieth century was the Russian-Soviet master Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote fifteen symphonies over the course of his prolific musical life, and taken together they form a fascinating picture of the musical and artistic life that was possible during the Soviet Union. Shostakovich, like all artists in those regimes, had to walk a tight rope of expressing himself in his art while also pleasing the masters in charge of everything, and no, he was not always successful on either score.
I always find Shostakovich’s music more appealing than his contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev’s. I’m not really sure why; perhaps it lies on Shostakovich’s tendency to a starker sound and his sometimes satirical, if not outright sarcastic, tone. In some of his works there is an outright tone of mockery going on. For some this can date his work, but for me it depicts something fascinating. Among the standard emotion there is real humor in Shostakovich’s music, even if it tends to be dark humor, the kind of humor that is whispered in the background lest someone in authority hear.
Shostakovich completed his first symphony in 1925 (though it was not actually premiered until 1926). He was only 19 years old when he wrote it, and it is in some ways a student piece. The work’s orchestration is particularly interesting; Shostakovich employs interesting instrument mixes throughout, such as starting the symphony with a duet between a trumpet and a bassoon. A piano is used in the work, not as a soloist, but as a part of the orchestral tableau. I always find something rather refreshing about listening to Shostakovich, which I suppose springs from my main temperament when it comes to Russian music: with Shostakovich you get the Big and the Epic, but not necessarily the Giant Sweeping Heart-on-their-Sleeve TUNE that you get with the Tcaikovskys and the Borodins and the Rachmaninoffs of the world.
Here is the Symphony No. 1 in F minor by Dmitri Shostakovich.
Continuing my small survey of the classical music of 1925, one hundred years ago, we have a work by one of the most interesting composers of the 20th century. George Antheil is mainly known as an “avant-garde” composer, and in keeping with that label he composed a great deal of experimental music that made use of mechanistic sounds, as he was initially fascinated by the sounds of industry. He wrote a work called Ballet mecanique, which calls for, among other things, sixteen player pianos. Antheil wasn’t just about sonic experiment for the sake of sonic experiment, though; he would later find work scoring films in Hollywood, and this work required a more traditional tonal hand. How traditionally tonal he was is for the listener to determine.
A Jazz Symphony is Antheil’s work from 1925. The work, which premiered at the same concert as Ballet mecanique, created quite the stir in 1925, but to our ears now it sounds like exactly what it claims to be: a work for orchestra that is deeply steeped in jazz. American music was at the time starting to embrace jazz as more than just a “Tin Pan Alley” kind of thing, and Antheil was part of the first wave of such composers.
(An interesting footnote on Antheil, who is mainly known as a composer: he worked during World War II with actress Hedy Lamarr to co-invent a new radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that would not be subject to Axis frequency jamming.)
I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to New York, hopefully to establish a life and then move their families and their loved ones along later. Cesar and Nestor become musicians and their lives…well, their lives go on. I don’t want to say a whole lot more than that, because the book is as effective at showing life for what it is–a sequence of things that happen to us, few of which we have any control over–and there are turns along the way that we don’t see coming. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is not a novel that grabs right away…in fact, I was wondering if I’d bother finishing it just after fifty pages or so. But it grows in the mind, and by the time I was in the last hundred pages or so, I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read the book slowly, savoring as it went, enjoying Hijuelos’s chapter-less structure and his very long paragraphs, sometimes extending over several pages, and his long parenthetical asides as one of Cesar’s memories triggered another one, barely related, that took place at some total other point in his life.
The Castillo Brothers’ biggest hit is a song that Nestor writes about the love of his life, a woman he can’t forget even though she is back in Cuba (and their relationship didn’t work out anyway), named Maria. Nestor pens a song called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul”, and this song’s success marks their high point as a musical act and it also somewhat haunts Cesar for the rest of the novel. And thanks to the fact that the book was adapted for the screen in 1992, in a film simply called The Mambo Kings, we can hear the song. It is sung by Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, who star in the film as Cesar and Nestor Castillo. I have never seen the film, but the song is quite good.
UPDATE: Apparently my fingers weren’t doing things right when I wrote this post, as I came up with two different spellings of “Respighi”. This has been fixed. Weird how some words and names just defy our fingers, for those of us who type quickly in an untrained fashion!
Concluding (or maybe just continuing, I haven’t decided yet) our rather capricious look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago is another work that arrived in 1925. While I had never heard this piece before, I am familiar with the composer: Ottorino Respighi, the Italian composer of such spectacular orchestral showpieces as The Pines of Rome. This work, Rossiniana, is a four-movement orchestral suite that derives from four piano pieces written by Giacomo Rossini. If Rossiniana sounds much less “modern” than we would expect for a work from 1925, that’s the reason: Respighi’s source material dates from the 1850s and 1860s.
That’s a useful reminder, I think: art is often as much about looking back as it is about looking ahead. Respighi updates these salon pieces by Rossini, orchestrating them with his own flair for orchestral writing. The result is something that is somehow old and a little modern. Maybe just a little modern.
(Normally I try to wait longer than just under four months before I do a re-post of something I’ve already written here, but Chuck Mangione has died, and I like what I wrote about him and this song back in March, so here it is again. I’m listening to it anew as I write this. Thanks for the music, Mr. Mangione!)
So for Tuesday Tones the other day, I went to feature a piece of music that I know I’ve featured here before but I couldn’t remember how long it’s been, so I looked it up. I featured it less than six months ago. So I chose something else.
Today I want to feature a piece of music I know I’ve featured here before, but I can’t remember how long it’s been. So I looked it up. Almost fifteen years.
Time is weird, y’all.
Anyway, here’s something I discovered after music camp one year. I was playing in the jazz band and we did a number by Chuck Mangione, called “Land of Make Believe”, and it was a really catchy tune, upbeat and happy with a relentless figure underneath it that will make only the deepest comatose people fail to react with toe-tapping glee. At that point I had heard the thing a number of times, always in the instrumental, but at the camp we included vocals. The lyrics at the time struck me as kind of syrupy and childish, but then our band director started pointing things out–the saxes quote “Old McDonald” here, the trombones quote “Farmer in the Dell” there–and gradually it started to make sense why this thing was so peppy and childlike.
Those actually aren’t bad things at all, unless you’re putting up a jaded front.
After the camp ended for that year, I embarked on a usual project of mine after a musical experience in which a new work captivated me: I sought out recordings of the pieces we had played, at least, the ones that I had particularly enjoyed. One was, indeed, “Land of Make Believe”, which I found on a Mangione compilation tape. (Yes, this was in the era of cassettes. Sue me!) But where the version we’d played at camp had been six minutes long or so, this one was over twelve minutes. It had a lot more vocals, it started with a long slow intro (the version we played started with the up tempo part), and it had more solo sections than the version we’d played (which only featured one solo, for trumpet/flugelhorn).
And there was more of those lyrics.
Here’s how it begins:
When you’re feelin’ down and out, wond’rin’ what this world’s about I know a place that has the answer, it’s a place where no one dies It’s a land where no one cries and good vibrations always greet you
How I love when my thoughts run to the Land Of Make Believe Where ev’rything is fun forever Children always gather ’round Mother Goose and all her rhyme They fill the air with sounds of laughter
And another sample, farther in:
I once asked the Wizard of Oz for the secret of his land Now just between us he said “Just take a look around here” Seven Dwarfs and Little Boy Blue, Uncle Remus and Snow White too Now just between us, that’s what’s known as integration
Silly? Sentimental? Simplistic?
Yeah, maybe. But if you want to illustrate for someone what the sentimental side of the 1970s was like, I think you can do a lot worse than play Chuck Mangione’s “Land of Make Believe” for them.
A note about this particular performance: it was recorded live, with Mangione and his band being backed by the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra (Hamilton, Ontario). Not only did you have Mangione and his own talented band on stage, but in the Hamilton Philharmonic at the time were five brass players who would go on to be the founding members of the Canadian Brass, one of the most famous chamber music groups in the world.
This is just over twelve minutes long, so give yourself some time…and give yourself permission to go where this music wants to take you. Here is Chuck Mangione (born in Rochester, NY!) and friends with “Land of Make Believe”.
Leoš Janáček was almost exactly that: like Dvorak, he was a Czech composer who was deeply inspired by the folk dances and rustic melodies of the rural lands of that region. The two men were contemporaries for most of their lives: Dvorak lived 1841 to 1904, while Janáček lived 1854 to 1928. Janáček was influenced heavily by Dvorak, but later in his life he turned to the folk songs of his country, deriving much more literal inspiration from them than even Dvorak did. The result is music with a much more rustic tone than Dvorak’s, and Janáček’s Lachian Dances, which we hear today, seem a direct answer to, and extension of, Dvorak’s famous Slavonic Dances.
The Lachian Dances were actually an early work of Janáček’s, but he reworked the piece and re-issued it in 1925, hence its presence here. Listening to it now, it is clearly firmly rooted in the 19th century…but with key differences that make it feel much more earthy and clear. This is music that reflects the 20th century’s post-Romantic insistence on real life, and it is a delight to hear.
Here are the Lachian Dances by Leoš Janáček. I found this work an absolute joy.
This lovely film music cue has been on my mind the last few days because for some reason, the YouTube algorithm served up a clip from The Karate Kid Part II, and because I like that movie (it’s not as good as the first one, but it’s still quite watchable and it’s gorgeously filmed), the YouTube algorithm proceeded to give me more of it to watch. So here’s a wonderful cue that’s from a scene toward the end, just before the movie’s climactic action starts to unfold. Daniel is set to leave Okinawa and return home, but before he does, he visits the Okinawan girl he’s been hanging around with in an old warehouse, where she performs a tea ceremony for him. It’s a frankly wonderful scene, wordless as the music plays. I featured this cue here before, but it’s been a bunch of years, so here it is again: “Daniel Leaves” by Bill Conti.
(The cue ends suddenly because at that moment the wind whips up, blowing out the candle hanging above them and alerting them to the coming cyclone.)
Continuing our brief survey this month of classical works that debuted one hundred years ago this year, in 1925, we have one of George Gershwin’s major works, and one that gives some clear idea of the direction Gershwin was moving as a composer. The Concerto in F, as it is officially titled, teems with jazzy, urban energy. It feels like what it is: a more structured and more compositionally-assured successor to works like Rhapsody in Blue, where the musical structure is simple to the point of being almost absurd. The Concerto is still a work of youth, with compositional imperfections, but when heard in context you can clearly see Gershwin’s development from a genius of melodies toward being a genius composer. More on this here.
The Concerto follows the traditional form, being in three movements of the fast-slow-fast variety. Opening with four sharp timpani strikes, the temptation might be to compare this piece to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which also starts with four taps on the timpani. Gershwin is doing something much more overtly energetic here, which suits his background; his ongoing use of wonderful melodies loads the work with propulsive energy. The work never seems to lose its dancing nature, even if the nature of that dance is at times playful and at times sultry and seductive.
This performance, featuring soloist Wang Yuja, is conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the recently retired conductor of the San Francisco Symphony who was once, in his own musical youth, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Continuing our look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago, we have a work for solo piano that was written in 1925. Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965, and he was a largely self-taught composer and performer who found himself heavily in the avant-garde school. It’s a roughly five-minute piece in which the pianist never touches the keyboard. Instead, the performer reaches into the string chamber and manipulates the strings directly through various means: brushing the hand over them, plucking them, and dragging the nails of a finger along them. The effect is otherworldly and haunting; it almost sounds like the kind of atmospheric soundscape-type music that is often heard during old science fiction movies and horror movies of all eras. Here is a good post with more information on this eerie, haunting work.
