Today a long tone poem by composer Michael Kamen, who is famous for his film scores (Highlander, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Three Musketeers) as well as his work with many rock musicians, often providing orchestrations for their songs that required such services. One notable entry in this part of his oeuvre is the orchestra work on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall. Kamen had a wonderfully engaging musical voice, and his untimely death in 2003 when he was just 55 was a deeply hurtful blow to the music world.

This piece is called (in keeping with our ongoing “Moon” theme!) New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms. Kamen cited as his inspiration for this work the Anasazi Tribe who flourished in the American southwest, and later disappeared, close to a thousand years ago. The piece is by turns contemplative and extroverted, rhythmic and lyrical, dance-like and song-driven. It’s very dramatic music with a lot of ebb and flow and contrasting musical textures thoughout.

The work’s title is an inversion of a phrase used sometimes to describe a very real astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, during a new moon, when the visible part of the moon is just the barest sliver, the rest of the moon can be faintly seen in the reflected glow of the earth. This is typically called “Earthlight”, but another, possibly more poetic, term for it is “Old moon in the new moon’s arms”. Kamen seems to have intended his inverted title to hint at greeting the future in the light of the past.

Continuing, but not completing, our exploration of classical music inspired by the Moon, we have a work that I have been waffling on whether or not to include…because it is not inspired by the Moon, even though it always shows up on such lists because it’s one of the heavy-hitters when it comes to “Moon music”. It’s one of the most famous pieces in all of classical music, to be honest. It is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, almost always called “the Moonlight Sonata”.

Why on Earth would I possibly exclude the Moonlight Sonata from a featured list of music inspired by the moon? Because there is no evidence at all that Beethoven was ever inspired by the moon when writing it. He didn’t name it “Moonlight”, after all; a poet named Ludwig Rellstab offered the appellation Moonlight Sonata in 1832, after Beethoven was already dead. For Beethoven, who didn’t do much with so-called “program music”, it’s doubtful that he had any particular scene or inspiration in mind for the sonata at all. He may have heard the comparison of the sonata to “moonlight” prior to his death, but that’s a tall order and isn’t supported by any actual evidence.

We’re also left with the work’s three-movement structure, typical for piano sonatas. If the whole sonata is called the Moonlight Sonata, does that mean that all three movements are to be taken as redolent of moonlight? I don’t know. The first movement, which breaks with sonata tradition in being slow and lyrical (usually the opening movements are the fast ones), is the best candidate for “moonlight”…but then there’s the second movement, a gentle and lilting minuet in triple time, which might also suggest moonlight in its graceful tones. And the third movement, which is stormy and even violent? Well, who knows…perhaps it’s the kind of moon that shines on a windy night at sea, or something like that.

All of this isn’t much of an exercise, anyway. Many musicians hate the idea of attaching extra-musical “meanings” to music that is inherently abstract, anyway, and if Beethoven had any particular point in mind, he surely would have written it in the margins of the manuscript. Or…maybe he wouldn’t. Beethoven was one of humanity’s towering artistic geniuses, clearly, but at the same time he was also a pretty strange man.

In the end, we’re left with the music. Is it really “moon music”? Maybe, maybe not. I lean toward “not”…but because of that name, we can’t really totally exclude it, either. As the founder of Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, once said, “(W)hat these austere critics fail to grasp is that unless the general public had responded to the suggestion of moonlight in this music Rellstab’s remark would long ago have been forgotten.”

Here is the Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, “Moonlight”, by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Returning after several weeks to our series of music inspired by the moon, we have a work by Julian Anderson, a composer with whose works I am unfamiliar. One bio of Anderson I read provides this information:

Julian Anderson is one of the most talented composers of his generation and has been commissioned by organisations including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Born in London in 1967, he studied with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail and first came to prominence when his orchestral Diptych (1990) won the RPS Composition Prize in 1992.  Anderson has held Composer in Residence positions with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Cleveland and London Philharmonic orchestras, relationships which produced an impressive body of orchestral works including Stations of the Sun (1998, a BBC Proms Commission) and Eden (2005, Cheltenham Festival). Fantasias (2009), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, won a British Composer Award and The Discovery of Heaven (2011), a co-commission by the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Both works were recorded by the LPO live label.

The work in question is called The Crazed Moon, a work that seems to be mostly a series of tone clusters at first, but from which an eerie logic and even beauty emerges slowly:

As Anderson writes, The Crazed Moon ‘takes its title from a poem by W.B. Yeats, in which he describes a frightening vision of ‘the moon, crazed through much childbirth/ staggering through the sky.’ This image combined with the beautiful lunar eclipse seen in March 1996 provided the main starting point for a work for orchestra lasting about thirteen minutes, in one continuous movement. The other factor determining the threnodic character and funereal mood of the work was the sudden death in September 1995 of a composer and friend, Graeme Smith, at the age of only twenty-four. This piece is dedicated to his memory.’

(Julian Anderson)

 

‘This tragic occurrence dictated the nature of much of the piece: predominantly slow, with tolling bells, heavy chords, keening melodic lines, and climaxes not only of mourning but also of protest. But two things make its expressive course over its 13-minute duration unpredictable. One is the overall plan of the work, which like a film sequence cuts between different elements developing independently of one another. The other is the incorporation as a recurring musical idea of Graeme Smith’s initials, G.S., which in German note-names spell G and E flat (Es). These two notes make a bright major third, which whenever it is used, harmonically or melodically, stands out in the darker, atonal context, to poignant effect.’

(Anthony Burton, LPO programme note, 2011)

I found myself more and more entranced each time I played the work. I hope you will too.