In honor of yesterday’s 40th anniversary of the major eruption of Mt. St. Helens, a musical work devoted to that very mountain. Alan Hovhaness was an American composer of Armenian descent, and he was very prolific, eventually producing over 500 numbered works in his almost 90 years (and in reality more than that, as when he was a young man he purposely destroyed his entire output to that point in an effort to start again). In 1982 he composed a symphony, his fiftieth, that was inspired by Mt. St. Helens and the 1980 eruption that destroyed its Alpine grandeur and reduced it to a moonscape of rubble. Hovhaness lived in Seattle at the time, so he was about as close to the mountain as I was in Hillsboro (he might have actually been farther away). The piece is in three movements, which Hovhaness described as follows:

When Mount St. Helens erupted on the morning of May 18, 1980, the sonic boom struck our south windows. Ashes did not come here at that time but covered land to the east all across the State of Washington into Montana. Ashes continued to travel all around the world, landing lightly on our house a week later, after their journey all around our planet. In my Mount St. Helens Symphony I have tried to suggest a musical tribute to the sublime grandeur and beauty of Mount St. Helens and the surrounding majestic Cascade Mountains.

The first two movements are evocative of the mountain itself and of Spirit Lake, while the third is most clearly a depiction of the violent cacophony of the May 18 eruption. I don’t tend to hear specific things in program music when I listen to it, even if supplied with a program by the composer, but it’s not hard to pick up on Hovhaness’s mysticism and is willingness to depict that mysticism through interesting orchestral effects. I haven’t heard a lot of Hovhaness, and in general he’s the kind of composer whose music I find more interesting than emotionally affecting, but this piece is certainly interesting and it does musically depict a sort of naturalistic majesty.

Here is the Symphony No. 50, Mt. St. Helens, by Alan Hovhaness.

Wow, am I stretching the idea of a tone poem to the breaking point today. This isn’t even an entire work, just an excerpt from one…and it’s not even a complete excerpt, just a part of the excerpt! Let me sum up:

As the Covid-19 disaster has brought the arts to a standstill just as it has so many other aspects of our lives, people who work in those fields have looked for alternate ways to keep making meaningful art. One thing that’s become popular is “socially isolated” musical performances, where individual musicians record their own part, and then the entire thing is stitched together into a larger performance. I’ve seen a bunch of these over the last few weeks, ranging from performances of the Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline” to Ravel’s Bolero to…this.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, subtitled “The Resurrection,” is a gigantic work. It’s scored for a huge orchestra, full chorus, a soprano and an alto soloist. It takes around an hour and a half to perform, and it runs an astonishing emotional gamut, from stormy and angst-filled passages to meditations on mortality to mysterious passages of solemn power, until it all ends in mystical vastness that is nearly impossible to describe.

About an hour into the symphony, the entire brass section plays a chorale that marks the beginning of the symphony’s third act. The strings aren’t silenced, but this section belongs to the brass, and I can only imagine what this symphony must sound like in a concert hall with good acoustics. So here we have the brass players of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (plus a snare drummer and a contrabassoonist) playing the chorale theme from the last movement. It’s a fascinating listen, even if it is incomplete.

Film music fans often notice how frequently their favorite composers are tasked with writing wonderful music for movies that really aren’t very good. Jerry Goldsmith in particular seems to have made a career of suffering this fate; the poor guy wrote a lot of amazing music for movies that were outright bad.

The phenomenon goes back a lot farther than that, however! Many operas are now rarely heard in full because the librettos aren’t very good or the stories have fallen out of favor, but the music lives on, at least in excerpt form or in the overtures. There was also another outlet for dramatic music in the ages before film: incidental music to plays. The famous march that we often hear at the end of weddings? That’s by Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote that as part of a suite of incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, the Shakespeare play has not vanished into obscurity. But virtually gone is a play called Rosamunde, which would be completely and utterly forgotten today if not for incidental music written for it by the great Franz Schubert.

Schubert is, depending on how you think about his music, either the last of the Classical composers or one of the earliest Romantics. Schubert did not live long, but in his short life music poured out of the man, including this suite of incidental music for Rosamunde, a play by Helmina von Chézy. The play, by all accounts, was not terribly successful, and in fact the original text is now lost. The story apparently involved (according to this old New York Times article): “a cursed princess, who had been brought up by sailors, a pursuer, who travels around with poisoned letters – whoever reads them, dies – and a prince, who has to live among shepherds; there is a mysterious shipwreck and, further, ghosts, hunters, and shepherds.” Frankly, all that sounds kind of fun to me, so for the play to have failed miserably must be indicative of some terrible writing.

But Schubert did able work in writing the incidental music! The overture is best known, being a suitably thrilling piece that almost evokes Rossini, but the entire suite from the play is something of a delight. Hearing this music, written by one of the greatest composers of all time, we might be tempted to think that the play must have been good, if it inspired music that good. Take the lesson we learn from Jerry Goldsmith’s career, though, to heart: This is not so.

Here’s the overture and incidental music from Rosamunde, by Franz Schubert.

No excuse, I just didn’t get to it yesterday. You get what you pay for, folks!

But anyway, a repeat of a favorite work of mine. This twenty-minute concert overture by Edward Elgar is lyrical and exciting. It reminds me of the grand old film scores, in all honesty, with its muscular opening that would accompany the giant “Warner Bros.” shield, followed by a big-hearted opening them that would soar as the film’s title appears onscreen. Remember when movie titles were GIGANTIC and would take up the entire screen? They don’t do that much anymore, do they? And credit montages that set the tone…films nowadays almost never have opening credits at all anymore, saving all credits for the end.

Anyway, Elgar wrote this overture, which he called “In the South (Alassio)”, after a winter’s holiday in Italy and a village called Alassio. The piece is pure sunlight from start to finish (well, there’s a bit in the middle that might be a summer storm, if we’re pushing our musical metaphors farther than perhaps we should), and to me it’s always a wonderful delight. I don’t know why the piece isn’t better known, in all honesty; it’s one of those works that always leaves me feeling like I’ve just spent twenty minutes in the company of a master.

Here is Edward Elgar’s “In the South” overture, subtitled “Alassio”.