John Adams’s first orchestral work, written in 1979, came well before the operatic work that made him well-known in the 1980s. It’s an interesting listen: solemn and meditative, and yet shot through with an odd kind of mystical optimism.
The music also concerns itself with registers, both very high and very low. Bass sound is witheld from the entire first part of the piece, making its appearance, when it finally arrives, a genuinely surprising and gratifying event. Likewise, long areas of similar figuration in the high winds or metallic percussion (glockenspiel and crotales) create their own feeling of formal unity. With its long “camera pans” and hints of aerial photography the music is very much influenced by film techniques. In no other work of mine is the dramatic impulse kept so consistenly reined in in favor of a natural progression of form and materials. “Common Tones in Simple Time” could justifiably be called “a pastoral with pulse.”
This newfound habit of mine, in which I post here on Monday through Thursday and then don’t post at all Friday through Sunday, is not an intentional habit at all; it’s just one of those seeming habits that gets dictated from without by external realities. In this case, it’s that we left town Saturday and did not return until Sunday. The reason for our trip was our annual visit to the Sterling Renaissance Festival. I took a lot of photos on this trip, and you can see them all at the Flickr album here (I’ll have more to say on the general topic of photography later this week, I hope), but here’s a small selection:
God save the Queen!
The Falconer’s owl
Melee!
I think this photo captures best the feeling I love so much about the Renaissance Festival.
The jousting field
End of Day Revelry: the pub sing!
I got NO sauce from my turkey leg on my white shirt. Victory! (And no, I didn’t get any on the overalls, either.)
The Sterling Renaissance Festival remains one of our favorite getaways of the year, and this year’s was especially delightful because we all hadn’t been able to attend since 2019, before COVID. The Festival was canceled in 2020 and I’m not sure if it happened in 2021 or not, but that year we couldn’t go anyway, because of Reasons. In 2022 we were able to go and we pre-ordered three tickets, for The Wife, The Daughter, and myself–but then The Wife had ankle surgery in early summer, and that ruled out her attendance. The Festival is a ton of walking, and it’s rustic walking, with the Festival grounds occupying the side of a forested hill. Getting around the Festival for an entire day is tiring for a fully healthy adult, believe me!
We did notice that the Festival is showing some signs of wear around the edges, if that makes sense: buildings in slightly greater disrepair than usual, some decorations in desperate need of re-painting, and some vendor booths and buildings actually empty (though some of those boasted signage that their particular vendors would be joining the Festival later in the year). And the crowds were definitely smaller…but that did make for a bit more enjoyable time. I do hope that none of the above was indicative of a Festival in decline, and that they’ll be back up to full strength moving forward. It’s a quirky and fun way to spend a day, even if it costs quite a bit of money. Most things do, nowadays.
Instead of driving all the way home, we stayed overnight in Palmyra, NY, after having dinner at our favorite fried chicken joint in Webster, NY. One note about staying overnight in Palmyra: that town is literally holy ground for the LDS Church, so you will almost certainly be surrounded by Mormons. This doesn’t bother me particularly, but it might bother some…and who’s to say if I bothered the Mormons! I’m not usually attuned to people staring at me, but it was hard not to notice some of them being somewhat flummoxed by a long-haired bearded guy in overalls and a poofy-sleeved shirt walking through the lobby of the Best Western by the Hill Cumorah site.
Anyway, getting out of town and doing something fun was a delight–and as it happens, this year it felt like a necessary delight. (More on that…someday, perhaps.)
(NOTE: I am aware of the controversy that has erupted in recent weeks surrounding the Sterling Renaissance Festival, the people who own it, and one employee there. My comments section is not the place to litigate that situation, and I will approve no comments referencing it.)
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and likely won’t until it hits a streaming service, but I’ve heard the music, and I can say that in that department at least, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Distiny fires on all cylinders. Of course, how could it not? The score is by John Williams, after all.
Here is the arrangement of “Helena’s Theme” for violin and orchestra. This is a complex and sophisticated theme, less obviously melodic than earlier lyric themes for these movies–Marion’s Theme, Willie’s Theme, and the Grail Knight Theme, for example–but it is no less heartfelt and moving, for all that. It sounds to me like a blend of an old-fashioned emotions and a new personality, as well as a complex musical introspection noting the difference between youth and age. That seems appropriate for this movie, which I do look forward to watching.
A literary anniversary went by last week, and I do want to mark its passing: on June 26, 1948, seventy-five years ago, The New Yorker published a new story by author Shirley Jackson. By this time Jackson was an established writer, albeit early on in her career, and her June, 1948 appearance in The New Yorker is the event that put her on the literary map, so to speak. And what an event that story’s publication was: that story became one of the most controversial ever published by that magazine, and to this day the story is a classic of the horror genre, which is even more notable as it does not contain one bit of supernatural behavior in it. No, this story is a simple one of the horror of human interactions and human adherence to tradition, and most disturbingly, the oh so human way of managing to put human life into a position of secondary, or even tertiary, importance.
The story is “The Lottery”. You can read it here. I recommend doing so; it’s a great work that has lost none of its ability to disturb in all its years. It’s not a long read, and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it, if you haven’t read it.
Jackson would later write a lecture about her experiences with the reaction to “The Lottery”. I don’t know where or when she actually delivered this lecture, but it’s been anthologized in a book called Come Along With Me, which anthologizes several of her stories, a couple of lectures, and a novel draft on which she was working at the time of her untimely death in 1965.
Here is a portion of that lecture:
On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. I was quite casual about it, as I recall–I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic. By the next week I had had to change my mailbox to the largest one in the post office, and casual conversation with the postmaster was out of the question, because he wasn’t speaking to me. June 28, 1948 was the day The New Yorker came out with a story of mine in it. It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name.
I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story. The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller–it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter the stroller held the day’s groceries–and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story; at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later and decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I didn’t want to fuss with it. It was, I thought, a serious, straightforward story, and I was pleased and a little surpised at the ease with which it had been written; I was reasonably proud of it, and hoped that my agent would sell it to some magazine and I would have the gratification of seeing it in print.
My agent did not care for the story, but–as she said in her note at the time–her job was to sell it, not to like it. She sent it at once to The New Yorker, and about a week after the story had been written I received a telephone call from the fiction editor of The New Yorker; ti was quite clear that he did not really care for the story, either, but The New Yorker was going to buy it. He asked for one change–that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course. He then asked, hesitantly, if I had any particular interpretation of my own for the story; Mr. Harold Ross, then the editor of The New Yorker, was not altogether sure that he understood the story, and wondered if I would care to enlarge upon its meaning. I said no. Mr. Ross, he said, thought that the story might be puzzling to some people, and in case anyone telephoned the magazine, as sometimes happened, or wrote in asking about the story, was there anything in particular I wanted them to say? No, I said, nothing in particular; it was just a story I wrote.
I had no more preparation than that. I went on picking up the mail every morning, pushing my daughter up and down the hill in her stroller, anticipating pleasurably the check from The New Yorker, and shopping for groceries. The weather stayed nice and it looked as though it was going to be a good summer. Then, on June 28, The New Yorker came out with my story.
What ensues is an encapsulation of Jackson’s reaction to the reactions to her story, which roughly fall into general groups: those who wonder if the events described in the story are based on reality, those who think the story is disturbing fiction, and…well, those pretty much are the two camps. Jackson’s story even inspired a number of “Cancel my subscription!” reactions. One particular such demand is phrased quite well:
Heretofore mine has been almost a stockholder’s pride in The New Yorker. I shared my copy with my friends as I do the other possessions which I most enjoy. When your latest issue arrived, my new distaste kept me from removing the brown paper wrapping, and into the wastebasket it went. Since I can’t conceive that I’ll develop interest in it again, save the results of your efforts that indignity every week and cancel my subscription immediately.
Ouch.
The New Yorker did a retrospective of reader reaction to “The Lottery” ten years ago, which you can find here; one interesting tidbit is that the magazine did not always label its fiction and nonfiction pieces, so perhaps the befuddlement of some readers who couldn’t determine on their own that “The Lottery” was just a story with no basis in the daily life of any small town in America is to be excused. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But surely these events would have been common knowledge if they were real, yes? I mean, wouldn’t everyone know about that small town in such-and-such a state where every year they got everyone in the town together and held a lottery to choose one of its denizens for–wait. That would be spoiling it, if you haven’t read “The Lottery”.
This is a repost of something I wrote some years ago. Back in my BlogSpot days this post was a regular driver of search-engine traffic to my blog; I’m not sure if that’s the case now or not, but it can always bear a repeating!
Anyhow, in my Something for Thursday series, I’ve lately posted several Grand Marches from various operas, and now I’m thinking a bit of the wide variety of music that falls under the general category of the “March”. You have Grand Marches, as I’ve noted above, that involve long musical scoring to big set pieces in operas. You also have the Funeral March, which are generally downbeat and sad-sounding, for obvious reasons. You have Processional Marches, with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches being prime examples. And there are the Military Marches, patriotic marches, circus marches, symphonic marches, and so on. Lots and lots of marches.
One of the most famous of all marches is, of course, John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. It’s a staple of nearly every patriotic-themed classical music concert you might ever attend, and the march is as central a staple in July 4th festivities as hot dogs or fireworks. In college, when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played a concert on our campus, their first encore work was The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Sousa wrote many marches — hence the moniker “The March King” — a number of which are very familiar to our ears now (Washington Post and Liberty Bell among them), but The Stars and Stripes Forever is by far his most familiar work. It can sound a bit clicheed these days, but like all works that have to a degree become clichee, when you blow off the dust and actually listen to the thing, you can hear anew those qualities that allowed it to become cliche in the first place.
The Stars and Stripes Forever is also a perfect example of the traditional American military march, which in their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to follow specific forms. If you were to join a concert band in rehearsing one of these marches, you would hear some odd-sounding terms: “Let’s begin at the second strain, first time through.” Or, “Just the trombones, please, starting at the dogfight.” You’d be thinking, “What’s a dogfight? Are there going to be planes flying in aerial combat above our heads?” Well, of course not! So what we’ll do here is go through The Stars and Stripes Forever, with my notations below indicating at which point each section starts.
(This is one of the niftiest musical videos I’ve ever seen, by the way.)
0:07 to 0:10: The is the Intro section. Most marches will have some kind of intro section.
0:11 to 0:24: This is the First Strain, which is will be repeated once.
0:24 to 0:39: The First Strain, repeated. Sometimes, but not always, a band or orchestra will perform a repeat of a strain differently than they did the first time: they’ll dial down the dynamics, playing the repeat softer, or maybe they’ll actually vary the instrumentation a bit. This is often at the discretion of the conductor. Marches in this genre tend to be “modular” in construction, making it easier to tailor the piece a bit depending on the demands of the performance. You might need to make it longer or shorter, depending on the situation, so a conductor might decide to repeat each strain twice instead of once; but then deciding to play the first repeat softer and the second repeat softer still, or some other kind of variation. Some conductors, with experienced ensembles, will even have hand signals ready so they can indicate to their ensemble such a change while in the midst of performance.
0:39 to 0:54: Here is the Second Strain, first time through. Note that it is more lyrical than the boisterous First Strain. In a well-written march, the strains will usually contrast in some way.
0:55 to 1:09: Now we repeat the Second Strain. Note in this performance that the brass join in the melody and it’s a bit louder and more boisterous than the first time through. This difference is why, in rehearsal, our conductor will say things like “OK, start at the second strain, second time through.” He has to let the brass know if they’re playing or sitting out.
OK. After we’re done with the first two strains — and there are usually just two — however many times we’ve performed them, with whatever performance variations our conductor has decided upon, we’re onto the Trio. Sometimes we’ll have a key change when we hit the Trio, along with some other way to differentiate the Trio from the Intro and the first two strains. In Stars and Stripes Forever, our relatively brisk sound of the first two strains yields to a longer, more lyrical melody — even more lyrical than what we heard in the second strain. Additionally, there is less syncopation now, although Sousa still puts key parts of emphasis on the occasional off-beat. A Trio section is often the longest part of a march, and it often revolves around a single melody or musical idea, as opposed to the first and second strains, which posit musical ideas briefly and then shuffle them off the stage. The Trio is the main attraction, as it were.
Now, with our Trio section, there’s only one main musical idea going on, but we’re going to hear it three times. Sousa doesn’t want to bore us, so he’ll change it up a bit each time. How? Let’s see:
1:10 to 1:39: The Trio, first time through. Sometimes we might call this the First Strain of the Trio, or we might just call it the Trio, first time. In any event, this specific case is one of the most recognizable melodies in musical history, and in terms of marches, it’s probably the most famous march melody ever. (It might be a close second to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1…or the Elgar is a close second to Stars and Stripes. Not sure which.)
By the way, note that Sousa doesn’t just give us this melody by itself; he continues to remind us that this is still a march by putting all those little staccato flourishes softly playing behind the melody. There’s always something going on in a Sousa march, something new or different or contrasting with the main thing at any given moment. Case in point: when the melody reaches its highest note at 1:24, note the descending arpeggio in the lower brass, or at 1:34 when we reach a high note again, a little “tweet” of a fanfare in the trumpets.
Note, also, that one time through the First Strain of the Trio takes as long as two times through each of the First and Second Strains.
1:39 to 2:02: Now, having heard the complete Trio strain one time through, we’re going to repeat it twice. But unlike the First and Second strains, which are repeated in immediate succession, we get a bit of contrast in a passage that stands in marked rhythmic and dynamic contrast to the Trio strain. This contrasting section, found in the Trios of many marches of this type, is called the Dogfight. We’ll hear it twice through; this is the first time. The Dogfight isn’t really a melody, per se; it’s more of a martial fluorish. Note that the Dogfight is, by itself, longer than either the First or Second Strain.
2:02 to 2:30: The Trio strain, repeated (or, alternatively, the Second Strain of the Trio). Sousa lowers the dynamics again, back down to a softer setting, but we get the first variation of the Trio here. The Stars and Stripes melody plays again in its entirety, but this time with a brilliant touch: a counter-flourish played by the solo piccolo. Note also that the little trumpet fanfares from the first time through aren’t there anymore, in favor of our piccolo solo.
2:31 to 2:55: The Dogfight, second time through. Many performances play the Dogfight a bit louder this time through, and have the Dogfight end with a crescendo into the Trio strain’s final repeat.
2:55 to end: Now we get the last repeat of the Trio strain (or, alternatively, the Third Strain of the Trio). After hearing the Trio strain played softly twice, this time Sousa lets it all hang out: everybody’s playing at full-bore, including our intrepid piccolo player. Now, a lesser composer might think that just hearing this great melody with the entire band playing forte might be pleasing enough to send the crowd away, but Sousa isn’t done giving new things to hear. Specifically, this last time, he gives a countermelody to the low brass that plays mostly on the off-bars of the main melody; when the main theme is holding a long note, the low brass are doing their thing.
And at the very end? That final punctuating note that the march ends on? That’s called the Stinger.
Most marches of this type derive their excitement from variations along the way, as described above: variations in dynamics (loud versus soft), variations in instrumention (who plays what and when), variations in backing detail (little fanfares versus that solo piccolo line). What doesn’t vary is tempo: a march of this type will always end at the same tempo it started. The only place I’ve ever heard a change in tempo in The Stars and Stripes Forever is at the very end of the Dogfight, the second time through, where some conductors — not all — will throw in a ritardando on that last descending scale before the Trio strain’s final repeat, and that’s about it. A march is not the place for the type of rubato that you might hear in, say, some Romantic symphony.
Anyhow, there you have it: a road map to The Stars and Stripes Forever. Next time you’re hearing this march while eating a hot dog and watching fireworks, note the march’s tight construction!
“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
Well…there’s a lot going on right now. A lot going on right now. Some of it I’ll almost certainly write about soon, when I have leave to do so; some of it I likely…won’t. But yeah. There’s a lot going on, and no, it’s not all bad. Some of it, though, is a struggle.
For now, here’s a nifty video from a professional wildlife photographer to whose content I’ve recently subscribed on YouTube. I find this man fascinating for a lot of reasons…some of which I’ll be going into at some point, soon!
Having the Titanic on the mind for obvious reasons, here’s some music from a movie about the wreck…but not the famous movie. This is the rather less famous movie from 1980 or 1981 called Raise the Titanic. I watched this movie years ago when it was on a mid-afternoon matinee kind of thing, and…well, that’s probably the best way to watch a movie like this. I don’t even remember if I watched it before or after Robert Ballard’s famous discovery of the actual wreck itself, which rendered the movie even more inaccurate than it would have been to begin with. Raise the Titanic‘s plot involves, well, a plan to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor, because there was some kind of cargo that was somehow still very valuable many years later. (All this is from faded memory; I’m not looking it up and I only watched the movie once.) I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, yes, they do find the Titanic and raise her from the ocean floor in a big special-effect set-piece.
The music from the movie is by John Barry, who by this point in his career was starting to lean hard into his “big sweeping slow melody” phase that would peak ten years later with Dances With Wolves. Here is a suite from Raise the Titanic.
OK, fine, here’s the actual clip of the ship rising to the surface again. Note that at this point, most people still thought that the ship had sunk in one piece, rather than snapping in two before sinking.
No, I don’t recommend the movie…unless it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have some popcorn handy.
