And so we come to the end of this year’s A-to-Z adventure, with another modern composer, Judith Lang Zaimont. I’ve never heard her music before the other day, so this chalks up as another ‘new to me’ composer, which is great! I’ve enjoyed my mix of music that is totally new to me and music that I know very, very well, over the course of this challenge. For too many years I’ve been content to simply keep enjoying and re-experiencing music I already knew, forgetting often how it was that I got to know that music in the first place. It all started, every single note of every single piece, with me thinking, “I wonder if this is any good?”
To wrap things up, here’s Borealis by Judith Lang Zaimont. I found this work vibrant and energetic and modern, while somehow familiar. Good stuff!
Tomorrow: Nothin’. We’re done. No more alphabet. But we’ll do it again in 2014!
We’re almost to the end! Today we’re back in Japan, with the music of the very-much-still-with-us Takashi Yoshimatsu. There is a lot of fascinating music coming out of Japan these days. Yoshimatsu is almost entirely self-taught, having gained his musical knowledge in that finest of late 20th century ways: by toiling in a rock band for a while. I love stories like that.
The work today is new to me, but I find it wonderful listening. It’s actually a series of works for solo piano, called the Pleiades Dances. It’s the type of post-Romantic, post-Modern music that’s new-sounding but also highly accessible. The works are intended to convey a sense of color and of various musical modes; Yoshimatsu employs many different modes and time signatures for a work that is unusually refreshing. I’d never heard the Pleiades Dances before yesterday, but I really enjoy and admire them.
Tomorrow: we wrap up the alphabet. With whom? I don’t know. Stay tuned!
I know, I missed yesterday, so we’ll do a make-up post today. ‘X’ is a tough letter anyway, obviously, and it pretty much led me inexporably to Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer of highly mathematical, avant-garde music. When I say “highly mathematical”, I mean just that: Xanakis applied a lot of advanced mathematical concepts to the creation of his music. From Wikipedia:
Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.
The work below, Metastaseis, is…you know, I honestly don’t know how to grasp this kind of music on any kind of intellectual way. This sort of thing takes music so far into pure abstraction that I find words utterly inadequate. Even after reading on its composition, I find it terribly difficult to understand the work, and I find myself confronting the philosophical problem of how the genesis of a given effect is somehow identical with that effect. I don’t know.
I don’t understand music like this. That’s not to say that I don’t like it — although this type of listening is really only possible for me in small doses — but that liking or disliking it just seems almost irrelevant. It’s like walking along a dirt road and saying, “I don’t like that pebble.” What the hell does the pebble care?
Richard Wagner can be a real slog, I will admit. He can be heavy and ponderous, and even when he’s not being those things — because he can also be light and ethereal — he’s always totally serious. He’s never kidding. I hear a lot of wonderful things in Wagner’s music, but humor is, for the most part, not one of them.
Wagner appeals to that part of me that still loves a big, epic story to chew on. Wagner is big stories, featuring heartbreaking sacrifices made by lovers. Wagner is epic magic, the magic that existed before the world began. Wagner is stately lines of guests entering torch-lit castle halls, and he is creatures of myth winging through the air. Wagner is a Knight of the Grail who is forbidden to reveal his name, and he is the final fall of the gods themselves.
No, Wagner is not much for the lighter things in life.
Wagner is also a stern test for the idea that an artist’s art should not be judged by the artist’s personality. This is because Wagner was pretty much of a shit — an arrogant and pompous philandering ass who went through life demanding money of others that he might maintain his lavish lifestyle. He was an anti-Semite and pretty much of a boor. But his music — oh, his music transcends.
Here is an orchestral excerpt from his masterwork, Der Ring des Nibelungen — specifically, the fourth opera, Gotterdammerung. It is “Siegfried’s Funeral Music”, but it also closes with the “Redemption Through Love” music that closes out the entire saga. Wagner’s not for everyone…but I sure dig him.
In the interests of honesty, here’s some music by a guy whose music I just don’t like very much at all. Antonio Vivaldi is one of the leading Baroque composers, and he’s uncommonly beloved, but whenever I listen to Vivaldi, I hear all of the things I dislike in Baroque music and none of the profundities a J.S. Bach brings to the table that blunt the impact of the stuff I don’t like. This is all purely a matter of taste, but so far as I’m concerned, the old saw that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto five hundred times really does carry some weight.
Yes, I had to perform this piece in college. Aside from enjoying the challenge of the trumpet part…nah, I didn’t even enjoy the challenge of the trumpet part. I just found this whole thing irritating. I have no rational explanation for this, any more than I have a rational explanation for my recoiling in horror from a plate of steamed broccoli. I’ve tried to be more fair to poor Vivaldi a number of times over the years, and in all honesty I find this piece more palatable than the ever-maddening The Four Seasons (I could live my whole life and happily never hear a bar of that work again), but there’s times when we just don’t like stuff, you know? But Vivaldi is an important part of musical history, so here’s Vivaldi’s Gloria in D.
Tomorrow: ‘W’ can go a lot of directions. Which will I take? Tune in!
African classical music, what little I’ve heard, tends to be as interesting as any nationalistic classical music, especially when the language of Western music is combined with the folk tunes and indigenous rhythms of the homeland. This is yet another area of classical music about which I know very little and wish I knew more; there’s a blog called AfriClassical that explores this area. African influence on music is, I suppose, often thought to be strongest through the importation of native rhythms and song to the Americas through the slave trade and then eventually into jazz, but it’s only natural that a classical tradition should spring up as the cultural pollination started going the other way, as well.
For a ‘U’ composer, I found Joshua Uzoigwe. Biographical information on Uzoigwe seems a bit scant, but he lived from 1946 to 2005 and was a native of Nigeria. This work of his, called “Ukom (from ‘Talking Drums’)”, is a very pleasurable study in rhythm.
As I near the end of this alphabetic exercise, I look back and note a complete lack of women cited here. Now, this blogging meme-thing was clearly not meant to serve as any kind of exhaustive, or even representative, survey of the long and rich history of classical music. But the question cannot be avoided: why is the long and rich history of classical music so dominated by men? Literature and art had prominent women in their history, but women seem oddly absent.
One answer is that they weren’t absent at all, we just don’t really bother with what they were doing. And that’s a fair point; googling “female classical composers” turns up an enormous number of names. But why have so few works by women endured to eventually enter the standard classical repertoire?
I wish I had a good answer other than “Music has a pretty sexist history”, which is a tautological answer, when you get right down to it. But it is true, nevertheless; witness the fact that the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the notion that women were even worthy of being allowed to appear within its ranks. It just seems to me that music has been an undeniable area of enduring sexism; just why that is the case is beyond my knowledge as a layperson. One argument I read recently is that music, unlike literature or visual art, is dependent upon others to work. You can write a symphony, but a fat lot of good it does you if you can’t get an orchestra to play it. As orchestras were, for most of history, dominated by men — well, that’s kind of the ballgame. I suspect that’s at least a chunk of the answer. Even the great male composers often had to struggle to get their works performed, with many of the most cherished masterpieces of all time having never been heard at all by their own composers. Here’s a good article as a starting point on this topic:
Classical music — at least in the United States — is one of those areas that tend to be something of a hole in a lot of people’s education. I’ve been continually surprised by the number of extremely intelligent people I know who can discuss politics, visual art, film, philosophy and popular music in detail who, nevertheless, don’t know very much about classical music – at least, beyond the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) and Mozart. Maybe Haydn or Handel. Maybe Wagner (but usually only Ride of the Valkyries). Maybe a 20th-century composer or two like Stravinsky or Copland. But certainly, never about any of the women over the years who have written classical music. After all, just about every field of art tends to diminish the accomplishments of women, but especially classical music, since most of it that outsiders pay attention to was made in a time when women’s roles in the arts were limited. Even today — in an era where there are countless amazing female composers — when I tell people I studied music composition in college, I still get “Wow, a woman writing classical music! I’ve never heard of that!” about as often as I get, “Wait, people still write classical music?”
But women have always been writing classical music; it’s just that, now, we’re more able to make a career of it, and compete with the guys. In the past, women were often limited in what they could write, thanks to gender roles. The rules for a female composer of the 18th or 19th century (when most of the best-known male composers flourished) were: only solo and small-ensemble works that you could play in your living room (which is why we now know this as “chamber music”). Never large-scale works, like operas or symphonies, where you would need to rent out a concert hall to have them properly performed. It’s easy to see how this was able to limit women; while there are a number of male composers known primarily for their chamber music (such as Chopin), most of them, while they wrote in a variety of genres, made their names through the big stuff. In fact, some of the biggest, most influential composers of that era were known mainly for writing operas, like Verdi and Wagner, or symphonies, like Gustav Mahler. Even the men who became famous for their chamber music were usually able to get them performed in large halls, unlike women, who were limited precisely so they wouldn’t be taking attention — and careers — away from men.
There is a great deal of classical music by women that deserves very much to be heard. Here are a few works by one such composer, Joan Tower, who is still with us and active. I find these works fascinating, particularly the Percussion Quintet.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (the inspiration here is pretty obvious):
Petroushskates:
DNA for Percussion Quintet (percussion ensembles can make for some really riveting listening):
Tomorrow: I have no idea. ‘U’ is not the easiest letter….
Jean Sibelius is one of those composers I struggle with from time to time. He seems like a composer whose music I should like more than I do, and yet, I don’t dislike his music. I’ve never really made a huge effort to listen to him, so I suppose the fault is mine. His life and career straddled the transition from Romanticism to Modernism, but Sibelius is generally best seen as one of the Romantics, albeit a highly nationalized one, coming from Finland and thus having a sound world all his own, quite distinct from the Wagner-Brahms thing going on farther south. Sibelius’s music is more of a cloth with Carl Nielsen’s, I suppose, but I tend to find it more distant, more difficult to really find the emotional center. But I also find that the more I listen to it, the more the internal logic of what he’s doing shows up. Sibelius’s music doesn’t so much sing or emote, as contemplate. It’s very inward-looking music.
In terms of performance, Sibelius was on my very first orchestral program, way back in the college days. It was the work below, his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. It was nearly impossible in those early rehearsals to get any real feel for the work, as our orchestra only had half its complement for most rehearsals (our ranks would be padded out by paid pros from Waterloo/Cedar Falls, the large city twenty miles south), and we didn’t have the soloist (a violinist from the University of Iowa, named Leopold La Fosse) available for most of it, either. These were hardly ideal circumstances on which to engage with a piece of music, which is a shame because it was — and is — quite the concerto, when you really hear it.
(Those sparse rehearsals got a lot better over time. The orchestra’s director, Dr. Janice Wade, was in the early stages at that point of really striving to build a string program from almost nothing at Wartburg. By the time I graduated, four years later, we had a full orchestra present each week at rehearsal. Dr. Wade could be idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I came to deeply admire and respect the job that she did with that group. Indeed, some of my fondest musical memories come from my time under her baton. She retired a short time ago.)
Toward the late 19th century, Russia came into its own in a big way as artistic Romanticism took hold in that country. One of the greatest composers to emerge from that period, slightly before Tchaikovsky, was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
I haven’t heard too much of Rimsky-Korsakov’s work, but I’ve yet to hear a piece of his that isn’t somehow deeply scintillating and evocative. The Russian gift for lyrical melody and brooding atmosphere is almost a stereotype, but Rimsky-Korsakov really was a magnificent melodist, but even more, he was one of the most brilliant orchestrators ever. He had a way of using the instruments of the standard orchestra in new and exciting ways to achieve tonal effects and colors that are as brilliant and fresh today as ever. This is particularly evident in this, my favorite work of his, and one of my favorite works of all time: the symphonic suite Scheherazade.
The idea of ‘program music’ has always been mildly problematic for composers. Can purely orchestral music really tell a story? Or can it only suggest mood and color? I tend to think the latter, but the visual associations in this music are very hard to forget once you read the titles of the movements. In any event, Scheherazade is an utterly spectacular musical entertainment, big and bold and vivid and melodic and thrilling and passionate and exotic. I used to pore over the score to Scheherazade, noting with amazement the things Rimsky-Korsakov did with just the standard symphony orchestra.
This particular performance, by the way, may sound slightly odd to modern ears, because the orchestra performs on period instruments, using period performance standards (such as a mellower trumpet sound and much less vibrato in the strings). I often find period-instrument performances fascinating and compelling if the performance carries a passion to match. This one nails the passion of Scheherazade fairly well.
Only eight letters left. What to do with ‘S’? We’ll see on Monday!
Well, you gotta do what you gotta do when you get to Q. I don’t know anything about this composer at all. Not a thing. His Wikipedia page indicates that he was born and studied in China and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he continues to compose. That’s all I know.
So obviously, I’ve never heard this piece before. It’s in two parts (because of YouTube length restrictions), and I don’t think it’s complete, but it’s interesting enough that I don’t care: a short opera called The Death of Oedipus. And it’s fascinating. I’d love to see this staging live, with the stylized acting using masks on the singers. Wow. I love finding works like this! Back in college, the music department had a thing called “Opera Workshop”, in which the vocal majors would learn and perform works like this. I’ve never much thought about the world of short opera since then. I wonder why that is?
Anyway, here is The Death of Oedipus.
Tomorrow: R. So many directions I could go…but probably back to Mother Russia.
