Tag: Music

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Tone Poem Tuesday (oops, it’s Wednesday edition)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was cued up and ready to go and then the person responsible for clicking “publish” did not execute. Unfortunately that person cannot be sacked, as that person is also the person writing this and the content and everything else here. Requests for full refund will be ignored.

I’ve noticed an uptick in mentions of the movie Contact lately on social media. I’m not entirely sure why it’s come up, as this isn’t a notable anniversary year for the movie, but I suppose it is a pretty popular movie among science fiction fans, so I don’t grudge it being brought up. It’s never been a movie that I love, for reasons outlined below. I was going to write about the movie anew but then I realized I’ve already said what I need to say about the movie, so I’m just reposting. But first, music: the movie’s end credits suite, composed by Alan Silvestri, who may not be the most profound composer out there but who always turns in well-crafted and highly-listenable work.

 

And now, a post I wrote a few years back, which in turn includes a post I wrote ten years before that. I’m nesting posts! It’s posts within posts within posts!

—

The movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s one and only one novel, came out this month in 1997. Almost ten years ago I posted the following piece about the movie, a film that I’ve always liked and admired but not quite crossed over into loving. I’m not sure I totally agree anymore with what I write below, but thinking does shift and evolve, and I appreciate Contact more now than I used to; it remains one of the few major pop culture artifacts that endorses the Saganesque view that science should be our guiding philosophy as humans, and not spirituality. But I still think the movie hedges its bets too much, it drives its points home with too little subtlety (a fault often found in Robert Zemeckis films), and I think it undermines the feminist subplots by surrounding its main character with men without whose help and influence she would not succeed.

And yet…Contact is still a movie that says the right things about science and about the universe. It’s a movie that confirms that the proper response to this universe is curiosity and wonder, and my favorite moment is when Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is discussing the voyage into the Cosmos that is at the heart of the movie’s narrative and she describes the required quality as “a sense of adventure”.

(Oh, Contact‘s score, by Alan Silvestri, is really good–for all the film’s lack of subtlety, Silvestri brings the goods here. Here’s one cue, called “The Primer”, scoring a scene in which the secret of an alien transmission is revealed. This is really good stuff, excellent suspense music, and it shows why Silvestri ended up being the composer for the recent sequels to the original Cosmos series.)

Here is my old post:

As much as I love Carl Sagan, I have to admit that I never warmed to his one and only novel, a science-fiction first contact story he called Contact. I tried reading it a couple of times, and each time I only got about a hundred pages in before I stopped. I just don’t think that Sagan was really cut out for novel writing, no matter how great his gifts may have been for science writing. But in 1997, a movie adaptation of the book arrived in theaters, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was six months too late for Sagan to have seen it, alas.

I’ve had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Contact ever since it came out. On balance I like it a lot…but I don’t love it, and in truth, I never really have. I’ve never been entirely successful in putting my finger on what it is about Contact that vexes me, but after recently watching the film again on NetFlix, I think I have it: the movie is too unfocused. When the film is concentrated on telling its story and attending to that central story, it is a fine, fine piece of work. But too often I get the impression that Robert Zemeckis got distracted, often by something shiny, and there are way too many times in the movie that the story gets lost so we can follow something shiny.

Contact tells the story of Ellie Arroway, an astronomer whom we meet as a young child, operating her HAM radio under the guidance of her father. They have a wall map of the United States, on which she marks her radio contacts with push pins; after talking to someone in Pensacola, Dad comments that it’s her farthest contact yet. Ellie asks if a radio could talk to the Moon, or to Mars…or to her mother, who is apparently dead. Dad responds, “I don’t think they’ll ever make a radio that can reach that far.”

Grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster) turns out to be an astronomer, as noted, who is using her research time at the Arecibo Radio Telescope to look for, as she says, “little green men”: she is dedicating her career and scientific energies to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). This leads to her meeting a former priest (Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConnaughey), who despite being religious and spiritual where she is not, attracts her on a number of levels, and it also leads to run-ins with an older male scientist named David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt) who is snide and condescending to Ellie as he regards her chosen field of specialty as an utter waste of time. After a number of obstacles to her career – mostly owing to funding difficulties, as convincing people to part with money for something like SETI tends to be difficult – Ellie finally has a breakthrough when, while working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, her radio telescopes detect an unmistakable alien signal. The rest of the film follows the implications of such a discovery.

Or, rather, the rest of the film should do that, and when it does, it’s incredibly effective and thought-provoking and loaded with the grand “sensawunda” of all the best science fiction. The problem with the movie is that it too often wanders into less interesting stuff, or its steps away from subtlety to drive its points home with a jackhammer, or it does things that forcibly eject me from the world of the film.

Taking the less interesting stuff first: Ellie Arroway is too often portrayed in the film as the feminine voice of reason in a crowd of over-bearing, pompous, or downright dim men. Science and engineering are male-dominated fields, and it’s a well-established fact that women in those fields tend to have a tougher going just to overcome gender biases. The problem with Contact‘s approach isn’t so much that it points this out, but that it’s about other things, and thus it can’t really delve too intelligently into those topics which really do deserve higher scrutiny. Thus we have Ellie being treated like an outsider on her own project, or Drumlin stepping up to claim ownership over a project he’s derided consistently up until the moment it proved fruitful. Ellie is constantly on the defensive in the movie, and I think it hurts the narrative because the film can’t just gear up and take us where it wants to go. Instead we have to keep talking about God.

EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: Re-reading the above now, 13 or so years after I wrote it, I think I’d back off from this a bit. My objection is not to the film pointing out how women are marginalized in science and tech, but rather that the movie doesn’t really do anything other then use that marginalization to craft a few plot points along the way. It’s kind of a reverse of the frankly dishonest complaint that some people make about diversity in movies: “I don’t mind seeing X in a movie, but it has to serve the story!” Here, ALL it does is serve the story. Moving on:

And God is where subtlety just isn’t something that interests Robert Zemeckis. Contact is full of discussions of religion versus science, but the feeling is never that anything is really being debated; what happens is that opposite sides’ viewpoints are stated, and restated, and stated again. Ellie goes to a reception in Washington, where her first order of business upon approaching Palmer Joss is to immediately launch into a discussion on religion, without any preamble or preliminary; more than that, though, the script treats all such conversations – and many that aren’t on the topic of religion at all – as though Ellie has a sizable axe to grind, while everyone else (just about all of whom are male) is calm and collected in their disagreement. Coupling that with the several instances in the film where Ellie is betrayed by men – Drumlin’s taking of the credit, Joss’s posing of a question at the hearings when he knows that the answer is going to doom Ellie’s chances of being the one selected to go in ‘the machine’ – and the film seems to depict Ellie as someone who doesn’t so much achieve a lot but whom is given things, table-scrap like, by the men in her life. It’s an odd kind of feeling.

It also bothers me that the film ends right when it gets most interesting, and it feels to me like it takes the easy way out. To me, the most interesting thing is, What would human society be like once we know that we are not alone in this Universe? We may know next to nothing about who is out there, but surely knowing once and for all, without speculation, that there is someone or something living out there would be a staggering revelation for the human species. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with this notion – in fact, it backs away from it. We get lots of intrigue involving the contents of the message that is received from space, and then the construction of the transport “machine”, and so on. And this is all very compelling and entertaining…but at the end, the film gives us the old “Did it really happen?” gambit, reducing a momentous scientific discovery to something that will appeal to some people and not to others. Not unlike, say, the belief in God.

(Again, I don’t know to what degree the film’s story tracks that of the novel.)

I always find that the film deflates in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Ellie returns from her journey only to learn that, so far as anyone here knows, she never went anywhere. This leads to a Congressional hearing (which really drives home the film’s theme of “one woman versus a whole bunch of mean men”), at the end of which one Representative says, “Are we supposed to take your story…on faith?” And yes, he really pauses and puts big emphasis on those last two words, just in case we missed the irony of a scientist committed to objective observation being forced to admit the necessity of faith. Again, subtle, this is not. The movie does try to have it both ways by showing two government folks discussion the fact that the machine’s video recorder recorded eighteen hours of static (had nothing happened at all, there would have been about two seconds’ worth). But this is to be kept secret, apparently. They might as well seal all this information in a crate and store it in the warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: It continues to bother me that the big lessons are really only learned by Dr. Arroway in CONTACT. She’s the one who is basically forced to admit to a degree of faith underpinning her rational approach to the universe. I wish the movie had found a way to show Palmer Joss also learning a similar lesson in reverse, showing a way in which his own faith-based viewpoint is shaken or informed by the scientific discoveries depicted in the movie.

And the movie ends, on this state of affairs. What happens now, though? Does some kind of new religion start to accrete around Ellie and her scientific beliefs? Does Ellie somehow become an evangelist for a new blossoming of a scientific worldview? Does her experience have any effect on the human tension between science and religion? We never get any suggestions or speculations. All we get is the rolling of the credits. Contact tells a good story, but it stops just as its important story is just beginning.

Finally, I just have to note that all the cameos in the movie annoy the crap out of me. This was when Robert Zemeckis had just discovered that he could put people into lots of interesting situations, digitally; remember, he’d had Forrest Gump consorting with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So here we get loads of real-life CNN personalities, and even President Bill Clinton, with the film taking quotes from actual Clinton newscasts and editing them so that it sounds like he’s discussing the events of the movie. It’s incredibly distracting. Instead of being drawn further into the story, I find myself trying to think of what event Clinton was actually discussing in the speeches that were repurposed for this movie. Things like having Rob Lowe play a Christian conservative leader named “Richard Rank” are incredibly distracting, because of course it makes me think of Ralph Reed. Shoehorning in mention of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which had happened just months before the movie came out, is another example. Zemeckis seems to want his movie to seem ‘real’ and relevant, but all this stuff has the exact opposite effect on me: it forces me to keep the story at arm’s length.

Ultimately, I want to love Contact, because of my love and admiration for Carl Sagan, for the subject matter of the story, and for the view of the Universe as a place of wonder and of science as humanity’s greatest achievement. And there really is a lot to love about Contact. But the movie spends so much time getting in its own way that I inevitably end up just admiring it a lot.

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Something for Thursday

Two hundred years and two days ago, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor was heard for the first time, in Vienna. The bulk of this post is what I wrote about this symphony three-and-a-half years ago, and the performance I feature is the same, because it’s one of the greatest performances of this work I’ve ever heard–the energy this youth ensemble brings to this symphony is amazing–and because I can’t help thinking of this piece, with its themes of joy and universal brotherhood (and sisterhood!), played by this particular orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which includes Jewish and Palestinian musicians among its ranks. This music, in those hands, seems to me a far better thing than what is transpiring now between those same peoples elsewhere, and I hope the spirit of Beethoven triumphs in the end.

The post:

Whether or not the Ninth is Beethoven’s greatest symphony is a matter of debate, and I’m not going to join it here. The main contenders seem to be the 7th, 5th, and 3rd, each of which have strong cases to be made. For me it comes down to the 7th and the 9th, and I probably have a stronger personal attachment to the 9th, since it was my first real deep dive into Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonic world. Quite a starting point, eh?

It was when I was in high school and becoming keenly interested in symphonic music, to the point that I was examining orchestral scores in an attempt to unlock what secrets I could, with my level of training to that point. (Which was, ahem, not much. But I went ahead undaunted!) I remember the bookstore: A B. Dalton (remember those?) in the Monroeville Mall outside of Pittsburgh, when we were there visiting my sister, who was in college. There was a Dover edition of Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, in full score.

Dover Publications used to make wonderful copies of music scores in fine books…and apparently they still do! I just now Googled the folks at Dover to see if they were still around, and there’s an active website, so that may be a place that starts taking my money soon…but anyway, I remember picking up the book in that B. Dalton and thumbing through it. At this point I knew nothing at all about either work, so I was completely baffled when I flipped to the last movement of the Ninth and saw…music for voices?

Was this a choral symphony?

Indeed it was…and is.

My sister actually gave me that book for either my birthday or Christmas that year; I procured a recording not long after. My band director dubbed me a cassette of the Ninth, and off I went. The recording was Herbert von Karajan, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. You never forget your first Beethoven Ninth.

That the Ninth captivated me utterly is unsurprising, as it has been captivating its audiences ever since Beethoven wrote it. The premiere is one of the legendary events in all music, with the deaf composer sitting on stage as his work crashed and hummed all around him…and he heard none of it at all. Imagine the poignancy of one of the musicians, alto soloist Caroline Unger, at concert’s end, putting her hand on Beethoven’s sleeve to turn him toward the audience, that he might see what he could not hear: their applause. When you listen to the Ninth, as with all of Beethoven’s late works, you are hearing the musical realizations of a man who could only ‘hear’ the work in his mind.

Beethoven’s Ninth went on to become one of the most influential works of music ever written. He fired the imagination of many composers with this work, and indeed, the Ninth took on a nearly mystical air as the 19th century wound on. The Ninth was one of Richard Wagner’s favorite works, and it was deep inspiration to both Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, both of whom felt superstitious angst as they approached their own ninth symphonies, as if Nine was a sacred barrier beyond which a symphonist dare not tread. Mahler, having already written eight symphonies when he set out write Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), thought he might cheat the limit of Nine by not titling this work as a symphony, even though everyone believes it is. Even so, it didn’t buy Mahler much time: he would write his actual Ninth symphony and then die with only a few sketches written for his Tenth.

The Ninth is one of classical music’s true “event” works, often being programmed for concerts that are meant to commemorate specific events. One of the most famous of these was in 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the work in East Berlin, leading an orchestra and chorus drawn from many nationalities. For this concert Bernstein changed the fourth movement’s focus from “joy” (Freude) to “freedom” (Freiheit), in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months earlier. There really is a universality to Beethoven’s Ninth that lends itself to such things. It’s a deeply human work, encapsulating the tortured journey toward joy as imagined by a great composer brought low by deafness.

I thought about writing a lengthy annotation of the Ninth, but time didn’t allow, and besides, I’m not sure if such a thing is really necessary. But there are so many moments in the Ninth that are sheer magic. Here are some of the spots that capture my imagination:

:: The opening bars, with the strings in tremolo, playing only the tonic and the dominant, so we don’t even know if we’re in major or minor key. It’s an opening of total mystery, leading to a stormy march of a movement that is sheer musical relentlessness.

:: And that fiery scherzo, whose opening motifs echo the main theme of the first movement, but in a rhythm that drives, drives, drives forward. Even the timpani gets into the act, pounding out that rhythm in moments that seem to come out of nowhere, no matter how many times I hear the work. But wait! Halfway through the scherzo, Beethoven changes his original time signature and provides, charmingly shocking, a genial “drum and fife” section that eventually yields back to the original scherzo.

:: The double variation of the third movement? I used to have trouble with this movement, not really understanding what Beethoven was up to. It’s certainly a very long movement that leads us into the depths of Beethoven’s mind, as one of the great writers of variations in music history. Somehow Beethoven finds new and enthralling textures each time he winds his way through the long melody that sustains the movement, and then toward the end come the two sets of giant fanfares that are answered by the strings. The woodwinds sing throughout, and the time is marked by pizzicato strings. It’s an amazing movement that once bothered me.

:: And then we arrive at the fourth movement, that gigantic movement that is by itself longer than some of Mozart’s entire symphonies. A stormy passage opens, leading to a remarkable passage where Beethoven quotes each of the first three movements, almost questioningly, only to have the low strings reject each one. After one last declaration by the low strings, we finally arrive where the entire symphony has been leading all along: the famous “Ode to Joy” chorale theme, played first by pianissimo low strings. Beethoven repeats the theme four times, adding to the voices each time (my favorite is the second statement of it, before he adds in the violins but also writes the most wonderful countermelody for the bassoons).

Then the original stormy passage from the movement’s opening bars reprise, before we hear the first of our voices: the baritone soloist, declaring that it is time for a more joyful sound. “Freude!” he cries out, and the choral passage arrives, with the soloists leading through a set of variations on the chorale theme, variations which are answered by the chorus, all of this building to an immense chord that is one of the greatest single chords in all of music…and then the bottom drops out and a Turkish march begins, with Beethoven doing one of his favorite tricks of off-setting the beat.

I won’t describe more than that, save to note that the symphony’s closing moments are one of classical music’s true moments of magnificence. I have never heard the Ninth in a live performance, but I can only imagine that if performed well, it can be an almost overwhelming experience. There is a vastness to the Ninth that makes it a colossus in itself, but this is not at all unique to the Ninth: Beethoven’s greatest works all enjoy this expansive quality, but none are quite so big in their concept as the Ninth. Few works achieve this sense of containing a universe in itself. With the Ninth, Beethoven moved beyond composing music and instead created a world.

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Eddie

Edward Van Halen, in his signature pose: shredding while in mid-air.

Born this date: Edward Van Halen, in 1955. This is what I wrote when he died, in 2020–but I’d rather honor him on the day on which he was born.

It took me a while to start loving rock music. I heard a lot of it as a kid (benefits of having an older sister, which I did not appreciate at the time because there are things you need years to figure out, especially when you’re a not-terribly-smart nine-year-old), but for various reasons none of it really captured my attention until the early-to-mid 1980s. Part of it might have been a kind of peer-pressure, as I did tire of being the kid who had no idea what all of my friends were talking about when they started discussing music. Another part of it was the arrival of MTV, which even I, as a geeky kid, thought was pretty cool.

We didn’t have MTV at our house for a while, because it took several years before the cable company ran the lines out our road to where we lived. But I would watch a lot of MTV at a couple friends’ houses, when I did sleepovers and the like. There’s a lot of nostalgic hay to mine in the music videos of those first few years, but I’ll keep it to just one group here, for what are probably obvious reasons.

There was one very strange video I enjoyed in particular. It actually had a filmed introduction; the music didn’t start for a minute or two. Our opening scene has a spectacularly nerdy kid being put on the school bus by his mother. This dude is so nerdy that when his mother flattens his hair with her fingers, it squeaks. She’s giving him the standard spiel about making friends and having a good year and whatnot, but our boy–named “Waldo”–is not having in, replying to her in a voice that can’t possibly be his: “Awww, Mom, you know I’m not like the other guys! I’m nervous and my socks are too loose.” No dice; off to school goes Waldo, after discovering that the bus is loaded with what the 1980s held to be the standard “degenerate” types of kid.

Then our music starts, with some wild drums, and then the most blazing electric guitar work I had heard to that point in my life. And that guitar work remains the most blazing guitar work I’ve ever heard. The song, and video, were called “Hot For Teacher”, and the band was a hard rock group called “Van Halen”. That astonishing guitar playing? That was a guy named Eddie Van Halen.

That song, and the others from the album 1984 were my introduction to Van Halen. I would learn not long after that while I’d just discovered these guys, Van Halen had actually been around in a big way since the late 1970s after toiling in obscurity for several years before that, and that 1984 was their sixth studio album. Soon after that album came out, some internal drama happened with the band that led to their lead singer, a charismatic but troublesome guy named David Lee Roth, to leave the group; luckily there was another lead singer available by the name of Sammy Hagar who was between bands at the moment, so he slid right in and the band accommodated him, making new music in new styles to reflect the style of their new lead man, all the while maintaining the focus on the hard-but-fun rock.

And through all of that was the guitar work of Eddie Van Halen.

The music of Van Halen was a big part of my teen years, and I’ve never lost my love of it, though eventually I didn’t buy the albums anymore. 5150, the first Van Halen album with Hagar aboard, was the first rock album that I played almost literally to death, to the point where I knew each and every song on that album backward and forward. I’d quickly get up to speed on all of the Roth-era albums as well, each of which is full of great rock music (well, Diver Down is really kinda meh, isn’t it?), but I am probably one of the only people around who can honestly say that I don’t have a genuine preference between the DLR and Sammy eras…or, as some people phrase it, “Do you prefer Van Halen, of Van Hagar?”

In all honesty, though, if you put a gun to my head and said “Play the first Van Halen song that jumps into your head!” I will probably wind up selecting “Dreams” from 5150 or “Right Now” from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge before I choose any DLR song. That might not be a “preference”, but there it is.

Of course, Van Halen’s history got even more convoluted later on, when I had kind-of moved on from listening to them on a regular basis. Hagar was out, Roth was back in; Roth was out, and a guy named Gary Cherrone was in (for one album, that most people speak of in the same hushed tones as the Star Wars Holiday Special). Hagar was back! Hagar was gone again! Roth was back! Roth was out! Roth was back again! And so on.

Eventually Eddie Van Halen’s years of hard living started catching up with him, with news and rumors of his various health troubles, winding up in the end with cancer…and that’s what finally took him away from the world, at the age of 65.

What to say about Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing? Well…yes, he could play fast and he could do astonishing things with the guitar. But what always got me was the tone of his playing. There was often a sense of cheer behind it, of happiness, of warmth. A lot of great rock guitar playing often seems obsessed with speed for the sake of speed, and the electric guitar can sound almost angry and snarling in a lot of guitar solos, especially in 1980s-era “hair band” hard rock. Eddie’s tone was always clean and pure, and there was almost always melody there, even in the midst of his virtuosic displays of pure skill and talent. Eddie Van Halen made music with the guitar, and his solos always blend into the songs and seem a part of the song. Many guitar solos of the era sound like what they are: rhythmic cadenzas stuck in the middle of the song, where the singer stops singing but the bassist and drummer keep on going.

Eddie Van Halen made the guitar sing and laugh, and in a few songs he even made it seem like it was about to cry. The man wasn’t just a guitar god, he was a musician. Eddie Van Halen was to the guitar, for me, as Vladimir Horowitz was to the piano or as Hillary Hahn is to the violin or as Tine Thing Helseth is to the trumpet. In his best work, he isn’t just “shredding”, he’s making music. And that’s what I’m going to remember Eddie Van Halen for: the music.

Thanks for the music, Eddie. It was always good, and quite a lot of it was great.

A word about this last one, the live performance of “Best of Both Worlds”. My paternal grandmother died in 1986, when I was just about to turn 15. It was a deeply sad day; she was the first significant loss of my life. It was a Friday. After making the arrangements that morning, my father drove all the way home from Philadelphia, where Grammy lived, and then I remember my parents going out to hang out with their friends on what was a difficult night. I stayed home, as I typically did. Grammy’s passing didn’t really hit me until my father told me, after he got home, that she had remembered me during her brief hospital stay; apparently someone had said something that had triggered her memory of me. I lost it after that, and I remember being deeply sad for the next several hours, until I idly turned on the teevee and channel-flipped to MTV, which had the Video Music Awards (MTV’s big awards show–do they still have the VMAs anymore?), and not long after I tuned in, MTV went to a segment of none other than Van Halen, in New Haven, CT. (At the time I thought this was live, but it turns out that it was dropped-in filmed footage from a performance two months earlier, but did that matter? Not really.) They were on their big tour for the 5150 album, their first big tour with Sammy Hagar. This performance is the one to which MTV cut. Maybe it seems weird, but watching them do “Best of Both Worlds”–which is one of the best songs on that album–jolted me out of my funk. It was still a sad time, and Grammy’s death was just the start of what was a generally godawful sophomore year of high school for me, but…at least there was Van Halen. Always Van Halen. To this day, I can rely on Van Halen to cheer me up when I’m stuck in the mud.

So, yeah. Thanks again, Eddie. (And Sammy, and Dave, and Michael, and Alex. And heck, you too, Gary.)

UPDATE: I was remiss in not crediting the photo above.

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Coverage!

I didn’t really plan to skip Tone Poem Tuesday or Something For Thursday this week, it just kinda happened. There’s this meme that I see go around social media every year around this time, referring how the time between Christmas and New Years tends to be this amorphous period when you’re not even sure what day it is, and that’s certainly true! I’m actually taking the entirety of this week off this year, and after some reflection a few days ago, I’m realizing that I haven’t taken this particular week completely off–meaning, no school or work–since my last year of high school. After that, I would have a part-time job where I’d work during this time while off from college, and after college itself, I was simply working. I always take some time off during the Holidays, but never the whole kaboodle, as it were…until now. Next year I’ll most likely return to some “fractured” time off during the holidays, as this year’s week off was aided and abetted by the fact that Christmas and New Year’s fall on Mondays. In 2024/2025 those days will be Wednesdays, so next year will like be back-to-back five-day weekends, instead of one solid week off.

(And honestly, that’s kind of how I prefer it, anyway. I rarely take my vacations as entire weeks off, unless we have a trip planned or for some reason I need to take it as an entire week. This goes back to when I was working in restaurants right out of college; it’s always been easier to structure my vacations as a combination of two very-short work weeks broken in the middle by a really long weekend. Even now, I found last week interminably long, leading up to my ten days off.)

But anyway, back to the point: the regular music features of this blog will return next week. Meanwhile, here’s something I just found a minute ago, and it’s seasonally appropriate:

(BTW, the title of this post makes no sense because I forgot to change it! I was going to actually feature something else here, a cover I just found of a favorite Christmas song, but then I decided to feature this because it showed up right after the thing I was going to feature. I did bookmark the original thing for next year’s Daily Dose, though! Fret not! I’m leaving the post title, though. Just because.)

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LB

Netflix released a trailer for the upcoming movie Maestro today, and let me tell you…I am well-and-truly excited to see this movie. It will be on Netflix in late December, right in time for my Christmastime vacation. I’ve watched this trailer three times, and not only does it make me want to listen to Mahler’s Second, it also leaves me honestly astonished at how deeply Bradley Cooper seems to have disappeared into Leonard Bernstein. There are times in this trailer when the artifice is so convincing I can barely spot it.

Leonard Bernstein is one of my musical heroes–and my writing heroes, come to that–and I have the highest possible hopes for this film.

 

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Sinead

What a voice she had. What a musician she was. Too hard was her life.

On the musical collaboration above:

And back through the glen I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see more
But to and fro
In my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled
Oh, glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew

Sheila O’Malley:

It’s hard to describe what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived on the world stage. She came from seemingly nowhere. Her voice was eerie and transcendent. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her head was shaved. She covered a Prince song. She arrived fully formed into a world that had no place for her. She created her own place. The second she arrived, you couldn’t imagine what it was like before she got there. That’s what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived.

It seems a particularly cruel curse of this world that often great art seems to require great pain to give it voice.

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Tony

Thank you for the music, sir. What a life.

I’m not one to appoint “golden ages” of this or that, but…there really is something awfully and uniquely special about the first half of the 20th century in American popular song-writing, isn’t there?

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Tone Poem Tuesday: The Annotated “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a repost)

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!

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