Tag: Music

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Here is everything I know about Zoltan Kodaly: He was a Hungarian composer who lived from 1882 to 1967, and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind cites Kodaly as the inventor of the hand-signal method used in the film to accompany the musical tones with which humans begin communicating with the aliens.

That’s it.

I even did a search on this blog, because I’ve been known to feature an obscure (or lesser well-known) composer once, completely forget about them for years, and then feature them again with a “I’ve never heard of this person!” blurb. I can find zero mentions of Zoltan Kodaly in all of my blogging. I’m pretty sure that I used to conflate Kodaly with Khachaturian, because it’s not as if I have any expertise on Eastern European composers who start with K. (That could probably be a Jeopardy! category for the Tournament of Champions, eh? “This Russian composer of two symphonies might have been a big name if he hadn’t died of tuberculosis at 34.” “Who is Kalinnikov?” “Correct! Pick again!”)

So, what about Kodaly?

In a way he seems to have been a kindred spirit of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, in the fact that he toured the rural outlying areas of his homeland to record (on actual wax cylinders) folk songs and melodies, which he would later use as inspiration for his own compositions. Bela Bartok was another contemporary of his, and apparently the two men were friends who shared a passion for the folk music of that region.

Kodaly was also deeply invested in music education, and he left behind a significant body of work that, taken together, has come to be known as “the Kodaly method”. It is in this method that we find the use of hand signals to stand in for musical tones, with the specific hand signals having been taken from earlier work by an English musician and teacher named John Curwen.

I feel like I’m writing a research paper here: “Take a composer’s name out of the hat and write five pages on them by Tuesday.” But Kodaly is a pretty important name in twentieth century classical music, and yet I know so very little about him! This is always interesting to me: the gaps that exist in my knowledge, and why.

Anyhow, this piece is a collection of what Kodaly called “Gypsy dances”. I assume the Gypsies were Romani people (the word “gypsy” had not been exposed as a slur back then), and the work is a presentation of a number of their themes. In this way the work is most reminiscent of one of my favorite works of all time, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1. For all my admiration of the various musical forms at play in classical music–sonata-allegro, rondo, chaconne, passacaglia–there really is something to be said for the good old collection of tunes.

This piece, called Dances of Galanta, is just that: a collection of dancelike tunes, each one with touching rustic lyricism and rhythm. (Galanta is a small town, population around 15000, in Slovakia.) Like many such works, the entire orchestra is featured throughout, but the clarinet gets special focus, apparently standing in for an ethnic reed instrument that you wouldn’t find in the standard complement of a modern symphony orchestra. Dances of Galanta is an interesting piece from a voice I may well have never actually heard before. Kodaly sounds like an interesting voice, though.

Here is Dances of Galanta by Zoltan Kodaly.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Maurice Ravel is a particularly fascinating composer, once one manages to get past the monument to terminal ennui that is Bolero. Here we have one his earlier works, the Rapsodie espagnol, in which a young Ravel turns his impressionistic eye on the sounds and impressions of Spain. Ravel composed the Rapsodie in 1907, and through its pages you can certainly hear Romanticism receding into memory and Modernism knocking on the door; this is 20th century music through and through, even if it maintains its grounding in the land of tonality. The work is in four movements, each one evocative of an exotic Iberia, so close and yet, thanks to the mountains, not quite so close as all that. Meditative song lives alongside exuberant dance here, and the entire piece ends in a riot of color.

Here is the Rapsodie espagnol by Maurice Ravel.

 

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The Soundtrack of Our Lives

It’s become a common enough experience in my life that I notice it: something notable happens regarding a particular musical artist whose stardom arrived during my younger years (sadly, it’s often a death, but not always), and as discussion about that particular artist revs up, a phrase gets used a lot: “the soundtrack of our lives”. This is used to describe either the ubiquity of that artist’s music, or the degree to which that artist’s work shaped the music we heard on a daily basis.

What I’ve also noticed is how frequently the artist in question was not a major part of my youthful music life.

An example: Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is now in its fourth season, which was released a few weeks ago. One episode features a song by Kate Bush in a major way (the song actually figures into the plot, as well as making a major appearance on the soundtrack). The song is “Running Up That Hill”. As people watched through the episodes, social media started to explode with people my age (or maybe a bit younger, or maybe a bit older) reacting with delight at the re-emergence of that song into collective musical consciousness, thirty-seven years after its release. Kate Bush and “Running Up That Hill” were part of “the soundtrack of our lives”.

Only…for me, it wasn’t. I can honestly say that my first full hearing of that song might well have come just a few days before we watched the Stranger Things episode, because I looked it up online out of curiosity. (It’s a good song, by the way.)

This morning, I read a new post by John Scalzi, who has been writing a series of posts exploring specific songs and what they have meant to him at various points in his life. This particular post is talking about a Madonna song (a song with which I am not familiar, while I’m quite familiar with Madonna in general), but at the outset, Scalzi says this:

For nearly all Gen-Xers, there are three artists who can reasonably be said to have been universal experiences, i.e., they were in the soundtrack to your life whether you went out of your way to listen to them or not: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. They were everywhere, the musical air that one breathed, there in the malls, in the schools, on MTV and radio. Even if you dove deep into heavy metal, goth or rap to escape their presence, sooner or later they were there, leaving you flabbergasted that, somehow, they found you.

This interests me because for me it’s only two-thirds right. Jackson? Sure. Madonna? Again, absolutely. But Prince?

For me, no. Not really. Prince was never a big part of my musical soundscape, intended or not; the only song of his I could have identified off the top of my head for years was “Let’s Go Crazy”. Prince was never a universal part of my musical life. I was aware of his existence, I knew he had fans, and…that’s about it. I never explored him much while he was alive because his music simply did not present itself to me in anything like the same ubiquitous way that Michael Jackson or Madonna did.

I don’t note this to pick on Mr. Scalzi’s point, because I suspect that far more people would agree with his summation than with mine. But it always fascinates me to consider the degree to which my movements in the cultural landscape have always been my own, and that while there were a lot of intersections between my landscape and the wider one, there are always large gaps. This leads to voids in conversations that I find awkward at times, as people enthusiastically discuss music with which I am almost completely unfamiliar. Or I find myself unaffected on those sad instances when prominent figures die, and I just don’t have that connection.

Why did I miss out on Prince? Kate Bush? All manner of other stuff? I can guarantee none of it was because of snobbery or distaste for “pop” music. I would hope that my years of musical writings on this site would make that clear! I did watch a lot of MTV in the 80s, but I also headed off to my room to listen to music on my own, and this was almost exclusively (almost, not quite, but almost) classical. This continued into my college years, with the additions of New Age and Celtic; I tried being a jazz listener for a time as well. If anything, my college years were an even bigger retreat from the “pop culture” world for me; if it was popular between 1989 and 1993, I very likely did not know about it. And it went on a bit into the 90s, leading me to mostly miss out entirely on grunge. Nirvana? Stone Temple Pilots? Smashing Pumpkins? All names to me. All talented. All major touchstones in recent music history. And all artists whose music passed me by. And I didn’t do much catching up after college, because in the late 90s and into the 2000s I went deeper into classical as well as into film music, which is one of the tiniest of musical niches.

I’ve never been able to work out just how I feel about all this. I do feel at times like I missed out, and many times I’ve found real enrichment and enjoyment when I take time to explore music now that I missed the first time around. Music is wonderful like that: you can come to it any time, much like books and movies–all art, actually. We focus too much on the new, don’t we? But at the same time, there is always a feeling of something I’ve missed, some shared context that I won’t be able to engage no matter how much I come to love a particular piece or song or work.

And others won’t have my context…lying in bed in the dark with a cassette in my Walkman after I’ve turned the lights out, but in my case it’s not Prince or Kate Bush but rather Berlioz or Wagner…in any event, my life had a different soundtrack than a lot of other people, and there are times I feel a real disconnect from others because of that.

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“My thoughts, I confess, verge on dirty….”

Dexys Midnight Runners. I cannot decide if they helped or hurt the cause of overalls.

Earlier I saw, somewhere online, a note that the song “Come On Eileen”, by Dexys Midnight Runners, was released 40 years ago this week. That’s…wow, that’s really something. I honestly don’t recall when I first heard the song, as I didn’t really start paying attention to pop music until several years after that, and even at that point I wasn’t much of a radio listener: albums and MTV were my avenue towards music, and even at that point, while MTV was still showing music videos, the older stuff–songs that had been off the charts for a while–were simply gone from their rotations, only popping up on “retro” days like MTV’s anniversary and that sort of thing.

“Come On Eileen” is often cited as a “one hit wonder” phenomenon, which like in many cases is only true if you consider US success. The band had more success in the UK, and stuck around for a little while; they produced enough albums and had enough body of work to produce a Greatest Hits album. I remember seeing that CD in the bins at Media Play once, in the early 90s, and it struck me as weird that they had a Greatest HitS album, which is when I learned that you can be a very successful band and not be big in the US. (See also: a-ha.)

As for “Come On Eileen” itself, it’s a strange kind of song, to be sure! It starts with a brief violin solo before the beat kicks in, and then the lyrics kick in. Singer Kevin Rowland sings with a lovely British baritone in a way that combines infectious exuberance with unintelligibility. I mean, really: I defy anyone to understand the words to this song the first time through. It’s one of those classic songs that makes me thankful for living in an era when I can Google the words. And then there’s the way the song blends several different styles in one, starting with a kind of retro folk-rock before breaking into the chorus, which is markedly different stylistically; it has an entirely different beat and nothing in the verses tells us anything about the Eileen of the title. I mean, we have the singer referring to Johnnie Ray and how popular he was, but now we’re hearing about Eileen and how she makes the singer all horny and stuff. This should not work, and yet, as both sections are cheery and upbeat, somehow this stuck-together-with-scotch-tape song works.

And then there’s the song’s video, which does the same thing! A black-and-white section at the beginning, set in the 50s–using footage of singer Johnnie Ray disembarking a plane while fans go crazy–contrasts with our mid-section, in which the band is performing on some London streetcorner. It’s all really weird, and honestly, this song and video shouldn’t really work, except for the fact that the constituent parts within work perfectly–so perfectly that the song has endured for forty years.

Of course, anyone familiar with the video will see a particular significance to me. I don’t know why this is the Official 80s Anthem Of Overalls; lots of bands can be seen rocking overalls in their videos from the era! And yet–maybe it’s because this is the only Dexys Midnight Runners song to endure in American consciousness–this is the one. Mention it and someone will usually say something like “Hey, that’s the band in the too-big overalls!” And yes, it is. I’ll be honest here: from the way they’re styled in this video, “Come On Eileen” does not exactly make the best case for overalls as a sartorial choice.

But anyway, I will admit to liking “Come On Eileen” a great deal. If we who rock overalls have to have an 80s New Wave rock anthem, we could do a lot worse!

See the official video here. (The video is not able to be embedded.) Meanwhile, you can listen to the song right here!

Damn…forty years of “Come On Eileen”. That’s wild!

 

 

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Also, this.

Here’s something in the “You learn something new every day!” Department: there is a Chinese reed instrument called the Sheng, which involves several upright pipes in a nifty kind of cross between an oboe and a calliope.

Here a sheng player sets up camp in a public place and plays music from the Mario Bros. videogames. The video includes nifty added animations based on gameplay, and it helps that our performer is dressed appropriately for playing Mario music.

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No orchestra? No problem

Franz Liszt, one of the first virtuoso superstars of the music world, didn’t stop at composing his own showpieces to display his own incredible talent at the piano keyboard. He also transcribed for piano many of the great symphonic works of his day, including all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. Reducing orchestral works to the keyboard results in a very odd kind of listening experience if you know the original work well: you’re hearing all the themes and all the development, in all their compositional glory, but with none of the orchestral timbres.

But it’s still Beethoven, distilled through the piano genius that was Franz Liszt.

Here’s the Symphony No. 7, possibly Beethoven’s greatest symphony and one of his very greatest works, recast as a piano virtuoso work by Franz Liszt. And make no mistake: it’s all here. Liszt transcribed it, but he sure didn’t simplify it.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Film music today!

This weekend was, among other things, the twentieth anniversary of the release of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which is one of my favorite installments in the series. Even now, when the Prequel Trilogy has benefitted from the passing of time and some much-needed critical reassessment (way overdue, but I remain proud of having done a lot of that lonely heavy-lifting myself back when hating the Prequels was still the mainstream position), AotC still seems to be the one that gets picked on the most, which I continue to not understand.

The movie’s music is something of an oddity. John Williams turns in a lot of his usual inventive brilliance, even though the film’s last act was apparently still under heavy revision so late in the production game that the entire last act is largely scored with music re-used from the previous film, The Phantom Menace. Williams’s original work is typically amazing, centering on a new Love Theme for the romance of Anakin and Padme, which even at this point we know is (a) doomed to failure, and (b) going to produce the baby twins of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa.

As the romance is doomed and tragic from the get-go, Williams wrote a lush love theme that leaps and yearns in suitably sad and tragic fashion. But he does some more with it: he gives that love theme a darkly militaristic middle section, for one thing, in line with the fact that Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side (which helps give the Empire its beginnings) is borne from this very love affair. Williams also crafts the love theme itself from a kind of minor-key inversion of the Star Wars main theme, and the theme’s final bars form a quote from the classic Imperial March.

In this selection, the Finale and End Credits Suite from the film, we start with some suspenseful music as the Battle of Geonosis winds down and the traitorous Count Dooku flees to Coruscant, so he can report to his master, Darth Sidious (the Sith alter-ego of Chancellor Palpatine, who is the puppet master behind everything). Then the music swells as the Republic’s Clone Army is revealed in all its terrifying majesty, setting forth to war–but the music here is the Imperial March from the Original Trilogy. Williams is telling us that this is the true moment the Empire is born.

Then, a blazing rendition of that love theme as Anakin and Padme marry in secret, before the film’s smash-cut transition to the end credits. This is the best of these transitions in the entire saga, in my opinion, and it’s the last time that Williams would end a Star Wars movie’s narrative with anything other than his iconic theme for the Force.

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Something for Thursday: Conversation songs, No. 2

Here’s another “Conversation Song”! This is my ongoing series, started last week, in which I feature songs whose lyrics give us one side of a conversation, and we are left to infer the other half.

This week’s song dates from 1976, and the singing duo England Dan and John Ford Coley. It’s a pretty straightforward song: one person is calling the other and suggesting that they get together to, I don’t know, talk old times, maybe rekindle an old relationship.

The lyrics suggest that this is a former love affair, or at least some kind of relationship that ended in a one-sided fashion. For this person to call the other, they have to have not been in contact in a very long time, and there’s a winsome sweetness in the suggestions for a place to go: “We could go walking through a windy park”. The entire song is the suggestion of a get-together; none of the real conversation is in the song at all. But there’s a hint of seriousness in the bridge of the song:

… I won’t ask for promises
So, you don’t have to lie
We’ve both played that game before
Say “I love you”, then say “Goodbye”

Our singer is trying to keep expectations low, downplay the whole thing–but even here they are assuring the other that it won’t get that deep again, even though they’ve “both played that game before”, a game which involves both “I love you” and “goodbye”. One wonders why it’s been such a long time, and what really prompted our singer to pick up the phone. It can’t just be that “warm wind blowing the stars around”.

Here is “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight”, by English Dan and John Ford Coley.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

A suite of film music today! We watched Avatar the other night, our first time watching it since we first saw it when the DVD came out after the movie’s initial release, way back in 2009 or 2010 or so. The movie was such a huge hit back then, but it oddly became that huge hit that somehow disappeared down the memory hole, never much being talked about except for when news about James Cameron’s more-than-a-decade of work on a bunch of sequels drips out. In fact, a kind of backlash has arisen around Avatar, for reasons that I might go into in another post. For now, though, here’s a suite culled from the film’s score, by James Horner.

I’ve always had a tough relationship with James Horner; some of his music is indispensable, but his strange habit of self-borrowing and self-repeating is often maddening (in this way Horner was the Aaron Sorkin of film music). For me, Horner’s work peaked in the mid-90s, and little of his work after that period really hit my sweet spot, with one exception: his score to Avatar. This music is evocative and exciting and it conveys the sense of wonder that I find when I look at the stunning visuals of the moon of Pandora.

It’s too bad that Horner died several years ago, and thus won’t be able to write the music for the sequels that are going to finally start coming out this December. I’m sure his work will be quoted, but still, his voice will be missed.

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