Tag: Music

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National Poetry Month, day 19, and Tone Poem Tuesday: Mr. Poe and Maestro Schmitt

Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favorite poets and always has been. In fact, his work partially provides inspiration for my John Lazarus novels; the plan is that each book in this series alludes to Poe or makes reference to him in some way or another. Such is the case with that series’s second book, which I hope to have out in 2023.

“The Haunted Palace” is a beautifully lyrical work of the sadness of beautiful things, lost forever but still leaving behind ghostly remnants of the way they once were.

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A wingèd odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene!
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.

—

It’s interesting to me, here, that Poe can’t just let his beautiful old palace lapse into memory all by itself; he has to have it happen via an act of violence or a doom applied from without. Is it an invasion by an enemy force? All he says is “evil things in robes of sorrow”, so maybe war comes to this palace…or perhaps a pestilence descends upon the land, or a famine, or a plague. Poe doesn’t tell us any details about the means by which the palace met its end and became haunted, so maybe it doesn’t matter…but why, then, tell us of the evil things in red robes at all?

I had already chosen this poem for today, but then the other morning YouTube prompted me with, among other things, a work by a composer with whom I was unfamiliar: Florent Schmitt. Schmitt was a French composer who lived from 1870 to 1958. He is a more obscure composer, to be sure, but I’ve just read some testimonials that hold his music to be worthy of deeper exploration. Schmitt was fairly prolific, producing work in most of the forms of the day. YouTube presented a piece by Schmitt, and I listened to it a bit and found it interesting.

But what interested me even more was another work, suggested in the sidebar: a piece by Schmitt called Le Palais Hante: “The Haunted Palace”. I did a bit of research and learned that this work is, indeed, inspired by Poe’s poem.

What of Schmitt’s music? It is atmospheric and impressionistic, reminding me most of the sophisticated voice of Ravel. Here is Le Palais Hante by Florent Schmitt.

 

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National Poetry Month, day 14 AND Something for Thursday: Leonard Cohen

The great Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen demonstrates quite ably the blurring of the lines between song lyrics and poetry. Are lyrics poetry? I’d argue that they are, but they are often slightly limited by their intended use in service to a particular musical form or melody.

Cohen’s lyrics and poems, though, are something else. First, there’s the density of Cohen’s wordplay, his references, and the fact that his songs are often long repetitions of the same melodic material where the focus really, truly is on the words. Second, there was the nature of Cohen’s performances themselves, in which his deep gravelly drawl made his singing of his own songs seem more like poetry readings with rhythm.

Here is a poem of Cohen’s, followed by Cohen himself performing it as a song. Poetry and song exist in the same artspace.

“First We Take Manhattan”, by Leonard Cohen

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I’d really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I
just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the
discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I don’t like your fashion business mister
And I don’t like these drugs that keep you thin
I don’t like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I’d really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I’m ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Remember me? I used to live for music
Remember me? I brought your groceries in
Well it’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Here’s the performance:

 

I have Cohen on the mind today because someone on Twitter asked readers to name their favorite cover song, but they could not name several specific famous covers, two of which are the most familiar covers of “Hallelujah” (likely Cohen’s most famous song), by Rufus Wainwright and by Jeff Buckley, respectively. So I noted my personal favorite cover of that very same song, a cover that deserves a lot more attention.

Here is k.d. lang, and “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.

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Elmer Bernstein at 100

Elmer Bernstein, one of the most consistently delightful of all film composers, was born one hundred years ago today. Bernstein died in 2004, after a long and prolific life of making our cinematic world better. Here’s a sampling of his work. Thank you, Elmer Bernstein!

From Westerns to science-fiction films to comedy scores to character dramas to sword-and-sandal Biblical epics…and more. Elmer Bernstein was one of the greats.

 

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Sergei Rachmaninoff at 149

I was going to spend this month writing about, among other things, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was born on April 1, 1873. Then I did the math and realized that a whole month-long focus on Rachmaninoff might be a better idea for next year, Rachmaninoff’s sesquicentennial.

Meantime, I can’t let this great composer’s birth date go unmentioned, so here’s a wonderful performance of his Piano Concerto #2 in C minor, performed by Khatia Buniatishvili and the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This is one of the finest performances of this work I have heard. Ms. Buniatishvili is an amazing musician. Note her attentiveness to the orchestra during the passages when she is not playing. (The music starts around the 1:45 mark; there’s some introductory stuff.)

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Some chamber music today, by the great Black composer Florence Price, whose work keeps rising in acclaim these days. I’ve featured Price’s music before in this space, and I plan to continue doing so! Her work, blending European classical forms and idioms with Black spirituals and folk-songs, is always fascinating.

In this case, we have Price’s Piano Quintet in A minor. In this piece the echoes of Black music stand out to great effect, not just in the melodies but in the harmonies and the rhythms, which are almost jazzy in their use of syncopations and resolutions that happen on the off-beats. The work is in four movements that share interconnected thematic material, giving the entire work a cohesion that would make any composer proud. The piece abounds in dance-like rhythms and excellent writing for strings and piano. I love that Florence Price is having a cultural moment. Her work deeply deserves it.

Here is the Piano Quintet in A minor by Florence Price.

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“I’d rather have fewer spectacular theaters than tons of cheap little multiplexes.” –Douglas Trumbull

Filmmaker and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull died earlier this month. His body of work is not large, but its influence is gigantic. For filmgoers of a certain age and a certain disposition to genre–say, 50ish and inclined to fantasy and science fiction–Trumbull’s work is likely as big an influence on how such stories are visualized as George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.

Trumbull was instrumental in the look and feel of such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and, probably the granddaddy of them all in terms of lasting influence, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull also dabbled in directing, with a number of short films and two features, Silent Running (a rather dour environmental allegory that actually makes you care about some robots) and Brainstorm, the infamous sci-fi thriller about a scientist who invents a way to plug memories and images directly into the brain. Brainstorm isn’t a bad film, nor is it a great one, but it certainly deserves better than to be chiefly remembered as the film Natalie Wood was almost done making when she drowned.

Trumbull’s experience on Brainstorm led to him never directing a feature film again, and it’s not hard to see why, given the tragic death of Wood and the subsequent attempts by MGM to kill the production entirely. I can’t assess Trumbull’s directorial skill on the basis of just two movies, but I do know that he was a huge part of the visualization of science fiction at the time I was being shaped most strongly by it. Trumbull’s work tended to be on the less action-oriented side of the genre; he wasn’t much for the “Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness” side of things, but rather he was an excellent visionary at creating futures that were plausible and beautiful. Even in the case of Blade Runner, a noir thriller that takes place in a rain-soaked Los Angeles of seemingly unending darkness, Trumbull infused the bleak cityscape with a type of beauty.

Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is particularly legendary, in the way he uses bright bursts of colored light throughout to suggest the UFOs until the film’s climax, when he gives us the Mothership in all its glory:

I can look at this image and fill in the exact chord from the John Williams score at this moment….

You can watch this scene here. Remember that none of the actors had any idea what they were reacting to, so it was up to Trumbull to make their reactions worth it. Obviously, he nailed it.

And then there is his now-legendary work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film whose reception was mixed at the time (and remains so to this day), a film whose transition from planned teevee series to feature film was no doubt pushed along by the wild success of Star Wars two years before. But ST:TMP was a different kind of movie than Star Wars, a film in which there’s no “pew pew” action, and in which the main developments are all conceptual. Trumbull’s effects work had to carry a disproportionate amount of the film’s emotional heft, and for me, they rose to the occasion. One sequence that occasionally gets cited as an example of the film’s visual excess is the long fly-by of the Enterprise, but I have never been one of that sequence’s detractors. Here’s a video where Trumbull discusses his approach to that scene, as well as the lighting of the Enterprise itself:

That is fascinating stuff: Trumbull discusses the technical aspects of the shot, but also the thinking that went into it, the nature of the sequence in terms of the film’s storytelling, and he even singles out Jerry Goldsmith’s amazing contribution.

Douglas Trumbull’s innovations and achievements may seem a bit quaint in this day of computers being able to shape just about any scene a human can imagine, but they were innovations. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea of a film showing a starfield that actually looks like what you see when you go outside on a cloudless night and look up, and then being able to pan across that starfield, was unheard of. Every Star Wars movie’s opening pan across the stars, after the opening crawl, is owed to Douglas Trumbull.

When I started looking up Trumbull’s career information for this post, I remembered his body of work being larger than it was. That shows just how big the man’s influence was. You really can’t tell the story of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking of the last sixty years without giving Douglas Trumbull a big credit for how things look and feel. His reach will endure. I know this because it already does.

Finally, I note that films to which Trumbull was attached, either as director or visual effects supervisor, always seemed to boast great filmscores. I leave with two examples.

 

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No, John Williams did NOT rip off Dvorak.

UPDATE 2/18/2022: Broken link fixed.

REPOSTING 2/16/2022 because…see addendum to text.

UPDATE 2/7/19: This post, for some reason, must rank highly on some Google search index or something, because it’s been a relatively consistent driver of traffic to this blog ever since I posted it, nearly four years ago. I have closed off commenting for this post because the only discussion that has ever really occurred here has been people showing up to assure me that yes, John Williams really does rip off everybody under the sun, and in all honesty I’m not interested in entertaining those discussions anymore. That said, it does strike me as interesting how many different composers of wildly varying background and voice Williams is accused of “blatantly stealing”, and how many times a specific piece by Williams is said to be a clear rip from half a dozen specific earlier works. It’s a heck of a composer who can clearly steal four or five different pieces (or so I’m told) just to craft one theme for a Harry Potter movie, innit? Anyhow, here’s the post.

This is one of the trustiest of annoying old chestnuts. What happens is someone hears Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (titled “From the New World”) for the first time, encounters the opening bars of the fourth movement, and immediately races to the computer to post the revelation for the ages that “OMG! John Williams totally ripped off Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” for the theme from JAWS!” This is the most common example of a thing that John Williams has ripped off, but there are a lot of them. A partial list of composers from whom Williams is obviously a plagiarist includes Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold, Steiner, Prokofiev, and Penderecki — in addition to the afore-mentioned Dvorak.

By comparison, here’s the Dvorak, and here’s the Williams. The similarities between the two are, to put it kindly, extremely superficial. Both start with low strings intoning a note, and then the note a half-step above it, and then the motif is repeated a few times. But Dvorak repeats it loudly and uses all the lower strings and goes at a quick tempo, building quickly and bringing in the rest of the orchestra before getting to his main theme. He also stays quite clearly in the same time signature.

Williams, however, starts off with similar notes…but slower, and much softer, and lower — I’m not even sure if he uses the cellos at all. It might be just the double basses at first. And then his insistent rhythm starts with those punching chords at off moments, so you’re not even sure what the time signature of the piece is. Williams’s sound is insistent and mysterious and somehow both mechanical and not — pretty much the opposite of what Dvorak does. And yet, “Williams ripped off Dvorak!” is one of those zombie nonsense notions that always comes back, despite being complete nonsense to anyone who bothers to pay attention.

ADDENDUM: I just saw this on YouTube. Clearly Williams was actually stealing the JAWS theme from Beethoven!

In cases like this, for years I’ve been recommending a wonderful essay by Leonard Bernstein called “The Infinite Variety of Music”, which appears in the book of the same title. The essay is actually the script of one of the wonderful episodes he used to do for the educational teevee program Omnibus. In this particular episode, Bernstein described how composers are able to create an astonishing variety of musical works from just thirteen notes of the Western tuning system, by reducing things even further and showing how a number of great composers wrote amazing pieces, many of which are very familiar, by using as their main motif the exact same four-note melody. It’s a worthy reminder that there’s a lot more to music than just what the notes are, and I’ve always found that essay to be a good remedy against the over-used canard that this composer or that composer ripped someone else off.

Of course, the problem with recommending an essay like that is that it’s in a book that isn’t always readily available…but I’ve recently discovered that the audio of that very program is on YouTube, with the musical examples helpfully included so you can see what’s going on as Bernstein speaks. I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s certainly worth the 48 minutes to listen through. No, Bernstein doesn’t specifically address Dvorak or Williams (in fact, this program was likely recorded while Williams was still a studio musician and Steven Spielberg was a kid), but it does suggest a good way of listening to music to evaluate such silly claims.

Here’s the video:


Really, give it a listen. It’ll make you better at listening to music!

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Something for Thursday

“To me, Seven O’Clock Shout is a declaration of our survival. It is something that allows us our agency to take back the kindness that is in our hearts and the emotions that cause us such turmoil. … We cheer on the essential workers with a primal and fierce urgency to let them know that we stand with them and each other.”—Valerie Coleman

Valerie Coleman is a flautist and composer who grew up in Louisville, KY, before becoming an influential musician in a number of ways: a flautist who formed the Imani Winds, a prominent woodwind quintet, while following a busy solo career, and a composer of a diverse body of work for soloists and ensembles all the way up to full orchestras.

Coleman’s piece Seven O’Clock Shout was written for, and premiered by, the Philadelphia Orchestra. The work is directly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the early response to it. From Coleman’s website:

Seven O’Clock Shoutis an anthem inspired by the tireless frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brings people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes.  The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon human kind, and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives, while nature is transforming and healing herself during a time of self-isolation. 

When a composer has the rare opportunity to create for musicians they have gotten to know, the act of composing becomes an embrace tailored to the personality and capabilities of the musicians with elements of both challenge and appreciation. One such moment is dedicated to humanity and grace, as a clarinet solo written for Ricardo Morales, followed by a flute solo with both Jeffrey Khaner and Patrick Williams in mind, providing a transition into a new upbeat segment. Later, to continue tradition from the first commission the composer received from the orchestra, a piccolo solo dedicated to Erica Peel dances with joy.

The piece is lyrical and optimistic, even in the face of the horrors of the pandemic–especially the early days, when everyone was sequestered from one another, with no real sense at all for when, or even if, things might start to get back to “normal”.

Who knows how we might have responded back then if we had realized that two years would then elapse during which we couldn’t entirely return to “normal”…but that’s a discussion for another time. Seven O’Clock Shout is one musician’s response to the great difficulty of our time. And why not? Much great art is.

Here is Seven O’Clock Shout by Valerie Coleman.

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“So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it’s gratifying to have something you have done linger in people’s memories.” — John Williams

John Williams was born ninety years ago today.

I’ve written many times in the years I’ve been blogging about John Williams’s influence on my creative world. He has been a central figure in the cinematic stories that shaped my life and stamped their print on my storytelling soul, all the way back to when I was five years old. Williams is, of course, best known for his many filmscores to some of the most prominent movie franchises of the last fifty years: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, and more. The Winter Olympics are going on right now, so I’m sure we’re hearing a steady dose of his Olympic Fanfare on the telecasts. He is absolutely a gigantic part of the sonic character of our time.

In addition to being very prolific, Williams is also versatile. He has scored intimate character studies, historical epics, and psychological thrillers. He has done horror as well as escapist fun…and he has also written a good deal of music for the concert stage. Pretty impressive lifetime of work for a guy who was once “Johnny Williams”, a session musician in 1950s Hollywood who did things like play the piano part on the theme to Peter Gunn.

Thank you, John Williams! Here are some selections, which I tried to draw from his “deeper cuts”–i.e., trying to stay away from the Big Hits. John Williams’s body of work really rewards a deeper look, even beyond the “usual suspects”.

(Oh, and a reminder: No, Williams did not steal the Jaws theme from Dvorak.)

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Last Thursday, in discussing Mozart, I hinted that today I’d be featuring a work by a composer whose promise really was cut short by a tragically early death.

Vasily Kalinnikov lived almost as long as Mozart did, dying of tuberculosis in January 1901, just shy of his 35th birthday. Unlike Mozart, Kalinnikov left behind a very small body of work, consisting of two symphonies, a handful of smaller orchestral works, some choral music, and a number of songs. What little we have of Kalinnikov suggests that a powerful voice in late Russian Romanticism was stilled by the tuberculosis that killed him.  He impressed many musicians of his day, including the great Sergei Rachmaninov.

Kalinnikov’s First Symphony is one of my all-time favorite works, and it’s a testament that his music still lingers on the periphery of the standard repertoire. The present work is Bylina, an “epic poem” or concert overture, and…that is literally all I’ve been able to find out about this piece. But like the Symphony No. 1, Bylina is lyrical and dramatic in the best brooding Russian way; at times it almost suggests a cinematic feel. And again, listening to this I wonder what might have come from Kalinnikov’s pen had better health and greater wealth been his.

Here is Bylina by Vasily Kalinnikov.

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