From what I’ve read, Qigang Chen (b. 1951) is one of the most performed of contemporary composers…and to my knowledge, I had never heard his music before YouTube served up his single-movement piano concerto, Er Huang, via its sometimes incomprehensible algorithm. Chen was born in Shanghai but eventually emigrated to France, which he calls home to this day. Er Huang is a work of serene contemplation that slowly becomes more and more openly dramatic, until it reaches a passage of almost breathtaking power before it subsides again to a peaceful, thoughtful conclusion. In the work, Chen deploys melodies from Peking (or Beijing) operas he saw as a child; the work is apparently a reaction on Chen’s part to the slow fade of Peking opera from the Chinese musical landscape.
I’ve never watched a Peking opera, which seems to me a pity; they sound like fascinating productions, combining music and mimes and stagecraft and acrobatics for something that sounds distinctly different from traditional Western opera. In addition to being a wonderfully listenable modern work, Er Huang also apparently serves as Chen’s nostalgic look back at a time that, for all its seeming strength in lasting for centuries (Peking opera began more than three hundred years ago) is now possibly fading under Western influence.
Of course, even Chen is not immune to these effects. He has, after all, written his work purely for the Western orchestra and the Western piano.
I know I’ve featured this in the past, but it’s my blog and I can do re-runs if I want! And it seems to me that this past week in particular has left a real need for some real beauty.
Hans Zimmer has become known for his bombastic and loud action film scores, and his more recent science fiction soundscapes, but he has also done some tender stuff, very effectively. Here is “The Greatest Woman Alive” from Zimmer’s score to As Good As It Gets.
I suppose that I’m like many a classical music lover when it comes to Gustav Holst: aside from The Planets, I really don’t know much about him at all. I’m a bit better off than most, by virtue of having been in the concert band in high school and college, so I’m familiar with Holst’s two Suites for Military Band (which I should feature at some point anyway, because they’re terrific), but really, that’s about it. Holst was fairly prolific, and his work had many influences: Wagnerian opera, English folksong, Indian mythology, and more. His music, in my experience, rarely fits into a simple box, and his melodic gift is a subtle one that doesn’t always leave the listener with tunes stuck in the ear. For many reasons Holst’s output has been almost completely outshone by The Planets, which is the case with the sacred work I feature today.
Holst wrote The Hymn of Jesus in 1917, not long after the completion of The Planets, and listeners familiar with the more famous work may hear its echoes in the present one. It opens with a solo trombone playing a plainchant melody, and then the work grows until Holst’s plan becomes clear. For a relatively short work–only about 22 minutes in length–he deploys a large group of forces, with the orchestra supplemented by two choirs and a female choir all by itself. He also seems to have specified that the two “main” choirs be separated spatially, I assume for sonic reasons that could really only be appreciated in live performance.
The Hymn of Jesus is solemn and meditative and at times almost ecstatic. Its musical language constantly suggests the music of the ancient church, music that predates our system of Western tuning. All the vocal work is by choir; there are no soloists here, and repeated use of ostinato passages combines with the generally “angelic” sound of the choir to give the work a largely liturgical and at the same time otherworldly feeling. This is music that suggests a cathedral, with its great stone vaults, rising all about you.
For a very deep dive into this piece, check out this article; for now, here is The Hymn of Jesus by Gustav Holst.
A very short work today! Less than three minutes, courtesy Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich.
In 1943 Shostakovich entered a contest to write a new national anthem for the Soviet Union. Apparently he did not win, but he was able to repurpose his material for that project seventeen years later, for use at a war memorial dedication in the city of Novorossiysk. According to what I have found on this piece, the work Shostakovich presented for the war memorial has been played continuously there ever since. Wow.
The piece is only a few minutes long, starting off quietly before building and building to a fairly thundering climax that isn’t hard to imagine being central to a patriotic tableau of some sort. I’d never heard it before today, but if you has asked me to imagine what a Russian/Soviet “Land of Hope and Glory” tune would sound like, this is what I would have thought of: a slow, stately melody of obvious nationalism that nevertheless broods.
Here is Shostakovich’s Novorossiysk Chimes (Flame of Eternal Glory).
Last week, Dusty Hill died. He was the bass player for ZZ Top.
ZZ Top is one of those bands that has been a part of the soundtrack of my life pretty much ever since early-adolescence, when I first became aware of rock music. They’re one of those acts that seems like they’ve been around forever, partly owing to their look: famous for their long beards, they cultivated an air of being old when they were still quite young. But there’s also a timeless quality to their music, which plays equally at ease on a classic rock station and an 80s throwback station, and more.
ZZ Top was always known most for its look: black suits and very long beards. They never updated that look at all. ZZ Top was not one of those “chameleon” kinds of acts that shifted with the times; their musical style and their look was always the same. They knew what they wanted to do, who they wanted to be, and the kind of music they wanted to make. And they made a lot of very fine music, too! Maybe they’re not quite at the level of, say, a Bob Seger or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but ZZ Top is every bit as essential to knowing the last forty years or so of popular music in America. (ZZ Top’s own history began in 1969, so they’ve been a thing for more than fifty years.)
By never much changing while maintaining a high standard of excellence, ZZ Top managed to seem like they’d been around forever and always will. They always had that air of “grizzled old veterans of rock”, even if they were only in their mid-30s when I first encountered them, with their big hit, “Legs”.
My favorite ZZ Top song is one of their less-known ones, a power ballad from the Afterburner album. “Rough Boy” is really quite a lovely song, with lyrics suggesting a boy trying to impress a girl even though he’s, well, ‘rough’. Those lyrics go well with Billy Gibbons’s raspy tenor, and the verses alternate with some frankly beautiful guitar playing.
Here are three videos: first the song itself as recorded (and later remastered) for the original album, and then a live version in which the band is joined by guitar legend Jeff Beck. And finally there’s an example of one of my favorite new genres, the “reaction” video, in which a listener with an open mind listens to “Rough Boy” for the very first time ever. (The reaction video is great, but her experience is slightly marred by the fact that she’s also watching the song’s official video for MTV, which is, I must admit, one of the weirder videos out there, and it’s a video whose content has almost nothing to do with the song itself. But her enthusiasm is real; I love these reaction videos!)
And Dusty Hill: Thanks for the music. It will live long!
The operas of Giachino Rossini are staples of the operatic stage, and the overtures from those operas are staples of the concert world. But even within Rossini’s well-known work, some works are more well-known than others. William Tell and The Barber of Seville are some of the best-known works of all time, including their overtures, which have enjoyed (or endured!) second lives in popular culture outside of the context in which Rossini originally wrote them. Less well-known, but still a staple of the repertoire, is Rossini’s take on the Cinderella folk tale, La Cenerentola.
La Cenerentola was Rossini’s follow-up after the huge success of The Barber of Seville, and its success was more uneven than the earlier opera’s. La Cenerentola did not open particularly well, but it grew quickly in popularlity through the 19th century. However, the style of singing its music required did fall out of favor, and thus La Cenerentola fell into relative obscurity. The opera was revived in the mid-20th century and has enjoyed stable popularity and performance ever since.
The overture is pure Rossini, starting with an air of subdued mystery before giving way to the kind of infectious energy and earworming, propulsive melody that is his hallmark. I’m always interested in how many of Rossini’s overtures don’t start with any kind of Bang!, instead starting pensively and building up their energy.
Here is the overture to La Cenerentola by Giachino Rossini.
A contemporary work today, by Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen.Wallen’s family moved to London when she was just two, and it was there that she grew and matured into her professional life as a prolific composer and teacher.
Composing for the orchestra is my favourite challenge, [and this] work is an especially important one for me. It is an innate human instinct to be free, just as it is a low of nature that the river should rush headlong to the sea. That is the concept behind Mighty River.
Slavery claimed the lives of countless people, but somehow my ancestors found the grit and determination to persist in spite of the conditions in which they found themselves. I dedicate Mighty River to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Though I never kner her, I am driven on by her courage in the face of dreadful dods and am inspired by her example not merely to survive, but to thrive.
I first heard this piece the other day, and it’s quite amazing. This performance by the National Youth Orchestra is quite something, and I’m discovering a keen apprecation for the music-making that comes from youth orchestras and ensembles these days. What they sometimes lack in technical polish they often make up for in an ability to make accessibile to emotional heart of a work. I’m less and less drawn to the musical restraint of maturity as I get older.
Mighty River opens with a solo horn quoting “Amazing Grace”, and then as the rest of the orchestra joins in, the piece genuinely does settle into the kind of constant flowing motion that is suggestive of a river on its way to the sea. But throughout the piece, with all its rocking and flowing rhythms, bits and pieces of other spirituals are heard, including more quotes from “Amazing Grace”. The music takes several darker, more introspective turns, but somehow it always finds its way home to that rocking ostinato, and ultimately back to “Amazing Grace” before ending on a gentle major chord. One senses the constance of Black persistence and forced endurance mirroring against the constance of the river’s motion.
There’s a quote by composer Gustav Holst that strongly resonates with me:
If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be ‘a success’. If he’s a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he’s capable.
Those words come to mind as I consider the work of American Modernist composer Charles Ives. For much of his life his music was completely ignored, and thus he was able to toil on his own, following his own interests and go where his own ears took him. By the time his work began to gain some renown, Ives had produced some of the more shockingly original music of the 20th century, all by following his own guiding light. Ives lived to the age of 79, but he stopped composing almost entirely in his early 50s, for reasons that have led to much speculation. He did live long enough to see his work gain acceptance, though, as he finished out his working career not as a musician but as an insurance agent.
Ives is always an interesting listen, though he unquestioningly, unhesitatingly, and unapologetically puts unusual demands on the listener. This was very much a part of his character. He once said “I don’t write music for sissy ears,” and he responded to another audience member’s distaste for a dissonant work with a caustic rejoinder: “Stop being such a goddamned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?”
I haven’t heard a great deal of Ives, but he is always fascinating and, indeed, moving. His work stands outside most of the traditions of his time: he is certainly not a jazzman, though he does incorporate popular songs here and there, nor is he exactly an atonalist, though he does experiment with alternate tonalities and things like quartertones.
The piece I feature here is a chamber work called Central Park in the Dark, and it’s one of Ives’s early works, written when he was just thirty-two. It starts as an atmospheric piece of tone-painting, but it becomes more and more raucous to the point of sheer cacophony, and we hear snatches of popular song and general noise. Of this piece, Ives himself wrote:
This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night….The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness – interrupted by sounds from the Casino over the pond – of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days – of some “night owls” from Healy’s whistling the latest of the Freshman March – the “occasional elevated”, a street parade, or a “break-down” in the distance – of newsboys crying “uxtries” – of pianolas having a ragtime war in the apartment house “over the garden wall”, a street car and a street band join in the chorus – a fire engine, a cab horse runs away, lands “over the fence and out”, the wayfarers shout – again the darkness is heard – an echo over the pond – and we walk home.
This is what Charles Ives was composing in 1906. By way of context, George Gershwin was only eight years old at this point, and Igor Stravinsky was still seven years away from premiering the work of his that would hit the musical world like a lightning bolt of intense Modernism, The Rite of Spring.
Maybe I should just start calling this feature “Something for Friday”…but then I’ll start screwing it up and it’ll just become “Something for Friday (Saturday edition)”, so why not stick with what’s kinda-sorta working…
…anyway, here’s a song by Taylor Swift, because I think Taylor Swift is awesome and so should you. This is a recording of one of my favorite songs of hers, and one of her first big mega-hits, though this particular version is the newer version that she re-recorded this year in her ongoing bid to reclaim control of the rights to her own music. (It’s all a mess, but apparently some other schlub owns the rights to her first bunch of albums, but as she is the singer-songwriter of the songs, she retains recording and performance rights for the songs themselves, so she’s hit on the elegant solution of simply re-recording all her old material anew.)
Here’s “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift.
