Tag: Music

 Returning to the work of Black American composer William Grant Still today, and yet another work by a Black composer that makes me think, “Why have I never heard that before?” It’s a work of American Impressionism called Kaintuck, and from what I’ve read it’s intended to express Still’s own feelings and impressions of mist-covered blue grass meadows of Kentucky. It’s not a long work, but it packs a lot of thoughtful lyricism and introspection into its roughly ten minutes. We open with the solo piano playing a motif of leaping intervals, and then the orchestra comes in and meanders thoughtfully with the soloist before fading out with just the soloist again. It’s quite an evocative, wonderful work. So, why have I never heard this before?

As with most such cases, I’m afraid I have a pretty good idea what the answer is…or at least, what it partly involves.

Here’s Kaintuck by William Grant Still.

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 Here’s a curiosity: a film music tone poem that’s actually a tone poem, and not a group of film music cues arranged into one. Composer Michael Kamen (much missed, he died too young and vibrant in 2003) scored the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, from which this piece comes.

The movie–which I quite like–tracks something like thirty or forty years in the life of Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss), a young man at the start of the film who envisions himself as a composer of serious music. He quickly finds that he’s not going to be able to support him or his wife on that at the outset, so he does the reasonable thing that a lot of people do when they figure they need something to do until they attain artistic success: he becomes a teacher.

At first, his efforts at teaching are not encouraging. He doesn’t see it as his actual job, and it shows, to the point that his students hate the drudgery of his class and he hates the drudgery of teaching them and his principal (played wonderfully by Olympia Dukakis) has to call him out on his awful attitude, saying something like “You actually beat some of the kids to the parking lot when the final bell rings.” Eventually Mr. Holland makes a turn in his teaching when he decides to employ rock-and-roll in his lessons (this is the 1960s, so this doesn’t go over spectacularly well with some folks) and when he actually realizes that a particular student who is struggling with the clarinet is trying to reach him.

Mr. Holland discovers that yes, he can teach high school music, and teach it he does, for the rest of his career: through the Viet Nam War and through his own child’s birth and through the discovery that his son is deaf and through a strange attracted protectiveness he feels toward one very talented pupil who comes along and through the inevitable budget cuts to the music program that will cost him his job in the end. He does compose through all this, and at the end of the film, the school band, along with some of the many alumni he has touched–including that unconfident clarinetist from years before, who is now Governor–sets up to perform the last minute or two of this piece. (Asking questions like why does a high school and alumni band sound so good and when did they rehearse is churlish behavior that should be swatted down with great harshness.)

So Kamen wrote this roughly nine-minute work, called “An American Symphony”, which purports to be the serious composition that Mr. Holland has been writing for all his many years of teaching. Kamen’s music is always impressive, and I miss his film music voice. He tended toward the big and the dramatic (there’s zero doubt in my mind he would have scored at least one MCU movie), and his melodies don’t always exactly leave you humming them, but they reward repeated listening and become quite familiar as you do. For this piece he even paid tribute to Mr. Holland’s breakthrough as a teacher, the realization that he could use rock-and-roll as a means to bringing the kids into more serious music, by adding the electric guitars to his orchestral palate.

It’s an interesting piece, a long-form tone poem written specifically for a movie whose central message is along the lines of “Life is what happens to you when you have other plans.” Here is “An American Symphony” by Michael Kamen, from the score to the film Mr. Holland’s Opus.

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 Greek-born composer Nikolas Labrinakos has come to my attention recently. After growing up in Greece, he went to London to study music composition, eventually getting a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey. He is an active composer of both film music and concert music, and what I’ve heard of his is fascinating and atmospheric, displaying a gift for shimmering, evocative string writing.

The present work, The Last of England, is a pastoral work in the tradition of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, and Gerald Finzi. The piece is inspired by the seascape of England’s southern shore, with its cliffs overlooking the great gray expanses of water. Melodies seem to arise from meditative chords and sink back into them again, often with a soloist in the orchestra singing somewhere not quite in the foreground. This isn’t the music of a stormy sea, nor the sad music of the water where all things end, but a singing contemplation of life at the edge of our world’s most permanent feature. The Last of England is neither sad music nor happy music. It is…music that is.

Here is The Last of England by Nikolas Labrinakos.

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 French composer Emmanual Chabrier isn’t much known these days, but he is represented in the standard repertoire by his intoxicating dance Espana. That work is one of the most compulsively joyful in its bright orchestrations, sparkling melodies, and effervescent rhythms in the entire classical music canon. This piece, from one of Chabrier’s less-performed operas (and none of his operas are often staged), is cut from the same cloth as Espana, being a five-minute burst of energetic dance.

From what I’ve read, Chabrier is a curious composer in that his work has never really cracked through into the mainstream of classical music, even though his music was greatly admired by great composers who followed, like Ravel and Stravinsky. Chabrier was innovative in his own way, and he may have simply lived too early and therefore just missed a time which might have been golden for his music. Anyway, here’s a bit of pure delight: the Danse slav from the opera The Reluctant King, by Emmanuel Chabrier.

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 One thing I’ve always believed about writing is that if an idea doesn’t work out in one piece, that’s no reason to put it aside forever. I’ve reused a lot of my own ideas over the years, a practice I learned in part from my beloved Hector Berlioz.

Berlioz wrote a concert overture based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy, relatively early in his career. Berlioz wrote very little abstract music; just about everything he wrote had a literary antecedent of some kind, and Scott’s novel was the thing for this piece. And it’s quite a decent piece: it’s not one of Berlioz’s greater works, but it’s a perfectly good concert overture.

Berlioz himself was never satisfied with the Rob Roy overture, but he knew a good idea when he had one: the slow melody in the central part of the overture stuck in his mind, so when it came to write his second symphony, itself based on a literary work (this time Byron’s Childe Harold), a work that was to feature solo viola and orchestra after a generous commission from Nicolo Paganini, Berlioz basically lifted that entire section of his earlier Rob Roy overture and dropped it into the first movement of Harold In Italy, which is one of Berlioz’s greatest works.

Learn from mistakes and lesser works–but don’t be afraid to mine them for ideas!

Here’s the Rob Roy overture by Hector Berlioz.

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