If you’ve seen the great movie Amadeus, you may recall a scene toward the end when Salieri, having driven poor naive Mozart to his literal deathbed, takes him home after he collapses during a performance of The Magic Flute, and then–under the guise of friendly helpfulness–grabs some paper to help Mozart compose a section of his Requiem (because Salieri is actually planning to pass the Requiem off as his own composition once Mozart is dead).
Of course the scene is utter fiction–Salieri and Mozart had no such adversarial relationship, and while a local noble did scheme about stealing Mozart’s work and claiming it as his own, it wasn’t Salieri, who lived a long and productive life after Mozart’s death and certainly did not end up in a sanitarium–but it’s an interesting piece of drama anyway, because it depicts how even adversaries can find themselves working collaboratively on a shared goal (no matter why the goal happens to be shared), and it underlines the film’s main theme of Salieri being a gifted professional musician who still can’t grasp the depths of Mozart’s genius, even when Mozart himself is sitting in the same room, talking him through it.
Someone took that scene from the movie and cut it together with a very clever animation of the actual score of the Confutatis (the section of the Requiem on which Mozart and Salieri are working). I love this kind of thing: when someone takes a piece of great filmmaking and uses it as a starting point for more terrific filmmaking.
Yup, missed a day. And here it is, a day later, and I still don’t know what to post! So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to sign onto my SiriusXM account, see what the first song comes up on whichever of my favorite stations loads first, and that’s what I’ll post here. Here we go!
[clicks a few times]
Huh. Well, OK, here it is! (And I solemnly swear that this really is what came up first. I did not choose this song for any particular meaning!)
I’m going to take a break for the weekend as I try to do some catch-up stuff. See y’all on Monday!
My whole life, I’ve never been able to decide which version of this song I prefer. I should default to The Supremes, because it’s the original, but I actually heard Mr. Collins’s cover (which is pretty faithful) first, back in the 80s, so I have an attachment to it.
I dunno, I guess I don’t really have to pick a favorite, do I? My world is big enough for both versions.
The Telnyuk Sisters are a Ukrainian folk rock duo. I know nothing about them beyond what I’ve read on their Wikipedia page…but I’ve listened to a bit of their music today, just a bit, via their YouTube channel.
I’m deliberately not posting information about this group or even translations of the titles or lyrics, because that’s not the point. The point is: This is the spirit of what Putin is trying to conquer.
This song has been firmly lodged in my head for two weeks, ever since we saw it featured in a particularly good (and funny) scene on Derry Girls. Apparently this song features in a kind of line dance in which people sit in a long row and mimic motions of rowing a boat and then, later, rocking it.
“Rock the Boat” was recorded by the Hues Corporation and nearly disappeared without a trace before disco clubs seized on the song months later, and its infectious beat and its pleasing repetition of lyrics. There are also some neat vocal harmonies and rhythmic tricks in the song, like bars with extra beats in them.
Here is “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation…and if this song is stuck in your head for days afterward, I accept responsibility but I feel no remorse!
I’m not usually one to play the “Ahhh, they don’t sing ’em like that anymore!” card, but…no, they don’t sing ’em like that anymore!
Which isn’t a bad thing, because there is always great music in the offing. But still, I wonder what it was like, in a time when cars were bigger and shinier, and songs like this were on the radio.
“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.
Actor Howard Hesseman, perhaps best known (at least to my generation) as rock DJ Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP In Cincinnati, died the other day. In a lovely remembrance post on Facebook, actor Wil Wheaton related a story that shows what a lovely person Mr. Hesseman must have been:
I also remember that one day on the set, we were sitting in cast chairs, talking, and the subject of jazz came up. I confessed that my familiarity with jazz musicians was ten feet wide and half an inch deep, but I enjoyed Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker. He asked me if I had ever listened to Charles Mingus. I told him that I hadn’t hear OF him, much less heard him play music, so Howard walked to his car, which he’d driven up from Los Angeles, and came back with a cassette of Mingus Ah Um that I still have today.
“You will love listening to this while you burn through the 5 on your way back to LA,” he said.
I loved the image of burning through interstate, just setting it afire and letting it turn to ash behind you before it blew away, having served its (your) purpose. It was so much more romantic and rebellious than the reality of trudging through mile after mile of “are we there yet” and cattle yards during seven monotonous hours.
“How can I get this back to you?” I asked him.
“You won’t want to,” he said. “I’ll get another copy. Forget it.” I can still hear the glee and enthusiasm that was in his voice. He was giving me so much more than a cassette tape.
Anne, Nolan, and I listened to Mingus Ah Um on the way home, and Howard was right. We loved it. I still love it. And I have Howard Hesseman to thank for it.
I have to confess to not being terribly familiar with Charles Mingus, either, so I looked him up. I’d heard the name, but that’s about it, which is kind of a bummer, since Charles Mingus was actually one of the most important jazz musicians of the 20th century. His name is as important to jazz as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie.
While reading a bit about Mingus, I found that entire album, Mingus Ah Um, available online.
I honestly don’t have the familiarity with jazz to discuss it in any intelligent way at all, beyond “Hey, this is cool! I like this! It grooves!” This album is…well, it’s cool! I like it! It grooves!
I played in jazz bands in high school and college, but for some reason, despite my best efforts, I always felt like jazz was keeping me at arms’ length. There was always something about jazz, about the jazz approach and the way a musician has to think to be an effective jazz player beyond just being a decent section horn, much less being a good jazz player, that was just slightly beyond me as a musician. This used to bother me, and I would occasionally get irritated at my general inability to grasp jazz, but…well, I picture jazz itself, just standing there with its saxophone, smiling and saying, “Well, Kelly, that sounds like your problem, not my problem.”
And so it was.
In this album, beyond all the extraordinary virtuosity audible in the improvisatory work of these musicians who also have total control of their instruments, I hear harmonies of incredible complexity. Jazzfolk do things with chords that make my ear happy in that dizzy, “I’ve no idea what’s going on!” kind of way. I listen to something like the fourth track, “Self Portrait in Three Colors”, which drifts into and out of and back into ensemble playing and passages where it sounds like each player is doing something that is both entirely reliant on, and completely independent from, what the other players are doing.
I’m also struck by the tutti passages, where the whole group is playing. This album has some of the tightest ensemble playing I’ve ever heard. This is on par with what you might hear from the best string quartet playing Beethoven. Listen to the way everyone is on the same page in the first track! Amazing.
Often jazz musicians are working “on the fly”, thinking of what they want to say and how they want to say it, at the very moment they’re playing. This boggles my mind. Surely writing is partially improvisatory, you might object–and indeed it is, but even so, I have to spend long amounts of time thinking before I get around to execution. I was rather the same way in my music days, which might be a big part of why I was never able to really grasp jazz.
But you don’t always have to really grasp things, do you? I’ll likely always be unhappy with my general outsider’s view of jazz, but really, it’s perfectly OK sometimes just to say, “Hey, this is good! I like it! This grooves!”
This scene from the great film Amadeus might be the best simple explanation of Mozart’s astonishing genius I’ve seen yet. In the film, there is an opening for a lucrative job for which Mozart would be ideally suited, but Mozart is a master of both spending calamitous amounts of money and burning his bridges with people he needs to impress (and usually not even realizing he’s burning those bridges). His wife, Constanze, decides to appeal directly to Emperor Joseph’s Court Composer, Antonio Salieri, for help. She doesn’t know that Salieri already loathes Mozart, despite being in utter awe of his talent. In fact, Salieri loathes Mozart because of the degree of Mozart’s talent: he sees Mozart as a profane, disgusting creature of a man, and yet it’s this profane, disgusting creature of a man that God has apparently chosen as the vehicle for a transcendent level of talent.
For this job, composers are required to submit examples of their work, and Mozart feels that his talent is so obvious that he shouldn’t have to jump through this particular hoop. So Constanze goes behind his back, and this unfolds:
I should point out that as wonderful a movie as Amadeus is, as brilliantly made and acted and shot and musically performed by Neville Marriner and his Academy of St Martin in the Fields crew, and as amazingly complex it is in its depiction of the relationship between two artists who are on different planets as far as their skill is concerned, Amadeus should not be watched as any kind of historical document. Salieri was not a mediocrity who schemed to steal Mozart’s own work as his own and who engineered Mozart’s self-destructive personality until the man went to an early grave. Nor did Salieri himself live a life of a frustrated loner who eventually went insane after decades of watching his own work be neglected. Antonio Salieri was a deeply respected musician who taught Beethoven, and by all evidence he and Mozart were friendly rivals, and that’s it.
But for this one scene, the film gets Mozart entirely right: he really was the staggering genius from whom music poured over the course of 35 short years, music that astonishes to this day with its degree of classical perfection. It’s tempting to think of Mozart’s youthful demise and think, “If only he’d lived on!” How tantalizing that is, to imagine what a Mozart who lived to see the rise of Beethoven and the end of Classicism and the dawn of Romanticism might have produced. Had Mozart lived to the same age as Haydn, 77 years, he would have lived to 1833: long enough to hear all of Beethoven’s symphonies, all of Schubert’s work, all of Weber’s, and perhaps he would even have heard the youthful works of a deeply odd composer from Paris, one H. Berlioz.
Historical counterfactuals are only interesting as thought experiments, though, and we have to ultimately console ourselves with what actually exists–and in Mozart’s case, there is nothing tragic at all about his final silencing in 1791. There are many composers whose early deaths truly did rob us of a voice that might otherwise have gone on to produce work of towering greatness, so amazing is the work of their unfulfilled youth (and you can tune in next Tuesday in this space for a citation of one such composer), but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is not one of them. I’m thankful that Mozart was here at all. Mozart’s music is one of the exhibits I would advance for the defense if humanity was ever put on trial and ordered to defend the value of its existence.
Here is one of my very favorite of Mozart’s works, the Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and chamber orchestra, K. 364. A “sinfonia concertante” is somewhere in between a symphony and a concerto, being a work featuring a soloist (or, in this case, two soloists) with orchestra, but the emphasis is more on collective music-making than in virtuoso display. As a specific form, the sinfonia concertante is mostly limited to the Classical era; Romantic composers would write “double” or “triple” concertos, depending on what their soloist needs were. The idea of reducing the focus on virtuosity and more on musical partnership between soloist and orchestra would live on, though, in works like Berlioz’s second symphony Harold in Italy, and eventually in a number of tone poems that featured soloists as “commenters” on the orchestral proceedings.
I love this work dearly…as I do Mozart. Long may he be heard and remembered!
