Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Wow, less than three weeks now until the Daily Dose of Christmas starts! Time flying and all that…but I’m still in a Blue kind of mood, and we featured Rhapsody in Blue last week, so here’s a work by composer Michael Torke. Torke is a synesthete, meaning that music manifests for him visually as color. So, for Torke, this work was very much directly inspired by–and for him, representative of–the color blue. I like this piece a great deal! Its energy and infectiousness shows a side of “blue” that we might not usually consider. Here is Bright Blue Music by Michael Torke. 

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I’m feeling blue today, folks. I hope a lot of you are feeling blue, too. Let’s go, blue!

Speaking of blue….

BTW, notice Maestro Slatkin’s “downbeat” to begin the work at the :24 mark. He just motions to the principal clarinet as if to say, “If you would, kind sir!”

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Another annoyingly busy week! Not as annoying as last week, but in the immortal words of President Joe Biden, “Come on, man!”

Anyway, right now I’m between “themes” for these posts so maybe we’ll just do a few weeks of strange little oddities I turn up, like this performance of the Colonel Bogey March (Kenneth J. Alford, composer) on the piano. Enjoy!

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Oof, that was a week. Just busy as shit, and The Wife got sick. (She’s on the mend, we’ll all be fine, last night I loaded her up with Hot and Sour Soup and her favorite Curry Chicken and she even had some of my Pad Thai.) The week was obnoxious enough that I didn’t even have the mental wherewithal to stick a Suppe overture on here! And on the couple of times in the week I did think about posting, some news event just pissed the living hell out of me. Right now, I think Vivek Ramaswamy might well be the single most vile human being currently drawing breath, and that is a hell of a competition to be winning. But enough of that, here’s what I would have posted on Tuesday as a conclusion of sorts to my brief look at “autumnal” music.

Now, strictly speaking, only one quarter of this is actually “autumnal”, because it comprises all four seasons. Thus it is titled, appropriately enough, The Four Seasons. Yes, I’m actually featuring Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons here, even though it’s a work to which I have never much warmed, though I have started coming around in recent years. (I started coming around on Vivaldi himself years before that!) This particular version, though, isn’t Vivaldi entirely. This is actually Recomposed: The Four Seasons by German composer Max Richter, which is inspired by Antonion Vivaldi.

This is not an arrangement of Vivaldi; it’s a new composition entirely, taking Vivaldi’s melodies and looping them and phasing them and doing new things with them. Apparently Richter has discarded fully three-quarters of Vivaldi’s original material for this work. How does it contrast with the original? I am admittedly not qualified to say; I simply do not know the original well enough to judge that. I do find this “Recomposed” experience a fascinating and appealing listen. I used to be bothered by the frequently repetitive nature of some Baroque and even earlier music, but now I find something meditative in that old compositional style, before symphonic-style thematic development had taken root.

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Continuing a look at autumnal music, we have today a symphony by a 19th century composer whose work was highly regarded in his day but who is mostly forgotten now. Swiss composer Joachim Raff lived for 60 years, 1822 to 1882, and he was very prolific and popular during his lifetime. Since then? Not nearly so much. I have heard, well, exactly one piece by Raff, to my knowledge, and it’s the symphony here. It’s a warm, genial work, certainly not hard to listen to. Is there anything about it that’s particularly autumnal? Well…not in my ears, honestly. Raff doesn’t seem to have had the gift of melody, either. I have to be honest that very little of this piece lingers in my ear or mind after hearing it. Is it bad? Absolutely not. But can I hear why Raff did not endure in the standard repertoire? Absolutely yes.

But give this a listen! It’s…nice.

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More autumn music today. My old friend Robert would have loved this one…and actually, I’m sure he did. Gerald Finzi was one of his favorite composers, and Finzi did not have a large output, by any means. He was more prolific as a choral and vocal composer, but he did produce a small amount of orchestral music and after he died at only 55 years of age (ooof, that’s my age, you notice these things more as you get older, I’ve discovered) he left behind a number of unfinished works that a good friend of his, composer Howard Ferguson, edited and orchestrated. This is one of those: an intended movement for a chamber symphony that now lives on as The Fall of the Leaf. 

Finzi’s music is deeply akin to Vaughn Williams and the other “pastoral” British music of the first half of the twentieth century.

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Here we have a student piece written by a young composer, when he was only 19 years of age. But not just any composer: it’s 20th century Russian great Sergei Prokofiev.

Prokofiev is, I admit, something of a tough nut for me. I don’t always respond readily to his music, for one reason or another. But this piece grabbed me immediately, perhaps because it is to my ears a fascinating blend of lyric Romanticism and of atmospheric Impressionism. I hear a wild melding of Tchaikovsky and Ravel here, and that is absolutely amazing to me. This work is called a “sketch”, and it is just that: a piece written by a student composer to explore some aspect of composition. In this case, I imagine it was to explore orchestral color and mood, and the mood is definitely dark and autumnal, in my ears.

Here is “Autumnal Sketch” by Sergei Prokofiev.

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I’m going to pause the exploration of Japanese composers for a bit, kind-of, because as I write this, the Autumnal Equinox is just under four hours away. The sun is scheduled to cross the equator at 8:05pm ET, and right now it’s–[checks watch]–[actually checks phone, I don’t currently wear a watch]–4:12pm. So, for the next bunch of weeks, I’ll be featuring autumnal music. I’ll likely be doing this up until Halloween.

But I don’t have to make the transition super sharp! I can feature Japanese autumnal music! Composer Toru Takemitsu wrote a lot of music inspired by autumn; apparently this season fueled his musical imagination quite a bit. So here is In an Autumn Garden, which Takemitsu wrote for gagaku orchestra. This is an orchestra comprised of Japanese instruments that was often used to perform the ceremonial music of court, as well as in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The work has the feel of religious chant to my ears.

Happy autumn!

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