Ozawa was best known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all twenty-nine years of that tenure–the longest of any of that great orchestra’s many amazing conductors.
In addition to his direct music-making, Ozawa was always deeply invested in teaching young musicians and young conductors. Here is a clip in which he steps in to correct a young conducting student on a matter of technique: “I try to understand you. I don’t do this…[conducts with a vague circular motion of the hand]…that’s like, ‘eighteen minutes, cook the spaghetti.'”
Here is how the Boston Symphony marked his passing:
And here he is, not too many years ago, looking perhaps a bit frail…but still able to bring the goods when Beethoven is on the program.
Thank you for all the music, Seiji Ozawa! You made the world better.
Ugh! I don’t know why this didn’t publish. I could swear I clicked the right thing on here. Anyway, this should have run the day before yesterday. Admittedly, this is one of my “Fallbacks because I’ve been having a busy week” kind of Tone Poem Tuesdays, but the thing should have at least gone live on the site! Here’s the post, as originally written:
Peter Schickele died on January 16 of this year. He was a composer and a comedian who was best known as the self-styled musicologist responsible for “unearthing” the music of “P.D.Q. Bach”, the “21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 children”. Over the years, Schickele crafted an entire life history of his fictional composer, and used “PDQ Bach”‘s work as a springboard to lampoon much of classical music. I have to admit that I have heard very little of Schickele/Bach, but what I have heard has always amused me. It takes a very good musician to do pastiche at this level, after all.
Schickele’s work along these lines was quite prolific, and he leaves behind an impressive catalog of musical works and albums that won several Grammys for Best Comedy Album. Often his work rewards knowledge of classical music, like this work here, which teases throughout with familiarity before going in completely different, frustratingly hilarious directions. Here is the 1712 Overture by Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach.
Today is National Pie Day, which no one seems to really observe anymore seeing as how we’ve adopted March 14, “3.14”, as the quasi-official Pi Day on which we celebrate pie in addtion to pi. But anyway, that being the case, here is Henry Mancini’s “Pie in the Face Polka”, which he wrote to score the enormous pie fight in the movie The Great Race.
Chinese composer Tan Dun always interests me, and yet I always feel like I haven’t heard enough of his music! Here’s a fascinating tone poem, based on a three-note motif. And where does the motif come from? Well:
Imagine if someone was preparing a surprise birthday party for you, and they asked a Grammy Award-winning composer to compose a new piece for you. That’s exactly what happened when Symphonic Poem of 3 Notes was written. The Teatro Real Opera in Madrid invited Tan Dun to write a piece for Placido Domingo while they were planning his 70th birthday celebration. Because of the similar sound of Placido’s name and the music notes la-si-do, Tan Dun decided to use these three notes as the musical theme of this piece. The composer says that these three notes remind him of “the ABC phenomenon—the meaning of things starting, of beginning and the origin of everything.”
The Music For me, the opening percussion reminds me of morning bells inside the temple. Along with the high pitches that are played by all the strings, it draws an image of a breezy morning with birds migrating in the air. The beginning of a new day, or even new life, is well portrayed. Tan Dun uses a variety of sounds and textures to develop the theme la-si-do after it’s played by the brass. The sound of stones and of the woodwinds’ mouthpieces keep interfering while the theme is being evolved into an intensive climax. The most fascinating part of this piece, to me, is the vocal part toward the end. The simple yet powerful shouting functions as an eraser, wiping out all the stresses in life, and brings us back to the hopeful chanting—like beginning, a new beginning of life.
Let’s get right into 2024 with something familiar, and yet…not!
Rodion Shchedrin is a Soviet/Russian composer, born in 1932. He is still alive as of this writing, and he has apparently been a very productive and prolific composer over his lifetime. The work on tap today is a ballet he composed for his ballerina wife, Maya Plisetskaya, who died in 2015. The ballet is actually a re-imagining of Carmen, using melodies from the Bizet opera–but Shchedrin had put his own enormously creative stamp on these melodies that nearly everybody has heard, as he composes for string orchestra and percussion. It’s a fascinating listen, bringing something new and fresh to material that sometimes fails to be either of those things, so familiar has it all become.
I have many associations with this piece, and one of them is my mother. When I was a teenager and getting into classical music in a big way, I discovered the New Year’s From Vienna concerts, and she made them a part of her New Year’s traditions as well. Eventually she even undertook a river cruise on the Danube, many years later, so she saw some of the vistas that are exhibited in this video.
I think of many things when I hear On the Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II; Mom was already one of them…and so she’ll be forever, now.
Yesterday was really busy, hence nothing but a short post about voting (by the way, nice work, America!). Today we have a piece by Aaron Copland, but the occasion is the passing of Donald Hunsberger.
Hunsberger was, for many years, a professor at the Eastman School of Music, where his main post was director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. In that position, Hunsberger did a lot of important work to advance not just that college’s Wind Ensemble, but wind ensembles in general (and their larger cousin groups, the symphonic or concert band), as ensembles for serious music. Wind ensemble music has for many years had a “student music” stigma, or been mostly limited to marches and orchestral transcriptions. People like Donald Hunsberger, though, made a more serious approach to music making for large wind groups.
Hunsberger died the other day, aged 91, after a long life of conducting, composition, arranging, teaching, and recording.
This piece, Quiet City by Aaron Copland, is a suite culled from incidental music Copland wrote for a play of the same title by Irwin Shaw. The play, about a man who has renounced his dreams and is beginning to go mad, was apparently a flop in 1939 and is pretty much only remembered now for being the inspiration of this Copland piece. One scene involves the hero imagining hearing a trumpet playing in the distance as he wanders the lonely city, and it’s that sound which Copland captures so well here. To me, Quiet City sounds like the musical equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting.
Donald Hunsberger arranged Copland’s work, originally for orchestra, for the Eastman Wind Ensemble and recorded it with Wynton Marsalis playing the solo trumpet part. It’s as curiously austere and effective as the original work. Donald Hunsberger was a great musician, and if his name seems obscure, that’s only because for some reason our classical music culture has long undervalued the wind-only ensembles in performance.
