Our local classical station, WNED, tends to be a bit heavy on the Dvorak. They play a ton of him. Like, a whole lot. Sometimes I think they need to tone down the Dvorak a little.
Other times I choose to listen to some Dvorak and I think, “Yeah, it’s fine, he is a crowd-pleaser, after all, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” This probably comes from his use of rustic folk songs and dance rhythms in his music, in which you can hear his Czech heart beating through every bar. Like in this concert overture!
Sometimes I need to go back to the beginning of my classical music roots. I had heard a lot of classical music as a kid, thanks to my parents’ music-listening habits and my sister’s piano lessons, and then later my horn, trumpet, and piano lessons; my initial love of movie music also primed the classical pump for me. But when did I really start to turn the corner toward classical music? I’m not entirely sure when I’d date that, but 1984’s Amadeus has to be a big signpost on that early stretch of road. I didn’t get parts of the movie, but much of it was utterly spellbinding to me, and of course…there was the music.
Here is the overture to The Magic Flute, which would a few years later become the first opera I ever saw, and has remained a favorite of mine ever since. Mozart sets the stage in just six minutes here. Amazing!
It’s August! I think August would count at “Midsummer”, right? Thus, here is some Mendelssohn: the overture to his suite of incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Technically, this isn’t a tone poem; it’s right up-front about being a concerto. But what a concerto it is, and it’s a masterpiece of tone painting as well. It is also a programmatic work, intended to tell a story.
The concerto illustrates the folktale of the star-crossed lovers Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, known as the “Chinese Romeo and Juliet.” Yingtai, the only daughter in her family, breaks with the convention prohibiting women from studying and attends classes disguised as a man. At school she falls in love with another scholar, Shanbo, but is recalled home to be married to a wealthy merchant. Shanbo dies of heartbreak. On the way to her wedding, Yingtai passes Shanbo’s grave and begs for the ground to swallow her up. The grave splits open and Yingtai throws herself into it. Yingtai and Shanbo’s spirits transform into a pair of butterflies that fly away together.
The Butterfly Lovers Concerto is a deeply gorgeous work, with an East-meets-West flavor as eastern melodies are interpreted in the language of western instrumentations. It is infectiously melodic, and it is as crowd-pleasing a work as you’ll find in all of classical music. Maybe it’s not especially profound…but I’m not at all sure it needs to be.
Watts was 77 years old when he died of prostate cancer last week. Born in 1946, Watts was best known for his expressive performances of piano music from the Romantic and early modern eras, which constitute the bulk of his recorded work. His music-making was always fiery and emotional, which I always appreciate; emotional distance and cool temperatures are never what I look for in music. Here is a selection of remembrances of Watts.
In this selection, Watts performs the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, by Camille Saint-Saens. The performance is taken from a live broadcast of the New York Philharmonic, so you actually get to hear Watts discuss the music for a bit prior to the performance itself. Saint-Saens himself was a long-lived French master who was as much a child prodigy as Mozart, but whose work hasn’t quite endured as Mozart’s did; Saint-Saens is represented in the standard repertoire by a number of works, but others sit in relative obscurity due to his occasional lack of attentiveness and depth. The best of Saint-Saens is almost always pleasing music, if not particularly profound; the standard quip about this concerto is that “it starts with Bach but ends with Offenbach”. This concerto’s moods shift from solemnity to playful dance and then to pure minor-key speed, all of this steeped in late-19th century urbane Parisian sophistication. Of particular pleasure is the ending of the second movement, just before the storm of the last erupts; and I challenge anyone to claim to be unexcited by the blaze with which the entire concerto closes.
Here is Andre Watts performing the Second Piano Concerto by Camille Saint-Saens.
John Adams’s first orchestral work, written in 1979, came well before the operatic work that made him well-known in the 1980s. It’s an interesting listen: solemn and meditative, and yet shot through with an odd kind of mystical optimism.
The music also concerns itself with registers, both very high and very low. Bass sound is witheld from the entire first part of the piece, making its appearance, when it finally arrives, a genuinely surprising and gratifying event. Likewise, long areas of similar figuration in the high winds or metallic percussion (glockenspiel and crotales) create their own feeling of formal unity. With its long “camera pans” and hints of aerial photography the music is very much influenced by film techniques. In no other work of mine is the dramatic impulse kept so consistenly reined in in favor of a natural progression of form and materials. “Common Tones in Simple Time” could justifiably be called “a pastoral with pulse.”
This is a repost of something I wrote some years ago. Back in my BlogSpot days this post was a regular driver of search-engine traffic to my blog; I’m not sure if that’s the case now or not, but it can always bear a repeating!
Anyhow, in my Something for Thursday series, I’ve lately posted several Grand Marches from various operas, and now I’m thinking a bit of the wide variety of music that falls under the general category of the “March”. You have Grand Marches, as I’ve noted above, that involve long musical scoring to big set pieces in operas. You also have the Funeral March, which are generally downbeat and sad-sounding, for obvious reasons. You have Processional Marches, with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches being prime examples. And there are the Military Marches, patriotic marches, circus marches, symphonic marches, and so on. Lots and lots of marches.
One of the most famous of all marches is, of course, John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. It’s a staple of nearly every patriotic-themed classical music concert you might ever attend, and the march is as central a staple in July 4th festivities as hot dogs or fireworks. In college, when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played a concert on our campus, their first encore work was The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Sousa wrote many marches — hence the moniker “The March King” — a number of which are very familiar to our ears now (Washington Post and Liberty Bell among them), but The Stars and Stripes Forever is by far his most familiar work. It can sound a bit clicheed these days, but like all works that have to a degree become clichee, when you blow off the dust and actually listen to the thing, you can hear anew those qualities that allowed it to become cliche in the first place.
The Stars and Stripes Forever is also a perfect example of the traditional American military march, which in their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to follow specific forms. If you were to join a concert band in rehearsing one of these marches, you would hear some odd-sounding terms: “Let’s begin at the second strain, first time through.” Or, “Just the trombones, please, starting at the dogfight.” You’d be thinking, “What’s a dogfight? Are there going to be planes flying in aerial combat above our heads?” Well, of course not! So what we’ll do here is go through The Stars and Stripes Forever, with my notations below indicating at which point each section starts.
(This is one of the niftiest musical videos I’ve ever seen, by the way.)
0:07 to 0:10: The is the Intro section. Most marches will have some kind of intro section.
0:11 to 0:24: This is the First Strain, which is will be repeated once.
0:24 to 0:39: The First Strain, repeated. Sometimes, but not always, a band or orchestra will perform a repeat of a strain differently than they did the first time: they’ll dial down the dynamics, playing the repeat softer, or maybe they’ll actually vary the instrumentation a bit. This is often at the discretion of the conductor. Marches in this genre tend to be “modular” in construction, making it easier to tailor the piece a bit depending on the demands of the performance. You might need to make it longer or shorter, depending on the situation, so a conductor might decide to repeat each strain twice instead of once; but then deciding to play the first repeat softer and the second repeat softer still, or some other kind of variation. Some conductors, with experienced ensembles, will even have hand signals ready so they can indicate to their ensemble such a change while in the midst of performance.
0:39 to 0:54: Here is the Second Strain, first time through. Note that it is more lyrical than the boisterous First Strain. In a well-written march, the strains will usually contrast in some way.
0:55 to 1:09: Now we repeat the Second Strain. Note in this performance that the brass join in the melody and it’s a bit louder and more boisterous than the first time through. This difference is why, in rehearsal, our conductor will say things like “OK, start at the second strain, second time through.” He has to let the brass know if they’re playing or sitting out.
OK. After we’re done with the first two strains — and there are usually just two — however many times we’ve performed them, with whatever performance variations our conductor has decided upon, we’re onto the Trio. Sometimes we’ll have a key change when we hit the Trio, along with some other way to differentiate the Trio from the Intro and the first two strains. In Stars and Stripes Forever, our relatively brisk sound of the first two strains yields to a longer, more lyrical melody — even more lyrical than what we heard in the second strain. Additionally, there is less syncopation now, although Sousa still puts key parts of emphasis on the occasional off-beat. A Trio section is often the longest part of a march, and it often revolves around a single melody or musical idea, as opposed to the first and second strains, which posit musical ideas briefly and then shuffle them off the stage. The Trio is the main attraction, as it were.
Now, with our Trio section, there’s only one main musical idea going on, but we’re going to hear it three times. Sousa doesn’t want to bore us, so he’ll change it up a bit each time. How? Let’s see:
1:10 to 1:39: The Trio, first time through. Sometimes we might call this the First Strain of the Trio, or we might just call it the Trio, first time. In any event, this specific case is one of the most recognizable melodies in musical history, and in terms of marches, it’s probably the most famous march melody ever. (It might be a close second to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March #1…or the Elgar is a close second to Stars and Stripes. Not sure which.)
By the way, note that Sousa doesn’t just give us this melody by itself; he continues to remind us that this is still a march by putting all those little staccato flourishes softly playing behind the melody. There’s always something going on in a Sousa march, something new or different or contrasting with the main thing at any given moment. Case in point: when the melody reaches its highest note at 1:24, note the descending arpeggio in the lower brass, or at 1:34 when we reach a high note again, a little “tweet” of a fanfare in the trumpets.
Note, also, that one time through the First Strain of the Trio takes as long as two times through each of the First and Second Strains.
1:39 to 2:02: Now, having heard the complete Trio strain one time through, we’re going to repeat it twice. But unlike the First and Second strains, which are repeated in immediate succession, we get a bit of contrast in a passage that stands in marked rhythmic and dynamic contrast to the Trio strain. This contrasting section, found in the Trios of many marches of this type, is called the Dogfight. We’ll hear it twice through; this is the first time. The Dogfight isn’t really a melody, per se; it’s more of a martial fluorish. Note that the Dogfight is, by itself, longer than either the First or Second Strain.
2:02 to 2:30: The Trio strain, repeated (or, alternatively, the Second Strain of the Trio). Sousa lowers the dynamics again, back down to a softer setting, but we get the first variation of the Trio here. The Stars and Stripes melody plays again in its entirety, but this time with a brilliant touch: a counter-flourish played by the solo piccolo. Note also that the little trumpet fanfares from the first time through aren’t there anymore, in favor of our piccolo solo.
2:31 to 2:55: The Dogfight, second time through. Many performances play the Dogfight a bit louder this time through, and have the Dogfight end with a crescendo into the Trio strain’s final repeat.
2:55 to end: Now we get the last repeat of the Trio strain (or, alternatively, the Third Strain of the Trio). After hearing the Trio strain played softly twice, this time Sousa lets it all hang out: everybody’s playing at full-bore, including our intrepid piccolo player. Now, a lesser composer might think that just hearing this great melody with the entire band playing forte might be pleasing enough to send the crowd away, but Sousa isn’t done giving new things to hear. Specifically, this last time, he gives a countermelody to the low brass that plays mostly on the off-bars of the main melody; when the main theme is holding a long note, the low brass are doing their thing.
And at the very end? That final punctuating note that the march ends on? That’s called the Stinger.
Most marches of this type derive their excitement from variations along the way, as described above: variations in dynamics (loud versus soft), variations in instrumention (who plays what and when), variations in backing detail (little fanfares versus that solo piccolo line). What doesn’t vary is tempo: a march of this type will always end at the same tempo it started. The only place I’ve ever heard a change in tempo in The Stars and Stripes Forever is at the very end of the Dogfight, the second time through, where some conductors — not all — will throw in a ritardando on that last descending scale before the Trio strain’s final repeat, and that’s about it. A march is not the place for the type of rubato that you might hear in, say, some Romantic symphony.
Anyhow, there you have it: a road map to The Stars and Stripes Forever. Next time you’re hearing this march while eating a hot dog and watching fireworks, note the march’s tight construction!
A longer post breaking this unplanned hiatus is coming, but meantime…here’s Franz von Suppe! This is not an overture, though: It’s a march called Fatinitza.
A piano concerto, today, and a very modern one at that: composed in 2018 and premiered a year later, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is the third piano concerto by composer John Adams.
Adams is best known for his operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, but he has been a prolific composer in many genres, and he may well be the best known contemporary American composer alive, aside from possibly film composers like John Williams. Adams has had a long career and thus his work has evolved over the years, but he is most often characterized as a “minimalist”, writing works that often rely on repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs. This piece is no different.
Cast in three movement-like sections that are played without pause, the concerto deploys a number of interesting effects, like giving the piano a kind of honky-tonk sound. The second movement uses a minimalist kind of lyricism, and the last movement returns to the upbeat feel of the first, but with a more care-free, dancelike character. The three sections are given these tempi by Adams:
Gritty, funky, but in Strict Tempo; Twitchy, Bot-like
Much Slower; Gently, Relaxed
Più Mosso: Obsession / Swing
That first is particularly interesting: “Twitchy, Bot-like”, as if to suggest a mechanistic feel in the first movement that slowly gives way throughout the work until the last movement takes on a more improvisational feel.
Here is Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, by John Adams.
