Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

As Rachmaninoff was a young man studying music in a rigorous environment (we’ll get to that in April), he–and just about every other young Russian musician of the day–was influenced heavily by a group of composers called collectively “The Five”. These composers, all giants of Russian music in their day and four of them still giants to this day, dominated Russian music and how it was taught and encouraged amongst the younger generations. Their focus was on a nationalistic school of Russian music that was to be wholly separate from the more dominant traditions from the Germanic nations and France to the west. How successful they were can be debated; certainly they turned out some wondrous music, but their forms are still wholly dependent on the Germanic traditions. As Leonard Bernstein would later write in one of his essays, “All the Russian symphonies are really German ones with vodka substituted for beer.”

The Five consisted of the spiritual leader Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui (more on him next week), Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin (so near to my heart!), and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Each of these composers had strong influence on Rachmaninoff, in some ways and in others, and in negative light and in positive. From Rimsky-Korsakov Rachmaninoff likely learned about drama in music, and an appreciation for the sounds and modes of the Russian church liturgies. Rimsky-Korsakov was not himself a directly religious man, but that particular antipathy of his did not extend to the music, which he embodied in today’s work, the Russian Easter Festival Overture. The melodies of this work are taken directly from Russian Orthodox chants, and Rachmaninoff would later draw from some of this same material himself in several spiritual works of his own, as well as his lifelong fascination with one specific chant, the Dies irae.

We’re coming closer and closer to Rachmaninoff himself. Meantime, here is another of his influences: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture.

 

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As I gear up for All Rachmaninoff All The Time in April, I’ve been listening to a lot of Russian music that pre-dates Rachmaninoff, particularly by composers who rank amongst his prime influences. Tchaikovsky was certainly one of those; Rachmaninoff actually had a number of encounters with the great older composer during his student years, and Tchaikovsky’s rather sudden death from cholera was a heavy blow for young Sergei. It certainly isn’t hard to listen to Rachmaninoff, even in his mature and later work, and not hear the Tchaikovskian influence.

This tone poem, like the earlier Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, is styled after Shakespeare: the subject this time is The Tempest. The structure here is similar to the more famous work, with its tumultuous depictions of the play’s stormier sections (literally, in this case, as the play begins with a shipwreck caused by a magical storm) and its lyrical love music in the central section. I actually find The Tempest preferable to the Romeo and Juliet overture, but that may be a reaction against the other work’s ubiquity over the years. I can also certainly hear the musical connections between this and the music that Rachmaninoff would produce.

Here is Tchaikovsky’s Symphonic Fantasia, The Tempest.

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One of the finest Black composers of the 20th century, William Grant Still lived from 1895 to 1978, bearing witness to the growth of the American vernacular in classical music, as well as the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Still’s work occasionally sounds almost like a rougher answer to Gershwin–in fact, the work heard below contains what seems to almost be a quote from Gershwin in its third movement–but Still is much more than that. He was prolific, writing five symphonies, nine operas, and a number of other works in many forms and genres. Still was also a proficient session musician on his own, playing in many bands and orchestras over his life, and he did a bit of arranging work for film. Still was in many ways a trailblazer, in much the same way that Florence Price was.

This work is his most well-known: the first of his five symphonies, subtitled “The Afro-American”. The work blends the sounds of spirituals with the emergent sounds of jazz. Formally, it is purely a symphony in the European tradition, but it is well-steeped in the sounds of the Black vernacular of the time. It’s dramatic, lyrical, and at times, thrilling.

Here is the “Afro-American Symphony” by William Grant Still.

 

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When I’ve listened to Florence Price’s music over the last few years, I’ve thought often of Antonin Dvorak’s observation from the time he spent in the United States, among American musicians and composers. Paraphrasing, Dvorak noted that the American musicians in that time were relying heavily on the forms and modes coming out of Europe. There isn’t anything particularly wrong with that, and a lot of fine music, if not great music, emerged from composers like Edward MacDowell. But Dvorak–whose own music was deeply steeped in the folk music of his beloved homeland in Moravia and Bohemia–felt that American music’s real rise to greatness would come when composers looked not to Europe for inspiration but rather to the music of Native Americans and the African-American community.

Later in the 20th century, this would come to pass, and Florence Price was a part of that.

This work is simply called “Concert Overture No. 2”, but its musical forebears do indeed come from the African spirituals of her own forebears. The work’s mood is set from the very beginning in that unique blend of sad hopefulness that imbues so many of those very spirituals.

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Composer Omar Thomas was born in Brooklyn in 1984 to Guyanese parents. He eventually studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and has moved on to a highly praised career as a composer. While he is mainly known as a jazz musician, he has not allowed genre to bind him, as we here in this work, which blends the classical and jazz idioms in a work that sounds at times like a primal scream against a world filled with racist violence and at others like an affirmation of a world that many are trying to fill with grace and forgiveness.

The impetus for Of Our New Day Begun was the attack by a white supremacist on Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, in which nine people were shot dead.

In Thomas’s own words:

“Of Our New Day Begun” was written to honor nine beautiful souls who lost their lives to a callous act of hatred and domestic terrorism on the evening of June 17, 2015 while worshipping in their beloved sanctuary, the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (affectionately referred to as “Mother Emanuel”) in Charleston, South Carolina. My greatest challenge in creating this work was walking the line between reverence for the victims and their families, and honoring my strong, bitter feelings towards both the perpetrator and the segments of our society that continue to create people like him. I realized that the most powerful musical expression I could offer incorporated elements from both sides of that line – embracing my pain and anger while being moved by the displays of grace and forgiveness demonstrated by the victims’ families.

Historically, black Americans have, in great number, turned to the church to find refuge and grounding in the most trying of times. Thus, the musical themes and ideas for “Of Our New Day Begun” are rooted in the Black American church tradition. The piece is anchored by James and John Johnson’s time-honored song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (known endearingly as the “Negro National Anthem”), and peppered with blues harmonies and melodies. Singing, stomping, and clapping are also prominent features of this work, as they have always been a mainstay of black music traditions, and the inclusion of the tambourine in these sections is a direct nod to black worship services.

The work’s ending is particularly fascinating to me. The piece feels like it is coming to a slow, meditative, and even peaceful conclusion…but then something new stirs in the band, starting with a rhythm emerging softly from the percussion, a rhythm that is a blend of march and waltz, and the entire band fills the hall with sound again. It feels like a rejection of the expected peaceful acceptance of the world in favor of a defiant facing of that world head-on.

Here is Of Our New Day Begun, performed by the James Madison University Wind Symphony.

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It’s not terribly surprising to learn that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was one of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s early influences; after all, Rimsky-Korsakov was a gigantic name in Russian music in the late 19th century, second only to Tchaikovsky. Even in his maturity, when Rachmaninoff found his own sound in yearning melodies and backward-looking Romanticism, hints of Rimsky-Korsakov can be found, particularly in his orchestrations. Rimsky-Korsakov is one of the great orchestrators of all time, and his works would have been studied and their lessons learned by Rachmaninoff.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas are unfortunately neglected in the West, mainly because few singers want to learn Russian and it is simply out of vogue to perform operas in translation. Nevertheless, his operas are highly regarded by those who have been able to seek them out and hear them, and the operas have yielded a number of excerpts that have found life in the standard concert repertoire. This particular work is not one of those, though: it is a thorough rescoring for orchestra alone of the third act of his opera Mlada, which he then retitled Night on Mount Triglav.

This is the type of Russian Romanticism in which a young Sergei Rachmaninoff was steeped. It would leave its mark.

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Staying Rachmaninoff-adjacent, as opposed to posting about Rachmaninoff directly: Rachmaninoff learned much from the great master of the Russia of his youth, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky met Rachmaninoff when the younger composer was still a teenaged student, and he gave young Sergei much encouragement and even requested work from him, such as four-hand piano arrangements of his ballets. Tchaikovsky could be a prickly critic of young Rachmaninoff’s early work, but he was nevertheless supportive, and the young composer was hoping for a more collaborative relationship with his elder master when Tchaikovsky sadly died of cholera.

I don’t know if this specific work of Tchaikovsky’s had any direct influence on Rachmaninoff, but you can still hear the brooding drama and the heartfelt lyricism here that would typify just about all of Rachmaninoff’s work.

Here is Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture.

 

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Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was one of the major names in twentieth-century music. HIs work is always brightly modern, but also accessible in a way that much of the avant garde music of that century was not; Messiaen’s work both rewards repeated listening and the first hearing.

I haven’t found much information about this particular piece, beyond the fact that the score was lost during World War II, prompting Messiaen to reconstruct it from memory. The result is a work of unflinching spirituality and modernism, an orchestral kaleidoscope of color and texture. It’s a fascinating listen, as Messiaen tends to be. Here is Hymne (Hymn to the Blessed Sacrament), by Olivier Messiaen.

 

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