The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I think that Franz von Suppe is to this blog as cream of mushroom soup is to Mark Evanier’s. Whenever Evanier is really busy, he posts a picture of a can of cream of mushroom soup. I tend to do the same with a YouTube selection of an overture by Franz von Suppe.
So here’s von Suppe’s Jolly Robbers overture. I played this in high school in an arrangement that was wickedly difficult. Rehearsals of this were, at times, quite a lot less than fun…but I still love the piece.
Bear with, lots going on!
Today we have a work of the kind that I find deeply challenging to write about, because I know so very little about this whole approach to music in the first place. It’s an avant-garde piece by 20th century Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis, called Jonchaies. Xenakis’s music was not only heavily influenced by the musical trends of the 20th century, but by his own training in architecture and engineering. I have not heard a great deal of Xenakis’s work, but there is a character in what I have heard that I would describe as industrial. (I almost chose mechanical, but that has connotations that I don’t think apply.)
When you hear Xenakis’s music – any piece of what we recognise as his mature work, starting with 1954’s Metastasis, onwards – you’re confronted with an aesthetic that seems unprecedented according to any of the frames of reference that musical works usually relate to. You won’t hear vestiges of things like familiar forms, or shapes, or languages. Even the furthest-out reaches of early 1950s serialism sound resolutely conventional next to Xenakis’s works of the same period. It’s music whose sheer, scintillating physicality creates its own territory in every piece, whether it’s for solo cello or huge orchestra. (credit)
As for Jonchaies itself, I find it a thrilling exercise in orchestral colors and textures. This is the kind of music one has to approach with a willingness to work at finding its appeal; it’s too easy to listen to this and dismiss it as random cacophonous noise. This article (worth reading!) describes Xanakis’s approach as “sound sculpture”, and I think that is right. Having walked through the Albright-Knox’s collection of modern art more than a few times, I can definitely hear the connective artistic tissue that binds this music to some of the abstract sculpture I’ve seen in museums.
There’s something particularly fascinating about the composers who labored in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. These artists had to walk a very fine line between personal expression and the creation of art that would earn the approval of the State’s apparatus, and many composers found themselves drifting into and out of favor. (Shostakovich in particular had to deal with this.)
Dmitry Kabalevsky was one such composer, and he managed to pretty much avoid internal controversy, perhaps by being more conservative and less adventurous than some of his musical colleagues. Nevertheless, you listen to his music and you can’t place it anywhere other than 20th century Russia.
Kabalevsky’s suite The Comedians is one of his most popular works. A ten-movement musical depiction of clowns, the piece abounds with invigorating rhythms and with plaintive melodies. The second movement, the Galop, gave me pause when I listened to the work this weekend. I’m certain that I actually got to perform it at some point, but digging a little deeper, I’m not sure if that’s the case or if it’s just the fact that the Galop is itself one of Kabalevsky’s most popular compositions. Sometime I’ll have to dig out all my old orchestral programs and see if I did in fact play this piece.
Meantime, here is The Comedians by Dmitry Kabalevsky.
A very modern work today.
Karel Husa (1921-2016) was Czech by birth, being born in Prague. When he was just 33 he emigrated to the United States, where in addition to being a celebrated composer he taught for decades at Cornell University. Husa won the Pulitzer Prize for Composition for his third string quartet, and his piece Music for Prague 1968 is one of the most notable compositions for wind band of the latter 20th Century. Music for Prague 1968, in which the composer pays tribute to his own people in the face of Soviet aggression, was later transcribed for orchestra, whereupon it enjoyed greater success. Husa was a forward-thinking composer who employed wild dissonances and difficult melodic material, in addition to quotes from ancient works. He was also a great experimentalist with different sounds, as you’ll hear in this piece.
Today’s work is Apotheosis of this Earth, a 1971 piece that started for wind band and chorus, but was also later transcribed for orchestra. The work springs from Husa’s deep environmentalism. Here is the text of Husa’s own writing on the piece (credit):
The composition of Apotheosis of this Earth was motivated by the present desperate stage of mankind and its immense problems with everyday killings, war, hunger, extermination of fauna, huge forest fires, and critical contamination of the whole environment.
Man’s brutal possession and misuse of nature’s beauty—if continued at today’s reckless speed—can only lead to catastrophe. The composer hopes that the destruction of this beautiful earth can be stopped, so that the tragedy of destruction—musically portrayed in the second movement—and the desolation of the aftermath (the “postscript” of the third movement) can exist only as fantasy, never to become reality.
In the first movement, Apotheosis, the earth first appears as a point of light in the universe. Our memory and imagination approach it in perhaps the same way as it appeared to the astronauts returning from the moon. The earth grows larger and larger, and we can even remember some of its tragic moments (as struck by the xylophone near the end of the movement).
The second movement, Tragedy of Destruction, deals with the actual brutalities of man against nature, leading to the destruction of our planet, perhaps by radioactive explosion. The earth dies as a savagely, mortally wounded creature.
The last movement is a Postscript, full of the realization that so little is left to be said: the earth has been pulverized into the universe, the voices scattered into space. Toward the end, these voices — at first computer-like and mechanical — unite into the words “this beautiful earth,” simply said, warm and filled with regret…and one of so many questions comes to our minds: ‘Why have we let this happen?’”
Listening to this work several times over the last few days, I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s use of modern music (primarily Ligeti) in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The piece speaks of the industrialized destruction of our own habitat, along with the habitats of many others, and of the regret as our light slowly dies. It’s not an optimistic work, to be sure. But optimism is not always well-taken.
Here is Apotheosis of this Earth, by Karel Husa.
I heard this piece of joyously bombastic music on the radio last week, and as I wondered what it was, I found myself thinking, “This sounds like the kind of thing John Williams would write for the Olympics.” Now, I’m a firm believer that music can never depict anything specifically, but in this case…I was right! The work is not by John Williams, though Williams did record it on an album of such music. It is a piece called Javelin, by composer Michael Torke. It was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and for the 1996 Summer Games in that same city. Torke has apparently openly admitted the debt the work owes to John Williams.
Here is Javelin by Michael Torke.
Going to the Renaissance Faire* always reminds me, among other things, of the music of Camelot, so here is Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangement of that show’s fine tunes. I got to play this in college one year for our orchestra’s Pops concert, which is probably where my love of Lerner-and-Loewe began.
* Post forthcoming
Film music today! It suddenly occurred to me the other day that I haven’t heard anything by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek in a long time, so I gave a bit of his music another listen. My introduction to him was the gentle lyricism of his score to Finding Neverland, a wonderful movie you don’t hear much about anymore. Kaczmarek won the Best Score Oscar for this score, and he won it the year after The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won that honor, so in two years you had polar opposites winning the Oscar: a gigantic epic score of enormous complexity and orchestral grandiosity, and a quiet chamber work of delicate intimacy.
Finding Neverland tells a fantasized version of the story of J.M. Barrie and his creation of Peter Pan. The film abounds with dream-like sequences and flights of imagination, and these passages have a gossamer quality that is well served by Kaczmarek’s orchestral clarity. I love this score and hearing it again after a number of years was a delight. It’s always a pleasure to return to favorite works we’ve not visited in a long time, isn’t it?
I looked for a suite from this score, but the few that I found don’t feature the passages that I love most, so I decided to simply go with this: the entire score album presented at once. Plenty of tone poems are an hour long, so why not?
Here is Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s score to Finding Neverland. If you can, listen to this someplace where you think there might be some magic lurking in the corners.
