Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

In light of the stunning images being released today by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope, I decided to look for “classical music inspired by space”, in hopes of finding a work that might evoke the cosmic sense of wonder that the Webb Telescope’s preliminary work is inspiring.

The search results took a bit of work to get though: nearly everybody who writes on the topic recommends Holst’s The Planets, which is fine but not so much inspired by space as by astrology. Many articles cite Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is indeed a great work that I’m sure I’ll feature eventually! But it’s not actually about space. Strauss’s inspiration was the philosophy writings af Friedrich Nietzsche, and the “space” association came many years later when Stanley Kubrick used Strauss’s work to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I did find several pieces that fit the bill, though, and this is one of them. It is the Sunrise Mass, bu Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo (born 1978). The work is a setting of the traditional Mass–the text is Latin–but with a somewhat stellar inspiration. The work has that cathedral-like feel in its sonorities that makes me think of, well, the universe.

The composer has written:

The reason I used English titles for each movement in this setting of the Latin Mass has to do with the initial idea behind Sunrise Mass. I wanted the musical journey of the work to evolve from transparent and spacey to something earthy and warm; from nebulous and pristine, though more emotional landscapes, to ultimately solid groundedness–as a metaphor for human development from child to adult, or as a spiritual journey.

The piece is also inspired by several movies and film scores from the past few years that I love dearly.

The work consists of four movements:

The Spheres
Sunrise
The City
Identity and the Ground

I listened to the piece twice today–once during lunch and again while doing some admin work–and it captivated me greatly. Gjeilo’s work is melodic without being cloyingly so, and his choral writing is top notch; his harmonies are easily parsed and the entire choir sings with balance and a huge sound. The work teems with the kind of sepulchral wonder that I hope we all feel when confronted with the infinite amazements of our universe.

In short, I loved this piece and I hope you will too. Here is Sunrise Mass.

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Don Juan is the first of Richard Strauss’s tone poems to be considered one of his masterworks, coming after the promising but not quite great Aus Italien. In Don Juan, Strauss’s inspiration is clear, though it’s a bit convoluted. Strauss derived his work from a stage play based in turn on an unfinished poem from 1844, which was itself based on a Renaissance-era legend about a serial womanizer. This same legend inspired Mozart a hundred years earlier, an inspiration which resulted in the great opera Don Giovanni.

Strauss’s work opens with bustling swashbuckler music that sounds like nothing so much as an anticipation of the kind of music Erich Wolfgang Korngold would later write for Errol Flynn movies, with adventurous derring-do alternating with lush music of our hero’s romantic interludes; but Don Juan gradually becomes more and more profound over the course of its roughly eighteen minutes, and it does not end on a heroic note but rather a sad and introspective one befitting a legend that ends with the hero’s death. It’s as if Strauss is depicting the way that all lives end in the same place, in the same way, regardless of how vigorously one has pursued one’s passions throughout.

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Here’s an old favorite: Espana by Emmanuel Chabrier. This is one of the most delightful pieces I know, just pure delightful color for all of its six minutes. I got to play this work in college, and I’ve loved it since that very first rehearsal. For a work written in the Romantic era, Espana really seems to be anticipating the Modern era in some key ways: its rhythm isn’t just engaging or “catchy”, but it has that wonderful 20th Century sense of the bar line being made irrelevant.

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Just getting this in under the wire, here’s a bit of film music: Lee Holdridge’s wonderful love theme from Splash, the Tom Hanks-and-Darryl Hannah “boy meets girl who’s really a mermaid” movie from the early 80s. This is one of the more wonderful love themes from a period that produced a lot of them.

As I write this, Splash is free on YouTube…and no, I have not been dipping into it and reminding myself that Darryl Hannah was one of my celebrity crushes back in the day….

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Mieczysław Karłowicz was a Polish composer who was just coming into his own, and who might well have become that nation’s greatest composer, when he was killed in an avalanche while skiing when he was just 32. He did not leave behind a particularly large body of work, but what remains is nevertheless fascinating post-Romantic writing, lush and evocative, almost impressionistic in its tone coloring. This work, “Returning Waves”, was apparently inspired by a trip Karłowicz took to the sea. A YouTube commenter provides this quote, apparently from Karłowicz’s journal:

“We sat on a rock jutted out into the sea, which was boiling. It clung to the rocks, and anger was accompanied by a roar that made a thunderous noise. The rocks were dripping from the receding waves, and when the sun came out for a moment, the whole battlefield was cleared up with white spots like snow, and the green water flashed like glass.”

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this–information on this particular work is hard to find online–but it definitely seems to fit the piece’s general mood. This is earthy, naturalistic music that puts me in mind of other post-Romantic composers like Arnold Bax.

Here is “Returning Waves” by Mieczysław Karłowicz.

(I just did a quick search to see if I’ve mentioned him before, and it turns out that Mieczysław Karłowicz was actually the composer I featured on the very first Tone Poem Tuesday I ever did, back in 2016! How time goes by….)

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Here’s something that I’m not sure if I’ve done in this space: shared a work I was literally listening to for the first time, all the way through, as I’m writing the post. I was on the way home from work and I heard a bit of a jubilant, almost jazzy work for orchestra, full of dance rhythms that seem almost Latino in character. I looked up the piece (that our phones can listen to a piece of music and identify it is one of the under-appreciated Great Developments Of Our Time), and I discovered that it does indeed quote extensively from Brazilian folk and dance tunes. The piece, called Le boeuf sur le toit, is by French composer Darius Milhaud.

Milhaud lived 1892-1974, and he is one of those Modernist composers of whom I know very, very little, despite his long life, his prolific output, and his influence on the music of the 20th century. Milhaud’s students included such modern music luminaries as Iannis Xenakis and Steve Reich, along with jazz and pop composers Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach. Milhaud spent time in Brazil, hence his incorporation of that nation’s tunes into this work.

Le boeuf sur le toit is a short ballet intended by the composer to be used as a soundtrack for the films of Charlie Chaplain, in the style of a fast and cheerful round that seems to cycle all around a particular dance floor. The energy starts from the very first bar, and just keeps right on dancing, all the way through. I also love the little off-key asides throughout, as if the dance is being joined by someone with no rhythm, and the song is being sung by someone with no pitch. Those touches remind me of Beethoven’s off-the-beat dance tune from his Sixth Symphony.

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