Edward Bland (1926-2013) was a composer and filmmaker who may be best known for a film he made in 1959, The Cry of Jazz, which has been deemed sufficiently significant in the history of Black filmmaking that it has been named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. (You can watch the film on YouTube, here.)
I haven’t been able to find a whole lot of biographical information on Bland, but he grew up in interesting circles: his father was a postal worker who moonlighted as an amateur literary critic, and thus knew such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. Bland himself would study music at the American Conservatory before going on to a lengthy career as a composer and teacher.
This work, Piece for Chamber Orchestra, is an interesting work of stark modernism. Bland apparently described it as “the piece I wanted to write after I heard The Rite of Spring,” and the debt to Stravinsky can definitely be heard in the demanding rhythms and harmonic language. The piece is strongly rhythmic and consists of a lengthy conversation between the instruments of Bland’s orchestra. Listening to it, I can just imagine the level of musical awareness this piece demands of its performers, as the individual voices are almost improvisatory in nature, and yet everything has to mesh together. If you respond to Modern music at all, you will surely find Piece for Chamber Orchestra by Edward Bland a fascinating listen.
A native of Buffalo who later moved to San Francisco to pursue her music career, Pamela Z is a composer and performer who works extensively with electronic sounds, vocal sampling, and other sonic augmentations to create works with an intriguing meditative quality. This particular piece puts her techniques on full display, as she augments a string quartet with electronica and recorded effects (much of which the listener will recognize) to create a piece that is at once meditative and disjointed, as the piece is continually interrupting itself.
I haven’t posted any Beethoven in a while, which is strange since it’s supposed to be a focus, given that 2020 is Beethoven’s 250th birth year. But here’s an interesting tidbit: even though it’s Beethoven, we’re not completely taking a break from my recent delving into the history of Black figures in classical music history.
This is not a tone poem by any definition, so I shouldn’t even be using it here, but my house, my rules. It’s a sonata for solo violin and piano. Beethoven wrote ten violin sonatas, which are among the greatest works ever written for the instrument. Beethoven’s compositional mastery of the violin is astounding (as I’ll discuss more when I finally get around to writing about his Concerto for violin and orchestra), and it shines forth here, in the Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major. This piece is often called the “Kreutzer Sonata”, after violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, to whom Beethoven dedicated the work.
But that’s where things get a little interesting, because Kreutzer took one look at the score, decided the piece was unplayable, and rejected it. But the dedication stood, which seems weird, doesn’t it? If I dedicated a piece to a specific musician who then insulted it, I’m not sure I’d let the dedication stand. And Beethoven was no stranger to removing dedications from his works, as we know from the Eroica symphony and…this very violin sonata.
For Rodolphe Kreutzer was not Beethoven’s first choice of dedication. That honor went to violinist George Bridgetower, a Black violin virtuoso who had already disproved Kreutzer’s notion that the sonata was “unplayable” by not only playing it, but by sightreading it. Bridgetower was one of the greatest violinists of his day, and he lived a long life mostly in England. He also did some composing of his own, but it’s as the original honoree of Beethoven’s Ninth Violin Sonata that he caught my attention.
Bridgetower’s falling out with Beethoven is also a rather odd story. Apparently Bridgetower was out on the town with the great composer, when he made some insulting comments toward a woman, without knowing that the woman was a personal friend of Beethoven’s. This was the impetus for Beethoven to rip off his original dedication and instead gift the work to a musician who didn’t even like it and refused to play it. Isn’t it weird how often the world of great art is as subject to human pettiness as everything else?
The sonata itself is a spellbinding listen as the mood shifts from moody darkness to the kind of joyful light that so often turns up in Beethoven’s music. Is it a tone poem? Of course not…but it was first played by a Black man, and had that same man not made some inopportune comments one night, this piece would be carrying that Black man’s name into history instead of some other guy who didn’t even play it.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1924, Julia Perry was a Black composer who studied widely, attending the Berkshire Music Centre and working with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris and then relocating to Florence for further study before returning home to the United States. She eventually settled into a life as a teacher and as a composer, working hard to integrate her African musical heritage with the Western musical language she had grown up with. She was apparently quite prolific, writing a dozen symphonies and a couple of operas in addition to her other works, until a series of strokes incapacitated her on the right side of her body. Undeterred, Perry taught herself to use her left hand to write, thus furthering her compositional career until she died in 1979, when she was only 55.
All that, and until last week I had never heard of her or her music [oops: this, it turns out, isn’t entirely correct! I need to search my own archives before saying things like this]. I think that’s the most sobering thing about this project I’ve been on in this space these past few months: realizing how all of these composers, who all wrote interesting pieces that should be heard, have never been on my radar before. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course. I, like many, tend to more easily gravitate to what I know than what I don’t. But there’s another, deeper, more insidious reason why these Black musical voices have been largely drowned out, and it’s pretty obvious what that reason is.
Here is a sacred work by Julia Perry, her setting of the Stabat mater. Many composers have written the Stabat mater over the centuries, adapting the hymn and text to new musical language each time out. Perry’s is a contemplative and modernist setting for string orchestra and contralto. The sound strikes me as somewhere between Black spiritual and Catholic chant, with the hypnotic qualities of each. Fascinating piece.
I had a piece picked out for this week, but it’s a pretty complex work that I want to hear a couple more times before I actually feature it, so this week I’ll take an “easy” route. This is a short track called “Anthem” by composer Michael Abels, featured in the score he wrote for the Jordan Peele film Us. I haven’t seen any of Peele’s movies yet (and yes, I know this is a big gap in my media consumption), but I like what I’ve heard of Abels’s music (previously featured in this space).
Here is “Anthem”. It’s atmospherically creepy, and reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s “Ave Satani” from The Omen.
While doing a bit of research for this post, I learned something that is actually a correction of something I’ve believed for years. Remember in the 70s when the ragtime piece “The Entertainer” was all the rage, because of its use in the popular movie The Sting? I don’t know why, but for pretty much all the time I’ve been aware of that piece’s existence, I thought that it was an original piece of ragtime music written by Marvin Hamlisch as a pastiche of the kind of thing that Scott Joplin wrote back in the late 1800s.
Well, as the kids say these days, “I was today years old” when I learned that no, what’s heard in The Sting is an arrangement composed by Hamlisch, and Mr. Joplin actually did write “The Entertainer” in 1902. Joplin (1868-1917) himself was known as “the King of Ragtime”, and ragtime music comprises almost all of his compositional output. He was trying to move beyond his ragtime reputation in his later years, but syphilis and dementia cut his voice short.
I know virtually nothing about ragtime, to be honest. My main impression of it is likely the same as many people: it’s mainly kept alive not through active performance but by being the kind of music used by piano teachers to help young students develop rhythm skills. “Here’s a piece that’s fun to play!” is the likely selling point when a teacher is helping a kid choose the next thing they work on, and…well, in a lot of cases, ragtime actually is fun to play, especially if you’ve been spending months struggling with the chaste classicism of, say, a sonatina by Muzio Clementi.
Obviously, though, ragtime–a musical form that springs from Black culture and artistry–deserves better than to be reduced to a common teaching tool for young piano students, especially when the music’s cultural context is virtually never discussed. “This is a piece by Scott Joplin, who wrote more than a hundred of these!” is about all you learn. At least, that’s about all I learned when it came time to try my hand at a ragtime piece. Which one was it? Almost certainly “The Maple Leaf Rag”, of course. Joplin wrote over a hundred rags, didn’t he? And yet, every year at piano recital time, someone played “Maple Leaf Rag” and no other.
I don’t mean to sound irritated at my piano teacher or at piano teachers nationwide, who can’t always be true to the music at the same time they’re trying to get little Billy interested in actually practicing for once. They can’t teach the basics and try to keep some kid motivated enough to put in their half-hour a day of boring Czerny exercises while also doing anything more than the bare minimum in terms of music appreciation, but…well, anyway. Ragtime, an adaptation of the popular march form of the day coupled with the syncopated rhythms of African music, would help pave the way for the rise of jazz, so its place in music history is secure. But ragtime shouldn’t be seen as merely a popular form for just a few decades that’s important for blazing a trail for the extremely important work that came afterward. Ragtime is a musical moment that somehow captures a certain air of sadness at the same time that it’s doing its “bouncy happy” thing, and while maybe it has its limitations, it should still be seen as more than just a thing to be viewed through a sepia veil.
Here is not “The Entertainer”, or “The Maple Leaf Rag”. This is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”, in which Joplin takes a slower tempo and incorporates tango rhythms into his normal ragtime language.
Joplin eventually wrote a ballet and two operas to go along with his ragtime work. As with many composers, I wonder what he might have accomplished if not for his illnesses and early death. The idea of Scott Joplin writing at the same time as George Gershwin is enticing, to say the least.
William Grant Still is not new to this series, but the goal is to highlight music as well as composers, and to just hear one work by a composer and then move on forever seems…well, weird, doesn’t it? So let’s get back to Still, one of the most notable Black composers in the repertoire. Still (1895-1978) had a lush, Romantic style that nevertheless displays a lot of influences, among them the Negro spirituals of his ancestors.
This piece is a string quartet (although I have discovered that it can also be performed by a quartet of clarinets or saxiphones), called the Lyric Quartette. In this work, which in my ears summons up hints of Copland and Debussy, Still depicts three of his friends in descriptive terms: the first movement is “The Sentimental One”, the second is “The Quiet One”, and the concluding third movement is “The Jovial One”. All those descriptors do apply to the music, which is introspective and at times meditative. This is a beautiful work. Enjoy!
Here is the Lyric Quartette by William Grant Still.
You may remember a hilarious sketch comedy show from the 2000s called Key and Peele; and if you do, then you likely know that Jordan Peele, one half of the comedy duo from that show, has gone on to an impressive career in filmmaking, mostly in the horror genre. He even won an Oscar for one of his screenplays a couple of years ago.
Peele, like many directors, seems to have established a partnership with a particular composer for his filmscores: a man named Michael Abels, who in addition to his film work has composed a number of meaningful works for the concert hall and who has worked hard to increase the visibility of composers of color. This particular piece dates back to 1990, and its title–“Global Warming”–refers not to the ecological challenge of our time, but the specific feeling of international goodwill that was emergent in the handful of years immediately following the end of the Cold War.
The piece opens with a coldly stark sound that gives way to exuberant dance which blends a number of elements from national music all over the world. One might expect that character of music, given this theme…but at the end it returns to that coldly stark sound, as if to express skepticism and a return to wariness even as old enmities were seemingly falling by the wayside. In this Abels may well have been prescient.
Ulysses Kay was a Black composer who lived from 1917 to 1995. Born in Tucson to parents who encouraged music-making in the home, Kay went on to study music at the University of Arizona and the Eastman School of Music, working with such musical luminaries as William Grant Still and Howard Hanson. Kay’s music is (so I’ve read, having not heard much of it at all!) mostly written in the neoclassical style, which makes sense from my hearing of today’s piece. I don’t hear a great deal of jazz or African influence here. This work has an almost academic kind of feel to it, which may be simply because the piece is called “Fantasy Variations” and does not seem to have any programmatic content at all, which puts it in a different category, more of an “absolute music” kind of piece, than a lot of what I’ve been featuring over the last few weeks.
This work rewards several listens, I have found. It opens with a lyrical passage that quickly gives way to stark modernism, and then the mood alternates several times before arriving on an almost hymnlike conclusion. The piece stands in much the same kind of musical tradition as a great deal of American 20th century music, and I am entirely unsurprised to read that Kay studied with Still and Hanson.
Here is Fantasy Variations by Ulysses Simpson Kay.
This may be something of a cheat, since Tone Poem Tuesday has always featured orchestral music, and this week all we have is a solo piano work. But what a work it is, juxtaposing traditional melodies with interesting sound effects, some produced by the piano and some not.
But first, let’s meet our composer: Blind Tom Wiggins.
He was born a slave in 1850, but–as one might expect from his name–he was blind. A blind slave might have expected to simply be killed by their owners, since they offer little by way of economic benefit, but for whatever reason, Tom’s owners let him live, and he seems to have been allowed to simply wander about the plantation and entertain himself as best he could, which ultimately led to his finding his way to a piano. He played songs from memory upon first hearing, and he had other strange gifts of recall as well: he was able to recite speeches he had heard years before, even aping the speakers’ intonations, and he could repeat entire conversations verbatim. But he couldn’t communicate his own thoughts or needs beyond grunting.
It is now thought that Blind Tom Wiggins was an autistic savant, in a time when such individuals were unheard of. He traveled extensively, performing concerts where he would entertain “audience challenges”: someone would play for him a new, unheard composition, challenging him to reproduce it by ear, and he would. Wiggins also composed a lot of music of his own, little of which has been heard since his day.
One of his best-known pieces is this week’s feature. It is called The Battle of Manassas, and it begins with rolling piano chords possibly signifying the drums of an army on the march. Then comes a series of familiar tunes from the Civil War era, some of which come as a surprise. As the piece goes on, the drumming in the bass gives way to pounded dissonant chords, possibly signifying gun and cannon fire. At one point the performer is to whistle a single note over the entire proceedings, while in another the performer makes a “Ch-ch-ch” sound.
It’s a bizarre and fascinatingly modern piece, written by a man who was enslaved, misunderstood, and exploited. Here is The Battle of Manassas, by Blind Tom Wiggins.
