Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Continuing an exploration of work of black composers in this, Black History Month, I turn to William Grant Still, one of the best-known black composers. The difficulty black composers have faced in history can be illustrated in the fact that Still lived from 1895 to 1978, dying in my lifetime, and yet many of his works are already lost. Still was born in Arkansas, where his musical life began, but his life later took him to Ohio, New York (where he is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance), and finally to Los Angeles, where the house in which he lived is now designated a Los Angeles Historical Monument. Still was a prolific composer over his long life, and he achieved things in music that would be the pride of any composer, much less a black one from a country not historically known for rewarding the creative efforts of its minorities.

Still wrote his symphonic poem Africa in 1930, after he had spent his youth working in W.C. Handy’s band and studying composition with Edgar Varese. Still’s style combines African-American sounds–blues, spirituals–with traditional orchestral writing. Africa comprises a musical depiction of a continent to which Still never traveled, and he would describe the work as “the Africa of my imagination.” He even opens the piece with distant drums tapping an almost tribal rhythm before the more plaintive orchestral writing begins. Still described his work, which traces three movements, in a letter thusly:

“An American Negro has formed a concept of the land of his ancestors based largely on its folklore, and influenced by his contact with American civilization. He beholds in his mind’s eye not the Africa of reality but an Africa mirrored in fancy, and radiantly ideal.

I. He views it first as a land of peace; peace that is partly pastoral in nature and partly spiritual.

II. It is to him also a land of fanciful and mysterious romance; romance tinged with ineffable sorrow.

III. Contact with American civilization has not enabled him to completely overcome his inherent superstitious nature. It is that heritage of his forebears binding him irrevocably to the past, and making it possible for him to form the most definite concept of Africa.”

(via)

Africa is a lyrical and rhythmic work that seems to sway and dance with sound that recalls blues and spirituals, but in a more distant way, hinting at the ancestral home of the musical traditions that African-Americans would make central to their often sad experiences in America. It’s a fascinating piece.

Here is Africa by William Grant Still.

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February is Black History Month, so each of this month’s regular music selections (Tone Poem Tuesday and Something for Thursday) will feature music either composed, or performed, or both, by black musicians.

George Walker (1922-2018) was the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for a work entitled Lilacs. Walker was a teacher, a composer, and a performer of note, and he had what was by all accounts a long and successful musical life before he died at the age of 96. This work is an exuberant bit of modern dance that he wrote on commission from the Las Vegas Symphony, in commemoration of that city’s centennial celebration. Hoopla: A Touch of Glee is a bright and bold orchestral showpiece that thrums with the odd optimism of Las Vegas, a city that has no reason to exist other than to be a place where the kinds of things that go on in Vegas…go on. I’ve been listening to this oddly infectious work for several days now, and it’s not easy to forget.

Here is Hoopla: A Touch of Glee by George Walker.

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In his lifetime Hector Berlioz wrote three operas (four, if you count the “Dramatic legend” La Damnation de Faust, which is sometimes staged as an opera even though its long passages of purely orchestral music make such staging difficult). The first is rarely heard on the opera stages of the world today owing to its high degree of difficulty for the singers, but the opera isn’t completely forgotten, as its overture is frequently heard in concert halls. Benvenuto Cellini is based on the memoirs of the Renaissance sculptor of the same name. In addition to fine sculpture, Cellini left behind an autobiography that has been hailed as the finest autobiography ever written, and which represents one of the finest accounts of Renaissance Italy written by a contemporary. Berlioz had a deep love of all things literary, which informed all of his music, including the opera Benvenuto Cellini. Even though this opera failed (and only one of Berlioz’s three operas, Beatrice et Benedict, was a success during his life), Berlioz–ever the recycler–made use of some of its material in one of his most famous works, the Roman Carnival overture.

Here is the overture to Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.

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I’ll have more to say about this later in the week, but for now I learned yesterday that one of my musical heroes, pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, has retired from public performance. Ashkenazy has been a giant of the music world for more than sixty years, and his performances–both at the keyboard and on the podium–always have a good deal of excitement behind them. In my opinion, Ashkenazy’s cycle of the three symphonies of Sergei Rachmaninov have never been equaled. (One day I’ll write the long paean to the Rachmaninov Second that’s been in my head for years.)

While Ashkenazy might well be most closely associated with Russian and Slavic music, he was no one-trick pony. Here he is conducting Debussy, about as spiritually far from the heavy Russian Romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov you can get and yet still remain in roughly the same time period. Debussy’s La Mer is a three-part work, called “symphonic sketches” by the composer, who wanted to avoid the associations of the symphony and the symphonic poem. Debussy often worked to throw off formal constraints in a way that is not unlike his earlier countryman, Hector Berlioz. La Mer is deeply evocative and masterful in its use of orchestral textures to convey Debussy’s impressions of the sea.

Here is La Mer by Claude Debussy, performed by the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the great Vladimir Ashkenazy.

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I am constantly amazed at the sheer output of Antonin Dvorak. Music poured out of the man, and his gift for melodic drama set with wonderful orchestration never, ever fails to delight. Even so, I was unprepared for the degree to which this piece–which, to my knowledge, I had never heard before a couple weeks ago–forced its way into my imagination. It’s called The Golden Spinning Wheel, and it is based on a Czech folktale that was gathered into a book by Czech poet K.J. Erben. As folktales go, it’s pretty satisfyingly grim, with a young maiden capturing the heart of the king and being murdered by her evil stepmother for her troubles, only to be resurrected by a magician. You can read the entire tale here…but meanwhile, give a listen to Dvorak’s tone poem, which is thrilling and adventurous and romantic in all the wonderful meanings of the word. At times this work is so swashbuckling in its sound that you can practically see Errol Flynn, rapier in hand, as he disposes of the evil soldiers as he fights his way to his love’s side.

Music like this is what keeps me coming back to classical music, year in and year out. I hope you’ll give it a listen. Here is The Golden Spinning Wheel by Antonin Dvorak.

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I suppose a “Back to basics” kind of thing is normal in January, isn’t it? Not so much a series of resolutions or a grand statement of intent to change my life, but there is most definitely a desire to clean things up a bit and to indulge a bit of simplicity.

In that vein I’ve been listening to a bit of Franz Joseph Haydn of late. Haydn’s reputation has taken a pretty dispiriting turn over the last few decades, it seems to me; he’s seen as a kindly old composer of nice, pleasant, and undemanding music. Haydn is Mozart without the fire, a placeholder to give us someone to talk about other than Mozart in the era between Bach and Beethoven. He’s referred to as “Papa” Haydn, and his symphonies often have cute nicknames: The “Clock” symphony, the “Surprise” symphony, and so on.

Well, to that I say nonsense, because in Haydn I find beauty and passion and the very best of the rationalism of the Classical era. I find formal perfection, structural amazement, and melodies that lodge in the ear with joyous aplomb. Returning to Haydn is like drinking clear, cool water after a long and difficult journey.

Here is the Overture in D Major by Franz Joseph Haydn. Notice how complete a journey he takes us on, all in the space of just under five minutes!

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Thus we end 2019! I’ll hear this work newly performed tomorrow night, when it is the traditional second encore in the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Years Concert. It’s not a new year until I hear On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

See you in 2020, folks!

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If you’re familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, you’re almost certainly familiar with the work he did using the tunes and melodies of other composers. And if you have any love of American musical theater of the 20th century, then you’re almost certainly familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, and you may not even realize it! Bennett was largely known for his work as an arranger and orchestrator for many of the great Broadway shows of the classic era of American musical theater. Look at the fine print of many of those albums and you’ll see something along the lines of “Arrangements by Robert Russell Bennett” or “Orchestrations by Russell Bennett”.

Bennett also arranged many fine orchestral suites of Broadway music, which have become staples in the repertoire of Pops orchestras all over the world. Bennett’s suites are almost always fine compositions in their own right, with Bennett giving a lot of thought to the melodies and how they should sound in a purely orchestral setting. The suites are more than worth listening to on their own, proving that dramatic music does not always need to be heard in its original context to be effective.

Here is the Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture by Robert Russell Bennett. Enjoy!

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So this week we conclude our trip through Dvorak’s trio of tone poems that he called “Nature, Life, and Love” with the Othello Overture. There was some definite Shakespearean inspiration for Dvorak here, but it’s not wise to try to find exact correspondences in the music to the drama. The overture is definitely more stormy and takes a darker tone than the previous two installments in this trio of overtures. For a work whose alternate title indicates that what is being explored is love, it certainly seems that Dvorak has a view of love that doesn’t exclude that emotion’s more introspective and combative elements.

Here is Dvorak’s Othello Overture.

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This week we have the second part of Dvorak’s trilogy of tone poems that he called “Nature, Life, and Love”: the “Carnival” overture. This overture launches into a dance-like rhythm from the very opening bars, and its energy almost never abates throughout, and by the time the work ends nine minutes or so later,you can almost hear the wild dancers in a village square exhaling with relief as they are finally allowed to fall, gasping, to the ground as the orchestra’s work ends. As a representation of the sheer energy and joy of life that often inhabits Dvorak’s music, the “Carnival” overture is unusually potent.

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