Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to be a student orchestra. I’m as big a fan of great orchestral recordings as anyone, but there’s often something wonderfully sincere about the music-making that the young people do, even if the technical work isn’t always quite as clean.)
As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely known now for La Gioconda and especially for the “Dance of the Hours”; his music now aside from those works is little heard. But he was influential in his day, and without Ponchielli we don’t get the likes of Puccini or Mascagni. Those kinds of composers are important to recognize and to hear, once in a while.
The “Dance of the Hours” is pure light and magic, utterly effervescent the entire way through. It depicts the march of an entire day’s time, and it comes at the end of the third act of the opera. Having just read a synopsis of the opera, I find myself wondering how this gloriously magical ballet works in the midst of a scene where guests have arrived at the home of an Inquisitor for what eventually turns out to be a fairly dark evening.
Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot:
Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines :
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes.
Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift. (via)
Montgomery’s website has three bios available, marked Long, Medium, and Short! Here is the short bio:
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.
I have found Rounds a fascinating work to hear as its sounds cycle back and forth. It’s a work that hovers around the edges of rhythm and melody in a particularly abstract and atmospheric way. I love works like this! At times it’s almost Ravelian in its impressionistic color, at other times it’s purely modern.
Here’s something fascinating: an entire album comprising a ballet written by a prominent rapper!
RZA is the leader of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop collective that has been around for over thirty years now. That is, I admit openly, the extent of my knowledge of RZA. Hip-hop has never been a musical genre to which I have paid much attention, though not out of dislike in any way. I’ve found, pretty consistently, that when I am exposed to hip-hop in any extended way, I find myself intrigued by it and respecting it. So why haven’t I explored it? Well…time, mainly. I just never find the time for it.
The album featured below is not hip-hop, though. It’s a straight-up classical record: a ballet told through eleven tracks, which tells a story of six youths, each named for a diatonic scale, who “transpose” into their “higher selves”. It’s dramatic, interesting listening that feels like good film music at first blush.
RZA wrote the ballet after he apparently found some old lyrics of his, which he had written in his teenage years, and found the old ideas lodging in his mind as old ideas tend to do. I can relate to this! It’s like the old ideas show up and say, “You weren’t ready for me then, but I’m back.” I found this ballet lyrical and emotionally varied, and dramatic in the best “film music” way.
I hope the embed works, as it’s a playlist. If it doesn’t work (i.e., only the first track plays), go here to get the whole thing. I really enjoyed this work!
An incredibly hectic week is going on! The Wife had carpal tunnel surgery the other day, so I have to pick up the slack and actually do stuff around the house. Do you believe this crap? The horror!!!
Also, at work I’m in the long-delayed, long-planned process of moving my work area from one part of The Store to another. This will be lovely when I’m done, but right now I’m in the “All my crap is where it’s going so now I have to move around piles of my crap while I try to organize it and put it where it goes” stage of moving, which is not a fun part of the moving process to be in. But we’ll get there.
Meanwhile…as is my oft-used practice when I’m too busy to write about music, I drop in an overture by Franz von Suppe. Enjoy!
I hope that worked, I’m always a bit nervous about embedding video playlists.
Anyway: Carlos Simon is a composer who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. He completed doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has since enjoyed a varied career of composition and performance; according to his bio he is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University, and he served recently as Composer-in-Residence at what was the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I don’t know what Dr. Simon’s current status is regarding that, since the Kennedy Center has been one of many Grounds Zero for our current President being a complete and utter calamity, but that post was a great honorific at one time. Dr. Simon has had a number of his works recorded, and he has been performed by quite a few of the finest music ensembles in America.
The work featured above, Tales: A Folklore Symphony, is “a four-movement piece for orchestra that explores African American folklore as well as Afrofuturist stories.” Dr. Simon’s website has an entire page devoted to this work, so I recommend going there for more! He even provides a perusal copy of the score which you can explore virtually as you listen. It’s a fascinating, inventive, energetic, and emotional work that plays out fascinatingly over its four movements.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to his work, but pleasing. I’ve never heard a work of Stanford’s that left me thinking anything other than, “I’m glad I heard that.” This work is a good example. Stanford wrote six tone poems that he called “Irish Rhapsodies”, and this is the fourth of those. It is subtitled “The Fisherman of Lough Neagh”, and what a wonderful work it is–brooding and melodic and, in the end, just wonderfully triumphant.
As I was listening to this work, I read that George Bernard Shaw criticized Stanford’s music as lacking passion. I’m not sure what Shaw was listening to when he said that, because it sure as hell wasn’t this.
Jonathan Bailey Holland is a composer originally from Flint, MI who is currently the Dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. According to his bio, he has had music performed by ensembles all over the world, and he has taught at a number of universities as well as at many music festivals and arts schools. And like many of the other composers in this ongoing mini-series of mine, I never heard of him until now. I have thus far only heard the work presented below, so I can’t discuss Dr. Holland’s general approach, but this work is minimalistic and haunting in its evocative use of a very small ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion) and its use of moody dissonances throughout. The work is chillingly meditative, befitting its title: The Clarity of Cold Air. This work does seem to me to fit the mood of the streetscape photo I posted the other day….
I couldn’t decide which of three pieces to feature today, so I said to myself, “Why limit myself to one?” That’s right, you get all three.
Composer and flautist Valerie Coleman has had a deeply impressive career already. A native of Louisville, KY, Coleman was steeped in music from an early age, and her trajectory seems to have mainly pointed in one direction her entire life, as far as I can tell: up. She has been an accomplished performing flautist as well as a highly-regarded composer; her work Umoja–which began as a work for woodwind quintet but then was re-arranged by the composer for many varying ensembles–eventually became the first work performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra by a living Black woman composer. Honestly, I’m not even going to try to sum up Coleman’s life; for more on her, I highly encourage visiting her official website. I’m just going to feature some music.
First, we have a work for an ensemble I’ve never encountered before: the flute choir. The piece is called Juba, and according to Coleman’s site, “JUBA for flute choir gives homage to its namesake: a rhythmic dance found in the origins of both African-American and West African cultures.” It is certainly rhythmic and dancelike…and the melding of various tonal colors of different kinds of flutes creates a unique kind of magic here.
Next is a work that is obviously inspired, at least in part, by the example set by Aaron Copland. Coleman provides a fanfare for brass and percussion, called Fanfare for Uncommon Times. That certainly captures the era in which we live, doesn’t it? Also from her site:
It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.
Finally, what is likely Coleman’s most well-known and performed work to date, the afore-mentioned Umoja. Subtitled “Anthem of Unity”, I found this work challenging and contemplative and moving as I listened to it several times in the last few days alone. The notes on Coleman’s site are well-worth reading:
In its original form, Umoja, the Swahili word for Unity and the first principle of the African Dispora holiday Kwanzaa, was compose a simple song for women’s choir. It embodied a sense of ‘tribal unity’, through the feel of a drum circle, the sharing of history through traditional “call and response” form and the repetition of a memorable sing-song melody. It was rearranged into woodwind quintet form during the genesis of Coleman’s chamber music ensemble, Imani Winds, with the intent of providing an anthem that celebrated the diverse heritages of the ensemble itself.
Almost two decades later from the original, the orchestral version brings an expansion and sophistication to the short and sweet melody, beginning with sustained ethereal passages that float and shift from a bowed vibraphone, supporting the introduction of the melody by solo violin.
There’s more there, go read it…but listen to Umoja. This is music as balm for the soul.
Oh, is THIS piece a “banger”, as the kids say! (A really good song is a banger now. Up ’til now, if you said “banger” to me, I’d have assumed you were talking about a British breakfast sausage.) Composer Kevin Day‘s Concerto for Wind Ensemble is a thrilling virtuoso showpiece that puts every section of the wind ensemble on full display. It is energetic and jazzy and rhythmic and lyrical, and it’s one of the most purely enjoyable pieces I’ve listened to as a new (to me) work in a long time. I have really enjoyed hearing this piece, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it and to Dr. Day’s music quite a bit moving forward.
From Dr. Day’s bio:
Dr. Kevin Day (b. 1996) is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary composer, jazz pianist and conductor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s leading musical voices, Dr. Day’s work is known as a vibrant exploration of diverse musical traditions from contemporary classical, cinematic, jazz, R&B, Soul and more. A unique voice in the world of classical music, Dr. Day takes inspiration from a broad range of sources, including romanticism, late 20th century music, jazz fusion and gospel. Across all areas, his work explores the complex interplay of rhythm, texture and melody across genres.
After several fruitful conversations with Dr. Cynthia Johnston Turner, director of bands at the University of Georgia, the concept for the Concerto for Wind Ensemble began to take form. We had talked about doing a potential commission for the UGA Hodgson Wind Ensemble, and ultimately the conversation led to the idea of doing a substantial work to further the wind band repertoire. I knew off the bat that I wanted to write something that reflected my upbringing as a young black man and the musical culture that I grew up in, which hasn’t always been represented in concert band music.
My experience and the inspiration for this work come from a world of various intersections. My father, born in West Virginia, was a hip-hop producer in the late 1980s who worked in Southern California, and my mother (also from West Virginia) was a gospel singer. During my childhood, I grew up listening to hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and gospel music. Simultaneously, I was learning classical music through playing in band, and later orchestra. I was playing jazz and gospel music on piano, while also playing classical music on euphonium and tuba. This dual learning environment had a huge impact on my musicianship and my development as a composer. While these words had been separated in my head when I was growing up, in this work I intentionally wanted to merge them together in new fusions, paying homage to my parents, the culture I grew up in, and to the wind band world.
What came from this concept is this Concerto for Wind Ensemble, a five-movement work for band that is my most ambitious composition to date, and a work that took almost two years to compose. The movements entitled Flow, Riff, Vibe, Soul, and Jam reflect the various musical styles that I have been immersed in. Vibe and Soul are specifically dedicated to my parents, without whom I could not have made it this far. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Turner and to the consortium members of this work, who believed in my vision and sought to bring this work to life. I’m happy to share this contribution and love letter to the wind band and to the culture.
Once again I note that the concert band and wind ensemble never seem to get the respect they are due as expressive music ensembles in this country and maybe beyond. Wind ensembles are typically seen as “student” groups, and professional ones are few and far between. I truly wish that would change, and works like Kevin Day’s Concerto for Wind Ensemble are a big reason why. This is fantastic music!
