The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
OK, this is pretty cool. I’m not the biggest fan in the world of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but I suppose it’s iconic enough and this video is pretty neat: it’s a scrolling score of the piece. The YouTube channel has a lot of scrolling score videos if you want to see how some musical selections work. The channel is heavy on Bach, but Bach is great, so check it out!
Meantime, here’s Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
New to me is this work by Georges Enescu, Vox Maris. I know nothing at all about this work, or what the vocal element is singing about. While much of the Enescu that I have heard is heavily reflective of Enescu’s Romanian folk heritage, this work sounds almost entirely atmospheric and haunting, bordering on pure impressionism.
Here is Vox Maris.
I don’t know anything at all about this piece. I heard it while driving to work one morning last week, and I liked it quite a lot. It’s a dramatic and romantic miniature by Anatoly Liadov, called About Olden Times. Liadov is a composer I haven’t heard much at all, mainly because he appears to have mostly written “miniature” works, at least some of which may have been written with the intention of using them as part of longer works that never reached completion. Still, what little Liadov I’ve heard has been like what we have here: lyrical and potent pieces that manage to make their point in less time even than a typical Franz von Suppe overture. I am often drawn to the big-and-epic, but there’s something to be said for short-and-sweet, too.
Claude Debussy, like Hector Berlioz years before, won the Prix de Rome in his youth; and like Berlioz, he did not much care for the experience of living in Rome for the years required of winners of the prize. One good thing did come out of his time there: the two-movement symphonic suite Printemps, which is worth hearing as a signpost of what was to come as Debussy matured into his role as one of the leading exponents in music of French Impressionism. The entire work is one of sensation and feeling and impression. There are no melodies that linger in the ear, and the whole time of the piece, it seems to be leaning toward a certain type of song that never arrives. I often find this sense of direction-without-destination in Debussy, and it’s a large part of why I often find it hard to really respond to his music, as lush and wonderful and evocative as it often is.
Here is Printemps by Claude Debussy.
What a dramatic work this is! Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini is based on a story from Dante’s Inferno, and as such, you can imagine how volatile a piece of music it is. The story being illustrated is a tragic one involving a heroine named Francesca da Rimini, who is condemned to Hell along with her illicit lover, where their torments are many and varied. It’s not hard to understand how Tchaikovsky came to relate strongly to this story, given what a disaster his own love life was. This work is powerful and illustrative, with little of Tchaikovsky’s usual, celebrated lyricism. This is a dark work and a fascinating listen.
Sorry to be so late with this, but I heard the last minute or two of this work yesterday morning while I was driving to work, and I wanted to hear the rest of it before I played it here. It is a concert overture by Scottish Romantic composer Hamish MacCunn, titled Land of the Mountain and the Flood. It is a full-on Romantic depiction of the wilds of Scotland at the time, rugged and mountainous and lyrical. This is the music of adventuring bands of claymore-wielding Highlanders as they roam through the lochs and glens.
Charles Martin Loeffler is one of those late-Romantic American composers of whom relatively little is heard nowadays, mainly because their music tends to be too derivative of European traditions, although this is likely unfair in Loeffler’s case. His European bona fides are well established, however, by virtue of the fact that he was born near Berlin and moved around Europe a good deal before emigrating to the United States in 1881, when he was twenty. His music apparently abounds in unusual instrument pairings and interesting sounds, especially late in his career when he became interested in jazz. (I’m getting all this from Wikipedia, by the way. I’m being honest when I say that I know nothing about the man.)
Loeffler’s A Pagan Poem is a dramatic work indeed, based on a work of Virgil. Apparently he did not mean the work to literally tell the story but convey some of its emotion. I can’t speak to his level of success there, but this is a powerful and emotional work.
Here is A Pagan Poem.
I’ve featured this before, of course, because Alexander Borodin is a relatively newly-discovered favorite composer of mine. But I find myself returning to this work often, not only because of its beauty but because of its depiction of two groups of people, traveling opposite directions on the same road, meeting each other and spending a bit of time before departing again as peacefully as they met.
Borodin described the work thusly:
In the silence of the monotonous steppes of Central Asia is heard the unfamiliar sound of a peaceful Russian song. From the distance we hear the approach of horses and camels and the bizarre and melancholy notes of an oriental melody. A caravan approaches, escorted by Russian soldiers, and continues safely on its way through the immense desert. It disappears slowly. The notes of the Russian and Asiatic melodies join in a common harmony, which dies away as the caravan disappears in the distance.
Here is In the Steppes of Central Asia.