Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Today we’ll conclude my exploration of music inspired by the moon, with a work I had no idea at all existed until just the other day when I was searching for a piece to wrap this mini-series up with…and as soon as I saw it, I realized that it’s one of the most obvious things in the world, and I should have assumed it existed somewhere. American composer Eric Whitacre, who has written a lot of wonderful choral music (and whom I have featured on this site before!), wrote a setting of the words from the iconic children’s book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. I mean, you don’t get more iconic than that, do you?

(OK, though, before I present Mr. Whitacre’s piece, here is one of my favorite all-time bits from The Simpsons:

“Don’t make me tell you again about the scooching!”

OK, back to the real business at hand….)

Throughout this series I’ve heard a lot of interesting music about the moon, and it’s interested me to see the varying emotions the moon seems to inspire. For me, though, the moon is always a welcome sight, and its silver light always brings me a feeling of peace. That’s what Mr. Whitacre’s piece evokes for me most of all, and he captures the profound feeling of heading into rest that the book always made me feel back when I was reading it aloud to a very young daughter.

There’s a lot more “Moon Music” out there, obviously! This may well be an idea I revisit someday…but for now, here is Eric Whitacre’s “Goodnight Moon”.

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Today a long tone poem by composer Michael Kamen, who is famous for his film scores (Highlander, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Three Musketeers) as well as his work with many rock musicians, often providing orchestrations for their songs that required such services. One notable entry in this part of his oeuvre is the orchestra work on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall. Kamen had a wonderfully engaging musical voice, and his untimely death in 2003 when he was just 55 was a deeply hurtful blow to the music world.

This piece is called (in keeping with our ongoing “Moon” theme!) New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms. Kamen cited as his inspiration for this work the Anasazi Tribe who flourished in the American southwest, and later disappeared, close to a thousand years ago. The piece is by turns contemplative and extroverted, rhythmic and lyrical, dance-like and song-driven. It’s very dramatic music with a lot of ebb and flow and contrasting musical textures thoughout.

The work’s title is an inversion of a phrase used sometimes to describe a very real astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, during a new moon, when the visible part of the moon is just the barest sliver, the rest of the moon can be faintly seen in the reflected glow of the earth. This is typically called “Earthlight”, but another, possibly more poetic, term for it is “Old moon in the new moon’s arms”. Kamen seems to have intended his inverted title to hint at greeting the future in the light of the past.

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Continuing, but not completing, our exploration of classical music inspired by the Moon, we have a work that I have been waffling on whether or not to include…because it is not inspired by the Moon, even though it always shows up on such lists because it’s one of the heavy-hitters when it comes to “Moon music”. It’s one of the most famous pieces in all of classical music, to be honest. It is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, almost always called “the Moonlight Sonata”.

Why on Earth would I possibly exclude the Moonlight Sonata from a featured list of music inspired by the moon? Because there is no evidence at all that Beethoven was ever inspired by the moon when writing it. He didn’t name it “Moonlight”, after all; a poet named Ludwig Rellstab offered the appellation Moonlight Sonata in 1832, after Beethoven was already dead. For Beethoven, who didn’t do much with so-called “program music”, it’s doubtful that he had any particular scene or inspiration in mind for the sonata at all. He may have heard the comparison of the sonata to “moonlight” prior to his death, but that’s a tall order and isn’t supported by any actual evidence.

We’re also left with the work’s three-movement structure, typical for piano sonatas. If the whole sonata is called the Moonlight Sonata, does that mean that all three movements are to be taken as redolent of moonlight? I don’t know. The first movement, which breaks with sonata tradition in being slow and lyrical (usually the opening movements are the fast ones), is the best candidate for “moonlight”…but then there’s the second movement, a gentle and lilting minuet in triple time, which might also suggest moonlight in its graceful tones. And the third movement, which is stormy and even violent? Well, who knows…perhaps it’s the kind of moon that shines on a windy night at sea, or something like that.

All of this isn’t much of an exercise, anyway. Many musicians hate the idea of attaching extra-musical “meanings” to music that is inherently abstract, anyway, and if Beethoven had any particular point in mind, he surely would have written it in the margins of the manuscript. Or…maybe he wouldn’t. Beethoven was one of humanity’s towering artistic geniuses, clearly, but at the same time he was also a pretty strange man.

In the end, we’re left with the music. Is it really “moon music”? Maybe, maybe not. I lean toward “not”…but because of that name, we can’t really totally exclude it, either. As the founder of Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, once said, “(W)hat these austere critics fail to grasp is that unless the general public had responded to the suggestion of moonlight in this music Rellstab’s remark would long ago have been forgotten.”

Here is the Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, “Moonlight”, by Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Returning after several weeks to our series of music inspired by the moon, we have a work by Julian Anderson, a composer with whose works I am unfamiliar. One bio of Anderson I read provides this information:

Julian Anderson is one of the most talented composers of his generation and has been commissioned by organisations including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Born in London in 1967, he studied with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail and first came to prominence when his orchestral Diptych (1990) won the RPS Composition Prize in 1992.  Anderson has held Composer in Residence positions with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Cleveland and London Philharmonic orchestras, relationships which produced an impressive body of orchestral works including Stations of the Sun (1998, a BBC Proms Commission) and Eden (2005, Cheltenham Festival). Fantasias (2009), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, won a British Composer Award and The Discovery of Heaven (2011), a co-commission by the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Both works were recorded by the LPO live label.

The work in question is called The Crazed Moon, a work that seems to be mostly a series of tone clusters at first, but from which an eerie logic and even beauty emerges slowly:

As Anderson writes, The Crazed Moon ‘takes its title from a poem by W.B. Yeats, in which he describes a frightening vision of ‘the moon, crazed through much childbirth/ staggering through the sky.’ This image combined with the beautiful lunar eclipse seen in March 1996 provided the main starting point for a work for orchestra lasting about thirteen minutes, in one continuous movement. The other factor determining the threnodic character and funereal mood of the work was the sudden death in September 1995 of a composer and friend, Graeme Smith, at the age of only twenty-four. This piece is dedicated to his memory.’

(Julian Anderson)

 

‘This tragic occurrence dictated the nature of much of the piece: predominantly slow, with tolling bells, heavy chords, keening melodic lines, and climaxes not only of mourning but also of protest. But two things make its expressive course over its 13-minute duration unpredictable. One is the overall plan of the work, which like a film sequence cuts between different elements developing independently of one another. The other is the incorporation as a recurring musical idea of Graeme Smith’s initials, G.S., which in German note-names spell G and E flat (Es). These two notes make a bright major third, which whenever it is used, harmonically or melodically, stands out in the darker, atonal context, to poignant effect.’

(Anthony Burton, LPO programme note, 2011)

I found myself more and more entranced each time I played the work. I hope you will too.

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Yes, we’re still here! I’ve been posting more on social media lately than here, but a return to the longer-form thing is definitely in the offing. Basically the last several weeks have seen a whole bunch of things all come to a head at the same time: a hugely busy period at work as we prepped The Store for a visit from the folks whose name is on the front of the building, followed by my annual getaway with The Wife to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and then followed by a surgery for The Wife, which we hope will alleviate some pain and mobility issues that she has been suffering for a while now. And before that was an infamous violent act that dominated the American conversation for a bit (I still haven’t figured out if I want to say anything about that at all in this space).

I’m off from work all this week, partly a vacation and partly a LOA to help care for The Wife in her post-surgery existence. (Oh, she’s doing great, by the way, thanks for asking!) Hopefully this will translate also into a bit more time to pivot my brain back toward some creativity and expression. We’ll get back to my “Moon Music” theme for this series, probably next week. For now, though, here’s a piece I have definitely featured here before and have shared on social media, but I don’t think I’ve shared it here in a while. It’s the concluding track from Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1997 rom-com As Good As It Gets.

Hans Zimmer’s music seems to be achieving higher and higher regard these days, and it definitely seems like the younger set is embracing him as basically their generation’s John Williams. I definitely love a lot of Zimmer’s work, though my John Williams is actually John Williams, so there’s that. I also am not as big a fan of Zimmer’s shift the last decade toward atmospheric music and less melody-driven work. I also miss his scoring of quieter, more intimate films like this. If there was to be a rom-com based in some weird way on my life, I’d want it to sound like this. I love when rom-coms set in NYC use music like this, that make the place sound like the kind of place for Parisian love-magic can happen amidst all the bustle.

Here, from As Good As It Gets, is “The Greatest Woman On Earth”, by Hans Zimmer.

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My long string of overly busy, and just this side of crappy, days continues. So, here is Rossini: the overture to La Cenerentola.

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Lots going on right now, so I’m putting the Moon Music series on pause. Here, as is my tradition when I haven’t had time to vet something new, is an overture by Franz von Suppe.

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Continuing our explanation…wait, that’s not right…our exploration of musical works inspired by the moon, we have today a short piece my Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. I have featured Einaudi’s music here a couple of times previously, and each time I’ve noted (a) my general lack of familiarity with his music, and (b) my desire to learn more about it. Have I done so? Well…no. Not yet. I should probably go through my archives here and actually learn more about the music of the many composers of whom I have said something along the lines of, “I don’t know much about them but I should learn more!”

Anyway, this piece, called simply “Full Moon”, is just one piece in a larger work that is itself part of a larger sequence of works! Einaudi released a series of seven albums, called Seven Days Walking, with each album being a musical summation of one of the days. The idea of the project is musically depicting the same walk undertaken on seven different days, and noting the similarities and the differences that come from interacting with the same landscape in different conditions at different times. “Full Moon”, a minimalist piano-violin-and-cello work, is from Seven Days Walking: Day Three. The piece recurs in several of the subsequent albums in the series, slightly varied each time.

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Continuing a short investigation into classical music inspired by the moon, we have a piece by Benjamin Britten. The Four Sea Interludes are taken from his opera Peter Grimes, which is in turn one of Britten’s most well-known works. Grimes has endured in the operatic repertoire ever since its premiere, and the Four Sea Interludes have taken their own place in the orchestral repertoire. As interludes, these four pieces are derived from the incidental music Britten wrote to bridge scenes and allow scene changes to take place behind the curtain. The composer did need to do some extra work to convert the interludes, which lead straight into their new scenes in the opera, into successful standalone works.

Though there are four “Sea Interludes”, I’m only including the third here today, because of its theme. Called “Moonlight”, it sounds soothing and meditative at first…but as one listens it becomes somehow more restless, until it ends on an unresolved chord. The pulsing underneath seems like the insistent lapping of waves against the shore, with drops of silvery moonlight breaking through the clouds.

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If the picture above doesn’t make our new post-series theme clear, we’re talking about Moon Music! Or, classical music inspired by the moon. Why did I land on this particular theme? Well…why not! I did a search for some pieces in this vein, and there’s some really nifty stuff out there, much of which I haven’t heard. So I’m kind of excited by this.

We’re going to start out with an aria by Antonin Dvorak. This, the “Song to the Moon”, is from his opera Rusalka, about a water spirit who falls in love with a mortal man. Obviously this love-match is not destined for an easy time of it. In Act I, Rusalka (our titular spirit) sees the Moon above and sings this aria to it, pleading the Moon to give the mortal man dreams of her. The music is sad and sensuous and deeply lyrical…and now I want to track down the entire opera and hear it. Dvorak’s operas have tended to languish in obscurity, mainly because their librettos are in the composer’s native Czech language, which most singers do not study.

Here is the “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, act I, by Antonin Dvorak.

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