Continuing our exploration of classical music that is inspired by water, in one context or another, we have a monumental masterpiece by Claude Debussy.
I’ve never had the easiest relationship with Debussy’s music. His approach to music from a place of tonal color-painting, with less emphasis on melody and on form, has generally kept him at arm’s length for me. I’ve generally found it difficult to engage with Debussy’s tendency to create musical mood through orchestral effect and color alone.
But…as I’ve engaged more and more with the visual arts in the last bunch of years, and engaged more and more with the abstract in the visual arts–even in photography!–I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the abstract impressionism in Debussy’s music. (Debussy famously disliked the label “impressionist” being applied to his music, but it seems to have stuck.) So we have this piece: La Mer, a three-movement tone painting in which Debussy paints in sounds and tones and chords his feelings regarding the sea.
Cascading fountain, Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens
Continuing our series exploring classical music about or inspired by water, in one way or another, we have one of the most evocative tone poems of all time: The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. Respighi lived 1879-1936, and his gift for using the orchestra for illustrative effect is nearly unparalleled. His music sings with pictorial clarity that recalls Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, and echoes Richard Strauss, albeit with an Italian flavor. His scores are shot through with brilliant light.
Fountains is perhaps a bit more introspective than Respighi’s other famous showpiece, The Pines of Rome, but it contains its own moments of showpiece brilliance. One device that Respighi uses frequently, to great effect, is his off-setting of the beat; he also makes great use of a “shimmering” sound in the strings. More than any other composer, Respighi’s music always seems to have a visible “sheen” to it.
Fountains is also in four movements, each representing one of Rome’s fountains at a different time of day. The opening movement depicts the Valle Giulia at dawn. Now enveloped in the suburbs north of Rome, the Valle Giulia was, during Respighi’s lifetime, a pastoral landscape. The orchestra gradually awakens, murmuring strings joined by plaintive oboes and English horn as cattle pass through the mists in the distance.
In the second movement, the majestic Triton Fountain on the Piazza Barberini springs to life in the morning light. The fountain was created by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and his work – and Respighi’s as well – was inspired by the story of the end of the flood from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “The ruler of the seas sets his trident aside, smoothes the billows, and summons the sea-blue Triton who towers up over the depths… and commands him to blow into his sounding shell and by his signal recall the waters and the rivers.”
The third movement represents what is undoubtedly the grandest of Rome’s fountains, the Trevi Fountain, at midday. Respighi’s majestic writing for brass over swirling strings and cresting waves of percussion captures the fountain’s sheer scale, with its central depiction of Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch.
The finale depicts the modest fountain in front of the Villa Medici, which sits atop a hill overlooking St. Peter’s, at dusk. Respighi’s orchestra provides the rich atmosphere of graceful birdsong, gentle evening breezes, and twinkling stars through a combination of sumptuous writing for strings and woodwinds and his use of percussion instruments such as the celesta and the orchestra bells. The work ends as gently as it began.
Here is The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Resphigi.
Here’s something I didn’t know until today when I was driving home: English composer Frederick Delius lived for a time in Florida in the 1880s, during which he managed a local orange grove while he studied with a noted organist in Jacksonville. From this stay arose one of Delius’s most popular works, The Florida Suite. We’re only concerning ourselves with one movement from the suite, because our focus in this series right now is music inspired by water.
The orange grove Delius managed was on the St. Johns River, which is the longest river in Florida, running over 300 miles from headwaters south of Orlando to its mouth near Jacksonville. The river runs parallel to the seacoast, and it’s actually a fascinating river to track on Google Earth, as it winds back and forth and into and out of large lakes along its path.
Since the St. Johns doesn’t have much elevation drop at all, its flow is generally slow and sometimes even ebbs with the shifting of the tides. Thus Delius’s work, which paints a tone picture of life along a slowly moving waterway. There is little drama here, just the slow life spent along a slow river.
A month or two ago when I was doing a series of music posts using music inspired by the moon, one post featured a work by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. As I seem to do whenever I find a new piece (new to me, anyway) by Einaudi, I always end up saying something like “I need to explore Einaudi’s music more!” And then I don’t, really, until the next time I’m looking for inspiration.
Which brings us to the current series, which is “Music inspired by water”.
Yes, I need to listen to the album this comes from, which is apparently highly regarded; it’s called In A Time Lapse. Yes, I need to listen to more Einaudi.
I haven’t found anything specific about this track, just its title, but it’s called “Waterways”, so that counts. Right? And it’s hypnotically beautiful. Kind of like a waterway.
Looking across the Niagara River Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/7.1, 1/1000sec, ISO 250
Continuing our self-guided tour of classical music inspired by water, we have perhaps one of the two greatest works ever directly inspired by a river (well, maybe three, depending on how strongly we consider Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen to have been inspired by the Rhine). The other work will surely show up in this series, but for now, we’ll stick with Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava, known to English-speaking audiences as The Moldau.
The work opens with a quiet shimmering that evokes the flow of Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic. Written as part of a cycle of tone poems evoking Smetana’s homeland, called Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”), Vltava is the most well-known of the group and is often performed on its own. Its main melody is one of the great tunes in all classical music, an earworm for the ages, but Smetana’s orchestration is marvelous throughout as he casts the work with sonic effects that evoke the flowing waters and the country through which it flows. Smetana himself wrote of the work:
“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”
Here is Vltava by Bedrich Smetana (in a particularly wonderful live performance).
Water Abstract Taken at Canalside, Buffalo, NY Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/5.0, 1/4000sec, ISO 500
This theme ought to yield some good things! That’s right: after completing an exploration of music inspired by the moon, we’re going to explore music inspired by water, in all its forms. And we’re going to start with a work premiered over 300 years ago, the usefully-titled Water Music by George Frideric Handel.
And maybe this isn’t the best place to start, because the work wasn’t actually inspired by water. Handel wrote it for the water…or rather, the boats upon it. Let me explain…no, is too much. Let me sum up.
In 1717, King George I decided to take a barge up the Thames in London, using the tide to propel the barge upstream before coming about for the return trip. The King wanted music, though, so he commissioned Handel to write some; this was performed on another barge that accompanied the Royal Barge on its journey. Some fifty musicians played Handel’s music on that other barge, and apparently many Londoners took to the water in boats and barges of their own to hear the music and pay homage to the King. This must have been quite a spectacle, and honestly, were I given the keys to Doc Brown’s DeLorean and told I could go back in time to witness one concert, the initial performance of Handel’s Water Music might well be the choice.
And the concert was very much a success: the King liked the piece so much he had it performed again on the return trip back down the Thames.
I’m not the best listener when it comes to Baroque music, but Handel and Bach are always exceptions. The Water Music is one of the most pleasant works I know: in its short movements over three suites, Handel deftly creates music of opulent delight and meditation in simple pleasure. As you listen to it, you may notice familiar themes throughout; the Water Music has provided a great deal of familiar music used for other things beyond some King’s barge journey. One movement was the theme music to The Frugal Gourmet, for instance.
Here is a wonderful original-instruments performance of Handel’s Water Music.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
