Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

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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I was going to launch my next series of themed music selections today, but I had to be up at 4am for work (an unusual early start for a special project that had to be done prior to open) and then when I got home I had to help take Carla to the vet (a likely urinary tract infection, she has meds now and is resting), so the brain power is not at its highest right now. So, today instead I share a movie theme that we heard on WNED on the way home from the vet: Rachel Portman’s lush and beautiful theme to Emma (1996). Not much else to say here…it’ll probably and hopefully be an early bedtime this evening!

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OK, I think we’re going to wrap up the short survey of classical works that either appeared, or were composed, in 1925, thus giving us an idea of where classical music was one hundred years ago. (I’m not bored of the topic at all, but there’s another one I’m wanting to explore, so time to move on!)

One of the great symphonists of the twentieth century was the Russian-Soviet master Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote fifteen symphonies over the course of his prolific musical life, and taken together they form a fascinating picture of the musical and artistic life that was possible during the Soviet Union. Shostakovich, like all artists in those regimes, had to walk a tight rope of expressing himself in his art while also pleasing the masters in charge of everything, and no, he was not always successful on either score.

I always find Shostakovich’s music more appealing than his contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev’s. I’m not really sure why; perhaps it lies on Shostakovich’s tendency to a starker sound and his sometimes satirical, if not outright sarcastic, tone. In some of his works there is an outright tone of mockery going on. For some this can date his work, but for me it depicts something fascinating. Among the standard emotion there is real humor in Shostakovich’s music, even if it tends to be dark humor, the kind of humor that is whispered in the background lest someone in authority hear.

Shostakovich completed his first symphony in 1925 (though it was not actually premiered until 1926). He was only 19 years old when he wrote it, and it is in some ways a student piece. The work’s orchestration is particularly interesting; Shostakovich employs interesting instrument mixes throughout, such as starting the symphony with a duet between a trumpet and a bassoon. A piano is used in the work, not as a soloist, but as a part of the orchestral tableau. I always find something rather refreshing about listening to Shostakovich, which I suppose springs from my main temperament when it comes to Russian music: with Shostakovich you get the Big and the Epic, but not necessarily the Giant Sweeping Heart-on-their-Sleeve TUNE that you get with the Tcaikovskys and the Borodins and the Rachmaninoffs of the world.

Here is the Symphony No. 1 in F minor by Dmitri Shostakovich.

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Continuing my small survey of the classical music of 1925, one hundred years ago, we have a work by one of the most interesting composers of the 20th century. George Antheil is mainly known as an “avant-garde” composer, and in keeping with that label he composed a great deal of experimental music that made use of mechanistic sounds, as he was initially fascinated by the sounds of industry. He wrote a work called Ballet mecanique, which calls for, among other things, sixteen player pianos. Antheil wasn’t just about sonic experiment for the sake of sonic experiment, though; he would later find work scoring films in Hollywood, and this work required a more traditional tonal hand. How traditionally tonal he was is for the listener to determine.

A Jazz Symphony is Antheil’s work from 1925. The work, which premiered at the same concert as Ballet mecanique, created quite the stir in 1925, but to our ears now it sounds like exactly what it claims to be: a work for orchestra that is deeply steeped in jazz. American music was at the time starting to embrace jazz as more than just a “Tin Pan Alley” kind of thing, and Antheil was part of the first wave of such composers.

(An interesting footnote on Antheil, who is mainly known as a composer: he worked during World War II with actress Hedy Lamarr to co-invent a new radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that would not be subject to Axis frequency jamming.) 

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UPDATE: Apparently my fingers weren’t doing things right when I wrote this post, as I came up with two different spellings of “Respighi”. This has been fixed. Weird how some words and names just defy our fingers, for those of us who type quickly in an untrained fashion!

Concluding (or maybe just continuing, I haven’t decided yet) our rather capricious look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago is another work that arrived in 1925. While I had never heard this piece before, I am familiar with the composer: Ottorino Respighi, the Italian composer of such spectacular orchestral showpieces as The Pines of Rome. This work, Rossiniana, is a four-movement orchestral suite that derives from four piano pieces written by Giacomo Rossini. If Rossiniana sounds much less “modern” than we would expect for a work from 1925, that’s the reason: Respighi’s source material dates from the 1850s and 1860s.

That’s a useful reminder, I think: art is often as much about looking back as it is about looking ahead. Respighi updates these salon pieces by Rossini, orchestrating them with his own flair for orchestral writing. The result is something that is somehow old and a little modern. Maybe just a little modern.

Here is Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi.

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