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!
Tuesday Tones
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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The Tones of Tuesday
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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The Tones of Tuesday
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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Tuesday Tones
It’s been fascinating, looking back a hundred years at the classical music that was brand new in 1925, one hundred years. I’m not quite done with this little project yet, but I’ve had an almost avant-garde piece, a piano concerto steeped in jazz and Tin Pan Alley, a sensuous Spanish ballet, and now, a work that seems like an updated version of Antonin Dvorak.
Leoš Janáček was almost exactly that: like Dvorak, he was a Czech composer who was deeply inspired by the folk dances and rustic melodies of the rural lands of that region. The two men were contemporaries for most of their lives: Dvorak lived 1841 to 1904, while Janáček lived 1854 to 1928. Janáček was influenced heavily by Dvorak, but later in his life he turned to the folk songs of his country, deriving much more literal inspiration from them than even Dvorak did. The result is music with a much more rustic tone than Dvorak’s, and Janáček’s Lachian Dances, which we hear today, seem a direct answer to, and extension of, Dvorak’s famous Slavonic Dances.
The Lachian Dances were actually an early work of Janáček’s, but he reworked the piece and re-issued it in 1925, hence its presence here. Listening to it now, it is clearly firmly rooted in the 19th century…but with key differences that make it feel much more earthy and clear. This is music that reflects the 20th century’s post-Romantic insistence on real life, and it is a delight to hear.
Here are the Lachian Dances by Leoš Janáček. I found this work an absolute joy.
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Tuesday Tones
Continuing our brief survey this month of classical works that debuted one hundred years ago this year, in 1925, we have one of George Gershwin’s major works, and one that gives some clear idea of the direction Gershwin was moving as a composer. The Concerto in F, as it is officially titled, teems with jazzy, urban energy. It feels like what it is: a more structured and more compositionally-assured successor to works like Rhapsody in Blue, where the musical structure is simple to the point of being almost absurd. The Concerto is still a work of youth, with compositional imperfections, but when heard in context you can clearly see Gershwin’s development from a genius of melodies toward being a genius composer. More on this here.
The Concerto follows the traditional form, being in three movements of the fast-slow-fast variety. Opening with four sharp timpani strikes, the temptation might be to compare this piece to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which also starts with four taps on the timpani. Gershwin is doing something much more overtly energetic here, which suits his background; his ongoing use of wonderful melodies loads the work with propulsive energy. The work never seems to lose its dancing nature, even if the nature of that dance is at times playful and at times sultry and seductive.
This performance, featuring soloist Wang Yuja, is conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the recently retired conductor of the San Francisco Symphony who was once, in his own musical youth, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic.
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Tuesday Tones
Continuing our look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago, we have a work for solo piano that was written in 1925. Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965, and he was a largely self-taught composer and performer who found himself heavily in the avant-garde school. It’s a roughly five-minute piece in which the pianist never touches the keyboard. Instead, the performer reaches into the string chamber and manipulates the strings directly through various means: brushing the hand over them, plucking them, and dragging the nails of a finger along them. The effect is otherworldly and haunting; it almost sounds like the kind of atmospheric soundscape-type music that is often heard during old science fiction movies and horror movies of all eras. Here is a good post with more information on this eerie, haunting work.
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Tuesday Tones
I was trying to come up with a theme for this month’s Tuesday selections, since themed groupings are fun and this month is good because it has five Tuesdays instead of the usual four. (Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if it’s more frequent for a month to have four Tuesdays or five….) So, what we’re going to do is look back one hundred years! Every Tuesday Tones work this month is a piece that premiered in 1925. We’re basically looking at where classical music was a century ago.
We’ll start with a piece I actually featured a year ago! But it’s a good piece, and I have no problem featuring good works more than once, so let’s listen again to Manuel de Falla’s wonderfully sensual, exotic, and fiery ballet El amor brujo. The ballet tells the story of a woman who is haunted by her dead husband’s ghost as she goes to marry another, and it really is one of the few outright sexual works of classical music that I know. I always have difficulty when people describe specific works as “sexy” or “sexual”; most times I just can’t hear it in that music, which inevitably leaves me to wondering if I’m not…well look, you know what I’m getting at. Ravel’s Bolero is often mentioned as a sexual and erotic work, and yet every time I hear it, I want to ask the people citing that one just how boring their sex lives really are.
But I digress. Let’s get to the music. This ballet is by turns energetic, gorgeous, moving, exciting, and downright sensual. I love this aspect of the music of a century ago.
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Tuesday Tones
Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was a prominent 20th century voice in American music, as well as gay art. He explored homosexual themes in his work, which was strongly modernist to the point of being avant-garde at times. He was heavily influenced by Asian music and Asian sounds, and he incorporated those sounds and tonalities into much of his own work. Harrison was one of the most important gay musicians of the last century, and he was open during his life about the influence his own homosexuality had on his art and how it informed much of what he had to say through his art. How difficult that must have been, even as he watched acceptance of homosexuality slowly, ever so painfully slowly, grow in America. And that struggle has by no means ended.
Today’s work, Pacifika Rondo, features that fascination with Asian sound. Here are some notes I found about it (via):
British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.
For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.
In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.
The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.
Like many modernist works, it is a fascinating listen, a study in pure musical color and mood.