Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

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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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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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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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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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.

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An old favorite, in two ways: first, because the music is obviously amazing, and second, because the accompanying animation is also amazing. Here is Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, as performed and animated for the Disney film Fantasia 2000.

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Today, a concerto: specifically, a trumpet concerto. This one was written by the great film composer John Williams, who has somehow over his incredibly busy years of scoring many films and maintaining a hectic conducting schedule managed to find time to compose concert works as well. The man is amazing. He just is!

This concerto is a strikingly dramatic work in a modernistic vein, and as is often the case with Williams’s concert works, the piece doesn’t have the ear-catching melodies that are almost always present in his film scores. This is not a criticism. In his concert music, Williams tends to let melody be more of an emergent thing than an obvious one; there is usually an improvisatory air to his concert music, which may spring from his days as a jazz pianist and a session musician before he fully transitioned to the life of a composer.

From the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s site:

Williams’s Trumpet Concerto was written in 1996 for The Cleveland Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Michael Sachs. The work was premiered by Sachs and The Cleveland Orchestra on September 26, 1996, under the direction of then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi. The debut of this significant addition to the trumpet repertoire garnered praise from the local press, with Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noting the concerto’s “dignified personality, soloistic variety and orchestral color.”

Here is the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra by John Williams. No Haydn concerto this, with a calm classical intro! The soloist is the first thing you hear, in starkly dramatic fashion.

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Igor Stravinsky is not a composer i know terribly well, and honestly, that bothers me a bit. More than a bit, really. Stravinsky is considered to be the major bridge composer between the Romantic era and the Modern one. His art has its roots in the 19th century, but most of his work is fully conceived in the 20th, but it’s not generally as hard to crack, in my experience, as is the work of other Modernists like, say, Schoenberg, Berg, and later avant garde voices like Cage. Stravinsky worked in recognizable forms, for the most part, and his ballet music–perhaps his most famous and familiar works–represent some of the most starkly dramatic work for stage dance ever written. The Rite of Spring actually provoked a riot at its premiere, so there’s that.

Written for a ballet that was in turn based on Russian mythology and legend, The Firebird is one of Stravinsky’s most enduringly popular works. It comes fairly early in his career, and thus he was only just starting his life-long evolution into full-on Modernism. (Born in 1882, Stravinsky died roughly five months before I was born in 1971!) The Firebird tells its story with startlingly evocative orchestral writing, and it is by turns exotic and suggestive, weaving a spell with sonic imagery that borders on the purely impressionistic. While I don’t know Stravinsky well as a whole, The Firebird has endured in the repertoire for a reason.

Also popular is one of the three shorter orchestral suites Stravinsky culled from the pages of the entire ballet. This suite, the middle of the three, was put together by Stravinsky in 1919, and despite his later insistence that the score was riddled with errors, it it the 1919 suite that has endured of the three suites he created from the entire ballet. I do recommend the entire ballet; it’s only about 45 minutes long, which does make me wonder why Stravinsky felt the need for abridgements at all.

Some of the moodier music in The Firebird would later serve as partial inspiration for composer Cliff Eidelman, when he was tapped to score Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

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