Rossini, and the US Marine Band. That’s just a match made in Heaven.
Here’s the Overture to William Tell.
Tuesday Tones
Tuesday Tones
Today, a piece I really don’t like. But it is one of the best-known pieces of classical music ever composed, and last week–on the 7th, actually–marked the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. And as performances of a piece I don’t like go, this one’s really very good, and the camera work in this video is pretty terrific.
So here is Bolero by Maurice Ravel. I’ll have more to say about Ravel in future weeks. For years I refused to give him much of a chance, because of how much I disliked Bolero. And yes, I’ve realized belatedly how unfair that was.
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Tuesday Tones
Tuesday Tones
I’m growing more and more attracted to the abstract, I’ve found. I think part of this comes from the greatly-increased amount of time we’ve been spending in art galleries and museums, particularly the Buffalo AKG Museum, with its amazing collection of modern art. But this interest in the abstract is also tinging my music listening. Works like the one I feature today are really appealing to me of late.
Jeffrey Mumford is a composer currently (I think) living and teaching in Ohio. From the bio on his publisher’s website:
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions.
Awards include the “Academy Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.…
Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and served as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.
Mr. Mumford is published by Theodore Presser Co. and Quicklight Music.
I snipped out a long list of honors and accomplishments by Mr. Mumford, just to keep this post at a reasonable length, but do go read through it. He is a very accomplished musician.
This piece is called “a garden of flourishing paths”. From the YouTube page, I believe these comments are by Mr. Mumford himself:
a garden of flourishing paths was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Contemporary Music Forum/VERGE Ensemble to celebrate the 100th birthday of the distinguished American composer Elliott Carter. This work would also not be possible without the generosity of Philip Berlin, Otho Eskin, and Nancy Dodge. Special thanks also to composer Steve Antosca, Artistic Advisor of the VERGE Ensemble and Stephen Ackert, Head of the Music Department of the National Gallery of Art, for their vision and support.
The work is cast in eight short movements, each featuring a particular instrument or group of instruments.
The title for me evokes the space for which it was written (the West Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). In addition, it refers to the expressive character of the developmental paths taken by the instruments in relation to one another.
It has been my pleasure to have known Mr. Carter for many years since being a student of his during in the early 1980s. I am pleased to add my small piece to the many that were written to honor this marvelous creative artist.
Hearing the work the first time, I found it striking in its blend of colors–just look at that combination of instruments!–and the way melodies and rhythms seem to briefly emerge, without ever taking over or forming a complete thought. The effect seems to me to suggest the kind of experience one has when walking a garden path: hints of color and splashes of sound, each obscured, each only perceived around the periphery. A brilliant blossom appears, but only seen through the branches of a tree in front of it; a snippet of conversation wafts from around the next bush, and so on.
You know what? Here’s another piece by Mr. Mumford. I love this man’s sound! This is “through a stillness brightening”. (Non-capitalization of his titles seems to be a thing he does, not unlike e.e. cummings.)
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Tuesday Tones
Here’s a piece I heard last week on my drive home from work. I was immediately transfixed by its color and energy, to the point that I sat in my car in the driveway while it finished. The composer is Black American Jessie Montgomery, and the piece is called Starburst. It is written for string orchestra. It’s very short, only about three and a half minutes, but what a vibrant three and a half minutes they are!
Program notes (via):
Composer-violinist-educator Jessie Montgomery hails from New York’s Lower East Side, where her father managed a music studio. She was, in her words, “constantly surrounded by all different kinds of music.” Thus, her own compositions have drawn from many diverse influences, such as African-American spirituals, civil rights anthems, improvisational styles, modern jazz, film scoring, etc. From those early years, she developed, chiefly as a violinist, to receive degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University. In her professional performing life, Montgomery has been a member of the Providence String Quartet and the Catalyst Quartet. The latter began as a project of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which creates opportunities for African-American and Latino string players.
As a composer, Montgomery was the resident Composer-Educator for the Albany Symphony during the 2015-16 season. In addition she has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Composers Orchestra, the Sphinx Organization, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization. Her reputation has been spreading steadily, mainly in North America, beginning in New York City, Providence, and Boston, reaching out to Deer Valley, Utah; Miami Beach, Florida; Birmingham, Alabama; and Toronto, Ontario. Montgomery’s debut record album Strum: Music for Strings (including Starburst) was released on the Azica Records label in late 2015.
Starburst was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and premiered by its resident Sphinx Virtuosi in 2012. About it, Montgomery writes:
This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst, “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly,” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble that premiered the work, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.
Program Notes by Dr. Michael Fink © 2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Here is Starburst. Enjoy! Play it twice! You’ve got time, and it’s good!
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Tuesday Tones
Nkeiru Okoye was born in New York City in 1972 to a Nigerian father and an African-American mother. She graduated from Oberlin in 1993, which is the same year I graduated Wartburg College. Okoye is almost entirely contemporary with me. I am less than a year older than she is. According to the bio on her website, Okoye has had an already-amazing career as a composer…and I only heard a piece of hers for the first time yesterday.
Sigh. There is so much wonderful music out there to hear! Would that I could do just that, and nothing else. Well, writing too. And photography. And….
I found this piece almost entirely accidentally on YouTube, and I listened to it over my lunch break yesterday. It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever heard, containing a mixture of styles and genres and techniques that blend together into something wonderfully old and new. Looking up Okoye’s work and trying to learn what her compositional style is, I found this profile which includes this:
With an output containing a plethora of orchestral, band, choral, and chamber works as well as operas composed over a career spanning nearly 30 years, Dr. Okoye has written across nearly every musical medium. Her genre-bending compositions draw from Classical, Gospel, Folk, Jazz, R&B, and African diasporic music, and are often infused with African American improvisatory techniques.
I don’t know how much of this piece is improvisatory, but you can certainly hear all of those influences in this piece’s pages. I thought this was wonderful, and I hope you will, too.
Here is Black Bottom by Nkieru Okoye.
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Tuesday Tones
Yup, that’s what we’re calling this series now: Tuesday Tones, because it’s still going to be a music focus series, but it won’t just be tone poems. Not that it was before, really, because if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s put up boundaries for myself and then immediately break them, because boundaries are only fun when you’re breaking them, right? (I’m still going to use the “Tone Poem Tuesday” post tag, because my tags on this site are already out of control and adding new ones isn’t a great idea unless I really need to.)
Anyway, let’s listen to some music.
Wood Notes by William Grant Still is an orchestral suite of four movements: “Singing River”, “Autumn Night”, “Moon Dusk”, and “Whippoorwill’s Shoes”. The work was apparently inspired by poems by one Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, though I have as yet been unable to track down his actual poetry. The naturalistic writing in Wood Notes calls to mind similar approaches to depicting nature in music as Smetana’s Die Moldau, though the musical language here is pure Still, mingling the sound of spirituals with a decidedly American idiom.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
I’m thinking about renaming this weekly feature, in order to make it into a more broad focus on classical music, but more on that later when I’ve thought of a name that I like. Meanwhile, today I have a piece of chamber music by Marcel Tyberg.
Tyberg was an Austrian composer, born in 1893. He was not highly prolific, but he left behind several symphonies, some songs, and a few chamber and sacred works that survived when Tyberg gave his manuscripts to a friend while he was living in Northern Italy in 1943. How prescient he was: his mother, abiding by Nazi law, registered that she did, in fact, have Jewish blood. On that basis, Marcel Tyberg was deported to the camps. He died in Auschwitz, December 31, 1944.
His scores remained with a family who later settled in Buffalo, NY, where decades later a descendant found the music and brought it to Buffalo Philharmonic music director JoAnn Falletta. She describes what happened:
One day, maybe a couple of years after I became music director; I remember it was a terribly rainy day in Buffalo, and I got off the stage after rehearsal and standing at the door of my dressing room was this older gentleman, just drenched, wearing a raincoat, dripping water, carrying a shopping bag. I had never met him before.
It was Dr. Enrico Mihich [the son of Milan Mihich, the friend to whom Tyberg entrusted his scores]. He said, “I have to speak to you. It’s very important.” He was the kind of person, when he said it was very important, you listened to him.
We went into my dressing room. He told me that story. He said, I know this is wonderful music. It’s great music. It needs to be played. I’ve tried with every music director and they haven’t been able to do it.
I looked at the music and I knew why they said no. It was almost illegible. The score had been handwritten, the pages were frayed, pieces were missing. It was almost impossible to read this European handwriting.
I realized this was going to be a daunting project but there was something about his urgency. He said to me, “I’m not going to live much longer. This is my life’s mission to bring this music to life.”
And I thought, how could you not be moved by the belief in this composer that this man had?
Marcel Tyberg is a musical voice that maybe would have flourished in the 20th century had other impulses not included his in the millions of voices that were marked for silence. Listening to music from artists like this is important, I think, for a number of reasons. First, those voices should never have been silenced and if we can hear them now, even many decades later, I think that’s a worthy thing. And second? It’s just plain good music.
This is Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F major. A piano trio typically involves a piano, a violin, and a cello, and that’s the case here. The work is energetic and lyrical with a middle movement that puts me in mind of Borodin, with its songful introspection and its insistent drive. And it can only be heard now because a man took his friend’s music and fled Europe with it.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
I could also title this post “I listened to it, so now I’m gonna make you listen to it too!” Because it’s a piece whose existence I learned about after I watched a video on YouTube called “Reacting to One of the Worst Pieces of Classical Music Ever“.
“Ooooh!” thought I. “He’s gonna rip on Ravel’s Bolero!”
Erp…no. He did not.
What did he rip on?
A piece called The Battle of Prague by Frantisek Kotzwara.
You are now no doubt wondering just who on earth Frantisek Kotzwara is or was. And I’m here to help! Kotzwara was an itinerant musician who played viola and double bass in addition to composing, and he traveled all over Europe after being born in Prague. He eventually settled in England, where he lived out the rest of his life before dying peacefully in 1791, either 60 or 61 years of age.
When I say “died peacefully”, I’m being nice. I’ll leave the details to the reader to search out, but according to Wikipedia, Kotzwara was “one of the first recorded instances of death by erotic asphyxiation”.
And you thought the folks of the “powdered wig” era were a bunch of no-fun types.
The Battle of Prague was originally written for piano primarily, but apparently it includes secondary parts for violin, cello, and percussion. The work memorializes a battle that took place near Prague (obviously), and it falls into a kind of mini-genre of “battle music”, not unlike Wellington’s Victory, a fairly silly potboiler of a piece that gains almost all of whatever cachet it has by virtue of its having been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Well, Kotzwara was no Beethoven, and I have to admit that I found this work (it’s been orchestrated here) entertainingly silly in a way that the Beethoven work also possesses. It’s hard to describe. The tunes are relatively catchy, and there’s some surprisingly impressionistic work here for a piece written in Mozart’s day.
Could it actually be good?
Well…no. Not to me, anyway. But it’s also not bad in the worst way, either. Apparently, from what I’ve sussed out online, The Battle of Prague was quite a popular piece in its day and after, and it’s got a certain crowd-pleasing weirdness to it. It’s a weirdly fun little listen. Here, you be the judge!