Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Another new composer to me: Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee, who lived 1900 to 1964. I’m not sure what he is “best known” for, because his influence seems to be more behind-the-scenes than anything else, but McPhee did undertake some of the first serious study of the music of Bali, which he encountered when he and his wife moved there for several years (she was an anthropologist). McPhee brought that music back to the United States, where he shared it with Benjamin Britten, leading to several later works by Britten.

The work featured below, Tabuh-Tabuhan, is a three-movement work for orchestra with extensive percussion and two pianos. It’s apparently McPhee’s best known work, and having just heard if for the first time, I am amazed by its degree of color.

Here is a program note written by the composer himself (via):

Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936, and performed before the ink was barely dry by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had already spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technic. The title of the work derives from the Baliness word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat – the drum, a gong xylophone or metallophone. Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive.

Although Tabuh-Tabuhan makes much use of Balinese musical material. I consider it a purely personal work in which Balinese and composed motifs, melodies and rhythms have been fused to a symphonic work. Balinese music never rises to an emotional climax, but at the same time has a terrific rhythmic drive and symphonic surge, and this partly influenced me in planning the form of the work. Many of the syncopated rhythms of Balinese music have a close affinity with those of Latin American popular music and American jazz – a history in itself – these have formed the basic impulse of the work from start to finish.

To transfer the intricate chime-like polyphonic figuration of the gamelan keyed instruments and gong-chimes, I have used a ‘nuclear gamelan’ composed of two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel. These form the core of the orchestra.

In form, Tabuh-Tabuhan is more or less that of the classical symphony- there being three movements, Ostinatos, Nocturne, and Finale. There is no place here to point out all the purely Baliness motifs. The flute melody in the Nocturne is an entirely Baliness flute melody, taken down as played. The syncopated finale is based on the gay music of a xylophone orchestra which accompanies a popular street dance. This is heard in its most authentic form at the beginning of the work and given the grand treatment at the end.

Here is Tabuh-Tabuhanby Colin McPhee.

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A new composer to me! And thus, hopefully, to you.

One of my favorite eras of “national” classical music is the English music of the 20th century, starting with Holst and Vaughan Williams and continuing on to Britten, William Walton, and others. To that roster I now add Ruth Gipps. (Provisionally, thus far. I’ve only listened to two pieces of hers, after YouTube Music suggested a new album of her work the other day.)

Gipps lived 1921 to 1999, and she had a full musical life in her years: she founded two orchestras, composed fairly prolifically, and taught extensively. Her impact on British musical culture was such that she was appointed an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her work. And yet, her own compositions are mostly unknown. Perhaps this is because her style is Romantic and tonal in nature, and one cannot rule out simple sexism. Whatever the reason, Gipps’s work is only now starting to see some reappraisal, partly because of conductor Rumon Gamba’s ongoing series of recordings of her work.

This piece, the Coronation Procession, dates from 1953, several months before the official coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a fine work in a genre that has produced some stunning classics like the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance marches. Katherine Cooper of Presto Music writes:

It’s a little gem of a piece, relatively light on pomp and circumstance until the final stretch but brimming with colour, energy and excitement as Gipps evokes cavalry, fanfares and the poised elegance of the young queen with almost cinematic vividness. In lieu of the broad string themes which sit at the heart of similar works by Elgar and Walton, Gipps gives us a minor-key melody for her own instrument, the cor anglais (which features prominently in several works on the album) before the music swells to a suitably majestic climax as the Procession enters the Abbey.

Here is Coronation Procession by Ruth Gipps.

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I featured this piece years ago, reflecting on the fact that I performed it in the concert band at a music camp that I attended as a teenager. But in that post I didn’t write much about the piece itself. It’s called Chorale and Shaker Dance, and it was written by John Zdechlik. Zdechlik was a composer and bandmaster who wrote prolifically, and this particular piece has become a staple work in the literature for concert band and wind ensemble. It blends two main ideas–an original Chorale theme by Zdechlik himself, and the familiar tune “Simple Gifts”, comprising the “Shaker Dance”. The two melodies come and go, neither ever seeming to really settle in, as the mood seems to shift from light to dark, from open to mysterious, and back again, before everything comes to a triumphant conclusion.

Chorale and Shaker Dance was one of the first contemporary works for band I ever played. My high school band director, Mr. Roosa, was much more interested in marches and classical transcriptions than in original compositions, to the point that I do not think we ever performed a single contemporary work under his direction. Chorale and Shaker Dance was one of several pieces that first year at Bristol Hills Music Camp that really pushed open a new musical world for me. It’s always been a special piece to me for that reason.

Here is Chorale and Shaker Dance by John Zdechlik.

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I could write something about Vocalise by Rachmaninoff…or I could just get out of the way and let you listen to Vocalise by Rachmaninoff.

So, here’s Vocalise by Rachmaninoff.

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This week’s selection is stretching the definition of “tone poem” probably past the breaking point, as this piece is not orchestral at all; it was originally written for harpsichord but we’re going to hear it on piano. It’s by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French Baroque composer and musical writer who lived contemporaneously with J.S. Bach. And with that, you now know as much about Rameau as I do.

I heard this piece on the Open Ears Project podcast (which I highly recommend!). The Open Ears Project is kind of like my “Something for Thursday” series, only it’s a different notable person each week describing a particularly meaningful musical work. In this particular episode, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson discusses his experiences with Rameau in general and with this piece in particular. I really do recommend listening to the podcast for his thoughts. For this post, right here, suffice it to say that the piece is very fast, and very quick; it’s over in about two minutes and it really does seem to capture the energy, if not the exact sound, of a bunch of birds squabbling. There’s even a moment when the music stops, completely stops, for a second, as if the birds have just happened to all stop squawking and chirping at the exact same moment.

This is a tone poem, even if it comes nowhere near an orchestra. Here is Le Rappel des Oiseaux by Jean-Philippe Rameau.

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I suppose it’s something of a cliche: the composer who aspires to serious work and yet finds their greatest success in crafting music for the popular world. Such was the fate of Robert Russell Bennett, whose name will be well known to anyone well-schooled in the history of twentieth century American musical theater. Bennett worked for many long years as an arranger and orchestrator for the most famous Broadway composers: George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Frederick Loewe, among others. Bennett adapted the melodies written by Rodgers for the acclaimed television documentary series Victory at Sea, with Rodgers later admitting that Bennett “made his music sound better than it was”.

If you’ve ever attended a “Pops” concert where your local orchestra played a medley of selections from one or more of the great Broadway musicals of the mid-1900s, you’ll have heard Robert Russell Bennett’s work, whether you knew it or not. He was deeply skilled at this job, crafting wonderfully dramatic and musically consistent suites from melodies that weren’t his. This particular suite is one that I played in college, and in truth, it was my first real introduction to the music of Frederick Loewe. So much did I love these melodies that I later explored the musicals themselves, and found myself entranced with the particular magic that unfolded when Loewe’s tunes were wed to lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. We played this piece in the Symphony at the same time that I was becoming mildly obsessed with Arthurian literature, so of course later that year I watched the film version of this particular musical. Camelot is…well, it’s a stretch to call it any kind of a classic, in all honesty. It feels oddly bloated and somehow kind of lifeless on the screen, no matter how gamely Richard Harris throws himself into his work. It’s an odd duck of a film, and I’m told that the stage show was pretty hit-or-miss as well.

But oh, those songs. Those amazing, wonderful songs…and this wonderful suite. Here is the Suite from Camelot, original music by Frederick Loewe, and arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.

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Dame Judith Weir is a British composer with whose work I am entirely unfamiliar except for the present work, which I just heard for the first time the other day. But my lack of knowledge of Weir’s music shouldn’t be taken as any kind of statement of her skill, because her work is apparently of sufficient renown in the United Kingdom that Queen Elizabeth II actually named her Master of the King’s Music, a post which is analogous to a Poet Laureate but for composers. Weir held this post for a ten year term which just ended earlier this year. (Her successor, named by King Charles III, is Errollyn Wallen, whom we’ll investigate another time.)

The welcome arrival of rain is a work Weir wrote under commission by the Minnesota Orchestra. Her inspiration was the arrival of the monsoons on the Indian Subcontinent, and the joy with which the rains are seen when they come. Weir writes:

This profuse and exuberant piece arose out of bare beginnings; a scale passage followed by a simple melody. Whilst I composed it, as the notes and the pages multiplied, I began to think of a comparison with the arrival of the monsoon in India, when aridity is pierced by life-giving rain; and humans, animals and vegetation revel in sudden activity and fertility. Although the monsoon is expected yearly, its arrival is always joyously surprising. The music¹s title was inspired by a passage from the 18,000 verse Hindu text, Bhagavata Purana ( quoted in the score.)

A 6-phrase scale pattern is heard at the beginning of the piece in highly compressed forms; in rushing passages for the winds and as chords for the solo strings. Then an 8-phrase melody is heard in a lush and spacious version where strings predominate above horns and trumpets. From here on, these two melodic sources are alternated as the basis of melody and harmony, right up to the utterly energetic culmination where both melodies are heard together with their respective variations; there follows a gentle, rainy coda. A prominent solo for the drum section (rototoms, tomtoms and timpani) starts in the middle of the piece and reinforces the ever-growing energy of the music.

Here is The welcome arrival of rain by Dame Judith Weir.

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Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer whose life forms one of the better What ifs of music history. He was one of those composers who, being born in the late 19th century (1884, to be specific), learned and came of age while American music was still struggling to move beyond its European influences. American classical music would not really start to come into its own until European Romanticism was firmly on the wane, and American factors like jazz would arise. Griffes was enormously talented and his own influences seem to have been the kind of mystical impressionism found in the work of composers like Scriabin, as well as the sound world of the French impressionists like Debussy and Ravel. Sadly, Griffes was struck down at the young age of 35 when the Spanish flu pandemic swept the world. The music of his that survives is often fascinating and suggestive of what might have come to be had he lived to the fullness of his gifts.

The current work, The Kairn of Koridwen, is a chamber work intended for an unusual ensemble: one flute, two clarinets, two horns, piano, harp, and celeste. Since Kairn was composed as a “dance-drama”–I assume that means a ballet–it’s surprising how long the work is, but listening to it, it never feels overlong. Griffes gets a lot of color and almost mysticism out of his material and his scoring for that small ensemble. The work is downright dramatic at times, and never less than fascinating. Here is The Kairn of Koridwen by Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

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First of all, Happy October! October is the best month, and on this topic I will hear no debate.

Now, onto some music. This one I came upon by happenstance: I’m on vacation today and tomorrow (I’ve been on vacation since last Friday, actually), but The Wife had to work today, so I’m up but I’m staying home while she’s off to the office. But my car was parking her in! So out I went to move my car so she could get out…and this piece was on WNED at that moment. I only heard about ninety seconds of it, but I was intrigued, so I made note of the title and looked it up on YouTube. Now I’m sitting here finishing up my first cup of coffee while I listen to Ouverture bardique by Ferdinand Ries.

Who is that, you ask? Well, Ries is yet another of those common figures I like to feature here: composers of talent whose work may not be good enough to earn a spot in whatever “Musical Pantheon of Greatness” we’re celebrating, but whose work is too good to merit the obscurity into which it has fallen. Ries was a contemporary of Beethoven’s, living 1784 to 1838, but he wasn’t just a contemporary of Beethoven’s: he was an associate of the great master’s, actually serving for a time first as a pupil of Beethoven’s and later as his secretary and copyist. I assume that as a copyist it fell to Ries, at least in part, to decipher Beethoven’s manuscripts and put things in order as to create actually playable sheet music. In the annals of art preservation, not enough credit is given to Beethoven’s copyists. I mean, look at this–we’re talking seriously heroic work here.

Ries turns out to have been one of those composers who didn’t have to really wait for obscurity. He worked hard and had a modestly successful musical life, but he never heard a number of his later works performed, and his own passing at the age of 53 wasn’t even noted by the music publications of his day. But again, I listen to this and think, “Does he really deserve to be forgotten?” This overture, a concert work not written to introduce a dramatic piece, starts off with a typically “muscular” intro, common to the classical overtures of the time, but then it goes to very interesting places. No Rossini-style overture, this–Ries’s piece is thoughtful and exciting, and it’s also orchestrally interesting when you notice the degree to which Ries has given some of his most fascinating material to the harps. So here’s a work that is deeply classical in its conception, but you can feel the Romanticism whispering around the edges.

I liked this piece a great deal, and I hope you will, too. Here is Ouverture bardique by Ferdinant Ries.

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Well, an apology of sorts is needed here: I had a new-to-me piece cued up and ready to go, but I wanted to give it a few more listens before I actually posted it, and then I lost track of that during a pretty hectic bunch of days recently. So…if you’ve been around a while, you know what that means. Here’s Franz von Suppe, with his Boccaccio Overture! This actually is one of his overtures that I know quite less well than some of the others, but it’s typical von Suppe, sparkling and delightful.

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