Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

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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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):

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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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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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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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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!

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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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