Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Sibelius' Second


The last two movements of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 in D. The magnificent finale begins at 5:50.

Last night Nat and I heard the Madison Symphony Orchestra play this work.

I guess that it's a testimony to the power and vivdness of this music that people have often felt a strong need to look for some extra-musical meaning for it. According to Michael Allsen's excellent notes for the MSO concerts, there is a long-standing story that Sibelius did confide a "program" for the symphony to a friend of his: "a vaguely defined set of impressions of Finnish culture and politics." Politics!? I find that it gives me images of far northern landscapes: magnificent wastelands of forest, rock, and ice. The anthem-like themes of the finale seem to cry out for words. The brass choir seems to be signing the praise of something or someone. But whom? What? Each listener must supply his or her own sacred object.

As Ayn Rand said in a very interesting if quirky essay, "Art and Cognition":
Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. The theme of a composition entitled “Spring Song” is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as “peace,” “revolution,” “religion,” are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waters” was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph—by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.
(HT for photo to the C. I. A.)

Monday, May 30, 2011

d'Indy: High on Mountain Air


I've been listening to Vincent d'Indy's Symphony on a French Mountain Air over and over lately. Here is the classic 1958 RCA recording of the first movement with Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer at the piano and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch.

What an adorable work it is! And it's not just pretty -- it has some depths to it!

I'm prejudiced, here, I must admit, because this work is about something that's dear to my heart: mountains, life in the mountains, and mountain-people.

All three movements are based on a single mountain folk song, though the first movement, roughly in sonata allegro form, has a secondary theme as well -- listen for it at 3:10, above. Liner notes sometimes quote music historian Julien Tiersnot concerning this body of traditional music:
The high mountains give to folk that become acclimated to their altitude something of the purity of their atmosphere. It seems as though there were in these mountain songs - they were generally songs of shepherds - something fluid, ethereal, a gentleness that is not found in folk songs of the plains.
I think I hear these qualities in this music. There is a another quality that d'Indy captures brilliantly: mountain life is tremendously stimulating. This comes out especially in the third and last movement (see below).

There are probably several reasons for this. The accelerated heartbeat caused by the thin air might be one. The spicy resinous tang in the air from coniferous trees is clearly another. And the air itself! It is thinner, and like the man said, is more pure: it holds less moisture and dust. There is less in it to filter out the sun's rays, so more of them hit you. On the other hand, water evaporates faster in the thin dry air. That is why mountain plants often have leaves that have evolved into thick pads or dwindled into needles -- like desert plants, and for the same reason: the plant is trying to avoid evaporation. On you, the effect of greater evaporation is a bracing feeling of coolness, at least on the parts of your skin that are shielded from the sun. Those that are not, are roasted with radiant energy. As you move about in the mountain light and air you experience a tingling barrage of sharp, shifting contrasts, so different from the muffling, lulling air of the plains. It wakes you up and raises your consciousness.

Is it a coincidence that the great drug producing regions of the world, whether the opium fields of Afghanistan or the marijuana patches of the Sierra Madre Occidental, are typically in the mountains? My friends the Tarahumara, famous for their use of peyote, are mountain folk. Mountains are naturally high, in both senses.

Here are the other two movements of the symphony:





Photos of d'Indy suggest, by the way, that, like Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, and this man, he was mildly acromegalic.

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Rhapsody in Blue


The other night we watched Rhapsody in Blue (dir. Irving Rapper, 1945). It was really quite good.

It was a special treat to see Oscar Levant playing himself. He must have written many of his own lines: "I've got a date with my insomnia [trans.: it's time to go to bed]" "If it wasn't for Gershwin I could've been a pretty good mediocre composer." And then there is:
Oscar: If I had your talent, I'd be a pretty obnoxious fella. What do you call yourself?
George: George Gershwin. It's my real name.
Oscar: Mine's Oscar Levant. I'm thinking of changing it.
Levant's style of humor is unique. Generally, it's the sort of thing that is usually called "self-deprecating," but with a difference. Usually one deprecates one's own intelligence and virtue. In his case, it is mainly his own happiness and health that he deprecates. His trademark is the wry comment on his multitudinous neuroses.

A few years ago I purchased a copy of his autobiographical A Smattering of Ignorance. Maybe I'll read it now!

The musical numbers were beautifully done. As you can see in the above clip, they perform "Rhapsody in Blue" whole! I can't think of another studio-era Hollywood movie that depicts an entire performance of a symphonic movement. True, they seem to have cut some of it (this version is three minutes longer) but even Bernstein sometimes did this piece with cuts, so I am still impressed.

The storyline was less impressive, even though the great Howard Koch, author of my favorite movie ever, was involved. But I can't blame the writers that much. Gershwin was this workaholic who wrote a lot of memorable music, had a decade-long romantic relationship with a female composer whom he never married, and died suddenly at 38 of a brain tumor. Not a lot of a story there. Worse yet, he had a happy childhood and was a nice person who didn't quarrel with people. To get some kind of a story going, they invent a mentor for him, a wise old composer who dies during the Rapsody concert, and two fictional women, both of whom he loves. That, plus worries about whether he will offend both the critics and the public by combining jazz with classical music, and painful symptoms presaging his early death, are about all the dramatic conflict we get.

Robert Alda's performance as Gershwin is sincere and affecting. But what makes is all worth watching is the music -- and the lovably crotchety Oscar.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

The Lord High Everything Else


I've been reading the text of Gilbert and Sullivan's great comic operetta, The Mikado, and I'm amazed at how good it is. Aside from being laugh-out-loud funny, it's a social and political satire, which gives it real depth.

One bit that really made me think is the dialog that comes in at the very end of the above clip. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner asks advice from Pooh-Bah, The Lord High Everything Else, whether he should raid the treasury for his impending wedding festivities. Because Pooh-Bah holds every office in the city except for that of executioner, he is unable to give a coherent answer. He continually qualifies, contradicts, or overrules himself in a comical process that obviously could go through cycle after cycle forever.

One of the most distinctive principles of liberal democracy is the notion that these jobs should all be held by different people, so that they can check and balance one another.

Hey, wait a minute! Doesn't that mean that a free society will be like Pooh-Bah: confused, unstable, unable to arrive at a final answer?

Yes! It does! But what's so great about stability? After all, what "stability" means is that we have an argument and then one party wins, finally and irrevocably, and gets to lord it over the rest of us. The Hell with that!

If freedom is good, stability is bad. Let Topsyturvydom reign!

The dialogue between Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah is considerably abridged in this clip. You can find the whole exchange here, at the end of "No. 5" (the fifth scene). Here is another clip, of Groucho singing another song from The Mikado, this time with his daughter:

Monday, December 20, 2010

A Christmas Festival



We've played a number of different classical-music-style Christmas medleys in the Madison Community Orchestra over the years, and this one is clearly the best.

One reason is that it really isn't a medley at all. People who have tried to present it as a sing-along -- distributing lyrics to the audience -- have found that some of the keys that composer Leroy Anderson uses make part of it impossible for most people to sing.

It really is a symphonic movement, with the familiar tunes treated at times as orchestral "motives." It begins with one phrase -- half a bar long -- from "Joy to the World" and then rushes into "Deck the Halls," shifting back to "Joy" in the seventh measure.

The last section is a majestic version of "Adeste Fidelis" accompanied by a rhythmic phrase derived from "Jingle Bells." Amazingly -- it works! The coda is a rollicking jumble based on the opening phrases of “Jingle Bells,” interrupted briefly by “Joy to the World,” and a few measures that seem to derive from “Hark the Herald,” ending by hammering away fortissimo at the first two notes of the chorus of “Jingle Bells.”

Try doing that as an audience sing-along. But, boy, is it fun to play!

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

R and R



Here is a l
ovely version of Monteverdi's magnificent "Domine ad adjuvandum me festina" (Lord, Help Me Now) from the Vespers of 1610 (the most ambitious piece of liturgical music before Bach).

Below is a version that is far more visually stunning, set as it is in a Gothic cathedral in Lisbon. However, in this one you can't hear the instruments very well, and it's those highlights on the upper brasses that really make the piece, at least for me. Also, you might find the tempi a little draggy. The conductor's enthusiasm, however, is infectious.


Friday, August 20, 2010

Is this Classical Music's Golden Age?



This is one of those weird debates, acrimonious and nasty, in which I fundamentally disagree with both sides. Traditionalist Heather MacDonald wrote this essay, which ticked off modernist Greg Sandow. (Here is her reply.)

Her idea is basically this: Classical music is flourishing today as never before. The standard of performance is higher, there are more performers, there are more works available, audiences are more sophisticated, than ever before. You even have instant access, she points out, to beautiful performances such as the one I've embedded above. Classical music is in a new golden age.

There is a huge gulf between the way this person thinks about the arts and the way I do. Look at it this way. The reasons she gives for thinking the music is flourishing are: a) the performers of the music, b) the conduits by which the music is communicated to the audience, and c) the audience that listens to the music. What is missing from this list, class? Anybody? Anybody?

That's right! The music!

Here is an analogous argument: Dodo birds are flourishing today. More museums have dodo bird exhibits than ever before. Their quality is higher than ever. You can even see stuffed dead dodo birds on the internet! For free! So don't give me that stuff about how the golden age of dodo birds is dead and gone, pal. You're full of crap.

Okay, that's a little silly. Here is a closer analogy. Poetry today is flourishing. There are more volumes of old poems written by dead people than ever before. Previously unknown old poems are discovered and published every day. And they are embalmed in such beautiful editions! You can even read old poems by dead white guys on the internet!

I have been told that the most recent piece of classical music to become an established part of the standard repertoire is Strauss' exquisite Four Last Songs, which was composed in 1948. If the last poem with that sort of status were that old, no one would be giving an argument analogous to MacDonald's that poetry is flourishing.

I guess the reason it is possible for an intelligent person to give an argument like MacDonald's is that she doesn't think of classical music as an art like poetry or painting. What she means by "classical music" is something like the world of people who collect antiques, old coins, or classic cars. It so happens that the world of classic car collecting is flourishing. There are several shows every year in my area. More classic cars are being restored and displayed every year. It's really cool. But the giant automobile with tail fins is not flourishing. It is as dead as the dodo.

And so, it breaks my heart to say, is classical music.
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BTW, here is a more professional performance of "Cum Dederit Dilectis" than the one to which she directs us: