Music
Some people watch lots of TV. Some people read a lot.
I'm a music person. Mostly I'm a classical music person. Sometimes I
listen to Jazz or Blues, but that's more because I'm too lazy to change
the radio station when my
local
NPR
affiliate switches from news and culture programming on the
weekend. That's not to say I don't have an appreciation, just that I
have to work a little harder for it to catch me.
Popular music - the stuff that everyone else seems to like - completely
eludes me.
Symphony #3 (Symphony of
Sorrowful Songs)
October 27, 2006
Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony is unique in classical music. In a
world where contemporary classical music is a niche even less visible
than sub-genres of gospel music, broke on to the charts. No, not the
classical charts, the
Pop
charts. The ones that usually feature Madonna and Britney Spears.
Composed in 1976 and recorded in 1991 with a very young soprano named
Dawn Upshaw as the vocal soloist,
The
Symphony of Sorrorful Songs
somehow made enough of an impression that it came to be known
outside the small remainders of the classical music-buying public.
Simply put, Gorecky's Third symphony is the musical evocation of grief.
Not grief in in a country music sense. Pain in a "They are committing a
mass genocide of my people"-sense. Which is fitting, because Gorecki
wrote the symphony as a rememberance of the end of Hitler's occupation
of Poland.
Each of the three movements in the symphony includes a lengthy soprano
solo - a prayer or plea, voiced by a mother or a child, for a child or
a parent. The soloist is grieving and haunted, but her voice
swells to transcend pain, into something that is wrought
with righteous purity. The words are sung in Polish and in
Latin,
and their meaning, even without language, is clear from the swelling
bass drama beneath them and the pleading anguish in every note formed
on the soloist's mouth. Grieving mothers, children lost to brutality,
are a thing more universal than any language.
I am literally transfixed by this music. The emotional response I have
to it is a wellspring of tears. Tears! I cry as I listen, every time.
How can one not respond, knowing that the words sung in the second
movement are a farewell letter, found scrawled on a wall at Birkenau,
to the mother of a young woman about to be sent to the gas chambers?
I do not know why this piece of music captivated public imagination so.
There's no dancing pop diva, nor a pounding bass line nor an amplified
electric guitar. It is a symphony orchestra, a young woman
with a
powerful voice and some utterly heartbreaking words that must be sung.
The
Planets
October 27, 2006
Gustav Holst, despite the germanic name, is another English composer.
The Symphonic Suite called "The Planets" is by far his most famous
work. Based on the astrological symbols for each of the
classical
planets, the most striking piece is undoubtedly
Mars, Bringer of War,
composed as World War I raged across Europe.
Mars, Bringer of War
happens
to have been the first piece of music I heard at the first concert I
ever went to. It is a march with its meter set by a madman.
A death march. Five incessant beats to a measure,
furiously
pushing toward a climax. It is music that sounds exactly as it should:
Young men could very well be sent off to die to those notes. It is
angry and sinister and majestic all at once, and it is exactly as
captivating as it sounds.
Mars
is the true sound of evil. Not a chaotic mass of discordant notes or
simple noise for the sake of noise, but instruments surging forward in
lock-step, each serving the musical goal of perverting our
bravery and our nobility to the service of generals and war-gods who
care nothing for human cost.
Venus, Bringer of Peace
serves
no less purpose than to be the break of dawn, the day after the rage of
Mars comes to an end. It is gentle, pastoral music, more a
lullaby than the eros typically associated with the name of the goddess
of love.
Venus
is delicate woodwinds and simple string, an airy, diaphanous daydream
to come after the nightmare of
Mars.
Fantasia
on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
January 25, 2006
I seem to write a great deal about music with religious overtones.
I don't mean to. It's just that the music I love was often
sponsored by the church, or written out of the devotion of the composer.
Thomas Tallis is essentially the giant of pre-Baroque English music. He
wrote the Original Anglican church music. Ralph Vaughn
Williams,
an English composer who worked mostly in the early 20th century, is
well known for his own Anglican Church music, and for taking themes
from traditional English folksong to use in his own composition. In the
case of the Tallis Fantasia, we have the rare case of a hymn being
adopted to a purely secular instrumental work.
The work itself is strikingly beautiful, a composition for strings.
Ornate. I hear it, and I see light streaming through stained glass, or
the musical version of a sunset. It is majestic and richly varied. It
is sensual, slowly building to each crescendo, then descending
to simple percussion.
But that's not why I love it.
I love it because, one day, someone asked me to play some music that I
like for her. We sat in her bedroom, and I played this long, beautiful
piece of music, and she asked me to rub her back. I rubbed
her
back literally as noon passed to midnight, and when the music stopped,
I caressed her to the memory of I had of its rythmn and pitch. I was
literally unaware of the passage of time, even as day became night.
So strongly is this music ingrained within me, that when I hear it,
even years later, I can remember how her skin felt to my fingertips,
how she smelled that day, the pulse of her breath, and how nervous yet
intent I was to make her feel as wonderful as the music I couldn't stop
hearing.
Passio
January 25, 2006
Whoa.
"The Passion" is the tale of Jesus' suffering leading up to his
crucifixion. It's really a pretty popular motif for classical music.
Beethoven wrote a Passion. So did Bach. There are dozens of re-tellings
of the story in Western Literature, art, music and pretty much every
other possible medium. I've even seen a comic book.
There's this composer named Arvo Pärt. He's an Estonian. He's
still alive. And the music that he writes is off in a world all its
own. I suppose it should be called minimalist, which would put his work
in the same world as Philip Glass or maybe John Adams. It's not the
same thing. Pärt's music sounds as old as time. It's half-made-up
of silences and simple chords that build to pregnant pauses and
dramatic echoes. It's not even identifiably Western.
Pärt's "Passio" is his version of St. John's story of the last
moments of the messiah, possibly the most dramatic moment in the
Christian New Testament. It's a piece for a small ensemble of
musicians, an organist, a quartet of singers and two soloists, the airy
tenor who speaks the words of Pilate, and a bass, who intones
the
final words of the son of God.
There is no "melody" here, no simple, repeated theme. Instead, we are
given a conversation. The quartet, representing the Evangelist, sings
only in dissonant chords, conveying distress and sorrow. At times
Pilate sings, brightly, of his judgement. His voice is nearly a capella
- he is alone for all the world. From time to time, Jesus will sing,
his simple words slowly booming from the cross.
The rewarding thing about this work, I think, is the measured pace of
phrasing, compared with the emotional depth of words being sung, sorrow
and solemn both. This is music that walks its own death march, to the
inevitability of "It is Finished." I am in no way a person of faith,
but in this music I find an emotional response as a listener. I cannot
imagine what the story, the words might mean to someone who Believes.
Scheherezade
November 2, 2005
The very first Compact Disc I ever bought was the CBS Masterworks
recording of Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic
performing Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade and, more
importantly,
his Russian Easter Overture. It was, I think, 1990, and at the time I
didn't even own a CD Player. Thing is, I had just heard a CD
of
music that I actually
appreciated
for the first time, and after that it was imperative that I hear more.
The Russian Easter Overture is quite simply grand. Swooping, dynamic,
exciting and majestic - all things that fit with the title; the
resurrection of the son of God is probably enough cause for all
adjectives, right? The first thing I thought, the first time I heard
classical music from a Compact Disc was "I
have
to hear the horns and cymbals from the Russian Easter Overture this
way." Literally the next day I was in the crummy "Tape World" in the
local mega-mall, digging through the roughly three dozen classical CDs
they had. In retrospect, it's amazing that they had a recording of it
at all.
Scheherezade is one of those overplayed pieces. Oh, it's not in the
same shudderiffic category has Pachelbel's Canon in D or Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture (both of which are still great music; just like that
chart-topping ballad that gets played every 20 minutes on "adult
contemporary" radio, it's good and then everyone gets tired of it), but
it's big-time bread and butter piece for just about every orchestra.
Still, when I was 14, I was learning about classical music in
a
vacuum. I didn't have radio or anyone else's taste to learn from. So
the first time I heard the basso profundo crash of those opening horns
- the terrible Sultan of the fable, I found a new love. It's a
silly thing to say about one of the tiny group of overplayed classical
pieces, but it's a sincere truth as well. Scheherezade is programmatic
music. Each of the movements represents one of the surviving tales of
the Arabian Nights. Orchestral music telling a story was for
me
kind of a new and unique concept at that point. Later I would
find
Debussy's Le Mer (a portrait of the Sea) and Berlioz's Symphonie
Fantastique, both works that represented some visual or narrative
concept, but in the years since I first heard the gentle solo
violin that represents the great storyteller herself, I have found
nothing more evocative.
Leontyne
Price Sings Barber
November 1, 2005
Samuel Barber holds a dear place in my heart. If I write about music,
I'll write a great deal about Samuel Barber. As a young person
I
spent a great deal of time in practice rooms; I'm a classically trained
baritone. When I was 16, my high-school choir teacher handed me her
tattered copy of the G. Schirmer collection of Barber's Complete songs,
along with a cassette tape of her performance of ALL of them. I think
now that she meant to encourage my musical talents, something that I
really took for granted (I know she wanted to strangle me
at the time, as I never thought of even the possibility of a career in
music). But still, these songs were in English and to a one
they
were gorgeous; literate, romantic and lyrical. I learned them all and
performed many of them in recitals and auditions. They represented my
absolute favorite vocal music.
I haven't sung out loud in over a decade now.
A few days ago I bought this wonderful recording of Leontyne
Price
singing those songs that I love. The recordings were done live, with an
audience and simple piano accompaniment. Leontyne Price is of course
one of the greatest sopranos of the previous century, but as I listen,
what I remember is my teacher's voice on a poorly dubbed tape.
The real treasure on the disc, however, is a song that I didn't learn,
"Knoxville,
Summer of 1915."
I'd heard it a few times before, but never really gotten to LISTEN to
it. I'm glad that I have, at last. The text is pastoral and
nostalgic. It's not a song sung
by
a child, but a rememberance of
being
a child, and it is lovely for that as much as Barber's score. There is
not enough music of its sort in our world.
Carnivale
October 26, 2005
Right now I'm listening to the soundtrack from the HBO series
Carnivale. The score is really a standout; it added tremendously to the
atmosphere of the show. It's all minor-key and mournful stuff, mostly
acoustic guitar or fiddle, and it works pretty well for me as
background music as I sit here "working".
The thing that really caught my attention (enough to pay $15 for a
soundtrack album) to this particular was the strings/violin/piano theme
associated with the character "Jonesy" from the show. I had a real
hair-standing-on-end moment the first time that cue played on the show.
Scoring for a TV show is something most people don't notice. I guess
that's to be expected, but TV shows and movies are more-or-less the
only place most people are exposed to classical or classical-like
music.