Tone Poem Tuesday (or, Hello, Mr. Strauss)

 Has anyone noticed that in all the time I've been doing Tone Poem Tuesday, I have never once yet discussed any of the works of the composer who is not only best known for his tone poems, but who is actually best known for being the greatest composer of tone poems? I've been holding this composer back because aside from a handful of other works (which are also great, such as his operas, his songs, and his horn concertos), this composer is so synonymous with the tone poem that he actually overshadows just about everyone else in this rich, rich form of music.

But, I can't keep him on the bench forever, so: at long last, let us grapple with Richard Strauss.

Strauss was the last of the line of German Romantics who reached their thundering apotheosis in Richard Wagner. Strauss's life was long, spanning from 1864 to 1949; he saw the end of German nationalistic Romanticism, the rise of Modernism, and his own reputation falter as musical tastes changed and as he made his own regrettable political choices during his last two decades. Strauss did not actually join the Nazis, but neither did he exactly repudiate them. This might be seen as the sad choice of an old but beloved artist who was reluctant to turn away completely from his homeland, but still...the fact remains.

As an artist, Strauss's work pushed Wagnerism about as far as it could go without crossing the line that the likes of Arnold Schoenberg would. Strauss's music, at its best, is profound and evocatively lyrical. He wrote massive orchestral music that still shines with utter clarity in the orchestral writing; his textures are never muddy, never unclear, even when he is clearly indulging himself. Strauss is a great enough artist that his descents into self-indulgence are nevertheless captivating in their enthusiasm. Strauss's skill at conveying scenes through orchestral tone-painting will be appreciated by anyone with a love of film music, where a lot of his influence can be felt, especially in the work of Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, and Rozsa.

Going back to my high school years, when I was doing my first major explorations of classical music, I entered the world of Richard Strauss not at the beginning of his career, but toward the end. (Some composers I entered through their early works, like Berlioz and the Symphonie fantastique, while others I entered through late works, like Mozart and his 40th Symphony or Beethoven with his 9th.) I knew that Strauss had written a series of works called "tone poems": not symphonies, not concert overtures, but large scale symphonic works with form determined on an individual basis depending on the composer's need. The first one of Strauss's that I heard, via a cassette recording I bought pretty much on a whim (my allowance in those days mostly went to comic books and classical recordings), was a piece called Eine Alpensinfonie. This, I learned, was actually the very last of Strauss's tone poems. Though he would live another thirty-four years after writing it, and though he would write a great deal of music in that time, never again did he write a tone poem.

Eine Alpensinfonie--"An Alpine Symphony"--is also not generally viewed as one of Strauss's truly great tone poems, and there is reason for that. It's almost entirely intended as pictorial music, and the focus is generally on orchestral pyrotechnics. Aside from a few introspective passages, Eine Alpensinfonie is almost entirely a showpiece. There's a reason why, for a work not generally viewed highly by critics, a recording of Eine Alpensinfonie ended up being the work used on the very first test pressing of a compact disc. (That recording was by Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and by coincidence it ended up being one of the very first compact discs I ever owned. It only had one track, comprising the entire work. All later recordings separate the work into tracks, played without break, comprising the piece's twenty-some sections.)

Eine Alpensinfonie is wildy Romantic, thrillingly dramatic, and massively orchestral. It also has moments of melodic grandeur that utterly soar, which is almost entirely why I love it: listening to it is an experience, and since despite the critics it has remained steadily performed and recorded for over a hundred years, I think it's time to finally grant that it is, in any useful sense of the word, a classic.

"That's great, but what is it about?" You might be asking...and you're right to ask! Eine Alpensinfonie is simply a 50-minute musical depiction of a journey up an Alpine mountain peak, over the course of an entire day. The work opens with hushed tones and descending minor scales followed by soft churnings in the bass; a minute or so in we hear, in the low brass, the motif that will represent the mountain. As the orchestra slowly begins mustering its strength (in a passage that is spiritually connected with the opening of Wagner's Das Rheingold, and its depiction of the Rhine's deep dark waters), eventually everything culminates in a magnificent passage that is so gloriously resplendant that one almost doesn't even realize that all Strauss has done is orchestrated, in grand fashion for full orchestra thundering fortissimo, a descending major scale.

What follows is a sequence of segments depicting various aspects of a climber's ascent up the mountain: The ascent (note the offstage hunting horns), treks through forests and beside wandering brooks; scrambling over rocks beside a waterfall (the music actually glitters here); passages through flowering meadows and Alpine pastures (note the cowbells, inevitably making one wonder if the conductor asks the orchestra for more--well, you know);  tense moments as the climb becomes more difficult; and then an introspective passage before we break through to the work's grandest moments, depicting the acheivement of the summit. O, to be a brass player in the orchestra during this passage!

After the summit, the music takes on a darker tone as our climbers begin descending. The darkness is gathering, with good reason: the last big bit of musical theatricality that Strauss has in store is the "Thunder and Tempest" segment as a wild storm takes over. Here Strauss goes so far as to supplement the orchestra with a wind machine. After this, calm is restored and the sun returns, but the music grows quieter and quieter and quieter over as night settles. The entire work ends almost exactly as it began: descending soft scales, and the mountain's motif plays once more before the final chords fade away.

Obviously Eine Alpensinfonie is not a symphony in any traditional sense. Strauss is not the least bit concerned with symphonic development or treatment of musical ideas here; the music is pure show from one of classical music's great showmen. But really: what a show it is, and surely there's room in our lives for pure theater, right?

Here are three recordings of Eine Alpensinfonie by Richard Strauss. The first is a magnificent classic performance, released in 1974, by the Staatekapelle Dresden, conducted by Rudolf Kempe (one of the finest Strauss conductors). 

This recording, featuring Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony, may be the most technically perfect recording of the work I've ever heard. (Admittedly, Eine Alpensinfonie gets recorded a lot, because it's so popular a showpiece; for all the recordings I've heard of it, there are many more I haven't tried yet!)

Finally, here is the recording that got my attention in the first place, way back in, I don't know, 1988 or so. This is Sir Georg Solti conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Many "Oh, wowwww" moments in this recording. (This is digitized from vinyl, but it's a pretty high quality record, and it provides a neat demonstration of a particular problem that used to vex recording engineers back in the days of LPs and cassettes: how to accommodate long works on recording media that had two sides, neither of which could support the length of the work in question. The answer is simple: you have to split the recording in two, requiring the listener to flip the record or the cassette somewhere in the middle. Obviously this isn't ideal, but it simply could not be avoided. In this case, those recording engineers managed to put the side-flip in a very logical place, musically. You can actually hear the brief gap in this recording, but it's so well done that you have to know it's there, almost.)

Finally, here's a good article on the genesis and background of Eine Alpensinfonie.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 A strange and small subgenre popped up in the middle of the 20th century, called the "Tabloid Concerto". These were entire classical works composed specifically for use in film. Not film music per se, with individual tracks written specifically to hew to the rhythm and length of specific scenes, but entire works to be used in the films themselves. The first, and probably best known example of this, is Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, written for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight, which is about a concert pianist and composer who must fight in World War II. Needing a classical work to tie the film together musically, but wanting to avoid the specific associations of pre-existing (and well known) classical works, the producers decided to have composer Addinsell write a single movement, which has gone on to be known as the Warsaw Concerto (the composer in the film is a Pole) and has made the leap to the concert repertoire.

I'll return to the Warsaw Concerto later on (maybe next week!), but this business of writing concert works for use in a film became a small genre in its own right, and a number of the great composers of the "Golden Age" of film music produced works like this, including Miklos Rozsa's Spellbound Concerto, written for the Hitchcock film Spellbound. Unlike the Addinsell work, the Rozsa Concerto wasn't written for specific use in Spellbound but was crafted from the film's themes and cues later on, but it still falls into that same category: a single-movement work of throbbing romanticism in the great Hollywood style.

This performance is a dated one, but it is thrilling and vibrant, featuring the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by the composer, and with great pianist (and native Buffalonian!) Leonard Pennario as soloist. Enjoy!

Something for Friday (the "Oh crap, I've been busy as hell and a day off all week" edition)

 Sorry, folks, it's just been a busy week.

Anyway, as part of my mood-listening for writing of late, I've been listening to music from Star Trek. Here's a selection from James Horner's score to Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.

Have a great weekend!

Tone Poem Tuesday

 In honor of Labor Day, and therefore of the labor movement and the fact that the single biggest contributor to the America that exists is the American worker, here's a piece that pays tribute to one of the fruits of all that labor: the automobile.

Frederick Shepherd Converse was an American composer who lived from 1871 to 1940, spanning the shift from Romanticism to Modernism. As such, he is known for a handful of works, the best known is the tone poem The Mystic Trumpeter.

The piece before us today is Converse's tone poem Flivver Ten Million. The word "flivver" was a slang term for Ford automobiles back in the days of the Model T and shortly afterward, and Converse gave his piece the subtitle A Joyous Epic Inspired by the Familiar Legend "The Ten Millionth Ford is Now Serving Its Owner. Quite a long title for such a short work (it's only twelve minutes!), but there it is. The work does seem redolent of the enthusiasm of 1930s America for the coming of the automobile, and as we all know, the shift to being an automobile culture shifted America in ways that we are still grappling with to this day.

Even though the work is a single movement, Converse divided Flivver Ten Million into sections:

1. Dawn in Detroit (sunrise over the city)

2. The Call to Labor (the auto workers report to work)

3. The Din of the Builders (factory workers)

4. The Birth of the Hero - He Tries His Metal (the car wanders off into the great world in search of an adventure)

5. May Night by the Roadside - America’s Romance (love music via solo violin)

6. The Joy Rider’s - America’s Frolic (happy have a great time music)

7. The Collision - America’s Tragedy (poignant, sad intonations)

8. Phoenix Americans - The hero, righted and shaken, proceeds on his way with redoubled energy, typical of the indomitable spirit of America (great fun) 

As an added bonus of civic pride, this performance is a recording of the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Here is Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Shepherd Converse.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 Another fascinating work today by a composer whose work I'd never heard before: Zhu Jian'er, a Chinese composer who lived from 1922 to 2017. Judging by this piece, I need to hear a lot more of his work. A particular subgenre of classical music that I tend to love a great deal is the intersection of Western and Asian music, when Asian composers write music that blends compositional techniques, thematic material, tonalities, and instruments from both "worlds". There's something about the skilled and convincing synthesis of disparate artistic traditions that always excites me.

(This kind of approach to making art, in any form, can easily go awry if the non-native tradition isn't treated fully and equally with respect as a tradition of its own; this is, I suspect, a part of where what we now call "cultural appropriation" starts. But I digress....)

This work is a four-movement suite called Fisherman's Ballade Suite No. 1, and it deftly blends the pentatonic sound of Chinese folk music with the kinds of orchestral color that typify French Impressionism. The work sounds almost Ravelian at times, and is thus deeply evocative of a land of seas and rivers. I don't know if the work quotes a specific folk song, a particular ballad that might be sung by the fisherman of the Yellow or Yangtze Rivers as they cast their nets, but it's not hard to hear that kind of thing in the piece. In truth, I haven't been able to find much specific information about this work's background at all, but that's not always a bad thing: it forces us to come to a work entirely on its own terms.

Here is Fisherman's Ballade Suite No. 1 by Zhu Jian'er.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 From what I've read, Qigang Chen (b. 1951) is one of the most performed of contemporary composers...and to my knowledge, I had never heard his music before YouTube served up his single-movement piano concerto, Er Huang, via its sometimes incomprehensible algorithm. Chen was born in Shanghai but eventually emigrated to France, which he calls home to this day. Er Huang is a work of serene contemplation that slowly becomes more and more openly dramatic, until it reaches a passage of almost breathtaking power before it subsides again to a peaceful, thoughtful conclusion. In the work, Chen deploys melodies from Peking (or Beijing) operas he saw as a child; the work is apparently a reaction on Chen's part to the slow fade of Peking opera from the Chinese musical landscape.

I've never watched a Peking opera, which seems to me a pity; they sound like fascinating productions, combining music and mimes and stagecraft and acrobatics for something that sounds distinctly different from traditional Western opera. In addition to being a wonderfully listenable modern work, Er Huang also apparently serves as Chen's nostalgic look back at a time that, for all its seeming strength in lasting for centuries (Peking opera began more than three hundred years ago) is now possibly fading under Western influence.

Of course, even Chen is not immune to these effects. He has, after all, written his work purely for the Western orchestra and the Western piano.

Here is Er Huang by Qigang Chen.

(Credit; Info on Er Huang)

Something for Thursday

 I know I've featured this in the past, but it's my blog and I can do re-runs if I want! And it seems to me that this past week in particular has left a real need for some real beauty.

Hans Zimmer has become known for his bombastic and loud action film scores, and his more recent science fiction soundscapes, but he has also done some tender stuff, very effectively. Here is "The Greatest Woman Alive" from Zimmer's score to As Good As It Gets.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 I suppose that I'm like many a classical music lover when it comes to Gustav Holst: aside from The Planets, I really don't know much about him at all. I'm a bit better off than most, by virtue of having been in the concert band in high school and college, so I'm familiar with Holst's two Suites for Military Band (which I should feature at some point anyway, because they're terrific), but really, that's about it. Holst was fairly prolific, and his work had many influences: Wagnerian opera, English folksong, Indian mythology, and more. His music, in my experience, rarely fits into a simple box, and his melodic gift is a subtle one that doesn't always leave the listener with tunes stuck in the ear. For many reasons Holst's output has been almost completely outshone by The Planets, which is the case with the sacred work I feature today.

Holst wrote The Hymn of Jesus in 1917, not long after the completion of The Planets, and listeners familiar with the more famous work may hear its echoes in the present one. It opens with a solo trombone playing a plainchant melody, and then the work grows until Holst's plan becomes clear. For a relatively short work--only about 22 minutes in length--he deploys a large group of forces, with the orchestra supplemented by two choirs and a female choir all by itself. He also seems to have specified that the two "main" choirs be separated spatially, I assume for sonic reasons that could really only be appreciated in live performance.

The Hymn of Jesus is solemn and meditative and at times almost ecstatic. Its musical language constantly suggests the music of the ancient church, music that predates our system of Western tuning. All the vocal work is by choir; there are no soloists here, and repeated use of ostinato passages combines with the generally "angelic" sound of the choir to give the work a largely liturgical and at the same time otherworldly feeling. This is music that suggests a cathedral, with its great stone vaults, rising all about you.

For a very deep dive into this piece, check out this article; for now, here is The Hymn of Jesus by Gustav Holst.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 A very short work today! Less than three minutes, courtesy Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich.

In 1943 Shostakovich entered a contest to write a new national anthem for the Soviet Union. Apparently he did not win, but he was able to repurpose his material for that project seventeen years later, for use at a war memorial dedication in the city of Novorossiysk. According to what I have found on this piece, the work Shostakovich presented for the war memorial has been played continuously there ever since. Wow.

The piece is only a few minutes long, starting off quietly before building and building to a fairly thundering climax that isn't hard to imagine being central to a patriotic tableau of some sort. I'd never heard it before today, but if you has asked me to imagine what a Russian/Soviet "Land of Hope and Glory" tune would sound like, this is what I would have thought of: a slow, stately melody of obvious nationalism that nevertheless broods.

Here is Shostakovich's Novorossiysk Chimes (Flame of Eternal Glory).

Something for Thursday

 Last week, Dusty Hill died. He was the bass player for ZZ Top.

ZZ Top is one of those bands that has been a part of the soundtrack of my life pretty much ever since early-adolescence, when I first became aware of rock music. They're one of those acts that seems like they've been around forever, partly owing to their look: famous for their long beards, they cultivated an air of being old when they were still quite young. But there's also a timeless quality to their music, which plays equally at ease on a classic rock station and an 80s throwback station, and more.

ZZ Top was always known most for its look: black suits and very long beards. They never updated that look at all. ZZ Top was not one of those "chameleon" kinds of acts that shifted with the times; their musical style and their look was always the same. They knew what they wanted to do, who they wanted to be, and the kind of music they wanted to make. And they made a lot of very fine music, too! Maybe they're not quite at the level of, say, a Bob Seger or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but ZZ Top is every bit as essential to knowing the last forty years or so of popular music in America. (ZZ Top's own history began in 1969, so they've been a thing for more than fifty years.)

By never much changing while maintaining a high standard of excellence, ZZ Top managed to seem like they'd been around forever and always will. They always had that air of "grizzled old veterans of rock", even if they were only in their mid-30s when I first encountered them, with their big hit, "Legs".

My favorite ZZ Top song is one of their less-known ones, a power ballad from the Afterburner album. "Rough Boy" is really quite a lovely song, with lyrics suggesting a boy trying to impress a girl even though he's, well, 'rough'. Those lyrics go well with Billy Gibbons's raspy tenor, and the verses alternate with some frankly beautiful guitar playing.

Here are three videos: first the song itself as recorded (and later remastered) for the original album, and then a live version in which the band is joined by guitar legend Jeff Beck. And finally there's an example of one of my favorite new genres, the "reaction" video, in which a listener with an open mind listens to "Rough Boy" for the very first time ever. (The reaction video is great, but her experience is slightly marred by the fact that she's also watching the song's official video for MTV, which is, I must admit, one of the weirder videos out there, and it's a video whose content has almost nothing to do with the song itself. But her enthusiasm is real; I love these reaction videos!)

And Dusty Hill: Thanks for the music. It will live long!

Happy Birthday...

 ...to the person whose influence on my life includes, among many other things, a love of these various musical numbers.

And so many more!

(The person in question is my mother, who turns 80 today!)

Tone Poem Tuesday

 The operas of Giachino Rossini are staples of the operatic stage, and the overtures from those operas are staples of the concert world. But even within Rossini's well-known work, some works are more well-known than others. William Tell and The Barber of Seville are some of the best-known works of all time, including their overtures, which have enjoyed (or endured!) second lives in popular culture outside of the context in which Rossini originally wrote them. Less well-known, but still a staple of the repertoire, is Rossini's take on the Cinderella folk tale, La Cenerentola.

La Cenerentola was Rossini's follow-up after the huge success of The Barber of Seville, and its success was more uneven than the earlier opera's. La Cenerentola did not open particularly well, but it grew quickly in popularlity through the 19th century. However, the style of singing its music required did fall out of favor, and thus La Cenerentola fell into relative obscurity. The opera was revived in the mid-20th century and has enjoyed stable popularity and performance ever since.

The overture is pure Rossini, starting with an air of subdued mystery before giving way to the kind of infectious energy and earworming, propulsive melody that is his hallmark. I'm always interested in how many of Rossini's overtures don't start with any kind of Bang!, instead starting pensively and building up their energy.

Here is the overture to La Cenerentola by Giachino Rossini.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 A contemporary work today, by Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen.Wallen's family moved to London when she was just two, and it was there that she grew and matured into her professional life as a prolific composer and teacher.

Of this work, Wallen says:

Composing for the orchestra is my favourite challenge, [and this] work is an especially important one for me. It is an innate human instinct to be free, just as it is a low of nature that the river should rush headlong to the sea. That is the concept behind Mighty River.

Slavery claimed the lives of countless people, but somehow my ancestors found the grit and determination to persist in spite of the conditions in which they found themselves. I dedicate Mighty River to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Though I never kner her, I am driven on by her courage in the face of dreadful dods and am inspired by her example not merely to survive, but to thrive.

I first heard this piece the other day, and it's quite amazing. This performance by the National Youth Orchestra is quite something, and I'm discovering a keen apprecation for the music-making that comes from youth orchestras and ensembles these days. What they sometimes lack in technical polish they often make up for in an ability to make accessibile to emotional heart of a work. I'm less and less drawn to the musical restraint of maturity as I get older.

Mighty River opens with a solo horn quoting "Amazing Grace", and then as the rest of the orchestra joins in, the piece genuinely does settle into the kind of constant flowing motion that is suggestive of a river on its way to the sea. But throughout the piece, with all its rocking and flowing rhythms, bits and pieces of other spirituals are heard, including more quotes from "Amazing Grace". The music takes several darker, more introspective turns, but somehow it always finds its way home to that rocking ostinato, and ultimately back to "Amazing Grace" before ending on a gentle major chord. One senses the constance of Black persistence and forced endurance mirroring against the constance of the river's motion.

Here is Mighty River by Errollyn Wallen.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 There's a quote by composer Gustav Holst that strongly resonates with me:

If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you're in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be 'a success'. If he's a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he's capable.

Those words come to mind as I consider the work of American Modernist composer Charles Ives. For much of his life his music was completely ignored, and thus he was able to toil on his own, following his own interests and go where his own ears took him. By the time his work began to gain some renown, Ives had produced some of the more shockingly original music of the 20th century, all by following his own guiding light. Ives lived to the age of 79, but he stopped composing almost entirely in his early 50s, for reasons that have led to much speculation. He did live long enough to see his work gain acceptance, though, as he finished out his working career not as a musician but as an insurance agent.

Ives is always an interesting listen, though he unquestioningly, unhesitatingly, and unapologetically puts unusual demands on the listener. This was very much a part of his character. He once said "I don't write music for sissy ears," and he responded to another audience member's distaste for a dissonant work with a caustic rejoinder: "Stop being such a goddamned sissy! Why can't you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?"

I haven't heard a great deal of Ives, but he is always fascinating and, indeed, moving. His work stands outside most of the traditions of his time: he is certainly not a jazzman, though he does incorporate popular songs here and there, nor is he exactly an atonalist, though he does experiment with alternate tonalities and things like quartertones.

The piece I feature here is a chamber work called Central Park in the Dark, and it's one of Ives's early works, written when he was just thirty-two. It starts as an atmospheric piece of tone-painting, but it becomes more and more raucous to the point of sheer cacophony, and we hear snatches of popular song and general noise. Of this piece, Ives himself wrote:

This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night....The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness – interrupted by sounds from the Casino over the pond – of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days – of some "night owls" from Healy's whistling the latest of the Freshman March – the "occasional elevated", a street parade, or a "break-down" in the distance – of newsboys crying "uxtries" – of pianolas having a ragtime war in the apartment house "over the garden wall", a street car and a street band join in the chorus – a fire engine, a cab horse runs away, lands "over the fence and out", the wayfarers shout – again the darkness is heard – an echo over the pond – and we walk home.

This is what Charles Ives was composing in 1906. By way of context, George Gershwin was only eight years old at this point, and Igor Stravinsky was still seven years away from premiering the work of his that would hit the musical world like a lightning bolt of intense Modernism, The Rite of Spring.

Here is Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.

Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

 Maybe I should just start calling this feature "Something for Friday"...but then I'll start screwing it up and it'll just become "Something for Friday (Saturday edition)", so why not stick with what's kinda-sorta working...

...anyway, here's a song by Taylor Swift, because I think Taylor Swift is awesome and so should you. This is a recording of one of my favorite songs of hers, and one of her first big mega-hits, though this particular version is the newer version that she re-recorded this year in her ongoing bid to reclaim control of the rights to her own music. (It's all a mess, but apparently some other schlub owns the rights to her first bunch of albums, but as she is the singer-songwriter of the songs, she retains recording and performance rights for the songs themselves, so she's hit on the elegant solution of simply re-recording all her old material anew.)

Here's "Love Story (Taylor's Version)" by Taylor Swift.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 Returning to the work of Black American composer William Grant Still today, and yet another work by a Black composer that makes me think, "Why have I never heard that before?" It's a work of American Impressionism called Kaintuck, and from what I've read it's intended to express Still's own feelings and impressions of mist-covered blue grass meadows of Kentucky. It's not a long work, but it packs a lot of thoughtful lyricism and introspection into its roughly ten minutes. We open with the solo piano playing a motif of leaping intervals, and then the orchestra comes in and meanders thoughtfully with the soloist before fading out with just the soloist again. It's quite an evocative, wonderful work. So, why have I never heard this before?

As with most such cases, I'm afraid I have a pretty good idea what the answer is...or at least, what it partly involves.

Here's Kaintuck by William Grant Still.

Recent Reading!

 It's been a while since I posted an update on books I've been reading, so here's a bit of catch-up!

::  Edge of Sundown is a noir-mystery set in Chicago, by indie writer Jennifer Worrell. A writer who was once a fixture on the bestseller lists for his genre potboilers has spent the better part of a decade in the creative doldrums, until he starts writing what is a marked departure for him: a dystopian thriller in which alien beings are ridding the city streets of "undesirable" elements. But when real-world events start to mirror those in his novel, our hero starts to wonder where the boundary between fiction and reality lies...and that boundary blurs even more when the murders start.

I don't often read this sort of thing, so I was surprised how compelling it was. There is a palpable sense of dread hanging over the story, even as the climax nears, and Worrell really creates a sense of dark place as she explores Chicago's seedy underbelly. Highly enjoyable!

::  For my ongoing project of listening to (and writing about) the music of Jean Sibelius, I figured I should bone up on the composer's life and times. I got a book out of the library, called Finlandia: The Story of Sibelius, by Elliott Arnold. This is an older book, published in 1941 while the composer was still very much alive (and, in fact, Sibelius himself appears to have had input into Arnold's book). As such, the writing style is very much a throwback, and the tone of the book is one of somewhat relentless praise. If you are looking for a critical study of Sibelius and his music, you won't find that here. But I just wanted a readable treatment of the composer's life and times, and this is certainly that. In fact, I found the book valuable for its descriptions of the historical events in Sibelius's homeland, Finland, a country which wasn't even an independent nation when Sibelius was born. Sibelius was a highly nationalistic composer (even if he denied ever using actual Finnish folk material in his works), so this book gives a good sense of the events that shaped Sibelius's attitudes and patriotic fervor.

::  Two rival sea-faring clans try to put their long feud behind them by marrying their two youngest nobles in Daughter of the Deep, a fantasy novel by Lina C. Amarego. The problem is that our heroine, Keira Branwen, is convinced that her new husband, Ronan Mathonwy, is the one who murdered her father. She is expected to push those feelings aside in the name of peace on the seas, but obviously that isn't about to happen, and Ronan relentlessly insists on his own innocence. There's no way that peace between the Branwens and the Mathonwys is going to be easily attained by any marriage, and so unfolds a novel full of character and conflict. I enjoyed this one immensely! Daughter of the Deep is the first volume of a duology called The Children of Lyr, and I absolutely intend to read the follow-up. Recommended!

::  For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe is a collection of essays that ran in the magazine of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, along with that magazine's shorter program notes for specific concerts. As such, the book can be dipped into at will, which I recommend doing. There are chapters on Erich Wolfgang Korngold and on Sergei Rachmaninov and the great Chicago impresario Theodore Thomas, along with many more. The essays are often personal reflections on the part of Steinberg and Rothe, informed by many years of love of and listening to classical music. It's an excellent collection of recent classical music writing.

::  A sadly necessary book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the state of science today, in this time of climate change and the threats it poses to the natural world and to human civilization in general. This is not a general look at climate change, but rather an examination of a number of "case studies" in which scientists are working on very specific environmental issues, such as preserving a fish that only lives in tiny pools in caves in the Mojave Desert. In another example, Australian researchers are trying to engineer a coral that can thrive in the hotter oceans to come, hoping to somehow preserve the Great Barrier Reef. She ultimately arrives at the folks who are studying the possibilities of direct geoengineering to combat the ongoing warming of our planet, in such ways as dispersing huge quantities of reflective aeresols into the upper atmosphere, hopefully increasing the planet's albedo in hopes of putting the brakes on continued absorption of solar heat. Who knows if that will work, but the fact that it's being more seriously analyzed is itself an indictment of humanity's utter failure to take any major steps to alleviate the problem. Under a White Sky isn't an optimistic book, that's for sure...but oddly, it's not exactly pessimistic, either. My overwhelming feeling is that we'll just keep not making things exactly better, but just continuing to make things different and figure out how to live with it down the road.

More reading notes to come!

Something for Thursday

 Two selections from the vocal group VOCES8: One is "May It Be", from the score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the other is a setting of a piece called "Nyepi" by Icelandic musician Olafur Arnalds.

I like VOCES8 a great deal. There's a purity to their sound that elevates just about anything.

Tone Poem Tuesday

 Here's a curiosity: a film music tone poem that's actually a tone poem, and not a group of film music cues arranged into one. Composer Michael Kamen (much missed, he died too young and vibrant in 2003) scored the movie Mr. Holland's Opus, from which this piece comes.

The movie--which I quite like--tracks something like thirty or forty years in the life of Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss), a young man at the start of the film who envisions himself as a composer of serious music. He quickly finds that he's not going to be able to support him or his wife on that at the outset, so he does the reasonable thing that a lot of people do when they figure they need something to do until they attain artistic success: he becomes a teacher.

At first, his efforts at teaching are not encouraging. He doesn't see it as his actual job, and it shows, to the point that his students hate the drudgery of his class and he hates the drudgery of teaching them and his principal (played wonderfully by Olympia Dukakis) has to call him out on his awful attitude, saying something like "You actually beat some of the kids to the parking lot when the final bell rings." Eventually Mr. Holland makes a turn in his teaching when he decides to employ rock-and-roll in his lessons (this is the 1960s, so this doesn't go over spectacularly well with some folks) and when he actually realizes that a particular student who is struggling with the clarinet is trying to reach him.

Mr. Holland discovers that yes, he can teach high school music, and teach it he does, for the rest of his career: through the Viet Nam War and through his own child's birth and through the discovery that his son is deaf and through a strange attracted protectiveness he feels toward one very talented pupil who comes along and through the inevitable budget cuts to the music program that will cost him his job in the end. He does compose through all this, and at the end of the film, the school band, along with some of the many alumni he has touched--including that unconfident clarinetist from years before, who is now Governor--sets up to perform the last minute or two of this piece. (Asking questions like why does a high school and alumni band sound so good and when did they rehearse is churlish behavior that should be swatted down with great harshness.)

So Kamen wrote this roughly nine-minute work, called "An American Symphony", which purports to be the serious composition that Mr. Holland has been writing for all his many years of teaching. Kamen's music is always impressive, and I miss his film music voice. He tended toward the big and the dramatic (there's zero doubt in my mind he would have scored at least one MCU movie), and his melodies don't always exactly leave you humming them, but they reward repeated listening and become quite familiar as you do. For this piece he even paid tribute to Mr. Holland's breakthrough as a teacher, the realization that he could use rock-and-roll as a means to bringing the kids into more serious music, by adding the electric guitars to his orchestral palate.

It's an interesting piece, a long-form tone poem written specifically for a movie whose central message is along the lines of "Life is what happens to you when you have other plans." Here is "An American Symphony" by Michael Kamen, from the score to the film Mr. Holland's Opus.

Tone Poem Tuesday (and Composer Focus: Sibelius, part 4)

 It's not Tuesday. Sorry about that.

But let's give a listen to something our boy Jean Sibelius wrote in 1908: a tone poem called Night Ride and Sunrise. It's quite an evocative piece, starting with a brief fanfare figure in the brass before settling into a rhythm that suggest hoofbeats along a dark road, the "Night Ride" of our title. It seems as if we're going to be in for a long stretch without a melody, until one arises in the upper woodwinds, playing above the rhythmic pulse; this melody yearns and stretches and yet somehow manages to stay almost in the background. Our rhythm gives way to long scalewise passages in the winds, as our texture becomes colder, stormier, more dramatic.

Eventually, though, our sunrise arrives, and it is exactly what one might expect from a Sibelian sunrise: shot through with clarity and nobility, with simple magnificence. Even here, when the chorales in the winds and brass take over, there is still momentum to spare in the continuing pulsing rhythms. I'm coming to see that for Sibelius, a blend of textures is always afoot.

Here is Night Ride and Sunrise by Jean Sibelius.