The role that classical music has played in my life up until now has been to score films, cartoons and television (shows/ads). At times, I have clearly remembered these snippets of music but never sought them out.
I hope to extract the music like Rambo would some do-gooder missionaries and take it somewhere safe and far from Elmer Fudd. Ok, I am mixing my examples a bit.
My father loves Disney's Fantasia. Walt Disney wanted to bring the kids some classical music and sell some tickets to their parents as well. It was a good idea and mostly became famous for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. To me, it was and is a wondrous example of film and music together but in my mind there is still none greater than Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Now don't think I want to go out and banish John Williams. He has taken orchestral music to places few composers could have, a truly mass audience. I love what he and other composers do to create a rich world in film (and rarely, TV). But for me, I need to be able to hear the music and not see the closing credits to Rocky.
Last night I saw An Education, in which a young cellist becomes entwined in an affair with an older man. They go to see a performance of Ravel and I thought "Ah Ha, an opportunity to learn!" So I spent some time with Maurice Ravel. I found a beautiful performance of A.B. Michelangeli playing the Adagio of Ravel's Piano Concerto.
I let Pandora dance me through some things as well. Pandora is a free service on the web (as long as you listen less than 40hrs per month) that allows you to name a song or artist or several of each and then it builds you a "station" of music. It gave me Debussy (very recognizable from Film), Prokofiev and Shostakovich to start with. I think with Pandora you get a variety and if you use it's functions well, get a strong grouping of music.
So, that is a long winded way of saying I hope to find inspiration in life for new avenues to approach Classical music...I will let you know how it goes.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Simone Dinnerstein
An essay from the New Yorker archive
This article was passed along to me by Anne-Marie, my co-conspirators spouse and a supporter of the Year of Classical. She says it is her one of her favorite essays on music ever. I loved it! Please enjoy!
A classical kid learns to love pop-and wonders why he has to make a choice.
I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”
For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre élitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider some of the rival names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious; but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. This morning, for me, it was Sibelius’s Fifth; late last night, Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; tomorrow, it may be something entirely new. I can’t rank my favorite music any more than I can rank my memories. Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. They say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. If it is worth loving, it must be great; no more need be said.
When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.”
Friday, January 1, 2010
Day 1 with Yo-Yo Ma
I decided to spend a little down time today after much eating and Wii researching some of the suggestions I have received for this so called Year of Classical.
My father spoke very highly of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suite in G. Part of the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Rather than think of Bach or music history, this was more of a chance to hear Yo-Yo Ma.
First impressions: I know of Yo-Yo Ma and his status as a virtuoso. I can hear the musical hurtles he has to jump through. At times all the mastery and skill fades into the background and the feeling seeps through with every bit of the music. I didn't want to overthink it, so I listened to both albums once through. Overall I loved it for it's quiet strength. Bold and groaning lines of music making strong bass vibrations in everything. A very good Day 1.
My father spoke very highly of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suite in G. Part of the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Rather than think of Bach or music history, this was more of a chance to hear Yo-Yo Ma.
First impressions: I know of Yo-Yo Ma and his status as a virtuoso. I can hear the musical hurtles he has to jump through. At times all the mastery and skill fades into the background and the feeling seeps through with every bit of the music. I didn't want to overthink it, so I listened to both albums once through. Overall I loved it for it's quiet strength. Bold and groaning lines of music making strong bass vibrations in everything. A very good Day 1.
Album information from Amazon below:
Bach: The Cello Suites Inspired By Bach, From The Six-Part Film Series / Yo-Yo Ma Though they were long misunderstood as mere technical hurdles, Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello are among those rare works of music that offer inexhaustible rewards for performer and listener alike. Yo-Yo Ma gave a pathbreaking account of the suites back in the '80s (Suites for Unaccompanied Cello ) but returns to them here impelled by a unique and interdisciplinary approach. For this project, Ma engaged the talents of artists in different fields--ranging from a landscape artist to a Kabuki actor and figure skaters--to produce six short films as a visual correlative for the highly distinctive character of each suite. While the success of the films in illuminating Bach's creativity is decidedly uneven, Ma brings the music itself to life with a searing, quasi-vocal eloquence. His interpretations are probing, characterized by imaginative bowing and attention to the spacious architecture of Bach's score. This is especially clear in Ma's preference for broad, expansive tempos and patient spinning of filigreed detail. True, the generally Romantic cast of his conception can seem overdone and exaggerated in statement, as if Ma is more intent on overlaying his own personality on the discipline of the music. But the prayerful, meditative concentration he brings to the Sarabandes--listen to the single-lined, anguished tone painting in Suite 5--is utterly convincing. There is a sense of profound introspection here, while in the Sarabande of Suite 6 Ma's phrasing suggests we are in the same spiritual terrain as Beethoven's late quartets. Yet there is no lack of blistering energy and extroverted high spirits in some of the more overtly dance-oriented movements. While purists may complain of distortion in these accounts, Ma once again proves he has something vital to say with this music. --Thomas May
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Pre-req in "Pre-Music"
Bear, my fantastic sibling and supporter of all of my crazy pursuits, let the world know yesterday that #yearofclassical was born. To that FB post, I have received much guidance.
Pre-Music
Hanne Blank
Hanne Blank
In a long-ago music appreciation course I taught whilst a doctoral student, I had a young undergraduate, fumbling for vocabulary, refer to the music I’m about to talk about as “pre-music.” When pressed to clarify, she said “You know, the stuff from when they didn’t have chords yet.”
What she meant was monophony: “mono” meaning one, “phone” meaning sound or voice. The earliest notated music we possess in the Western tradition is monophonic Monophony was the primary type of musical composition we know of in the Western tradition until around 900 CE. Monophony means music that consists of a single musical line, a melody, whether for voice (most common) or for an instrument. Whistle a tune and you are performing monophony, creating a musical line that stands alone.
This does not mean that monophonies were always intended to be solos, or that they were necessarily intended to be unaccompanied. A monophonic piece might be intended to be sung by an entire choir of monks or nuns—as in the case of many pieces of plainchant, chants that were written to enable the singing of the daily Catholic liturgy. (It still counts as monophony if some singers or instrumentalists play the same pitches an octave higher or lower than the others.) Monophonic pieces could also be accompanied by instruments or voices. Historians agree that drones were a common type of accompaniment, long continuous pitches that would anchor the melody tonally. Percussion also had a definite place in accompanying monophonic pieces, especially in secular songs and dances.
This does not mean that monophonies were always intended to be solos, or that they were necessarily intended to be unaccompanied. A monophonic piece might be intended to be sung by an entire choir of monks or nuns—as in the case of many pieces of plainchant, chants that were written to enable the singing of the daily Catholic liturgy. (It still counts as monophony if some singers or instrumentalists play the same pitches an octave higher or lower than the others.) Monophonic pieces could also be accompanied by instruments or voices. Historians agree that drones were a common type of accompaniment, long continuous pitches that would anchor the melody tonally. Percussion also had a definite place in accompanying monophonic pieces, especially in secular songs and dances.
Because accompaniments were not notated, we don’t really know what early musicians did or how it sounded. Early music specialists look at many sources to try to figure out how exactly monophonic music might have been performed. Letters and diaries, tapestries, paintings, illustrations in illuminated manuscripts and so on have given us some idea of some of the ways that monophonic music was played and enjoyed, but contemporary recreations will always consist to some degree of educated guesswork.
Monophony came in two major varieties, sacred and secular. Thanks to the infrastructure of the Roman Catholic Church, vastly more sacred monophony survives than secular. Probably the most familiar type of monophonic early music is plainchant, a form of which was later called Gregorian chant after the eighth-century Pope Gregory II. For a long time it was believed that Gregory was instrumental in standardizing plainchant… which is a bit of a stretch considering that it wasn’t actually standardized until the twelfth century and even then the standardization wasn’t all that complete. Even today, there are a number of often national traditions in terms of how to sing chant and which chant melodies to sing.
Plainchant consists of notated but unmeasured melodic lines used to sing elements of the Catholic liturgy. “Unmeasured” in this context means that the rhythmic values of the notes were not given, only the pitches. Singers would base the rhythm of their singing on the rhythms of the texts primarily, although chant composers could hint at duration by making a single syllable of text into a melisma, stretching it across multiple different pitches.
The liturgy of the Church being as vast as it is, there is an awful lot of plainchant: an enterprising grad student from Prague recently developed a plainchant database (http://www.globalchant.org/) if you have any interest in poking around and seeing a bit of the fairly dizzying array of what exists. Entering any single term that is common to the Catholic liturgy, for instance “Alleluia,” yields pages and pages of results. Two good places to go to listen to some plainchant: http://www.christusrex.org/www2/cantgreg/index_eng.html -- he has bunches of MP3s available, sung by the brothers of a working monastery in Brazil, and if you like you can listen all the way through the liturgical selections for an entire service for a given date in the liturgical calendar. (Some of the texts that are read or sung change depending on the particular service, the time of the year, and other factors. Other texts remain the same from service to service… but the chants may be different.) The monks of the Abbey of Solesmes, in France, have been among the most instrumental of organizations in terms of working on chant collections and keeping chant and chant practice alive in the Church, and you can hear a selection of Solesmes chant-singing here: http://www.abbayedesolesmes.fr/FR/gregorien/forme.php?js=1
For the most part, we do not know the names of the composers of plainchant or Gregorian chant. Humble anonymity was the name of the game for most liturgical composers. However, there is one remarkable composer of sacred monophony whom we know very well: the early 12th-century Hildegard von Bingen. Abbess of a convent, visionary, herbalist, mystic, poet, preacher (at a time when women were not permitted to preach, she got dispensations from the Pope to do so because she was so gifted), writer, and composer, Hildegarde was sufficiently unusual that her name stayed on her creations. Among her works is a remarkable drama called the Ordo Virtutum, the Order of Virtues: a musical drama about the journey of the soul, the difficulties of being embodied, the temptations of Satan, and ultimately, a victorious ending in which the Devil is bound and God is praised.
For the most part, we do not know the names of the composers of plainchant or Gregorian chant. Humble anonymity was the name of the game for most liturgical composers. However, there is one remarkable composer of sacred monophony whom we know very well: the early 12th-century Hildegard von Bingen. Abbess of a convent, visionary, herbalist, mystic, poet, preacher (at a time when women were not permitted to preach, she got dispensations from the Pope to do so because she was so gifted), writer, and composer, Hildegarde was sufficiently unusual that her name stayed on her creations. Among her works is a remarkable drama called the Ordo Virtutum, the Order of Virtues: a musical drama about the journey of the soul, the difficulties of being embodied, the temptations of Satan, and ultimately, a victorious ending in which the Devil is bound and God is praised.
Secular monophony came in many flavors, and the vast majority of it never made it into notation -- the same is still true of most of today’s secular songs, which may be recorded but are mostly not transcribed or notated. Quite a lot of secular monophonic pieces exist only as poetic texts, without anything to tell us how they might’ve been set to music. Many more were never written down, but that we know existed because someone somewhere mentioned hearing them. From the same sources we also know there was a lot of dance music that didn’t have words, and thus even less chance of survival in written form. However, even though the number of things that have come down to us is small, we know that pretty much any kind of song you can imagine existed in the secular monophonic repertoire: love songs, laments, ballads, heroic tales, seduction attempts, you name it.
Some of my favorites of the early monophonic secular repertoire are the Spanish songs attributed to the thirteenth-century Galician composer Martin Codax – you can see an image of a copy of his “Cantigas de Amigo” here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martim_Codax_Cantigas_de_Amigo.jpg
The Cantigas are a very early example of a song cycle: a series of songs that can each be performed separately, but that tell a longer story if they are performed in order. The recording by the group Sinfonye is particularly good, in my opinion, and are a great illustration as well of some of the different ways that secular monophony might’ve been accompanied. The CD also includes one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the early monophonic repertoire I know, the song “A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria” – a wonderful, moving, lament for a lost love by a long-dead anonymous composer.
The Cantigas are a very early example of a song cycle: a series of songs that can each be performed separately, but that tell a longer story if they are performed in order. The recording by the group Sinfonye is particularly good, in my opinion, and are a great illustration as well of some of the different ways that secular monophony might’ve been accompanied. The CD also includes one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the early monophonic repertoire I know, the song “A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria” – a wonderful, moving, lament for a lost love by a long-dead anonymous composer.
There were musical dramas in the secular world, too, just as there were in Hildegard’s abbey. One of the relatively few secular composers we know was Adam de la Halle, a thirteenth-century French troubadour. He was the composer of a musical play called “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion,” (The Play of Robin and Marion) from which a catchy little ditty called “Robins m’aime” is one of the highlights, although the entire work survives. An MP3 of this particular song can be listened to here: http://home.snu.edu/~bballweg/robins/robins.mp3
Listening Recommendations:
Gregorian chant – many recordings, take your pick of three or four and you’ll get a good taste
Hildegard von Bingen, “Ordo Virtutum” (Sequentia)
Martin Codax, “Cantigas de Amigo” (Sinfonye)
Adam de la Halle, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion”
Gregorian chant – many recordings, take your pick of three or four and you’ll get a good taste
Hildegard von Bingen, “Ordo Virtutum” (Sequentia)
Martin Codax, “Cantigas de Amigo” (Sinfonye)
Adam de la Halle, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion”
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Beginning
I listen to a fair amount of pop music and jazz. I love music. I commute with it an hour in the morning and an hour at night...my iPod is my soundtrack daily. I listen to Pandora at work when its slow in the gallery and on my computer at home when I am working. In this way I am totally normal. My taste in music is all over the place. I love moody pop music and have been listening to Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors and TV on the Radio in heavy rotation. I do love jazz, especially Miles Davis - the whole catalog.
I have always liked Classical music, but have never pursued it.
Today during my commute I decided that I would immerse myself in it for a year. I would learn it like a language. Composers first, mostly by chronological order then maybe conductors and eventually modern composers like Glass or Cage or Feldman.
So please feel free to offer suggestions and let me know what I should listen to and what I should learn.
Jeff
I have always liked Classical music, but have never pursued it.
Today during my commute I decided that I would immerse myself in it for a year. I would learn it like a language. Composers first, mostly by chronological order then maybe conductors and eventually modern composers like Glass or Cage or Feldman.
So please feel free to offer suggestions and let me know what I should listen to and what I should learn.
Jeff
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