aworks :: "new" american classical music

Vanessa (1953). Samuel Barber /it's the 70s/

Luciano Pavarotti (via last.fm)

Old issues of Billboard Magazine are now available on Google Books. Here's the top of the classical album chart for May 21, 1977:   

1. The Great Pavarotti. London.
2. Jean-Pierre Rampal & Claude Bolling. Suite for Flute & Jazz Piano.
3. Pachelbel Kanon: Two Suites. Fasch: Two Symphonies. Paillard Chamber Orchestra. RCA.
4. Puccini. Tosca. Montserrat, Caballe, Carreras, Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Philips.
5. Puccini. La Boheme. Pavarotti, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. London.
6. Holst. The Planets. Tomita. RCA.
7. Meyerbeer: La Prophete. Horne, Royal Philharmonic. Columbia.
8. Bolling: Concerto for Classic Guitar and Jazz Piano. Lagoya. RCA.
9. Luciano Pavarotti. The World's Favorite Tenor Arias. London.
10. Ravel. Bolero. Chicago Symphony Orchestra. London.
33. Barber: Vanessa. Steber, Bedda, Metropolitan Opera Chorus & Orchestra.
37. Vaudeville: Songs of the Great Ladies of the Musical Stage. Morris, Bolcom. Nonesuch.

The same page has a photo that includes Morton Gould and Tony Randall.

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we're going out to a movie tonight, probably smoky and the bandit although there's another new movie, star wars, that might be good. last week, i went with you know who and her friend to see a star is born. it was ok. a buddy and i have also agreed to split the cost of stevie wonder's songs in the key of life; i think it's finally on sale at sears. i'll tape it and he can have the lp.

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now playing: little feat - rock and roll doctor. now reading: stuck in the 70s diary for may. now avoiding: the elvis concert scheduled next month at market square arena in indy.

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2009 update: Weather Report's Heavy Weather is #30 on the pop album chart for that week. Other surprising jazz notables in the top 100 include Maynard Ferguson, Return to Forever, George Benson, Bob James, Ronnie Laws, Herbie Hancock's VSOP, and Al DiMeola. In hindsight, the music wasn't all that good but at least it was popular.

Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954). Samuel Barber /life out of balance/

Phantom Regiment via WikipediaLetters and Surveys: This year, as last, I've decided to keep a record of books I've read and significant pieces of music that I have listened to...Barber: Prayers of Kierkegaard/Bartok: Cantata profanna/Vaughan Williams: Dona nobis pacem by Samuel Barber, Bela Bartok, and Ralph Vaughan Williams

For some reason, I am also listening to the music of Barber this year although how I ended up with 41 MP3s of Adagio for Strings is not clear. The quartet it belongs to is particularly good, though.

And of all my 258 Barber tracks, I can't explain why none of them are Prayers of Kierkegaard.

Though in 2003, I did blog about Prayers of Kierkegaard being played in drum corps, and the blogger/commenter pointed out they also played Adagio for Strings. He went on to point out numerous other classical references of interest including the Phantom Regiment playing Schoenberg.

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Where are you, blogger/commenter 75th Trombone? You were probably aworks' first real TCP/IP connection.

And why all of a sudden am I nostalgic about this decade, at least blogging-wise?

Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance (1955). Samuel Barber /pandora classical/

Pandora now appears to support classical music. I just created a John Adams station and the first track is Samuel Barber's Medea. And why does my station play this track?:

...it features modern stylings, a symphony orchestra, chromatic harmony, dissonant harmony and a broad tempo.

Summer Music (1956). Samuel Barber /cool refreshment/

I used to always pleasantly associate the music of Mozart with hot summer weather --something about being genteel and relaxed, maybe in an aristocratic way. Think the summer holiday scene in Stephen Frear's Dangerous Liasons )complete with a cast of Close, Thurman, Malkovich, and Pfeiffer).

Samuel Barber's woodwind quintet Summer Music is the American proxy for this feeling. But times (and tastes) change. This week, I found comfort from this week's heat wave in the jazz of Miles Davis' Pharoah's Dance and Frank Lowe's In Trane's Name. There's something otherworldly and soothing about both, in a frantic, woodwind-ish kind of way.

And speaking of summer escape, I'm still immersed in my Radiohead listening project. The band is clearly talented if a bit disjointed and I haven't come to terms with Thom Yorke's voice and I still haven't heard Pablo Honey yet (the only version of Creep I own is the Edmund Welles bass clarinet rendition), Still, I'm surprised at the overall quality of the body of their work. Not a single dud song, so far.

I'm also reading a Radiohead biography by Marc Randall. Some relevant notes follow.

First, their later music emphasized timbre over melody, which is part of the appeal for me. And on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood played the ondes martenot, famously used in the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen. A quote from the Alex Ross article on Radiohead is used in the book:

I heard the 'Turangalîla Symphony' when I was fifteen," Jonny [Greenwood] went on, "and I became round-the-bend obsessed with it. I wish I could have met him or shaken his hand.

Let me remember. Do I own three or or is it four CDs of Messiaen's symphony?

Randall also writes about the influence of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, specifically the use of a Fender Rhodes electric piano also found on the OK Computer album. This time, Thom Yorke comments:

We're just obsessed by Bitches Brew or anything even vaguely like it. That's a record for the end of the world.

Back in my "thin" days, I was also captivated by the album (and am again).

As more inspiration, in this case with the string arrangements on Fake Plastic Trees, the producer of the album The Bends mentions Greenwood's awareness of Samuel Barber, although only the remnants of the string parts remain in the final recording. Yet the song captures a mood. Barber's Adagio for Strings aworks posts ad infinitum here.

I'm not yet far enough in the book where jazzman Charles Mingus' impact on Radiohead is presumably mentioned. But I'm starting to realize the pattern of how Radiohead effectively absorbs others' musical art for their own creative purposes. They don't have the virtuosity or "chops" of the jazz or classical originals but since Radiohead is "just" a band playing songs, that doesn't really matter.

Finally, even though I enjoy and respect classical musician Christopher O'Riley, his piano versions of Radiohead leave me flat. Maybe a bias for timbre is rock's greatest achievement?

frank oteri on porous boundaries. heather heise on not black and white. dave winer on why we are spoiled in the bay area

A Hand of Bridge (1959). Samuel Barber

I used to have a soccer blog but it was tedious for me let alone any readers. In any case, for the next six months, I may show surprising interest in music from Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. Related, the News Blog has the best prediction so far for next year's soccer World Cup in Germany:

But a win in Germany would likely bring back the Cup to the UK, if the English fans don't refight WWII in the process.

So, I'll be seeking out Italian-American, Czech-American, and Ghanian-American composers. Only Gian Carlo Menotti and his Pulitzer-winning The Counsel comes to mind but I'll keep working on it.

Reading Menotti's bio, I see that he "wrote the libretti to Samuel Barber's operas Vanessa and A Hand of Bridge." I'm not familiar with the latter but the Wikipedia description intrigues:

A Hand of Bridge, a nine minute opera composed by Samuel Barber with libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, is one of the shortest operas that is regularly performed. It consists of two couples playing a hand of bridge. During the opera each character has a short arietta in which they express their internal monologue. The soprano laments not loving her now dying mother while she was still well. The contralto recalls a hat she saw in a shop window erlier in the day. The tenor recalls an ex-lover and wonders where she is now. Finally, the baritone fantasizes about what he would do if he were as rich as his boss "Mr. Pritchett."

Uh oh, I identify with several of those characters...

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A quick search points out Tomas Svoboda and I suppose Dvorák has relevance here. Amazon, via this interesting list of African American composers, also turns up a CD I want.

Piano Sonata, Op. 26 (1949). Samuel Barber

This month, I've been listening to the Italian Emanuele Arcuili play Barber's Piano Sonata. It's appropriate on a Saturday morning before the fog burns off.

The composer:

I have been having a wonderful time with [Vladimir] Horowitz, who has spent much time out here practicing 5 hours a day on the sonata, and then playing it for me. He has only had it a month, but already does it superbly; and with a surprising emotional rapproachement which I had not expected.

Horowitz called it "the first truly great native work in the form," Charles Ives apparently notwithstanding.

The Arciuli CD is entitled Americans! XXth Century Piano Music of American Composers. I never noticed before but the cover has a picture of the New York skyline, including the World Trade Center. With everything that has happened in the five years since this was recorded, I wonder what the pianista thinks about the US now.

Piano Concerto (1960). Samuel Barber /linkage #2/

• mAdness / coLd-water / fLats.  From Richard Robert Leston's Cage Mesostic. aworks via one of those feed re-publishers.

OK, I apparently conflated Robert Leston with movie director Richard Lester. As an excuse, I associate  the chaotic but lively energy of the 1960s with both Lester and Cage. And while we really enjoy the director's 1966 film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I have apparently also conflated his sixties Beatles' movies: A Hard's Day Night and Help!. I've seen one but not the other but I can't remember which.

• Alex:  Your website's freaky, dad. Via Robert Leston.

I'm guessing the millennial kids won't like the music of John Cage either, even if he is from their generational archetype.

• We find almost nothing in classical composition after 1950 to be interested in even though we've heard lots, and we want to like it. Cheryl Mendelson via Steven Hicken's post on BOP.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson would presumably beg to differ, modulo the decade of the fifties.

• The most recent melody I can think of that I've heard someone out in public randomly humming is the slow movement of Barber's Piano Concerto, composed in 1960. Marcus Maroney.

• Morality in modern music?  Argggghhhhh... I just can't decide!  It drives me insane. ktwhit.

• And of course regarding the "my music is the best thing since..." guy, who needs peer pressure when anyone else can just go back in to the entry and hack out the offending bits? ("One, two, three, four, I declare a fact war!") ;-). Steve Layton on a Sequenza21 wiki talk page.

• Instead, by insisting once again on retroactively justifying the invasion as nothing more than an immediate response to 9/11, the president squandered the chance to broaden support for the struggle ahead, and indirectly strengthened the hand of those who use the same logic to reach the opposite conclusion: that if the invasion was a mistake, then it's a mistake to do anything other than withdraw as quickly as possible. ndol.org.

• And would the paper please, in an article tomorrow, explain what the President's "catastrophic mistakes" were in executing the war in Iraq? Joe's Dartblog.

We share almost no political views but I find Joe Malchow's blog interesting, nonetheless.

• Apparently, 50% of the corpus of music written by "Great American Composers" (according to iTunes, at least) has been written by the Minimalists. Mr. Rambles.

  He goes on to doubt this observation but it sounds right to these ears.

• I am not a music scholar, but it strikes me that in this concerto grosso where Bartók pits the orchestra against itself, he has managed to use modern dissonances, harmonies, and structure without sounding like Charles Ives. Nic.

  Since I practice musical polytheism, I may be fortunate in enjoying both Ives and Barkok's Concerto for Orchestra.

Adagio for Strings (1936). Samuel Barber /the cure?/

We were at a wedding in Baltimore which seems to have interrupted my blogging flow. To get back into it, I'll start with some Adagio blogging. Kristy on Little Ubiquitous points out The Cure used Adagio for Strings for pre-concert music:

The shows were at the Greek Theater, and there was no opening band. Instead, they played a recording of Barber's Adagio for Strings, so ethereal under the summer evening sky. Magical.

I think I own a Cure CD, a live one from Detroit (Cobo Hall?). I can't check though. When we moved, I stopped alphabetizing my CDs, which makes random access difficult.

Not much of musical significance while we were in Maryland. I couldn't find a good classical station while in the car so ended up listening to DC101 and then to substitute, made a quick trip to the Daedalus remaindered books and records outlet in Columbia. I picked up several CDs including Stefan Hussong playing more Cage on accordion (I've decided to be a Cage on accordion completist), John Cage to David Byrne: Four Decades of Contemporary Music (from the LA County Museum of Art), and the musical highlight so far, Andres Diaz and Samuel Sanders playing Barber's Sonata, Op. 6 (along with some Bernstein and Foote). I also bought Anarchy by John Cage, "a book-length lecture compromising twenty mesostic poems." Seeing the mesostic form may have prompted me to try the crossword puzzle on the flight home, which sought four letters given the clue of "Beatty and Rorem."

I could blog more on weddings and anarchy but discretion prevails...

I did make it back home in time for last night's tsunami warning, though. Weird. Wikipedia points out that of West Menlo Park "none of it is covered by water." I suppose had that changed last night, I would have edited the Wikipedia page to ensure it was up-to-date.  celesteh has East Bay tsunami coverage here and here.

Adagio for String Strings (1936). Samuel Barber /trombone/

I promise I don't only view the world through Adagio so bear with me...

The OTJ Forum ("Discuss and Discover the Trombone") had a recent poll to vote on preferred arrangement of Barber's Adagio. To the trombonists' credit, string orchestra won out over the arrangement for trombone choir (which I'll admit I haven't heard). All well and good, but then I just read Paul Bailey's post where he laments the traditionally limited path for trombonists:

listening to them talk and prepare the same few excerpts seemed like they were limiting the trombone to a character actor status instead of practicing an instrument that is capable of a wide range of expression. many of my lessons on classical repertoire were consumed not with musical expression, but strategies and discussion of the various “schools and sounds” in the trombone world.

He also points out that playing the traditional repetoire, despite its lack of connection to contemporary culture, is the equivalent of having comedians today primarily performing vaudeville. Today, for something different, I happened to read comic Jay Mohr's book about his two years on Saturday Night  Live. While Mohr behaved in some less than flattering ways, at the end, he comes across well by forsaking his SNL gig in order to regularly perform as he was driven to do. Clearly, SNL was stifling his creativity and so he found a means of expression more true to himself. It sounds like Bailey, at some point, made a similar decision to focus on his own ensemble instead of the conventional "paradigm."

And apparently, Chris Farley was the funniest man alive and a great guy.

Symphony No. 2 (1944). Samuel Barber

Gary Panetta writes of a Peoria Symphony concert commemorating World War II veterans on the 60th anniversary of the US victories in Europe and Japan. Among the selections Samuel Barber's Symphony No. 1:

Like much of Barber's work, it's passionately romantic with an expansive quality that's captured in the symphony's opening moments.

Barber's Symphony No. 2 might be a more literal choice and possibly more captivating to those aging veterans. Written while Barber was serving in the Army Air Corps, it attempts to give the impression of flying.

In 1964, Barber decided he was dissatisfied with the work and withdrew it. Andrew Schenk later recorded it based on a found copy and the work was re-published in 1990.

My father and three of his brothers served in the War. One of my uncles was killed in combat in Europe; I happened to see his Purple Heart over the holidays. It makes clear the sacrifices of war.

On the other hand, Bob Dole, wounded veteran himself, questioning John Kerry's Purple Hearts during last year's presidential election was a low point in political discourse.