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Post by jk on Feb 21, 2023 6:25:38 GMT -5
This and the following two posts feature country blues tracks in the "looking forward" department. Then we'll have to wait a further 20 posts before non-"classical" music rears its head again. Shortly after that, the floodgates will open with a vengeance. 1688: André Raison (c.1640–1719) was born in the Paris area and by all accounts never left that city. He was one of the most famous French organists during his lifetime and a key influence on French organ music. One of his posts as organist was at the church of the Jacobins at Rue St. Jacques in Paris, where it seems he remained until his death. He was succeeded there by his most illustrious pupil, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault [ 1704], who dedicated his Premier livre d'orgue to Raison. Raison himself published just two collections of organ works, in 1688 and 1714. His own Premier livre d'orgue consists entirely of liturgical music: five masses (in order of appearance, in the first, second, third, sixth and eighth modes) and an offertory in the fifth mode: 1928: The short-lived Robert Hicks (1902–1931) was an early Piedmont blues musician who worked as a cook in a barbecue restaurant, hence his nickname "Barbecue Bob". "Chocolate To The Bone", which I first heard on the fantastic 1960 compilation Blues Fell This Morning, was Bob's way of dealing with racial discrimination ("so glad I'm brownskin", "black man is evil, yellow's so low-down"):
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Post by jk on Feb 22, 2023 5:26:01 GMT -5
1687: Antonio Gianettini (1648–1721) was an Italian organist, concertmaster and composer of mainly oratorios and stage works, many of which have been lost. Although rarely known now, Gianettini was considered one of the most talented composers of his era, his operas and sacred music alike being highly regarded in Germany as well as Italy. This is the "Prelude" from part one of his oratorio L'uomo in bivio, premiered in Modena while he was maestro di cappella at the ducal court: 1929: "Elm Street Blues" was written and first recorded in 1928 by Ida May Mack. From the comp mentioned in the previous post, this is the version by Texas Bill Day (vocals and piano) with Billiken Johnson (vocal effects) and Coley Jones (guitar): [Note: The performer shown on the album cover in this video is Blind Lemon Jefferson]
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Post by jk on Feb 23, 2023 13:25:39 GMT -5
1686: The Dutchman Johannes Schenck (or Johan Schenk; 1660–after 1712) was an Amsterdam-born composer and renowned virtuoso on the viola da gamba, who later worked in Düsseldorf and Mannheim. Schenck's pastoral opera Bacchus, Ceres en Venus is one of the earliest surviving Dutch-language operas, with a libretto by the Amsterdam regent, physician and poet Govert Bidloo. It was premiered 325 (!) years later at the 2011 edition of the Utrecht Early Music Festival. From it, this is "Nu mag de aarde vrolijk wezen” (Now let the earth be joyful): 1930: John Adam Estes (1899 or 1900–1977) was an American blues guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, whose lyrics have been described as combining keen observation with an ability to turn an effective phrase. Known to the world as Sleepy John Estes, his music has been an influence on the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Robert Plant. Oddly, I first came across his surname as the composer of Eddie Cochran's "Milk Cow Blues", although according to Rocker at Smiley, "that credit is probably an error, not unusual with 'Folk'-songs. Eddie Cochran certainly got his influence from Elvis' recording who based his version on Bob Wills' version. Writing credit goes to Kokomo Arnold." Thank you, that man. But I digress... "Street Car Blues" is to my mind one of a select group of country blues songs (including others by Estes) that stand head and shoulders above the rest. It features the unique combination of Estes' "crying" vocals and the evocative mandolin lines of James "Yank" Rachell, who like harmonica player Hammie Nixon played with John on and off for more than half a century (Estes' guitar is in there too). Commenter doubleotwentyone completes the picture: "A unique sound in the blues, with Jab Jones on piano who also played jug with Gus Cannon. Love the legato mandolin over the stabbing piano chords."
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Post by jk on Feb 24, 2023 14:54:46 GMT -5
Both today's composers excelled as performers on bowed instruments... 1685: Le Sieur de Machy (fl. 1655–1700), also Monsieur Demachy or just Machy, was a French viol player, composer and teacher remembered principally for his Pièces de Violle en Musique et en Tablature, a valuable source of information on the performance practices of his time. From that source, this is the opening "Allemande" from the Suite in G Minor, apparently one of Machy's eight surviving suites, although the facts as presented to me are anything but clear: 1931: The German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was a violist as well as a music theorist, teacher and conductor. In 1929 he played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's Viola Concerto, after Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, turned it down. Five years later the composer Hindemith was publicly denounced by Joseph Goebbels as an "atonal noisemaker"; his music was banned by the Nazis not long after. His fascinating Concertino for Trautonium and Strings has been described by YouTube commenter Alcaeus89 as "such a wonderfully weird piece. Like being serenaded by a banana."
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Post by jk on Feb 25, 2023 6:39:02 GMT -5
1684: Rosa Giacinta Badalla (c.1660–c.1710) hailed from the Milan area, likely Bergamo, and became a Benedictine nun at Santa Radegonda. The convent, in a diocese overseen by Archbishop Borromeo, was well known and flourished musically, partly due to the Archbishop's belief that "singing sacred and wholly spiritual things … is divine praise." Badalla wrote one collection of Motetti a voce sola in 1684 as well as two surviving secular cantatas, O fronde care and Vuò cercando, all three of which were published at the convent. Her compositional technique was unique for her time and her style has been described as "remarkable … for its patent vocal virtuosity, motivic originality, and self-assured compositional technique". [ Source (tweaked by jk)] From Mottetti a voce sola, this is "Non piangete": 1932: I used to have a love-hate relationship with the music of George Gershwin (1898–1937), probably because of his mix of popular, jazz and classical genres. (I had the same problem with Leonard Bernstein!) Now, older and hopefully slightly wiser, I can appreciate Gershwin's genius in successfully embracing what on the face of it are conflicting genres (the same holds for Lenny). The first encounter with Gershwin that cost me money was a 1963 Supraphon LP called Musical Gems of the 20th Century, which I bought in 1966: After a getting-acquainted period, the works by Milhaud, Roussel and Stravinsky proved "heavy" enough to meet with my approval. Not so the Gershwin piece -- this was lightweight stuff and "beneath me". Time did its job again and the Cuban Overture now sounds thrilling to these ears (ye gods I was a snob in those days):
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Post by jk on Feb 26, 2023 6:19:29 GMT -5
1683: David Petersen (also spelled Pietersen, c.1651–after 1709, before 1737) was a violinist and composer of north German origin active in NL, specifically Amsterdam. Petersen is closely associated with Servaes de Koninck [ 1697], Johannes Schenck [ 1686] and others who contributed to a revival of Dutch music and arts in the period before 1710. His Speelstukken, a collection of twelve sonatas for violin and basso continuo, is the only Dutch work of its type in this period to see publication. From it, this is Violin Sonata No. 5 in G Minor: 1933: Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor often associated along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy with Impressionism, a term both men rejected. In the 1920s and '30s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Ravel is best-known to the public at large through his orchestral tour de force Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development, and the orchestral arrangement he made in 1922 of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, both of which have been embraced by pop musicians, Frank Zappa in the first case and Emerson, Lake & Palmer in the second. My favourite work of his is the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, often regarded as the finest example of orchestral writing by a 20th-century French composer. The song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée was the last work Ravel wrote. It had been commissioned in 1932 by the film director G.W. Pabst for a cinema version of Don Quixote starring the bass Fyodor Chaliapin. The score was to include four songs and some background music. Ravel's rapidly worsening health affected his progress on the project and eventually Jacques Ibert's music was used in the film. The three songs Ravel completed -- "Chanson romanesque", "Chanson épique" and "Chanson à boire" -- are most often performed by a baritone:
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Post by jk on Feb 27, 2023 3:39:53 GMT -5
1682: Jacob Büttner (fl.1680s) is better known by the French version of his name, Jacques Bittner. The information handed down to us about this lutenist and composer of Austro-Bohemian origin is in inverse proportion to his reputation over the centuries and to the number of performances and recordings of his music in recent times. Pièces de lut constitutes the first (1682) of two collections of Bittner's lute music published in Nuremberg. From it, this is the Suite in G Minor: 1934: The music of the Ukranian composer Thomas de Hartmann (1884–1956) has fascinated me ever since encountering it a decade or so ago (I devoted an entire thread to him at my old "hobby forum"). So has de Hartmann the person, whose connections over the years ranged from Romantic composer Anton Arensky through pioneering abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky to philosopher, mystic and spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was himself a composer and de Hartmann transcribed and co-wrote much of the music that Gurdjieff collected or composed to accompany his movements exercises. Both de Hartmann alone and his work with Gurdjieff are well represented in recordings. From de Hartmann's Symphonie-poème No. 1, Op. 50, this is the closing fourth movement, marked "Allegretto feroce":
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Post by jk on Feb 28, 2023 5:06:05 GMT -5
1681: Henri Dumont (also Henry Du Mont, 1610–1684) was almost exclusively a composer of religious music, including many motets. Born Henry de Thier, he adopted the name Dumont or Du Mont in 1639 when he moved from Maastricht (in what was then the Southern Netherlands) to Paris to become organist at the important parish church of Saint-Paul, from there working his way up to eventually become Master of the Queen's Music, the Queen being Louis XIV's wife Marie-Thérése. From his Motets à deux, trois et quatre parties, this is "Regina Divina": 1935: The Mexican composer Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) is known to the music-loving public at large by just one work, the second of his six symphonies, the thrilling Sinfonía India. To quote from the symphony's wiki, "The percussion section originally included a large number of indigenous Mexican instruments, for example the jicara de agua (half of a gourd inverted and partly submerged in a basin of water, struck with sticks), ... cascabeles (a pellet rattle), tenabari (a string of butterfly cocoons)... and grijutian (string of deer hooves). When the score was published, the composer substituted their nearest equivalents in commonly used orchestral percussion, but requested that the originals be used wherever possible." During the 1930s and '60s, Chávez made several recordings of his own music as well as that of other composers. One of the earliest combines his Sinfonía de Antígona and Sinfonía india with (to my delight) his orchestration of Dieterich Buxtehude's Chaconne in E Minor. Generally I prefer to use studio renditions in this thread but Sinfonia India benefits from a live performance, not least to show the percussion department in full swing:
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Post by jk on Mar 2, 2023 3:55:07 GMT -5
This expansive post, which addresses two composers very dear to me, took me hours to organize for that very reason. Don't make a habit of this, jk. 1680: Dieterich Buxtehude (c.1637–1707) was a Danish organist (most famously at the Marienkirche in Lübeck) and composer whose works are typical of the North German organ school (in fact founded by a Dutchman, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck). Buxtehude's compositional style was a major influence on other Baroque composers, not least J.S. Bach [ 1722]. In 1705, Bach, then a young man of twenty, walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, a distance of more than 400 km (250 miles) and stayed nearly three months to meet the great Lübeck organist, hear him play and, as Bach puts it, "to comprehend one thing and another about his art". Buxtehude is universally regarded as one of the most important composers of the 17th century. He is also the man in my avatar and the subject of a EH thread of that name. I discovered "the 'Hude" (as JH once called him) in late 2019, while investigating the music of Bach at the urging of my indefaticable "Baroque guru", and have been fascinated by him and his music ever since. Membra Jesu nostri (BuxWV 75) is a cycle of seven cantatas, each of which addresses a part of Jesus' crucified body: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart and face. It is scored for five voices (SSATB), two violins, a consort of viols and a basso continuo of double bass, theorbo and organ. The voices sing solos, duets, trios and as a choir. The viols play in the sixth cantata only, where they replace the two violins (to stunning effect) with the middle two choir voices removed. 1936: The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) was not even a name to me when I heard a radio broadcast (possibly the UK premier) of his Symphony No. 11 in G Minor, Op. 103 back in [gulp] 1962. It has remained one of my favourite Shostakovich symphonies, together with today's choice, the Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43. Written at the onset of Stalin's Great Terror, it was withdrawn during rehearsals on the advice of others and had to wait until 1961 for its premier. It is impossible to understand this astonishing work without a grasp of the horrifying context in which it was written (Shostakovich had a packed suitcase permanently on hand during those years for the dreaded night-time visit). Ian McDonald (he of Revolution in the Head) gives a vivid description of the last seven-plus minutes (here from 18:35) on p. 116 of the original indispensable warts-and-all 1990 edition of The New Shostakovich. (It was drastically revised and updated in 2006, sucking out much of its life-blood in the process.) "Looming up on a rolling timpani tidal-wave, a dissonant four-chord sequence … sweeps us without warning back into the gigantomanic world of the symphony's opening bars. [T]he fanfare from the funeral march [that opens the movement] reappears in the midst of this terrifying din and soon the march itself is climbing up through an obliterating landslide of sound, as if determined to achieve a crazed apotheosis. The final explosion, quite possibly the loudest music ever written, subsides onto a vast 129-bar [234 in the new edition] pedal-point over which the funeral fanfare rises in desolate resignation. Fusing the personal and the universal, Shostakovich has reached the end of his world and the end of the world at large. Lit fitfully by the cold radiance of the celesta's valediction, the symphony pulses gradually away into lifeless darkness."
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Post by jk on Mar 3, 2023 2:46:54 GMT -5
1679: The Italian Carlo Pallavicino (c.1630–1688) wrote more than 20 operas, premiered in Venice and Dresden, the two cities where he spent his working life. This aria, whose original Italian name I am unable to trace, comes from Act III of Messalina (libretto by Francesco Maria Piccioli): 1937: The Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) is best known (it could be said only known) to concert-goers for his orchestral masterpiece Sensemayá, based on the poem of the same name by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén:
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Post by jk on Mar 4, 2023 5:41:27 GMT -5
1678: The Dutchman Carel Hacquart (Latinized as Carolus, c. 1640–after 1686) wrote the first opera to be sung in Dutch. De triomfeerende Min (literally, Triumphant Love) has a libretto by the poet Dirck Buysero based on the signing of the peace treaty between France and Spain in Nijmegen (NL) in 1678. It was not performed during Hacquart's lifetime, the first known performance dating from 1920 in Arnhem. Unfortunately most of the music from this opera has to be considered lost, although it seems to have been reconstructed recently (the other three known publications by Hacquart have survived). From it, this is the "Dialogue between Bacchus and Ceres": 1938: The French composer Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) was an accomplished pianist and wrote much for this instrument, often in a chamber music setting. But it is his Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings that features here. Poulenc himself had never actually composed for the organ before, and so he studied Baroque masterpieces for the instrument by J.S. Bach [ 1722] and Buxtehude [ 1680]; the work's neo-Baroque feel reflects this. To quote a poster elsewhere, "It sounds a bit dark in spots, and even a bit sinister", to which I replied that "it was written between 1934 and 1938, when the clouds of war were gathering. There are airier moments too. One or two of these would have worked well in a Tchaikovsky ballet. But I agree, the unsettling side is never far away."
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Post by jk on Mar 5, 2023 5:20:32 GMT -5
1677: Not much seems to be known about the Swiss composer Johann Melchior Gletle (1626–1683), if his wiki is anything to go by. Apparently Gletle was also an organist and Kapellmeister, goodness knows where. Born in Bremgarten, he was a prolific composer of church music -- masses, psalms, motets -- and also several pieces for that most wondrous of stringed instruments, the tromba marina. In Germany, at the time when the trumpet was extensively used in the churches, nuns often substituted the tromba marina because women were not allowed to play trumpets (!!), hence the name Nonnengeige (literally, nuns' violin). Gletle died in Augsburg. From his Expeditionis musicae classis IV, Op. 5, this is motet no. 36, "O Jesu rex noster": 1939: Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) is regarded by top Russian conductor Valery Gergiev as the greatest 20th-century Russian composer, ahead of his beloved Shostakovich. Prokofiev had the great misfortune to die on the same day as Joseph Stalin. Not getting to experience even one day in a Russia free of the dictator, his coffin had to be carried by hand through back streets in the opposite direction of the masses of people going to visit Stalin's body. About 30 people attended the funeral, Shostakovich among them. The leading Soviet music periodical reported Prokofiev's death as a brief item on page 116, the first 115 pages being devoted to the death of the dictator. Prokofiev's score for Eisenstein's classic film Alexander Nevsky was later arranged by its composer into a seven-movement cantata for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra. For the film score, Prokofiev experimented with different microphone distances in order to achieve the desired sound. For example, horns meant to represent the baddies, the Teutonic Knights, were played close enough to the microphones to produce a crackling, distorted sound. The brass and choral groups were recorded in different studios and the separate pieces were later mixed. Was Prokofiev the first to do this? He certainly wasn't the last. From that cantata, this is the fifth and longest movement, "The Battle on the Ice":
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Post by jk on Mar 6, 2023 3:37:49 GMT -5
1676: Johann Jakob Walther (1650–1717) was one of the foremost German violinists of the 17th century. Besides a virtuoso technique including double stops and arpeggios, his compositions display a wealth of formal devices, especially in the treatment of ostinato variations. His twelve-part cycle Scherzi da violino solo con il basso continuo anticipates the technical ingenuity of arch-violinist Niccolò Paganini by 150 years. This is the ninth in the cycle, "Sonata in D Major": 1940: In 1977 the pre-eminent English composer Malcolm Arnold wrote a set of Variations on a Theme by Ruth Gipps. Like Sir Malcolm, the multi-talented Ms Gipps (1921–1999) had no interest in trends in modern music; indeed, her compositions are most closely allied to the likes of Vaughan Williams [ 1909] and E.J. Moeran, both avid collectors of British folk-songs. This is The Piper of Dreams, Op. 12b for solo oboe:
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Post by jk on Mar 7, 2023 4:43:13 GMT -5
1675: One of the royal posts held by the English composer and music theorist Matthew Locke (c.1621–1677) was "Composer for the Violins". His successor in this office was the family friend Henry Purcell [ 1692], who composed an ode on the death of Locke entitled What hope for us remains now he is gone?Psyche is a semi-opera in five acts to a libretto by Thomas Shadwell, loosely based on Jean-Baptiste Lully's 1671 tragédie-ballet Psyché. The plot, which I'm told is extremely complicated, follows the Classical legend of Cupid and Psyche. Although it didn't equal Locke's success with The Tempest earlier that year, Psyche helped further establish the genre of semi-opera in England: 1941: The Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) and I go back a long way. When I was five or six and already fed up with uninspiring pieces I had to learn for my piano exams, my father brought back from the local library a book of piano music that included an arrangement of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance" from his then exceedingly popular ballet Gayane (1942). This turned my musical world on its head. It also gave me hope, that there was more to classical music than scales and boring pieces illustrating this or that pianistic technique. I played it constantly along with other ballet numbers by Harry Cack, as my conservative music teacher of an uncle used to call him. Piano lessons died a death once I hit puberty but my love of Khachaturian's music has persisted to this day. My parents, bless them, opened the bedroom door one evening so that I could hear, in a now long-abandoned light music programme called Grand Hotel, another favourite of mine then and now, the "Waltz" from Aram K's incidental music to Mikhail Lermontov's play Masquerade. No wonder Khachaturian is regarded in Armenia as a national treasure:
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Post by jk on Mar 8, 2023 4:17:26 GMT -5
I was hoping for at least one woman composer on International Women's Day but no such luck. Today's "forward" selection is the best I can do! 1674: Cristoforo or Cristofaro Caresana (c.1640–1709) was an Italian Baroque composer, organist and tenor. He was an early representative of the Neapolitan operatic school. La Veglia, a Christmas cantata for six voices and strings, curiously compares Christ to a gambler who wins by staking his own life. From it, this is the brief lullaby "Dormi, o ninno", a model of simplicity and an exquisite example of "less is more": 1942: John Cage (1912–1992) decided to become a mycologist as well as a composer, simply because music and mushrooms are next to each other in the dictionary. That's how the man's mind worked. The one connection I can make between Cage and Brian Wilson is their use of the prepared piano, in Cage's case a whole array of items inserted in between the strings, in Brian's the tack piano with taped strings in "I'm Waiting For The Day" and a similar treatment in "Bag Of Tricks" from The SMiLE Sessions ( here). This is Cage on Arnold Schoenberg [ 1903]: "After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'" This is The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs for voice and piano (with the lid closed). Setting a reworked version of a passage from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a favourite book of Cage's, its vocal line only uses three pitches while the pianist produces sounds by hitting the lid or other parts of the instrument in a variety of ways (with fingers, knuckles, etc.):
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Post by jk on Mar 9, 2023 4:10:46 GMT -5
1673: Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) wrote some truly remarkable music, much of which was way ahead of its time. What follows is largely drawn from some excellent concert notes by the Highland Park Recorder Society: Biber's Battalia à 10 for strings and continuo was written in 1673 during the Baroque era. Some historians have considered this work as expressing Biber's feelings about the Thirty Years' War, a religious war fought from 1618 to 1648. Beginning as a conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the war spread throughout most of Europe. The opposing sides often used mercenary armies, and the war brought with it famine and disease that devastated many countries. This war killed almost half of the male population of German-speaking lands and over a third of the Czech people. Battalia seems to be a statement about the social and historical impact of war and its toll on humanity. Battalia is often translated as "a body of troops" or simply as "battle". The piece is dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, vegetation and the theatre, which immediately suggests notions of absurdity to both player and listener. In it Biber uses many non-traditional musical techniques, including striking the bow on the instrument, weaving paper through the strings and Ives-like polytonality. The piece is divided into eight short movements. The opening movement, "Sonata", is a lively flurry of activity employing pizzicati and col legno (using the wood rather than the hair side of the bow), in what is perhaps the first use of the technique. These techniques were used to imitate the soldiers' footsteps and the contrasts between soft and loud passages. In the second movement, "The Lusty Society of Common Humour", the troops have gathered in their separate camps. No fewer than eight different songs -- in Czech, German, Slovak, Italian and other languages -- are heard, in seven different keys, all at once and each starting at a different time. Biber gets his point across by remarking in one of the string parts that "Hic dissonant ubique nam ebrii sic diversis Cantilenis calamari solent" ("Here it is dissonant everywhere, for thus are the drunks accustomed to bellow with different songs"). This brief, bizarre movement anticipates by over two hundred years similar juxtapositions by Charles Ives of unrelated types of music. After a short "Allegro" recalling the opening music comes "Mars" (March), in which a drum-like rattle from the low strings, produced by having the contrabass players place a piece of paper in between the strings, accompanies a wild passage for solo violin that suggests a military fife. The ensuing "Presto" features a melody with a galloping rhythm and a hunting-horn quality, and the "Aria" -- perhaps a prayer by the soldiers before the battle -- is a sweet, song-like interlude. Then comes the actual "Battle", which is short but aggressive. To imitate the firing of cannon, Biber employs what in later days came to be known as the "Bartók pizzicato", where the string is plucked forcefully enough to snap against the fingerboard. Battalia concludes not with a song of victory but rather with the "Lament of the Wounded Musketeers", a funereal song of genuine pathos with some biting dissonances. 1943: Anton Webern (1883–1945) was, together with his mentor Arnold Schoenberg [1903] and his colleague Alban Berg [1912], at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. Ironically, Webern's music only became a major influence on the direction modern music would take after his tragic death on 15 September 1945, when he was shot by a US soldier outside his home during the Allied occupation. Written in 1941–43, Cantata No. 2, Op. 31 for soprano, bass, choir and orchestra sets a poem by Webern's friend and sometime lyricist, the poet and painter Hildegard Jone (1891–1963; see here). If the music mirrors the dark and foreboding influence of the war, the text speaks of nature and alludes to a Christian outlook on life ( source):
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Post by jk on Mar 10, 2023 4:00:17 GMT -5
1672: Antonio Sartorio (1630–1680) was a leading composer of operas in his native Venice in the 1660s and '70s. Between 1665 and 1675, he spent most of his time in Hanover as Kapellmeister to Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg, returning frequently to Venice to compose operas for the Carnival. In 1676 he became vice maestro di capella at San Marco in Venice. From his opera Adelaide, this is the opening "Sinfonia" for two trumpets, strings and continuo: 1944: Aaron Copland (1900–1990), the "Dean of American Composers", has at least one thing in common with King Harvester Ron Altbach, namely a period of tuition from the noted Parisian pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Copland is best known to the public at large for his Fanfare for the Common Man. Another work in what he labelled his deliberately accessible "vernacular" style is the ballet Appalachian Spring. Premiered in 1944, he rearranged it a year later as an orchestral suite. One of its melodies has a lot in common with a stunning P.J. Proby 45 released in 1966. "I Can't Make It Alone", a Jack Nitzsche-produced Goffin-King composition, is carried by a sublime riff with clashing E flats and Ds that features in an almost identical form in Copland's ballet suite. Another of Appalachian Spring's melodies takes its cue from a Shaker hymn called "Simple Gifts"; it can be heard here. Copland's orchestral masterpiece invariably conjures up for me visions of mountain streams and melting ice announcing the imminent arrival of Spring:
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Post by jk on Mar 11, 2023 5:23:23 GMT -5
1671: Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611 or 1612–1675), known as the "Orpheus of Zittau" (his principal place of work) was a German Bohemian composer and organist of the early to middle Baroque era. Over 400 of his works survive, in a total of 14 separate collections, but nothing for organ -- maybe he never published anything he wrote for his instrument. He himself managed to survive the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. From Fest- und Zeitandachten (HaWV 678), this is "Meine Seele erhebt den Herren": 1945: Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music due to his unique approach to rhythm, orchestration and tonality. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity, which broadly speaking consists of a Russian period (c.1907–1919), a neoclassical period (c.1920–1954) and a serial period (1954–1968). Written between 1942 and 1945, the stirring Symphony in Three Movements at times harks back to Stravinsky's seminal 1913 ballet Le Sacre du printemps, which he was rescoring at the time, and at other times looks ahead to his 1951 opera The Rake's Progress. The symphony uses material written by Stravinsky for aborted projects, that of the outer movements having been to accompany wartime news footage. The piano's presence in the first movement stems from a piano concerto that was left incomplete. Music for harp is prominent in the second movement, which was written for the appearance of the Virgin Mary in the film adaptation of Franz Werfel's novel The Song of Bernadette (Alfred Newman eventually landed the film score). The third movement unites the first two movements by giving equal emphasis to piano and harp.
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Post by jk on Mar 12, 2023 6:34:52 GMT -5
1670: The Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) was responsible for creating French-style opera as a musical genre; he and his librettist Philippe Quinault had concluded that Italian-style opera was inappropriate for the French language. He is also credited with the invention in the 1650s of the French overture ( ouverture, or "Frenchie", as JH calls it), a form used extensively in the Baroque and Classical eras, especially by J.S. Bach [ 1722] and Handel [ 1728]. Lully died from gangrene, having struck his foot with his long conducting staff during a performance of his Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery. He refused to have his leg amputated so he could still dance! This resulted in gangrene propagating through his body and ultimately infecting the greater part of his brain, causing his death. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is a five-act comédie-ballet -- a play intermingled with music, dance and singing -- written by Molière with music by Lully. It was first performed for the Sun King and his court on 14 October 1670: 1946: It took me decades to "get" the music of the English composer, conductor and pianist Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). It was accompanying choir rehearsals of his a cappella Hymn to St Cecilia (1942) that did the trick. "Old Benjy Britt", as Alex calls him in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, co-founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 and was responsible for the creation of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967. His masterpieces, in my opinion, are the opera Peter Grimes (1945) and the War Requiem (1962). His most popular work by contrast has to be The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34. Subtitled "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell" [ 1692], its opening theme used to introduce the afternoon classical segment on, I believe, Saturday of what was then the BBC Third Programme. Written in 1945, it was commissioned for the British educational documentary film Instruments of the Orchestra released the following year, hence its inclusion here (1946 was also the year of its concert premiere):
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Post by jk on Mar 13, 2023 3:19:48 GMT -5
1669: Johann Caspar Kerll (1627–1693) was a highly influential German Baroque composer and organist who has since slipped into obscurity, perhaps because so many of his works have been lost. Influenced by Heinrich Schütz (end of the week) in his sacred vocal music and Girolamo Frescobaldi (next month) in his keyboard works, Kerll was known as a gifted composer and an outstanding teacher. Of the pupils that can be fully attributed to him, the best-known is Agostino Steffani [ 1709]. From Kerll's Delectus sacrarum cantionum (Munich, 1669), a collection of 26 motets for two to five voices, this is "Exultate corda devota": 1947: Samuel Barber (1910–1981) is generally known for one work and one work only, the Adagio for Strings, which he later arranged for choir as Agnus Dei. The Adagio is popular in the EDM genre, notably trance, and has been covered by the DJ-ing likes of William Orbit, Armin van Buuren and Tiësto. The luminous Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Op. 24) was composed eleven years later at the behest of the soprano Eleanor Steber. The text, drawn from a short prose piece by James Agee, is a poetic evocation of life as seen from the perspective of a small boy. Barber sets approximately a third of Agee's piece ( here):
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Post by jk on Mar 14, 2023 4:01:30 GMT -5
1668: "Jacopo Melani (1623–1676) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era. He was born and died in Pistoia, and was the brother of composer Alessandro Melani and singer Atto Melani." This is all Wikipedia has to say about him, apart from a list of eleven works. So I poked around in various corners of cyberspace and found odd bits, some of them very odd. Turns out Jacopo was the eldest of seven brothers and that his family was one of the most prominent musical dynasties of its time. He spent much of his adult life in Florence, later moving to Rome. One of the works listed is Il Girello, a "dramma musicale burlesco" to a libretto by Filippo Acciaiuoli with a musical prologue by Alessandro Stradella (one of Stradella's earliest operatic compositions, I'm told). Everything else was composed by Melani. According to one Robert Weaver, Il Girello was "one of the four or five most frequently performed operas in the seventeenth century". It was premiered at Rome's Palazzo Colonna in 1668. A YouTube uploader describes "Chiedo Numi" as a "'lament' aria [that sees] Mustafa begging for mercy and singing his love for Doralba", M and S being an "amorous couple", according to another Italian source. This final cybersnippet made me smile: "At the end of scene XVI, act 2 stage directions indicate: 'I Papagalli cantano.' and 'Gli Orsi Ballano.'--p. 63. ['Second Intermezzo./Chorus of Armenians, who lead Bears and Parrots, who form a Dance.' 'The Parrots sing and the Bears dance.']" 1948: The music of French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) fascinates and scares me in equal measure. Its uncompromising nature stems in part from the use of what Messiaen calls modes of limited transposition. These give his works an unsettling quality much like that found in the graphic art of M.C. Escher. I have been drawn to many of Messiaen's works over the years, but never as strongly as to his ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. At the time of writing this gargantuan work, the composer was fascinated by the myth of Tristan and Isolde -- Messiaen once summarized it as "a love song; a hymn to joy". It is considered one of the greatest musical compositions of the 20th century. The symphony includes a piano part of terrifying virtuosity and a part for the Ondes Martinot, whose otherworldly wail is all over this overwhelming display of orchestral colour:
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Post by jk on Mar 15, 2023 6:32:51 GMT -5
1667: The Czech Samuel Capricornus (born Samuel Bockshorn; 1628–1665) had a short and sometimes difficult life. In May 1657 he became Kapellmeister in Stuttgart, a position he held until his death, where he soon became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the organist of the collegiate church, Philipp Friedrich Böddecker, and his brother David, a cornetto player who complained about the demands Capricornus made of him. In his defence, Capricornus referred to the unruliness and the "gluttony and drunkenness" of the musicians in the kapell, adding that the cornetto players played their instruments as if they were cow horns! His wonderfully dark Sonata a 8 in A Minor is scored for 3 violins, 2 violas, 2 violas da gamba, viola di basso and continuo: 1949: Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969) was the second Polish woman composer to achieve national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century. One of her teachers at the École Normale de Musique de Paris during the 1930s was Nadia Boulanger [see 1944]. Her Quartet for Four Violins, an unusual combination if ever there was one -- could it be that women composers feel less bound by convention? -- is in three movements, "Allegretto – Allegro giocoso", "Andante tranquillo" and "Molto allegro" (Ms Bacewicz was herself a violinist):
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Post by jk on Mar 16, 2023 4:47:14 GMT -5
1666: Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) was the most influential composer in the rising genre of public opera in mid 17th-century Venice. Unlike his illustrious teacher Claudio Monteverdi's early operas, scored for the extravagant court orchestra of Mantua, Cavalli's operas make use of a small orchestra of strings and basso continuo to meet the limitations of public opera houses. Of the 41 operas he is known to have written, the 27 that survive provide the only example of a continuous musical development by a single composer in a single genre from the early to the late 17th century in Venice. His three-act opera (or "dramma per musica") Pompeo Magno (Pompey the Great), with an Italian libretto by Nicolò Minato, was first performed in Venice at the Teatro San Salvatore on 20 February 1666. From Act 2, this is the aria "Cieche tenebre", sung by Pompey’s son Sextus: 1950: McKinley Morganfield (1913 or 1915–1983), known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an important figure in the post-war blues scene, and is often cited as the father of modern Chicago blues. In 1950, Waters recorded two early versions of the blues standard "Rollin' and Tumblin'". On a session for the Parkway label he provided the guitar, with Little Walter Jacobs on vocal and harmonica and Baby Face Leroy Foster on drums. Released as a two-part single (Part 1 b/w Part 2), it was attributed to the Baby Face Leroy Trio. In 2022, this recording was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in the "Classics of Blues Recording – Singles" category.
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Post by jk on Mar 17, 2023 2:51:49 GMT -5
1665: Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) was an early Baroque composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before J.S. Bach [ 1722], as well as one of the most important composers of the 17th century. He is credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany and continuing its evolution from the Renaissance into the Early Baroque. Between 1609 and 1612 he studied with maestro Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. Often called the "father of German music" and traditionally accredited with composing the first German opera, Dafne (1627, now lost), Schütz himself had many pupils, including many of the musicians who sang or played under him as Kapellmeister in Dresden. This is the wonderfully sonorous Magnificat anima mea (SWV 468), his one extant Latin setting of the Song of Mary: 1951: Frankie Laine (1913–2007) had one heck of a voice, attested to by two not entirely flattering nicknames, "Old Leather Lungs" and "Mr Steel Tonsils". He could make any song sound great, but if the song was good to start with, such as this " Jezebel", you had a masterpiece on your hands: Twelve years later, Laine would find himself breaking new ground sonically with the Mann-Weill song "Don't Make My Baby Blue". Produced by Terry Melcher and arranged and conducted by Jack Nitzsche, it features a distorted guitar solo (by Glen Campbell?) that takes this otherwise fairly innocuous outing to another level. Very audacious considering Laine's reputation and fanbase but most effective!
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Post by jk on Mar 18, 2023 4:27:27 GMT -5
1664: Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (c.1620-1623–1680) was the leading Austrian composer of his generation who promoted the use and development of sonata and suite forms in Austria and South Germany. He was also an influential violinist and made substantial contributions to the development of his instrument's technique. His Sonatae unarum fidium was the first collection of sonatas for violin and basso continuo to be published by a German-speaking composer. It contains the brilliant virtuosity, sectional structure and lengthy ground-bass variations typical of the mid-Baroque violin sonata. This is Sonata No. 2: 1952: John Lee Hooker (1912 or 1917–2001) must be the only blues musician to have made recordings in six decades! Hooker, who had a lisp (in interviews, he talks of "the bloothe"), would credit his distinctive playing style to his stepfather William Moore, who introduced the young John Lee to blues guitar and singing (Hooker had heard nothing but spirituals up until then). "Walkin' The Boogie" is not your standard blues fare. The double-tracked vocals, what sounds like a double-speed guitar, the stamping, the echo, the spoken passages… it's in a field of one. I've had great trouble discovering when this endlessly fascinating track was first released. It sounds very far out for 1952, but Discogs and others place it in this year. Maybe it was first recorded in '52 and doctored in 1965, the other year I keep seeing mentioned, although I'd swear I heard it some two years earlier on a city blues compilation:
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