7 & 8 December

This programme is a repeat from earlier this year!

CB Winter

Intro:  Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes, Gurney

 

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows and takes winter as it’s theme.

 

We have just heard a song by Ivor Gurney, whose benign shade wanders often into the mind.  The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes sets a poem by Ernest Casson.  It is a song for contemporary shepherds watching their sheep.

 

Now, a setting of a sonnet of Edmund Spenser made by Edmund Rubbra.  It comes from his set of Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra, a work of his mid-thirties, first performed in 1935.  After the first performance, he amplified the original string quartet accompaniment, very likely as the textures of the string parts are often strongly contrapuntal and played on only four instruments may not bear the weight; of course, to thicken the lines may overpower the soloist’s contribution.  The sonnet’s compact structure of fourteen lines, balanced phrases and poised rhythms, comparatively long lines and an argument developed tautly within strict metre and rhymes, is not easy to set - its form being a single verse, frequently stating abstract propositions in a manner that does not imply any melody other than its own.  In the case of New Year Forth Looking Out Of Janus’ Gate, the tenor sings above a fugue; the quiet climax brings voice and instruments together in a broadened statement before the stalky opening subject, a tempo primo, ends the piece abruptly.

 

Track Two:   Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra Rubbra

 

Tchaikovsky’s twelve piano pieces, The Seasons, were written month by month for the journal Nuvellist.  They were intended for readers to play, they were written to deadlines, work on them being often prompted by Tchaikovsky’s valet.  It was fortunate for us that Alexei remembered.  Small-scale and unambitious as they are in form, The Seasons are anything but ephemeral as music.  Each was headed by a quotation from Russian poetry.  January (At The Fireside) is headed by words from Pushkin:  “A little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire is dying in the fire-place, and the candle has burned out...”  There you have it, two of Russia’s more sophisticated artists of the 19th Century:  but the piece is a miniaturization of much that is best in Tchaikovsky, the song, the thought-provoking forays into rhythmical contrast and overall charmingly sensitive affect conveyed with notable melodic and harmonic skill, all this in a form of simple alternation.  

 

Track Three:  January (At The Fireside), Tchaikovsky   

 

Schubert’s Winterreise, composed only two years before his death, frightened his friends.  One can imagine that Schubert stared for too for long into its icy regions for their comfort:  how far their friend could travel by staring into the flame of a candle and thinking...   A twenty-four song-cycle setting poems of Muller, it tells the story of a journey into cold and nightmare, snows and madness, undertaken by a disappointed lover.  Here are three contrasting songs from the cycle, No 11, Frühlingstraum, No 18, Stürmische Morgen and No 20, Der Wegweiser - Dream of Spring, Stormy Morning and The Signpost.  Spring is the hope of salvation; storms and cold are too much to the lover’s mood; the lover has his path; it is shown him by the sign-post; the beloved did not have to make this journey - she has a home.  The wanderer’s journey is far from over.   

 

Track Four, Five, Six:  Winterreise - Fruhlingstraum and Sturmische Morgen, Der Wegweiser, Schubert

 

When news broke that Schubert had died, the eighteen year-old Schumann was heard to sob nightlong. Here is the Slow Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor.  This arioso is possibly Schumann’s most beautiful concertante creation.  The entire concerto was written and scored within a few days in the October of 1853 and during a spate of inspiration.  It was his last major work and was composed for the young Hungarian violinist, Josef Joachim, who with the twenty-year-old Brahms had done much to brighten what was a difficult time in his professional career.  In the event, the concerto was suppressed by Schumann’s musical executors, his pianist-wife, Clara, Joachim and Brahms after a private run-through with an orchestra, two years after the composer’s death.  Nearly eighty years later, during a seance, a spirit contacted another Hungarian violinist, Jelly D’Aranhji, and the objections of Schumann’s last remaining daughter, Eugenie, merely delayed performance and publication of the concerto a short time, which took place after Eugenie’s death, in 1938.  We hope to devote space to the entire work and the fascinating story surrounding it, in a future programme.  Marked Langsam -Slow - and beginning on cellos, the slow movement treats an introduction and violin solo melody to ornamentation and development in ternary form; near the close, the violin sings its melody a third lower and in the minor.  Filled with baroque touches, canons, imitations, appogiatura and trills, this is music instinct with the skills of old music made anew, and with all the dignity of the old.  The movement as a whole expresses a depth of sadness unusual in Schumann, and yet the sheer, full-hearted purity of means and ends and beautiful sense of form one finds in it confers on it an air of wisdom innocent of self-pity.  It seems to sing over the cradle of the vanity of human wishes.  Schumann loved his children, six of whom he watched grow:  here, it is as if we watch a dear child at the window, its dark eyes hypnotized by the twisting fall of snow-flakes, the fall that seems to rise.  We feel the sadness of how much young promise must learn by suffering through a too-short life.  This is not to sentimentalize either Schumann’s fascination by the baroque, or his own winter thoughts. “Work,” he had written to himself some time earlier, “while there is still light...”        .     

 

Track Seven:  Violin Concerto, 11 Langsam, Schumann

 

The four North Country Sketches were the Bradford-born Frederick Delius’ tribute to his home county, Yorkshire.  Most of his life was spent in France with periods when he was resident in Florida, Germany and Norway, but in 1913-14, he wrote an orchestral suite depicting the Yorkshire countryside that he had loved and explored as a boy.  Frederick. or Fred, Delius came of German stock, and was named Fritz.  As a man he had a curious accent, but at the bottom of a weakness for French idioms and beyond fencing of slightly German gutterals softened by the Norwegian of his wife, one encountered the tell-tale flat vowels of his county of origin.  His view of the moors in Winter, Winter Landscape, has the characteristic breadth and light and shade of all his pictures in music, but the violins, violas and woodwind bring an edge, the higher-pitched instruments at first chiming in coldness, the horns subdued, flute and oboe and clarinet only gradually becoming the hope of warmth.  The chromaticism of the harmony and rocking ostinati beloved of this composer are restricted and end unresolved, as though keen perceptions of Winter have no contrivable end in themselves, and simply fade out as the focus of one’s gaze is claimed elsewhere...

 

Track Eight:  North Country Sketches, Winter Landscape, Delius

 

Now, a Branles de la Torche from Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore or book of dances, of 1612.  Torch--dances were a favourite courtly spectacle at this time, torches borne aloft throughout.  What a symbol for defiance of harsher winters than we know now!

 

Track Nine:  Bransles de la Torche, Praetorius,  

 

The American composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote many fine film-scores:  but also a number of equally striking concert-works, where his colouristic imagination was given full play.  Here is his glistening evocation of February, from the song-cycle, Fantasticks, to words by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton.

 

Track Ten:  February, Fantasticks, Herrmann

 

Another traditional song: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, otherwise known As Dives and Lazarus.  In this,

The miserly contempt of the rich man for the presumably undeserving poor man brings its own reward...

 

Track Eleven:  As It Fell Out Upon One Day, Trad

 

To Bernard Herrmann the film composer.

 

Let’s hear his Sleigh-Ride, written for the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which a Midford farmer sells his soul to the devil (Scratch) for Hessian gold.  The Scots song on which the cue is based is one thing;  the prominence of the tritone - the devil’s interval in music - in the harmonies quite another, seeming to be telling us where the enriched Jabez Stone is ultimately headed...

 

Track Twelve:  Sleigh-Ride, Herrmann

 

“Great God, this is an awful place!”

 

If one wants to take on Winter and win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other men, all of whom are starving.

To end, here’s a suite of cues from Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in 1911-12.  Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished from cold and scurvy on the return journey. 

 

Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, or the photography of the Terra Nova expedition – the artistry of Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five extraordinary men.  It is music of human endeavour and the inhumanity of the elements.  Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment - strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness, of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...

 

The cues are entitled:  Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

 

Tracks Thirteen - Nineteen:  Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 30-December 1 2013

CB  America IV

This weekend's programme is a repeat of last week's show, by popular demand!

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today, we continue our exploration of music of the United States.  The script was written and researched by MikeBurrows. We began with a setting of Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, for mezzo-soprano, choir and organ by the Michigan composer, Leo Sowerby (1895-1968).  This work was written in the composer’s late twenties, after war-service in a US Artillery unit, and is remarkable for its serene, blues-tinged simplicity.  The melodic line is narrow, overwhelmingly syllabic, the accompaniment sparse and largely chordal, the choral counterpoint limited but effective, the soloist preceding and following the affirmatory chorus, who have the last word – a single, syllabic Amen.  Sowerby was a great and well-regarded writer of music for the Anglican Episcopal Church.  He held a number of positions as organist and choirmaster – for example, at the St James Episcopal Church – now, cathedral – in Chicago.  Self-taught at first – studying from books and the scores of composers such as Franck and Reger – and taking a correspondence-course with the Chicago Conservatory whilst in the Army, he was a modest practitioner who may have had much in common, as man and artist, with Cesar Franck, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ of St Clothilde’s and Paris Conservatory. 

Any ‘blues’ in this piece are owed more to the innocently Wagnerian Franck than to the jazz that as beginning to enliven most forms of American music in the first quarter Of the 20th Century.

Track 1:  Psalm 121:  I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes, Leo Sowerby

Some of the most tatty, rackety Instrumental playing ever recorded was issued In the teens of the Century In albums of New Orleans jazz.  It has a raffish gloire all its own that increases the breadth of one’s smile when one is told of how  American church leaders, social crusaders and municipal authorities campaigned with high zeal for crackdowns on jazz-clubs, and Jazz-performances after midnight, if not for a total ban!  Jazz destroyed the moral fibre of all who heard it; it was the music of sexual abandon, alcoholism, drug-addiction and gambling!  Jass was the negro word for sexual arousal!  This appalling threat to religion and public morals began at revival meetings, in theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, bars and brothels  and on bandwagons; many of the performers were blacks or poor whites, self--taught and, worse still, talented and, to a high degree, rightly cocky. 

Growing out of rag-time and blues,and also Jewish klezmer, Jazz’s  busy textures and frantic manners would be nothing without the momentum Created by characterful rivalry for predominance in the hectoring vividness of the band.   Cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and percussion – a typical early jazz-line-up - form a brilliantly humorous or sardonic combination – possibly originating in the  theatre orchestra-pit: a raucous, gaudy combination, razzing all classical or romantic concepts of their natures .  Here is one of the earliest jazz-recordings:  The Ostrich-walk, composed by Nick LaRocca, cornetist extraordinaire, and performed by him in the company of his Original Dixieland Band, in 1917.

Track 2:  The Ostrich Walk, LaRocca

One may say that the aggressive on-olling sound moves faster than tanks of the day, to crazy effect. 

The tune comes in for treatment – It is made to be an indestructible ‘standards, made up by someone who had a  talent for invention; apparently, LaRocca  was the only member of his band who could read music:  improvisation, very often an informally-acquired skill,  took over, the piano and percussion maintaining rhythm, the cornet,clarinet and  trombone given the spaced, repeated hooks, imitations and discoveries that characterize this idiom.

In contrast to LaRocca’s “white jazz”, here are Jelly-roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers in Dr Jazz, by King Oliver, recorded In 1925.  It Is matter for conjecture why the boys of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, surrounded as they were by black bands, were the First recorded jazz-musicians.  They have impetus and blague not matched by Morton and his fellow band-members, a comic timing hard to define but real.  In comparison, the black band appears less abrasively assertive, but it is arguable that LaRocca and Co have less poise and self-awareness, less independence within their ensemble – less-developed solos; overall,  theirs seems the less fluent accomplishment...

Track Three:  Dr Jazz, Oliver

There’s no doubt that early jazz, whether white or black, was an accomplished form of music; its practitioners could say that if they were not concert-hall musicians, it might be equally said that concert-hall musicians hadn’t the first idea of how to make jazz-music.  The skills of self-taught folk-musicians who conceal awkward note-acquisition, pentatonic modality, unmigrating tonality and harmonies discovered whilst a-wandering  behind quick tempos, repeated notes and daring or wrong-right harmonic or contrapuntal shifts, are often coveted by trained virtuosi.  So it is between jazz- and Art-musicians.  At the same time, folk-music has a lyrical pathos of simplicity, and jazz had developed in that direction, too, in slow blues and Spirituals.  The blues originated in work-songs, The spiritual in white hymns.  Jazz is neither Black nor White.  It is migrant:  it is the music of the oppressed – of Italians, Jews and African Americans – all victims of the post-Civil War settlement and a competitively capitalist industrial society  in which the Dollar is President, and slum-dwelling, low-paid labour, deprivation and the poorhouse are the lot of those who give him his wealth in return for uncertain  employment and subsistence.  How’s this for thrift:  the poor turn misery and defiance into music - and that music beggars spoilt rich people’s best efforts in verve and expressiveness:  sooner than wealth can synthesize this elixir vitae, it finds itself paying true exponents, whose genius changes and reinvigorates bourgeois art-music forever.  Good jazz is a locus classicus for unpermitted culture and dexterity, spirit, intelligence and expressiveness.  It was once seen as revolutionary.  It is a music of passive or active resistance and folkish self-assertion, a music that illuminates fashionable life to this day, at its most characteristic when provided by brilliant, burn-out-risking illuminati among the poor or descendants of the poor of all races.

Let’s hear the traditional song, I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven,performed by the Hall Negro Quartet, in 1941.

Track 4:  I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven, Trad 

Archishman Ghosh is a young Indian scientist and musician.  He composes songs and piano-pieces in his spare time, inspired by German romantic poetry and the music of Romantics such as Chopin, Wagner, Wolf, and, most recently, Grieg and Grainger.  He earns his place in this programme as he resides in Florida and as hewrites as well as anyone, having both the ‘can-do’ attitude and faculty of stern self-criticism to boost his undeniable technical skills.  Out of many influences, he appears to be forming himself, as any American would be proud to do.  One has a few small but well-made piano-pieces, and thoughts that potential is already realizing itself.  Here is the March in A, a droll march and more searching trio.  The piece ends with both flourish and question-mark – an achievement in itself!    Its material is rich and enharmonically modulatory, while the direction remains adroitly clear. 

Track Five:  March in A, Archishman Ghosh

Peter Boyer, born in 1970, wrote a work that expresses much of the awe, gratitude and trepidation felt by immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration reception-point lying off New York City, watched over by the Statue of Liberty.  Ellis Island:  The Dream of America is a melodrama – a piece for speakers and musical accompaniment, in this instance, a symphony orchestra.  Actual memories are linked by orchestral commentary and interludes.  The style of the music is filmic. Its sturdier moments, in the currently revived everymanish Copland-era idiom, are surrounded by a neo-romantic lyricism suited to epic movies, and more imaginatively conceived passages of menace – of which modern film-composers are well-capable.  Here are the Second Interlude and memories of Lillian Galleta, who emigrated from Italy in 1928.  

Track 6&7:  Ellis Island:  The Dream Of America

The United States had its share of pianist-composers formed in the mould of the European tradition.  Such an one was Henry Holden Huss, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey.  Born to an affluent, musical family – his father was a friend of the much-travelled lion of the keyboard, Anton Rubenstein – he was trained at Munich and became not only a Fine pianist with a national reputation, but also a purveyor of excellently-crafted salon-pieces that became popular with pianists of the parlour.  Books of character-pieces, dances, album-leaves, reflections and the like flowed from his pen.  A class or more up from hymns, patriotic or sentimental songs, ragtime or darky-music, it is music wonderfully well-turned by a hand that has worked hard enough to conceal all effort in the making.  Then again, it is of its time as experienced by a very isolatedly cultured class.  Formally unexceptional in every regard, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, tonal and developmental, it must be heard on its own terms.  Isn’t this true of all music of another age?  Much of it was of another age when composed.  Francophile, Russophile, Brahmsian?  It is none the worse for its conservatism, it seems.  Here is the Menuet Rococo,  Number one of Three Pieces, Opus 26, published in 1917.       

Track 8: Menuet Rococo, Huss

All Day and All Night, Music.  The 13^th Century Sufic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi Wrote a work of six books, the Mathnawi; 64,000 lines of verse that have exercised men’s minds ever since.  Once a source of wisdom for New England’s Transcendental philosophers and novelists, Rumi has inspired a thirteen-movemented cantata by that hugely active figure in modern American Art-music, Christopher Theofanidis.  At the time of its composition, there was increased curiosity about Islam, owing to the suicide attacks on the WTO buildings and Pentagon.  Nine-Eleven Is not to be seen as An inspiration or influence on the form that this work took.  Written in an idiom similar to that of Carmina Burana, with clear lines and harmonies and rhythmic spring percussively underlined, largely homophonic or chordal writing for the choir, and bold contrasts in orchestral tone, The Here and Now is a further example of contemporary attempts to relate post-modern Art-music to the moods and musical sense of the public.  It reminds us of concepts of  Gebrauchtsmusik of the ‘20s and ‘30s of The Last Century, perhaps without the sense of educational zeal.  This is practical music with a social purpose, a commissioned message.  Here is the Fourth Movement, All Day and Night ,Music.

Track 10:  The Here and Now, 4. All Day and Night, Music, Theofanidis

 Meredith Willson, from Mason City, was given formal training at the Damrosch Institute in New York, where he became a flautist, paying his way through school by performing as a cinema-pianist.  He was offered a place in Sousa’s famous band, and from there made his own name as a composer.  A hit on Broadway with such musicals as The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, he also wrote concert-music, including two symphonies in the pictorial manner of Ferde Grofe.  His Second Symphony, The Missions of California, dates from 1940, and commemorates in particular the missionary work of a Spanish Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra.  The finale is a celebration of the building of a road that connected the missions.  As might be expected of an alumnus of Sousa’s band, the writing for all sections of the orchestra is impressive in blend and contrast, bright-toned, and the overall mood both active and optimistic.  Themes from the earlier movements are redeveloped and combined and come to a brassy, bell-capped climax.  A fine work.

Track 11:  Symphony No 2, lV, El Camino Real, Willson

The murder of a President of the United States causes reverberations that last for decades.  Horror that such a deed against the person of the supreme elected official of the Union remains possible is increasingly succeeded by suspicions as to who ‘put the assailant up to it’.  The United States has a highly organized Society, with powerful sectional interests that have very little to do with democracy if they can help it.  In September, 1901, it was President McKinley who lay dying, reportedly singing Nearer, My God, to Thee.  In New York digs nicknamed Poverty Flat, Charles Ives wrote a Memorial Slow March that has sadly not come down to us in its original form.  On the other hand, he worked on another piece at about this time.  Scored for trumpet, trombone and four sets of bells pitched in different keys, From The Steeples and The Mountains originated in a childhood memory of his father’s trying to reproduce the effect of Danbury’s church-bells on the family piano as they were rung in a rainstorm.  George Ives was every much as revolutionary a musician as his son, a Civil War Army bandmaster – thus the Taps-call at the outset - who had his own ideas.  Charles’ mother remembered that the bells were rung in alarm in the middle of the night, after a lightning strike on a row of a houses.  This piece speaks of those bells – and, also, of how the age-old New England hills take up the shout of New England bells.  It sounds like a reaction to the death of a McKinley – or a J F Kennedy.  From The Steeples and The Mountains, by Charles Ives.  We began our programme looking to the hills, like Leo Sowerby, and end it by looking to them in the manner of Charles Ives.  It’s the American way.

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on music of the United States, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!   

Track 12:  From The Steeples and The Mountains, Ives   

23 & 24 November

CB  America IV

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today, we continue our exploration of music of the United States.  The script was written and researched by MikeBurrows. We began with a setting of Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, for mezzo-soprano, choir and organ by the Michigan composer, Leo Sowerby (1895-1968).  This work was written in the composer’s late twenties, after war-service in a US Artillery unit, and is remarkable for its serene, blues-tinged simplicity.  The melodic line is narrow, overwhelmingly syllabic, the accompaniment sparse and largely chordal, the choral counterpoint limited but effective, the soloist preceding and following the affirmatory chorus, who have the last word – a single, syllabic Amen.  Sowerby was a great and well-regarded writer of music for the Anglican Episcopal Church.  He held a number of positions as organist and choirmaster – for example, at the St James Episcopal Church – now, cathedral – in Chicago.  Self-taught at first – studying from books and the scores of composers such as Franck and Reger – and taking a correspondence-course with the Chicago Conservatory whilst in the Army, he was a modest practitioner who may have had much in common, as man and artist, with Cesar Franck, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ of St Clothilde’s and Paris Conservatory. 

 

Any ‘blues’ in this piece are owed more to the innocently Wagnerian Franck than to the jazz that as beginning to enliven most forms of American music in the first quarter Of the 20th Century.

 

Track 1:  Psalm 121:  I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes, Leo Sowerby

 

Some of the most tatty, rackety Instrumental playing ever recorded was issued In the teens of the Century In albums of New Orleans jazz.  It has a raffish gloire all its own that increases the breadth of one’s smile when one is told of how  American church leaders, social crusaders and municipal authorities campaigned with high zeal for crackdowns on jazz-clubs, and Jazz-performances after midnight, if not for a total ban!  Jazz destroyed the moral fibre of all who heard it; it was the music of sexual abandon, alcoholism, drug-addiction and gambling!  Jass was the negro word for sexual arousal!  This appalling threat to religion and public morals began at revival meetings, in theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, bars and brothels  and on bandwagons; many of the performers were blacks or poor whites, self--taught and, worse still, talented and, to a high degree, rightly cocky. 

Growing out of rag-time and blues,and also Jewish klezmer, Jazz’s  busy textures and frantic manners would be nothing without the momentum Created by characterful rivalry for predominance in the hectoring vividness of the band.   Cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and percussion – a typical early jazz-line-up - form a brilliantly humorous or sardonic combination – possibly originating in the  theatre orchestra-pit: a raucous, gaudy combination, razzing all classical or romantic concepts of their natures .  Here is one of the earliest jazz-recordings:  The Ostrich-walk, composed by Nick LaRocca, cornetist extraordinaire, and performed by him in the company of his Original Dixieland Band, in 1917.

 

Track 2:  The Ostrich Walk, LaRocca

One may say that the aggressive on-olling sound moves faster than tanks of the day, to crazy effect. 

The tune comes in for treatment – It is made to be an indestructible ‘standards, made up by someone who had a  talent for invention; apparently, LaRocca  was the only member of his band who could read music:  improvisation, very often an informally-acquired skill,  took over, the piano and percussion maintaining rhythm, the cornet,clarinet and  trombone given the spaced, repeated hooks, imitations and discoveries that characterize this idiom.

In contrast to LaRocca’s “white jazz”, here are Jelly-roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers in Dr Jazz, by King Oliver, recorded In 1925.  It Is matter for conjecture why the boys of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, surrounded as they were by black bands, were the First recorded jazz-musicians.  They have impetus and blague not matched by Morton and his fellow band-members, a comic timing hard to define but real.  In comparison, the black band appears less abrasively assertive, but it is arguable that LaRocca and Co have less poise and self-awareness, less independence within their ensemble – less-developed solos; overall,  theirs seems the less fluent accomplishment...

 

Track Three:  Dr Jazz, Oliver

There’s no doubt that early jazz, whether white or black, was an accomplished form of music; its practitioners could say that if they were not concert-hall musicians, it might be equally said that concert-hall musicians hadn’t the first idea of how to make jazz-music.  The skills of self-taught folk-musicians who conceal awkward note-acquisition, pentatonic modality, unmigrating tonality and harmonies discovered whilst a-wandering  behind quick tempos, repeated notes and daring or wrong-right harmonic or contrapuntal shifts, are often coveted by trained virtuosi.  So it is between jazz- and Art-musicians.  At the same time, folk-music has a lyrical pathos of simplicity, and jazz had developed in that direction, too, in slow blues and Spirituals.  The blues originated in work-songs, The spiritual in white hymns.  Jazz is neither Black nor White.  It is migrant:  it is the music of the oppressed – of Italians, Jews and African Americans – all victims of the post-Civil War settlement and a competitively capitalist industrial society  in which the Dollar is President, and slum-dwelling, low-paid labour, deprivation and the poorhouse are the lot of those who give him his wealth in return for uncertain  employment and subsistence.  How’s this for thrift:  the poor turn misery and defiance into music - and that music beggars spoilt rich people’s best efforts in verve and expressiveness:  sooner than wealth can synthesize this elixir vitae, it finds itself paying true exponents, whose genius changes and reinvigorates bourgeois art-music forever.  Good jazz is a locus classicus for unpermitted culture and dexterity, spirit, intelligence and expressiveness.  It was once seen as revolutionary.  It is a music of passive or active resistance and folkish self-assertion, a music that illuminates fashionable life to this day, at its most characteristic when provided by brilliant, burn-out-risking illuminati among the poor or descendants of the poor of all races.

Let’s hear the traditional song, I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven,performed by the Hall Negro Quartet, in 1941.

Track 4:  I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven, Trad 

Archishman Ghosh is a young Indian scientist and musician.  He composes songs and piano-pieces in his spare time, inspired by German romantic poetry and the music of Romantics such as Chopin, Wagner, Wolf, and, most recently, Grieg and Grainger.  He earns his place in this programme as he resides in Florida and as hewrites as well as anyone, having both the ‘can-do’ attitude and faculty of stern self-criticism to boost his undeniable technical skills.  Out of many influences, he appears to be forming himself, as any American would be proud to do.  One has a few small but well-made piano-pieces, and thoughts that potential is already realizing itself.  Here is the March in A, a droll march and more searching trio.  The piece ends with both flourish and question-mark – an achievement in itself!    Its material is rich and enharmonically modulatory, while the direction remains adroitly clear. 

Track Five:  March in A, Archishman Ghosh

Peter Boyer, born in 1970, wrote a work that expresses much of the awe, gratitude and trepidation felt by immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration reception-point lying off New York City, watched over by the Statue of Liberty.  Ellis Island:  The Dream of America is a melodrama – a piece for speakers and musical accompaniment, in this instance, a symphony orchestra.  Actual memories are linked by orchestral commentary and interludes.  The style of the music is filmic. Its sturdier moments, in the currently revived everymanish Copland-era idiom, are surrounded by a neo-romantic lyricism suited to epic movies, and more imaginatively conceived passages of menace – of which modern film-composers are well-capable.  Here are the Second Interlude and memories of Lillian Galleta, who emigrated from Italy in 1928.  

 

Track 6&7:  Ellis Island:  The Dream Of America

 

The United States had its share of pianist-composers formed in the mould of the European tradition.  Such an one was Henry Holden Huss, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey.  Born to an affluent, musical family – his father was a friend of the much-travelled lion of the keyboard, Anton Rubenstein – he was trained at Munich and became not only a Fine pianist with a national reputation, but also a purveyor of excellently-crafted salon-pieces that became popular with pianists of the parlour.  Books of character-pieces, dances, album-leaves, reflections and the like flowed from his pen.  A class or more up from hymns, patriotic or sentimental songs, ragtime or darky-music, it is music wonderfully well-turned by a hand that has worked hard enough to conceal all effort in the making.  Then again, it is of its time as experienced by a very isolatedly cultured class.  Formally unexceptional in every regard, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, tonal and developmental, it must be heard on its own terms.  Isn’t this true of all music of another age?  Much of it was of another age when composed.  Francophile, Russophile, Brahmsian?  It is none the worse for its conservatism, it seems.  Here is the Menuet Rococo,  Number one of Three Pieces, Opus 26, published in 1917.       

 

Track 8: Menuet Rococo, Huss

 

All Day and All Night, Music.  The 13^th Century Sufic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi Wrote a work of six books, the Mathnawi; 64,000 lines of verse that have exercised men’s minds ever since.  Once a source of wisdom for New England’s Transcendental philosophers and novelists, Rumi has inspired a thirteen-movemented cantata by that hugely active figure in modern American Art-music, Christopher Theofanidis.  At the time of its composition, there was increased curiosity about Islam, owing to the suicide attacks on the WTO buildings and Pentagon.  Nine-Eleven Is not to be seen as An inspiration or influence on the form that this work took.  Written in an idiom similar to that of Carmina Burana, with clear lines and harmonies and rhythmic spring percussively underlined, largely homophonic or chordal writing for the choir, and bold contrasts in orchestral tone, The Here and Now is a further example of contemporary attempts to relate post-modern Art-music to the moods and musical sense of the public.  It reminds us of concepts of  Gebrauchtsmusik of the ‘20s and ‘30s of The Last Century, perhaps without the sense of educational zeal.  This is practical music with a social purpose, a commissioned message.  Here is the Fourth Movement, All Day and Night ,Music.

 

Track 10:  The Here and Now, 4. All Day and Night, Music, Theofanidis

 

 Meredith Willson, from Mason City, was given formal training at the Damrosch Institute in New York, where he became a flautist, paying his way through school by performing as a cinema-pianist.  He was offered a place in Sousa’s famous band, and from there made his own name as a composer.  A hit on Broadway with such musicals as The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, he also wrote concert-music, including two symphonies in the pictorial manner of Ferde Grofe.  His Second Symphony, The Missions of California, dates from 1940, and commemorates in particular the missionary work of a Spanish Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra.  The finale is a celebration of the building of a road that connected the missions.  As might be expected of an alumnus of Sousa’s band, the writing for all sections of the orchestra is impressive in blend and contrast, bright-toned, and the overall mood both active and optimistic.  Themes from the earlier movements are redeveloped and combined and come to a brassy, bell-capped climax.  A fine work.

 

Track 11:  Symphony No 2, lV, El Camino Real, Willson

 

The murder of a President of the United States causes reverberations that last for decades.  Horror that such a deed against the person of the supreme elected official of the Union remains possible is increasingly succeeded by suspicions as to who ‘put the assailant up to it’.  The United States has a highly organized Society, with powerful sectional interests that have very little to do with democracy if they can help it.  In September, 1901, it was President McKinley who lay dying, reportedly singing Nearer, My God, to Thee.  In New York digs nicknamed Poverty Flat, Charles Ives wrote a Memorial Slow March that has sadly not come down to us in its original form.  On the other hand, he worked on another piece at about this time.  Scored for trumpet, trombone and four sets of bells pitched in different keys, From The Steeples and The Mountains originated in a childhood memory of his father’s trying to reproduce the effect of Danbury’s church-bells on the family piano as they were rung in a rainstorm.  George Ives was every much as revolutionary a musician as his son, a Civil War Army bandmaster – thus the Taps-call at the outset - who had his own ideas.  Charles’ mother remembered that the bells were rung in alarm in the middle of the night, after a lightning strike on a row of a houses.  This piece speaks of those bells – and, also, of how the age-old New England hills take up the shout of New England bells.  It sounds like a reaction to the death of a McKinley – or a J F Kennedy.  From The Steeples and The Mountains, by Charles Ives.  We began our programme looking to the hills, like Leo Sowerby, and end it by looking to them in the manner of Charles Ives.  It’s the American way.

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on music of the United States, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!   

 

Track 12:  From The Steeples and The Mountains, Ives    

16 & 17 November

Classical Break – America 3

 We'd like to thank Judy Kirkham for the reading of two quotations in the course of this programme.

Track 1:  Introit, The Peace, Let not your heart be troubled, Suite for Trumpet and Piano, Stephen Shewan                     

 

This is Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is an anthology of music from the United States.

 

We have just heard The Peace, Let not your heart be troubled, the second movement of  the Suite For Trumpet and Piano, by Stephen Shewan.  The Suite was written for the New York composer’s life, in 1995.  A New Testament verse provided the melody for The Peace, which first saw the light of day as a hymn for soprano and piano. Taught composition by Samuel Adler, Shewan has a tonal though often dissonant idiom inflected by jazz, religious chant and the hymnal.

 

Actually, there in one sentence may lie the astonishing power of American Music:  its culturally rich and creative mix.  It achieves frequently what other countries’ musicians have struggled to do, squaring the circle of musical theory and self-expression with an appeal for others.  In American music today, there are tonalists, pantonalists, serialists, jazz-composers, minimalists, folk-lorists, populists, all of whom, on their day, have the ability to bring the listener into intense communion.

 

Imagine how exciting it must be to belong to the evolution of a music in a country that has thriving academic departments and outreach in every major city, supported by a school and municipal system that values music as a communal expression...  Choirs, orchestras, operatic and chamber ensembles, combos, bands:  record companies whose interest is drawn by the music of every stripe and colour of Art-music...  The frontier spreads, the possible ethnic and aesthetic syntheses of music

continue to be made.  The philosophical achievement is great and healing for one of the world’s more inequitable and divided of societies.

 

Shewan is regarded as America’s John Rutter.  This is not held against him by a nation that values the accessible and whose cognoscenti do not necessarily seek to prevent the lower orders from trespassing on the preserves of the affluent and privately-educated.

 

Vijay Singh is director of the Vocal Jazz Program at Portland State University.  Here is his song of Winter for mixed choir, A Glimpse of Snow and Evergreen.  This piece, faithfully reflecting the sentiments of its little verse,  is set not a million miles from the Shakerish simplicity of quieter moments from Appalachian Spring -  its harmonies, movement with passing notes, and even melodic shape from the days when United States art-music strove to escape the influences of German academe.

 

“So free, pristinely at peace,

So free, and free for all,

So peaceful, tranquil, beauty fair,

The cool white hush of snow.”

 

Track 2:  A Glimpse of Snow and Evergreen, Vijay Singh

 

A New Yorker, Joseph Fennimore was trained at the Eastman and Julliard, and won a Fullbright Scholarship to study further in London.  He has written in most genres.  He made his name as a pianist and was director of the annual Hear America First concert series for five years before turning to full-time composition of music and libretti.  His style is eclectic and often introspective, akin to that of Shostakovich – unexpected dissonant melodic turns or progressions causing one to question romantic expectation.   Here is the opening movement from his  Cello Sonata no 2, Fast, anguished. 

This piece dates from 1984. 

 

The restlessness of the music acts on the surface of music that owes much to romanticism – Brahms, for example - and Impressionism as well as social realism.  There are clear contrasts in  harried attempts at repose in cello, agitation and flightiness in the piano.      

 

For an idea of the stylistic mix to be found in American music, the second movement of this Sonata, for which we sadly don’t have time, is in the tempo of a Mariachi (Mexican band-style) waltz, and sounds like Brahms or Dohnanyi gone wrong.

 

Track 3:  Cello Sonata No 2, Fast, anguished, Fennimore

 

Joseph Lucasik’s Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Electronic Sounds was first performed at the World Saxophone Congress at Pesaro (the birth-place of Rossini!), in 1992.  It is an intriguing piece, the accompaniment of the flighting soloist unearthly in shiny tingling timbres, long pedal-notes, unresonant harmonies and rhythmical crispness.  Jazz – specifically the improvisatory music of John Coltrane – is clearly the idiom of the piece, the saxophone’s often rapid, high--pitched riffs in the outer movements requiring skill of a high order to perform.  The middle, slow, movement is a night-piece, haunting, possibly influenced in its subtlety by the night-music of Bela Bartok, who succumbed to poverty and Leukaemia in the United States.  The music moves meditatively through various consistent  shifts in mood and style – the accompaniment consisting of sudden percussive knocks, oscillations, held harmonies and at times, a slow tread, under the gathering, rising and relapsing song of the saxophone.  Loneliness in the city, a favourite subject with American composers since the days of Charles Ives and later, Aaron Copland?  All ends inconclusively.  The composer is a staff-member at the music theory and jazz faculties at the University of Colorado.  Here is the Nocturne from his Concertino.   

 

Track 4:  Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Electronic Sounds, Lukasik

 

A song for children, now, by Bill Crofut.  The Chipmunk’s Day.  The poem was written by Randall Jarrell.  The melody and style of accompaniment  shows that traditional manners of folksong remain hardy in music of the United States.

 

 Track 5:  The Chipmunk’s Day, Bill Crofut     

 

“There came to me in this case, a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood; that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale.”

 

This quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden heads the score of Brian Banks’ tone poem for small ensemble, Forest Echoes.  This transcendental evocation of the wilderness began as a piece for bass clarinet solo; the composer added other parts that act as ‘albeit abstract accompaniment’.  String quartet, flute and percussion encircle the bass clarinet with fine-drawn or menacing Ravelian

pointillisme of harmonics and held notes, bird-calls, strokes of the wood-blocks and clash of gong, echoes perhaps of the Great (and deep) Spirit at centre:  all reaches a level of intensity and fades out again... 

 

Track 6:  Forest Echoes, Brian Banks

 

In the Winter of 1942-3, almost a third of a million men of the German 6^th Army were trapped  by multiple forces of the Red Army at the city that they had been sent to take - Stalingrad.  Efforts were made in freezing blizzard-weather to supply them with food and equipment by air, but failed with huge losses in men and transports.  From Berlin, the Leader gave the Commander in the field the order to fight to the death. 

 

Shortly before the surrender, a final mail-run was afforded the troops, so that they could send home

their last thoughts to loved ones or friends (in fact so that the state of morale, ie, loyalty, at Stalingrad and at home could be gauged).  These letters were not passed on, but preserved on file,

names and addresses excised, by the Nazi Authorities.  

 

Elias Tanenbaum, a modernist and jazz-musician from Brooklyn, was  taught composition by a number of fine composers, including Wallingford Riegger and the Czech, Bohuslav Martinu.

 

In 1981, at a time of extreme international  tension, he took twelve of the hoarded letters and created a powerful statement against War.  Last Letters From Stalingrad – for Baritone, Guitar, Viola and Percussion.

 

The cycle has the immediacy and strange authenticity (not to mention expressionistic procedures) of Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw.  A kind of speech-song is employed, with unnerving occasional use of a high falsetto register.  The instrumentation is harsh, the violist required to play frequent harmonics and microtonal slides, the guitar oddly like a reminder of home, the percussion – various drums, bells, marimba  - inimical, cold or funereal.  The Winter chill, wreckage and threat of violence of these men’s last environment are palpable.  The listener is entrapped.

 

The Gregorian funeral  chant, Libera nos is referred to at every fourth song; during the last, the viola

plays the German folksong, How Glorious Is Youth.

 

Let’s hear one of the songs - During The Last Two Nights.  At its close, one hears a fragment of the Libera nos, to strokes of a passing--bell.

 

Track 7: No 4 of Last Letters From Stalingrad, No 4, Elias Tanenbaum

 

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914, Robert Ward studied at the Eastman and Julliard Schools of Music and the Berkshire Music Center – latterly with Aaron Copland.  Another of his tutors was Howard Hanson.  Here is a duet from Act 2 of his opera of 1964, LadyKate.  Kate emigrated to England with her English husband, but the couple have now returned to their farm, disappointed in their hopes of wealth and social success; she is comforted by her friend, Eve, who is given a theme of certain faith

and hope and some beauty.

 

The idiom of this piece is romantic, tonal, lyrical; less searching than that of Bernard Herrmann, and inhabiting, some might say, a zone that stretches between opera and musical theatre.  In the US, later than in most other parts of the world, there was a vein of lyrical, period opera, mimicking the gold of European Late Romanticism,  misnamed Grand and mined into the ‘Sixties and even ‘Seventies by many composers besides Virgil Thomson, whose opera, Byron, was perhaps the last gasp of the genre.

 

Eve, I can’t lie to an old friend, by Robert Ward.

 

Track 8:  Lady Kate, Eve, I can’t lie to an old friend, Robert Ward

 

Four years older than Robert Ward, Read Gardner, from Illinois, studied at Northwestern University and the National Music  Camp at Interlochen, Michigan.  A symphonist at his most ambitious, his strongest gift in composition was for writing art-songs.  His choice of verse was wide, ranging from American and English poets of various epochs to Chinese poets in translation and Rabindrath Tagore.  His painstaking style ranges from impressionistic modal and whole-tone work to a more abrasive expressionism.  Here’s his ‘Lullaby For A Man-Child’, a setting for soprano, flute, harp and string quartet of a poem by Jean Starr Untermeyer, from his collection, Songs To Children, Opus 76, of 1947-9.   

 

Track 9:  Lullaby For A Man-child, Read Gardner

 

Another song for children by Bill Crofut, now,  again, setting Randall Jarrell, The Bird of Night.

Track 10:  The Bird of Night, Crofut

 

Leo Sowerby is remembered as “the Handel of Michigan”.  It was the city in which he lived for most of his life.  He was prolific, producing 550 works in all the art-genres save ballet or opera.  Like many composers of his generation – he was born in 1899 – he learned to use modern techniques as they came along, and relied on a grounding in traditional styles that helped him to evolve with consistency, rather than this or that mark of fashion.  His songs evolved as he did, from the idiom of Macdowall or Cadman through impressionism to astringent chromaticism.  He was descended from English North Country people, and always felt an affinity with English music.  This can be heard at every turn.

 

Here is his gaunt but determined Lyric of Spring, from 1944-6, a setting of Jeanne DeLamarter.

 

Track 11:  Lyric of Spring, Sowerby

 

Our latest journey in the United States ends with the second movement of a diptych for wind orchestra, from 1979, After A Gentle Rain,  by Anthony Iannacone.  Iannacone was born in 1943, another alumnus of the Manhattan and Eastman Schools of Music. 

                                                                        

The movement is entitled The Dark Green Reflects with Old Reflections.   “The light reflecting off moist green foliage as a metaphor for ‘reflections’ (thoughts) on old memories” is, according to the composer, the subject of this music of vivid colours, in which impressionistic musical ideas seem indissolubly one with instrumental scoring.  The composer believes that the music of Debussy – to be specific, the Prelude for piano, Les Collines d’Anacapri - was an unconscious influence on his methods in this work.  Certainly, there is a use of short phrases, motifs and sequences and unsparing progressions through modal or whole-tone dissonance that might just be the work of the later Debussy.            

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme on music from the United States was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

 

 

Track 12:  The Dark Green Reflects with Old Reflections, Iannacone  

 

 

 

     

9 & 10 November

War in the 20th century

Today's programme is a tribute to those who gave their lives (voluntarily or otherwise) in the global conflicts of the 20th century.

Script (Rupert Kirkham):

 Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Symphony No. 6 in E minor (opening minute)

The opening of Ralph Vaughan-Williams 6th Symphony. We'll hear more from that  work later in the programme.
This is Classical Break and I'm Rupert Kirkham. Now, we've got a bit of a departure from our normal today; as I'm sure you know, it's the time of year when we remember those who died in the great wars of the last century.  Armistice Day is on the 11th and this programme is our contribution to the memories of those terrible times which live on in the literature and music of the twentieth century. In the programme, we'll be hearing music, poetry and prose on the subject of war and reactions to it - specifically, the first and second world conflicts.

All this week on Somer Valley FM, we've been broadcasting an exceptional series of short programmes under the title, "Lest We Forget", drawing together popular music of the time, war and other poems and readings from local author, Chris Howell's book, "No Thankful Village" on the impact of the Great War or Midsomer Norton, Radstock and the surrounding area. These programmes have been put together by Michael Taylor. Today we'll feature 2 of those programmes and we're going to mix it up with classical musical contributions from two of the 20th century's finest  British composers - Ralph Vaughan-Williams and Benjamin Britten.

Let's start with programme three in the 'Lest We Forget' series. We'll begin with Michael Taylor's introduction to the programme as it went out last week.

LEST WE FORGET
Programme 3

segway into

Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Symphony No. 6 in E minor (middle section, 9 minutes 19 secs)

The middle section of Vaughan-Williams' 6th Symphony, played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan-Williams always maintained that this symphony, performed over 100 times in it's opening year of 1948, just 3 years after the end of the second World War, was not about war. He had recently started compsing film music, which, he said, had liberated him to experiment with new styles (for him, at any rate).

However, many people quite logically felt that the 6th was a war piece, despite his protestation, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music!". Later, we'll have the opening movement of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem - that was definitely about war, but first, here's Michael Taylor again with "Lest We Forget".

LEST WE FORGET
Programme 4

Thanks to Michael Taylor for allowing us to use his programmes in Classical Break and to Chris Howell and Mike Plummer for their evocative readings of Chris's material, which came from his book, "No Thankful Village".

Now onto our final piece today, the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. We're not going to play all of it - we don't have time - just the first movement. Requiem Aeternam. It includes a setting of Wilfred Owen's war poem, 'What Passing Bells for Those who Die as Cattle" (transcript below).

It's the hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten this year and the piece we're about to hear sets Britten firmly amongst the pacifists of the 20th century. The War Requiem, written in 1962, was to commemorate those who died in both World Wars and was, in the words of Shostakovitch, "The greatest work of the twentieth century". It was in fact commissioned four years earlier for the consecration of the new modernist cathedral designed by Basil Spence in Coventry, the old one having been seriously hit by German bombers in 1940 and left in ruins.

So here's the first movement of Britten's War Requiem, performed by the LSO under Richard Hickox, with the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the tenor, Philip Langridge on a Chandos recording from 1991.

 Enjoy the rest of the programme and join us again for another edition of Classical Break, next time. Goodbye.

Benjamin Britten
War Requiem (first movement)

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
    Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
    Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
    Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
    And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
    Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
    The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent maids,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen