This just in from the I-Had-No-Idea-He-Was-Still-Alive Department:
Venezuelan composer Inocente Carreño has died at the age of 96. Though you have to dig deep in order to find much information about him in English, he was regarded as Venezuela’s national composer. His brother, Francisco, was a noted specialist in folklore, and the two used to play guitar with their sisters, as Inocente explored the popular forms of joropos, meringues, waltzes, rumbas, tangos, and boleros.
He attained prominence as both a composer and an educator, founding a music school and advocating for the arts. Over the course of his illustrious career, he was showered with awards, while he wrote symphonies, symphonic poems and other orchestral works, as well as vocal, chamber and instrumental music.
In 1954, he composed his most famous work, “Margariteña.” A tribute to his homeland, the main theme was inspired by the folk song “Margarita is a tear.” Other traditional melodies are woven into the work’s impressionistic tapestry, so that the piece is regarded as a classic of musical nationalism.
Carreño remained active into his 90s. Descansar bien, mi amigo.
Is Bernard Herrmann the greatest film composer who ever lived?
I can’t think of a single other composer who had a more assured sense of precisely what sound would perfectly complement a specific onscreen image. Most scores by film composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age were melody driven, and while Herrmann certainly could write a heart-rending melody with the best of them, he seemed to be more interested in timbre. What sounds could he create, no matter how outlandish, that would best convey the experience of fighting a giant crab?
Only Herrmann would resolve to score a film like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” using two theremins, two Hammond organs, a large studio electric organ, three vibraphones, two glockenspiels, marimba, tam-tam, two bass drums, three sets of timpani, two pianos, celesta, two harps, electric strings and brass. On paper and in execution, it was the height of lunacy. Yet all at once, the theremin became shorthand for 1950s science fiction.
Despite his stand-apart genius, Herrmann was honored with only a single Academy Award, in 1941 – the same year he followed Orson Welles to Hollywood to write the music for “Citizen Kane” – for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (also known as “All That Money Can Buy”). He was nominated for his work on “Kane,” and then late in life for the music he wrote for Brian De Palma’s “Obsession” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (both 1976). He died in his sleep only hours after completing the recording sessions for the latter.
Yet he left behind dozens of beloved and classic scores for films like “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Jane Eyre,” “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” and “Jason and the Argonauts,” to say nothing of those from his landmark association with Alfred Hitchcock, for films like “North by Northwest,” “Vertigo” and “Psycho.” How could “Psycho” not have received an Academy Award? It wasn’t even nominated!
Almost certainly the reason for Herrmann’s neglect on the part of the establishment had less to do with his talent than with his prickly personality. He was a notorious crank. Many found him intimidating, but his acerbic behavior made for some great stories. Steven Spielberg, who had recently enjoyed his first great success with “Jaws,” met Herrmann at the recording session for “Taxi Driver.” When the young director expressed his admiration for the veteran composer’s work, the cantankerous Herrmann shot back, “Then why do you always hire John Williams?” He disagreed violently with studio executives and cab drivers alike – in fact seemed to go out of his way to do so – but many also attested to his kindness and warmth in private.
Curiously, though his concert works have their moments, they don’t grip me from start to finish in a way that certain pieces by fellow film composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, and Jerome Moross do. His was a peculiar kind of genius. He was perhaps the greatest film composer who ever lived.
Today is the birthday anniversary of two able musicians who made their biggest reputations, for better or worse, in fields other than music.
When Henry VIII (1491-1547) wasn’t occupied in upgrading spouses or downgrading churches, he happened to be a skilled composer and performer. More about Henry and his music here:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is best remembered as one of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment and a driving influence behind the French Revolution. But he was also a successful composer who wrote seven operas. The best-known of these is probably “Le devin de village.”
Undoubtedly less heads would have rolled had these gentlemen stuck to their music!
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” leave all your troubles behind, as we take a musical vacation to the Mediterranean.
We’ll have a work by Charles Camilleri, Malta’s national composer – his “Mediterranean Dances” – and a guitar concerto by an apparently shoeless John McLaughlin. McLaughlin is better known as a jazz or jazz fusion artist. We’ll hear his infectious “Mediterranean Concerto,” a work of ambitious scope, about twice the length of your average guitar concerto. McLaughlin kept a home along the Mediterranean at the time of the work’s composition. We all should be so lucky! Thankfully, we can live vicariously through the music.
Join me for “Mediterranean Muse” – musical souvenirs of the Mediterranean basin – this Sunday night at 10 EDT; or listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
Midsummer is a big deal in Sweden, though the Swedes don’t really seem to care when it’s observed, as long as there’s plenty of drink, food, flowers, dancing and bonfires.
Midsummer’s Eve, of course, is tied to the summer solstice and marked by free-flowing vodka, prognostications of the identities future lovers, fertility rituals and the wider celebration of nature. The Swedes set aside the Friday between June 19 and 25 to don wreaths, carouse around the maypole and eat strawberry cake. The day is a national holiday.
This year, it just so happened to coincide with Midsummer celebrations in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Quebec, all of which celebrate on June 24, the date recognized as the solstice by the Romans. Other countries to celebrate Midsummer include those of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russian, France, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula.
Half of Europe has been sleeping it off today. Skål to our Swedish friends!
Click here to learn how to celebrate Midsummer like a real Swede:
