Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Amico Method Scripting Challenge Two New Comics

I have two scripts to write today. This strip, which ran on Sunday, is a sadly accurate reflection of the Amico Method.

July 30, 2014
Mikis Theodorakis A Birthday Tribute & Zorba’s Dance

Mikis Theodorakis’ birthday (born 1925).

Here’s the music which made him internationally famous:

July 29, 2014
Rued Langgaard Eccentric Danish Genius

Rued Langgaard, a name to challenge the English-speaking tongue if ever there was one, followed a vision quite unlike any other in Danish music. A precocious pianist, organist and composer, he studied theory under C.F.E. Horneman and later Vilhelm Rosenberg, with lessons in counterpoint, briefly, under Carl Nielsen.

His first compositions were published when he was 13. By the time he was 19, his first symphony was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. After such a promising start, sadly it was all downhill from there.

Langgaard followed his own eccentric muse deep into the realm of late Romanticism at a time when most of the musical world was exploring modernist territory. Though he was given a state grant at 30, he failed to secure a permanent job until the age of 46, as an organist at the cathedral in Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark – which somehow seems appropriate for this most anachronistic of Danish outsiders.

An eccentric, shabby figure with wild hair, Laangaard died in Ribe 13 years later, in 1952, just shy of his 59th birthday, still largely unrecognized as a composer.

His reputation would not begin to gain traction for another 16 years. In all, he composed over 400 works, including 16 symphonies – which bear evocative titles such as “Yon Hall of Thunder” and “Deluge of the Sun” – and an opera, “Antikrist.”

Langgaard believed he was living in a corrupt age, the age of Antichrist, where the clash of good and evil was coming to a furious climax. The final movement of his “Music of the Spheres” suggests an encounter between Christ and his malevolent doppelganger.

“Music of the Spheres” was composed between 1916 and 1918. In the preface to the score, the composer describes the work as “celestial and earthly music from red glowing strings, on which life plays with claws of a beast of prey – life, with a crown of iris on its marble face and the stereotypical – yet living – demonic smile on its lily-white cheeks…”

The descriptive titles of the movements are as follows:

I. Like sunbeams on a coffin decorated with sweet-smelling flowers
II. Like the twinkling of stars in the blue sky at sunset –
III. Like light and the depths –
IV. Like the refraction of sunbeams in the waves –
V. Like the twinkling of a pearl of dew in the sun on a beautiful summer’s morning –
VI. Longing – Despair – Ecstasy –
VII. Soul of the world – Abyss – All Soul’s Day –
VIII. I wish…! –
IX. Chaos – Ruin – Far and near –
X. Flowers wither –
XI. Glimpse of the sun through tears –
XII. Bells pealing: Look! He comes –
XIII. The gospel of flowers – From the far distance –
XIV. The new day –
XV. The end: Antichrist – Christ

Here is Langgaard’s “Music of the Spheres”:

And his name pronounced by a native speaker, on Forvo:

http://www.forvo.com/word/rued_langgaard/

You go, Rued Langgaard! Happy birthday.

July 28, 2014
Harl McDonald Forgotten American Composer

Today is one of those days with so many interesting birthday anniversaries, it’s hard to make a choice. Do I write about the brilliant composer-conductor Igor Markevitch (born 1912); the Hungarian composer of so much gorgeous music, Ernő – later Ernst von – Dohnányi (born 1877); or possibly my favorite of Spanish composers, Enrique Granados (born 1867)? I definitely need an air shift to do this one justice.

Faced with such an embarrassment of riches, I feel a little sheepish focusing on Harl McDonald. But since he has a number of local connections, I think it fitting.

McDonald was born in Boulder, CO, in 1899. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Redlands and the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1927, he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also director of the university’s music department, its choral society and the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club.

In addition, he worked as a business manager for the Philadelphia Orchestra for a number of years, and his compositions were performed by Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy. Both Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky recorded selections from “San Juan Capistrano” (1938), and Stokowski a good deal else beside.

Among his other works were four symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, a violin concerto, two piano trios and an assortment of choral works, including “Lament for the Stolen,” written in commemoration of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

McDonald died in Princeton in 1955.

There’s actually a surprising number of McDonald rarities posted on YouTube. In fact, my posting this morning has been delayed by so much listening.

Here’s McDonald’s Symphony No. 1 “Santa Fe Trail”:

If it picques your interest, there’s plenty else to explore. I have no idea where this guy got some of this stuff (air checks?), but it’s fascinating. My hat’s off to you, fellow traveler!

July 27, 2014
Czech Composers’ Forbidden Love Affairs

Anyone at all acquainted with the life story of Leoš Janáček knows about his relationship with Kamila Stasslova. Stasslova was the married woman, 38 years Janáček’s junior, who was the recipient of his “intimate letters” (hence, the subtitle of his autobiographical String Quartet No. 2). Though the relationship was chaste one, she instilled in the composer an ardor which propelled him into the creation of a series of masterworks that spanned his final decade. This is the music which essentially made Janáček’s reputation as a composer for the ages.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have two more examples of Czech extramarital love that resulted in flowering creativity. Vitězslava Kaprálová undoubtedly would be much better known had she not died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. The brilliant Kaprálová seemed poised to become the best-known woman composer and conductor in Europe. Her teachers included Vitězslav Novák, Václav Talich, Charles Munch, Nadia Boulanger and Bohuslav Martinů.

Her relationship with Martinů deepened into one of romantic love, which fueled some of the older composer’s most powerful works, as he grappled with his emotional turmoil, caught as he was between his wife and an irresistible attraction to his star pupil.

Kaprálová reciprocated, producing a number of pieces under Martinů’s influence, generally submitting them for his approval. One such work was the “Partita for Piano and String Orchestra,” composed in 1938 and 1939. Martinů is said to have made a substantial contribution to its final version.

The idea for this particular thesis came from a consideration of Zdeněk Fibich, the unsung Czech master who was roughly nine years younger than Dvořák. Fibich led something of a turbulent emotional life. When his first wife was about to give birth to twins, one of her sisters came to help out with the delivery. The sister and one of the newborns fell ill and died. They were followed within two years by the other child and Fibich’s wife.

Fibich promptly married another of his wife’s sisters, only to abandon her and the son she bore him, in favor of one of his pupils, Anežka Schulzová. He documented the affair, musically, in his collection of piano pieces, “Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences,” composed between 1892 and 1899. He referenced material therein in a number of works written during the last decade of his life.

One of these was the Symphony No. 2, which incorporates the musical reminiscence about the day he declared his love to Schulzová. This occurs in the second movement of the symphony, with another full-blown statement in the finale.

I hope you’ll join me for “Bohemian Lifestyle: Illicit Love in Czech Music,” this Sunday night at 10 ET. “The Lost Chord” repeats Friday morning at 3, or you can listen to it later as a webcast, at http://www.wwfm.org.

PHOTO: (left to right) Václav Kaprál, Vítězslava Kaprálová аnd Bohuslav Martinů, with friend

July 26, 2014

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