Alas, it’s too late for me at this point to come up with a fresh acknowledgment of St. Cecilia on her feast day, as the holiday may as well have begun. However, you can still celebrate the patron saint of music as you get started on your Thanksgiving preparations with this evergreen playlist of Cecilia inspirations. All hail!
William Boyce, “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day” (overture also published as Boyce’s Symphony No. 5)
Benjamin Britten, “Hymn to St. Cecilia” (Britten was born on this date)
Ernest Chausson, “La légende de Sainte Cécile”
Norman Dello Joio, “To Saint Cecilia”
Gerald Finzi, “For St. Cecilia”
Charles Gounod, “St. Cecilia Mass”
George Frideric Handel, “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day”
If you’re a classical music nut, the Internet Algorithm Overlords may have introduced you to Colette Maze. Maze amazed with her videos of centenarian keyboard dexterity and grace as likely the oldest pianist ever to record. Maze died this week at the age of 109. Her last record was released earlier this year.
In 1929, at the age of 15, she entered the École normale de musique de Paris to study with Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger. Alfred Cortot! This woman was living history. She continued playing daily right up to the very end, the better to maintain her memory. An amazing feat.
The longest-lived pianist I had previously been aware of was one-time Philadelphian Leo Ornstein (founder of the now-defunct Ornstein School of Music). Ornstein, who also gained notoriety as an avant-garde composer, died in 2002 at the age of 106. I have no idea if he was still playing up to that time. He certainly was not recording.
In 2017, I mused about Ornstein’s unlikely resurrection as a video game character. You can read the post here:
How do you like that? In 1970-71, Malcolm Williamson was composer-in-residence at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ.
In 1975, Williamson would succeed Sir Arthur Bliss as Master of the Queen’s Music, a position he held until his death in 2003. Today is his birthday anniversary.
Williamson, born in Sydney, Australia, in 1931, was the first non-Briton to be appointed Master. From the start, the decision was not without controversy. Sir William Walton quipped that they had given the job to the wrong Malcolm. He was implying that Malcolm Arnold would have been a better choice – a bold statement, since Arnold was prone to alcoholism, promiscuity, manic-depression, and possible bi-polar disorder. He once shot himself in the foot to get out of war service and attempted suicide several times. Still, he did manage to churn out much delightful music-to-order, often lickety-split, and in an immediately accessible idiom. So who knows, maybe Arnold would have been a good choice.
Williamson was always an establishment outlier. Though he arrived in England in his late teens, his antipodean origins led to sotto voce grumblings that his Royal appointment was but a utilitarian one, “cementing the cracks in the Commonwealth,” as Walton put it.
Whether or not a sense of alienation contributed to a kind of paralysis in the face of overwhelming pressure, Williamson developed an unfortunate reputation of being very bad with deadlines. Most particularly, he failed to complete a symphony in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1977. His ambitious “Mass for Christ the King,” also intended for the occasion, was also delivered late. Significantly, he was the first Master of the Queen’s (or King’s) Music in over a century not to be knighted.
Following the Jubilee debacle, his output slowed, though he was seldom unproductive. In all, he wrote seven completed symphonies, concertos for piano, violin, organ, harp, and saxophone, and numerous other orchestral, choral, chamber, and instrumental works.
Williamson suffered from ill health in his later years. He too may have turned to the bottle as a means to numb himself against stress and depression. However, those close to him assert that, toward the end of his life, he never drank, but rather struggled with aphasia, the effect of a series of strokes.
Be that as it may, following his death in 2003, the parameters of the Royal appointment were revised. The position is no longer one for life, but rather a fixed, ten-year term.
What’s puzzling is that, for someone who had a reputation for being unable to meet deadlines, Williamson was able to write a fair amount of music for the cinema. The films were admittedly of varying quality. It’s always amusing to find his name in the opening credits of Hammer horror movies. But it proves that he could write to order, and he could write very quickly, perhaps when he wasn’t under the microscope.
Williamson was not the only future Master of the Queen’s Music to spend time in Princeton, by the way. His eventual successor, Peter Maxwell Davies, who served as Master from 2004 to 2014, attended Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow, studying under Roger Sessions and Earl Kim, and received his PhD here in 1967. Max would be the first to hold the office under the new guidelines. He was succeeded in 2015 by Judith Weir, the first woman to hold the post (and yes, she is still referred to as “Master”).
Happy birthday, Malcolm Williamson!
Williamson plays his attractive Piano Concerto No. 2
Rare recording of his Symphony No. 6
“Mass of the Feast of Christ the King”
Ballet “The Display” (inspired by Robert Helpmann’s dream of a naked Katherine Hepburn!)
“With Proud Thanksgiving”
Two Christmas Hymns
“Vision of Christ-Phoenix” for Coventry Cathedral (organ)
“Autumn Idyll”
Lento for Strings
Theme music for “The Brides of Dracula”
“The Horror of Frankenstein”
“Nothing But the Night,” starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing
Spoken observations on Pär Lagerkvist, Nobel prize winning author of “Barabbas” and “The Dwarf”
“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his preface to “Walden” (now on my bedstand, just in time for the season of consumerism run amuck).
The quote serves as a superscription for Daniel Gregory Mason’s “Chanticleer Festival Overture.” Mason was born in Brookline, MA, on this date 150 years ago. His father was Henry Mason, cofounder of the Mason & Hamlin piano company, and his grandfather was Lowell Mason, composer of some 1600 hymn tunes, including “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Daniel studied theory and composition at Harvard under John Knowles Paine, continuing his lessons with George Whitefield Chadwick and others. He became a writer on music and a lecturer at Columbia University. After 1907, his compositional output increased. He acquired further polish in Paris, studying with Vincent d’Indy, in 1913.
Of course, 1913 was the year that Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” shook the musical world, but Mason remained resistant to its charms. Instead, he continued to create cocooned in a Romantic sensibility, and a rather conservative one.
In his way, he sought to increase respect for American music, incorporating indigenous and popular themes into a number of his works, urging native composers to stop imitating European models (though he himself evidently admired the Austro-German canon), and criticizing European conductors working in the U.S. for not including American works on their programs. On the other hand, he wasn’t overly happy with George Gershwin or Aaron Copland, nor was he thrilled by jazz or the influence of Stravinsky.
In common with many of his time, Mason held some complicated views. He publicly condemned anti-Semitism and embraced what were then described as Negro spirituals. However, he was pretty firm in his belief that American culture should be “Anglo-Saxon,” and went a little overboard in expressing his xenophobia, to the extent that he felt compelled to write an apology in the New York Times in 1933, stating that he had been misinterpreted and clarifying that he was opposed to “jingoism and Hitlerian nationalism.”
Mason was a man of contradictions, to be sure. Among his writings are 18 books on music, so there is certainly plenty to sift through. One can only imagine what he made of American music at the time of his death in 1953.
Mason’s “Chanticleer Festival Overture” dates from 1926. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was composed in 1924, and Copland’s jazz-inflected “Music for the Theater” appeared in 1925.
“All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.”
Mason’s own music is now virtually forgotten. But it is not without its charms. His Thoreau-derived rooster portrait is still something to crow about. A tip of the cockscomb to Daniel Gregory Mason on his sesquicentennial.
Symphony No. 3 “Lincoln,” conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
String Quartet in G minor on Negro Themes
“Variations on Yankee Doodle in the Styles of Various Composers”
Last night, I finally got around to watching “Living,” a fairly good remake of Akira Kurosawa’s (let’s face it) untouchable classic, “Ikiru” (1952). Bill Nighy plays a tight-buttoned public servant, a hidebound functionary, referred to behind his back by a young coworker as “Mr. Zombie.” (She gets out before she’s worn down on the lathe.) He seems all the world as if he’s stepped from a Magritte painting, though lacking any sense of the surreal. At least until the day he is forced to come to terms with his unremarkable life, frittered away in routine, silently riding the steam railroad back and forth to London to sit in a quiet office behind a heavy desk and dutifully pass the buck in the Public Works Department. It is an existence without drama, without personality, and woefully without consequence. Suddenly, late in the game, he is forced to self-examine and grapple in his understated way (it is, after all, Bill Nighy) with finding meaning and grace in his final months.
The film is gorgeously executed, though perhaps a bit too seductive to successfully reflect the dour world of the bureaucrat. I understand the drama, such that it is, is in transformation. But from the get-go, the workaday is captured so alluringly. Everyone heads off to work impeccably dressed in period costume, filing past spotless, stately architecture and bright double-decker buses. Everything is bathed in sunlight. The film’s titles are self-consciously retro. Dvořák whirls gracefully on the soundtrack. If this is what it’s like to live the life of a cog, sign me up!
To lend further verisimilitude to the enterprise – another exercise in “Masterpiece Theatre porn” guaranteed to titillate fans of “Downton Abbey” – the screenplay is by Merchant-Ivory scribe Kuzuo Ishiguro.
But the real reason I mention the film at all is that in its closing moments, what should well up on the soundtrack, but the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Chalk up another victory for Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“Living” is now available for streaming, if you want to check it out. But watch “Ikiru” first.
PHOTOS: Bill Nighy (left) and Takashi Shimura, in the swing
