Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Byron Adams on Vaughan Williams & the Bard Music Festival

It’s summer and a Sunday. As I continue to work on my appreciation of conductor Roger Norrington (who died on Friday), which hopefully I will have in satisfactory shape soon, I thought I’d share this interview with musicologist Byron Adams, conducted by Andrew Green of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

Adams, whose comments on this page are invariably illuminating (and always welcome), has been a passionate and lifelong advocate of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and other British composers. If you ever attend concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra, pay attention to who wrote the program notes. There’s a possibility it could be Byron!

Adams is also a composer himself, a retired professor of music at the University of California, Riverside. The conversation at the link rightly emphasizes his contribution to the Bard Music Festival, especially in the editing of a tie-in volume of critical essays for the 2023 festival, devoted to “Vaughan Williams and His World,” published by University of Chicago Press. But you may also learn a thing or two about Vaughan Williams’ experiences in America and certainly more about the Bard Music Festival.

Another one of Byron’s enthusiasms and areas of expertise is French music. He’ll be introducing a concert to be performed at Bard on the afternoon August 9 for a program he helped curate, titled “The French Connection,” designed to illuminate the experiences in Paris of – and French influences on – the subject of this year’s festival, the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. The concert will also include music by Alexandre Tansman, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, and Josef Suk.

Adams is a Bard stalwart, having for many years served on the program committee for the festival.

Here’s a link to the complete schedule for “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17.

Bard Music Festival

Watch the interview to find out which essay in his book drove him to drink!

Fisher Center at Bard

July 20, 2025
Shelley’s Summer Music Lost Chord on KWAX

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory…

This week on “The Lost Chord,” ‘tis an hour of seasonal works inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley and friends.

Hearken to Geoffrey Bush’s “A Summer Serenade,” from 1948, settings of poems by Shelley, James I of Scotland, Samuel Daniel, William Blake, Thomas Heywood, and the ever-prolific Anonymous.

Then listen, listen, Mary mine, to Arnold Bax’s “Enchanted Summer,” from 1918, the text drawn from Act II, Scene 2, of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” Composed in the midst of a run of Bax’s better-known nature poems (on the one hand, “Into the Twilight” and “In the Fairy Hills,” and on the other, “Nympholept” and “The Garden of Fand”), the work opens with the play of light and shadow on a forest floor, traverses mysterious caves and crags, and conjures woodland spirits; dallies with “voluptuous nightingales;” and eavesdrops on the exchange of two fauns, who contemplate the wondrous things they have witnessed.

In conclusion, bring hot blushes to thy cheek, with one of Romantic poetry’s most protracted pick-up lines and Roger Quilter’s “Love’s Philosophy,” from 1905.

’Tis mine hope that thou wilt join me for “Summer Shelley, Some Are Not.” The dulcet music swells, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 19, 2025
Childhood Summers Music and Nostalgia

At midlife, the seasons fly by so quickly, they scarcely seem to register. This week on “Sweetness and Light,” we defy the gravitational pull of back-to-school advertisements and premature Halloween displays to indulge in some nostalgic recollections of the carefree and seemingly endless summers of youth.

Join me for alternately boisterous and languid works by Eugène Bozza, Sergei Prokofiev, Déodat de Severac, and William Walton.

It’s music reflective of riding bikes, tramping through woods and meadows, building forts, laughing with friends, and getting up to no good. When you’re a kid, there’s always plenty of adventure to be had, with the guaranteed security of a homecooked meal and a roof over your head. At least if you’re as fortunate as I was.

I don’t know, perhaps this kind of off-the-leash freedom and hedonistic enjoyment is a thing of the past, in a society where dreams are strangled by subdivisions and superwarehouses, surveillance cameras and militarized police, helicopter parents and cell phones, psychopaths and existential dread. But even with a hemmed-in, over-scheduled existence crammed with organized activities and soul-crushing electronics, I think the illusion of time stretching on forever must surely still be one of the enchantments of youth?

I don’t want to think about it. In a world wreathed by barbed wire, I will hang onto my illusion that childhood is the last frontier. Listen for me rafting down the Delaware, crowing like Peter Pan, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 EDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station on the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 19, 2025
Sabatini’s Swashbucklers on Picture Perfect

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rafael Sabatini (on April 29, 1875) and the 75th anniversary of his death (on February 13, 1950).

Though Sabatini’s popularity may have faded somewhat over the decades, in his day the Italian-English writer might have been regarded as the heir apparent to Alexandre Dumas. His bestselling novels are full of romance and derring-do. However, unlike Dumas, I’m not sure if any of his books have really endured in the consciousness of the wider public.

His memory is kept alive principally through film adaptations of his works. And why not? His incident-filled pages seem tailor-made for the silver screen. Film adaptations of “Scaramouche,” “The Sea Hawk” and “Captain Blood” were all made during the silent era. As recently as 2006, a long-lost John Gilbert classic, adapted from Sabatini’s “Bardelys the Magnificent,” was rediscovered in France. Several of these, of course, were remade, more or less, to even greater success during the era of talking pictures.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music for the Errol Flynn classics “Captain Blood” (1935) and “The Sea Hawk” (1940). The former provided Flynn with his breakout role; the latter actually has nothing at all to do with Sabatini’s original plot, despite the writer’s prominent onscreen credit.

We’ll also enjoy Alfred Newman’s rollicking main title music for the pirate opus “The Black Swan” (1942), which starred Tyrone Power, and one of Victor Young’s most rousing and melodically inventive scores, for “Scaramouche” (1952), which featured Stewart Granger in probably the best swashbuckler of the 1950s.

Polish up those seven-league boots and don your gaudiest plumage. We’ll set sail with scores from movies inspired by the novels of Rafael Sabatini on “Picture Perfect,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 18, 2025
Musical Roads Beethoven’s Rumble Strip Craze

The Beethoven rumble strip in the United Arab Emirates has been getting some press recently.

You know what a rumble strip is, right? They’re those irregularities in the pavement installed to jolt you awake when you’re about to drift off the road, or to warn you to slow down when you’re entering a hairpin turn. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone would figure out that different rhythms and pitches could be produced by varying the spacing of the strips. When driven over at a certain speed recognizable melodies emerge.

Fujairah has decided to emulate Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

I don’t know how many of these “musical roads” there are in the world, but the number must currently be pushing 50. (The most recent tabulation I could find was 46 in 2022.)

The first known musical road was created in Denmark in 1995. Argentina, Belarus, China, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, San Marino, South Korea, and Taiwan followed. Japan, the musical road champ, has at least 30. The U.S. has at least three. France and the Netherlands had some for a while, but they were paved over.

It’s true, musical roads might be considered a nuisance by some, especially those living nearby, who have to contend not only with the incessant repetition of “Ode to Joy,” for instance, but also increased volume of traffic due to curiosity seekers.

Often the melodies can be made out only when the strips are encountered at a correct, consistent speed. In at least one instance, in California, a strip was paved over after residents complained and then reconstructed elsewhere. Unfortunately, the construction workers confused the measurements, so what you get is a badly out of tune “William Tell Overture.”

One post beneath the video suggests that the tune would sound correct if you hit it at 100 m.p.h. I’m not condoning it; just saying.

Hi ho, Silver! Away!

FUN FACT, though hardly surprising: It was New Jersey that installed the earliest-known rumble strips, on the Garden State Parkway, in 1952.

ADDENDUM: Okay, so it looks like Little Alex and his droogs decided to go back and hit the “William Tell” strip at 100 m.p.h. Still pretty wonky, but worth it for the laugh.

July 17, 2025

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