This week on “Sweetness and Light,” I’ve assembled a playlist of avian music for the month of May.
Yes, yes, I’ve programmed Ottorino Respighi’s “The Birds,” his evergreen suite for small orchestra based on musical bird portraits of the 17th and 18th centuries, and Handel’s Organ Concerto in F major, “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.”
But I’ve also included a lesser-heard selection by Hubert Parry, from his incidental music for Aristophanes’ “The Birds,” a bridal march revived for the weddings of both Princess Elizabeth (soon to be Elizabeth II) and Prince William; a piece of light music kitsch juxtaposing bird song and chanting monks by Albert Ketèlbey; and a galop by Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye, the Johann Strauss of the North, celebrating the exotic birds of the Tivoli Volière.
Finally, it’s very much my pleasure to have dusted off some vintage recordings of Elisabeth Schumann (whose hobby it was to engage in bird-whistling) and John McCormack, who will sing works by Carl Zeller and Eric Coates, respectively.
Better start lining the cage with newspaper. It’s “For the Birds” this week on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” carve out some time for music from the films of Akira Kurosawa. We’ll hear selections from three historical classics by the influential Japanese director.
“Seven Samurai” (1954) concerns a band of ronin who come together to defend a farmers’ village against invading brigands. The simplicity of that synopsis doesn’t begin to hint at what a marvelous achievement it really is. In fact, “Seven Samurai” is regularly included on lists of the greatest films of all time. It was remade in the United States as “The Magnificent Seven.” And though “The Magnificent Seven” enjoys great popularity, a terrific cast, and an unforgettable film score by Elmer Bernstein, the movie itself stands only knee-high to the original. The music is by Fumio Hayazaka.
“Seven Samurai” was Kurosawa’s first, full-out samurai film, but a samurai does feature as one of the characters in his earlier, break-out international hit, “Rashomon” (1950). In this instance, the discovery of a murdered samurai leads to a series of courtroom-style examinations, during which everyone present at the killing gives his or her own account of what transpired – including (through a medium) the murdered man himself! The conflicting testimonies reveal the slippery subjectivity of what we understand as “truth.” The film, the first from Japan to receive wide exposure abroad, had such an impact that the term “Rashomon effect” entered the English language.
Kurosawa had great respect not only for American movies, but also Western classical music. This led him, on occasion, to request of his composers that they emulate certain well-known pieces. In the case of “Rashomon,” Hayazaka was encouraged, during one of the segments, to channel Ravel’s “Bolero.” “Rashomon” was remade as, among other things, “The Outrage,” a middling western starring Paul Newman.
Masura Sato sought out Hayazaka as a teacher on the merits of his music for “Rashomon.” Following his master’s early death from tuberculosis at the age of 41, Sato stepped in to fill the void as Kurosawa’s composer of choice. Sato would score eight of Kurosawa’s films (his first, a completion of Hayazaka’s score for “Record of a Living Being”). He too could be called upon to conjure the spirit of Western composers, with the ghost of Verdi hovering over “Throne of Blood,” Haydn and Brahms coloring “Red Beard,” and in the case of “Yojimbo” (1961), Franz Liszt lending attitude to masterless samurai Toshiro Mifune, who wanders into a remote town and sets about playing two rival families off one another to his own profit.
“Yojimbo” provided the basis for the first of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars.” What’s interesting about that is not only Leone’s reliance on the scene-by-scene structure of the plot, but also that its composer, Ennio Morricone, emulated the kind of goofy juxtapositions and unexpected orchestrations used by Sato in the original film. Kurosawa himself was inspired by the western tropes of John Ford movies and the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett.
As a bonus, I will include just a little music from one of my least favorite Kurosawa films (beside “Rhapsody in August”), “Dodes’kaden” (1970). “Dodes’kaden” marked a break with Kurosawa’s classic style. It was his first film shot in color, for one thing – truly lurid Technicolor – and the first made after his break with Mifune (who was brilliant in “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” among others). The title can be translated, roughly, as “clickety-clack,” the sound of an imaginary trolley car in the fantasy world of a mentally-challenged boy who literally lives in a dump. Though it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, its commercial failure drove Kurosawa into a deep depression and even to attempted suicide.
For as much as I personally dislike the film, the composer of its soundtrack, Toru Takemitsu is regarded as one of Japan’s most important classical concert composers. Interestingly, like Sato, Takemitsu was a protégé of Kurosawa’s friend and frequent colleague, Fumio Hayazaka.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of Kurosawa classics (AND “Dodes’kaden”), on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, 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
May 1st. Nothing says May Day like a good Morris dance!
It’s all-too-appropriate, then, to report on my day trip yesterday to the Percy Grainger Home & Studio in White Plains, New York.
Grainger (1882-1961) is best-known for his buoyant evocations of Morris dance melodies in works such as “Country Gardens,” “Shepherds Hey,” and “Mock Morris” – which became ubiquitous in arrangements for every conceivable ensemble and combination of instruments – I might add, often to Grainger’s chagrin, although the royalties brought him a steady, comfortable income.
He was also a world-renowned pianist, who played with individuality and panache. He toured with Australian soprano Nellie Melba and played for three American presidents. He packed houses and sold records. His wild, Bohemian hair and striking good looks only served to enhance audience adulation. He may have been born in Melbourne, but he had the energy of a Tasmanian devil à la Looney Tunes.
Grainger was ceaselessly active. He preferred to walk or run between engagements, rather than take a car (although he loved trains). At the start of a recital, the doors would open at the back of the auditorium and he’d run down the aisle to leap onto the stage. One of the best-known Grainger anecdotes is about how he’d throw a ball into the air, over the top of Frederick Delius’ house, run through the open front door, pass out a door at the back, and catch the ball in the yard before it landed.
I suspect he was also easily bored. He may have been a celebrated pianist and an accomplished composer, but he couldn’t practice or sit still for very long. He used to have his wife read to him, often from the Norse sagas, to distract him from the drudgery of working at the keyboard.
Downtown White Plains might not be much to look at these days (the hospital seems to dominate everything, recently even swallowing two properties adjacent the Grainger house), but stepping inside the Grainger home is like walking back in time. The rooms are gratifyingly framed with the rich wood characteristic of the period. There are bronze doorknobs on the closets, “centennial bulbs” in the ceiling fixtures, and stained glass in a leaded landing window. So much of it, in fact, put me in mind of my grandparents’ house, where I was lucky enough to live for five years as a child.
Grainger’s house still brims with evidence of his questing intellect and irrepressible physicality. Across the entrance to the parlor hangs a substantial bamboo pole, held in place by interlaced ropes, on which he did chin-ups. In the basement are the wheel barrows into which he used to toss his luggage or a preferred piano bench before a sprint to the train.
At a certain period of his life, he pushed all the furniture aside to make room for audacious “free music” machines, which he designed to liberate music from the strictures of traditional notation and performance. I don’t pretend to understand the finer points – I’m sure you can read more about them elsewhere – but these seem to me to operate on a similar principle to piano rolls, only homemade, oversized piano rolls, threaded through jerry-rigged contraptions fashioned out of whatever happened to be available and at hand, with the paper running around rolling pins, recorders, and pennywhistles. Cut contours in the paper determine the pitch, volume, and timbre of several oscillators. One machine on display has a scrap of paper taped around the bottom of one of its legs to kept the device stable in the manner of a shim slid under a rocking table. The sounds it produces are rather like those of a theremin. It’s as if the Swiss Family Robinson took a crack at inventing a synthesizer.
Grainger’s handwritten labels are all over everything. Every box and canister bear his signage. For as lively as his mind seems to have been, and for as full as the house is of souvenirs of a vigorous life, he was evidently very organized and, after his fashion, systematic. Among the items inside his gramophone is a piece of a card tailored to fit the curve of a record label, with numbered lines drawn onto it to be used as a guide to specific passages so that he could tell at a glance where to drop the needle.
More than once, I couldn’t help but think that Grainger would have been right at home with the eccentric cast of characters in the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy (and later, Frank Capra film) “You Can’t Take It with You.” On a tangentially-related note, my guide was impressed when my face brightened at the mention of actor Ernest Thesiger, a Grainger acquaintance from England. Thesiger played Dr. Pretorius in “The Bride of Frankenstein.” Come to think of it, his hair was rather like Percy’s in that movie!
It’s interesting that Grainger spent most of his life in the U.S. (he even served in the U.S. Army during World War I), yet he is best-remembered for his works infused with English folk music. He was a pioneer of the ethnomusicological impulse to traverse the English countryside to document authentic folksong before it was plowed under by industrialization. One of the ways he stood out from Vaughan Williams and Holst was that, rather than jot down the songs longhand onto music paper, he rode around with an Edison machine on his bicycle, the better to capture the personalities of the rustic singers. These he worked into some of his best-known compositions.
Grainger came to the United States with his mother, Rose, on whom he doted, in 1917. They settled in White Plains, where Percy lived until his death in 1961. Rumors that they were unnaturally close pushed Rose over the edge, almost literally. She had long been suffering from a chronic illness when she leaped from the 18th floor of New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1922.
Percy had his quirks, kinks, and contradictions, to be sure. The Grainger Museum in Melbourne has an extensive collection of his homemade whips and bloody shirts. I didn’t ask about them in White Plains. I seem to recall, he also offered to donate his skeleton, but Melbourne declined.
He held some fairly outrageous racial views, with a pronounced belief in the superiority of all things Nordic. By coincidence, his wife, the Swedish-born artist and poet Ella Viola Strom, whom he married at the Hollywood Bowl before a crowd of 20,000 (during a concert that included his work “To a Nordic Princess,” written specifically for the occasion and dedicated to her) was born on this date in 1889. To the extent possible, he cleansed his writings and speech of all Romance influences in favor of Anglo-Saxon neologisms (for instance, using made-up words like “louden” for “crescendo”). Yet he was also an enthusiastic champion of Black music and music of the South Seas. His ballet “The Warriors” is an idealized celebration of warring tribes of all cultures. “…[T]he ghosts of male and female warrior types of all times and places are spirited together for an orgy of warlike dances, processions, and merry-makings, broken or accompanied by amorous interludes; their frolics tinged with just that faint suspicion of wistfulness all holiday gladness wears.” So, as with so many aspects of his personality, go figure. Like Whitman, Grainger contained multitudes.
Although he did not live in Australia since he left for school at the Hoch Conservatory at the age of 13, he returned to visit a number of times. His love for his homeland is evident from a boomerang collection displayed on a window sill and a stuffed kookaburra.
At the conservatory, he became the youngest member of the “Frankfurt Gang,” which included Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, and Norman O’Neill. One of the rooms at the Grainger Home is devoted to the lifelong influence of his schoolmates, including photos and the “Cyril Scott piano,” which Scott used to play on visits. In the same room is an inscribed photo of Edvard Grieg, whom Grainger got to know intimately and became one of his most renowned interpreters. Another composer whose influence and friendship is evident is Frederick Delius, whose significance is honored through photos and portraits. This is to say nothing of the Grainger Steinway, one of many brought into the house over the years, and a harmonium.
Of course, photos and portraits of Grainger himself are all over the place, including one painted by Ella of the subject in his “towel clothes,” festive-looking, faux traditional dress, designed by Grainger to be worn by him and his wife, with a sample of such towels displayed on a rack beneath. (The clothes themselves are in Melbourne.) Ella also created a sizeable visual counterpart to “The Warriors,” with scantily-clad, pleasingly-contoured men and women of all races, about as prepared for battle as the half-naked characters on the cover of a Conan paperback. Ella is not the only artist represented. Additional portraits and busts of Grainger abound.
The house is filled with treasures, and you really get to walk around the place. The thorough tour takes you into bedrooms and even down into the basement, which is like any other basement, except it was Percy Grainger’s basement, and so it is outfitted with a dark room and walk-in fireproof vaults, with scores, programs, and paintings stored all over the place. It really is like walking back in time into Percy Grainger’s house. Stunningly, it appears to be run on the good faith that visitors will have the good sense not to touch anything.
I can’t promise everyone will get as much out of a visit to the Percy Grainger Home and Studio as I did, but I personally found it fascinating and richly rewarding. There may not be much else in downtown White Plains, but perhaps you can piggyback a trip onto a tour of Washington Irving’s estate, Sunnyside, in nearby Tarrytown. Copland House in Mount Kisco is not all that far away, nor is Samuel Barber’s Capricorn, the house he shared with Gian Carlo Menotti (although, from what I understand, the latter is currently a private residence, so I’m not sure what is visible of the property from public land).
I hasten to add, a lot of these places are only open during very specific hours or by appointment. The Grainger House and Studio is available for touring on Wednesdays at noon and 1:00 and every third Sunday. I think I’ve got that right. Better check the website. In any case, definitely call or email ahead to set up an appointment. I was there for 70 or 75 minutes (my version of the hour tour) and feel like I took it all in. But of course I came prepared. The Percy Grainger Society’s website about the house (linked below) will keep you occupied for hours. The more you look, the more you’ll find. It really is quite impressive.
The Percy Grainger home was built in 1893 and was declared an historic landmark in 1993. You can’t really tell from the photographs, but as with any house of that vintage, Grainger’s can use some maintenance and restoration TLC. It’s evident the exterior, in particular, is in need of a good paint job. I am sure the Percy Grainger Society would be very grateful for any donations!
Warm thanks to Anne Ocone, the museum coordinator, who was my guide.
Get ready to rock the Brocken! It’s April 30th – Walpurgis Night.
Walpurgis Night, the eve of the feast day of Saint Walpurga, is a time when evil spirits are believed to roam the earth. Tradition holds that a witches’ sabbath and orgy of the damned are held atop the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in Central Germany. It’s the last blast of diablerie before May Day. In Goethe’s “Faust,” Mephistopheles guides his imperiled charge into a swirling cauldron of witches and demons so as to complete his moral degradation.
Of course, “Faust” has inspired innumerable pieces of music – operas, symphonies, cantatas, piano works, and songs. Here, Samuel Ramey sings “Ecco il mondo” from the Walpurgis Night scene (Act II, Scene 2) of Arrigo Boito’s “Mefistofele.” Sadly, the clip doesn’t run to the end of the act.
However, if your curiosity is piqued, the complete performance, in this amusing Robert Carson production, is posted here.
Another Goethe poem provides the basis for Felix Mendelssohn’s cantata “Die erste Walpurigisnacht” (“The First Walpurgis Night”), about a band of prankish Druids playing mind games with some superstitious Christians.
Johannes Brahms wrote a song, “Walpurgisnacht,” on a text of Alexis Willibald (nom de plum of Wilhelm Häring), about a mother freaking out her daughter, telling her a thunderstorm is actually the sound of witches celebrating on the Brocken. As if that isn’t enough, she adds that she herself is a witch! Ha ha! So German.
Walpurgis Night is an occasion for leaping over bonfires, vandalizing neighbors’ property, and rioting, all in the name of welcoming spring. It is not to be confused with St. John’s Eve (June 23), the night the demon Chernobog emerges from the Bald Mountain. More on that later, I’m sure.
I’m hoping I still fit into my goat-leggings. Have fun, but remember… keep Walpurga in Walpurgis Night!
While I think of it, on a slow news day, I want to remind everyone that the exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” is now on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. But not for much longer!
For all us latent Romantics – by which I mean those of us with a predilection not for flowers and candlelit dinners, but rather withered trees, wan moons, ruined monasteries, wayside shrines, lonely seashores, and heavy woolen cloaks – Friedrich is the ne plus ultra of emo German painters. Anyone with an extensive classical music record collection or a long acquaintance with literary paperbacks will recognize his work, which has adorned many an album and book cover.
I’ve been waiting for this show for months, ever since I was tipped off about it by H. Paul Moon, who saw it in Germany in 2023 (and made a five-minute film about it). For one reason or another, I hadn’t been able to make it in to the city for anything other than a concert or work since the show opened on February 8.
The other week, all at once, I became conscious of the sands of the hourglass, as I realized my calendar for the coming weeks was filling up fast, AND I DID NOT WANT TO MISS IT! In a rare act of spontaneity, I hopped the train on a rainy Friday for a whirlwind round-trip, at the heart of which I was able to spend a couple of hours at the Met Museum. It was 100-percent worth it.
Hard to believe, for an artist whose 250th anniversary was last year, that this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his works in the United States. I loved it! If it sounds at all appealing to you, if your taste runs to E.T.A. Hoffmann, Byron, Poe, or Wagner, there’s still time to brood, but you need to act soon. Hie thee to the Met by May 11!
I used one of Friedrich’s most famous canvases to illustrate this post from 2022 about a favorite television series from the golden age of A&E. Does anyone else remember “The Romantic Spirit?”
