Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Musical Wonder Cabinets on The Lost Chord

Cabinets of curiosities, also sometimes referred to as “wonder rooms,” were small collections of extraordinary objects, strange and often fanciful precursors of today’s museums, which attempted to categorize and explain oddities of the natural world. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three examples of musical equivalents.

Princeton University professor Dmitri Tymoczko’s “Typecase Treasury” recalls a small table his parents acquired, made from a typecase subdivided into a hundred little compartments. “Each had been filled with a tiny mineralogical curiosity,” he writes, “a strange crystal, a piece of iron pyrite, a shark’s tooth, or a fossilized tribolyte.” He found it a useful metaphor for a multi-movement collection of short pieces, in which he attempts to produce “a sense of form through juxtaposition.”

Grammy Award-winner Michael Colina is perhaps best known for his jazz and Latin projects. However, Colina was classically trained, having studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then abroad, at the Chigiana Academy, in Sienna, Italy. We’ll hear his Violin Concerto, subtitled “Three Cabinets of Wonder,” a work inspired by Fanny Mendelssohn, the Buddha, and an Amazonian nature spirit.

Finally, we’ll sample just a bit from “Cabinet of Curiosities” by Philadelphia-based composer Robert Moran, who’s something of a wonder himself. “The Hapsburg Kunstkammer” employs graphic notation and is scored for marimba, hairbrush, aluminum foil, bells played with fingers, finger cymbals, telephone bell, vibraphone, rubber ball, celesta and harpsichord.

I hope you’ll join me for “Curiouser and Curiouser,” a tour of musical wonder cabinets, this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

More about cabinets of curiosities here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities

January 14, 2018
Percy Grainger: Eccentric Genius Revealed

In the course of working so much with Australian music over the past week, I happened to come across some interesting photos of Percy Grainger. Grainger, in addition to being an extraordinary pianist, was a visionary composer, whose music has frequently been undersold. He’s remembered largely as a collector and arranger of folk songs, especially those from the British Isles (“Country Gardens,” “Shepherd’s Hey,” “Molly on the Shore,” “Irish Tune from County Derry,” etc.).

But it’s clear he was not afraid to think outside the box, either in his life or in his music. Even in these overexposed sweetmeats, which he arranged multiple times, he plays with rhythm and harmony, and in the case of “Shepherd’s Hey,” completely alters the original mood. Some of his orchestrations can only be described as “out there.” Part of the reason so little of his music is known is that he’ll decide to drop in a bass concertina or a detuned guitar for a piece that lasts only a couple of minutes.

In life, of course, he was a force of nature. A physical fitness nut, he would throw a ball over the top of a house and run around the other side in time to catch it. He preferred to jog from engagement to engagement, sometimes with his favorite piano bench in a wheel barrow. It was not uncommon for him to take the concert stage with a running leap.

He also had his dark or queasy side. He was unusually close to his mother (who didn’t touch him until he was five years-old, for fear that she would pass on her syphilis). He held contradictory views about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race (he married a “Nordic princess” before a crowd of 20,000 at the Hollywood Bowl), yet was enthralled by music of non-Western cultures and loved jazz (he was a friend of Duke Ellington). He endowed a museum in his birthplace of Melbourne with his collection of whips, bloodied clothes, and even his own skeleton. (As far as I know, the latter was not accepted.)

Later in life, while living in White Plains, NY, he devoted himself to the construction of machines that would help him realize his dream of what he termed “Free Music,” a music liberated from what he saw as the “goose-stepping” rigidity of Western tradition. These cumbersome beasts were, in some respects, precursors of the modern synthesizer.

Clearly so much can be written about this eccentric and his freewheeling genius, but for today my purpose is to share with you something new to me. On top of everything else, Grainger designed what he called “toweling outfits.” Here’s a link to some photos, with the composer’s own comments at the bottom of the page.

http://collectedphotographs.blogspot.com/2012/04/percy-grainger-towel-clothes-and.html

More about Grainger’s Free Music Machine here:

The ‘Free Music Machine’. Percy Grainger & Burnett Cross, USA/Australia , 1948

The multifaceted Percy Grainger

January 13, 2018
Airport Airplane Movie Music Picture Perfect

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we take flight with music from movies about airports and airplanes.

In the original “Airport” (1970), producer Irwin Allen established the pattern for disaster movies of all stripes by placing an aging all-star cast in spectacular peril. Burt Lancaster! Dean Martin! George Kennedy! Jean Seberg! Jacqueline Bisset! Helen Hayes! The list goes on and on, longer than the longest runway. The bongo-laden theme was by veteran composer Alfred Newman, from the last of his over 200 film scores.

Another movie with something of the same feel is “The V.I.P.s” (1963), allegedly inspired by a real-life love triangle made up of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Peter Finch. The story is set at London Heathrow Airport, where flights are delayed because of a dense fog. The film was written by Terrence Rattigan, and sports a laundry list of stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor and Orson Welles, with Margaret Rutherford in an Academy Award-winning performance. The music was by Miklós Rózsa.

By contrast, Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal” (2004) is an (intentionally) comic take on the predicament of an Eastern European who finds himself in a kind limbo, trapped in an international arrivals airport terminal in New York after his country erupts into civil war and his passport and other documentation are no longer valid. His plight mirrors that of real-life Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who lived 17 years in a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Tom Hanks plays the unfortunate traveler, who makes the terminal his home, and Catherine Zeta-Jones the airline attendant with whom he strikes up a relationship. The music was by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams, and I think you’ll find it quite different from the Williams known for his work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.”

Finally, we turn to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “North by Northwest” (1959), a film which had Cary Grant encountering love and danger in, on, and from a variety of planes, trains and automobiles. Planes are particularly significant. Over the course of the film, we find out the title is a play on a Northwest Airlines flight; Eva Marie Saint learns she must do all she can to avoid getting on another; and of course the film’s most iconic image is that of Grant fleeing a strafing crop duster. Bernard Herrmann’s opening fandango propels us into the adventure.

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of music from films featuring airports and airplanes this week on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 12, 2018
Aussie Composers Brumby Hill & Beyond on WPRB

As the sun rises over the ‘roos, I hope you’ll join me for a morning of music from the Land Down Under. We’ll enjoy FIVE HOURS of music by Australian composers, including Colin Brumby, who died on January 3rd at the age of 84. Repertoire will range from a symphony by seminal antipodean composer Alfred Hill, influential in both Australia and New Zealand, to an experimental work by a creative artist of the current generation, Carl Vine. Also represented will be a Master of the Queen’s Music, a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and a figure better known as a conductor, who had his career destroyed because of a lurid scandal involving both sex and witchcraft. If that’s not enough, I’ll also toss in a didgeridoo or two.

Join me as we travel Down Under, to remember the late Colin Brumby and explore the musical outback (from the perspective of the myopic West). It’s all music from Australia, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. I’ll be wrestling crocodiles and savage koalas, on Classic Ross Amico.

January 11, 2018
Australian Classical Music WPRB

With the recent death of composer Colin Brumby on January 3 at the age of 84, it occurred to me that I have never given Australia the WPRB treatment. Therefore, get ready to suffer some serious jet lag, as we embark for the antipodes and five hours of music from the Land Down Under.

We’ll hear from composers who found world renown in London, and others who chose to remain at home to find inspiration in their native traditions and geography. Among our featured composers will be John Antill, John Carmichael, Ross Edwards, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Sir Eugene Goossens, Matthew Hindson, Peter Sculthorpe, and Brumby himself.

I hope you’ll join me this Thursday morning for a full playlist of didgeridoos and don’ts, from 6 to 11 EST on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. If the crocodiles don’t get you, the dingoes will, on Classic Ross Amico.

January 10, 2018

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