This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” on Australia Day, it’s an hour of music celebrating the beleaguered continent’s indigenous peoples.
Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014) devoted much of his compositional output to environmental concerns, such as climate change and preservation of wildlands, and demonstrated an overt sympathy for Aboriginal culture. His String Quartet No. 12 of 1994 includes a part for didgeridoo.
50 years earlier, John Antill (1904-1986) recollected a sacred ceremony he attended, when he came to write his 1944 ballet, “Corroboree.” Among its unusual instrumental effects is the appearance at the work’s climax of a bullroarer.
Embrace endangered traditions of a vanishing land. We head Down Under and outback, on “Didya Hear the One About the Didgeridoo?,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
To get you in the mood, here’s ten hours of didgeridoo music:
The University of Delaware is setting up an archive of Robert Moran’s manuscripts. Bob sent out this video of the process, apparently the first of three. Evidently it transpired at his house, prior to a break for dinner and against the looming menace of a Philadelphia parking meter.
The interviewer is James Allen Anderson, Delaware’s director of orchestral activities, who, as music director of the university’s symphony orchestra, has conducted a lot of Bob’s music, including the collaborative opera (with Philip Glass) “The Juniper Tree.”
Even though I’d heard a number of these anecdotes before, there’s still plenty that was new to me. Of course, I loved the little asides that reveal the composer’s feelings about some of his colleagues, or how certain well-known musicians related to one other. Had I known Bob was going to be so enthusiastic about it, I would have suggested he donate his manuscripts a long time ago!
Incidentally, he’s not parting with everything. That box is by no means all-inclusive. I’m told there are at least two more to go. Bob wrote some full-length operas (other than “The Juniper Tree”) and an evening-length ballet on the subject of Alice in Wonderland. Also, he’s planning to hang on to some of the more popular rentals.
The first 55 minutes or so are mostly autobiographical, providing a brisk overview of the composer’s life and all the fascinating people he worked with and encountered. It is not by any measure comprehensive. We don’t really hear any details about his insane performance pieces of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that involved entire cities – including San Francisco, Bethlehem, PA, and Graz, Austria – or his work for Houston Grand Opera. For those, I hope we won’t have to wait for the definitive biography.
The last 45 minutes consist of random thoughts and anecdotes triggered by going through the manuscripts. There’s even a shout-out to Classic Ross Amico at the 1:31:00 minute mark!
Be forewarned, even though Bob is on his best behavior, there are a few brief interludes that slip into PG-13 territory. Still, for Bob, this is pretty family-friendly.
Also, while you’re at it, do yourself a favor and check out some of his music. It’s not ALL tied up in being a merry prankster.
From the opera “Desert of Roses” (after Beauty and the Beast):
Trinity Requiem (for the tenth anniversary of 9/11):
Welcome the Year of the Rat! This week on “Picture Perfect,” on the eve of Lunar New Year, we travel the Silk Road to China.
We’ll have music from “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938), which features Gary Cooper, of all people, as the medieval merchant-explorer. The score was the first by Hugo Friedhofer (born in San Francisco, despite his über-German name). Freidhofer had been laboring as an orchestrator for bigger-named composers, such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. He would go on to win an Academy Award for his music for “The Best Years of Our Lives.”
Then we’ll hear selections from two big screen presentations of the exploits of Genghis Khan. In the best Old Hollywood tradition, “Genghis Khan” (1965) had quite the multi-national cast: Omar Sharif, Stephen Boyd, James Mason, Robert Morley, Francoise Morleac, Telly Savalas, Eli Wallach, Woody Strode, and hordes of extras. The music was by Yugoslavian composer Dusan Radic.
“Mongol” (2007) was a joint production of Russia, Germany and Kazakhstan, but the film was actually shot in China. The music is by Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen, supplemented by contributions by the Mongolian rock band Altan Urag. We’ll stick with the orchestral stuff.
The score is striking for its use of khöömii throat-singers, female soloists lamenting and ululating over the orchestra, as well as the unique art of “urtiin duu,” traditional Mongolian long-singing. “Mongol” received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Finally, we’ll hear selections from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), with music by Tan Dun. The film was the winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score. It was also nominated for Best Picture.
Yo-Yo Ma performs the cello solos. One of the tracks is titled “Silk Road.” In 1998, Ma founded his Silk Road Ensemble.
Slip into some sensible shoes. We’ll travel 7000 miles along the Silk Road this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Vitězslava Kaprálová undoubtedly would be much better known had she not died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. This brilliant musician was poised to become perhaps the best-known woman composer and conductor in all of Europe. Among her teachers were Vitězslav Novák, Václav Talich, Charles Munch, Nadia Boulanger and Bohuslav Martinů.
We’ll remember Kaprálová this afternoon on The Classical Network, on the anniversary of her birth, with a recording of the piece that brought her her greatest success, the “Military Sinfonietta.” Kaprálová herself conducted the work’s first performance, with Czechoslovakia’s president, Edvard Beneš, in attendance, in 1937. The next year, she conducted it again in London, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
Her relationship with Martinů deepened into one of romantic love. We’ll hear some of Martinů’s music, as well, alongside birthday tributes to Liszt pupil William Mason, Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Dello Joio and Leon Kirchner, Austrian composer and arranger Gottfried von Einem, and composer and writer of supernatural fiction E.T.A. Hoffmann.
At 6:00, we’ll get a jump on the Lunar New Year on “Picture Perfect,” with music from movies set along the Silk Road, including “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (Hugo Friedhofer), “Genghis Khan” (Dusan Radic), “Mongol” (Tuomas Kantelinen), and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Tan Dun).
Cap your day with Kaprálová and a swathe of cinematic silk, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
On this date in 1894, Antonin Dvořák, then serving as director of the newly-established National Conservatory of Music in New York, presented a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Garden.
The event, which also featured at least some of Rossini’s “Stabat Mater,” was given to benefit the New York Herald Tribune’s Free Clothing Fund. The program was performed by members of St. Philip’s Colored Choir, with the participation of vocal soloists Sissieretta Jones and Harry T. Burleigh.
Jones was a graduate of the New England Conservatory, a soprano equally at home in the singing of grand opera, light opera, and popular music. She wound up touring internationally and sang for four consecutive U.S. presidents. One critic dubbed her “The Black Patti” – a reference to Italian singer Adelina Patti – an epithet that Jones, a modest woman, disliked.
However, given the limited opportunities for black singers at the time, ultimately she decided to capitalize on the association, founding the Black Patti Troubadours, a successful revue that ran for 20 years. By 1895, she had become the best-known and highest-paid African-American performer.
As for Burleigh, American art music might have developed very differently without him. Born in Erie, PA, in 1866, he was accepted into the National Conservatory, a progressive institution for the time. On Dvořák’s insistence, students were not to be discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity.
There, he studied with, among others, Rubin Goldmark, the hidebound pedagogue who would later give lessons to Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. He also played double-bass and timpani in the school’s orchestra, which Dvořák conducted.
One day, the story goes, while seated at his desk, Dvořák overheard the most soulful, plaintive air being sung in an adjacent corridor. He was transfixed. This was his first exposure to the African-American spiritual, and it had the force of an epiphany. Thereafter, Burleigh was a regular guest at the Dvořák home.
Reflecting on his own debt to the folk idioms of his native land, for his part in the development of a Czech national sound, Dvořák was eager to share his impressions with American composers, and to encourage them to embrace this unique and neglected resource.
“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies,” he wrote. “This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I first came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.”
This was quite the pronouncement for 1893.
African-American spirituals, of course, would profoundly influence Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. Interestingly, another Dvorak pupil, William Arms Fisher, was responsible for transforming the work’s famous Largo into the neo-spiritual “Goin’ Home.” Since the symphony was intended, in part, as instructional, an attempt to lead American composers by example, Burleigh’s significance becomes inescapable.
Burleigh himself went on to a distinguished career as a composer and arranger. Not only did he popularize a great many spirituals, he also wrote hundreds of original songs. Isn’t it ironic that one of the great, unsung figures in American music wound up changing the course of our music through singing?
Here’s one of the works that received its premiere on that 1894 Madison Square Garden concert – Dvořák’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”
Burleigh’s setting of “Goin’ Home”
Sissieretta Jones:
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Dvořák (doing his best Sean Connery impression), Burleigh, and Jones
5 responses