Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Ernest Tomlinson

Tippett & Tomlinson New Year’s Music

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have contrasting works for the New Year by two English composers whose surnames begin with “T.”

Sir Michael Tippett’s fifth and final opera is an especially abstruse one, even by Tippett standards. Composed on his own libretto, “New Year” is set in Terror Town, an imaginary city that exists “somewhere today.” The dramatis personae includes such diverse characters as a child psychiatrist, her Rastafarian foster brother, a shaman, and three time-travelers from the future – or, as Tippett specifies, “nowhere tomorrow.”

The orchestral suite opens and closes with music for the arrival and departure of a spaceship, represented electronically, on New Year’s Eve. Other striking touches include the use of saxophones, and, at the work’s climax, a quotation of “Auld Lang Syne,” pitted against a rather turbulent backdrop.

“New Year” was first performed at Houston Grand Opera in 1989, with the British premiere taking place at Glyndebourne the following year. The opera was not well received. The wholly reimagined suite was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 1990. Tippett noted that the primary metaphor of the opera is dance. Hey, man, whatever.

The balance of the program will be devoted to works by a composer of a very different sensibility – master of British Light Music, Ernest Tomlinson. It is Tomlinson’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” underlies most of the world’s great masterpieces. He goes on to support his thesis with no less than 152 examples in his dizzyingly clever “Fantasia on ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

We’ll conclude with a waltz from Tomlinson’s “Cinderella,” someone else who clearly understands the transformative power of 12.

The kettle is on. Turn over a new leaf and join me for a cuppa, with “’T’ Time” – welcoming the New Year with music by Tippett and Tomlinson – this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

December 29, 2019
Pettersson, Tomlinson: Light & Dark Music

Into every life, a little existentialism must fall. It is for this reason that God invented British Light Music.

Today is the birthday of Allan Pettersson, a composer who never had a happy day in his life.

Pettersson grew up in Södermalm, today a gentrified, bohemian neighborhood, but then viewed as the slum of Stockholm. And there, he more or less remained. His father was a raging alcoholic blacksmith, but his mother was pious and attentive to her children.

Somehow, he managed to attend the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, where he studied violin and viola. He also took private lessons in composition on the side. Then he traveled to Paris for roughly 15 months for further studies with Rene Leibowitz, Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud.

In the early 1950s, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. By the time he completed his Fifth Symphony, in 1962, his mobility had become so compromised that he was forced to dictate many of his subsequent compositions. It took him four years to write his Sixth Symphony. After completing his Ninth, he was hospitalized for nine months. He began his Tenth on his sickbed, in an apartment he seldom left. For the final decade of his life he was assigned to state living quarters, but at no point did his productivity wane. He died in 1980 at the age of 68, leaving in his wake seventeen symphonies.

I’ve now managed to collect most of them, thanks to Princeton Record Exchange. Don’t ask me why. I guess I’m saving them to temper the happiest day of my life, should it ever occur.

Pettersson’s symphonies are never less than ambitious, each one a saga of despair crafted by Sweden’s reigning bard of bleakness. The longest of these spans some 70 minutes. To maintain interest, the composer carefully calibrates his soundscapes, arriving at unique solutions to the question of form. The emotional range runs the entire Scandinavian gamut, from grimness to anger to violence. Don’t go into a Pettersson symphony expecting the “Pastoral Suite.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Ernest Tomlinson, whose birthday is also today. Judging purely on the basis of his music, Tomlinson never had a sad day in his life. Sure, he was color-blind, but I think Pettersson would agree, color-blindness beats the hell out of rheumatoid arthritis.

Tomlinson was a master of light music and bright arrangements. His output consists of overtures, suites, rhapsodies, and miniatures. I’d be surprised if any of them are even in a minor key.

In 1984, Tomlinson learned that the BBC was planning to dispose of its light music archive. In response, he founded The Library of Light Orchestral Music, preserving in a barn on his property some 50,000 pieces, many of which otherwise would have been lost.

Tomlinson died in 2015, at the age of 90.

Which is healthier, I wonder – to lay bare the horrors of the void, in all its cruel indifference, over agonizing, epic spans, or to defy them by creating three- and four-minute miniatures of distilled happiness and purified beauty?

A question of prophet vs. profit? You decide.

The juxtaposition of Pettersson and Tomlinson totally puts me in mind of “Strindberg and Helium,” a series of videos from back in the days of the Wild West of the internet, when everyone still had desktop computers, with Pettersson as Strindberg (naturally) and Tomlinson as Helium.

Each episode is around a minute long, so it’s easy to meet your daily fortification of despair.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1tKMjYxYSJI9jLA6Jf3Mw

Pettersson, Symphony No. 7

Tomlinson, “The Fairy Coach”

September 19, 2019
New Year’s Music Tippett & Tomlinson

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have two works appropriate for the New Year, and both of them will be by English composers.

Sir Michael Tippett’s “New Year” was the composer’s fifth and final opera. Set in Terror Town, an imaginary city, the location of which is described as “Somewhere Today,” the time is New Year’s Eve. The character personae features such unusual and diverse elements as a child psychiatrist, her Rastafarian foster brother, a shaman, and three time travelers from the future – or, as Tippett specifies, “Nowhere Tomorrow.”

The suite opens and closes with the arrival and departure of a spaceship, which is represented electronically in the score. Other striking touches included the use of saxophones, and, at the work’s climax, a quotation of “Auld Lang Syne,” against a rather turbulent backdrop.

The opera was first performed at the Houston Grand Opera in 1989, with the British premiere at Glyndebourne the following year. It was not well received. The wholly reimagined suite was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 1990. Tippett noted that the primary metaphor of the opera is dance.

The remainder of the hour will be devoted to works by a composer of a very different sensibility: master of British Light Music, Ernest Tomlinson. It is Tomlinson’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that the melody of “Auld Lang Syne” underlies most of the world’s greatest masterpieces. He goes on to support his thesis with no less than 152 examples in his dizzyingly clever “Fantasia on ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

In the few minutes left at the end of the show, I include a Tomlinson encore. It’s not a New Year’s piece, strictly speaking, though the subject of the work has to be home by the stroke of twelve.

I hope you’ll join me for “T Time,” – music for the New Year by English composers whose surnames happen to begin with T – this Sunday night at 10 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 1, 2017
Elgar’s Enigma Decoding New Year’s Blues

THE SEVENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

New Year’s Eve, my nemesis. The most depressing day of the year.

Fortunately, I’ll be working tonight, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to ignore all the hollow attempts at merriment. But it hasn’t happened so far, that I can remember. Once, I even flew through the night to Europe, hoping to confound the natural passage of time. But it’s always midnight somewhere, and the flight attendants vexed me with a champagne toast.

At any rate, I hope whatever you are doing, you have a better attitude, and that you are all safe and genuinely happy with your New Year’s lot.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty happy with my life. It’s just New Year’s I hate!

To coat the bitter pill, I’d like to talk for a minute about Sir Edward Elgar. For over a hundred years, musicologists have puzzled over the hidden theme Elgar claims to have left off of his “Enigma Variations” – which, come to think of it, is a great New Year’s Eve piece, since it celebrates friendship as an antidote to what the composer claimed was his sense of loneliness as an artist.

“Through and over the whole set, another and larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played,” Elgar wrote.

Since then, theories as to the theme’s identity have ranged from “Rule, Britannia” to the “Dies Irae” to “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Here’s an interesting article from 1991 that posits the elusive theme may have been taken from Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/07/arts/new-answer-to-a-riddle-wrapped-in-elgar-s-enigma-variations.html

In this clip, someone actually uses the opening of the “Enigma” to harmonize “Auld Lang Syne.”

What do you think?

Ernest Tomlinson takes this theory about as far as it can go, suggesting that “Auld Lang Syne” underlies not only Elgar’s magnum opus, but also most of the world’s great masterpieces. He puts his money where his mouth is, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, by sending up no less than 152 familiar melodies in his “’Auld Lang Syne’ Variations.’”

Happy New Year, everyone.

PHOTO: Sir Edward takes a pipe for Auld Lang Syne

December 31, 2014

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