Classic Ross Amico

Tag: KWAX

Byrd Remembered A Belated Tribute

Consider it a belated tribute to William Byrd.

Byrd died 400 years ago, on July 4, 1623. I think it’s understandable that as an American – especially one born on the Fourth – I would have let the observance slip by, at a time when my head would have been a tug-of-war between fireworks and regret.

Byrd is one albatross I will finally be able to address, this weekend on “The Lost Chord.”

A “Gentleman of the Chapel Royal,” Byrd was one of the best loved and certainly one of the most powerful musicians in England. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth granted him and Thomas Tallis – who had been a “Gentleman” from the time of Henry VIII – a 21-year monopoly on polyphonic music and a patent to print and publish music.

Not incidentally, Byrd has his own fireworks connection. Despite his favored status within the Anglican Church, he converted to Catholicism, and even rubbed shoulders with Robert Catesby. Catesby formulated the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, during the reign of James I, for which Guy Fawkes gained his undying notoriety.

Though Byrd was never imprisoned for his religion, he was involved in numerous lawsuits and subjected to heavy fines. Elizabeth interceded on his behalf at least once. He participated in illegal services, and the texts he chose to set to music could, at times, have a subversive edge. In particular, as a Catholic in a Protestant country, he became fond of texts related to persecution. Comparatively speaking, he went unmolested, because of his record of allegiance to the crown.

Glancing through my recorded shows, I note that Byrd makes a substantial appearance on one of them, by way of Gordon Jacob.

Jacob, born in 1895, is perhaps best remembered these days as an orchestrator. He did a popular arrangement for full orchestra of Vaughan Williams’ “English Folk Song Suite,” originally composed for symphonic band; he orchestrated Sir Edward Elgar’s Organ Sonata; and his arrangement of the ballet “Les Sylphides” has been eclipsed only by that of Roy Douglas.

But he was also a prolific composer himself. In all, he wrote some 400 works. In fact, when weighing the size of his output against his reputation, it’s tempting to underestimate – as the Angel did his Biblical namesake – Jacob’s tenacity.

We’ll hear an example of his talent as an arranger, the “William Byrd Suite,” after virginal pieces by the Elizabethan master. The work was Jacob’s contribution to the celebrations in 1923 surrounding the tercentenary of Byrd’s death. The balance of the program will be devoted to one of his original compositions, the rarely-heard Symphony No. 1, dedicated to the memory of his brother, who died during the First World War.

We’ll grapple with the range of Jacob’s accomplishments, even as I wing it with an impromptu tribute to Byrd, on “Wrestling Jacob,” this Saturday on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.

For streaming information, see below.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

IMAGES (left to right): Jacob, Byrd, and Jacob

BONUS: Follow the link for a witty survey ranking the various depictions of Jacob wrestling the angel in Western Art!

https://the-toast.net/2014/09/16/famous-paintings-jacob-wrestling-angel-ranked-much-actions-resemble-slow-dancing/?fbclid=IwAR2IEewoVZtSngyVhY0VkprxjtH8x7oLoaJJf70Ye29G1Q1YfjKPKPP-EUA

July 15, 2023
Michel Legrand’s Movie Music on KWAX

Vive la France! This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll celebrate Bastille Day with the bittersweet stylings of French composer Michel Legrand. The recipient of three Academy Awards (and 13 nominations), along with five Grammys, Legrand wrote music that tugs at the heart even as it lifts the soul.

Take a nostalgic journey down Memory Lane (or perhaps Rue de Mémoire?) with indelible selections from a handful of his over 200 film and television scores, including “Summer of ’42,” “The Picasso Summer,” “The Go-Between,” “Yentl,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” Le Grand, indeed!

The best of the classic European film composers always seemed to grasp the fundamental sadness of existence. There is poignancy in beauty and beauty in poignancy this week. Get out your handkerchiefs for music of Michel Legrand, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

For streaming information, see below.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 14, 2023
George Antheil Bad Boy of Music Birthday

George Antheil, classical music’s original Trenton cracker, was born on this date in 1900.

The self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” (the title of his autobiography) had to travel all the way to Paris to make good. It doesn’t make my transcontinental exile to Eugene, Oregon seem so bad! I hope you’ll join me for “The Lost Chord,” now on KWAX, as we divvy up the nut bread for a musical celebration of Antheil’s birthday.

Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” sparked one of classical music’s great riots when it was unveiled at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1926.

The work made preposterous demands on performers and audience alike, with its battery of player pianos, sirens, bells, and airplane propellers – all difficult to coordinate, but worth it, if they were to transform concert halls into free-for-alls and secure Antheil’s status as enfant terrible. His notoriety earned him the respect, friendship, and envy of Paris’ artistic community. From the stage, he watched as Man Ray punched a heckler in the face, as Satie cheered, “Quel precision!,” and as Ezra Pound shouted, “Shut up, you are all stupid idiots.” Pound became one of Antheil’s most ardent champions, taking a break from poetry to publish an inflammatory book, “Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.”

Antheil speculated, perhaps facetiously, that his mechanistic nightmares may have been inspired by his having been born across the street from a noisy machine shop. In fact, a number of his works bear the boisterous imprint of the factories he knew in Trenton as a boy, including the “Airplane Sonata,” “The Death of Machines,” and the “Sonata Sauvage.”

It was all rather forward-looking. Antheil was one of the first composers to search beyond conventional instruments for musical means. He not only presaged the alien soundscapes of Edgard Varèse, but also anticipated the stupefying repetitions of minimalism – though infusing his own compositions with enough violence to prevent them from ever becoming numbing. Stravinsky was his hero. He fed off the savagery of “The Rite of Spring,” then followed the master’s subsequent hairpin turn into neoclassicism. Both artists suffered a backlash from former idolaters who felt betrayed by what was perceived as a cowardly retreat into the past.

In Antheil’s case, his reputation never recovered. The one-two punch of his Piano Concerto No. 2, transparently influenced by Bach, and the spectacular failure of his “Ballet Mécanique” to impress at its American premiere at Carnegie Hall (mostly due to faulty machinery) cast Antheil, rebel angel that he was, from the lofty heights of notoriety to the slag heap of has-beenery.

But if it is true that the remainder of his career was indeed that of a has-been, we should all be so lucky.

The composer of six symphonies, Antheil also wrote books on endocrinology and speculative war tactics, a murder mystery, a nationally syndicated column of advice to the lovelorn, and over 30 Hollywood film scores. With the actress Hedy Lamarr, he patented a torpedo guidance system that became the basis for modern Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular phone technology.

I hope you’ll join me for music by this eccentric and multitalented figure, including “Ballet Mécanique,” in all its original, uncompromising glory; then selections from his neo-classical Piano Concerto No. 2, his wartime Symphony No. 4, and dance music from his score to the ballet film noir “Specter of the Rose.”

The irony is blistering that Trenton’s own classical music station no longer hosts “The Lost Chord,” but you can still enjoy this celebration of Trenton’s (other) bad boy, thanks to the miracle of worldwide streaming. I hope you’ll be able to join me for “Antheil Establishment,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

For more information, see below.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 8, 2023
Kurosawa’s Cinematic Music: A Samurai Soundscape

Any classical music station that would drop “Picture Perfect” must be dull as a blunt katana. Fortunately, those of us who care about the preservation and dissemination of classic film music can stay sharp with a playlist drawn from the films of Akira Kurosawa this week on KWAX.

“Seven Samurai” (1954) is a three-and-a-half-hour epic on a deceptively simple premise: a ragtag company of ronin is assembled to defend a farmers’ village against marauding brigands. Of course, that capsule synopsis doesn’t begin to hint at what a marvelous achievement it really is. “Seven Samurai” is regularly included on short 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 score, it stands only knee-high to the original, with music by Fumio Hayazaka.

“Seven Samurai” may have been Kurosawa’s first, full-out samurai film, but it was not his first crack at jidaigeki (literally “period drama”). Already, a samurai features as one of the characters in his earlier, international break-out 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 ordinarily accept 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 and became Kurosawa’s new 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 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 scene-by-scene reliance on the original, but also Leone’s composer, Ennio Morricone, emulating Sato’s goofy juxtapositions and funky orchestrations. Kurosawa himself was inspired by the western tropes of John Ford movies and the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett.

As a bonus, we’ll hear 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. For one thing, it was his first film shot in color – truly lurid Technicolor – and the first made after his break with Mifune. 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, even to the point of 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.

If your local classical music station is low on local programming, we’ll keep you runnin’ on ronin, in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.

See below for streaming information.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

July 7, 2023
Ernest Bloch’s American Rhapsody on KWAX

Just in time for Independence Day, Princeton’s wretched refuse washes up on the teeming shores of KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon. And in common with this week’s subject on “The Lost Chord,” I love and revere my adopted country as only an outsider can.

We’ll have music by immigrant-turned-naturalized-American-citizen, Ernest Bloch – who died in Portland, less than two hours north of Eugene, home of KWAX, in 1959. Bloch, born in Switzerland, is probably best remembered for his music on Jewish themes, including the rhapsody for cello and orchestra, “Schelomo,” the suite for violin and piano “Baal Shem,” and the humanitarian oratorio, “Sacred Service.”

With a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe, Bloch decided to make the United States his permanent home. His epic rhapsody, “America,” was written, according to the composer, “in love for this country, in reverence to its past, in faith in its future.” He dedicated the work to Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

Bloch first conceived the idea for the piece in 1916, as his steamer entered New York Harbor. The conflict of the First World War gave further impetus to the composition of what he envisioned as an American anthem, but it wasn’t until 1925 that the work began to take concrete form.

For modern listeners, it’s possible that this symphony in all but name crosses the line at times into the Realm of Hokey, with its quotations of “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Yankee Doodle” – it is certainly a time capsule – however, Bloch’s heartfelt conviction and his love for his adopted country remain palpable.

Hear Bloch himself, full of patriotic fervor, introduce this homage to his adopted land. Leopold Stokowski conducts the Symphony of the Air. I hope you’ll join me for “Rhapsody in Red, White and Blue,” now in syndication on KWAX!

See below for streaming information.

Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)

Stream them here!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

Bloch was also interested in the visual arts, especially photography, and developed a close friendship with Alfred Stieglitz:

Ernest Bloch and Alfred Stieglitz: Photography, Music and the Soul

July 1, 2023

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS