Music Monday: Arrieu: Wind Quintet

As a wind player, I spend a lot of time playing repertoire that originated in Paris in the 1920s. There are a number of historical factors playing into this, from the relatively late development of modern woodwind playing mechanisms (at least compared to the string family) to the annual round of competition commissions from the Conservatoire de Paris, but the result is that wind players are disproportionately familiar with the style in vogue at the time, Parisian Neoclassicism.

Regrettably, I think this style is often misunderstood. On its surface, it is usually light, effervescent, and bubbly, and this sometimes leads people to dismiss it as trivial repertoire, fun listen to, sure, but lacking in real depth and musical substance. It isn't. I've written in various places on this blog in the past about the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) school of composition that arose in Germany as a response to the horrors of World War One, but it shouldn't surprise you to learn that that was not, in fact, the only such response. While the Neue Sachlichkeit reacted to the intense, hyper-emotional music from before the war with caustic mockery and sardonic wit, the Parisian Neoclassicists* reacted more by turning away, almost with a sense of resignation. If the extreme introspection of the late Romantics couldn't expose and scour away the darkness that led to the war, why believe that delving even deeper into the human psyche could help with the fallout from it? Better to set those things aside, leave them to things outside the realm of music.

Reading that, you might get the impression that this was a musical movement of stuffiness and repression, but that isn't the case. Instead, it's an aesthetic that makes a very conscious, deliberate choice to smile even tho it is surrounded by nightmares. After all, despite the many dead, the sun still shines. There are still birds singing in the savaged trees that survived the bombing. Even after the corpse factories of the Passchendaele and the Somme, some good things endure. The cheerful surface of this music is a mask, a papering over, a tacit acknowledgement that all is not well but music is not the medium for exploring these ills. It is music with a tremendous amount of pain hidden just beneath its glibness, and there are times where it spills into plain view, all the more heartbreaking because even the most determined joy could not keep it at bay.

If this seems like a lot to reconcile, an example will doubtless help. Claude Arrieu (originally Anne-Marie Simone, tho as this article mentions in passing, there appears to be some uncertainty on this point, as well as on why she ultimately changed it) was born to a musical family in Paris in 1903, and she spent the bulk of her life in that city. After graduating from the Conservatoire with the first prize in composition, she went to work as a radio producer, but composed prolifically the entire time. She worked in pretty much every genre out there, from operas to chamber music to film scores. (IMDB lists seven film credits to her name, tho other sources seem to indicate that she worked on considerably more.) Evidently she wrote prodigious amounts of vocal music, but very little of it has entered the standard performing repertoire. Indeed, very little of anything she's done has entered the standard repertoire, and there's almost no information about her or her works easily accessible online. I'm not sure why — she seems to have had a prolific and successful career right up until her death in 1990 — but for whatever reason, her extensive body of works hasn't inspired much interest of late.

Even so, it's quite good, and certainly deserves to be heard. So today, in the wind-dominated spirit of the Parisian Neoclassicists, we feature her wind quintet from 1955. The first movement jumps right into the fray with bustling theme that melds seamlessly into more lyrical interludes as the music progresses. There's a brief quote of the opening material towards the end, but for the most part, the music is non-repetitive, developing everything continuously in a heady rush. Next is a languid but no less sunny dalliance, or at least it starts that way. It cools as it progresses, until a stark passage in octaves seems to pull it up short. It tries to restart, but it seems haunted, and has a hard time holding on to perfect tranquillity.

Up next is the scherzo, which is at times almost borders on the snide. It's over in a flash, paving the way for the introspective fourth movement. A plaintive oboe solo sets the stage, and an air of melancholy settles over the proceedings. It is late, the sun is setting, there is too much time to fill, and weariness is creeping in from the corners. The finale sets things to rights. A breakneck dance, it balances out the frantic energy with elegance and poise, in true Parisian Neoclassical fashion, skating deftly around pools of darkness, choosing, with full knowledge of the alternative, to be happy in its final moments.

____________________
*Confusingly, many of the German composers working under the Neue Sachlichkeit umbrella are also referred to as Neoclassicists, the most famous of these being Paul Hindemith. There's a lot of validity to that label in terms of shared aesthetic principles and musical techniques, but there are also significant differences between the German and French Neoclassicists. For the purposes of this post, I will only be talking about the French side of this split. (Sergei Prokofiev and Bartók Béla are both also sometimes called Neoclassicists; for Prokofiev I think it's sometimes usefully applicable, but for Bartók I think it is generally a miscategorization.)

Music Monday: Gillis: Symphony 5½

Generally, symphonies are Serious Business. Even the lighter offerings from the mid-1700s were meant to mark grand occasions, adding weight and importance to the occasion of their performance. With the advent of Gustav Mahler and his monumental outpourings, one could understandably get the impression that 20th-century symphonies are bound to be intense, fraught affairs. To counter that impression, I present: Don Gillis.

It's not surprising if you've never heard of Gillis. Born in Cameron, Missouri in 1912, he followed the relatively typical (for a 20th-century American composer, at least) path of bachelor's and master's degrees in composition (at Texas Christian University and the North Texas State University, respectively), he then left academia and went to work as a producer with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. (Gillis was quite close to the maestro, and produced an extensive radio program about his life after he died. Toscanini, despite his current reputation for strictness and seriousness of purpose, seems to have been quite fond of Gillis's music, and programed quite a bit of it on his radio broadcasts.) He was instrumental in founding the Symphony of the Air after the NBC Symphony disbanded, and continued on as a producer before taking a job on the composition faculty of the University of South Carolina in 1973, a position he held until his death from an unexpected heart attack only five years later. So far as I can tell, his compositions never won a single award, and the academic music world has been quite happy to forget all about his existence.

Lack of formal recognition, however, didn't stop him from composing. Gillis wrote prolifically in his years as a producer, churning out twelve symphonies, several operas, and a plethora of other works as well. On numerous occasions he explained that he didn't really care about how posterity received his work, he only cared about music for people to enjoy in the present. This is probably for the best since — to be perfectly honest — many of his pieces don't hold up that well with the passage of time, diving headlong into kitschy Americana with folksy presented and developed in bland, predictable ways. He also doesn't have a terribly wide stylistic range, and after too much listening, it starts to feel like each piece is the same as the last. Unlike many of the more obscure composers featured here, I wouldn't make the case that Don Gillis is an unfairly neglected master of his craft.

Luckily, tho, some of his pieces do stand up pretty well, and they are delightful pieces at that. In 1946, he started working on a new symphony, which he thought would be his sixth. He quickly decided, however, that the music was too silly for that number and instead called the resulting piece his symphony no. 5½, "A Symphony for Fun". And it is. It's frothy and giddy and absurd, a wonderful antidote for anyone tempted to take Western concert music too seriously. The first movement, "Perpetual emotion", starts with a jazzy fanfare that launches a bustling romp. Cheeky woodwind themes alternate with irreverent percussion in a breathless rush of ideas that hovers just one step away from going off the rails. The "Spiritual?" that follows strikes a more somber note. The thematic content is Gillis's own, but the harmonies are strongly influenced by the music of black composers and performers, another example in the American music scene's long tradition of white people taking the musical stylings of black people (or approximations thereof), "sanitizing" them, and using them to sound hip, contemporary, or popular. (Of course, many of the resulting pieces were wildly popular with white audiences, and there were many borrowings in the other direction as well, so it is not always easy to trace what originated where. The intersections of music and racial dynamics in the United States are many and complicated.)

In place of a traditional scherzo, Gillis next provides a "Scherzophrenia", which has nothing to do with the disorder. The upbeat jazzy effects are back, including a rambunctious dance break that wipes out any expectation of a statelier trio. These persist into the final "Conclusion!", but they merge with music that seems more indebted to the music of hoe-downs and rodeos, with a few passages in the central section that unexpectedly seem to be winking at the opening to Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka. (A quick listen to his treatment of "Here Comes the Bride" in the last movement of his ballet Shindig provides ample evidence that he was no stranger to the art of distorted quotation, so it's not entirely implausible that it's a deliberate reference.) Any semblance of formality is long since gone by the time the music crashes its way to the double bar with one last playful thumbing of its nose.

Music Monday: Brouwer: Remembrances

By now, even if you've only read half of these posts, you're probably familiar with the trope of the composer who starts writing music at a very early age and never looks back. It's true that many composers do follow this trajectory, but by no means is it the one and only life path, and today we feature a work by Margaret Brouwer (b. 1940), a composer who took a rather more roundabout route to the composing life.

Roundabout, but not entirely out of left field. Instead of diving into life with the intent to write music, Brouwer initially set out to be a professional violinist. (In an interview over at New Music Box, she says that one reason she was slow to come to composition was that she simply didn't know women could be composers, given the overwhelming maleness of the average concert program.) She majored in violin performance at the Oberlin Conservatory, and ultimately wound up living and working down in Dallas. She had quite a successful career, too, working as a freelancer for numerous recording gigs and also landing positions with both the Fort Worth Opera and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. For many musicians, this is the dream life, and she was living it.

Over the years, tho, she had started writing music, at first for children at summer camps or for her friends to play, and she gradually began to ramp up her compositional activities. There was no big epiphany moment, but she ultimately decided that she wanted to switch over to writing instead of playing primarily. Since she was supporting two children as a single mother, she didn't want to strike out as a freelancing composer (a proposition even more financially risky than being a freelance performer), and went to Indiana University to earn a DMA in composition instead. As soon as she graduated, she managed to land a job teaching composition, and would go on to serve as the chair of the composition department at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where she is currently a professor emerita) from 1996 to 2008. Despite having little to show for her nascent compositional efforts prior to 1980, she's had a dazzlingly successful career, with commissions coming from major orchestras all around the country and a plethora of prestigious awards, up to and including the Guggenheim Award in 2004.

Unlike many composers who came of age in mid-century America, Brouwer resists being pigeonholed into one specific compositional style. She's quite happy to deploy the techniques of Minimalism and Serialism in the same work, despite the radically opposed foundations of these schools. (Indeed, in many ways Minimalism was founded in direct and strident opposition to Serialism.) This freewheeling stylistic eclecticism is more often a characteristic of the current generation of up-and-coming composers, but Margaret Brouwer beat us to the punch. (She is, of course, not entirely alone in this — there have always been elements of stylistic blending in American composition — but she does it exceptionally well.) As such, her pieces live in a wide variety of sound worlds, to the point that if you didn't know better, you might think they weren't all written by the same person.

With that in mind, today we're featuring a rather Neo-Romantic work, but it would be a mistake to flag Brouwer exclusively as a Neo-Romantic composer. Remembrances (1996) was written for the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra in memory of Robert Stewart, a close friend of Brouwer's. It begins with a dull pounding in the timpani followed by searching, aimless strings, conveying the ache and emptiness of loss. The brass and woodwind instruments enter gradually, building to a climax that launches a faster, murmuring section, seeming to conjure up fleeting memories of happier times. (Stewart was a sailor, among other things, and this music certainly seems to capture the rush of ploughing thru the waves.) After a stirring, expansive climax, the music ebbs to a darker, stiller place, echoing the opening sorrow.

Echoes of the faster music ensue, now scored more delicately, as tho only glimpsed faintly, from afar. This sets the stage for several intimate, lyrical woodwind solos, seeming to emerge like personal speakers at a wake, haloed gently with warm and resonant strings. These individualized memories dissolve into another collective tutti, one that, perhaps unintentionally, hints at "America the Beautiful". This memory sours, collapsing back into the rushing music from before, which builds to a reprise of the earlier climax, this time not ebbing away so much as disintegrating under the strain of the emotional intensity. An extensive coda ensues, projecting a final mood of hard-won acceptance, and maybe even hope.

Music Monday: Barber: Summer Music

Because we're having a bit of a heat wave here in Los Angeles, I'm skipping ahead to something that I'd normally save for rather later in the year. Despite the fact that there's almost nothing about him on my blog, I consider Samuel Barber (1910 - 81) to be one of my deepest compositional influences, tho he can be a hard composer to get a handle on. Born into a decidedly upper-middle class family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Barber had no shortage of musical influences early in life: His mother was a pianist, his uncle a composer, and his aunt a contralto with the Metropolitan Opera. Little wonder, then, that Barber expressed certainty that he'd be a composer when he was only nine years old.

At the age of 14, he entered the Curtis Institute, triple majoring in piano, composition, and voice. He was basically absurdly talented at all three of them, and quickly became the darling of the school's founder, Marie Louise Curtis Bok, who would subsequently introduce Barber to his future publishers in the Schirmer family. While at Curtis, he met Gian Carlo Menotti, who would go on to become his life-long romantic (and sometimes artistic) partner. (Menotti was a composer in his own right, tho he has generally not been as widely recognized an appreciated as Barber has. I personally find Menotti's works to be rather bland and uninspiring, so don't expect to see Amahl and the Night Visitors featured here any time soon.) Unlike many composers who struggle to gain recognition in their lifetimes, Barber was pretty much an instant success, and many of his works entered the standard repertoire as soon as they were premièred. His few flops — most famously the Antony and Cleopatra opera that he wrote for the opening of the current Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966, which was savaged in the press and not exactly beloved by the audience — are far eclipsed by his other works — you have definitely heard his Adagio for Strings, even if it wasn't identified as such. Said works are somewhat scattered between ensembles and genres — he didn't write a whole cycle of symphonies or slew of concerti; his largest compositional category is probably voice and piano — but they are each and every one of them gems.

Rather unusually, the commission for Summer Music was paid for not by an organization or consortium, but by subscribers to a chamber music series in Detroit. The idea was to defray the cost of the new work so that the individual audience members of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit would only have to chip in a few dollars, much like a pre-internet in Kickstarter-style crowdfunding. (This model of commissioning didn't catch on in 1954, but it seems considerably more viable today.) Originally, Barber was supposed to produce a septet for three winds, three strings, and piano, but after spending a summer with the New York Wind Quintet, he altered the instrumentation to fit that ensemble. Despite working very closely with the NYWQ in the compositional process (one of the members reportedly drew up a chart of chords that are particularly difficult for a wind quintet to play well, and Barber gleefully included all of them), Barber honored the initial arrangement and let the Detroit players give the world première. (As soon as they could, the NYWQ began playing the piece, and with gusto, playing it more than fifteen times in the first year alone.)

Bassoon and horn set the piece on its way, singing out languid, indolent lines quickly interspersed with colorful interjections from the flute and clarinet. What follows is less programmatic than suggestive — there are interludes that suggest idle lounging in a shady hammock and others that suggest the astringent chirping of insects, but no narrative arc links these together, and many passages seem to have no direct counterpart in the external world, instead conjuring a mood or emotion that one might feel on a lazy August afternoon. Each section is distinct and clearly defined, but they flow into each other easily and without high-stakes drama. A reprise of the opening material about halfway thru re-starts the piece with a greater sense of forward motion. There is an interruption in the form of a rapid ascent followed by yet a third re-launch, this time leading to a brilliant, swirling apotheosis before the dregs of the piece swirl quickly by and wink out of existence, like a memory of distant youth.

JS Bach: Cello Suite No. 3: V. Bourée I and II

Hey all! The fifth movement of my project to record JS Bach's third cello suite is now online! (You can find the earlier movements here in case you missed them or want to listen again.)

Music Monday: Baker: Cello Concerto

Back to the land of the living! David Baker was born in Indianapolis in 1931, and spent the bulk of his early life in that state, attending the University of Indiana for both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Somewhat unusually, both of these degrees were in music education instead of composition or performance, and indeed, education seems to be an ongoing passion of Baker's, especially when it comes to the world of Jazz. He was an early codifier of many of Jazz's unwritten traditions, and published several seminal treatises on Jazz improvisation in the 70s and 80s. Down Beat magazine made him the third ever inductee into their Jazz Education Hall of Fame, and many other organizations have recognized him for his accomplishments in this regard. He currently teaches at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University.

As a composer, Baker has been astonishingly prolific, penning upwards of 2000 compositions to date, ranging from standard Jazz charts to thru-composed symphonic works and everything in between. (Since he studied with Gunther Schuller, the term "Third Stream" — Schuller's label for works that fuse classical and Jazz idioms — is never far off from the works in the middle. I'm not particularly interested in diving into the various cans of worms associated with that term today, but it seems important to note the connection.) Today's featured work, his cello concerto from 1975, falls decidedly more towards the classical side, at least until the final movement.

Keeping in line with traditional concerto protocol, the orchestra presents a brief introduction before the soloist's entrance.  It's a swirling mass of turbulent sounds, and the cello does little to change the mood, tumbling in with angular, disjointed motives and mutterings. There are hints of lyricism and almost-tonal harmony sprinkled about the movement, but they never quite cohere, feeling instead like fragments of inert past languages dissolved in an acidic stew of contemporary disorientation. Eventually, this phantasmagoric wandering works its way to exhaustion, and the movement ends with a ghostly whisper from the cello's upper register.

Every theme in the expansive second movement is derived, in some way, from the solo cadenza that begins it, tho these derivations are not always immediately obvious. The harmonic language is still far from familiar, but there does seem to be more genuine lyricism here; for all the unusual twists and turns, things gel around long lines, singing despite their sinuousness. There are various orchestral punctuations, but they feel less like accompaniment in their own right and more like interpolations in the solo part. Despite occasional flowerings of consonance and warmth, the movement ends much as it began, in a distant, etherial world.

Right from the start, it's clear that the finale is going to have some Jazz in it, but it's a far cry from a bland injection of a tune with swing into a piece that otherwise lives in the realm of high modernism — it's a real blending of what has come before. It's a dissected, exploded Jazz tune, one that's been put thru a blender and then carefully pinned down like some massive exotic butterfly in a surrealist taxidermy shop. Even harmonically it's a mixture of worlds, with the chord changes from "Back Home Again in Indiana" alternating with a twelve-tone row. It's a wild ride, and it ends with a fittingly irreverent tumble into silence.