One of the great pleasures of having your own podcast is that you get to go on other people’s podcasts. It’s a whole ecosystem out there, and we’re all in it together!
I get a little hyper when I go on other people’s shows because I’m usually talking about myself or my work, subjects upon which I am but rarely asked to opine. On my show The Classical Gabfest, the whole point is that my cohosts and I don’t talk about ourselves, we talk about music and news. Of course our personal lives come through in little glimpses, and I quite like that. It’s good to get to know someone slowly.
But, if you are curious to hear my thoughts on conducting, composing, and non-classical music…
Creative Baggage
This is an interview show wherein artistic guests talk about the professional demons that have haunted them along their career paths. We had the hosts on our show in January, at which time Kensho and Tiffany and I revealed a bit about our ups and downs and bumps along the road.
In my episode, I ended up talking more abstractly about the conducting profession as a whole, but I definitely got into some of my own stuff. I think it was a good conversation.
Moveable Do
Also an interview podcast, this time specifically for composers. The host, Steve Danielson, is a choral conductor and composer so the guests mainly come from the choral world. He’s had one some pretty well-known figures, Jake Runestad being a standout example.
I really like the structure of this show. In the first half, Steve asks the composer about their musical background and career; in the second half, he plays four representative works (chosen by the composer) and has a little discussion about how each fits into their output and artistry.
I chose my works based on whom I perceived his audience to be — mainly choral music aficionados — so I started off with a very old choral piece (which I still quite like) and then moved onto brass music (a movement from The Dwarf Planets), my piano sonata, and Acadia Fanfare.
On another show (or a different day) I might have chosen four different works, but I think these ones serve their purpose quite well.
Putting It Together
I’ve become something of a fixture on Kyle Marshall’s podcast dedicated to the work of Stephen Sondheim and I always have a great time going on the show. I think my earlier appearances were much more hyper, and now I’ve settled into myself when we talk.
In my most recent episode, we talked about what is easily the most fucked up song in the very fucked up (and completely perfect in every way) Sweeney Todd. It’s pretty wild!
The Classical Gabfest
Did you think I wasn’t going to include my own show in this little list? Not bloody likely! We just did another All-Games Extravaganza this week, and those tend to be very popular with our hardcore user base, so here it is:
In this week’s edition of the Gabfest (technically the Lovefest) we talked about Music of the Heart for our movie club, a 1999 tearjerker about an inner city violin teacher played by Meryl Streep. I called it “one step removed from a Hallmark film,” a statement I stand by, but Tiffany thought it should be part of the core canon of beloved classical movies.
I was willing to grant that it’s not a bad movie per se, but it will never enter into my personal pantheon. So what would I put in my personal pantheon? Well, I’m glad you asked:
10. La Pianiste
I’m starting this list with the single most f*cked up movie about music. La Pianiste (“The Piano Teacherâ€) stars Isabelle Hupert as a sexually repressed classical musician who experiences the grave misfortune of seeing her kinkiest desires come true. (See Žižek for a deeper analysis.)
For most of its running time, La Pianiste falls into my favorite genre of movie, which is “moody French art film with almost no dialogue†(more on that below.)
9. The Red Violin
Another movie that came out when I was a teenager and did surprisingly well at the box office. It’s basically The Da Vinci Code of the violin, and it’s more than slightly ridiculous. But it’s got a cool score by John Corigliano performed by Josh Bell (both of whom, apparently, also acted as script consultants.) I doubt this one holds up particularly well, but it was fun at the time.
8. Hangover Square
If you think I’ve only seen this movie because of the position it holds in Sondheim lore, you’re absolutely right. Sondheim often told the story of how when he was 10 or 11 years old, he watched this movie like 100 times with the intention of memorizing its score. (Just listen to the podcast episode in my last post.) It’s about an Edwardian-era composer-pianist who goes insane, and the picture ends with the character playing the piano as he’s engulfed in flames. Neat stuff!
7. Mahler
This is the second most f*cked up movie on this list, an avant-garde phantasmagoria of a biopic. Ken Russell also made movies about Elgar, Delius, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt, but I haven’t seen any of those (though I’d quite like to.) It’s been a long time since I saw this movie, and I only saw it once, but like… this isn’t a movie that you easily forget.
6. Shine
A performer biopic for a change. This movie came out in the US when I was 13 and it was something of a sensation. And for good reason — it’s a fantastic movie! It spurred in me a several months’ long obsessed with the Rachmaninoff piano concertos. Been a while since I’ve seen it, but I would guess that it holds up quite well.
5. Immortal Beloved
I watched this movie so. many. times when I was a kid. Beethoven was, after all, my favorite composer (still is!) and this movie was the best available depiction of him on screen. I think Gary Oldman does a great job portraying Beethoven and overall the film holds up pretty well. It’s always fun to see Isabella Rossellini and she matches Oldman beat for beat as his main love interest. The period details and are very good as are the musical depictions. There’s one big criticism though, which is that in the scene depicting Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna, there are two shots that are edited out of order. See if you can spot them!
4. England, My England
Now we get into one of my weird hobby horses, which is the fact that when I was a teenager, Bravo TV — yes, that Bravo TV of “Real Housewives†fame — was an extremely highbrow channel that ran a steady stream of artsy-fartsy European films; it would be hard for me to explain how much of a formative impact this had on me. (Exhibit A in just how obscure most of their programming was: Bernt Capra’s Mindwalk, which I also watched several times, barely understanding any of it.)
Anyway, England, My England is the story of Henry Purcell, easily one of my top 10 favorite composers, and it’s a very good movie. Once again, it’s slightly experimental, but it works incredibly well and the music is fantastic. Simon Callow plays Charles II and he can essentially do no wrong (see below.)
3. Tous les matins du monde
This movie has everything. First off, it’s the paradigm of a moody French art film with almost no dialogue. Second, it’s all about sulky old French viol music from the early Baroque. Third, it’s got smokeshow Guillaume Depardieu rocking the most luscious locks in all of Europe (sadly, he died shortly after making the movie.)
The movie itself is a sort of dual-biopic about the composer Marin Marais (played by both Guillaume and Gerard Depardieu) and his teacher, who is only known to history as M. de Sainte-Colombe. MdSC was a petty nobleman who revolutionized the viol as an instrument and the music written for it. Jordi Savall does the music and it is first rate. I wrote a piece inspired by this music (and, in a way, the movie itself.)
2. Amadeus
This really is one of the best movies ever made, and not just about music. The performances are — without exception — superb. Tom Hulce paints a portrait of Mozart that is so vivid it has no chance of ever being matched. Simon Callow was born to play Emanuel Schikaneder, and of course F. Murray Abraham is perfect as Salieri.
I just finished reading Jan Swafford’s recent biography of Mozart, and after 750 pages, my big takeaway was that Amadeus gets Mozart so so so right. Now, the scolds among you will complain that the contents of the movie are ahistorical. I take the point, but in a broader sense, I think this movie’s history is perfect. The plot is not factually accurate, but the costumes, settings, style, and background detail are all spot on. And of course, the plot wasn’t trying to be perfect — it was Peter Shaffer’s retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. Mozart and Salieri were polite (and even friendly) rivals in real life. (Salieri did Mozart the honor of conducting his 40th symphony with an orchestra of 180 people!)
Ok this is it, easily one of my top 2 or 3 favorites movies of all time. Moodier, Frenchier, and silenter than any other film on this list, Bleu is the story of Julie, a contemporary composer living and working in Paris in the early 90’s. When her husband — also a composer — dies in a car accident (along with her daughter) she is forced to reconstruct her life from the ground up.
Why did I click so hard with this movie when I was 13? Who can say. I was in the formative stage of my lifelong loves of the French language, of classical music, and of art film. Later I came to find out that this is widely considered Kieslowski’s masterpiece and that it was Juliette Binoche’s breakout role, but I had no idea of either of those facts at the time.
The music in the film is one of the focal points, as several of the main characters are composers. The score by Zbigniew Preisner has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, with many listeners finding it overwrought. And in a way it is, but it’s also hauntingly beautiful if you give yourself over to it, and of course, encountering it as a young teenager, I was easy prey for its intensity.
You won’t have to dig too deeply into this blog (or any of my other public-facing work) to know that Stephen Sondheim is easily my favorite American composer of the latter-20th century and a major influence on my own work.
Thankfully, my co-hosts on The Classical Gabfest were willing to let me have this week’s episode to myself. In lieu of our normal roundtable discussion, I created an audio documentary devoted to Sondheim’s work as a composer.
It’s hardly surprising that the discourse around Sondheim in the past two weeks has been heavy on his lyrics and light on his music; music is just harder to talk about, especially without resorting to non-technical terminology. (Sondheim even said as much in his two-volume book of lyrics.)
But with an audio medium, the job becomes (slightly) more feasible. I put a lot of myself into this podcast, and I hope it brings classical music lovers closer to Sondheim and Sondheim lovers closer to classical music.
I did an interview with Sergio Canovas who runs one of those great YouTube channels that digs up obscure symphonic music. He reached out after digging up my own obscure musical Symphony in Three Movements. You can read Sergio’s translation on his site, or read what I wrote in English here:
What is, in your opinion, the current state of classical music in the United States today?
In one sense, classical music is incredibly strong in the U.S. today. We have some of the finest conservatories in the world; because of this, the U.S. is home to a large number of exquisitely trained musicians.
However, many of these people will find it hard to make a living in classical music after they leave music school. Governments in the U.S., both at the federal and state levels, provide very little funding for the arts, and classical music is becoming less and less of a priority as funding organizations (both public and private) seek to bolster art forms that originate outside the European hegemonic sphere.
In the past decade, large classical music institutions in our major cities have attracted quite a bit of private money though, and they seem to be safe from major catastrophes. (The Metropolitan Opera in New York is, perhaps, an exception to this.) The situation with orchestras, opera companies, and chamber music presenters in smaller cities is more complicated: some of those communities are able to maintain classical music institutions in spite of declining populations because the people who remain are older and have more conservative taste. However, this is a mixed bag.
In terms of general interest in classical music among U.S.-Americans, I think it is quite low overall, but the accessibility of the internet might be changing this. Where I live, in Seattle, there is a thriving community of amateur classical musicians, mostly people who work in the technology sector. Many of these people earned music degrees at university, but they have gone on to careers in computer programming or other related professions, and now they pursue classical music performance as a passion (or, in some cases, as an addiction!)
What is the relationship between composers and audience?
I think very carefully about the audience for my works, and I try to write music that will appeal to each specific audience. Am I writing for an audience that is accustomed to “new music†or one that barely knows about traditional classical music? My goal as a composer is to meet an audience where they are, to connect with them, and then to take them on a journey.
Since orchestral music attracts the largest audience, I try to use a particularly approachable musical language in orchestral music. That doesn’t mean that the language can’t have dissonance or other challenging features — many people today are quite familiar with a certain “light modernism†that they have heard in film scores, particularly in thrillers and horror films.
I believe that once an audience trusts you — trusts that you are writing music for them, not music intended to bewilder them or show off your own intellect — they will willingly follow you on the musical journey you have created for them, and that they will enjoy the surprises and challenges you include along the way.
What do you conceive when you think of a Symphony?
For me, a symphony should have an emotional sweep like that of a novel or a film. I particularly admire “cyclical†symphonies, such as Franck’s symphony in D minor or Sibelius’s first symphony, where themes reappear throughout the various movements like characters in a play.
A symphony should tell a story, but not a literal one: music stubbornly resists most attempts at literal depiction. Rather, music is the language of emotions, and therefore a symphony can (and should) explore the internal drama of the human experience.
Of course, when I conceive of a symphony, I naturally reflect on the great tradition that stems back to Haydn and Mozart. I am intensely interested in the ways the form has been altered and reshaped during its nearly 300 year history. One may think that everything that can be done with the symphony has already been done, but I am constantly amazed at how many different approaches to this form exist. Every symphony solves the puzzle in a different way.
Is there a place for the symphonic genre in the XXI century?
I see no reason why the symphony should not continue into the 21st century, but there are many forces working against it. Generally speaking, it seems that large new works are only accepted if they are multimedia or collaborative — pieces with narration, singing, dancing, film, or theatrical elements. At least, that would appear to be the case in the United States.
But the symphony (in its unadorned form) has much to offer audiences in the 21st century. It offers a different way of interacting with music (and indeed with artistic expression) than any other art form. Because the orchestra offers so much coloristic variety, a symphonic composer can constantly surprise and refocus the listener, even over a long time span.
We still find a place for excellent literary fiction in our cultural world today (for example, the novels of Elena Ferrante), and for artistic films and plays. I think there are many more people who would also appreciate large scale symphonic music if they could be exposed to it. We tend to direct our efforts at exposing classical music to new audiences at children and underserved communities — which is a good thing to do — but there is also a large audience of mainstream adults who are generally interested in fine arts but lack exposure to classical music.
Not only are you a composer, but also a conductor. Does the music you perform influence your compositions?
Yes. I trained as a composer at university, but I have pursued conducting as my profession, and because of this, I have spent many hundreds of hours studying the orchestral works of the great composers; they have, in effect, become my most important composition teachers.
When I conduct a work, I analyze it deeply, trying to understand every bit of its structure and harmony. I examine its smallest details, its largest forms, and everything in between. I deconstruct its melodies and counterpoint and seek to understand everything the composer has put into the work.
Many composers try to hide their influences or claim to renounce them. I prefer to celebrate mine. I think that greatness in any artistic pursuit comes from building on the work of those who went before you. Beethoven was a great composer because he built upon the work of Mozart and Haydn. Schnittke was great because he built upon the work of Mahler and Shostakovich.
Do you believe in inspiration or hard work? Perhaps both?
Naturally, both are important.
Other crucial attributes for a composer include: wide-ranging curiosity about the world; intellectual rigor; a fascination with puzzles, logic, and design; a profound emotional honesty; an intense desire to communicate; openness to collaboration and interpretation; a constantly evolving understanding of one’s own work habits and needs; a fascination with history (music history in particular); and a desire to engage with “eternal philosophyâ€.
By “eternal philosophy” I am referring to the aspects of meaning in human life that are consistent from generation to generation. In certain ways, our technological age is very different from the era of the Ancient Greeks, the Medieval Arabs, or the Qing dynasty in China. But in some crucial ways, the way we experience life internally as human beings is the same in all of them. Composers need to try to get to the core of that inner human experience that transcends the ages.
I think that every composition should have some music that embarrasses its composer, at least slightly — something quirky that reveals a bit of bad taste or childish enthusiasm.
What has been your best experience at the podium? And the worst?
Best:
It would be hard to top the experience I had in June 2015 conducting the final movement of my symphony at Carnegie Hall. I had been the conductor of the Cincinnati Youth Symphony for four years and had personally selected all the students in the orchestra. I had worked with many of them closely for several years and I had composed the symphony with them specifically in mind. The program included my work, as well as selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and two works by Alfred Schnittke, perhaps my favorite 20th century composer. It was my last concert with the orchestra, and one that I will never forget.
More recently, I conducted The Rite of Spring with my current orchestra in Seattle. It was a major challenge for them, but they worked extremely hard and delivered a fine performance. I also conducted Lili Boulanger’s “Du fond de l’abîme†with them, which I rate as one of the most important choral-orchestral works ever produced. At first, the musicians were skeptical, but by the time we got to the concert, they had all fallen in love with it.
Worst:
I have had to conduct the first movement of Brahms’ 3rd symphony several times, always in conducting auditions. I adore Brahms’ music, and in particular this symphony, but it is extremely challenging to conduct. When you have only a few minutes to “crash through it†with an orchestra, the results are terrible, at least in my experience.
One day I hope very much to program it on a concert and devote the necessary time to rehearsing it and getting comfortable with its intricacies.
Who would you consider the quintessential American composer?
For me, the “quintessential†American composer has to be someone who can write in both classical and popular styles and blend the two; ideally it should be someone who has made contributions to the concert hall, the Broadway stage, and the Hollywood film industry (since those are the quintessential American genres.)
With that in mind, I would choose Leonard Bernstein. His music for West Side Story incorporates many different popular styles, but he also carries off a 12-tone fugue in a work that went on to be adapted into one of the most popular movies of all time.
Honorable mentions: John Philip Sousa, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Billy Strayhorn, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, and John Williams. The closest we have to a “quintessential American composer†today is probably Jennifer Higdon, though she has not (yet) branched out into non-concert media.
What emergent composers are you interested in or follow?
The emerging composer whose work I am most interested in is a young American composer from Dallas, TX named Quinn Mason. I became aware of Quinn’s music about four years ago when he reached out to me via email and asked me to review some of his compositions.
I have received many such emails from young composers and I am always happy to listen to what they send and to offer advice. Sometimes, the music they send is very good indeed, but I have never encountered another young composer with Quinn’s talents and abilities. His music immediately revealed itself as the work of a young artist who was thoroughly mastering his craft and emerging with an original voice.
What is your opinion on film music? Especially with regards to classical music.
I am a great lover of film music, but only the kind of film music that is connected to classical music in some way. I adore the scores from Classic Hollywood by people like Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, and Miklos Rozsa.
Among film composers working today, there are only a few who interest me. My favorite contemporary film composer is Alberto Iglesias, and indeed he is one of my favorite contemporary composers in any genre. I worship the films of Pedro Almodóvar, in large part because of the contribution of Iglesias.
Besides Iglesias, there are some French composers whose film scores I quite admire, particularly the scores of Philippe Rombi for the films of François Ozon and the scores of Alexandre Desplat for the films of Wes Anderson.
One thing really bothers me with film soundtracks though: when a historical picture does not use a period score. Unfortunately, this is extremely common; it’s the exception when a period picture uses music appropriate to the time.
Do you listen to other types of music?
Yes, I listen to a lot of “golden era†Broadway show tunes. I consider Stephen Sondheim a living deity sent to earth from heaven; he is easily my favorite living composer in any genre. His work is almost totally overlooked by the classical music establishment, and this is a pity. His music combines the best of the great Broadway tradition (Gershwin, Arlen, and Styne) with the best of the 20th century classical music tradition (Ravel, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff.)
Aside from that, I do not listen to many other types of music. My main interest is in discovering little-known works of classical music by obscure composers (as I often do on the Sergio Canovas YouTube channel!) Even when I don’t love the music, I almost always find something interesting to learn from it.
Any recent personal anecdote?
We’re now at the beginning of June 2021, and life in the US is starting to return to normal. I received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on May 12. I was able to go to a small house party, a ‘diletto musicale’ if you will, last weekend and perform some of my recent compositions for an invited audience in Portland, Oregon.
Even better, my ensemble has returned to musical life with outdoor rehearsals and several concerts scheduled for this summer — our first time making music together since February 2020!
Well, we’re doing it. Not only does my organization have a new name, but we’re actually planning a full season of choral-orchestral concerts, which I describe in this video:
I’m pretty happy with this season (but then again… I would be.) When you program a season, you’re going for balance. A representative mix of nationalities, personalities, historical periods, styles, familiarity levels and concert formats. And I think we’ve got that here.
Want an extra long Baroque oratorio concert? We’ve got that (Messiah, St. Matthew Passion.) Want something light and frothy? Come to our opening night. You’ll get a mix of classical, romantic, modern, and contemporary in a ~90-minute package, all light and joyous.
Want something deeper? Come to our November concert, which features that old warhorse, the Brahms German Requiem paired with a piece that almost nobody has heard of called “Elegy for Brahms.†Or you could come to our orchestra-only concert in February (an actual overture-concerto-symphony format!) which has music from WWII, including Still, Barber, and Prokofiev.
Anyway, we’re already knee-deep into rehearsals for our first show, and I’m having a blast. If you want to see how the whole thing comes together, here’s a YouTube playlist.
What started as a pandemic project has become a weekly source of artistic and intellectual sustenance, and a product I’m genuinely proud of. I’m a podcast junkie, so I had a clear vision for the kind of podcast I wanted to produce from the jump, but I have to say, I owe it all to the Gabfest team — my co-hosts Tiffany and Kensho, intern Joey, consulting producer Eric, and listener-statistician Christopher — for making it as good as it is. And I think it’s very good indeed.
The last project of this type that I tried my hand at was the Ask a Maestro vlog, and I gave up on that after less than a year. To research, script, film, present, edit, and animate a compelling internet video all by oneself is a Sisyphean undertaking, and my editing skills (and my computer’s RAM) just weren’t up to the task.
But team work makes the dream work! Plus, somehow all the practice podcast editing has actually paid dividends. I’ve actually gotten better and more efficient at it over the past 12 months in a way that I never did with video editing.
People keep asking me if we’re going to keep it going now that the pandemic is… well, not over, but in a new phase. And the answer is: yes, that’s the plan. I really love it and the team, thankfully, is as committed as ever.
I’ll end this little bit of boasting by mentioning the fact that I commissioned an art work in celebration of our podcast anniversary from a very talented conductor / visual artist named Andrew Crust:
In the coming days, we’re going to challenge our social media followers to identify all the references, so for people that actually read my blog, I’ll offer a cheat sheet, starting in the top-left corner.
Wagnerism is a book by Alex Ross that we did as a book club project over the course of three episodes. Our final evaluation was summed up admirably by Tiffany: “this is a reference book disguised as a popular history.â€
Johannes Brahms is “the king of our mixtape†and easily the composer most beloved by my our team as a whole.
The three of us rendered in “pop art” style.
Just below our portraits is the façade of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, easily our bête noir this past year as we chronicled their many travails and missteps as an institution.
Smack dab in the middle, we’ve got our theme music.
Hanging from the “a“ in “Classical†is a hurdy-gurdy. Tiffany built and played a hurdy-gurdy from UGears in one of our favorite segments.
On the “t†in “Gabfest,†we’ve got a 2nd place medal from the Croatian Podcast Awards. This refers to a time when we received an utterly mysterious email in our inbox telling us that ours was the second highest downloaded podcast in the “Music†category in iTunes Croatia. It remains a badge of honor.
In the lower-left corner we’ve got Francis Poulenc, who has a special place in the Gabfest pantheon.
The most “inside joke†on the page is the ostrich egg. You’d have to have seen our actual Zoom sessions, but for a long time, Tiffany was podcasting from a room in a rented house that included a large, decorative ostrich egg on a shelf behind her head.
NEWS! The whole show, in a way, is built around the news, but a regular segment on the show is a brief roundup of headlines, and of course we use the famous aria from John Adams’ Nixon in China as the theme.
But there’s one particular tweet I’d like to draw your attention to:
A song cycle based on the photo captions of Martha Stewart’s instagram? A grand idea to be sure, but I’m a busy guy. When, if ever, would I find the time to devote to such a whimsical project?
OK, yes, it’s a bit of a joke that I used a month of my lockdown time to compose a 45-minute song cycle on the instagram poetry of Martha Stewart. But you know what? It was pretty important to me. It was a form of music therapy. I wrote these songs during this past February and March. The dreariest, chilliest time of year, and thus, the loneliest time of the pandemic. I was toying with a number of composition projects, but I chose this one because I thought it would bring me some much needed joy and light.
And it did! One of the great advantages of this piece was that it was not only entertaining to write, but it also gave me new material to play and sing at home (and yes, I have written many apologetic texts to my neighbors. Luckily, they’re into it!)
And the other thing I hope? That Martha gets to hear them (preferably performed by me, for her, at one of her properties.) I’m trying to make it happen, but very open to help. Email me if you have ideas. I have quite a bit to thank her for.
One thing we were trying to get at was “what makes French music French music“? While I’m skeptical of nationalist essentialism, especially in art, it’s a fun discussion question, so I want to further the discussion here:
One thing Ludo brings up is that French music is the music of “harmonic ambiguity.” He was talking about the extended 7th chords of Debussy in particular. But let’s get real — when you think of “harmonic ambiguity,” the first name that comes to mind is Richard Wagner. The Triiistaaan Chooord.
It’s a known known that Debussy was influenced by Wagner, then rejected his influence, then found mocking amusement in his influence. But the influence was there, and it’s unmistakable. But then of course, there’s a lot of other influences, famously, Javanese gamelan and Chopin’s pianistic imaginings, which are also non-French sources. (Though Ludo might contest the case of Chopin.)
But here’s the thing: to me, these extended 7th harmonies in Debussy have precisely nothing to do with harmonic ambiguity, i.e. with chords that could go any which way. In Debussy’s hands, they’re the opposite — pictures of coloristic stasis.
The example of Debussy is illustrative of how this nationalism thing can get tricky. Ludo talked a lot about Stravinsky being a “pseudo-French” composer and listed Rimsky as being the “French” influence on him. What? Paging Richard Taruskin!
But of course, he’s not altogether wrong, because the Russians were heavily influenced by the French. But they were also doing their own thing and that’s true of no one more than Rimsky-Korsakov who is responsible for all sorts of discoveries concerning octatonic harmony that Stravinsky would later go on to use. So what’s Russian and what’s French? It’s pretty hard to disentangle.
I suppose I’m left where I started, wondering if there is truly any through line that binds Rameau to Berlioz to Franck to Debussy to Boulez to Grisey.
*Yes, I am well aware that the French call it “le 14 juillet” or the “fête nationale” and not “Bastille Day” — it’s literally the only thing anyone ever says when you say “Bastille Day”!
My former student, current friend, and Classical Gabfest “official unofficial intern” Joseph Vaz has just recorded the piano sonata I wrote for him and I can hardly get my head around how amazing this performance is.
I’ve listened to this recording several times since he recorded it last week, and there have been times when I’ve gotten so engrossed in his performance that I’ve literally forgotten that I wrote the piece. It’s as if I’m listening to a sonata that Joseph composed that I just happen to know and like.
I like to think that part of this successful music mind-meld thing is due to the fact that I wrote the piece for Joseph, but that’s giving me too much credit — I could say that I tailored the glove to fit his hand, but its more like he refashioned his hand to fit the glove. Or, to use a less strained analogy, it’s like I’m the gardener and he’s the chef.
I’ve never had a performer of Joseph’s talents and musicality devote their entire virtuoso apparatus to a large, complex, challenging piece like this — he recorded the piece from memory for heaven’s sake — and the unalloyed success of this project also has me reexamining my thoughts about the relative potential of the various genres and forms of classical composition.
Let me put it this way: I’m an orchestra guy, and I’ve always felt that when it came to instrumental music, the symphony is the end-all-be-all of musical genres. But now I’m not so sure. A symphony is a beast, but it requires the total commitment of 60-100 people in order to achieve its effect. Yes, a sympathetic conductor can go a long way to achieving that goal, but it’s an awfully heavy lift.
But a piano sonata? There, you just need one talented, committed interpreter to bring it to life. It’s really only one step away from a novel, which goes directly from the brain of the writer into the brain of the reader. (In the case of the communication from composer to performer, it’s exactly the same.)
Of course, the piano lacks the coloristic possibilities of the orchestra, but it’s not exactly bereft of them either. It retains an awful lot of the grandeur of the orchestra, and what it lacks in size it makes up for in incision. I don’t know, I just think it’s pretty great. I still want to write symphonies, but now I am also very enthusiastic about writing piano sonatas, and piano music in general, which used to inspire tremendous fear in me, not being a trained pianist myself.
(One thing worth mentioning is that Joseph helped me tremendously to overcome my phobia of piano writing by teaching me one simple fact, namely, that Claude Debussy never marked pedaling in his scores. Pedaling notation was always a major hangup for me — as far as I’m concerned, it’s an issue best kept between a pianist and their foot!)
Joseph and I discuss the piece, the process, and the genre in more depth on this week’s Classical Gabfest, which also features discussion of some equally fascinating recent projects that my co-hosts have been involved in:
I’ve recently recorded and posted two pieces that are, in part, inspired by films.
The first is a piece from a few years back, a duet for violin and clarinet titled Lemn de Viata. The title is in Romanian because I was very into the movie Aferim! when I wrote the piece. Aferim! is a historical drama set in rural 19th century Romania. I have precisely zero recollection if the music in the movie itself (I think it was all diegetic music performed live on set) but I remember so much about the tone and mood of that film and the world it created.
I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but there can be quite a bit of confusion when I say that a given piece was influenced by a movie. People always think I mean it was influenced by the score, but most of the time that’s not the case. (Though sometimes it is!) Usually it means that I’m trying to capture something about the vibe of the movie — the drama, the setting, the atmosphere — the type of things that music is so good at capturing.
In the second case, the situation is more complicated, because the movie is about music, and that music is at the heart of my own piece.
The film in question is Tous les matins du monde, which for me is one of those indispensable music movies, right up there with Amadeus and Bleu. It made me fall in love with early baroque viol suites, and to this day I will go weeks at a time listening to nothing but Marin Marais and Sainte-Colombe.
I had been wanting to write something that interacted with that music for some time. When my friend Will asked me write a solo bass piece, it seemed like the perfect fit, given that the modern string bass is the last surviving member of the viol family. (Well, among modern orchestral string instruments, at least.)
The soundtrack of Tous les matins du monde is a cornucopia of chamber pieces for viols, among them a composition by M. de Sainte Colombe titled “Tombeau Les regrets” and one by Marin Marais titled “La Rêveuse”. So when Will asked me to write a piece about the death of his father and the birth of his son (which I discuss more here) it was further evidence that this old music might supply the necessary tools for the job.
As a musical term, a “tombeau” (literally “tomb”) is a composition that memorializes the dead. As far as I know, it was exclusively used by French musicians (I’ve never heard of a tomba or a Grabkammer.) Most modern-day musicians know the word exclusively from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin.
The other side of the title, “Les Rêves,” refers to the dreams, hopes, and desires that we imbue our children with. In a slightly complicated twist, I use a quote from Marais’ “La Rêveuse” not to represent the dream music, but rather the sorrow music (I mean, just listen to it!)
The concept of the piece ties into the movie in yet a further way. In the climactic final scene (spoilers, I guess) the old teacher, ever obstreperous, reveals what he believes to be the sole purpose of music: not to win the glory of kings or to delight the ears of the cognoscenti, but rather, to speak to the dead.
