For my past ten entries, I listened to works by composers named on CultureTrip.com’s list of “10 Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music," HERE. Therefore, since I have now written about ten contemporary pieces, I thought I’d turn my attention to something more traditional. I chose at random Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E Flat Major.
The Quintet was written in 1842, and it has four movements:
The work is certainly a pleasant if not lovely piece, though it is not particularly striking or memorable to me. I listened to Franz Schubert’s “Fantasie in F Minor” for two pianos for the first time this year (I wrote about it here), and it has really stuck with me. I listen to it quite often now. However, I’m not sure that will be the case with this quintet by Schumann. I did enjoy the piece. I liked it very much -- but again, while it is very pleasant music to listen to, there’s nothing particularly “catchy” about it. There’s nothing really memorable. It’s funny though that I say that the work is not “really memorable,” because I wonder if I’ve heard this piece before. There’s a passage in the fourth movement that I seem to remember. It starts at 23:02 in the YouTube video here. Have I heard this quintet before, and I just don’t remember it? Or does this passage just remind me of some other piece I’ve heard before? Comments under the YouTube video state that “Robert Schumann’s Quintet for piano and strings in E flat major has earned a place of distinction among piano quintets, one of only a handful...that are known to more than just a few performers.” The writer goes on to describe the work as “fresh, buoyant, and inventive” -- and that is true. Overall the work is very buoyant -- particularly the third movement, it’s a real foot-tapper -- and I suspect that the entire piece is fun to play. I just didn’t find it memorable. Impressive? Yes. Memorable? No.
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For the past several weeks, I’ve been listening to works by composers on CultureTrip.com’s list of “10 Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music," HERE. This is the tenth week, so I am down to the final name, Mason Bates.
I plugged in Mr. Bates’ name into a YouTube search, and the first piece to pop up was “Mothership,” HERE. I found the comments posted along with the video to be very interesting, so I have reposted them here, below: Appointed the first-ever composer-In-Residence at the Kennedy Center this season (the beginning of a three-year residency), Mason Bates has rapidly joined the ranks of John Adams among the most frequently heard living American composers on the concert scene today - including prominent performances as well as a commission from the National Symphony. Along with his growing body of pioneering orchestral works, Bates recently accepted a commission from Santa Fe Opera to write an opera with librettist Mark Campbell titled The (Re)evolution of Steve Jobs, about the iconic figure of the digital era. Bates himself has been re-imagining the possibilities of traditional orchestral music and the concert experience itself for the context of our wired times. In Mothership this impulse converges with the composer's parallel career as a DJ (who goes by the moniker "Masonic"). In San Francisco and many other cities Bates has for years been curating after-hours sessions of immersive electronica, at times as late-into-the-night extensions of an orchestral concert. Compositions like Mothership fuse Bates's varied identities by incorporating electronic samplings familiar from the dance club floor into high-energy orchestral textures. Even Mothership's creation followed an unusual track. It was commissioned by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the world's first online collaborative orchestra (which was established in 2008). The members of this ensemble were recruited on the basis of auditions they posted online (juried by professional orchestral musicians and selected according to online voting from YouTube users). Spearheaded by the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a prominent champion of both John Adams and Mason Bates, the YouTube Symphony has also performed in live concerts (which, naturally, are also available on YouTube). At their live concert debut in 2009, Tilson Thomas quipped about the way to get to Carnegie Hall (where they performed): "Upload, upload, upload!" On March 20, 2011, the YouTube Symphony unveiled Mothership, its second major commission, in a live broadcast from Sydney Opera House in Australia. As a preliminary step, the London Symphony Orchestra under Tilson Thomas recorded the orchestral score as a demonstration piece which they then uploaded during the initial call for musicians to audition. Bates hit on the image of the orchestra as a mothership on which four visiting soloists temporarily "dock" in sequence, improvising on material that generated by the larger ensemble. There's also a "chance" element: solo instruments are undetermined and can vary according to a particular orchestra's strengths. The piece can also be performed using written-out solos. Bates had been asked to write a short concert opener - the genre represented by such works as The Chairman Dances - but instead of a standard burst of energy and color to get listeners in the mood for what is to follow, he characteristically decided to enrich the context with a narrative underpinning. Mothership not only invites the energy of modern techno dance into the concert hall but rethinks the relationship between soloists and an orchestra - the core of the concerto idea. Bates recalls finding his inspiration for the piece while riding the subway in New York City: "I was watching people getting on and off the train and suddenly realized I could have one of the [four] improvisers get on for one stop and then get off. But the orchestra would be the mothership throughout, with the musicians docking on and off." In formal terms, Mothership follows the model of a scherzo with double trio. (Bates mentions Schumann's Second Symphony as an example.) Here, two of the four soloists play one after the other for each of the "trio" passages. But in place of the dance idioms that animate the traditional scherzo, Bates supplies "the rhythms of modern-day techno" as the orchestral "mothership floats high above." So, if/when you listen to “Mothership,” you will very quickly hear a John-Williams-esque flair infused with an electronic techno-dance beat -- and if that is something you enjoy, then you’ll love the piece. Of course, when George Gershwin infused classical music with jazz in “Rhapsody in Blue,” it was generally well received, although some critics panned the work. From Wikipedia (HERE): “In contrast to the warm reception by concert audiences, professional music critics in the press gave the rhapsody decidedly mixed reviews. PItts Sanborn declared that the rhapsody ‘begins with a promising theme well stated’ yet ‘soon runs off into empty passage-work and meaningless repetition.’ A number of reviews were particularly negative. One opinionated music critic, Lawrence Gilman — a Richard Wagner enthusiast who would later write a devastating review of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess — harshly criticized the rhapsody as ‘derivative,’ ‘stale,’ and ‘inexpressive’ in a New York Tribune review on February 13, 1924.” In this case, Bates has fused classical music with “modern day techno,” and while I won’t pan the piece like some of those critics of Gershwin mentioned above -- for “Mothership” was enjoyable -- it just wasn’t for me. However, I could see this being a crowd pleaser at a modern-day concert, and orchestras do need to include selections that will bring folks into the concert hall -- and then get them to come back for more - and I suspect that “Mothership” could do just that.
Is there a classical music equivalent to the genre of “Film Noir” in movies? Perhaps a style called “Musique Noir”? If so, I think Daniel Ades violin concerto, “Concentric Paths,” would fit the bill.
For me, the start of the piece immediately called to mind a line from the old TV show “Naked City,” "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” In Ades’ piece, the violin is the protagonist telling its story against the paths (i.e. the various lines of music) of the rest of the orchestra’s instruments, and the story is filled with stark sounds and heavy use of melancholy, bleakness, and disillusionment. Of course, the names for the concerto’s three movements – “Rings,” Paths” and “Rounds” – suggest that Ades’ intention was not to tell a “Musique Noir” type of story with the violin as the story’s protagonist – that’s just my interpretation of where the music took me. I did enjoy the work, but rated I it “blue” because I thought the second movement was a bit long and redundant. Also, I expected a more climactic ending – something more taut and dramatic to conclude the “story” told by the violin – but that never came. Still, I did enjoy the work -- I just wish it had capitalized more on it's "Noir-ish" characteristics to tell a complete story.
In recent weeks, I’ve been listening to works by the composers listed on CultureTrip.com’s list “10 Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music," HERE. This week I’m down to the eighth name on the list, Judd Greenstein. I plugged his name into a YouTube search, and the first piece that came up was called “Four on the Floor,” a work for string quartet.
Just as I suspected from the title, “Four on the Floor” -- the phrase used to describe a four-speed manual gearshift mounted on the floor of a motor vehicle -- Greenstein’s quartet is an energetic piece that takes off right from the start. Interestingly enough, the Google dictionary entry for the meaning of “four on the floor” included an example of its use, "a coupé with racing tires and four on the floor," and the term “coupé” seemed to suggest something a bit nostalgic (do people today still use the word “coupé”?). I mention this because the drive and energy in Greenstein’s work also seemed a bit nostalgic to me, but not in a melancholic, out-of-date way. The piece was more like a romp in an old fashioned sports car -- picture a jaunty ride along the English countryside in Matthew Crawley’s AC Six in Downton Abbey. I’m not sure that this was the actual vision Greenstein had in mind when he wrote the piece, but I did find an article HERE, written by the composer where he describes the energy and verve of the piece as follows: “Here, I ask the quartet to sound like a sextet, or perhaps an octet, through the frequent use of double stops (where players play on more than one string at once). The result is a thick texture that’s constantly moving and shifting while the staggered rhythms drive the piece forward.” If you’d like to go for a spirited and energetic spin, rev up a string quartet and try “Four on the Floor.” I think you’ll enjoy the ride. UPDATE: I've not been publishing posts for the past several weeks because I was on a month-long road trip (my wife and I travelled historic Route 66 from St. Louis, MO, to Santa Monica, CA). We're now back home, so I'm ready to start back up with weekly posts.
I’m back after a four week trip on the road down historic Route 66. Wow, what an experience. One of these days I’ll post info and pics from the trip. For now, I’m back at home, and I’m returning to my regular routines -- including the posting of a weekly blog entry on classical music that is new to me. My last post -- before the trip -- was for the week of September 26th, and it was on “Three Continents," a cello concerto by Nico Muhly, Sven Helbig, and Zhou Long. I landed on that piece because I wanted to listen to something by Nico Muhly, one of the composers listed on CultureTrip.com’s “10 Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music" (HERE). For the past several weeks I’ve been working my way down that list, and this week I’m down to the seventh name, Daniel Bjarnason. I know nothing about Daniel Bjarnason, and as far as I know, I’ve never heard anything by him; therefore, I went to YouTube, typed in his name, and chose the first piece that popped up, “Collider.” “Collider” is a fifteen-plus minute tone poem, and I’m not sure what Bjarnason was visualizing mentally when he wrote the piece and named it “Collider.” What is he suggesting with the tone of this piece? I had a thought about that about five minutes into the piece -- although I don’t think my idea matches exactly what Bjarnason was trying to convey with this music, as after five minutes his piece went into a direction that was incongruent with my idea. More on this later. So what is Bjarnason attempting to convey? The first definition that popped up when I typed into Google, “define collider,” was “an accelerator in which two beams are made to collide.” However, with the extremely slow and quiet opening notes of the work -- sustained whole notes drawn out by some very serious and solemn strings -- I don’t think that is what Bjarnason was after. This is not a fast-paced thrilling piece -- suggesting an acceleration of beams about to collide. Nor is it a lyrical piece with a beautiful, memorable melody. Instead, it is a sober piece that layers sustained notes on top of sustained notes as the intensity of the piece grows in crescendo.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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