Ludwig Van Beethoven: Symphony Number 7, in A

Several years ago, I had to prepare a speech for my Toastmaster's club that summarized my life  experiences.  At first it was daunting—how could I make myself sound  humble and
interesting at the same time?  But this turned out to be a  valuable exercise, because it revealed to me a pattern in my life that I had never noticed before.  I summed up that pattern by naming my  speech: "When The Student Is Ready."

The title comes from the Japanese saying, "When the student is ready the Buddha will appear." The origin of the word Buddha means "to wake  up" and people think of the Buddha as a great teacher.  And what is a  great teacher but someone who wakes you up? Why this is important to me  is because—while preparing for that speech—I realized that I've always been a student, and whenever I most needed it, a person has appeared to either teach me or point me in the right direction.

The Buddhas who taught me about classical music are numerous and after my friend Kerry Wade came an entire family, the Mankowski's. whom I presented in yesterday's entry.   Mr. Mankowski would sit in his comfy chair in  the living room, champing a cigar, listening to a symphony.  Every once  in a while he would look up from his book to read aloud a humorous  passage from Ring Lardner or S.J. Perlman or to quote a James Thurber  cartoon.  One time I arrived to find the whole household in an uproar.    The Mary Tyler Moore show, a '70 American sitcom, had depicted a dinner  party in which one of the characters raised a glass of wine and said  "It's a naive domestic Burgundy, without any
breeding, but I'm sure  you'll be amused by its presumption."  The Mankowskis weren't enraged by  the use of the quote, but rather that the writers hadn't attributed it  to James Thurber, who had created it as the captions of one of his cartoons in the New Yorker.

Paul Mankowski, a year my senior, and I once went to see the John Borman film, "Zardoz." This film was a kind of anti-intellectual and anti-bourgeois, post-apocalyptic morality play.  Kind of like "If . . ." but with more sex and Sean Connery.  In one scene, a huge stone head  comes floating down from the sky accompanied by a somber, almost  funereal piece of music.  "Beethoven," Paul leaned over and whispered.  "Seventh Symphony.  Second Movement."  Some days later, I bought a recording of the  symphony by The Chicago Symphony, conducted by Fritz Reiner.  It remains  one of my favorite symphonies by Beethoven.

The liner notes called this work "The Dance Symphony," which might go back to Wagner referring to it as  "the apotheoisis of the dance."  For  me, the association with dance goes back to an early '70s movie that was  shown on T.V. around the time I first heard it.  The film was "The  Loves of Isadora," which starred Vanessa Redgrave. I had first heard of  the dancer, Isadora Duncan, from my friend Kerry Wade, who told me she  had been killed on the island of Capri while riding in a Bugatti (Kerry  was an antique car enthusiast.)  It seems that Duncan had a fondness for  flowing scarves and while riding in a small convertible her neckwear  became entangled in the wire spokes of the rear wheel and it snapped her  neck.  The film depicted this event in rather disturbingly graphic  detail.  In another kitschy touch, they showed Redgrave flitting about  on stage doing an interpretive dance to Beethoven's Seventh.

The Seventh sparked much florid prose by its enthusiastic supporters, among whom Schumann, Wagner, and even Karl Marx.  Some read into the piece  depictions of
gay peasant dances, revolution, orgiastic bacchanlias,  flowering meadows, and the jubilant voices of children.  Even Beethoven found this really too much and he said, if writers needed to explain his  work to the public,"they should be confined to characterizations of the  composition in general terms, which could easily and correctly be done  by any educated musician."

In  truth one would have to be pretty callous to listen this music and not  feel good.  True, the second movement does sound almost funereal,  starting out with ominous low strokes by the string basses.  This was  perfect music for a brooding adolescent boy with acne.  However that  movement ends on an optimistic note and is followed by one of the most  exuberant pieces Beethoven ever wrote.

Maybe that is why Beethoven is  so great, he takes you into the dark depths of sorrow, but he then leads  you out safely into the light.

In the the 38 years since my high school days, I gradually lost touch  with the Mankowsi Buddhas.  The last I heard of Paul, he had become a Jesuit and worked with Mother Teresa in India preparing people to die.   One of his sisters went on to become a doctor. Their lessons live on in  me, though, every time I hear this great, great symphony.

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Johannes Brahms: Symphony Number 4, in E minor

If I had feared entering middle school, the thought of going to high school filled me with dread. My older siblings had told me stories of how seniors made freshman carry their books, dunked their heads in toilets and performed other degrading acts on them. Much to my relief, because my class was the first to go to the new middle school, which was for grades seven through nine, by the time we got to high school, we were sophomores, and so we didn't have to suffer the indignity of hazing.

In contrast, I actually found a ready-made subculture waiting for me which greeted me with open arms—the swim team. Oddly enough, the swim team had a number of individuals with similar tastes in music to mine. We were the underdogs of the athletes—not necessarily muscle-bound like the football players or nose-bleed kings like the basketball players—and got attention by relying on our wits. The pecking order on most teams is determined by physical prowess, but on the swim team, you could also rise to the top of the heap by demonstrating keen mental abilities as well.
The year I joined the team, there were a number of fast swimmers who were to be admired, but the real leaders were two brothers, who had high I.Q.s and SAT scores and swam well—the Mankowski brothers. Paul and Mark (respectively one and two years older than I) came from a family everyone regarded as smart. Their mother taught high school English and the father, though a quality control engineer in a factory, had gone to the University of Chicago for two years on the G.I. Bill after World War II. They had three bright sisters as well: a set of twins my age and a little sister two years younger. Some of us used to rendez-vous at their house on weekends before going out to parties.
The Mankowski's household was completely different from mine. They all listened to classical music, read The New Yorker, discussed classic works of literature, and studied languages. This opened up a whole other world for me. I felt so uncultured in their presence that I devoted myself to turning myself into an "intellectual." (Partly because I had a crush on one of the sisters.) I read voraciously, studied the works of great artists, and began buying or checking out from the library classical albums that the Mankowskis recommended.
My three years in high school, therefore, turned out to be one of the most fertile in my intellectual life. The Mankowskis introduced me to quite of the few pieces that I will write in the next few weeks. Others I stumbled upon while browsing through the shelves at the library. And finally, our town was blessed at having two classical FM public radio stations, which I began to listen to religiously. My parents began to worry about me at this time, but I felt as if someone was giving my brain a massage and I had to make up for lost time.
One of the first pieces I remember the Mankowski's telling me about was Brahm's Fourth Symphony. The recording they had was by Carlo Maria Giulini, who had taken over the baton of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after Fritz Reiner died. The daughters pointed out to me that the rock group "Yes" had done a synthesized version on one of their albums, and the parents didn't seem to particularly mind. The third movement is a marked allegro giocoso or "fast and jocose," and to me embodies ebullience and joy. I also love the first movement, which seethes with passion and near climaxes that reminded me of the constant crushes I experienced as hormones began coursing seriously through my adolescent body. Brahms was probably the greatest Romantic composer that lived and many of his pieces have a movement that nearly reduces me to tears. The second movement does that to me, and though the last movement is entitled allegro energico e passionato its energy makes the symphony end with an upbeat, happy feeling.
Though I pretty much lost touch with the Mankowskis after I graduated from college, I think of them often, and wonder how much duller my life would have been not having met them. They will resurface in these pages as I write about other pieces I discovered in their company. I am eternally in their debt.

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Modest Mussorgsky-Maurice Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition

Writing about music worries me. I have virtually no credentials as a musician or music journalist. My experience studying and producing music amounts to: one year of playing clarinet in sixth grade band, three years of choir in middle school, a semester of piano in college, two years of violin with my first daughter beginning at age 39 and one year of studying guitar with my second daughter in my late forties. Oh yes, I almost forgot-in high school I taught myself to play "Camptown Races," "Oh, Susannah!," "Swanee River," and the Polish national anthem on the harmonica. Truth be told, however, I have trouble naming the notes on the treble clef.

What's more, I am scared to perform. That fear goes back to my sixth grade band experience and the clarinet. I got stuck with the clarinet, which was a hand-me-down from my sister who had played it in high school. I hated it for a very simple reason-I could not read music. Someone in my family decided I didn't need private, lessons. "Oh, it's an easy instrument," I remember someone saying. "He'll pick it up in band class."

Needless to say, I didn't. Band class became a daily humiliation as my classmates, many of whom did have private lessons, quickly outstripped me. I soon started inventing strategies to get out of playing-forgetting to bring my instrument to school or feigning a head or stomach ache. One particularly humiliating day, when I "forgot" my clarinet, my music teacher told me to substitute for the bass drum player who was out sick that day. The music started. I picked up the drumstick and started beating out a rhythm. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with the march everyone else played. The teacher furiously tapped the podium with his baton and said:

"Kurt! What are you doing?"

"I don't know. Following along?"

"Following along?" he asked. "Where? Look at the music." I squinted at the page on the stand in front of me. It might have been a mess of dots and lines as far as I was concerned. Mark Balin, on the snare drum next to me, came to my rescue. He pointed to the bass line.

"See it?" he asked.

"Yes!" I said, smiling and nodding at the teacher, who picked up the baton and gave the downbeat to start again. I think I was even worse and everyone laughed. Fortunately the teacher, who was a nice man, indicated I could return to my seat. It was degrading, sure, but oddly enough the trauma did not kill my appreciation for all music-just band music. Especially anything with horns, since they were always the best--and noisiest players.

What's funny for me now, is that I didn't realize until writing this piece to day that this incident resulted in my dislike for most brass and band music. Baroque trumpet concertos send me up the wall, and I usually walk the other way at Christmas time when some brass quintet sets up in the nearby shopping mall and butchers some sacred carol.

Freudian psychologists say that all you have to do is realize the true root of your neurosis and it will suddenly evaporate. To test that, I tried dusting off a few old disks that I heard in high school to see if the truth had, indeed, set me free. The piece I chose was Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition. In high school this piece was "rediscovered" in a way when the rock group, Emerson, Lake and Palmer did a synthesizer-based version of the Pictures.
Though it captivated hordes of screaming adolescents in the early 1970s, thankfully this piece has been allowed to die a quiet death.

While written for piano by the composer, the symphonic version that you hear now was actually orchestrated by Maurice Ravel, about forty years after Mussorgsky's death. The orchestral piece starts out with a rousing brass section that represents the general impression the composer had walking into an exhibition of paintings by his friend, a little-remembered artist named Victor Hartmann. I am pleased to say that though sometimes a bit brooding, there are some quite memorable melodies in this piece. And though the opening phrase is much quoted, to the point of being a bit hackneyed, it still is good for rousing the spirits.

So my little test seems to have proved Freud correct. Mussorgsky has cured me. My fear of brass music, caused by childhood performance anxiety has all but evaporated. I'm a changed man. Still I have to tell you, I'm not going to push my luck, so I'll leave the Canadian Brass for another day.

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Ludwig Van Beethoven Symphony Number 9, Second Movement

It may seem a cheat to break up a symphony and write about just one movement at a time. In many cases, however, I heard just a part of a work used in a film or on a television show. Often I did not learn the name of the work until later—sometimes much, much later. For example, at 18 I first heard a haunting, eastern kind of melody that became associated in my mind with Arabian market places. In the fall of 1998, some 25 years later, my daughter ended up playing it in the county youth orchestra. It was the "Bacchanale" from Saint-Saens' Samson and Delilah.
Beethoven's music has appeared quoted in just about everything from car commercials to futuristic films. I heard the second movement of the Ninth Symphony because back in the 1960s the National Broadcasting Corporation used it as the theme for its nightly Huntley-Brinkley News Report. It got everyone's attention, and even my parent knew it was Beethoven but not what it was called. It was my swim coach who told me.
My parents made me swim competitively from the age of eight until my senior year of high school. When I started competing, I perceived myself as being overweight and had a negative self-image. Neither was I a particularly fast swimmer and so swimming in races always filled me with the dread of humiliation. If I placed, it was always third, and to make matters worse, my coaches always made me swim butterfly, which is one of the most demanding strokes. So swimming always held bad associations for me, though things changed a bit in high school.
We called our high-school swim coach "Herr Green," because he also taught the German language classes. I don't know how he got interested in German, since he was a Korean war veteran, and since I studied French, I have no way of knowing how good his German was. But he was a great coach, and his was the first team I ever felt part of. The reason was basketball.
Basketball was big in Indiana, and our high-school basketball team was one of the better ones in the northern part of the state. The players on our basketball team were treated like, and acted like, gods. The school constantly held pep rallies for them; they kept to themselves; they always dated the prettiest girls, usually the cheerleaders.
We swimmers on the other hand were largely ignored by the rest of the school. The basketball coach taught American history and once told me that if swimming was as popular as basketball, we'd have gotten the money we needed to build a modern swimming pool to replace our cavernous, noisy and tiny one. For this reason, we swimmers played the role of the underdog, the subversive and marginalized. We thought of ourselves as the intellectuals among the athletes, and we tried, at every opportunity to undermine school spirit.
Herr Green did not encourage us in this role, but he provided a haven for us. On weekends, a number of would go to his house to talk, watch television, sit by the fire, and eat popcorn. Herr Green was the first adult who treated us like adults—an avuncular role I now see in retrospect. He always sat in a lazy-boy chair, smoking his pipe and making pronouncement on politics, books, and German culture. Sometimes he sat patiently listening to us rant and rave about the things in our lives, never telling us we were wrong but always offering some insight. He was a terrible punster and would sit for hours brewing up some gem that he'd deliver to be met by our groans. When I turned 18 the summer after graduating from high school, he organized a party to a bowling alley/bar over the Michigan state line, where the drinking age was 18, and he got me drunk, the American equivalent of the rite of passage to manhood. I'm eternally grateful for that.
Herr Green had an ear for music. One year he bought a banjo, and on our subsequent visits he'd perform some new blue grass piece that he'd worked out. When I began to take an interest in classical music, he overheard me talking about Beethoven's music being used on the news and he told me that it was from the Ninth Symphony. The next time I went to his house, he was in an uproar. "I went to watch the news last night. To listen for Beethoven's Ninth," he fumed. "I had just settled in to my chair when it came on and I was all geared up for the second movement. When it came on, they had changed it to some modern crap!"
The Ninth is one of those perfect pieces of music. You could spend hours listening to each movement over and over again, and find something new and interesting. It is glorious, and passionate, and rousing, and sad and happy. The second movement is entitled Molto Vivace, and people tend to just remember it for the dynamic opening few phrases. Later, it became one of my favorite pieces, not for that part, but for another about four minutes into it. At that point the cellos, oboes and English horns have some nice interplay, which I became sort of obsessed with. I really loved hearing the oboe, and before buying a version of it, I checked out about five different copies of the album from the library to see which conductor emphasized that part. It turned out that two directors had done this movement to my satisfaction—Toscanini and Karajan. Toscanini had recorded it with the New York Philharmonic, but that version was in mono-and out of print. RCA did reissue it around that time, but they had switched to an inferior plastic, which warped easily and so I didn't buy it. That left Herbert Von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker, which, despite Karajan's Nazi affiliations during World War II, I ended up buying. Karajan recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, which were about the most expensive label back then, and so I had to save up my pennies to purchase this disk, which ran about twice the price of the RCA Victor label.
Several years ago, my brother sent me Herr Green's obituary, which said he had died of a heart attack. About a year after that, my high school wrote to invite me to a dedication of a new swimming pool, named after Herr Green in his honor. I'm sorry I couldn't make it. Though later our politics diverged, he provided a safe harbor during my turbulent and stormy high school days.

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Frank Zappa: "Status Back Baby" from Absolutely Free

Die-hard classical purists would say "Frank Zappa didn't write classical music." Or "He's a performer, not a composer." Zappa claimed in his autobiography that the reason he became a rock musician was so that he could bankroll his classical aspirations. In his last years, he focused less on rock concerts and spent his time writing pieces that saw performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, and the German group, Ensemble Modern. The reason he is the subject today is because as a boy, I heard the second album he ever released and recently, as an adult, the last recorded during his lifetime. What strikes me now comparing the two is how he good a musician he really was, and in my mind, I put him in the category of Kurt Weil

Zappa released Absolutely Free in 1967. I just happened to be in my brother Bob's room one day when Tim Labuda, his best friend, burst in holding an album. Tim, who looked like a beat poet with a goatee (and I think he even wore a beret) said "You've got to listen to this." They let me stay, and though I didn't have a very highly developed sense of sarcasm back then, I was interested to hear lyrics making fun of high school cheer leaders along with quite interesting music that didn't sound like your average pop record of the day.
As mentioned earlier, I used to sneak into Bob's room when he wasn't there and Absolutely Free was one of the albums I used to play again and again. One song became my favorite "Status Back Baby," which lampooned vapid cheerleaders from the point of view of a boy who doesn't fit in because he doesn't care about high school spirit. At one point, the song breaks into an instrumental interlude, which sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. Seven years later in college, when I first heard Stravinski's "Petrushka" I realized Zappa had lifted the first movement from that ballet score. That made me return to Zappa and I casually followed his career from then on, buying just a few albums of the scores that he released. Another song on Absolutely Free, "Plastic People," became the anthem of the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia that brought an end to twenty years of communist rule.
During the 1980s, Zappa became interested in politics and free speech and even testified in hearings before congress against labeling rock albums with parental warning stickers. In the late '80s he toured again, and I went to see him perform at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Though Zappa's ensemble performed some rock standards, the concert seemed more like a cabaret show than anything else. At one point, they broke into a musical skit satirizing Ed Meese, head of the Justice Department, who had announced an additive that the federal government was going to start putting in prisoners' food to keep them docile. Zappa saw this as fascistic, as he did censorship and big business.
Around this time, I read his autobiography, in which he described his early musical influences--Stravinski, Messiaen, and Varese. He bemoaned the fact that people writing serious music often couldn't get their works performed. The reason is that new music is often difficult to play, which requires extra rehearsal time for orchestras and that makes the pieces prohibitively expensive to produce. Still at the end of his life, the Frankfurt Music Festival honored him, placing him in the same category as John Cage and Stockhausen. His last album Yellow Shark consists of a performance of his works by the Ensemble Modern at that festival. One of the pieces, "G spot Tornado" is so accessible that it could become part of the basic repertoire for orchestras.
Thinking about Zappa also makes me wonder what has happened to classical music. Before composers became cult figures, musicians often improvised. We're told nowadays that renaissance musicians were kind of like modern jazz performers. They had a basic melody and some musical conventions, but they were free to do their own thing within that framework. Maybe that is why renaissance music has become popular of late: it is beautiful, but it also has a fresh spontaneity to it that you often don't find in huge, ponderous, symphonic pieces.
European audiences and musicians took Frank Zappa more seriously than American, who didn't quite know how to categorize him. Zappa was a kind of iconoclast, who never minced words when criticizing people he thought of as vain and stupid. Thus he angered just about everyone. For example, he referred to rock journalists as ''people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.'' He also criticized what he thought of as stodgy classical musicians, orchestras, and conductors who didn't perform his work. Still, he never seemed to compromise his principles, and he did get through to a number of people. Rarely do you get a chance to laugh at rock music; it takes itself so seriously. Even more rarely do you find popular musicians that aren't a "product" targeted at a specific market segment, and who actually have talent. Rarest of all are "serious composers" who are also virtuoso performers, articulate champions of free speech, and who maintain a sense of the absurd. Among some people, me included, Zappa finally got his "Status Back Baby."

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Alexander Borodin: Polvetsian Dances

"Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise…" Looking back over some of the entries on my home page, it seems I've given the impression that music played no part in my life until stumbling upon classical music. This would be misleading, and today's piece made me realize that music played an important role in my life at an early age, in a way that it seems is rarer in our culture than it once was.

In truth, music surrounded me as a child. My parent had bought an old mono, console hi-fi record player about the time that stereo arrived on the scene in the early 1960s. They also collected 78 and 33 rpm records at garage sales. My older brothers and sister, by the time they hit puberty, were buying 45s and LPs around that same time period. The console had two large compartments for storing records, and I used to delight in going through the albums, studying the artwork on the covers, and playing them on the old turntable.

Bob, my second oldest brother had some very "cool" jazz albums by Dave Brubek, and he once brought home a copy of that hot-sounding party favorite "Tequila!" Joan, my sister, collected Beatles albums and owned a myriad of 45s (which seemed to be released every 30 seconds after the "British Invasion.") My parents had a number of old crooners--Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Mario Lanza and Tony Bennet. They also owned sound tracks to many of the big musicals of their day-- Oklahoma, Brigadoon, South Pacific, and Annie Get Your Gun. Everyone in my family liked everything in our collection and I remember all of us delighting in listening to that music. But we didn't just passively listen to music; singing was also pervasive in our lives. My father was my cub scout master and I assistant scout master when I joined the boy scouts. We sang lots of songs around the campfire, at our weekly meetings, and at Christmas parties.

We also sang in church. I loved standing next to my father, who had a rich tenor and sang beautifully. He hit all the high notes and could sing harmonies, and it used to thrill me to hear him sing "Ave Maria." I always tried to stand as far as possible away from my mother for the opposite reason. Still, she appreciated music and once in high school I was very surprised to find she knew a lot about opera. I had come home with a copy of  La Traviata from the library, and when she saw it, she started singing an aria from it. When I asked incredulous how she knew it, she said "Oh, I used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio every Saturday."

How the pervasiveness of music in our lives changed remains a mystery to me. Perhaps television had something to do with it. When I was younger, friends and relatives of my parents used to come over to play cards or just visit. Music always played in the background. Socializing like that broke down when television arrived and we started spending evenings glued to the television. Then when the Beatles arrived on the music scene, the whole music industry changed. Performers became superstars, the gap between professionals and amateurs deepened, and songs became preoccupied with different themes—narcissistic, ones often far away from the goals and aspirations of normal people.

Church music also changed after Vatican II, which allowed folk music into church. All those great hymns like "Adeste Fideles," and "Tantum Ergo," gave way to such bland pap as "Kumbaya" or "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" or some other mind-numbingly hackneyed tune. This "folk" music, I later discovered, was a twisted travesty and perversion of the socially relevant work of Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seager and early Boby Dylan.

So what does this have to do with Borodin? Well one of the records in that old hi-fi console had the melody, which Tony Bennet popularized, called "Stranger in Paradise." The songwriters Wright and Ferre, had taken a melody from Borodin's  Polvetsian Dances, which were extracted by the composer from his opera Prince Igor. The crooner's version was sweet and seductive. The Polvetsians, my Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music tells me, were a nomadic people who had invaded Russia. How you get from invading, nomadic hordes to Tony Bennett, I haven't a clue. Less even how you get from "This land is my land" to "Kumbaya."

One last interesting note about Borodin. He suffered the shame of being an illegitimate son of a Georgian nobelman, but he later went on to become a physician and professor of chemistry. He also founded a women's medical school. Once upon a time, it was OK to excel in more than one discipline, even quite unrelated ones. So beware specialization.

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Franz Josef Haydn: Paukenmesse (Missa in Tempore Bella)

It puzzles me that music education in public shcools is not considered part of the core curriculum. When there are budget cuts, often the music programs suffer. This does not happen to sports programs. Why? Because they bring money into the schools. When I was a kid, music programs had to rely on "Music Boosters" that is, parents who held bakes sales and fund raisers for their kids. When my kids were young we lived in hyper "my-kid-is-gifted" Montgomery County, Maryland, and parents would rather the money went to enrichment programs in math and science.

This seems like a perversion of our entire educational system. In a study reported in 1998 by the American Psychological Association, researchers found that taking music lessons and playing an instrument correlates positively with higher I.Q. levels. They also observed that participating in music utilizes many parts of the brain that control a wide range of abilities. It is a holistic activity in that it stimulates both the right and left brain (which control feeling and logic). Performing requires both gross and fine motor skills. Finally, music also involves at least three senses--auditory, visual, and tactile.
Other learning researchers have established that involving more than one sense at a time makes learning more efficient and speedy. A Bulgarian researcher even based an entire educational program on that--I think it was called Suggestopedia. By combining music and a highly structured curriculum, they claimed feats of super learning. Students learned a foreign language in one week, reportedly.

The misplacement of our priorities in the American educational system, reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw on a car: "Wouldn't it be nice if schools had billions of dollars and it was the Army that had to hold bake sales?"

Here's one final factoid I think is relevant. The two men who invented Kodachrome were concert musicians, who taught themselves chemistry so they could work on an idea. Kodak gave them a laboratory and they spent years perfecting their method. When they got stuck, they would pull out their instruments and play a sonata together. The "real scientitsts" used to laugh at them. They also kept up an intense performance schedule. Finally they succeeded. I wonder how many un-musical scientists could write a symphony.

This relates to Haydn's  Paukenmesse because I sang in school choirs in grade school, but it wasn't until hearing that album that I became interested in vocal music. The pieces our choir teachers chose were for them most part ghastly and really had nothing to say to me. In college, I once saw the Vienna Choir Boys, small little cherubs who belted out pieces by Strauss and other great composers. I was stunned. How did they get little kids to do that?
Haydn's Paukenmesse was in that stash of records I found at a garage sale. Though this disk was ruined when an apartment I lived in flooded, I still remember its upbeat, snappy orchestral sections, the lovely choral and beautiful vocal solos. My father used to whistle, and I picked up the habit from him. The opening to the Paukenmesse, with its baroque trumpets and kettle drums (in German pauken), was very whistle-able, indeed. From this mass I went on to start listening to baroque oratorios and eventually opera.

The subtitle for this mass is "Mass in Time of War." I don't know which war, or who was winning or why they were fighting, but you won't detect a bellicose note in the whole piece. It sounds joyous, like a lot of baroque music. Perhaps it was written as a piece of propaganda, to buck up national spirits and mobilize the masses. As such, maybe I should disdain the mixing of religion and war. I would hate to do so, however. I'm not going to say in hindsight that had my choir teachers expected us to sing great works of music that I'd now be singing in the Met, but it would have been nice if the pieces chosen had been beautiful and challenging. Haydn, as I found out researching this piece, started out as choir boy in the Cathedral of Vienna, and when his voice broke, he became a teacher. He went on to write over 100 symphonies and gained renown as the greatest composer of his time. See the value of good music education in the schools now?

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Antonin Dvorak: The Wood Dove

Another record in the “classical cache” of albums I found in a garage sale held a little gem–a tone poem called The Wood Dove by Antonin Dvorak. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Dvorak before, but it interested me that he was Czech, since my grandfather came from Eastern Europe. The music didn’t sound at all like any of the gypsy melodies we listened to every Sunday on the Hungarian Hour, though.

When I first started listening to classical music, half the fun was seeing the mental images each new piece evoked for me. Later in college, I read a lecture by Stravinski, in which he criticized composers who wrote visual or onomotopoeic music for popular tastes. In the liner notes to Rite of Spring, Igor let it slip that the Disney Studios only offered him a pittance for the right to use that piece in Fantasia. They supposedly told him that if he didn’t like it, too bad–they didn’t have to pay him anything since the Russian copyrights weren’t valid in the United States. So I don’t think Stravinski was completely unbiased on the issue of visual music. (He also once wrote he thought the gramaphone was generally a bad idea.)

Several years ago, my daughter asked me to let her take violin lessons. The teacher followed the Suzuki method, and owning an old violin I bought in high school with the hopes of one day learning, I was happy when the teacher encouraged me to learn as well. As a result, I understand a little more now about what’s going on in a piece musically, and so sometimes listening to music is more an intellectual activity than a visual/emotional one for me. That, by the way, was why Stravinksi didn’t like gramaphones–he thought it would expose music to people who had no musical training, who would therefore not understand. Another example of the Western schism between mind and body. Learning researchers find we remember better when we involve more of the senses. And to try to turn shut your mind’s eye to visual images seems a bit pointless (and boring, too!) Thinking back on all the pieces I’ve so far written about, they remain vivid and still beloved precisely because I formed visual associations with them.

The Wood Dove starts out with the French horns quietly puffing out a loping melody. Today it still makes me imagine myself standing in a field in the English countryside. It is a foggy morning and in the distance a pack of hounds and red-clad horsemen ride by, in hot pursuit of a fox. Following this introduction, the full orchestra swells up dramatically into a romantic melody. The piece alternates between these two themes until the end. What this has to do with a dove I don’t know, and I can’t find the old vinyl anymore, which I had probably worn out anyway.

I haven’t told my daughter about the images The Wood Dove conjures up for me. She’s an animal rights activist, vegetarian and she volunteers at a local no-kill animal shelter. She’d cry “Poor Fox!” Sometimes her extremism rankles me a bit–as does extremism of any sort. Which is why I’m happy to have been reminded, in writing this, of how important it is to just take your mind on a visual vacation, with the music cranked up.

• Composer biography
• Recording
• Youtube

Edvard Grieg: Music from Peer Gynt

I lived across the street from my elementary school. Beside it stood the junior high school, which was a big red brick monstrosity that my mother, who was born in 1915, also attended. One day, in first or second grade, our teacher marched us from our classroom into the old gymnasium of the junior high school to watch a puppet show. It was a production of "Jason and the Golden Fleece." Puppets always unnerved me, and these were just as grotesque as any I've ever seen, but the production had one saving grace–the music. The puppeteer had chosen the incidental music from Peer Gynt. Over the years, I've heard "In the Hall of The Mountain King" so many times that it became almost hackneyed. Then one day, it came on the local classical station, and my two daughters perked up. Suddenly, I remembered the excitement that permeates that music and how masterfully it builds from a quiet dance into a thundering cataclysm. They loved the piece and were happy to learn I owned a copy of it. Though Unamuno said "to fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be," some pieces of music you can listen to forever.

• Grieg biography
• Recording:  Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic did the version I had.
• Watch on Youtube

Darius Milhaud: Le Boeuf sur le Toit

There is a Japanese proverb that goes something like: "When the student is ready, the Buddha will appear. The origin of the word Buddha means "to wake up" and people think of the Buddha as a great teacher. And what is a great teacher but someone who wakes you up? Why this saying resonates with me is because-while reviewing all the pieces that I intend to write about-I have come to value my great luck in finding people who have either taught me about or exposed me to new pieces of music. Kerry Wade probably wouldn't want to be called a Buddha, but he was one for me.


One day, on a visit to his house, Kerry pulled out an album and said "You have to listen to this!" It had two works on it by Darius Milhaud, Le Boeuf sur la Toit and La Creation Du Monde. Milhaud was a 20th Century French composer and a member of Les Six, a group of six avant gardecomposers who hung out together in Paris early in the century. (The other five were Durey, Honegger, Tailleferre, Auric and Poulenc.)

Kerry gave the disk a spin and the most unique music started, which instantly made me laugh. Milhaud wrote Le Boeuf after returning from Brazil in 1919 where he worked as the secretary of the ambassador from France, Paul Claudel, the writer and brother of the subject of the movie Camille Claudel. The work is based on a Brazilian dance-hall melody Milhaud heard in a Brazilian bar he used to frequent called Le Boeuf sur la Toit (trans. The Ox on the Roof). It is a raucous, discordant piece, which every time it starts to slow down, Milhaud jump starts it by repeating the melody–a galloping tune blasted out by the trumpets. He does this twelve times, on each occasion changing key.

The liner notes on my copy, directed by Milhaud himself, states that the composer received a commission to write this piece for a Charlie Chaplin silent short film, but it was never used. It does have a comic feel to it.

I sometimes wonder how this piece was received by the critics. Of course, since the debut six years earlier of Stravinski's Rites of Spring, the public was probably ready for anything. The French surrealist poet (and writer, and painter, and film maker), Jean Cocteau, was so taken by the piece that he produced it as a ballet performed by a troop of clowns and acrobats, with the stage design having been done by the painter Raoul Dufy.

Since the advent of CDs, I don't get a chance of listening to my old vinyl disks any more, which I've relegated to a shelf in my basement. I pulled Le Boeuf out the other day, however, to give it a spin. My daughters laughed at it and my wife asked what it was. Nice to know that it still surprises people after all these years.

• Composer biography
• Recording
• Youtube

Felix Mendelssohn: Fingal's Cave (or the Hebrides Overture)

My two earliest memories of hearing classical music go back to watching the "Bug's Bunny Show" with my father every Saturday morning back in the 1960s. The musical director for all the Looney Toons was Carl Stalling and he wove classical and popular music together seamlessly. The Bugs Bunny cartoon most famous for its classical music is "What's Opera Doc?" which spoofs those overblown Wagnerian operas. Bugs appears dressed in Walkyrie drag, complete with horned helmet and a metal bra. I did not see this cartoon until the 70s when I went to college, so I can't claim it as my earliest memory.There were three other cartoons that I do clearly remember, for they spotlighted the work of three composers whose music I started collecting in high school--Mendelsohn, Rossini and Liszt.

The first piece was by Felix Mendelssohn(1809 - 1847) and was called Fingal's Cave (or the Hebrides Overture). Stalling used the piece for what today would be considered a not very politically-correct piece. The cartoon depicts a small African hunter who follows a mysterious crow-like bird that walks determinedly through every scene unfazed by the hunter who chases him. Every so often, the bird hops in time to the music. The the way the animators captured the haunting qualities of this music by mind melding it to the characters' movements are superb.

Composer Bio	Mendelssohn biography
Watch Online	YouTube
Buy online	Maag Recording