Jaquin Rodrigo: Berceuse de Printemps

Every once in a while,  you hear a piece that stops you dead in your tracks.  This just happened while I was eating dinner and Pandora was streaming works on my "Gymnopedies for Piano" channel.  Now recently Pandora seemed to have lost its edge and sold out to advertisement.  Sometimes in the midst listening to a stream that was clearly in one genre, I'd be jolted by a song that was from a completely different one.  It took me a while to figure out that it was because my daughter and I shared the same Pandora account and she'd add channels of hip-hop, rap, and other artists.  So I created a new account and got back to my uninterrupted, sedate works.  Then I noticed that sometimes, in a stream, Pandora would eventually end up playing the same works over and over.  So that's why it surprised me today when it suddenly kicked out "Bercesues de Printemps."  It also surprised me for two other reasons.  First, I didn't know Rodrigo composed for piano.  We've all heard his "Concierto de Aranjuez" about a gazillion times, so that was new for me.  Second, I was stunned by its sheer, unadorned beauty.  Rodrigo's life spanned nearly the entire 20th century and he studied with Paul Dukas in Paris before returning to his native Spain.  So this piece sounds like it was influence by Debussy or Ravel.  It's an utter joy, so please take a moment to give it a listen.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Symphony Number 38.in D "Prague"

Most people consider Mozart one of the greatest musical geniuses of all times. He was precocious, to boot. Starting at six, he toured all of Europe with his sister, an accomplished harpsichordist, until the age of ten. I believe he wrote his first symphony at the ripe old age of seven, and by the time he died at 35, he had written over 40 more symphonies, five violin concertos, 23 piano concertos, countless choral pieces, and five great operas. Some people have seen his father as an evil task-master who forced his child into music. And as the movie, Amadeus tried to show, though Mozart created sublime music, he had the social skill of a five year old, (and a highly sexed one at that.) Good thing we moderns know better, right?
Nowadays the hunt for the youngest prodigy has spread to almost every area of human activity—Olympic gymnasts are over the hill at 13; fashion models old hags at 25; 25 year-old actresses have face lifts to look 18; and if you don't start playing a musical instrument by the age of 4, you'll never be a Paganini.
Parents, money and greed, I suspect, are mostly behind this. Imagine seeing your child on the silver screen, playing a violin concerto at Carnegie Hall, or getting a gold medal at the summer Olympics. Think of the merchandizing! You'd be set for life!
No one seems to question whether this contributes to the mental stability of the "talent." Imagine doing one thing to the exclusion of all others. Then, after peaking at a young age, what kind of let-down will they be in for? What skills will they have? A friend of mine once told me about a documentary she once saw about ballerinas. That is a highly competitive profession, and some body types just don't fit the standards. When asked what kind of job one hopeful might consider should her career as a dancer not pan out, she replied, straight-faced: "A princess, maybe."
Let's say that somehow a parent was able to provide proper balance in a prodigy's life so that the child became a fully functioning human being. Can you say they're a great artist? That is, could they successfully marry technical virtuosity with a wide-range of feeling? Children were once considered to be closer to God, but would that necessarily give them depth of feeling? True, the hormone-wracked body of an adolescent feels intensely, but only extremes, in my experience. "Sensitive to nuances" is not how I'd typify most teenagers, though they are capable of great feats.
A friend of me told me a story about the pianist Aurthur Rubenstein, who also was a child prodigy. Supposedly when he hit 60, he abruptly retired from performing. When asked why, he said he was going to spend three years practicing. "But you're the greatest pianist alive," they said to him. "No," he said. "I've been faking it." So he spent three years practicing, and when he re-emerged and started performing again, his playing had greatly improved. Then he went on to perform for another 20 years.
Our focus on the cult of the personality and younger and younger performers has something of the freak show about it. Rubenstein's story is telling, because it meant the concert wasn't about actually listening to him, it was about seeing him. To see RUBENSTEIN. The cult of youth means that people now view life experiences and accumulated wisdom as worthless. The wise usually say: "Take it slow. It will come. And if it doesn't, no problem. Be happy." No one wants to hear that message when you're young. Everyone wants instant gratification.
That leads me to suspect the real reason child prodigies are so valued. They prove that you don't have to be patient. You don't have to peg way and work hard at something to excel in it. A pity, because what if you're not gifted? What if you're pre-wired to develop slowly? What if you got to spend your whole life watching the wonders of existence unfold before you? If you peaked at the age of 12, what else is there to do? And if you focused exclusively on one field of endeavor, how can you begin to appreciate all the other things there are to enjoy?
Mozart wrote his 38th Symphony at the age of 30. He had just finished his opera The Marriage of Figaro which was going to be produced in Prague, and he premiered the symphony in that city as well. For that reason, it is called the "Prague" Symphony. Though it has two fine slow movements, what really interested me was the final presto movement, which is joyous and reminiscent of the overture to the Marriage.
By this time in his life, Mozart was almost "channeling" music from the gods. He once wrote three symphonies in six weeks! And the music was getting better and better. One can only imagine what direction his work might have taken had he lived to a ripe old age, alhough, some of Beethoven's early works sound a bit like Mozart's last symphonies. Oddly enough, Mozart's early, early works are seldom performed. Could it be they are considered immature?

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture

Little boys like things that go "BOOM." Come to think of it, big boys do, too. How else can you explain the wars that continue to spring up even after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Several years before my daughters were born, an article appeared in the Washington Post, by a puzzled mother. She had a small son whom she had tried to keep away from toy guns, violent movies, and all other traditionally gender-based activities. One day at a friend's house she saw her son hop on a tricycle, pretend he was an airplane fighter pilot, and go racing down a hill, making a rat-a-tat noise as he imaginarily strafed his playmates. The mother concluded that boys possess a gene for this kind of behavior, or else the missing leg of the "Y" chromosome, which girls don't lack, is involved in masking this behavior. I suspect this might be the secret reason behind the popularity for the1812 Overture

This turns out to be another one of those pieces that's hard-wired into everyone's neural structure, because of over-playing. My earliest memory of the piece goes back to a 1960's television commercial for the cereal, Quaker Puffed Rice. The ending of the Overture blared in the background as canons exploded, showering the screen with the puffed cereal. The clever copywriters had penned these memorable lyrics: "This is the cereal that's shot from guns. This is the cereal that's shot from guns. Quaker Puffed Rice!" which scans perfectly.

Nowadays you can't go to an Independence Day concert, without the orchestra playing it. What's more, a kind of 1812 Overture arms race has begun as people found the kettle drums lacking sufficient "oomph." You can now hire a company that will set up a row of computer-controlled mortars, which the percussionist can percuss in perfect cadence with the music. I have also heard of towns making deals with the Army artillery to actually set off real Howitzer canons at the end of the piece.

I must admit that as a boy, those bursting canons did fascinate me. When I first heard the entire piece, though, I was surprised to find that the canons only occur at the end. Before that, Tchaikowski effectively captured the worry of Napoleon's campaign, the rallying of the Russian people, and the terror of battle. This music evokes vivid images and that too might be a reason for its continued popularity. Even among boys.

Before my daughters were born, I came down on the side of nurture in the "nature versus nurture debate." To prove the case, I tried to capture my their interests with non-sexist toys, book, and games. My oldest daughter went through a strong tom boy phase, which I believed proved the case. However, they both raised their eyebrows later when I brought home a used race car set from a garage sale. I stopped the experiment when I realized they were drawing the wrong conclusion: one day I overheard Claire—the oldest—say to my wife that she thought that I must have really wanted a son.

Now, they're both in college and have boyfriends. They don't follow contemporary fashion, but they dress fashionably in retro-Hippy. They're both studying science and are quite articulate and environmentally aware.

Still, one summer, at an Independence Day concert in front of town hall, they were excited to find out that the orchestra would perform The 1812 Orchestra that evening. They were up for it when I suggested we go watch the computer-controlled mortars. We all laughed when the mortars went off and nearly scared us out of our skin.

Boom!

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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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