Tag Archives: Composers

by | April 30, 2012 · 1:00 am

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, visual artist

When Mendelssohn Bartholdy was 13 a family trip to Switzerland afforded his first opportunity to devote himself to drawing; subsequently a sketch book was always an indispensable part of his holiday luggage.

Soon the prodigy’s musical career precluded other artistic activities, but after the death of his beloved sister Fanny when he was 38 he returned to Switzerland and completed a remarkable series of watercolors. These were among his final creative activities; he died in November of that year.

This according to the preface by Margaret Crum for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1972), which reproduces items from the Bodleian Library’s collection.

Above, Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s depiction of Lucerne in July 1847; below, Piero Bellugi conducts the final movements of his sixth string symphony, written around the time he first started drawing.

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by | April 28, 2012 · 1:00 am

Elton John’s décor

When Elton John returned to London in 1991 after six weeks in an addiction recovery center it was essential to establish a new home that was free of associations with his former compulsive behavior. He rented Queensdale Place, fell in love with it, and bought and completely redecorated it with Biedermeier furniture and Regency and Neoclassical artwork.

Over the years Sir Elton’s passion turned to collecting photography and contemporary art, and in 2003 he decided that Queensdale would be the perfect context for exhibiting and enjoying his new collection. The auction of his former collection is documented in Elton John and his London lifestyle: London, Tuesday, 30 September 2003 (London: Sotheby’s, 2003).

Related article: Liberace’s taste

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by | March 31, 2012 · 1:00 am

Haydn and Ellington

In what he dubbed “a musicological jeu d’esprit”, Edward Green drew 25 parallels between the lives of Joseph Haydn and Duke Ellington in “Haydn and Ellington: Parallel lives?” (International review of the aesthetics and sociology of music XL/2 [December 2009] pp. 349–51). These include:

  • Both had an outstanding orchestra at their immediate disposal for decades. This meant that they wrote for individuals, not just for instruments, and enabled the striking timbral and contrapuntal risks that they felt safe taking.

  • Both helped to create the predominant musical style of their century, and were celebrated in their lifetime for having done so.

  • Despite the necessity of producing numerous occasional works, both took an experimental attitude to composing, striving for freshness of form, design, and content, and their styles changed and developed remarkably over their careers.

  • Both had a notoriously keen business sense.

Today is Haydn’s 270th birthday! Below, Baryton Trio Valkkoog performs the Adagio and Finale Fuga from Haydn’s “Birthday” trio, Hob.XI:97, composed for the birthday of  Prince Nikolaus Esterházy.

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by | March 15, 2012 · 1:00 am

Improvised vocal fugues

Sethus Calvisius (1556–1615), one of the very small number of specialists in the improvised vocal fugue, provided a discussion of the practice in his Melopoiia (1592), illustrated with 21 notated examples of fugæ extemporaneæ—tricinia, or two-part canons, over a cantus firmus.

These pieces were improvised as a third voice sang the cantus firmus, with the two improvising voices entering a minim or semibreve apart; the first of the two singers was effectively the composer. Analysis of Calvisius’s works shows that his mastery of the technique was complete, and he was capable of creating canonic improvisations of surprising originality.

This according to “Harmonia fvgata extemporanea: Fugenimprovisation nach Calvisius und den Italienern” by Olivier Trachier, an essay included in Tempus musicae–tempus mundi: Untersuchungen zu Seth Calvisius (Hildesheim: Georg Olms 2008, pp. 77–102). Below, the Dresdner Kreuzchor performs Calvisius’s Freut euch und jubilieret.

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by | March 5, 2012 · 1:00 am

Busoni and the Leskovites

During his lonely years as a young traveling performer and teacher in northern Germany, Ferruccio Busoni adopted a Newfoundland for companionship; he named the huge black dog Lesko. When he sailed to Helsinki to begin his first steady teaching position in 1888, of course Lesko came along.

Busoni’s lively personality and prodigious performing skills soon attracted a group of artists who gathered regularly at bars and restaurants. Since his dog always attended these meetings, they declared Lesko the honorary convener and dubbed themselves the Leskovites. This group included Jean Sibelius, the writer Adolf Paul, the conductor Armas Järnefelt, and his brother, the painter Eero Järnefelt.

In 1890 Busoni expressed his regard for the Leskovites with his Geharnischte suite, op. 34a; each movement is dedicated to one of “the four friends of Lesko in Helsinki.”

This according to “The friends of Lesko, the dog: Sibelius, Busoni, Armas and Eero Järnefelt, Adolf Paul” by Barbara Blanchard Hong, an essay included in Sibelius in the old and new world: Aspects of his music, its interpretation, and reception (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 57–68).

Below, Busoni’s suite dedicated to the Leskovites.

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by | February 19, 2012 · 1:00 am

John Philip Sousa, violinist

While the composer of iconic marches is famous for directing the U.S. Marine Band and his own world-famous ensembles, John Philip Sousa’s early life as a violin prodigy is relatively unknown.

A sickly child, Sousa was home-schooled, and from the age of six his studies included lessons with an Italian violin teacher. He showed tremendous promise, and his father, a trombonist in the Marine Band, enlisted him as a Marine apprentice when he was 13; there he studied academics and several instruments.

Sousa went on to play the violin in orchestras and chamber groups, where he developed a taste for cutting-edge art music that he never lost; for example, his band performed excerpts from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger ten years before the opera’s first U.S. production.

This according to “John Philip Sousa’s violin: An American original” by Erin Shrader (Strings XXV/4:187 [November 2010] pp. 53–56). Above, Sousa’s childhood violin before (background) and after it was restored by John Montgomery. Below, Sousa’s Band performs Carl Friedemann’s Slavonic rhapsody.

Related article: Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

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by | February 9, 2012 · 1:00 am

Source: Music of the avant-garde

The journal Source: Music of the avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published until 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others.

A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice and live electronics, computer music, notation and event scores, theater and installations, intermedia and technology, politics and the social roles of composers and performers, and innovations in the sound of music. Special features included custom typography, multiple paper stocks, multicolored scores, 10 inch LPs, 35mm slides, fur, and shotgun holes.

Source: Music of the avant-garde 1966–1973, a 396-page collection of reprints from the journal, was issued by the University of California Press in 2011. Below, a performance of Feldman’s revolutionary percussion work The king of Denmark.

Related article: John Cage unbound

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by | February 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

Silvio Rodríguez and disappearance

 

 

On 31 March 31 1990, in the early days of the newly restored democracy in Chile, the Cuban cantautor Silvio Rodríguez staged a concert in Santiago de Chile’s Estadio Nacional for an audience of 80,000 people. Accompanying him were the fourteen-piece band Irakere, led by the Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdés, and the formerly exiled Chilean singer Isabel Parra and her group.

While it is entirely possible to see the concert as an event whose event-ness is created post facto, it is also useful to posit the concert as part of a construction of a larger process, that of opposition to the event of authoritarianism.

Two songs performed there, Víctor Jara’s Te recuerdo Amanda and Rodríguez’s Unicornio, involve evocations of death and disappearance. Death, as evoked in the Jara song, at least bears the comfort of a tangible end image; disappearance, as Unicornio bears witness, denies closure.

The afterlife of these recorded concert performances and the subjects of cover versions and tributes all contribute to the counter-event suggested by the Rodríguez concert.

This according to “Reconstructing the event: Spectres of terror in Chilean performance” by Richard Elliott (British postgraduate musicology VIII [June 2006]). Below, Rodríguez’s performance of Unicornio at the historic concert; click here for Jara’s performance of Te recuerdo Amanda.

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by | January 26, 2012 · 1:00 am

Patti Smith and Rimbaud

Patti Smith’s direct assimilation of Arthur Rimbaud’s work into hers presents a case of cultural cross-fertilization in which the poetry of a foreign high-cultural figure enters into and influences a popular and countercultural discourse, illustrating how a nonacademic reading of a canonical text can help to produce a musical style that disseminates a message of social deviance.

Smith has foregrounded her debt to Rimbaud in several ways, explicitly referring to him as her major poetic influence and participating in a hermeneutic activity as she transformed his texts into her own. The poet has served as Smith’s most credible archetype of subversive behavior, and his work has provided the richest source for the development of her innovative aesthetic practices.

This according to “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as social deviance” by Carrie Jaurès Noland (Critical inquiry XXI/3 [Spring 1995] pp. 581–610). Below, Smith performs Rock n roll nigger, one of the songs analyzed by Noland, in 2011; listen for Rimbaud’s name around 3:20.

More posts about punk rock are here.

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by | January 24, 2012 · 1:00 am

Schubert deltiography

Schubert deltiography, a database produced by The Schubert Institute as part of its Schubert ographies website, is an open-access online resource for postcards bearing images relevant to Schubert—portraits, buildings, and so on. In addition to reproductions of both sides of the cards, entries include detailed annotations for deltiologists and other interested parties.

Above, a postcard depicting Schubert playing the “trout” quintet (piano quintet in A Major, D. 667) with Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and Gluck in Heaven (click to enlarge). The audience includes Beethoven and Wagner; leave a comment if you can identify others!

Below, a terrestrial performance of the work’s first movement by members of the Amadeus Quartet with Clifford Curzon.

Related article: Postcards

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