Tag Archives: Ravel

Java to jazz

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Gauthier, gamelan, and Gershwin

Java Paris 1889Source.

I can’t remember how I came across the name of Éva Gauthier (1885–1958) and the story of how she presented arrangements of Javanese music in her concert recitals.

By the late 19th century the sounds of gamelan were regularly heard at grand exhibitions in the West; Paris 1889 (Exposition Universelle), Chicago 1893 (Columbia Exhibition), and San Francisco 1915 (Panama–Pacific International Exposition) all had a “Javanese village”.

By contrast with Berlioz’s aversion to the music of the Mystic East, Debussy was entranced by the gamelan he heard at the 1889 Exposition. He wrote to a friend in 1895 of “the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades… which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts, for use by naughty little children.” And in 1913, in a much-cited passage:

There used to be—indeed, despite the troubles that civilization has brought, there still are—some wonderful peoples who learn music as easily as one learns to breathe. […] Their traditions are preserved only in ancient songs, sometimes involving dance, to which each individual adds his own contribution century by century. Thus Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. And if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.

(Ravel is also sometimes said to have been impressed by the gamelan at the 1889 Exposition, but he was only 14, and I haven’t yet found a source.)

As to gamelan studies in later years, Michael Church devotes chapter 12 of Musics lost and found to the immersion of Jaap Kunst (1891–1960) and Colin McPhee (1900–1964) in the musics of Java and Bali. On his return from Indonesia to Amsterdam in 1934, Kunst established gamelan as a major theme in ethnomusicology. The Canadian-American composer McPhee lived in Bali through the 1930s; he found the engaging A house in Bali easier to write than his monumental study of the island’s music: “I did not live in Bali to collect material. I lived there because I wanted to, for the pleasure of it”. As Church comments,

he disdained the paraphernalia of scholarship, wanting to purge the book of “all stupid jargon-like aeophones [sic], idiophones beloved by Sachs and Hornbostel”. Yet as Oja points out, his approach to research was fastidious and scholarly.

Such pioneers lay the groundwork for the later gamelan craze; since the time of Mantle Hood few self-respecting ethnomusicology departments are without their own gamelan…

* * *

Even before Kunst, the French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier was already promoting the music of Java (besides wiki, I have consulted Matthew Isaac Cohen, “Eva Gauthier, Java to jazz”).

Gauthier 1905Éva Gauthier, 1905. All images from wiki.

In 1910, disillusioned by being replaced in the opera Lakmé at Covent Garden, she travelled to Java, where she inconsequentially married a Dutch importer and plantation manager. Until 1914 she was based in Surakarta; besides performing there, in 1911 she toured Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Peking, followed over the next two years by Japan, Siam, and India.

But while in Surakarta Gauthier was granted permission to live in the Kraton palace to study its court music. She gained an introduction to this world through the composer and pianist Paul Seelig (1876-1945), former conductor of the royal band, chronicler of gamelan and kroncong. As she learned the basics of gamelan theory, Gauthier’s relations with the all-male gamelan musicians of the court were mediated through the royal wives.

She was taught, for example, that the drum was the “chef d’orchestra”, and that the vocal part “is merely a tone colour in the ensemble, and the singer’s voice counts as another instrument in the orchestra”.

Here’s film footage of a performance at the Kraton from 1912 (part of an interesting playlist):

And here’s the album Court music of Kraton Surakarta (King Records), recorded in 1992:

Gauthier’s sojourn at court also involved, um, International Cultural Exchange:

I sang to them a bit of colorateur and they thought the screaming on the high notes was hideous; they thought I was going to burst. Then I sang to them a melody. But they looked bewildered. They could not grasp it in the least. Then I sang Debussy to them, and they went into raptures.

Anyway,

She became such an enthusiast of Javanese performance that she hatched a plan to produce a tour of Javanese dancers and gamelan to Europe. She was convinced that the srimpi dance would captivate European audiences as much as it had her.

When this plan was thwarted by World War One, Gauthier moved to New York, and began to give recitals of arrangements by Paul Seelig and Constant Van de Wall, inserting short talks on Javanese courtly culture into her programmes. Her 1914–15 recordings of two songs were reissued in 1938:

For a gruelling vaudeville tour of the States she teamed up with the exotic dancer Regina Jones Woody (“Nila Devi”) with an item called Songmotion. As the latter recalled,

We were booed, laughed at, and made targets for pennies and programs. Almost hysterical, Eva and I changed into street clothes and sat down with Mr. Smith [the stage manager] and the conductor to discuss what to do. We had a fifty-two-week tour ahead, but if this was a preview of audience reaction, the Gauthier-Devi act wouldn’t last two minutes in a big city.

The stage manager, Mr Smith, was outspoken. He took Madame Gauthier apart first. “Take off that horse’s head thing you’re wearing and get rid of that sarong with its tail between your legs. Scrap that whiny music. You’re a good-looking woman. Put on your best evening gown, sing the Bell song from Lakmé, and you’ll get a good hand”. Madame promptly fainted.

On being revived, she stalked out of the room, announcing, “We’ll close before I prostitute my art”.

I came next. According to Mr. Smith I look bowlegged as I moved my feet and legs in Javanese fashion. Even he had to laugh. My native costumes were ugly. Why did I have four eyebrows? And if I could really dance, why did I just wiggle and jiggle about? Why didn’t I kick and do back bends and pirouettes?

Substituting Orient-inspired songs by composers such as Ravel and Granville Bantock, they only retained two songs by Seelig and Van de Wall. Gauthier withdrew from the year-long tour after five months, but for Songmotion in 1917, with Nila Devi no longer available, she found another dance partner in Roshanara (Olive Craddock!). This led them to perform in Ballet intime, an altogether more classy affair directed by Adolf Bolm, formerly of the Ballets Russes.

Having premiered Stravinsky’s Three Japanese lyrics in 1913, Gauthier loaned her Java notebooks to Ravel and Henry Eichheim. In November 1917 she premiered Five poems of ancient China and Japan by the talented young Charles Griffes (1884–1920). 

and that same year she supplied him with material for his Three Javanese songs:

Much drawn to both French modernism and American popular music, in 1923 Gauthier gave a seminal recital of “Ancient and modern music for voice” at the Aeolian Hall in New York—an early challenge to the boundaries between high and low cultures. In the first half she sang pieces by Bellini and Purcell, as well as modernist works by Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and others. The second half was still more daring, including pieces by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin (who accompanied these items on piano). This was the first time Gershwin’s music was performed by a classical singer in concert, and led directly to the commissioning of Rhapsody in blue (1924) and his later jazz-classical syntheses.

Gauthier poster

Through the 1920s Gauthier often performed her “Java to jazz” programme, which typically began with her Seelig and Van de Wall songs, continuing with Beethoven, Bliss, Debussy, and Ravel, and ending with Gershwin, Berlin, and Kern. **

Eva 2
Birthday party honouring Maurice Ravel in New York, 8th March 1928.
From left: Oscar Fried, Eva Gauthier, Ravel at piano, Manoah Leide-Tedesco, George Gershwin.

* * *

Griffes is cited as saying “In the dissonance of modern music the Oriental is more at home than in the consonance of the classics”. Cohen again: 

Gauthier’s encounters with traditional Asian music, and particularly Javanese and Malay song, at a pivotal point in her career opened her mind to the diversity of world music and made her rethink her cultural values. As she remarked, “It was actually a serious study of all Oriental music that enabled me to understand and master the contemporary or so-called “modern music”.

For more on Indonesia, cf. Margaret Mead (under The reinvention of humanity), Clifford Geertz, and Frozen brass. For more Debussy, click here and here.

* For the riches of regional traditions, note the 20-CD series Music of Indonesia (Smithsonian Folkways, masterminded by Philip Yampolsky)—this playlist has a sample.

** From the days before newspaper typesetting rejoiced in the terse and gnomic, the wiki article on Gauthier cites a 1923 headline in the Fargo Forum:

Eva Gauthier’s Program Sets Whole Town Buzzing: Many People Are of Two Minds Regarding Jazz Numbers—Some Reluctantly Admit That They Like Them—Others Keep Silent or Condemn Them

Cf. the over-generous title of an 1877 book cited by Nicolas Slonimsky (in note here). And this roundup of wacky headlines.

In memory of Seiji Ozawa

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The great Seiji Ozawa died last week (tributes; obituaries e.g. NYT; see also nippon.com). *

Born in 1935 to parents based in Mukden (Shenyang) during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, he returned with his family to Japan in 1941. His rise to conducting stardom was meteoric. A pupil of Hideo Saito (1902–74), in 1959 he won a conducting competition in Besançon. This led to an invitation to study with Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux in Boston, where he soon won the Koussevitzky Prize; this began his close association with the Tanglewood Festival. Gaining a scholarship to study with Herbert von Karajan in West Berlin, he was spotted by Leonard Bernstein, who made him assistant conductor of the New York Phil in 1961. Here Bernstein introduces Ozawa conducting the overture to The marriage of Figaro in 1962:

Ozawa remained the only conductor to have studied under both Karajan and Bernstein (cf. Unlikely bedfellows).

Messiaen Ozawa 1962
Meeting Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod on their honeymoon in Japan, July 1962.

In 1963, still little-known in the USA, Ozawa appeared on What’s my line (cf. Anna Mahler on You bet your life, 1952!). By the late 60s, in contrast to the staid, ageing Teutonic maestros to whom concert-goers were accustomed, he exuded a rock-star vibe that no-one has since been able to emulate (NYT: “with his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless energy, he captured the popular imagination early on”; Peter Gelb: “a symbol of male beauty on the podium that I don’t think the world had seen before.”) As Norman Lebrecht commented (The maestro myth, pp.137–41):

Ozawa sported a Beatle fringe, flowery shirts and cowboy boots, and wore a roll-necked sweater instad of a dress-shirt at concerts. His appointment was clearly aimed at rejuvenating the Symphony Hall subscription list. Oriental mysticism was all the rage among the East Coast college kids who escaped conscription to Vietnam; and Ozawa was, they said, something else.

Ozawa 1973

In the early 70s I too basked in his charisma at London concerts, hearing him conduct an exhilarating Symphonie fantastique, as well as November steps—Takemitsu’s music becoming known partly thanks to Ozawa’s advocacy.

Ozawa LennyBaseball with Lenny, Japan 1970.

Here Ozawa directs Maki Ishii’s Sō-Gū II for Gagaku and Orchestra (1971):

Ozawa acted as music director of the Boston Symphony from 1973 to 2002, a tenure that “many thought too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’ “.

Screenshot

According to the NYT, he played a role in easing tensions between China and the USA in 1979, when the Boston Symphony toured China, still emerging from the Cultural Revolution (cf. the 1973 visits of the Philadelphia and London Philharmonic). Peter Gelb, then the orchestra’s publicity director, said that Ozawa had been crucial in making the tour happen, Chinese officials feeling “a connection with him since he had spent part of his childhood in China” (hmm, I wonder how that worked…).

Noting Ozawa’s fine ear for timbre and nuance, some magical selections:

Ravel: this playlist, with the Saito Kinen orchestra that he nurtured, contains his 2015 recordings of both L’enfant et les sortilèges and Shéhérazade (cf. my main Ravel page, and links). Here’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, from a concert in 2007:

Ozawa’s 1968 recording of Messian’s glorious Turangalîla, with Jeanne and Yvonne Loriod (on 2 LPs, with November steps), is on this playlist—here’s the fifth movement Joie du sang des étoiles (Gramophone: “turbo-thrusted to the point of kinky delirium”):

and the sixth, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (“an early window into Ozawa’s ear for obsessive detail and softer-than-soft textures”):

Ozawa also conducted the 1983 premiere of Messiaen’s monumental opera Saint François d’Assise.

All this can only be matched by Mahler 2, live in 1995 for a Nagasaki peace concert:

In 2016 Ozawa’s conversations with Haruki Murakami were published as Absolutely on music (introduced here and here). See also this Gramophone roundup from 2014, and the magazine’s review of his complete DG recordings. For more maestros, see The art of conducting: a roundup.

* As I write, the regular Guardian is strangely devoid of an obituary—a gap filled by the East London and West Essex Guardian, whose readers seem rather less likely to be avid tofu-eaters. Update: Guardian notice here.

Debussy: flute, viola, harp

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In these superfluous polarities that we set up, I can’t help favouring Mozart over Haydn, and Mahler over Bruckner/Richard Strauss. Similarly, I’m so enthralled by Ravel that encounters with Debussy make a more occasional pleasure for me.

Laskine

One of Debussy’s most alluring works is the late Trio for flute, viola, and harp (1915; see e.g. this introduction). Having heard it a lot in my 20s, I’m just as enchanted now.

The instrumentation is one of those magical combos that was just waiting to be invented, like the shengguan ensemble of north Chinese ritual groups (e.g. sidebar Playlist #8), the classic bebop line-up with sax and trumpet, or the banana-and-peanut-butter sandwich.

Lily Laskine (left) and Marcel Moyse recorded it with Eugène Ginot in 1927 (first movement here); in this 1938 recording the viola player was Alice Merckel:

I still wonder if Noor Inayat Khan played it during her student years in Paris.

Evanescent, melancholy, and whimsical, fleeting vistas emerge and dissolve like Rouen cathedral in the mist. I relish the fleeting chinoiserie, and hints of Mahler’s Abschied at the end of the first movement, with a 7th on flute and harp hanging in the air over the harp’s major triad. And at the very end of the piece, the quirky extra chord never fails to delight me—it’s as if having spent so long gliding around in a sensuous, elusive sea of chromaticism, the performers are so surprised to find themselves actually landing on a chirpy conclusive cadence that they think they might as well confirm it for us with a final flourish.

The very end of the first and last movements.

I like this in-the-round performance at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, with Emmanuel Pahud, Yulia Deyneka, and Aline Khouri, from 2018:

And talking of Boulez, for the influence of this instrumentation on his sound-world, listen to Le marteau sans maître.

For Debussy and gamelan, see Java to jazz. The Debussy Trio is a star exhibit in the chamber repertoire for harp, along with Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro (under my main Ravel page) and Caplet’s Masque of the Red Death. For more Debussy, Clair de lune is worth experiencing anew. For more Ravel chamber music, apart from the piano trio (also under Ravel), see Méfiez vous des blancs.

* * *

A BTL comment somewhere there led me to this mysterious quotation from Goethe (cf. Cite not Faust):

Blasen ist nicht floten, ihr musst die Finger bewegen

To blow is not to play on the flute; you must move the fingers

—or he might just as well have said

To move the fingers is not to play on the flute; you must blow.

Either way, it’s small wonder that Goethe wasn’t in great demand as a music teacher (cf. Stewart Lee on the British Book Cover Awards; for another post dragging a German icon to the trash, see Beethoven’s melodic gift, yeah right). A more radical maxim would have been

Don’t just do something, stand there

(which I still think should have been coined by Miles Davis), or a Zen koan on the silent shakuhachi in an empty forest.

The NYO Prom, 2022: Ravel and Gershwin

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NYO Prom 2022

The annual visit of the National Youth Orchestra to the Proms is always a great event. This year, conducted by Andrew Gourlay, their programme included Ravel and Gershwin—listen here (also to be shown on BBC TV on 19th August).

Fokine 1910
Michel Fokine in Daphnis and Chloé, c1910. Source: wiki.

The week after Ravel’s piano concerto, Daphnis and Chloé was ravishing as ever, brilliantly played—even if I wanted rather more fantasy, bringing out its balletic, gestural, impromptu, sensual qualities, as my rose-tinted hearing-aid recalls Boulez conducting it in the 1970s…

In the first half, after Danny Elfman’s Wunderkammer, Simone Dinnerstein played George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue, always a pleasure. As an encore they played a Gershwin arrangement by Trish Clowes, conducted by NYO percussionist Sophie Stevenson (her jaunty hat not recalling the headwear of the Albert Hall audiences of yesteryear).

hats Albert Hall 1908Source.

Alex Ross (The rest is noise, pp.155–63) has some salient perspectives on Gershwin. The premiere of Rhapsody in blue, “with one foot in the kitchen, one in the salon”, was part of the mission “to give jazz a quasi-classical respectability” (cf. What is serious music?!, and Joining the elite musical club).

The wiki article on the piece has intriguing detail. Gershwin first wrote it in 1924 for a concert at the Aeolian Hall in New York entitled “An experiment in modern music” (cf. Java to jazz), whose purpose was “to be purely educational”. Conceiving it as “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness”, he played the solo piano part himself, with the score for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band arranged by Ferde Grofé. Gershwin partially improvised, and only committed the piano part to paper after the performance (cf. Messiaen).

Lawrence Gilman’s review of the premiere is included in Nicolas Slonimsky’s wonderful Lexicon of musical invective:

I weep over the lifelessness of its melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive.

Like the audience, other critics were more enthusiastic, one commenting that the piece had “made an honest woman out of jazz” (oh, so jazz is female is it, like ships? Pah!). On an incongruous note, the concert ended with Elgar’s Pomp and circumstance March No.1.

Further to the piano rolls of Mahler and Debussy, here’s a gorgeous (if very fast) recording of Gershwin’s own piano roll from 1925 fused with the Columbia Jazz Band directed by Michael Tilson Thomas in 1976:

Amidst all the jazzy glitz, crowning the piece (from 8.22 on the recording above) is one of the All-Time Great Tunes, * worthy of Rachmaninoff—in sumptuous E major, to boot!

By the time Grofé made the orchestral arrangement in 1942, jazz hardly needed the veneer of respectability, although it did go on to acquire a quasi-classical status.

Gershwin poster

Rhapsody in blue soon became the soundscape of New York (for well-off white people, I guess that means). Some musicians still had reservations about it, like Constant Lambert: “neither good jazz nor good Liszt”. Leonard Bernstein’s comments have been seen as criticism, but read more like an insight into the intrinsic nature of jazz, countering reification:

Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone; it can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact all these things are being done to it every day. It’s still the Rhapsody in Blue.

It’s mainly become a frozen vehicle for WAM pianists rather than jazzers, but here’s a refreshing 1995 recording with Marcus Roberts:

For more on the narrow path that WAM has trodden, see On “learning the wrong music”.

Among composers who were reluctant to inflict their learning on such a genius as Gershwin were Nadia Boulanger, Ravel, Schoenberg—and Alban Berg, who remarked wisely:

“Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

* * *

Oh well—in the end the NYO Prom was still, um, an orchestral concert. Maybe I was still in world-music mode after immersing myself in the Pontic lyra and Rajasthani bards, so I had to get used again to the whole complex regimentation of the orchestral machine, and found myself struck by the vast investment of aspirational parents (instruments, lessons, giving lifts to local venues…).

For some of the NYO’s previous Proms, click here, here, and here. Listen here for Barbara Hannigan singing Gershwin. See also many posts under A jazz medley, and Society and soundscape.

* With my usual qualifications—remembering (of course) to include in our remit Hildegard von Bingen, fado, the preludes of north Chinese ritual wind ensembles, kilam laments of Kurdish bards, and so on.

Another Proms Rite

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RiteNot the new European champions defending a corner (another Spot the Ball competition),
but Nijinsky’s “knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas”, 1913.

Hot on the heels of the amazing women’s football on Sunday, it was great to return again to the Proms, to hear the engaging Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a fine programme (listen here) culminating in Stravinsky’s ever-astounding The Rite of Spring.

BrabbinsPhoto: BBC.

The overture, Harrison Birtwistle’s Sonance Severance 2000, far from The pirates of Penzance, was challenging but mercifully brief. Then young Tom Borrow played the exquisite Ravel piano concerto—the perfect piece for a summer night at the Proms. I was even able to forgive him for not being Hélène Grimaud. After a rather measured first movement (with more rubato than Ravel might have wished), thankfully he didn’t take the Adagio assai quite as slowly as in this 2019 performance (assai is generally interpreted as “very”, but some composers used it as “rather”; I don’t know how Ravel meant it, but an excessively ponderous interpretation doesn’t seem to work for a piece of such classical elegance). As an encore he treated us to Debussy’s Feux d’Artifice.

Borrow

Before the interval the orchestra played the stimulating Jonchaies (“reed-beds”, 1977) of Iannis Xenakis (see also this obituary). Pierre Boulez described Xenakis as having a “fantastic brain—absolutely no ear”, but Jonchaies is full of fantastical sonorities.  I’m really pleased to have heard it. Here’s a recording:

The choice was apt: its primordial soundscape is somewhat reminiscent of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which followed after the interval. Though long part of the mainstream orchestral repertoire, The Rite never loses its power to amaze (see The shock of the new, and the NYO’s 2017 Prom). Just imagine hearing it for the first time, or indeed playing it as a teenager…

Korngold at the Proms

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Korngold and Walter 1928

A rejected casting for the mirror scene in Duck soup. Allegedly.

Among the highlights of this year’s Proms was John Wilson‘s stimulating programme with the reborn Sinfonia of London (shown on BBC4, on i-Player).

After Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus overture (a favourite of the incomparable Carlos Kleiber), Francesca Chiejina sang the exquisite Seven early songs (1905–08) of Alban Berg. As a polar opposite of the overture, Wilson continued with Ravel’s disturbing La valse (1920), depicting “a society spinning out of control, reeling from the horrors of the recent past towards those of the near future”, in the words of Alex Ross.

* * * 

The second half of the Prom featured the Symphony in F sharp (1952) * of Erich Korngold (1897–1957) (note the excellent Michael Haas, on his “Forbidden music” site ; see also websites, here and here; and wiki).

Korngold cartoon

As a prodigy in Vienna, Korngold was praised by Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Puccini. Making his name with the opera Die tote Stadt, he was a prominent figure in the lively theatrical scene of the 1920s, going on to collaborate with Max Reinhardt. Having commuted between Vienna and Hollywood since 1934, by the time of the Anschluss in 1938 Korngold realised that it would be impossible for him and his family to continue living in Austria. In the USA his film scores soon came to define the Hollywood sound. As Michael Haas comments,

he found himself mugged by both realities—commercial necessity and Hitler, both at the same time.

Korngold films

It’s unfortunate that Korngold himself subscribed to the notion that “serious music” could only reside in the symphonic tradition—to which he returned after retiring disillusioned from film in 1947, but still writing in a romantic style that had plummeted from fashion after the war. Even Messiaen‘s Turangalîla (1949), challenging yet sensual, was met with negative reviews; Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître was premiered in 1955. 

So pieces such as Korngold’s Violin concerto (1947) were received patronisingly. Whatever the zeitgeist was, this wasn’t it; much as we all love late romanticism, surely this was too late?! (cf. the ever-later early music).

But Korngold’s reputation has grown in recent years. As Alex Ross comments,

“That sounds like film music” is a put-down that deserves to be retired. The usual intention is to dismiss a work as splashy kitsch. Over the past century, though, enough first-rate music has been written for the movies that the charge rings false. Hollywood composers have employed so many different styles that the term “film music” has little descriptive value.

Ross gives thoughtful background in Chapter 8 (“Music for all”) of The rest is noise, under “Hollywood music” and “Exile music”. Richard Taruskin is always worth reading too: in The danger of music (§33, “The golden age of kitsch”) he thickens the plot by contrasting Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane with Ernst Krenek’s “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf, both from 1927.

Perhaps the weird twin burdens among WAM aficionados of expecting both background knowledge and linear progress can be eased by imagining Korngold’s late works as composed before the war, as if he were a Rachmaninoff or a Zemlinsky. At least, it would be sad not to allow oneself to relish the symphony’s gorgeous slow movement (and in Haas’s post, do listen to Korngold playing the Adagio on the piano—as with Mahler’s piano rolls, one gets a sense of composition, improvisation).

Indeed, since Mahler was already fêted in New York by 1908 (see e.g. here and here), while it may be fruitless to speculate how his style might have evolved had he lived to the era of the 1930s’ talkies (one can hardly imagine that any more could be said after the 9th and 10th symphonies and Der Abschied), it’s intriguing to wonder whether he too would have been seduced by the lure of Hollywood…

As Haas observes, conflicts over modernity and populism were already hotly debated in 1920s’ Berlin and Vienna (cf. What is serious music?!);

The themes that resonate throughout Korngold’s life are particularly relevant today as they represent the fight for the very purpose of music. Is it elite, or is it populist? Is it high art or easy entertainment? Is it merely an application, like the use of colour in cinema, or is it l’art pour l’art—a thing of purity and a bridge between the listener and a higher state? Is music a cultural cornerstone of European civilisation or is it merely “disposable”? 

So all this makes Korngold’s work grist to John Wilson’s mill. Here’s his 2019 recording of the symphony with the Sinfonia of London:

For audience tastes since the 1970s (again based on Taruskin), see also The right kind of spirituality?.

*  Though it’s often described as “Symphony in F sharp major”, Korngold’s biographer Brendan G. Carroll notes that he was particular in casting the work in F sharp, without specifying either major or minor (cf. the story of the prison exam!). Nor should it be confused with F hashtag minor. Anyway, six sharps would be well above the legal limit on Sundays in Pennsylvania. 

Méfiez-vous des blancs

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I’ve featured the music of Ravel a lot on this blog (starting here), but the Black Lives Matter movement reminds me to get to know his Chansons madécasses (1925–26).

These three songs to lyrics by Évariste de Parny (1753–1814), with flute, cello, and piano, [1] came soon after the premiere of the enchanted L’enfant et les sortilèges—and just as the Rif war in Morocco was coming to a head.

I’ve broached the themes of exoticism and colonialism in posts on Berlioz and Mahler. For Ravel, Shéhérazade, as well as his taste for jazz, are also relevant.

But the style of the Chansons madécasses is far from Ravel’s customary sensuality. Even the outer movements—the first an ode to a casual sexual encounter, the third a languid dream of the master with his maids—are uncompromising, unsettling.

Aoua

Most disturbing is the second song Méfiez-vous des blancs, with the false promises of the white invaders, their priests who “wanted to give us a God whom we didn’t know”, and carnage. Though the invaders are expelled, after the initial Aoua! screams of alarm, the final cries are subdued.

For the first recording in 1932 the singer was Madeleine Gray, with Ravel apparently supervising rather than playing piano:

Nahandove
Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove! L’’oiseau nocturne a commencé ses cris, la pleine lune brille sur ma tête, et la rosée naissante humecte mes cheveux. Voici l’’heure; qui peut t’’arrête, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Le lit de feuilles est préparée de fleurs et d’’herbes odoriférent; il est digne de tes charmes, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Elle vient. J’’ai reconnu la respiration précipité que donne une marche rapide; j’’entends le froissement de la pagne qui l’’enveloppe; c’’est elle, c’’est Nahandove, la belle Nahandove!

Ô reprends haleine, ma jeune amie; repose-toi sur mes genoux. Que ton regard est enchanteur! Que le mouvement de ton sein est vif et délicieux sous la main qui le presse! Tu souris, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Tes baisers pénètrent jusqu’’à l’’âme; tes caresses brûlent tous mes sens: arrête, ou je vais mourir. Meurt-on de volupté, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Le plaisir passe comme un éclair. Ta douce haleine s’’affaiblit, tes yeux humides se referment, ta tête se penche mollement, et tes transports s’éignent dans la languer. Jamais tu ne fût si belle, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Tu pars, et je vais languir dans les regrets et les désirs. Je languirai jusqu’’au soir. Tu reviendras ce soir, Nahandove, ô belle Nahandove!

Méfiez-vous des blancs
Aoua! Aoua! Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage. Du temps de nos pères, des blancs descendirent dans cette île. On leur dit: Voilà des terres, que vos femmes les cultivent; soyez justes, soyez bons, et devenez nos frères.

Les blancs promirent, et cependant ils faisoient des retranchemens. Un fort menaçant s’’éleva; le tonnerre fut renfermé dans des bouches d’’airain; leur prêtres voulurent nous donner un Dieu que nous ne connaissons pas; ils parlèrent enfin d’’obéissance et d’’esclavage. Plutôt la mort! Le carnage fut long et terrible; mais malgré la foudre qu’’ils vomissoient et qui ecraisoit des armées entières, ils furent tous exterminés. Aoua! Aoua! Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage.

Nous avons vu de nouveaux tyrans, plus forts et plus nombreux, planter leur pavillon sur le rivage. Le ciel a combattu pour nous. Il a fait tomber sur eux les pluis, les tempêtes et les vents empoisonnés. Ils ne sont plus, et nous vivons, et nous vivons libre. Aoua! Aoua! Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage.

Il est doux de se coucher
Il est doux de se coucher, durant la chaleur, sous un arbre touffu, et d’’attendre que le vent du soir amène la fraîcheur.

Femmes, approchez. Tandis que je me repose ici sous un arbre touffu, occupez mon oreille par vos accens prolongés. Répétez la chanson de la jeune fille, lorsque ses doigts tressent la natte, or lorsqu’’assise auprès du riz, elle chasse les oiseux avides.

Le chant plaît à mon âme. La danse est pour moi presque aussi douce qu’’un baiser. Que vos pas soient lent; qu’’ils imitent les attitudes du plaisir et l’’abandon de la volupté.

Le vent du soir se lève; la lune commence à briller au travers des arbres de la montagne. Allez, et préparez le repas.

Among more recent renditions, here’s Magdelena Kožená (cf. her incomparable Ich bin der Welt abhanden bekommen):

[1] See e.g. Richard S. James, “Ravel’s ‘Chansons madécasses’: ethnic fantasy or ethnic borrowing?”, Musical quarterly 74.3 (1990), and Roger Nichols, Ravel (2011), pp.271–80.

By the sleepy lagoon (Bognor)

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Sleepy lagoon

A plaque on all your houses!

It was Daphnis and Chloé that got me going on this—all will become clear.

In 1905, Debussy’s inspiration for La mer was the sea at Eastbourne: “the sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness”, as he observed. * By 1930, it was the exotic acquatic vistas of Bognor that inspired Eric Coates to compose the “valse serenade” By the sleepy lagoon.

radio

It’s been the theme tune of Desert island discs ever since the series began in 1942, soon becoming a comfy old sonic armchair. But like Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto and Also sprach Zarathustra, it’s been truncated into a soundbite, so one rarely gets to hear more than the opening. This seems to be the original version, with Eric Coates directing “the Symphony Orchestra” (a name that all the other symphony orchestras will be kicking themselves that they didn’t think up); it’s good to hear it in full at last— complete with modulation, and a whimsical middle section:

In 1940 Jack Lawrence made it into a song, which Coates loved. Here’s Richard Tauber, being Richard Tauber:

and Kate Smith—a name you don’t often hear nowadays, what with all these young upstarts like Dusty Springfield and Madonna:

Now then, here’s what I came in here for.

The piece soon became a favourite with American big bands. The Harry James arrangement (1942) opens, wonderfully, with a fleeting homage to the magical Lever du jour from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, and goes on to introduce some abrupt, evocative key shifts:

Other band versions, within a far more contained world than that of bebop, are also creative, with fine details—such as Jimmy King:

By way of a Chinese interlude, here’s his arrangement of Shanghai at night:

and for good measure, Zhou Xuan‘s 1946 original (see also A Shanghai Prom):

Meanwhile back at the sleepy lagoon, here’s Tommy Dorsey, with more key shifts:

and Glenn Miller:

Would it be sacrilegious for Desert island discs to ring the changes?

For more nostalgia, see Pique nique; The Archers; Unpromising chromaticisms. See also The mantric Shipping forecast, and The art of the miniature.

Harwich* Cf. the classic graffiti addition to

Harwich for the Continent

Bognor for the incontinent

 

Yin and yang: the divine Hélène Grimaud

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More images here.

On this blog I’ve featured the radiant magic of Hélène Grimaud, in

—all of which you simply must listen to. Here’s a further hommage.

See also her 2003 memoir Variations sauvages, English translation Wild harmonies: a life of music and wolves, 2007); and for a most insightful article, do read this New Yorker piece from 2011.

Hélène Grimaud https://stephenjones.blog/2019/11/12/grimaud/

Since her London appearances are far too infrequent (her planned visit in June 2020 had to be postponed—has she really not come here since her numinous “Water” recital at the Barbican in 2015?), I resort to relishing her performances of the two colossal Brahms piano concertos online. Here’s a trailer:

And the two concertos complete:

For a sequel on tempo and timbre in Brahms, with a HIP version of the 1st concerto, see here.

I trust you too will be unable to resist going on to admire her live performances of both works online (here and here)—indeed whole days can, and should, go by as you bask in all of her ouevre there.

OK, one can’t help noticing that she is one of the most entrancingly beautiful people ever to grace the planet—neither here nor there, one might say, but her own unassuming radiance goes hand in hand with her music. She embodies a perfect combination of yin and yang, with both innige spiritual intimacy and intensely muscular emotional intelligence.

Here she gives an interview in French on the Rachmaninoff concerto and Abbado:

Here she plays Schumann with Ann Sofie von Otter:

And returning to the Ravel concerto, here’s the exquisite slow movement again:

Busoni HG

And do click here for my tribute to her 2023 London concert, featuring Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach–Busoni.

Is music a universal language?

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What is music, anyway?
And who’s asking?

Nettl

Ethnomusicologists have long questioned the seductive idea—derived from 19th-century Europe and latterly popular with the peace-and-love brigade—that music is a global language transcending the conventions of time and space. As always,

  • Bruno Nettl, The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-three discussions (3rd edition, 2015, augmenting his original 1983 version),

gives a masterly and accessible overview of the field, in chapters 2, 3 and 5—and indeed passim.

In Chapter 2 he notes the wide range of definitions among societies of what constitutes “music” (cf. McAllester on the Navajo):

There is no conceptualization of definition of music that is shared by all or perhaps even many cultures, and very few societies have a concept (and a term) precisely parallel to the word “music”. They may instead have taxonomies whose borders cut across the universe of sounds produced by humans (or even animals) in ways quite different from those of Western societies.
[…]
Fieldworkers early on learn this major lesson: they may get one kind of answer when asking a question that would normally have no place in the culture and another when observing the society’s behavior. And we may note rather different approaches in formal statements by authorities, informal interviews, and ordinary conversations. Of the three, the cocktail party conversation may give us the most reliable perspective on the way urban, middle-class Americans actually use the concept of music in their lives.

The perspective of the (“gluttonous, insatiable”) ethnomusicologist is broader than that of a cultural insider—itself, as he observes, an ethnocentric approach, though, always broad-minded, he approves of a plurality of ethnomusicologies as much as of musickings.

In Chapter 3, while noting changing trends, Nettl cites a 1939 article by George Herzog stressing the diversity of world musicking.

It seems to me that for some twenty years after about 1940, musics—as conceived in Western academia—had to be liberated, as it were, from Western ethnocentrism; ethnomusicology had to make clear their mutual independence, had to urge the acceptance of each on its own terms and not simply as evolutionary way stations to something greater and more perfect. This mission accomplished, ethnomusicology could return to exploring the world’s musics as part of a single whole.

He goes on to discuss different kinds of universals; and under origins, besides worship and individual or group bonding, he notes competition and conflict. Music separates and defines us just as much as it brings us together—varying constantly and delineating boundaries not only of ethnicity but over time, and by class, age, gender, and so on.

In Chapter 5 Nettl explores some boundaries of concept, space, and time, borrowing from linguistics and noting idiolects as well as heterogeneity and polymusicality within individual cultures. Musical cultures may not be universal, but it would be unwise to draw clear boundaries. For more, see here.

* * *.

Meanwhile on BBC Radio 3, Tom Service’s long-running series The listening service always broadens the mind beyond the confines of the station’s largely WAM audience (cf. here, and here)—ethnomusicology in plain clothes, perhaps. He debunks cosy Western myths in a series of three programmes to accompany the TV series Civilisations (which wisely limited its brief to material culture)—a welcome antidote to Radio 3’s mystifyingly ethnocentric complement to Neil MacGregor’s fine series Living with the gods.

In the first programme, Searching for paradise, Service notes the basic importance of music to religious observances, with a collage of ritual music from around the world (shamans, qawwali, plainchant, Sardinian liturgy, Bach…). Unpacking the “spiritual” and reflecting on the historical ambivalence of religious leaders towards the embodiment of ritual texts through sound, he makes connections with the latter-day rituals of the concert hall.

Indeed, the search for exotic Oriental mysticism is a major theme in Western studies of the East. In his second programme, Orientalism and the music of elsewhere, Service adduces Mozart, catering to the 19th-century craze for all things Turkish; the taste for the exotic sounds of Indonesia and Japan in 19th-century France (later furthered by Messiaen); and more recently, raga, the music of Africa (Reich, Ligeti), film music, and the whole “world music” fad with its gleeful taste for “fusion” (for a parody of which, scroll down here).

But, he suggests, for some composers such sounds were more than a “titillating and imperialist added extra”: they also transformed our ways of experiencing sound, suggesting other modes beyond the discursive, nay “shouty”, 19th-century ethos. Here we might also add Mahler’s Abschied. And so for visual culture too.

Along with my early fascination with Eastern mysticism (see series beginning here), I too was seduced by all this, and remain so—even as I found through fieldwork (as one does) that musicking in local Chinese societies was anything but an exotic activity.

Meanwhile in the notionally Mystic East, led by Japan, Western culture became suddenly desirable, with profound and lasting consequences—not least in China, where traditional culture came to be considered “unscientific”. There’s a thoughtful cameo from Unsuk Chin (who adorns the splendid T-shirt of female composers!), with her piece for the sheng mouth-organ. But the “two-way conversation” surely remains unequal.

Service suggests we listen to music in its own terms (that is, in the terms of its own culture), rather than as sonic propaganda. I like his bald question “Is our music better than theirs?”, evoking Judith Becker’s influential 1986 article “Is Western Art Music superior?“, which debunks some major Western preconceptions.

In his last programme, Is music a universal language?, Service opens with a discussion of the “universality” of Fidelio, observing, “You need to be conversant with the patterns of tension and release in the specific confines of the Western tonal harmonic system”—not to mention knowing what opera means, and what it meant in Vienna at the start of the 19th century, and so on. He then segues adroitly to Chinese opera.

As he notes, identifying “universals” (fast repeated rhythms for dancing, slow repeating lyrical melodies for lullabies, and so on) may be a bland exercise. We can find similar building blocks, such as the (anhemitonic!) pentatonic scale, but the way they are used and experienced will differ widely. It’s nature and nurture again. And then there’s timbre…

* * *.

Such issues, bearing not just on “music” but on human cultures, are part of the standard fare of ethnomusicology. While in my studies of Chinese ritual I tend not to scare the sinological horses by focusing too narrowly on music, the discipline is really most stimulating. Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before: sound is not some optional decoration to rital, it’s the very medium through which it is expressed! Whatever your cultural focus, do follow up The listening service by reading Nettl! And for further canonical works, see here—including advertisers’ debunking of the “universal language” myth.

Ravel: an enchanted Prom

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Rattle’s Ravel, or Ravel’s rattle

Ravel prom

After Boléro as a pulsating early overture the previous week, S-S-Simon‘s Ravel Prom was a delight from start to finish.

Even the opening Ma mère l’Oye—in the expanded ballet version (1912), less often heard than the suite—was charming, chiming with the childlike world of L’enfant et les sortilèges after the interval. Here too there’s a magic garden, a princess, and birdsong. Ravel seems less likely than Debussy to have been inspired by hearing gamelan at the 1889 Exposition universelle,  but oriental influences abound in his music; the organum of the oboes at the beginning and end of L’enfant reminds me of the sheng mouth-organ.

Chinoiserie (see here, and here) is prominent in Shéhérazade too. Last year at the Proms Marianne Crebassa sang it exquisitely; in a week when we rejoiced in Aretha Franklin and Madonna, Magdalena Kožená’s singing was further cause for celebration of the wonders of the human voice.

L’enfant et les sortilèges (first performed in 1925, but not heard in Britain until 1958!) is an enchanted, enchanting lyric fantasy. In the story the protagonist is 6 or 7 years old—the same age as the girls for whom Ravel wrote the original piano pieces of Ma mère l’Oye. 

Whereas Colette wrote the text in eight days, Ravel worked on it over several years—she was in awe of the way he brought her libretto to life. Full of variety, the piece blends the comic drôlerie of the furniture, with ragtime and foxtrot, and the astounding fire aria, with the moving scene of shepherds and shepherdesses from the wallpaper leading into the boy’s poignant duet with the storybook princess.

The cat duet leads into a magical evocation of the garden. Here Ravel’s music anticipates Messiaen‘s use of birdsong and the ondes martenot, with evocative use of a slide whistle (Sachs-Hornbostel 421.221.312!—the cheese grater escapes me, though). Now it’s the turn of the animals and birds to indict the boy’s casual cruelties.

Amidst all the quirky virtuosic pastiche, and ravishing orchestration, the moments of tendresse register all the deeper, as he reflects on his errors; redeeming himself at last, the final chorus is a moving atonement.

If only a certain other public figure in the news could be converted from infantile petulant tantrums…

* * *

Both as player and concert-goer, I do admire conductors who trust to memory, dispensing with a distracting score, as S-Simon did for the first half.

As of 2020, apart from memory, the only trace of the concert is this brief excerpt.

This season’s Proms

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Mahler 10 scream

Notwithstanding my admiration for Christopher Small‘s critique of the curious behaviour that is concert-going, as opposed to more communal kinds of musicking (see e.g. here), I’m enjoying visits to this year’s Proms.

So far, among the feast (nay, “veritable smorgasbord“) of musicking on offer, I’ve basked in Turangalîla—always an overwhelming experience, as well as the NYO Prom.

The latter included Debussy’s La mer (which I played with the NYO at the Proms under Boulez in 1971!) and the Ravel Piano Concerto for the left hand (for ways of occupying the other hand, see here). Now I’m looking forward to Les enfants et les sortilèges with S-S-Simon.

Meanwhile it was wonderful to hear the Philharmonia with the great maestro Salonen (the drôle story of whose interview encapsulates Some People’s attitude to WAM!). Effectively, from the spartan pointillism of Webern he segued directly into the desolate viola line the opens the first movement of Mahler 10, before its devastating prophetic catclysm (see my fantasy timeline here; lots more under Mahler tag). Salonen conducted this first half of the concert without a baton, recalling Boulez with his expressive hand gestures and the insights of a composer. I can’t wait to hear him conduct the complete symphony live.

For Salonen’s Mahler 9, see here.

 

The Proms: more Ravel

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I always admire Esa-Pekka Salonen in concert—and not merely because of the fine story (about his interview for the LA Phil) that I love to relay, illustrating establishment mindsets in both WAM and Daoist studies.

Sheherazade

And I can never resist a live performance of Ravel’s Shéhérazade. At the Prom yesterday it was just magical. The venue itself creates a remarkable intimacy—the special communication between performers and Prommers, rapt attention, unique silences. Marianne Crebassa’s singing was exquisite: embodying Ravel’s intimate parlando style, she was always a vehicle for the nuance and drama of the text, deftly avoiding the diva trap. And Salonen conducts with suitably detached clarity. (For L’indifférent, see also here.)

Reluctant as I was to break the spell, John Adams’s grand Naïve and sentimental music eventually won me over.

Hot on the heels of my implausible link from Bach to Stravinsky, the concert began with a more convincing one, Stravinsky’s Variations on Vom himmel hoch. Reading Richard Taruskin as I am just now, I was more in the mood for it than usual.

Concert etiquette, and auditions

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À propos Ravel’s Piano concerto for the left hand: two-handed pianists soon got in on the act, though how to occupy the spare hand must take some thought. In This Day and Age one imagines young pianists saying,

“You know what’s so great about the concerto? You can text your mates while you’re playing it!”

<OMG GUESS WHAT I’M DOING LOL>

Alternatively one could wear a boxing glove on the right hand, or a glove puppet, making suitably cute gestures to reflect the changing moods.

In Certain Quarters such behaviour might go down like a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.

Conversely, watching people texting with two thumbs, I think of the mbira.

While we’re on deficiencies in the limb department, apart from the one-legged men in The third policeman, this classic audition springs to mind (Tarzan, “A role that is traditionally associated with…”):

Parks and recreation

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Parks

More from the Terpsichorean muse:

Just as brilliant as Family guy and Soap is Parks and recreation, with the most joyous theme tune ever:

Parks theme

An innocent vamp, with its tiny yet prophetic throw-away ending, introduces the zany syncopated opening of the tune—Not A Lot of People Know This, but it reminds me of the climactic ending of Boléro, played a lot faster than the much-too-fast versions of lesser “maestros”:

Bolero syncop

This leads to crazy successive modulations à la Berlioz, and to the manic ascending scale and coy simplicity of the descending quarter notes that herald the recapitulation—how does it cover so much ground in 30”?! And this is the full version that doesn’t always get aired!

Ecstatic… And it perfectly suits the mood of the script—here are some great moments from the series:

Yet more Ravel: an update

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Ravel

Along with the many entries under the Ravel tag, and I’ve been adding to the main page dedicated to him as well:

cliquez ici!

Besides great recordings of Shéhérazade, L’enfant et les sortilèges, the piano concertos (with Kind of blue as a bonus!), the Introduction and Allegro, and so on, you can now find Monteux’s classic 1955 Daphnis and Chloé, and a 1954 recording of the piano trio.

Composers

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Having praised them both, my amusement about Stravinsky’s description of Messiaen is tempered with surprise:

All you need to write like him is a large bottle of ink.

But then he described Ravel as a “Swiss watch maker” too, so just let’s move on. There’s no pleasing some people…

In Nicolas Robertson’s brilliant series of anagram tales, composed in free moments on choral tours in between (or during) frequenting local hostelries and singing like angels—anagrams masterminded and elaborated by  (“more on that story later”)—Igor Stravinsky comes out as

Gran visits York

Ravel et al.

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Further to my Ravel page (under WAM):

Tanita Tikaram (where has she been all my life?), for her wonderful Private Passions, chose Michelangeli’s version, also very fine, of the slow movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto.

Apart from Bach (including the amazing Lalo Schifrin) she featured the slow movement of Mozart’s A major piano concerto, with the ill-fated Clara Haskil.

Simile

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Further to my remarks on Ravel (under WAM), the dreamlike last movement of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, “L’indifférent”, is clearly about an androgynous boy, as Roger Nichols (Ravel, pp.54–7) recognizes in a cogent discussion—though he gets a tad bogged down in discussing the gender of the singer/voyeur, as if it matters. You might think the title itself would offer a clue, but some translators couldn’t even countenance the androgynous boy, making it necessary to vandalize, coyly,

Tes yeux sont doux comme ceux d’une fille

into

Your eyes are soft like those of any girl.

Resting case
I mean, you wouldn’t say, “Your skin is wrinkly like that of an elephant” if you were talking to an elephant, now would you eh? I rest my case (left: me resting my case in Paris, 2017).

Simile can be silly (“What Am I Like? LOL“):

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“Naa,” [chewing gum], yer allright.”

Anyway, do listen to Shéhérazade in my post—and all the other enchanting ouevres there!

Transliteration

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Talking of Chinese versions of foreign names, I like

  • Andeli Poliwen 安德利珀利文: André Previn
  • Qielibidaqi 切利比達奇 Celibidache
  • Futewan’gele 福特萬格勒 Furtwängler
  • Laweier 拉威尔: Ravel
  • Chake Beili 查克贝里 (pronounced Charcur Bailey): Chuck Berry
  • Ao Shaliwen (Ao as in “Ow!”) 奥沙利文: O’Sullivan
  • Fuluoyide 弗洛伊德 is a generous expansion of Freud into four syllables.

I also like

Tintin Tibet cover

Not to mention the Chinese transliteration of the word toothbrush:

  • tuzibulashi—“rabbits don’t shit”, which inspired me to this fine headline.

For my Chinese name, and that of Beethoven, see here.

The shock of the new

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Rite“Knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas”, 1913.
“When they cocked their heads against their hands, someone yelled, ‘Get a dentist!’
and someone else yelled back, ‘Get two dentists!’ ” (cited here).

Though The Rite of Spring has become standard, a classic, since the 1970s, it remains overwhelming today, whether or not you’re familiar with it. Playing it in 1970 with the National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Boulez, was one of the great experiences of my life (see also here). For a 2022 Rite at the Proms, click here.

Never mind that it’s the kind of imagining of “pagan rites” that academically I would dispute—it’s a world away from the cultural pundits’ romanticised view of folk culture! (For a “pagan” ritual performer among the Cheremis, click here; and for the New Year rituals of Gaoluo in China, here; cf. the Hutsul people of west Ukraine).

Among endless discussions, Tom Service gives a succinct introduction. Alex Ross (The rest is noise, p.57) nicely (sic) compares the “riot” at the 1913 première with the release of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK.  Gertrude Stein’s detailed account of the event is curious:

We could hear nothing. One literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music.

Curious, as she wasn’t actually at the premiere (supposing that she had lived long enough not to actually attend the premiere of The sound of music either, she might have said, “One literally could not hear the rite of spring.”)

I’ve cited Richard Taruskin’s fine expression “lite Rite”—“Is nothing Sacred?”, as Keats and Chapman might say. In his stimulating article on Bartok and Stravinsky (The danger of music, pp.133–7; see also pp.421–4), he observes Bartok’s identification of The Rite’s “folk” elements that Stravinsky later disowned:

Even the origin of the rough-grained, brittle and jerky musical structure backed by ostinatos, which is so completely different from any structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in the short-breathed Russian peasant motives.

Alex Ross is also very much on The Rite’s case. In a crowded field, his comments in The rest is noise are very fine, with vivid context in his chapter “Dance of the earth” (pp.80–129), citing Taruskin’s definitive 1996 book Stravinsky and the Russian traditions.

I take Taruskin’s point that the darker energies of The Rite have been “resisted, rejected, repressed”, but even in the most polished performance it’s both exhilarating and disturbing.

Swan Lake it ain’t. Remember, at the 1913 Paris premiere the ballet was just as shocking as the music. You can see a reconstruction of Nijinsky’s own choreography here, and the recreation (from 25.40) following this documentary gives an impression:

Pina Bausch’s version is amazing:

For an intense series of posts on the ballet, see here. Note also Israel Galván’s flamenco-tinged solo version.

And here’s an attractive quandary:

Stravinsky once joked that the dauntingly high-register bassoon solo which opens the piece should be transposed up every year to stop players getting complacent about it. He wanted the effort to register.

But “it’s complicated”—see also here (and note the ritual wind instrument connection). I’m not sure about the dudka, but if it’s really related to the Armenian duduk, then there’s a link to the guanzi of north Chinese ritual bands! There’s a wealth of discussion of that opening solo in bassoon blogs.

Not only do concert-goers “share intimate and personal cultural moments with strangers”, but they have to keep still; the Rite is one of many pieces where this should be an impossible demand. And another where conducting without a score yields fruit:

If Stravinsky really said that Karajan’s version

sounded like someone driving through the jungle in a Mercedes with the windows up,

then good for him.

And then there’s the “original instrument” debate—the “lite Rite”, as Richard Taruskin called it:

This version for organ, far from silly, is just awe-inspiring:

A harpsichord rendition has also appeared on YouTube. Jazz tributes include the Bad Plus arrangement:

In her recent exploration of The Rite, Gillian Moore also observes:

My feelings of creeping feminist unease in writing a book on a ballet about the sacrifice of a young woman created by three men were at least partly relieved when I came across the Russian folk metal band Arkona and their frontwoman Masha Scream.

On a lighter note, here I imagine the Danse sacrale as a suitable riposte to the haka.

BTW, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, less revolutionary but no less captivating, must have suffered by its proximity.