Mark Likes Music

If you know Ernst Toch for anything, it's probably this: "Geographical Fugue"is a perfect tongue twister of a showpiece for high-school and university choirs, the kind of rhythmic, referential, kind-of-humorous diversion that moms and younger brothers love ("Hey ma, it's just a bunch of names of places! Lake Titicaca! Get it: titty-kaka? Ha!"). It certainly didn't start out that way . The "Geographical Fugue" was the third movement of  Gesprochene Musik ( Spoken Music ), which Toch premiered at the Berlin Festival of Contemporary Music in 1930 . Toch had not written the piece   to be performed live, but rather had it pre-recorded and played back at 45 rpm on a  gramophone:   Gesprochene Musik was a wry bit of musical experimentation, an early example of electronic experimentation shot through with Weimar-era modernist wit. Three years later, as the Nazis came to power, Toch's burgeoning career in Germany ended when he fled contine...

Benjamin Britten's centenary is Friday, and while WQXR gives you five ways to celebrate , NPR.org reminds us that the composer spent time in Brooklyn and gives us a Britten cheat sheet . In his home country, the Guardian has been streaming performances all week from Aldeburgh Music , the festival that Britten founded.  If you like Wes Anderson, you probably know Britten. Moonrise Kingdom featured a lot of Britten's music, as Russell Platt of the New Yorker discussed , including the second movemenbt of Simple Symphony (start below around 3:20):

Pointing out the lack of attention paid to Debussy's 150th birthday (which is today),  Anthony Tommasini thinks we take him for granted: We like to think we know and admire Debussy. Ah, Debussy the great Impressionist! For painting there is Monet. For music, Debussy. "La Mer," how gorgeous. There are the inventive piano pieces, with their watery textures and evocative titles like "Estampes" and "Images." And of coures the diaphanous orchestral beauties of "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun."  Pierre-Laurant Aimard, who has a recording of Debussy's Preludes coming out in October, thinks we don't really know him at all--and probably never will : We don't always know what it (Debussy's music) is about .... because things are mixed, they are also not completely said. Things remain hidden. Case in point for Aimard is Jeux : Debussy wrote Jeux on commission from the Ballets Russes; audiences didn't take to Nijinsky...

Back in 1999, the Rochester Academy of Medicine commissioned Lorenzo Palomo to write a piece commemorating its centennial. The result was Andalusian Divertimento, which   Rebecca Pennys and herNew Arts Trio performed at the 2001 anniversary celebration: Through this project, the Spanish composer met Sid Sobel, a Flower City oncologist with a particular passion for The Sneetches . They hit it off, and Sobel proposed another commission, this one to set his favorite Seuss story to music. Tomorrow, the Oberlin Orchestra gives the world premiere of Palomo's Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches, fulfilling Sobel's dream of using a new medium to convey the story's message of tolerance, and showcasing Palomo's flair for orchestral writing. Unlike so much of Palomo's other music, Sneetches has little of that characteristic (some might say stereotypical) Spanish sound; it does, however, have a strong enough rhythmic flow to move the story along, and lots of catchy melodic hooks...

In 1952, Mills College students banded together with professional musicians from around Oakland, taught themselves how to play Harry Partch's array of strange, self-made instruments, and  put on the composer's King Oedipus . Oedipus garnered a surprising amount of national coverage (surprising in that it got any at all), including (most likely) the newsreel footage that Open Culture posted on its website yesterday . In this report, the announcer identifies cloud-chamber bowls "derived from atomic research" (!) and a 72-stringed kithara as byproducts of Partch's search for "the elusive tones that exist between the notes of a regular piano." Whether you think Partch was "kooky," as Open Culture puts it, or not (see the comments following the article), this newsreel is intriguing in that it takes Partch's search for new musical resources seriously. The tone is not jokey or disbelieving, but straight-up, delivered with the same seriousne...

Her husband gets more attention today, but back in the 19th century Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was the star in the family. With a performance career spanning six decades (she made her solo debut in Leipzig at the age of 11), Clara was Germany's reigning "Queen of Pianists" throughout most of the 1800s. Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn dedicated works to her, and no less a cultural kingpin than Goethe was an enraptured fan of her playing. She also served as Brahms's confidant, musical adviser, and muse from the time they met in 1850, when Brahms was an up-and-coming twenty-year-old, until her death. She was a first-rate composer, although she was personally insecure about her skill at writing music. Clara's most popular piece during her lifetime was the Piano Trio, which she wrote in 1846. Only months later, her husband completed his inaugural work in the genre, and she often paired the pieces in concert. Here's the last movement, which includes a fugato s...

If you want to get a good picture of how Schoenberg's aesthetic thought changed over time, his solo piano music is the place to start. In no other genre can you so clearly hear the shift from free-wheeling intuitive expression to a historically conscious formalism grounded in a desire to redeem Western music. Here's an essay that appeared in the program for  Russell Sherman's recital of these works  last night at Mannes as part of the Institute and Festival of Contemporary Performance. Take a look. If you're interested, I'm happy to point you to other things to read, and recordings as well.  You can listen to Steuermann's recording from the 1950s of the Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, here . Also, here's a video of Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin talking about Schoenberg's Violin Fantasy.

Berio's Italian, but he has some strong connections to the US and New York City in particular. He  wrote  Sinfonia  for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1968 . This was no commission to an out-of-towner: Berio had been teaching at Juilliard since 1964, and before taking the Juilliard job he had taught at Mills College in Oakland for two full school years. He studied at Tanglewood in 1952 with Luigi Dallapiccola and then returned as an instructor in 1960. As the second movement of Sinfonia , Berio included a version of his 1967 piece O King, an elegiac tribute Martin Luther King, Jr. Originally scored for a small ensemble and one singer, O King  (here in its symphonic arrangement) projects the individual syllables of the phrase "O Martin Luther King" into the surrounding musical landscape; gradually they coalesce to sound out the slain civil-rights leader's name at the end of the piece. Even if you can't hear this, it's a beautiful, ...

I recently posted a note on the Carnegie Hall blog about Mozart's Zaide , which in the version that Ensemble ACJW is performing on Thursday really isn't Mozart's at all. Throughout the unfinished singpspiel is music that Luciano Berio (1925-2003) wrote back in 1995: the show starts and ends with it; it interrupts the action at two points during of the opera. Whether you like it or not, Berio's music asserts itself and--as a recurring comment on the action--hijacks the event. Berio showed a penchant throughout his career for this kind of appropriation, and people who know his music will compare the  Zaide music to the third movement of  Sinfonia (1968). Spoken texts from Beckett's The Unnamable --and Berio's own writings--uncomfortably intermingle with Mahler's scherzo movement from the Second Symphony , and quotations of Schoenberg and Debussy (for example). Here, things are not cut and dry: although Mahler is the clear focus, all the borrowed material ...

In addition to Dichotomy , it's important to mention the piece that made Riegger's name,  Study in Sonority .  He wrote it in 1927 for his Ithaca Conservatory summer-term orchestra; the group had mostly violins, so he wrote for 10 violinists. At Eastman, Howard Hanson programmed the work before Stokowski got a hold of it and performed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra strings in 1929 at Carnegie Hall and in their home city. The  New York Philharmonic played the piece a couple of times in the 1960 s, and in 1994 at the  American Eccentrics  festival . There's nary a commercial recording to be had, but you can view the score  on the New York Philharmonic's digital archives .

Maybe it was because he was a communist, but you don't hear much about Wallingford Riegger anymore. Two years before Riegger went in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, Gilbert Chase made a point in his book America's Music of singling out the composer as "the leading native-born American composer who composes with twelve tones." Granted, that's a pretty small group to be out in front of, but you get the point: Riegger was generally well respected, a composer who had emerged from the hotbed of avant-garde musical activity in 1920s New York City with a style at once daring and grounded in traditional technique. He was flaky, but not too flaky. Dichotomy (1931-2) is one of his earliest works that typify what Riegger was all about, the first piece of his that showed the maturity he would later exhibit in his third and fourth symphonies. His earliest success here in the US (he studied in Germany for a few years) was his Study in Sono...

On Facebook, Joe McKesson celebrated the birthday of Roy Harris  (1898-1979) yesterday. Part II is here . Harris's Third Symphony (1939) is his most famous work, but I also like the music on the Louisville Orchestra's recordings from 1960: his concert piece Kentucky Spring , Violin Concerto, and Symphony No. 5, all written in the late 1940s.

As Beth Levy points ou t, you'll see the words log cabin , Oklahoma , and Lincoln  in the opening sentence of almost every biography ever written about Roy Harris. Although he was a Sooner for only five years, almost everyone in music circles identified him as being quintessentially Western. Arts patron Mary Churchill had this to say about her meeting with Harris in Paris, where he was studying in the late 1920s: "[he was] wild and worn; but gave off a wonderful western farmer air in the middle of the Place de la Concorde." Serge Koussevitzky said that "nobody has captured in music the essence of American life--its vitality, its greatness, its strength--so well as Roy Harris." That Harris shared a birthday with Lincoln-- both were born on February 12 --only added to the mystique. Harris (1898-1979) certainly didn't dispel any of the myth making, and even helped cultivate it. He was a lot like Bob Dylan that way: both built personas to promote themselv...