Third Shade of Grey--Latin Influences

Well, Wikipedia says he’s South America’s best-known composer, and it’s arguably true. If someone tells you he or she knows only one piece of Latin-American music, you can be fairly sure it’s the Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5, scored for eight cellos and soprano. And yes, it’s a sultry, steamy affair, a bit more Brazil than Bach.

And also according to Wikipedia, the intention of the Bachianas Brasileiras was never to fuse the native music of Brazil with Johann Sebastian Bach, but to use some of the counterpoint and harmonic elements of the baroque period along with traditional Brazilian folk tunes.

And Villa Lobos was colorful, to be sure, at least in his early days. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he ventured in his twenties out into the “dark interior” of the country, and came back with tales of near escapes from cannibals. He also, he stated, realized that he would never completely follow the European tradition in music: the folk music of his native land would always influence his work.

Don’t think, though, that this is a composer who is unfamiliar with the boulevards of Paris—he spent some five or six years there, working with Varese, Aaron Copeland, Milhaud (whom he had met in Brazil), Stokowski, and Pablo Picasso. So he got around.

Or tried to. At a later point, a military dictator blew in—they tend to in South America—and stopped all money from going out of the country. That meant that Villa Lobos was stuck in the country, but not a problem, because he became the director of the Superindendência de Educação Musical e Artistica—right, don’t have to know Portuguese to get that one—and also wrote the national anthem. He wrote sufficient amounts of propaganda that he soon was seen as reactionary, especially among the younger generation.

He also was no slouch at marketing himself, saying at one point, “I don’t use folklore, I am folklore,” and at another point, in reference to his tour of Europe, “I haven’t come to learn, I have come to show what I have made up to now.”

And this, then, is part of what he showed them….    

Not bad, hunh? Anna Moffo knows how to do it….

Now then, don’t imagine that Villa Lobos is the only composer on the continent--there’s also Astor Piazzolla, an Argentinian born in 1921 who spent most of his childhood in Greenwich Village and Little Italy in New York City. He was obsessed with his father’s tango records, and though he studied with a pianist who herself was a student of Rachmaninoff, he turned to playing tango when he returned to Argentina in 1935.

Like  Villa Lobos, Piazzolla gets around, eventually landing in Paris, where he studies with the woman who ranks as the all-time composition teacher of the 20^th century, Nadia Boulanger. He tries to impress her with his “mainstream” or “Western” compositions—Boulanger hems and haws. Then he plays her a tango, and she says, “hey, that’s it.”

OK—it’s like having the Delphic oracle give you directions for your life; he goes back to Buenos Aires and starts a group. And yes, he composes both tangoes and more mainstream works. And the tangoes merge elements of jazz, baroque music, and Western music—the moment I heard the piece below, I thought, ‘he’s had to have studied with Boulanger.’ Her influence is all over the place.

This piece, written in homage to his father after Piazzolla had learned of his death (Piazzolla was in Puerto Rico at the time), is classic….  

Of course, you really can’t talk about South American music without getting into Alberto Ginastera, also Argentinian but born of a Catalan father and an Italian mother. (Time out—the Italian influence is so strong that in Buenos Aires, Spanish is spoken with an Italian inflection. Oh—and what’s an Argentinian? An Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he’s an Englishman.)

At any rate, Ginastera studied at the conservatory, later studied with Copland for a couple of years, and finally ended up living and dying in Geneva, Switzerland. Notwithstanding, his music incorporates Argentine folk themes; much of his music, reports Wikipedia, “were inspired by the gauchesco tradition.” (Don’t know the term? Don’t worry, neither does the computer. The gaucho is the Argentine version of the cowboy….)

Ginastera got noticed by people other than classical music freaks when the rock group Emerson Land and Palmer took the fourth movement of his first piano concerto and adapted it. A member of the group ran down to Argentina to clear it with the master, who responded “diabolico”. It was one of those moments when knowing Spanish (or English) would have helped—Emerson left the room crushed, not knowing that the Master, as his wife would write, had felt “you have captured the essence of my music, no one has ever done that before.”

Right—you know what’s coming.... 

Sorry, I can’t, I just can’t leave you with that in your ears—Ginastera’s approval to the contrary not withstanding. So let’s cheat a bit, and give you a composition that, if not from Latin America, is at least Spanish and of the 20^th century. And if you’ve never heard Rodrigo’s Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez—get ready. It’ll change your life…..

Second Shade of Grey--Bach Piano Transcriptions

The second shade of grey takes us to the father, or perhaps mother, of it all, Johann Sebastian Bach. And it takes us, specifically, to his lyric, or song-like side.

It’s a good way to know Bach, to start to understand him. Because yes, he can be the most cerebral, the most theoretical of composers; he’s a composer that every mathematician loves. But make no mistake about it, he’s also a composer who is surprisingly song-like, who can just deliver up a beautiful melody, something you’ll sing all day.

He was also a guy who was a church musician, so he knew how to serve up, and then dress up, a simple hymn. But let’s go back.

He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Germany, into a family of musicians. His father was director of the musicians in the town, all his uncles were professional musicians. One of them, Johann Cristoph Bach, took Bach in at age ten when his father died (his mother had died eight months earlier), and introduced him to the organ. Bach then attended the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg, graduated, and then obtained a position as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Ernst of Weimar. He did that for a few years, grew a bit dissatisfied and decided to take a hike.

Literally—he walked 250 miles to go see one of the finest composers of the day, Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern town of Lübeck. Right, that went well enough, and Bach might have been Buxtehude’s successor, but there was a little catch: he had to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—it was a bit like a fairy tale, or at any rate a package deal.

So Bach, presumably again by foot, married his second cousin, and hoofed it to Mülhausen, where he spent a couple of years. In 1708, Bach returned to Weimar, where he began a long career of composing, as well as directing the musicians of the ducal court. He next moved to Köthen, where his employer is a Calvinist; here Bach would write most of his secular compositions. Finally, in 1723, he was appointed director of music in two important churches in Leipzig, which had an important university.

Bach stayed in Leipzig all his life, and progressively went blind. He had an eye surgery that was completely unsuccessful, came down with pneumonia, and died in 1750.

Bach was prolific in two senses; biologically, he had two wives and twenty children, several of whom became important composers in their own right; musically, he wrote 300 cantatas, 2 passions, 2 oratorios, orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg concerti, and a huge amount of keyboard music.

In fact, the only thing he didn’t do was compose an opera, as Handel, his exact contemporary, would do. Nor did he, like Handel, travel extensively, either to Italy or to London. Though well known in his lifetime, he wasn’t not particularly celebrated as a composer, but instead as an organist. The fame came later, when Mendelssohn, most conspicuously, champions Bach’s compositions.

Right—that’s the man. What about the music?

Well, here James chooses a lovely song, written by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello. Originally, it was part of Marcello’s oboe concerto—Bach freely borrows it, and transcribes it for piano. Have a listen:

Transcriptions were popular in the 19^th century—everyone had a piano, everyone wanted to take a nice choral or orchestral piece and play it at home, in the evening, on the piano. And so lots of Bach’s best tunes got transcribed. And Bach himself borrowed liberally from his fellow composer, as they did from him. Here’s another famous song, Bist du bei Mir, which Bach lifted from the composer, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel:



Bist du bei Mir, in fact, is song expressing the melancholy sentiment: “if you are with me, I will go gladly to my death; oh, what a pleasant end it would be, for your hands to be the last things my faithful eyes were to see, as they close my lids to rest….” Or words to that effect. And as you can hear, it’s a knockout.



There’s more, much more, and it’s all well worth exploring. I will, more fully, in my other blog, Words on Musick. But it’s a beautiful spring day, in New York City. All of the flowering tree—the crab apples, the cherry trees, the redbud—are in full bloom. Time to turn from sonic loveliness to visual delight!
But I send you one last clip—a piano transcription of “Sheep may Safely Graze.”

First Shade of Grey

Right, I have not read the trilogy, and I’ll be honest, I’m a little peeved about it all. Here this woman, E.L. James, sits down one day and writes a series of books, beginning with Fifty Shades of Grey. And boom, the next day she’s a multimillionaire, she’s famous, she’s on top of the New York Times Bestseller List for a zillion weeks.

Marc, right down here in little San Juan?

Iguanas has sold about six copies.

Look, I knew that would happen. It shouldn’t rankle, but it does; I should rise above it, content in knowing that I produced a book that, if not read, at least is well-written. James’s work has not been uniformly well-received. But who knows? Maybe they’re great; books that are popular more often than not are also good.

So, as penance, I offer the following; it appears that James has done a good deed: she’s introduced a whole bunch of people to classical music. So much so that there’s even an album out of the music about which she wrote. (As well, there appears to be a movie or movies in the making….) OK, so that’s worth checking out, right?

Well, Amazon has the CD, and there are fifteen tracks, fifteen really great pieces of music. So let’s spend time with each track, look at the composer, and explore a bit more his work or the work of his contemporaries.

Right—track number 1, the Flower Duet from Lakmé, by Léo Delibes.

Well, it’s sufficiently obscure that the computer didn’t know “Lakmé”—that old red squiggle—but did recognize Delibes. Why?

He was big in the 19^th century, where, according to Wikipedia, he influenced guys like Saint-Saëns, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky. Actually, Tchaikovsky thought Delibes was greater than Brahms, though Tchaikovsky also had a bee in his bonnet about the composer; he called Brahms a “gift-less bastard.” But Tchaikovsky went on to say, about a ballet that no one, to my knowledge sees or listens to, “... what charm, what wealth of melody! It brought me to shame, for had I known of this music, I would have never written Swan Lake."

OK—so who was Delibes? French, 1836-1891, the son of a postman, the great-uncle of the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes. He studied at the Paris Conservatory under Adolphe Adam, who, like Delibes, principally composed for the theater and ballet. (Adam, by the way, wrote O Holy Night, the Christmas carol that gets trotted out regularly….)

And Delibes follows in his teacher’s footsteps, writing ballet scores for Coppélia and Sylvia. But he also wrote an opera, Lakmé, which is a rich, atmospheric setting of an Oriental tale. And it’s from Lakmé that James takes her first selection, the Flower Duet, or Dome epais le jasmine. Right—so what’s it all about?

Ummm—look, let’s be real. There are some operas that are less about the plot than the atmosphere. I saw Lakmé years ago, read the synopsis, rubbed my eyes, and tried the synopsis again. Then I decided—it’s better not to know. Sit back, look at the costumes, enjoy the music, admire the set. But don’t try to make anything of the libretto.

Briefly, however, Lakmé, daughter of the high priest of a sacred Brahmin temple, and her servant Mallika are left behind at the river while the men go to perform mysterious rites in the temple. See? This stuff happens in a certain kind of opera. So they amuse themselves gathering flowers…..

Juicy little stuff, hunh? Well, in my mind this duet is paired with another duet, just as beautiful, just as lush, and with a libretto just as silly. Oh, and also by a French composer of the 19^th century, Georges Bizet, whose most famous work is the opera Carmen. But he also wrote another opera, The Pearl Fishers, or Les pêcheurs de perles.

Here again, the libretto isn’t the most substantial part of the opera—it’s about two men, good friends, whose friendship is threatened by their love of the same woman. And in this famous aria, Au fond du temple saint, we are once again at a temple, and the men are swearing eternal friendship.

Both pieces are just on the edge, dangerously close to being maudlin and sentimental and overblown. Look, I never seek it out, I never get up in the morning and say, “hey, why don’t I listen to Au fond or the flower duet….”

But if they come upon me, in a concert or a television program?

I just love the stuff….