Author: Mark Berry

Move Over Michael Feinstein, George Crumb’s Working on the American Songbook

There’s an article in the Los Angeles Times this weekend about George Crumb’s seven-part American Songbook project. There will be performances this season in LA, in Washington, DC and New York City, and a version of Song Book IV staged by Peter Sellars and sung by Dawn Upshaw at the Ojai Festival.

Delia Casadei describes the folk songs Crumb chose to adapt:

They are, in other words, more than references to an archaic lost world: Some of the bloodiest episodes of the country’s history are etched into their very sinews. They are the spirituals of African slaves, the lullabies of American Indians, the congregational singing of the English settlers and songs of the Civil War. And they have been on the lips of the entire country since time immemorial. 

 Name that tune: there’s a sample on the Bridge Records website. And read Casadei’s article.

More on Gorecki

As Tom Service points out in the Guardian, Gorecki’s legacy is much more–and much more varied–than the Third Symphony that brought him worldwide notoriety in the 1990s:

The thing is, the Third Symphony is untypical of Górecki’s earlier work, and only partly reflects his later. Górecki began his musical life as an uncompromising modernist in Poland. His orchestral works of the late 50s and early 60s made him a new-music sensation at the Warsaw autumn festival, and his music was heard at the same bleeding-edge events as that by Xenakis and Boulez.

His listening suggestion: the 1956 Piano Sonata. He links to one version; here’s another:


I don’t know if I would call this bleeding-edge modernism, certainly not at all like Xenakis or Boulez, but it does show a more lively, aggressive side. At the same time, there is a directness and consistency of affect to the Piano Sonata that is similar to the Third Symphony.

Another piece to look at is the Second Symphony, commissioned by the Kosciuszko Foundation in honor of Copernicus’s 500th anniversary in 1972. It opens with the driving rhythm of the piano sonata and a final movement that presages Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

If you want to hear Gorecki discussing his music, go to NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog, which has a 1995 interview with the composer posted.

It Never Ends

A couple of things struck me when I read that Gorillaz is recording its new record on an iPad:

  • Frontman Damon Albarn professes to be a technophobe but “fell in love” with his iPad at first look. And now he’s recording an album on it. That’s a pretty big leap. 
  • There’s no mention about how Albarn is using the iPad. Is he using Smule apps for instruments? Is he mixing stuff on it, using it as a virtual console? 
  • We should stop talking about all the great things an iPad can do. 
Here’s the video that Radhika Marya mentions was a YouTube hit: 

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtv.com:489414

Gorecki Was the ’90s

Gorecki’s Third Symphony was all the rage, particular in the UK, after the recording with Dawn Upshaw, London Sinfonietta, and David Zinman became a hit in 1993.

Lamb released a song named after the the composer that was a licensing bonanza (it was used I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a Femme Nikita TV episode, and a Tomb Raider video game). “Gorecki,” as musicologist Luke Howard points out, bears the characteristic mark of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs:


The symphony’s trademark sound–slow, thick strings; ethereal, slightly exotic sounding soprano melodies; static harmonies–was everywhere. Even in beer commercials. Howard hears it in the Death Scene to Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann also used Lamb’s lyrics in his Moulin Rouge!).

It’s hard to deny that this Polish composer, who passed away today, shaped our everyday musical environment–what we heard in movies, on the radio, on TV, and even in the mall–for a good ten years just as definitively as Kurt Cobain.

It’s All About the Ask

Executive Director Lynne Meloccaro on why the American Symphony Orchestra offered its players salaries instead of maintaining the pay-for-service model it’s been operating under for years:

We didn’t want to do that because the perception people had that orchestras were collapsing all over the place was affecting philanthropy.

The primary reason that Ms. Meloccaro gave wasn’t artistic (although music director Leon Botstein said that it was “a way of stabilizing a very fine orchestra”) or at all related to ticket sales (that an ever-shifting roster would result in inconsistent performances and a lack of personal identity that could repel audiences).

This move had everything to do with the ask. No one will donate to a non-profit that is crumbling. The new ASO contract, so Ms. Meloccaro hopes, sends a signal to large donors that the orchestra is on sound financial footing.

You might want to keep ASO’s reasoning in mind the next time you see a non-profit arts organization put on a program that seems to have little reason for being, that couldn’t possibly pull in a crowd large enough to justify its existence.

The Detroit Symphony management might want to keep Ms. Meloccaro’s words in mind as they try to resolve the strike with musicians. I know things look bleak in Motor City, but GM did post a third-quarter profit.

I’m Getting Sick of People Playing Their iPads


App maker Smule just released their Magic Fiddle, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet took the bait. Couldn’t they have at least picked something more upbeat that Pachelbel’s Canon?

When I saw Lang Lang play his iPad, I thought it was kind of cute.


But it gets old really quick.

There’s something about this marketing campaign that’s just depressing. It turns the music into a joke or a stunt. I’m not sure whether people are laughing with or at the musicians: Hey, look at those dorks in the tuxes playing Mozart on iPads. What a bunch of dorks.

There are musicians out there who are using iPads as music-making tools. Do you know of any?

Ravel’s La Valse: Definitely Not Cheesy Music


Like Bolero, it gradually builds, using a distinctive dance rhythm to drive the music forward toward the big finish. But there’s nothing erotic about La Valse: it’s a phantasmagoria that leaves you winded, and a little bit wounded too. As Ravel put it, a “fantastic and fatal whirling.”

Ravel wrote versions for solo and duo pianos, but it’s most popular–and most horrifying–as an orchestral  piece.

Five Songs That Make Me Uncomfortable

Writing about Ravel’s Bolero in the movie 10 (one of those movies that a guy who grew up in the post-AIDS 1980s finds horrifying) got me thinking about the songs that make me feel just a little bit … uncomfortable.

Here’s my top five (not that you asked):

1. Exile, “I Wanna Kiss You All Over”


What a coincidence: this song was a #1 hit the same year that 10 came out. How could anyone find this sexy?

This is the gold standard. Whenever I hear a song that is overladen with sexual innuendo (or explicit calls to action), it’s “I Wanna Kiss You All Over” that I compare it to.

2. John Mayer, “Your Body is a Wonderland” 
This is one of those songs that measured up to Exile’s.

3.  Rod Stewart, “Tonight’s the Night” 
Another 1970s hit: #1 in 1976. Pete Townshend wrote a short story about this song. I read it when I was 14. It kind of messed me up for a while.

4. Bob Crewe and Kenny Nowland, “My Eyes Adored You”
“… Though I never laid a hand on you.” This is just the wrong way to put it, man.

Here’s a fun fact: the same people who wrote Frankie Valli’s only chart topper (in 1975; what was wrong with people back then?) also wrote “Lady Marmalade.”


5. Def Leppard and “Mutt” Lange, “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
What saves this from being totally creepy is the unabashedly exuberant chorus. That, and this:

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Ravel’s Bolero (Part II)

Here’s what Uncle Fred had to say about Ravel’s Bolero: “It’s the most descriptive sex music ever written.”

According to his niece-in-law Jenny, played by Bo Derek in 10, “he proved it.” To anyone with qualms about pedophilia (I’m firmly in this camp), Jenny’s little story, meant to seduce poor hapless George (Dudley Moore), is uncomfortable, to say the least. (The whole movie gives me the creeps.)

Although he was an incestuous cad, Uncle Fred had a point about Bolero. As mentioned in an earlier post, the piece opens with the snare drum playing the distinctive rhythmic pattern of the Spanish dance it’s named after. The seductive flute melody that enters shortly after sets in motion a gradual blossoming to a climactic finale; as that rhythm pulses below, the melody repeats, the orchestration expands, and the music becomes ever more incessant and powerful. It’s hard not to get all worked up when you listen to it.

Bolero set Ravel for life financially. It’s hard to believe that the composer didn’t know he had a crowd pleaser on his hands, but he did express doubts that no one would want to hear it as anything more than ballet music. For Ravel, it was a chance to show off his chops as an orchestrator, an “experiment in a very special and limited direction.”

Some critics didn’t care for the piece in the few years after its 1928 premiere. Writing for the American Mercury in 1932, Edward Robinson called the piece “the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetrated in the history of music” that sounds like “the wail of an obstreperous back-alley cat.” Even today, a lot of critics look down on the piece, and programmers tend to consider it to be fluff. Fortunately, lots of orchestras still play it.

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Ravel’s Bolero (Part I)

Now that the World Series is over, it’s time to start thinking about the Super Bowl–and the ads that’ll be on the Super Bowl broadcast.

During the third quarter of last season’s game, Coke ran an ad that used Ravel’s Bolero, a piece that even the composer might concede is among the cheesiest music ever written.

The ad, by advertising company Wieden & Kennedy, was set in Africa, but the music is based on the distinctive Spanish dance rhythm. Ravel’s mother was Basque, and although he didn’t make his first trip to Spain until 1924 when he was almost 50, he used the sounds of the country in early pieces like Rapsodie espagnole suite (completed in 1908) and his opera L’Heure espagnole (composed at around the same time, and premiered in Paris in 1911).

In the same year Ravel sat down to write Bolero, he made a triumphant tour of North America. Everywhere he went–from Houston to Montreal–people greeted him as a star. Ravel was overwhelmed: “You know, this doesn’t happen to me in Paris,” commented the composer after a Carnegie Hall performance of his orchestral music that was met with roaring applause and a standing ovation.

Flush with good ol’ American style fame, Ravel returned to the City of Lights; one of his first duties was to fulfill his promise to dance impresario Ida Rubinstein to write ballet music for her. The result, of course, was Bolero, which received its premiere at the end of the year, in November 1928 at the Paris Opera.

What’s all this got to do with the Super Bowl? Not much, beyond the aforementioned ad. But with its Spanish groove and colorful orchestration, Bolero is worth getting to know better.