Remembering Charles Villiers Stanford

This year was Holst’s 150th birthday, but it also marked the centenary of the death of his teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford.

If you’ve never heard of Stanford, that’s probably because he suffered from a reputation, unfairly earned early on, for being too much the teacher, too academic, too hidebound by rules to be interesting. In a broadcast speech commemorating Stanford’s centennial, Ralph Vaughan Williams, another of his students, pointed to an article by George Bernard Shaw, who took aim at Stanford for being part of an “‘academic clique.’” Vaughan Williams defended Stanford but was measured, ceding that there was a “certain amount of dull music” in Stanford’s oeuvre, and describing his orchestration as “perhaps unadventurous,” even as praises his ability to remain “always within the bounds of classical beauty.”

You’d expect a precocious and rebellious student like Vaughan Williams to stick it to his teacher a bit, and it is true that much of Stanford’s music evokes late-19th-century contemporaries, but I see this ability to take familiar sounds and refine them to be Stanford’s superpower. He knows the codes of this music so well that he can use it to his advantage, combining them in unusual ways and bending them to meet his needs. And he does this while always maintaining a level of polish that few composers of his age possessed (certainly not Vaughan Williams).

Stanford’s Songs of the Sea for baritone, male voice, and orchestra received its premiere in 1904 at the Leeds Festival, where the composer was artistic director. There are plenty of stereotypical sea-shanty sounds and Royal Navy puffery in the cycle, such as in the opening “Drake’s Drum,” which recounts the legend of a magical drum owned by Sir Francis Drake. But there are also moments of real tenderness, such as “Outward Bound,” a plaintive farewell from a sailor “in exile on the eternal sea” to his mother. The song ends with a choral swell that will leave you breathless from the lump in your throat.

Songs of the Sea ends with the rollicking “Old Superb” about a beat-up, out-of-date ship in Nelson’s fleet whose crew refuses to give up the fight during the Napoleonic Wars (Master and Commander: Far Side of the World is set at the same time, with a similar chase-the-French-and-save-the-Empire plot). It’s swashbuckling but also comic in depicting the sad shape of the “Old Superb” and the never-say-die attitude of its crew. Stanford depicts this perfectly through the music: it sounds like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus orchestrated by Brahms, triumphant and madcap at the same time.

One place where you’ll still hear Stanford’s music regularly is in Anglican churches, as he wrote a seemingly endless stream of anthems and canticles. Beati quorum via, the last of his Three Latin Motets, Op. 39, published in 1905, is a popular church anthem, a setting of the first two lines of Psalm 119: Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.

Instead of setting this text to sound joyful or celebratory–there’s an exclamation point after “Lord” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Psalm lines–Stanford writes music that is soft and plaintive. To walk with God, to live a Godly life, is not easy and can be filled with loneliness; Stanford’s music brings the hidden implications of the text to the surface in Beati quorum via.

Stanford is one of those composers whose music begs us to question the definition and value of originality in music. On the one hand, you can hear at times the echos of Bach or Mendelssohn–as you can in his Irish Rhapsodies or the “Irish” Symphony–but on the other hand, you can hear the ways that Stanford uses style in conjunction with texts to paint unusually nuanced portraits. Stanford’s music also shows rare refinement.

On His 150th Anniversary, Holst’s Music Is Still Relevant Today

Of musical figures celebrating their 150th anniversaries in 2024, Ives and Schoenberg are the most celebrated, but Gustav Holst has had a bigger impact on our culture than both of them.

You probably know Holst’s The Planets; everyone does. Seven short character studies depicting the Roman gods after which the planets in our solar system (except for Pluto and Earth) were named, it received its premiere in 1918 in a private performance funded by Henry Balfour Gardiner, the son of a rich wholesale draperies entrepreneur who was himself a composer and ardent–even lavish–defender of contemporary composers (he bought Delius’s house for him). From these humble beginnings, The Planets grew in notoriety to the point where today it is a concert-hall staple and radio favorite: in 2023, the piece was #23 on WQXR’s Classical Countdown, and “Jupiter” was #57 on KUSC’s California Ultimate Playlist. You’ll hear it on BoJack Horseman, in ads for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and you’ll sense its presence throughout the Star Wars soundtrack.

You’ll also find, lodged within “Jupiter,” the melody that became “I Vow Thee, My Country.” Holst set the poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice to his tune in 1921 and added additional voices to create the patriotic hymn in 1926. It’s still a standard Remembrance Day anthem and British state ceremonies; it was performed at the funerals of Princess Diana (below) and Queen Elizabeth II. So, if you’re an Anglophile or a Royal Family buff, you’ve certainly heard this hymn, and I’m sure it will bring a tear to your eye.

Few people are familiar with Holst’s music inspired by Vedic mysticism, yet even it has a toe-hold in our popular imagination. His opera Sita and chamber opera Savitri are based on Sanskrit epics, and he wrote two tone poems, Cloud Messenger and Indra, on related subjects. Perhaps the most moving of his music in this vein are his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda (1908-12; premiered 1911-1914) for SSAA choir and harp or piano. The third hymn from the third set gained some notoriety a few years ago for being quoted in Billie Eilish’s song “Goldwing.” “Hymn to Vena” moves like a slow-moving fog as the voices float on top of the harp accompaniment. It’s wispy and smooth, truly beautiful music.

There is so much more to explore in Holst’s catalog, including his Second Suite for Military Band in F Major, which almost every high-school band member (including me). All of it is worth your time, and I hope you take the opportunity to enjoy his music before his 150th birthday year ends.

Ives at 150: How Much is Too Much?

Charles Ives was born 150 years ago, and Joseph Horowitz bemoans in American Scholar the lack of attention paid to the sesquicentenary of a composer he sees as our signal musical representative in a tradition of rough-hewn, homespun experimentation:

“No other American composer connects more explicitly with the New England Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau … (and) the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville.”

For Horowitz, the “pantheon of the self-created, ‘unfinished’ American genius–the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, but also Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner–is Ives’s rightful home.”

If Horowitz wants to know why performing organizations are passing on an Ives in 2024-25, he might want to listen to the music. The “Concord” Sonata, his most famous piece and one that Horowitz cites as a crowning achievement, is relentless. The “Emerson” movement is a constant onslaught of thick chords of extreme range, usually delivered loudly; I had the feeling of being held underwater as I listened to it.

Ives’s Second Symphony, another one of the “masterpieces,” is all right, I guess, but there’s nothing in it you couldn’t get out of Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite or similar piece out of the UK in the first half of the 20th century. At best, the Second Symphony is surprisingly sweet; at worst, it’s boring (and that includes the “mistake” that ends the piece). It is no classic.

Those in the arts constantly confuse historical interest and aesthetic relevance. There’s no doubt that Ives’s music and writings can tell us a lot about cultural life in the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, just as his valorization by figures as notable as Bernstein can help explain the values of high-art musicians after World War II. This doesn’t mean his music deserves any more of a presence in the concert hall this year than any other.

Starting September 30, the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music is hosting a nine-day festival in honor of Ives. I’d say this is more than enough time to listen to his music and talk about his legacy, and in exactly the correct context.

Is “Daughters” Really So Bad? Yes!

St. Vincent showed her good taste in a recent interview with Kerrang when she declared John Mayer’s “Daughters” to be the worst song in the world:

“It pretends to be a love song, but it’s really, really retrograde and really sexist. And I hate it… It’s so deeply misogynistic, which would be fine if you owned that, but it pretends like it’s sweet.”

So, it’s bad, but is “Daughters” truly “hideously sexist”?

Yes!

When “Daughters” came on my radar years ago, I had assumed that the message was one of allyship, a patronizing by well intentioned plea for parents to acknowledge the difficulties of growing up as a young woman. Turns out, the song is about a guy who blames the parents of the girls who reject his sexual advances for not raising them to be more pliant to his will. If Andrew Tate were a song, he’d be “Daughters.”

It starts with an mid-tempo acoustic guitar introduction that reminds me of something I would hear a first-year undergrad play in his dorm room to impress his roommate, girls, anyone passing by. Some of us grow out of this phase; John Mayer never did. As juvenile musically as this is, it doesn’t make “Daughters” the worst ever.

The first verse makes it the worst ever. Mayer tells us that he knows a “girl” who “puts the color inside of my world,” but try as he might, he can’t win her over. She’s “just like a maze,” after all, “where all of the walls all continually change.” She’s indecisive, apparently, or is trying to let him down gently. Hard to tell. But, whatever’s going on, “it’s got nothing to do with me.” Who’s at fault here? Her father!

Dads like me need to “be good to our daughters,” as Mayer tells us in the chorus, because they take their cues on how to be good girlfriends from us when they “turn into lovers.” For my sake, says Mayer, teach your daughters to be confident and secure enough that they’ll put out.

Throughout the first verse and chorus, Mayer uses a vocal timbre that plays against both the immaturity and the perversity of his lyrics. Instead of projecting in frustration, Mayer practically whispers his lines to us, like a pedophile singing a lullaby. Underneath the whisper is a gravelly base that makes him sound older, wiser, as if he can trick us into thinking he’s on the same emotional and social level of a father. He’s not whining at how unfair women are to him; he’s giving us all advice. For the betterment of us all. Of course.

If a young man came to me, exhorted me to raise my daughter better, and even vaguely implied the reasoning Mayer gives in his song, I would call my daughter and tell her a stalker might be after her: lock your door, call friends and ask them to keep their phones close, be ready to call 911, and document any interaction you have with this guy. Good fathers do what they can to prepare their children to handle people like Mayer in this song.

In the bridge, which is the last thing you hear before the closing chorus, Mayer addresses his fellow “boys,” telling them, “you can break” / “You find out how much they can take.” I’m assuming the “they” here is women. These lines are chilling in light of the lines that follow: “But boys would be gone without warmth from a woman’s good, good heart.” Women should prepared to absorb the punishment (literally? figuratively?) that mete out–it’s hard to “be strong” after all–and parents need to prepare them to be that security cushion.

Even without considering the message of the lyrics, this is a bad song. The singing grates and the guitar playing is juvenile. The structure of the song makes no sense, with the bridge, for example, sounding too similar to the verse to be a proper, separate section. But of course, we do need to consider the lyrics, and when we do, we realize that “Daughters” belongs in the pantheon of truly horrible, shouldn’t-be-heard-again songs of death and trash.