Salon97 - classical music with attitude » Uncategorized

Top 4 Ways You Can Be Studly Like Liszt

Cariwyl Hebert — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:47:15 +0000

Image courtesy of www.bbc.co.uk

Top 5 Ways You Can Be Like Franz Liszt,
the Ultimate Stud

Franz Liszt. Legendary virtuosic pianist. Fabulous composer, despite the current debate over whether his work was any good or not. And oh, how the women swooned. They threw their handkerchiefs at him in appreciation of his talent and physical beauty. This phenomenon is referred to as Lisztomania.

And now fast forward to the 21st century. French pop band Phoenix writes the song “Lisztomania.”

Oh, to be a stud like Liszt! YOU CAN BE.
Here’s how:

Be an excellent pianist. (Yeah, that may be a lot to ask.)
Write incredibly virtuosic works that others struggle to perform correctly. (A lofty task, I am well aware.)
Have someone make a wide-release movie about you or write what will be come a very popular song about you. (Maybe??)
Be a philanthropist. Franz Liszt taught over 400 students in a 40 year period and never charged for a lesson. And by the time he was in his mid-40s, Liszt started giving most of his performance earnings to numerous organizations he felt were worthy of his financial support.
This one is easy! Contribute to Salon97 for our annual fundraiser to help keep our programming alive. We only ask for donations once per year! It’s easy to donate.

Salon97′s Annual Fundraiser!

Cariwyl Hebert — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:53:01 +0000

Greetings, lovely folks.

Our annual fundraiser is in full swing and we need your help! Here at Salon97 we only fundraise once a year, yet 99% of our events are completely free of charge. Please support the cause and help us keep these gatherings as accessible to all as they are now!

Donate today!

Salon97 Digest, 30 October 2011

Cariwyl Hebert — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:07:33 +0000

Bernard Herrmann: The Composer as Co-Author
by Justin Stewart, The L Magazine
We know and love him for his scores to many a Hitchcock film, but Bernard Herrmann was so much more than a composer.

Opera’s Unsung Pit Heros
by Colin Eatock, The Globe and Mail
Wherein we get an inside peak at what it’s like to be a pit musician.

Copyright Battle: Who Are You Calling “Big Money”?
by Mark MacNamara, San Francisco Classical Voice
Yes, folks. It’s a tough world for most musicians. Including composers.

Demystifying #OccupyWallStreet’s Arts and Culture Meetings
by Liza Eliano, Hyperallergic
Yes, there are arts and culture meetings within OWS.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Michael Jackson of the 18th Century

Cariwyl Hebert — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:50:03 +0000

It is highly probable that you haven’t yet considered the similarities between Michael Jackson and Mozart. A few hundred years will do that. However, both were incredibly prolific, died far too young, and are discussed worldwide every day. But wait, there’s more.

Top 10 Reasons Why Mozart is the Michael Jackson of 17th Century (or MJ is the Mozart of the 21st Century):

Both were the 7th child in their respective families.
Both had overbearing fathers who wanted more than anything for their youngest sons to be famous.
Both worked as touring musicians by age 8.
Both dealt with illness throughout their lives.
Hype, anyone?
Both had unique and easily identifiable styles that are second to none.

Below are clips from Mozart’s Dies Irae and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Can you hear the similarities?

Salon97 Digest, 24 July 2011

Cariwyl Hebert — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:07:13 +0000

Finding America’s Composers
by Rob Deemer, NY Times
A fabulous accounting of how one musician’s career morphed from aspirations of being a band teacher to becoming a composer and radio curator — and who he met along the way.

Brazil’s Orchestral Crisis
by Norman Lebrecht, Slipped Disc
Drama, classical style. Conductor who forced many musicians to re-audition for their seats now has to take a reduced role with the orchestra.

Through Static, The Voice of History
NPR
The first commercial recording!

Does a new classical recording exploit 9/11?
Wall Street Journal
More drama! A bunch of people are angry that Steve Reich’s new album displays an image of the twin towers.

Opera Takes the Heat with a Little Help from Gatorade
by Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times
The trials and tribulations of rehearsing a summer outdoor opera.

Bach and My Father

Cariwyl Hebert — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:03:01 +0000

Last week my dear friend Holly shared a poem she came across in Writer’s Almanac. It’s simple beauty speaks for itself, and I wanted to share it with all of you.

Bach and My Father
by Paul Zimmer

Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care—
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.

“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
My father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”

“Bach and My Father” by Paul Zimmer, from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited. © The University of Georgia Press, 2007.

If you were never curious about J.S. Bach‘s Brandenburg Concerti before, you probably are now! Here is the most famous segment of Bach’s Brandenburg Conerti–Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, First Movement:

Classical Music and Cinema: Pachelbel and “Ordinary People”

Kevs — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:19:25 +0000

Pachelbel’s Canon. Where would weddings, high school graduations or any public celebration of passage be without it? You’ve heard it if you’ve ever played in an orchestra. Heck, you know PC if you’ve ever seen an orchestra. It’s formal name is “Canon in D major”, its composer a German named Johann Pachelbel. But if you say “The song you always hear at weddings” most people will know what you mean.

That ubiquity is why I love Robert Redford’s choice of the piece to bookend his directorial debut, 1980s Ordinary People. It’s the first time I know of that the piece of classical music most yoked to celebrations has been the soundtrack to a divorce.

Redford adapted Ordinary People the movie from Ordinary People, the young adult novel by Judith Guest. Both concern the autumn and winter’s passing of a Chicago family in the wake of an older sons death and a younger son’s suicide attempt. The project was an orchard of beginnings–Guest had won the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize (for best first novel by an American woman) four years earlier, and Redford and star Timothy Hutton both received Oscars for their maiden trip in their respective screen roles.

Ordinary People itself is about one very sad march to an ending. The Jarrett family are in the early days of their own extinction as the sadness of the past reveals how ill-equipped they are to stand together in its aftermath. The clip I’ve included comes from the film’s final scenes where the mother, Beth Jerrett, leaves the family and is not coming back. Pachelbel’s Canon comes in at about 9:05 and is unmistakable.

The same cannot be said for its composer. Johann Pachelbel enjoyed considerable fame in his lifetime (the Baroque music era of the mid 17th century) both as a musician and a teacher (several of his students were the siblings of J.S. Bach). But his music wasn’t paid much attention by scholars until the early 1900s. Canon in D, the only canon Pachelbel ever composed, was thought to have been originally recorded for the wedding of Bach’s older brother. A 1970 recording by French composer Jean-Francois Pailliard brought it roaring back to popularity in the modern era.

It’s hard to believe that music as widely known as Pachelbel’s Canon needed a second chance at life. It’s fairly unlikely also that Robert Redford knew this about the piece when he chose it. Nonetheless the choice manages to both retell the piece’s own story and add another dimension to Ordinary People’s.

Redford selected the Pachelbel’s Canon as the film’s lead-in and coda. Like much great film music it doubles back on itself, commenting on the movie while still supporting its narrative. You might grin in recognition or nod when the piece underscores the film’s opening, a reverent yet melancholy montage of the falling leaves of late fall. But when it reappears at the end, your face might twist.

Why is a canon associated so permanently with celebration and marriage concluding a story of a family’s collapse? Perhaps the music hints at the ending also being about the rebirth of another family, between father and son, based on forgiveness more than regret. Perhaps Conrad and Calvin Jarrett have a another shot at a different kind of life. The canon that plays them off into that possibility certainly did.

Classical Music in Film: Wagner + Apocalypse Now

Kevs — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:34:53 +0000

Today we begin a new series here at Salon97 on the role of classical music in cinema. Our first case study: Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in the famous helicopter assault from Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

In his 1979 review of Apocalypse Now, Roger Ebert called the scene above “simply the greatest movie battle scene ever filmed.” I’m with him on that one and not because of its pacing, photography or that you could watch it 15 times in a row and not bore once. Try muting the sound and it’s still great cinema. Now turn it back up and the music takes a great battle scene and gives it another life–as historical double entendre and a microcosm for the film’s thoughts on war itself. In a hail of strings we all recognize, the triumphant arrival of our military becomes a ironic anti-climax, a white horse dragging a chariot piled with corpses.

“Ride of the Valkyries” opens the final act of the second opera in Wagner’s enormous four-opera “Ring Cycle.” The Valkyries (Goddesses of war and battle in Norse mythology) have gathered on a mountain peak to transport fallen soldiers to the underworld. Artistic renderings of the moment often capture the Valkryies as an assemblage of warriors–helmeted and bearing spears–striding across the sky on flying horses. It’s no great leap from there to the mid-air swarming of military helicopters (the flying horse of pre-computerized warfare) in Coppola’s overture to an attack on a Vietnamese fishing village.

He did not stop there. Coppola had done his research and knew that both Nazi tankers and Lufftwaffe pilots listened to “Ride of the Valkyries” over their radios in preparation for battle. The Third Reich’s propaganda office had also employed the piece as the soundtrack to many its wartime newsreels. Wagner himself was an avowed white supremacist and Hitler’s favorite composer. D.W. Griffith, America’s first great movie director, had “Valkyries” underscore as the climatic final scene in the first great American movie “Birth of a Nation”–the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback.

Much of “Ride of the Valkyries’s life outside the opera house had been linked to regimes of hated and bigotry. America certainly didn’t see itself as one of them in the late 1960s when its air force dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than on any country in the history of the world, before and since. But the way Coppola uses “Valkyries” here, cutting being warlike heralds and silence, between the excitement of battle and the murder it masks, thrills us then accusingly asks why. It’s a confrontation we cannot avoid, here or anywhere else in the film. That’s not because Apocalypse Now is an anti-war statement, at least not out loud. It instead looks at war as an anthropological study of ourselves as human beings and demands we confront what we see.

We cannot hide from what violence does to us. Not behind power, ritual or purpose the soaring but empty glory of “Ride of Valkyries” and the unsettling history it carries, insists we pay attention.

Boccherini: He’s a composer, not a cheese.

Cariwyl Hebert — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:17:30 +0000

Recently, details of a UK survey identified how little people seem to know about classical music. Even Sir Edward Elgar, who used to be featured on UK bank notes, was barely recognizable by whoever it was who took this survey.

Luigi Boccherini. Image courtesy of www.hoasm.org

My favorite part of all, however, is that four percent of those surveyed confused composer Luigi Boccherini with Bocconcini–the Italian water mozzarella balls.

image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Wow.

So here’s the deal. Bocconcini is that super tasty cheese that is so aptly paired with tomatoes and basil. Cool?

Luigi Boccherini was a bad-ass late-baroque era Italian composer who wrote lots of super amazing music, including a suite of guitar quintets (guitar + string quartet) that cease to amaze listeners to this day. He was also a cellist.

Feast your ears:

July is here. Happy American Composers Month!

Cariwyl Hebert — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:40:18 +0000

Yes! Today is the kickoff of Salon97′s American Composers Month. Our classical trivia text message today (sign up for free in the red box on the right-hand sidebar!) highlighted John Philip Sousa, so we thought it only appropriate to include a video of one of his marches.

“The Washington Post” was written as a tribute to the newspaper by the same name and gained worldwide popularity when listeners realized the piece had the perfect beat for dancing the two-step.