I learned late yesterday that my SXSW panel submission, StART-up 101: Core Conversation for New Arts Organizations, is a confirmed presentation for the upcoming March 11-15, 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference.

I’m super excited to be a part of it and hope to see you there! More details to follow.

image courtesy of wikimedia.org

b. Oct. 24, 1929 in Charleston, West Virginia

George Crumb, American composer extraordinaire, engaged in quite an extensive musical education — he studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Berlin Conservatory. Crumb received a Rockefeller grant in 1964 and was a composer in residence at the Buffalo Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Most of Crumb’s music can be described as eerie and bone-chilling, and he is certainly one of the more avant-garde composers featured in our Composer of the Week segment. His compositions reference art-music, hymns, folk music and non-western music, and they also commonly employ various vocal techniques along with symbolic, mystical and theatrical components.

Crumb taught at the University of Pennsylvania for over 30 years. He was a Fullbright scholar and won the Pulitzer prize for his work “Echoes of Time and the River” in 1968. Crumb is also a 2001 GRAMMY award winner and was the 2004 Musical America “Composer of the Year.”

Ancient Voices of Children:

Vox Balaenae:

image courtesy of last.fm

b. June 29, 1911 in New York, NY
d. December 24, 1975 in Los Angeles, CA

Bernard Herrmann began studying composition and conducting at NYU while still in high school. He went on to Juilliard where he remained for two years, however, he found the school to be too conservative. In 1933, Herrmann formed the New Chamber Orchestra, which was comprised of unemployed musicians. He used this group to practice his conducting abilities as well as test his compositions. In 1934, Herrmann was hired as an assistant to Johnny Green, a conductor and composer with CBS. From 1936-40 he composed incidental music for episodes of “The Columbia Workshop” radio show, “The Mercury Theater on the Air” (directed by Orson Welles), and “The Campbell Playhouse” (also directed by Welles).

This work led to Wells commissioning Bernard Herrmann to write the score for Citizen Kane. Herrmann went on to compose for Fox studios for 12 years, and upon beginning to work with Alfred Hitchcock and MGM, his career became quite successful. He composed the score for Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and also TV’s Rawhide, The Twilight Zone, and The Alfred Hitchcock Half Hour.

Herrmann was one of the few Hollywood composers of his time who orchestrated his own works. He saw this aspect of music as the composer’s musical thumbprint. That said, his orchestration was often unusual. In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) he used two theremins, an electric violin, bass, guitar, 4 harps, 4 pianos, percussion and brass. In Journey to the Center of the Earth he used 5 organs. Herrmann’s concert and operatic works did not receive nearly as much attention as his film compositions.

Socially, he was known to be egotistical and difficult to get along with. Herrmann would only compose for films in which he was at liberty to write what he wished. As such, when Hitchcock once asked him to write a score with more “pop” sound and did not like Herrmann’s result, Herrmann refused to change the composition and never worked with him again. He won the 1941 Academy Award for The Devil and Daniel Webster. He received a GRAMMY and Oscar nomination for his score to Martin Scorsese’s film, Taxi Driver.

And now for some listening! A couple of Bernard Herrmann’s best known works are below.

The theme from Psycho:

The theme from Vertigo:

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.

image courtesy of bbc.co.uk

Antonin Dvorak was basically a rock star. So much so that some computer keyboards were named after him.

b. September 8, 1841 in Prague

d. May 1, 1904 in Prague

Dvorak was an early musical talent and made quick gains on the violin upon beginning his studies at age 5. He studied at the only organ school in Prague and later became accomplished on the violin and viola. He played in the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra until 1871 when he began composing.

In 1871 he wrote the song cycle “Cypress Trees” to woo one of his students, Josefina Cermakova. He ended up marrying her sister Anna instead since Josefina married another man. Dvorak had 9 children.

Dvorak began being recognized as an important composer in the early 1870s. He received an honorary degree from Cambridge and directed the National Conservatory of Music in NY from 1892 to 1895. He wrote Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” in winter and spring of 1893 and returned to Europe in 1895. He later directed the Conservatory in Prague until he died in 1904.

He wrote 9 symphonies, a set of symphonic poems, concerti, several operas and was greatly influenced by composers such as Smetana, Wagner and Brahms, who was the most influential for him. Brahms and Dvorak became friends after Dvorak won a composing competition three years in a row. Brahms was a judge at the competition. After the two became friends, Brahms had tremendous influence on Dvorak’s work. Brahms contacted the European publisher Simrock on behalf of Dvorak, and the following year a few of Dvorak’s works were published and became very successful. These included the Serenade for Strings, 5th Symphony, String Quartet No. 2 and Piano Trio No. 1.

Most of the Dvorak photos I found were either incredibly pixelated, or were of Dvorak keyboards. Composers first, keyboards second. Okay? Additionally I came across some strange images:

Mozart ≠ Dvorak. Just sayin’.

image courtesy of www.chinaoilpainting.com

Czechoslovakia (prior to becoming the Czech Republic) released a Dvorak coin. Way to represent!

image courtesy of www.tady.cz

What???

image courtesy of 3.bp.blogspot.com

A couple great Dvorak pieces to listen to:

New World Symphony, 4th mvt. Who hears Jaws??

Serenade for Strings, tempo di valse:

image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Johannes Brahms was a star of the Romantic Era and was also really super cool. His emphatically expressive music is an absolute pleasure to listen to.

b. May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany
d. April 3, 1897 in Vienna, Austria

Brahms began studying piano at age six and also studied cello and horn. As a young person he enjoyed romantic German poetry and the music of Bach and Beethoven. He also collected manuscripts of European folk songs in his teen years.

In the 1860s Brahms spent much of his time in Vienna but also went on many concert tours to supplement his income.

Brahms was very close with fellow composers Robert and Clara Schumann. Upon Robert’s eventual institutionalization, Brahms fell in love with Clara and pursued her after Robert’s death. She declined to be involved in a romance with Brahms.

In addition to his love for Clara Schumann, Brahms also had deep infatuation for Julie Schumann, Robert and Clara Schumann’s daugther. He also nearly proposed to a young singer, and he quit teaching piano lessons to another young student because he was so deeply in love with her.

In 1872 Brahms became the music director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. He remained there for three years. In general, Brahms tried to avoid taking official positions so that he could remain dedicated to composing. Much of Brahms’ career was spent trying to master two genres dominated by Beethoven — the string quartet and the symphony. Over the course of his career, Brahms conducted concerts in major cities in Germany, Poland, The Netherlands and Switzerland. He later became known in England and the US.

As he became more well-known he began receiving honors which included the Bavarian Order of Maximilian for Science and Art (1873, with Wagner), the Gold Medal of the Philharmonic Society in London (1877), a knighthood in the Prussian Order ‘Pour le Mérite’ for Science and Art (1887), the Knight’s Cross of the Imperial Austrian Order of Leopold (1889), honorary membership of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn (1889), and the Austrian Order for Art and Science (1895). In 1876 he declined an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge because he was unwilling to travel to England.

Brahms became wealthy as a result of payment for compositions and performances and his habit of leading a modest lifestyle. He was very generous and supported scholarly projects, young musicians and family. Brahms had tons of friends, including musicians, writers, artists, scholars and music-loving members of the professional and wealthy business classes. He was good friends with composers Karl Goldmark and Johann Strauss, German poet Klaus Groth, Swiss poet and writer Josef Victor Widmann. German poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Heyse and Swiss writer Gottfried Keller were friends who also supplied Brahms with texts for his songs. Despite having a multitude of friends, Brahms became prickly with those who invaded his privacy or were not sincere in their associations with him.

Posthumously, Brahms’ music was very influential. Some composers had trouble developing past what Brahms created and other, mostly younger, composers such as Busoni, Hindemith, Schoenberg and Weill utilized Brahms’ idioms to pave the path for the beginning of modernism.

Where to start

Brahms has a brilliant collection of Romantic Era symphonic and chamber music. His symphonies are a great place to start. Symphony No. 2 is a personal favorite, but all are wonderful to listen to. You’ll also find a bit of comedic value in his Academic Festival Overture, as it was written as a thank you to the University of Breslau after he received an honorary doctorate from the institution and contains many college drinking songs, according to Brahms. Of course, his chamber music is great too. Check out his trios and string quartets and see what you think.

Academic Festival Overture:

Symphony No. 2:

Image courtesy of wikimedia.org

We’re squeezing in one last Fantasia salute before the month ends! Beethoven’s segment of the film truly rocks, so we couldn’t pass this one up. Yay Beethoven and yay Fantasia!

b. December 16, 1770 in Bonn, Germany

d. March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria

Ludwig van Beethoven was regarded as the most important composer in the transition between the Classical and Romantic period of music and is also thought to be the most important composer ever to live.

He came from a musical family — both his father and grandfather sang in choruses. After the death of his grandfather, Beethoven’s father declined into alcoholism and Beethoven became the breadwinner for the household.

Though his father tried to turn young Ludwig into a piano prodigy like Bach, the effort was unsuccessful. Obviously, Beethoven’s career did not lack success though, as we well know. He began working as an assistant court organist in 1782 and in 1783 became a continuo player for the opera in Bonn. He also studied in Vienna with Mozart, who was very impressed with Beethoven’s capabilities. In fact, Beethoven’s improvisation skills were so good that he surpassed the great Mozart with his abilities in this genre.

We owe gratitude to Beethoven for many things. Prior to his career, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Many of the amazing chamber works and orchestral works we’ve come to know and love may not have been written if it wasn’t for Beethoven’s great influence.

Beethoven is famous for many wonderful compositions, but today we focus on his Symphony No. 6, Pastoral. Here’s Beethoven’s clip from Disney’s Fantasia:

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.

image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Paul Dukas wrote the iconic and amazing work The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. As we continue our salute to Disney’s Fantasia, he is our Composer of the Week!

b. Oct 1, 1865 in Paris

d. May 17, 1935 in Paris

Paul Dukas studied piano as a child but was not particularly talented. Upon falling ill at age 14, Dukas began composing. He subsequently began studying formally at a conservatory, where he learned about orchestration and conducting in addition to improving his composition skills.

Dukas led a dual career as a music critic and a composer. He composed symphonies, operas, overtures and chamber works. Over time, Dukas became enveloped in a growing self-criticism which impacted his ability to compose.

Though he only published 14 works (there are another couple dozen unpublished and destroyed pieces), he will never be forgotten for the famous and fabulous The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s also one of the most famous segments in Fantasia!

Disney’s rendition of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

image courtesy of www.tchaikovsky-research.net

We continue our salute to Disney’s Fantasia with the ever-fabulous Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. With so many amazing works in his repertoire, how could we not love him?

Tchaikovsky began studying piano at age five and went on to train to work as a civil servant. Against his family’s wishes he discontinued his studies and entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Despite Tchaikovsky’s great career success he battled depression, suppressed his homosexuality and had a disastrous marriage. His nephew was one of the great loves of his life. In tandem with the drama of his personal life, Tchaikovsky received numerous honors for his work.