The legal and political obscenities surrounding the Wisconsin election have kept me awake at night. The whole package – making people choose between their health, potentially their life on the one hand and their right to vote own the other, reducing 170 polling stations to 5 within the largest city of the state, not sending absentee ballots in a timely fashion (somehow they got delayed, no one can tell why….) so that they could be dropped off by today, refusing to permit vote by mail in general, it all is too much. Too many poll minders excused themselves for fear of infection, being replaced by national guard soldiers, and lines extending for 4 plus hour waits had many people give up and go home. The (conservative!) German Handelsblatt called it the insanity election. And here is a summary of the implications – far reaching in ways that most people, myself included, did not grasp.

The US Supreme Court showed its partisan power in full force by not even allowing a delay to that absentee ballots could be received and could be counted, thus disenfranchising 10s of thousands of voters, while they themselves refuse to sit in the face of the viral anger – it all is in itself a step to undermine democracy, but also a sign of things to come. When we have barely come out of the trauma of these months, mourned the losses, should that be the case in November, we have to deal with voter suppression of un-imaginary large and cruel proportions.

In short, I got the blues. As an anti-depressant I decided to make it all about music today, singing the blues, as a form of protest, from prison labor, to the acknowledgment of racism, from a description of the feelings to an admission that they are hard to shake.

From prison:

to the acknowledgment of racism,

from a description of the feelings

to an admission that they are hard to shake.

And then: you look at this historical footage, and feel the spirit (whether you share the religious affirmations or not) and realize what people have overcome – enough to encourage us that we, too, can organize and join another movement to pursue what’s morally right.

Tired, yes. Scared, you bet. Feeling helpless, check. We simply cannot afford to give up, though. 2030 is rapidly approaching and 1930 is not what we want to repeat!

Montages all contain blue….

Yesterday was International Women’s Day and it seems appropriate to celebrate women this week – particular after we have seen female presidential candidacies collapse (among other factors) under the weight of ongoing misogyny.

I want to start the week with women composers, particularly since I stole today’s title from a series of musical compositions by Joan Tower. Tower, who teaches music at Bard college, composed the 6 part piece, a response to Copland’s Fanfare to the Common Man, between 1986 and 2016, dedicating it to women risk takers and adventurers. I chose the most recent segment, with full orchestra for us to contemplate.

Before I introduce two more uncommon women, female composers who left their mark in a male-dominated domain, I also want to stand in solidarity with the common women of Mexico, who organized an unprecedented strike today to demand attention for their (literally) existential struggle: the number of women murdered in their country (which leaves the even more incomprehensible numbers of hurt and raped women to the side.) Almost 4000 women were murdered in Mexico last year alone, some mere girls, 7 years old. The strikers ask every woman in the country to simply stay home and not do the work for one day – it would cost the Mexican economy 1.37 billion which might do more to start a serious national conversation and effect substantive changes across Mexican society than women’s voices alone. Alas, Mexico’s new president, touted a progressive, is not exactly supportive of the efforts. Details here and photographs today from the streets of 2017 Mexico City.

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Here are two courageous women providing us with empowerment and joy: let’s start with Clara Schumann’s Piano concerto in A Minor (Op.7). Wife to Robert, friend to Brahms, she actually composed this when she was 14 years old and performed it at age 16!

On the other end of the spectrum we find Florence Price whose Symphony No. 1 in E Minor was premiered in 1933, when she was in her mid 40s. It was the first symphony by a black female composer to be performed by a major American orchestra. Price suffered from the effects of racism in addition to gender bias. She pretended to be of Mexican descent to be admitted to the New England Conservatory; moved from Arkansa, her home, to Chicago when she was denied work and racial tensions and lynchings were threatening her family. Chicago friendships with Margaret Bonds and later Marian Anderson helped her music to be performed eventually.

Here is one of my favorites, Langston Hughes’ poem set to her music:

Songs to the Dark Virgin

by Langston Hughes

I 

Would 
That I were a jewel, 
A shattered jewel, 
That all my shining brilliants 
Might fall at thy feet, 
Thou dark one. 

II 

Would 
That I were a garment, 
A shimmering, silken garment, 
That all my folds 
Might wrap about thy body, 
Absorb thy body, 
Hold and hide thy body, 
Thou dark one. 

III 

Would 
That I were a flame, 
But one sharp, leaping flame 
To annihilate thy body, 
Thou dark one.

The poem is often interpreted as a black woman staring into the mirror, trying to hide her blackness by the shine of jewels, or the folds of her dress, to finally annihilate herself because her blackness cannot flourish in a racist world. Florence Price did not give in to that sentiment or give up – she provided the world with beautiful music that combined classical elements with those from her own tradition, spirituals and jazz. Tomorrow I will introduce other role models who also defied that despair. Things must, will change!

It’s Friday January 31, 2020, the end to an insanely wet, politically distressing week. It is the day of Brexit and the elevation of a US president to KING. Let’s wallow in art and nothing but art, to distract us. I am going to find paintings that inspired some classical music pieces – all you have to do is look and listen!

For the Senate:

‘The Just Upright Man is Laughed to Scorn’ by William Blake

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For you know who, who may end up in Bedlam, the insane asylum:

A Rake’s Progress (1733–1735) – 8 paintings and engravings by William Hogarth

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For the son in law of you know who who devised the steal of the century “peace” plan effectively creating Apartheid in the Middle East:

Der Totentanz by Hans Holbein

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For Friderike Heuer, assuring that the combination of a favorite painter, a favorite subject, a fun cartoon and some weird modernist German music has the weekend off to a better start.

Die Zwitschermaschine by Paul Klee

So far this week I have talked about the way sound can affect you, enrich you and bring you closer to the world that surrounds you, even when it comes in the guise of musical translation. Hm, I start sounding like I teach Intro Psych to first year college students on a M/W/F schedule again. Old habits die hard.

Today I thought it would be interesting to look at how sound, music really, translates a sense of spirituality. Modern music, that is, not the traditional beautiful chanting of the Eastern Orthodox Church, or the Baroque equivalent of Western religion or the cantorial accomplishments of Judaism and Islam.

The two examples I picked exist, of course, not in ahistorical space, and so are rooted in some aspects of faith traditions. But they bring something new.

The first is the music of Galina Ustvolkskaya (1919-2006,) a Russian composer who was closely linked to Shostakovitch in artistic, spiritual and personal ways (people always introduce her as his student, but many think the influence went in the other direction.) Her work was pretty much surpressed until Glasnost and has only been performed in its entirety in the West since the 1990s.

Her music is strange, using repeated blocks of sounds and unusual combinations of instruments (8 stand-up basses and piano and percussion?) The way rhythm and loudness hits you over the head explains why some critics called her The Lady with the hammer….

But here is the truly unusual part: her pieces require techniques that physically hurt the musicians, particularly the pianist: they inflict pain. Her instructions: “Strike the keys with the knuckles of the left hand (four fingers curved, thumb protruding at an angle), and ensure these strikes are clearly audible.”[Sonata No. 5] Or: each tone cluster should be struck with the edge of the hand,” the “flattened palm,” or the forearm (6th piano sonata.) You might wonder why anyone attends a concert that puts your own sensory apparatus under assault, or has you witness someone else, the performers, experience physical discomfort.

Or performs it, for that matter.

A fascinating study by Maria Cizmic, Performing Pain, Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe, points to the Russian composer’s dealing with the societal trauma of the Stalinist era, trying to reveal the truth of the people’s suffering. The author puts those compositional forces in the context of a term new to me, “Hesychasm, a kind of a monastic tradition of the Orthodox Christian tradition, a way of conceiving pain in a person’s life as having, ultimately, a kind of positive experience. Pain as redemption, compositions with sacralized suffering.” Music as a moral reckoning then, grounded in the spiritual traditions of asceticism.

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Here’s something less heavy – in fact unbelievably light: the music of Julian Loida. The interview linked below calls it music of introversion. But when you dig a bit on Loida’s website, you find a lot of connections to the beauty of church bells calling to service. It is no coincidence that he has a BA from Malboro College in music and religion. He is an all around talent, incorporation tons of different musical styles into his compositions which makes them fresh, different, but the most astounding thing is the tempo of his performances: his hands have wings.

Montages today are from a 2015 series Augentrost (Eyebright, gen. Euphrasia.)

And I’ll close with something more familiar from the spiritual realm, directed by the inimitable Marika Kuzma, to add some beauty to this day.

Since I couldn’t decide if Vienna, Paris or Berlin deserved the last slot of our mini series, I turned to Portland.

We have our very own resident composer of note, David Schiff. You can find out all about him in a wonderfully comprehensive essay written some years back by Brett Campbell here. This quote is a good introduction:

“The Bronx native, who turned 70 last month, credits his move away from the center of America’s musical universe to Oregon for enabling him to find national renown. Oregon’s best known living composer, and probably the American composer most accomplished at creating viable hybrids of classical music and jazz, Schiff is also one of the country’s major composers of Jewish music (including klezmer) for classical forces. His music has been performed and recorded by major orchestras and ensembles around the country.”

More recently we can go to an informative, if weirdly titled, interview with the now retired Reed professor, describing how he got to where he is today. Worth a read, if only for the sentence “I gave myself permission to be eclectic.”

As someone whose middle name is eclectic I had to stop and think for a moment. I never saw that attitude as a choice, something to be allowed or suppressed by some cognitive super-ego. Happens, sort of, more like a force of nature. But I digress.

Schiff’s music is an amalgam of many styles, but carried by an overarching theme: expressiveness. His writing, on the other hand, is incisive. In addition to his books about Elliot Carter, George Gershwin and most recently Duke Ellington, he has published articles on a wide variety of topics that have always enriched my understanding of music.

This year saw a three-concert retrospective to celebrate David’s retirement from Reed. The program was proof positive for the diverse nature of his compositions, as well as of the many friendships and working relationships he has forged along the way – Kaul Auditorium practically vibrated with adoration. Let’s listen to some samples – it is actually hard to find public videos of the work, music seems tightly guarded. I wish I could offer a full concert just to share the variety.

Early opera Gimple the Fool:

And here is an excerpt from Stomp

I could not find one of my favorite pieces played by Regina Carter, 4 sisters: concerto for Jazz violin – but here is a sample of her work as a musician.

Another genre-defying composer from PDX is Kenji Bunch. When he performs his own work on the viola you find yourself forgetting to breathe. The emotional impact is more than matched by the intellectual challenge of his music, though, which makes me a fan, of course.

Photographs were taken yesterday early morning on the waterfront. The river was still and reflective, until a jumping fish or a speedboat broke waves. It’s own kind of music.

And Halloween was celebrated in true PDX fashion.

Quick, name a Dutch painter. Right, the one that came immediately to mind was…. let me guess: Rembrandt? van Gogh? Bosch? Hals? van Dyck? Vermeer? Brueghel? Mondrian? Shall I go on?

Quick, name a Dutch composer.

Yup, I couldn’t either.

Why would that be, given the geographic closeness to all of the middle-european countries that had a flourishing music scene through the centuries? Why, even the Scandinavian countries, further removed, had great composers that come readily to mind.

Here are some possible reasons that people have speculated about, with no particular scientific evidence for any one. (And some of today’s musings can be found here, following this week’s guide to musical cities.)

• Holland is a small country, (less than ⅓ of the population of Germany, for example. (Hmm. Plenty of great musical performers and conductors hail from Holland. Population size cannot be the answer.)

• Music from the Baroque period on depended on a rich and generous court-scene. Composers were supported and financed by dukes and kings throughout Europe, who needed compositions for their great orchestras used for lavish entertaining. The Netherlands never had a big court culture (being a Republic until 1815.) No aristocracy, no cultural production….

• Across Europe, 19th century nationalism inspired the “greats,” think Beethoven, Wagner, Sibelius, as some examples. Holland constructed a national culture way earlier, starting in the 16th century, with much energy devoted to colonialism.

• The Netherlands were a Calvinist nation since the 16th century. This form of protestantism is a theological system centering on human sinfulness and God’s sovereignty. Calvin was intensely opposed to using images in worship and that extended to music. Singing was allowed but only if it used the words of the Bible. Calvinists are often equated with puritans, which allows me to cite one of my favorite H.L.Mencken quotes: A “puritan” is a person with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. (For what it’s worth, here is something interesting and critical on the current US calvinist revival.) My money is on this potential explanation….

So what does a search for Dutch composers reveal? Some contemporary greats: the minimalists Louis Andriessen, Simeon ten Holt and the microtonal composer Ton de Leeuw.

Here are some samples: ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, the four grand pianos a sight to behold. Andriessen’s De Staat (about Plato’s Republic) played by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble. And finally de Leeuw’s Trio. Anyone of these will wake you up on a cold Thursday morning…..

Photographs are, of course, from Holland. And speaking of Holland: some excerpts from old Dutch paintings (photographed this summer at an exhibit of 16th century dutch naval paintings) found their way into montages for my 2020 calendar. If you want to look at the prettiest pictures of hubris, greed and environmental destruction, you can order one ($30). Proceeds go to Street Roots this year.

Let’s mention Antonio Vivaldi – and then move on. Of all the musicians associated with Venice (where he was born and taught music many years at an orphanage) he is probably the most frequently broadcast. Honestly if I go to my grave without ever hearing the Four Seasons again, I won’t complain.

Then again, I mentioned an orphanage – here is a report from 1739:

The transcendent music is that of the ospedali. There are four of them, made up of illegitimate and orphaned girls and those whose parents are not in a position to raise them. They are brought up at the expense of the state and trained solely to excel in music. They sing like angels and play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello, and the bassoon…They are cloistered like nuns…about forty girls take part in each concert.”

—Charles de Brosses,
from Le Président de Brosses en Italie: Lettres familières
écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740 (1858)

Females played an enormous role in the musical development of the city, and not just the ones behind convent walls: the female madrigal singers and the prima donnas of the opera houses were also highly respected.

My wonderful source in the Guardian has so many more interesting composers or musicians in store for this ravaged city (lately most of all by tourists and climate change) that I have a hard time making choices. Some music written there and some music written about La Serinissmia as the city is also known, is simply ravishing.

There is Monteverdi, of course, and there is Cavalli, less known, and luckily there is a contemporary Venice Music Project whose 9 musicians (with soprano Liesl Odenweller) bring the baroque music beautifully to life with periods instruments. Or they just make it up – based on old manuscripts and letters that they found. Listen for yourself:

Franz Liszt wrote music in Venice, where his son-in-law Richard Wagner often resided, composed and eventually died in 1883.

Here is Orson Wells reading from Wagner’s journals written in Venice.

Benjamin Britten visited in 1949 and one of his very last compositions was an opera Mann’s Death in Venice. Here is an excerpt performed at La Fenice, the opera house that burned through arson in 1994, and was re-opened 10 years later.

And then there is Thomas Adés, who is neither Italian nor wrote in Venice, but the title of one of his pieces gives me an excuse to introduce him. The first movement of his work Arcadiana is called Venezia Notturna. We will listen to something else instead, though, with him conducting – I have been hooked on Concentric Circles for some days now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVG5R6sIobo It is magic.

And a further connection to Venice exists: I have been running in concentric circles around there, a few years back, exploring on my own, living in a tiny garret at the Grande Canal and getting sore shoulders from never ever putting my camera down. I’ll leave the palaces and churches and decaying beauty for another time – picked photographs today that show the city is a working city dependent on the canals having enough water or not too much which has been an increasing problem with the climate crisis.

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As I mentioned yesterday, this week will ride on borrowed material. Here is the source article about musical cities, and of course my first choice was my former hometown of Hamburg, Germany. Musical selections are my own.

Photographs are of the Elbphilharmonie, a controversial concert hall that opened a few years back, and surrounding neighborhoods. (For reviews of the hall go here and here. I have also written about it some time back here.)

As for music and musicians associated with Hamburg, there are quite a few.

Georg Friedrich Telemann lived and composed in Hamburg in the 1700s and was musical director of the city’s churches, followed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, his godson.

Here is Telemann’s music for the admirals of this port city:

Here is CPE Bach’s Hamburg music:

Johannes Brahms was born in 1833, and composed his first piano sonata here. (So was Felix Mendelssohn, but he moved away as a toddler.)

And if a symphony takes 14 years to be completed, we should pay it tribute, particularly with this spectacular conducting: Brahms’ 1st, by Furtwängler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw266Ox-N8k

The city drew a lot of musical talent even if they didn’t live there for long or only came for premiering their work. Gustav Mahler, for example, was chief conductor at the Hamburg State Opera and premiered Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin there in 1890.

Let’s look at another Hamburg Great, John Neumeier, choreographing Gustav Mahler.

Erich Korngold‘s Die Tote Stadt opened in Hamburg at the Stadttheater with Egon Pollack conducting (and the same day in Cologne under Otto Klemperer, there was fierce competition…) As one of the greatest hits of the 1920s it circled the globe within two years of its premiere, including several performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The Berlin première was on 12 April 1924 conducted by George Szell. The work was banned by the Nazi régime because of Korngold’s Jewish ancestry and after World War II it fell into obscurity.

Here is the full opera in a praised production.

And here is Korngold himself, improvising on some of the themes of the opera.

György Ligeti was professor of composition at the city’s music academy in the 70s and 80s. One of his last works was the Hamburg Concerto, for solo horn and chamber orchestra.

And here you can see and hear what Ligeti‘s Le Grand Macabre sounds like in the Elbphilharmonie. Just be glad you sit in your own, more comfortable chair….The (full) opera is something else!

If you happen to be visiting the city and interested in classical music, it’s worth your while to seek out the Composers’ Quarter an association of various museums all in the same place offering interactive insights about Brahms, Telemann, CPE Bach, Mahler and Johann Adolf Hasse ( who I know nothing about….check that for my next visit!)