Listening Back: cultural reflections on music
”Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.”
Aleksander Hemon, The World And All That It Holds
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“The lights are going out”: Serkin, Busch Quartet, Brahms
It must have been a Thursday in 1977 or 78. After school, my father drove me to my clarinet lesson with my new teacher – John Melvin, who was Head of Music at Oxford High School. He was a warm and encouraging mentor and taught music as an expressive language, not overly concerned with the…
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Light refreshment: the piano singles (ISCM 1922/23)
As an antidote to my previous two posts, and to show that modern music wasn’t all about serious soul-searching, here is a playlist of 14 minutes of pure delight: five short piano pieces, chosen for performance at the first festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music in 1922 and 1923.
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Air from another planet: seriously modern string quartets (ISCM 1922/23)
Unless you have three and a half hours to spare and a particularly robust constitution, I would not recommend listening to this playlist in one go. A dozen pieces for string quartet performed at the two earliest festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Salzburg (year 0 in 1922, year 1 in 1923)…
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Six of the best: violin sonatas for a new age (ISCM 1922/23)
In the early years of the twentieth century, the violin achieved iconic status in European culture in an almost literal sense. Whereas Renaissance painters looked to the Madonna and Child as worthy subjects for art, modernist artists – putting their faith in more secular imagery – often turned to the violin to represent one of…
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Mahler steals a march… or maybe not
Massed high woodwinds, a barrage of brass in lockstep, batteries of snare-drum-heavy percussion: the soundscapes of Mahler’s symphonies are pervaded by the specific sound-world of the Austro-Hungarian military wind band, and dominated by the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tropes of the military march in particular. There is hardly a Mahler symphony – and first movement…
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My time with Strauss
Richard Strauss was born in June 1864. I was born in June 1964. In a blog series about recordings made 100 years ago, that chronological nicety gives me a little thrill, as, with a stretch of imagination, I can put myself in Strauss’s polished shoes in 1922. (Though, unfortunately, I don’t have the Mercedes. And…
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Do it Again… and again… and again… and again
The 23-year-old George Gershwin was already a prolific composer by the time The French Doll opened on Broadway in February 1922. The musical comedy ran for 120 performances, but its lasting legacy was the single song that Gershwin wrote for the show: Do it Again, with racy lyrics by Buddy de Silva. The song already…
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String quartets, poetry, and cups of tea: Frank Bridge and Ivor Gurney
British classical music in the early twentieth century was dominated by the teaching of an Irishman: Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 – 1924), Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music since its founding in 1883, and Professor of Music at Cambridge University since 1887, where he established Music as an academic subject requiring a…
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“You’re in the right church, but in the wrong pew”
This is a woman with attitude. This is a band with attitude. Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds were launched into the world of recorded music as the real sound of African American jazz in the early 20s after several years of an often fairly tidied up version in more respectable arrangements by mostly white…
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Beethoven and Rilke – “existence is still enchanted”
By 1922 the 10-inch 78 rpm disc was pretty much established as the norm for commercial recording. The 3 minutes or so that could fit on one side set the template for pop songs that continues to this day. Classical recordings were often released on 12-inch discs, which allowed for an extra minute or two,…
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Modernism in miniature?
Here we are at post no. 12 in this series on recordings of 1922 and there’s been little mention of the m-word. 1922 is often seen as a crucial year in the history of Modernism – the year that saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. And both writers were…
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Naftule Brandwein and Joseph Roth: sketches of a lost Europe
This is the music of borders. Or the crossing of borders. The great klezmer clarinettist, Naftule Brandwein crossed the maritime border of the USA in April 1909 to join his brother Israel who was already living in New York. But his musical journey had begun much earlier – from birth in fact, as he was…
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Rhythm is life: Paderewski and the Art of Rubato
During these dark times in Europe my recent posts have dealt with music and politics, so who better to listen to next than one of the greatest musicians of his age who was also an international statesman and passionate advocate of the right of nations to determine their own future? Ignacy Jan Paderewski (born 1860…
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On Being Hu(ber)man
If you’re a world-class musician at the height of your fame, and your country, or the country where you perform, commits crimes against humanity, what do you do or say? If you want to take an ethical stance, there are essentially two alternatives: the Furtwängler option and the Huberman option. As the Nazi Party tightened…
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Voices of Ukraine 1922 – Part 2
It’s never possible to separate art and culture from politics. Any attempt to do so is itself a political act. The only question is whether those politics are benign and welcoming to all, or hostile and discriminatory to groups or individuals. Cosmopolitanism versus local or national culture is a false dichotomy when it comes to…
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Voices of Ukraine 1922 – Part 1
For a brief moment following the collapse of empires – Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman, after the First World War – an independent Ukrainian state existed: the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Ukrainian National Chorus was formed to promote Ukrainian culture abroad and, in a triumph of what must nave been very challenging post-war logistics, it toured…
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First the smoulder, then the glow, then the blaze
“Tone, tune, time reading, technique and expression of the finest culture.” These were the adjudicators’ comments when St Hilda’s Colliery Band won the Crystal Palace 1,000 Guinea Trophy and the Championship of the British Empire (later called simply National Championship) for the third time in 1921. The band had won in 1912, came second in…
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Will the real Mr Rachmaninoff please stand up?
A masterly transcription of an orchestral piece by Bizet. With minimal changes to the original (written 50 years before these recordings, in 1872) – just a few chromaticisms in the figurations and an occasional spicy chord – it has been transformed into a Rachmaninoff-sounding piano miniature. It’s as though Rachmaninoff recognised his doppelgänger in the…
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“At night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep,” sang The Beatles
A Jewish Russian-Hungarian band leader (Dajos Béla) and his Berlin-based salon orchestra (Künstler-Kapelle) playing an Arabian shimmy (“Arabischer Shimmy”) by an American composer (Ted Snyder) written in response to a book by an English author (Edith Maud Hull), and made popular by a hit silent film (The Sheik), starring an Italian actor (Rudolph Valentino). What…
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“The Greatest Woman Violinist the World Has Ever Produced. Unknown.”
Two sisters from Vienna. Erika, about 17 years old, sits casually – her right leg underneath her, holding a copy of the Musical Courier. She wears a sailor-suit ribbon to emphasise her youth. Her smile still has a hint of adolescent self-consciousness about it. Alice, 8 years older, sits on the arm of the sofa…
Listening Back 