Britten ghosts

Certainly, Benjamin Britten is one of the most eminent and influential figures in Twentieth century Music. He is one of the best English composers and perhaps, the one that truly translate the English language into music. His relationship with many of the most important poets and authors take him to create music that in a way alters and have a serious engagement with the literature text which is based on. This level of relationship with literature and music is one of Britten’s more particular and amazing characteristics. His close relationship with literature put Britten’s music into two realms, the music and the literature one. 

In 1961, Britten spent most of the year writing the War Requiem, which was finally performed at the end of May in 1961 and become one of Britten’s more acclaimed works. The Requiem is conceived in three planes: a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass for soprano, chorus and orchestra, another setting for male soloists and a chamber orchestra based on poems by Wilfred Owen, a war poet of WWI, and a third setting that evokes the innocence unstained by war, a separate choir of boys voices.

Britten’s Requiem is not meant to be taken as a piece of pro-British-war glorification. It is Britten most clearly statement of his pacifism and his anti-war convictions. The piece is a public and artistic denunciation of all the horrors of war. It is also truly significant that Britten intention with the requiem is to evoke reconciliation between the conflict nations after the WWII. He wrote the piece for three specific soloists- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya) and a British tenor (Peter Pears). This demonstrated his conviction with peace and it symbolized the importance of forgiveness and unity.

The text that Britten used to combine them with the Latin traditional mass for the death text was Wilfred Owen’s poetry. He was a World War I foot soldier who was killed in France one week before the Armistice. His poetry is strange, realistic and obscure, it is a clearly reflection of a man struggling with guilty and conflictive feelings. His topics denounced the life in the trenches and the horrors of poison gas. During his time Owen’s poetry help to change public perception of the war and it changes the literary conception of patriotic verses. Owen poetry is full of truthful, his poetry doesn’t feel conciliatory but it is certainly a warning for all generation.

Britten orchestration for the Requiem enhances the importance of Owen text and it represents and communicates the message. The Performers are divided into three distinct planes and are physically to create the atmosphere of distant. . The soloists who sing Owen poetry unify the piece with the mass of the death tradition and war poetry. The use of a tritone between C and F# also works as  a unify motif during all the piece. The boys choir and the organ gives the sensation of inhuman sounds almost like a distant eco, perhaps emulating how does the war sounds.

Britten Requiem is one of his finest examples on how he manage to fusses literature and music and make it a one being. His ghosts hover around in the form of a neurotic governess, an elder writer obsessed with a young boy, a sailor mad by guilt and the spirit of a crazy French prodigy. All that it remains is to simply listen.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Wilfred Owen.

The Doomed Generation

How can we imagine all of the horror that the WWII left behind. The level of physical destruction that the war shows was extensive, the world and its inhabitants seemed literally to have been torn to pieces. Music after war suffer perhaps, it biggest change in its aesthetics. The general statement was to rebuild a new musical world out of the ashes and horror of WWII. The task was taken by young composers whose own experience with the war made this change possible.
It seems that this generation of post-war composers were at the same time, living the duality of have all the freedom to make musical discoveries but at the same time, the darkness mood that the war left was dangerously faced them with the crude reality of finding “nothing”.
The wartime devastation and the beginning of the atomic age after the 1945 treaties exacerbated the pessimistic and subdued tone. The new tendency in arts was looking for a total distrust with the past. The physical and cultural ruin that the war caused could be only reconstructed with a radical break and make possible a new start.
Composers like Messiaen, Stockhausen and Xenaquis was leading these radical changes in post-war aesthetics. Their own experience with war makes them fearless and their stylistic search reach large scales. The new aesthetics were leaving completely behind the old classical traditions. New laws were being writing. Music started to become more violent, direct and crude. New tools and stylistics recourses was being used to change for completely music structures. Fierce rhythms, total serialism, indeterminism, futurism, silence as a unitary musical motif, complexity, density, all of this new musical forms were reflecting the darkness of the post-war mood but at the same time was opening the gates to a new whole world of musical experimentation.
It was in these extraordinary circumstances that one of the most emblematic compositions of the war times took place. During 1940, Messiaen was captured by the German army and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Since he was with three other professional musicians, a violinist, a cellist and a clarinetist, he decides to use this peculiar ensemble to create his, Quatuor pur la fin du Temps . The quartet was premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz, Germany, outdoors in the rain on January 15 of 1941 with an audience of about four hundred fellow prisoners of was and prison guards. Although the piece according to some scholars could remain peripheral by comparison to other Messiaen’s works like the Turangalila Symphony, its major importance remains on the historical context that give birth to it and in its special significance for the composers that belong to the war generation.
The piece is inspired by a text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1-2, 5-7, King James Version). The piece is divided in eight movements and each of them has a special quotation made by Messiaen. The piece reflects Messian stylistic mélange and it is build base in his own ideas in theory and harmony. The first harmonies in the piece certainly have a crystal quality and although it has some frenetic moments in general the mood in the piece remains very reflexive and obscure. It is a perfect representation of what must have seemed like the end of times.

Shostakovich and the infinite sadness....

Knock, knock, who’s there? The NKVD…  

Shostakovich was one of many Russian composers that, during Staling times, suffer of censorship and constant fear of being arrest, exile of worse. His work was labeled of being intentionally discordant, muddled or extremely formalism for the state aesthetics. This abuse made Shostakovich’s life a living hell for many years.

During these times many of Shostakovich’s friends, patrons and family members, suddenly disappeared, drowned into the maelstrom of Stalinist repression. It is amazing how Shostakovich managed to keep, in a way, his sanity and at the same time, write some of the most remarkable music.

Shostakovich, according to many scholars and biographers, was an obsessive man. Full of strange habits, tics and grimaces. He was, certainly, very vulnerable and receptive, an important feature of his genius. It is unimaginable how a man like him could survive all the repression and horror of Stalin’s era. His life, like most of his compositions, were full of antagonism, at the beginning of his musical career, Shostakovich make his debut as a state composer, but, later in his life, he developed a love-hate relationship with the state.

Shostakovich composition style has two different directions, the extreme neo-classical and the heroic. The Cello Sonata in D minor for cello and piano Op. 40, was writen in a particular difficult time in Shostakovich’s life, He was in a period of emotional turmoil. This sonata is formed by four movements. The piece is full of the duality that a composer like Shostakovich was suffering by being trapped in a totalitarian system. As part of his latest works, this piece is full of statements more responsible and profound in its nature. The humanism and tragic lyricism of the sonata struggle with the concept that the artist cannot survive by retreating into a private creative world; he must be part of the socio-political problems, however bitter the experience were.

His face reveals a troubled man, struggling with his interests and his duty as an artist, his music, undoubtedly, reveals this concerns. In his cello Sonata, the first movement begins with accompanying and flowing piano arpeggios. As the musical tension arrives we can hear the themes, unusual and full of shifts but, tonal. Both instruments imitate each other during the piece, and, from the beginning we start to hear the development of a strange and insidious rhythmic motif, penetrating to our spine and through the flowing textures of the themes. Then is there, tataTA, tataTA, it starts in the piano like a whisper, almost an eco and then, is finally taken by the cello. First in pizzicatos and then, take it to its full sonority, it almost sound like someone knocking at the door, using the rhythm ostinato as a peculiar password. Knock, knock, who’s there…..?

How to kill a snake...¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

If you want to kill a snake, you have to do it a proper way, first you have to get a real mayombero (spiritual leader and medicine man) or become one yourself, god luck to find a place where they teach how to be one. After cover this small requirement you’re ready to lead the ritual and while you sing vigorously Mayombe-bombe-mayombe! Offer in sacrifice a snake to Babalu Aye in order to heal somebody or, if it is the case, spread some pestilence.

The other way, and probably the smarter, will be just listening to Revuelta’s Sensemaya. Silvestre Revueltas was Mexican composer born in 1899 in the North part of Mexico. Since he was a little kid he began his studies in Violin and composition in Mexico City. During the second decade of the twenty-century he moved to Texas USA to pursue studies in violin and composition. During his years in the United States he collaborated with Carlos Chavez and both of them were dedicated to perform recitals of modern music across the United States. Around 1937 he went to Spain with a group of leftist artist and after spent some time in Europe studying and conducting he returned to Mexico and devoted him to composition.

Revueltas was part of a family of renowned artist which include painters and highly regarded writers. As happens to many brilliant artists, Revueltas spent most of his life in poverty and earning very little. By the end of his life, just when he was in the height of his musical career he died as consequence of a poor life and tormented by social and political issues of his time all of this merged with alcoholism and exhaustion.

Nicolas Guillen was a Cuban poet dedicated to the creation of literature based on his Afro-Caribbean heritage merged with the traditional strophic structure of the Spanish poetry. With his works he renovated completely the Latin-American poetry. In his poems we can find a deep popular rooting full of the warmth feeling and melancholic rhythms of Latin-America. Sensemaya is one of Guillen’s examples of Poetic tributes based on actual Afro-Caribbean chants.

The principal theme of the piece has an onomatopoeic connection with the principal motive of the poem, Mayombe-bombe-mayombe. The music is purely based on the poem own rhythm and the musical sections keep an underlying relation with Guillen’s text. Revuelta’s work keeps a close relation with the tendencies who were rising at that time in the musical scene. The twenty-century compositional techniques had their genesis the de-Europeanization of arts who starts with Debussy’s interesting in Oriental music and continued by the following generations until Revueltas himself. The ostinatos used by him in Sensemaya are naturally risen out from the folk music of Mexico, who at the same time is a fusion between Spanish, Indian and African components.

The piece opens with a tuba melody that evokes the start of the ritual followed by the dominant ostinato of the piece, a motivic rhythm based on the beginning of Guillen’s Poem Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!. The colors in the piece and the static elements that applied to Afro-Cuban or Afro-Caribbean influences and the final crescendo rages masterfully throughout the piece and leave us at the end with the magical sensation that the ritual is complete and magic is just about to start.

Canto para matar una culebra

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

La culebra tiene los ojos de vidrio

la culebra viene y se enreda en un palo

Con sus ojos de vidrio, en un palo

Con sus ojos do vidrio

La culebra camina sin patas

La culebra se esconde en la yerba

Caminando se esconde en la yerba

Caminando sin patas

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

Satie and the poet who must have died on a Thursday, in a rainstorm.

Satie and the poet who must have died on a Thursday, in a rainstorm.

Erick Satie was a French composer and pianist who were born in Honfleur, France in 1866. Since he was young, he developed a curious character, perhaps as a result of the union of Normand and Scots blood or perhaps, according to some scholars, because he suffered with Asperger’s syndrome.  

Although in his early music education at the Paris Conservatoire he was labeled in negative terms by his teachers he developed a love for composition that no one could deny. In his first years as a composer he start to develop his eccentric personality, he is always described as a shy, discreet and reserved man, well-mannered and bohemian. His personality made him a lonely man, his character although is described as charming and lovable was also violent and unpredictable. 

His first compositions are full of his influence and love for medieval church polyphony, they are slow and solemn, full of successions of seventh and ninth harmonies, this give us the idea that the chords could continue for hours and yet the pieces remains in the realm of almost-miniatures. The Satie that we see in these early compositions, is a cerebral sensualist man, the use of solemn chords give to his music a vague mysticism, almost superficial but full of symbolism.

In 1890 He write his Gymnopedies, this composition spring away from the first mystic works and begun to show us a more heavy, a-rhythmic Satie, who  started to experiment with static harmonies, which characterizes his work latter. The pieces are presented in a set of three, like the Sarabandes which precede them, each one representing a different facet. This concept gives to the pieces a sense of unity although each gymnopedie supplies a variant.

The use of the number three was a peculiarity and an obsession for Satie and it is manifested over and over in his works that commonly are arranged in sets of three.  The popularity of this pieces remains in the singular music, its modality and stark simplicity and also in their enigmatic nature express in the mysterious and bizarre name that Satie chose for them.

The name came from a Greek word; Gymnopaidia, who is defined as a dance in which naked boys performance gymnastic exercise and that was part of a Spartan festival. The word was adapted by Satie supposedly in an attempt to describe his music as graceful arabesque painted by naked boys under an early-morning sky. When he wrote his Gymnopedies, he was part of the symbolist movement, mostly as a result of his work as a pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret (favorite place of the symbolist).  We can find this influence in the Gymnopedies, because Symbolism movement was characterized by the use of strange words, derived mostly form Latin or Greek and full of mysticism and esotericism. We can find also a lot of musicality in the word itself that refers us directly to the mood of the piano pieces. They are almost like silent poem, full of ancient happiness outlined by a transparent texture that serves also as a basic harmonic structure for the three pieces.

Cesar Vallejo, one of the most remarkable Latin American poets of that time and perhaps the only one that was labeled as a symbolist without being French, called Satie  the most “Great musician of France”. He was introduced to him by Vicente Huidobro. For Vallejo, Satie was  a dark man, poor inglorious and genius, sensitive and full of a peculiar sense of humor. In a music review published in 1926, by a Peruvian magazine called Revista Variedades, Vallejo ask himself how French people can ignored such a musician as Satie. By the time that this review was written Satie was already died in Paris.  For Vallejo, Satie was in his way to become the most recognized of the French musicians. And as he said, “Satie died poor, humble and lonely on a Wednesday of July 1, in his way to make the act of excite, a natural one.” He didn’t die a Thursday, like Vallejo himself, who died on April 5 on a Friday.

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

C.V

Kurt Weill, the stranger.

Kurt Weill the “stranger”

  The Jewish-european composer seems to have many facets that even today are difficult to classify.  Weill was the socialist composer, who truly believe in the social function of the music and work hand to hand with Berthold Brecht in works who’s mainly objective was to expose and criticized the capitalism and bourgeois societies. On other side we have the so called “American” composer who wrote Broadway musicals and who was a fervent nationalist in the war against his natal Germany. And finally we have the pure composer, the modernist highly intellectual who wrote operatic, orchestral and chamber music that we rarely get chance to hear. Which of this is the “true” Weill?

In his history we can find the tragedy that thousands of German Jews shared in the first fifty years of the twenty century, a tragic history of survival and fate that determines Weill’s intellectual development and his devote to the social responsibility of the artist. At the end, all of his musical statements are part of the substance of his compositions.

Weill was an extrovert character, reserve and modest, and in a way, according to many biographers, a workaholic. He subject everything on his art, even though his marriage with Lotte Lenya, who always complain for occupying a second place in Weill’s life.  He was a “highly conscious” musician who was aware of the important role of art in society and the artist’s obligations to that society. In all the works that he developed from Berlin to Broadway, we can sense the socio-aesthetic position that pops out and that was Weill’s special touch.

In 1933, when he was officially denounced for his socialist views and became a target for the Nazis, he was forced to leave Germany. He spent some time between Paris and London promoting some of his works and finally he decides to settle in the United States and is when Weill starts his American adventure.  He begins to study the American popular stage music and became fascinated with jazz.  Is in this scenario is where Weill’s came with the idea of One of his Broadway’s hit, “A touch of Venus”, who was written between 1942 and 1943. The show was a contemporary play that satirizes the contemporary American suburban values of romance and sex and takes the Pygmalion myth to illustrate this theme.  

Although is ironic how Weill managed accommodated himself in the most capitalist entertainment industry, he converted the American experience of being exile into a compelling musical statement, just as he did with his previous works. Besides the creations of Broadway’s musicals we can find also in his works during the American years, a composition moment when in a way he reconciles the German and Austrian musical tradition and start to create Lieders.

And what can we read between the lines of his Brodway’s musical works? In the play “A touch of Venus”, who talks about a statue of the goddess Venus who comes to life and become the object of affection of a good-hearted window dresser who happens to be engaged, we can find some of Weill statements.  When the female protagonist, Venus herself, sing a beautiful almost-aria called “I’m a stranger here myself”.

Tell me is love still
A popular suggestion,
Or merely an obsolete art?
 This simple question;
I'm unfamiliar with his heart,
I am a stranger here myself

Are the misadventures of Venus and her inability to understand the local idiosyncrasies an allegory of what Weill’s was living in the exile? Venus sense of estrangement was the melancholy that perhaps chased Weill in his American exile.  Like Camus allegory in his Novel “L’Etranger” (the stranger, the outsider), that happens to be published one year before the premier of Weill’s play. Kurt Weill, like Mersault, Camus principal protagonist who kills an Arab just because; Weill was also an outcast, an outsider.  How can he possible refuse? When he was a stranger himself.

It's "Summertime" George.

George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist who were born in Brooklyn, New York in 1896. His Parents were Jewish immigrants from Odessa (Ukraine). He is known for his incursion in both genres, classical and popular. He was as discipline as genius. He always also, had the feeling of insecure about his musical education and was always ready to learn more. Wherever he had a chance, he always asked for advice and lessons from almost every accredited composer he met. His musical education began at an early age and soon he displayed his true interest in music. According to Alex Ross in “The rest is noise”, Gershwin’s teacher, Edward Kilenyi, was the one who introduce to him the idea of winning and audience by making a name in the popular arena rather than in the academic realm of composition. However, in Gershwin, his personal taste and approach to the popular genres, although it was full of success from the beginning, was also avid of being filled with the academic knowledge in which he worked so hard.

Gershwin Rise to fame was quick. He published his first song at eighteen and by the time he turned twenty-one he had already contributed music to several stage shows and had composed the whole score for another. His fist first song, “Swanee”, was written in 1919, ant the early 20s saw him established in the first rank of popular music composers. However he was also, an enthusiastic fan of Debussy and Ravel’s music. He was fascinating with Schoenberg’s approach to music and also Berg’s, and, he was  willing to learn theory and composition with Stravinsky, All this background give the especial “touch” that we can heard in some of his compositions.

His first approach to give to popular genres like “jazz” a respectful place in the concert halls was definitely “Rhapsody in Blue”. The piece is full of syncopated melodies emulating the urban “jazz mood”. All of this mixed with open harmonies, blue notes, dominant-seventh chords and also, a Rachmaninovian love theme in the middle section. All of this creates a new language in American music and gave Gershwin the opportunity to gain high-level admirers.

Arts patron, Otto Kahn, chairman of the board of the Met, spurred Gershwin to write a “jazz grand Opera”. Is in this context that he got the idea of compose an Opera based on an American novel called “Porgy”. The book tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street-beggar in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina in the 1920s.  Gershwin began to work in the piece in 1933 with Dubose Heyward, the original author of “Porgy”, The reception of the opera was full of mixed reactions. Some of them claimed to label Gershwin’s piece in the “folk realm” rather than in the academic. Others called the piece a True Opera, full of power and vigor. The controversy was immediate too, because of the African American theme and the use folk tunes, some of them based on real folk and spiritual tunes. The opera had problems also, within the racial aspect. Some of the critics claim that the Opera portrayed racist aspects of African American life.

Despite of all this, we still have the wonderful chance to heard every time the genius introduction of the opera. The orchestra introduction is dotted with a modernism style. We can hear a Wozzeck wink with the use of a two-chord as an ostinato. The great crescendo filled with dissonant harmony and the great climax falls in the first notes of “summertime”.

It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy, the fish are jumplin’ and the cotton is high. This marvelous lullaby serves to introduce the opera and also as a unifying element since we can hear the song three times in different moments of the opera. The song mixes elements of jazz ant the song styles of African-Americans in the southeast of the United States. Its initial chords become a steady-state environment who serves as reference for the performer to play with it and move around them. This characteristic element of free improvisation makes the song into an independent being and is because of this that many renowned artists made “summertime” their own. My personal favorite interpretation is with “Lady Day” queen of the ‘bop’ and the ‘beatniks’, but perhaps, that is a different story.