Oh shut that off! Classical music! All of a sudden it starts shouting at you.
~ Sarah Kahn in Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley
In the years BC (before Covid) I listened to a lot of classical music. This interest was triggered by a copy of The Glenn Gould Reader I found in a house we were staying in, which I was kindly given by its owner, who’d become exasperated by Gould’s archly Nabokovian style and eccentric diktats. I couldn’t get enough of these and still peruse the book for kicks - for example Gould, in his 1963 essay ‘The Prospects of Recording’, predicted that the listeners of the future would be able to make remixes of their favourite recordings, and (as an interpreter of Bach granted a contemporary mystique comparable to Charlie Parker’s, which he deplored), gave Switched on Bach a favourable review. Where other classical experts heard the future Wendy Carlos’ Moog LP as gimmicky, Gould heard boundless potential.
When Gould tried to explain the importance of Schoenberg and 12-tone serial music, I listened, eventually writing a piece about the phenomenon, which you can read here. And when he explained that Richard Strauss was the greatest musician of the 20th C, and I saw a recording of Death and Transfiguration on LP in a Pt Chevalier op shop, it was all on.
I’d heard Strauss before, and listened to Also sprach Zarathustra around the time Kubrick’s 2001 came out, but found his music fusty; its surface reminded me of the embroidered furniture seen on visits to widows born in the reign of Queen Victoria when I was a child in Edinburgh and, like almost all serious composers, Strauss found it hard to invent memorable tunes. But this datedness is only a surface effect, reinforced at times by Strauss’s love of the waltz (can you believe there was once a dance craze that got people moving in 3/4 time?). Sink beneath it, and with Death and Transfiguration you’re inside a project very much like a classic early 70’s Pink Floyd LP, a slow-moving journey through moods that’s Strauss’ vision of an end-of-life experience. As with Zarathustra, Strauss, a canny manager of his career (until, that is, he tried to make a deal with Hitler), liked big themes and big effects, not to mention a gender-bending sexual sophistication (sensationalism, some said) that prefigured, and outlasted, that of Weimar Berlin. Critics accused him of being shallow and pretentious but audiences loved it, as do I - his kind of overreach, whether combined with supreme technical ability or not, is what art is to me.
After absorbing Death and Transfiguration by a form of osmosis I rediscovered Sergei Prokofiev, already a childhood favourite for Peter And The Wolf, and the composer I’d consider the greatest 20th C musician. If Strauss made a bad deal with Hitler, Prokofiev made an even worse one with Stalin. Like most great composers of his era, Prokofiev was a star concert pianist, but the 1st Violin Concerto as played by Isaac Stern (with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy) was my ear-opening introduction to a new world of pleasure. Prokofiev’s work, more than Strauss’s, relates easily to rock and pop music, because catchy melodicism and the motoric impulse combine - the 3rd Symphony and Alexander Nevsky contain many fine Metal moments, and ‘Peter’s Theme’ from Peter and the Wolf is just a modulation away from John Lennon’s ace ‘Day Tripper’ riff.
I found it harder to listen to classical music (by which I mainly mean late romantic and early modernist music, I have little interest in the classical era as such) in lockdown, because the family didn’t love it as much as I did, but I was able to find a few pieces that won them over, like Vaughan William’s Romance For Harmonica, written for that instrument’s greatest virtuoso, Larry Adler, in 1951.
Serious works for harmonica being few and far between, Adler enjoyed a long career in pop and jazz, and I own an EP of recordings he made in 1938 with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, including this sensitive reading of ‘Body And Soul’ (the last song recorded by Amy Winehouse, in a duet with Tony Bennet).
Crossovers between jazz and serious 20th Century music aren’t unknown - clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman commissioned the trio Contrasts from exiled Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and recorded it with the composer on piano and Bartók’s friend and fellow émigré Joseph Szigeti on violin.
In his student days Béla Bartók had befriended another young composer, Zoltán Kodály, and together they collected folk tunes from the Hungarian countryside (which in those days included Transylvania and part of Ukraine), which informed their later work in quite different ways - Kodály arranging folk tunes like the sprightly Dances of Galánta in a colourful late romantic style, while Bartók extended the theoretical possibilities of folk scales and modes into novel modernist structures. Zoltán Kodály also developed a method of musical education based on the voice (an instrument which everyone, no matter how poor, already owns), which became part of the school curriculum in post-war Hungary. On the 1967 World Record Club LP Kodaly Girls' Choir Of Budapest, recorded in England in 1966 under chorus master Ilona Andor with Kodály in attendance, we hear the results of his method - clear vocal tones, natural pitch control, and overall a sense of freedom rare in classically trained voices, that makes this one of my favourite recordings.
There are three of Bartók’s versions of traditional songs on this record but my favourite is Kodály’s arrangement of the (no doubt quite racist) Romanian folk song ‘The Gypsy Eats Cheese’.
The gipsy is eating cottage cheese, duba
He's arguing with me
He's saying he's going to smack me.
"The day after tomorrow!" I said, leba
Bartók took the concept of “night music” about as far as it could go before John Carpenter took up his synth - the idea of a piece of music not programmatic, but nonetheless suggestive of of “night thoughts” is Russian in origin, or rather, the first “nocturnes” were written in Russia by an Irish piano teacher, John Field.
Field was working in Russia because the country had little classical tradition of its own to speak of; he taught the first Russian composer of note, Mikhail Glinka. Only a few decades later, Russian composers were creating a sensation with a distinctly “Russian” sound, including recognizably Slavic melodies (probably invented, rather than found, examples) and the first convincing examples of Orientalism, the originals of which they didn’t have to travel overseas to find. What’s impressive is that many of the great Russians were dilettantes - Rimsky-Korsakov taught himself to orchestrate from books while sailing round the world as a naval lieutenant, creating a colourful language of theatrical effects that would inspire a later generation including Prokofiev, and became the orchestral arranger of the doomed Mussorgsky, cleaning up some of his uncouth harmonies, restored in more modern versions. Another friend of Mussorgsky’s, Alexander Borodin, composed while also pioneering the study of chemistry, and to Mussorgsky’s disapproval broke with the “program-music only” dogma of his set to compose the first successful Russian string quartets.1 Very lovely and melodic they are, with the second containing a “nocturne” third movement that has often been extracted and butchered by “pop” arrangers for orchestral mood music albums.
Though it can hardly be called a nocturne, Modest Mussorgsky wrote a striking piece of night music called Night On Bald Mountain, describing a witches’ Sabbath. Here’s Walt Disney’s creepy 1940 animation (mainly his employee Bill Tyta’s work - Tyta would be lead animator on Dumbo) for his music film Fantasia (with Toscanini conducting). Note the Slavic melody near the start.
This Night On Bald Mountain was, in fact, the loyal Rimsky-Korsakov’s rearrangement of fragments from a work that was never performed in Mussorgsky’s lifetime, St. John's Eve on Bald Mountain (1867), described by its composer thus:
”So far as my memory doesn't deceive me, the witches used to gather on this mountain, ... gossip, play tricks and await their chief—Satan. On his arrival they, i.e. the witches, formed a circle round the throne on which he sat, in the form of a kid, and sang his praise. When Satan was worked up into a sufficient passion by the witches' praises, he gave the command for the sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy.
I see in my wicked prank an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine, and, like Savishna, grown on our native fields and nurtured on Russian bread.”2
A few years ago I was driving around West Auckland reveling in my latest classical discovery, a cheap CD of Georges Bizet’s L'Arlésienne Suite 1 & 2. This is the classical music that will finally win over Sarah Kahn in Arnold Wesker’s trilogy of plays; populist, melodic, simultaneously naturalistic and uplifting.3 A good set-up for what I discovered in the next op shop, a CD with Amy Beach’s Piano Concerto (as well as Samuel Barber’s), which tipped me down the rabbithole of music by women composers, the start of the slippery slope that led to this blog.4
YouTube algorithms quickly led me from Beach to the 50 or so compositions composed by Vítězslava Kaprálová in her short life (1925-1940), works which start from a Slavic nationalism somewhat in the tradition of Bedřich Smetana, like the gorgeous melodicism of ‘Legenda’…
…and quickly pick up elements from jazz and the more interesting experimental techniques around at the time, without loosing that fine melodic sense and a distinctive sense of humour. I wrote about the most internationally successful work of her lifetime, the Military Sinfonietta, in the context of its time, here. Lately I’ve been returning to her most ambitious work for solo piano, the four April Preludes (1937), and hearing something I always hear in it - humourous, jazzy non-sequiturs that remind me of Robert Wyatt’s piano playing on Rock Bottom. Soon after the composition of this work, dedicated to Czech piano virtuoso Rudolf Firkušný, who would debut it in the USA after her death, Kaprálová moved to Paris to study, where she also went clubbing and, for all I know, heard Larry Adler play with the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1938.
The second Prelude, ‘Andante’, has a Sketches Of Spain quality, as if the left hand is gently strumming a guitar; the third is gently, childishly, unforgettably tuneful; the fourth. ‘Vivo’, brings back those hot jazz fireworks, and that sublime wit; its elements include close top-end harmonies, triplet rhythms cutting in and out (an effect common in trap), and the use of whole tone interval steps to modulate between its keys, a use of whole tones characteristic of Kaprálová and sometimes found in the work of other Czech composers, distinct from the “magical” effect Rimsky-Korsakov derived from whole tones, or the Impressionistic stasis of Debussy.5
The other night Hayley and I watched Asia Argento’s fascinating childhood memoir Misunderstood (2014), and I noticed a couple of references to her great-grandfather, composer Alfredo Casella - her mother’s surname in the film is Casella, and she’s a pianist (Argento’s mother Daria Nicolodi was an actress in real life) who plays, and teaches her kids, when she parents at all, some of Casella’s 'Pezzi Infantili' works for children.
Casella’s first two symphonies were somewhat in the style of Strauss and Mahler (though his 2nd is a lot more Metal than either), but he publicly repudiated German influence in the Great War to become an Italian Modernist. One of his first modernist compositions was the nocturne A Notte Alta, dedicated to his second wife, Yvonne Müller, Asia’s great-grandmother.6
”The only piece of program music I have ever composed”, A Notte Alta describes their passion, which is unable to move the eternal indifference of the night.
Asia Argento has lived the life of a complicated, classically tragic heroine, a type rare in today’s cinema world, and I used to wish her music was better, as the only examples I could find a few years BC sounded garishly melodramatic and unlistenable. But the incidental music in Misunderstood, credited to Argento as composer, was always striking, like a kid’s version of the pop, rock and rap music that 9-year old Aria liked, or a child’s sense of appropriate mood music for a scene. So I checked out her music again, and found 2021’s Music From My Bed, an arty, experimental trap album, like the trap album Yoko Ono might have made, collaborations with Anton Newcombe and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and other cool stuff.7
The Algorithm has finally settled on the (at times almost inaudible) 1958 recording of Sviatoslav Richter’s performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition live in Sofia, an award-winning LP which Glenn Gould used to illustrate the contrast between US and European approaches to recording.8
Borodin discovered, in 1861, a chemical reaction (now known as the Hunsdiecker reaction after the couple who generalized it in the 1930s) for the halogenation of hydrocarbons. Nature, in its infinite wisdom, almost never halogenates a hydrocarbon, and many of the reaction’s products are toxic. It’s likely that Borodin’s chemical work contributed to the headaches and other ailments he complained of and contributed to his death at the age of 44. But perhaps also, to his music - “In winter I cannot compose unless I am sick and obliged to give up my lectures. So my friends, contrary to custom, never say to me, ’Try and keep well !’ but rather, ’Try and fall sick!’”
By the late 19th Century German influence on classical theory and technique had become overbearing, and composers almost everywhere else rebelled against it and formed various movements of their own, a process complicated by the obvious greatness of Mozart and Beethoven, Wagner, and the modernists Strauss and Mahler, who still had much to teach anyone who cared about composition. Even Strauss, who acknowledged his place in that tradition, rebelled against it when he composed tone poems (abstract or “formal” music by now being seen as more lofty) and based operas on Greek and other non-Germanic themes.
Bizet’s early death on the eve of Carmen becoming the huge success he deserved is one of music history’s greatest might-have-beens. Only his young friend Cécile Chaminade would write music that can be said to be “school of Bizet”. But, as Wesker recognized in his study of working class émigré communism, Bizet, by the time of his death, was on to something, a “people’s music” less grand, more realistic than the sounds Stalin would later be demanding from those composers he’d captured.
Music in op shops represents the taste of an older generation, lots of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Delius; one is unlikely to find the works of women composers there just because they weren’t being recorded until relatively recently; the Beach concerto (1900) was not recorded until 1974, the first record of a work that was as popular as any in the early 20th C, and that had made its composer a celebrity.
Only a few years ago, it was fashionable to slam the Western system of musical notation as exclusive and Eurocentric. Maybe it still is. But I’m not aware that any other system, before the invention of the phonograph and the piano roll, allowed the accurate replication of complex music created by an absent individual. It’s Western musical notation alone that allows us to hear the musical thoughts of Chevalier de Saint-Georges or Florence Price, Amy Beach or Lily Boulanger, and many another marginalized genius who died before anyone got around to recording them.
Josephine Baker’s sensational 1932 performance in Prague converted the Czechoslovak avant-garde to jazz overnight.
Müller was Jewish, and Casella’s return to Italy and compromise with Mussolini’s fascist regime would become as unwise as Prokofiev’s return to Russia or Strauss’s attempt to accommodate Hitler once Mussolini dropped his hostility to the Austrian upstart’s racial policies in 1938.
I suppose it’s always possible that I’ve changed, and she hasn’t.
The better known orchestral version of Pictures At An Exhibition is a 1922 arrangement by Maurice Ravel.