Winter break drifts along, allowing me any amount of free time for taking on those household projects that must be put on hold during a typically busy semester. But no projects are getting done. Instead, I’m drifting right along with the flow of the vacation, while the guest bedroom remains a pig pen and all that new shelving I intended to install floats in planning limbo.
I had also hoped for plenty of listening over this break, and in that one area I have actually stayed fairly closely to plan. My listening backlog is enormous, nor does even the current full-frontal assault make much of a dent, given my propensity to add to the list. I am a Sisyphus of music listening, but happily so rather than tragically. I never run out of music to encounter, either in terms of stuff I’ve never heard before, or in the form of new interpretations of familiar works. Nobody who buys CDs with such carelessly unbuttoned abandon, or who has such a twitchy trigger finger for the "Buy Album" button on iTunes and its ilk, is ever likely to run out of audio fodder. I see absolutely nothing wrong in owning fourteen recordings of the Eroica, for example, or three complete sets of the Bach cantatas.
Nor am I obliged to travel out into the suburbs of the literature in order to find fresh material. For example, witness my yet-unexplored set of the complete Schubert symphonies from Colin Davis and the Staatskapelle Dresden. To be sure, I’m quite familiar with the Schubert Fifth, "Unfinished", and "Great" C Major. But I confess to being less familiar with the other symphonies; I’ve gone over the Fourth "Tragic" a few times, but I doubt I remember any of it. And the first three? Nope. And then there’s the happy anticipation of hearing these works played by one of my absolute favorite orchestras.
Furthermore, I intend to fill in some holes. I may know more of the Haydn symphonies than most musicians—heck, I can play a lot of them on the piano from memory—but my larder is woefully barren when it comes to Berlioz’s works. I’ve got "Symphonie fantastique" down cold (thanks to teaching it any number of times), but beyond that, maybe only "Harold in Italy" and the "Requiem". My acquaintance with the rest ranges from slender to non-existent.
But I’ll get to it, really I will. My modus operandi is to absorb myself for a while in a single composer, or a single set of works, or a single style. Sometimes I have a practical reason for that interest; other times I’m just exploring for the sake of exploring.
My current two targets: the work of Gustav Holst, and the early Hot Five/Hot Seven recordings from Louis Armstrong, made back 1925-29. The interest in Holst is largely practical given that I’m lecturing on "The Planets" at the SF Symphony in February. Satchmo has come bouncing onto my radar due to Terry Teachout’s fine new biography "Pops".
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five
I’m not a tyro at matters either Holstian or Satchmovian. However, I’ve run with the herd for the most part—for Holst, I know "The Planets" and not much else. As for Pops, I grew up in a world in which he was a fixture; his renditions of "Blueberry Hill" and "Mack the Knife" and "Hello Dolly" were just as common on the radio as he himself was a constant presence on TV. He was a cultural icon, as much a part of my consciousness as Santa Claus. I knew that he had been one of the great jazz musicians, but it was only with Ken Burns’s Jazz that I began to appreciate how far back his career reached or the depth of his influence.
But I remained skeptical. This had less to do with Louis Armstrong and more to do with Ken Burns, in particular with the hyperbolic, pompous commentary of Gary Giddins and Wynton Marsalis. I wasn’t aware until then that jazz commentators suffer from windbagus grandiloquenti syndrome right along with their classical music colleagues. But they’ve got the bug, Gott in Himmel have they got it. Nor have I ever been much of a jazz fan, to tell the truth; a lot of it strikes me as obnoxious and hide-bound. Swing never swung me, I never got much bop out of bebop, and as for fusion or other modern forms…nope.
However, I’ve been enjoying the blazes out of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, made from 1925 through 1929 at OKeh Records in Chicago and constituting what the windbagii describe as the "Old Testament" of jazz. I note with some amusement that the band’s name "Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five" implies six players, but in fact there were only five at first—Armstrong plus his wife Lil on the piano, Kid Ory on Trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo. By 1929 the arithmetic had improved and the Hot Five consisted of Armstrong plus Fred Robinson on Trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet, Earl Hines on piano, Mancy Carr on Banjo, and Zutty Singleton on drums. The "Hot Seven" of 1927 added tuba (Pete Briggs) and drums (Baby Dodds) to the "Hot Five".
Neither the Hot Five (any version) nor the Hot Seven played gigs together in public—they were a recording group, rather like the "Columbia Symphony" of later years that was actually a pair of pickup orchestras—one in New York, the other in Hollywood—conducted by Bruno Walter and Igor Stravinsky. Be all that as it may, truly wonderful moments abound, and I can well understand why Woody Allen thought of "Potato Head Blues" as being one of those things that make life worth living. I’m also taken with the sheer variety of phrase lengths, styles, and ideas that characterize these performances. I may have gone in expecting to hear an endless succession of 4-bar phrases in AAB structure (the "12-bar blues" that harkens all the way back to the "bar form" of the medieval troubadours), but I was quickly disabused of that notion. Armstrong & Co. range all over the map, and use a heady mix of solos, ensembles, and even vocal hi-jinks (a few almost qualify as accompanied skits) to keep the juices flowing. It’s hardly surprising that those records were as successful as they were—and they still have the power to delight and fascinate. Great stuff, the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings—easily available as downloads nowadays.
(How Satchmo would have loved the Internet! — he was an indefatiguable letter-writer and diarist of his own thoughts via tape recorder. Today he would have a busy blog and be a major presence on Twitter.)
And now for something completely different: from Pops to Gustavus Theodor von Holst—he Anglicized the whole and removed the "von" during WWI as a good-will gesture to anti-German sensibility. Gustav Holst was a full generation older than Louis Armstrong, and a classmate of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s at the RCM, putting him squarely in the generation of Stravinsky, Ravel, Schoenberg, et al. Despite the enduring popularity of "The Planets", the bulk of his output has remained fairly obscure. I certainly didn’t know any of it until recently. (For a quick ten points: can you name any other Holst compositions?)
Certainly I never would have suspected him of being interested in Hindu mythology, or that he had written a number of works (including an opera) on same. But he went through a Sanskrit phase, as it were, culminating in an intriguing choral work called The Cloud Messenger, from 1913. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he had been a fine and active teacher, the English music profession being so similar to ours here in the USA.
Gustav Holst
Nor was I surprised to find that he was yet another advocate of English pastoral, the lovely style that blends Anglic folk melodies with gently modal harmonies in chamber-orchestra settings. Think Vaughan Williams Third Symphony, or stuff by Delius or Butterworth. I’m impressed with the ingenuity on display in the Brook Green Suite in which he blends "Greensleeves" with the sailor’s hornpipe, for example, or the gentle rocking beauty of A Somerset Rhapsody. I freely and frankly confess to enjoying English pastoral no end, even if all that Aeolian mode eventually wearies the ear.
But it’s not all fresh-air-and-livestock pastoral, by any means. The choral work The Hymn of Jesus is fascinating, strange but worth exploring. A central dance section plunges into a 5/4 ostinato à la Samuel Barber, flanked by slowish and contemplative passages. I’m not sure yet what I think of Egdon Heath, a dour tone poem (based on Thomas Hardy) from Holst’s late years; I need to absorb it more fully as of yet. On the other hand, the chamber opera The Wandering Scholar is your basic English-country stuff, and St. Paul’s Suite is unabashed English nationalism, nice enough in its own way.
There’s nothing bad here, or unattractive, to be sure: he was a highly skilled composer with a distinct mystical bent, definitely a cut above the enervating gentility of many English composers, sort of an English Szymanowski. Nonetheless, I doubt that he is a major figure just crying out to be discovered. He came to resent the popularity of "The Planets", thinking that this one work was obscuring appreciation of his other compositions, but that’s viewing the glass as half empty; it’s quite possible that "The Planets" is the only work standing between him and posthumous near-oblivion, even in England.