My noggin is buzzing and flickering like a computer in a 1950s sci-fi flick. Order is conspicuously absent; there are no controlling leitmotifs or themes overseeing the effluvia of mind-stuff. It just chatters and chomps along, churning out yards of punched paper tape and filling up an entire wall with flashing lights. The sheer caprice of it all leaves me wondering if I’ve misplaced a handful of my marbles. Just last night I left a San Francisco Symphony concert, having heard Revueltas’s Sensemayá, Villa-Lobos’s Ciranda des setes notas with my friend Steve Paulson as a charming bassoon soloist, Varèse’s loudly barren Amériques, and a fine rendition of the Beethoven Seventh. And what started rolling around in my head? No Beethoven, Villa-Lobos, or whatnot. Oh, no. Here’s what it was:
Fan-Tan Fanny was leaving her man,
Fan-Tan Fanny kept waving her fan,
Said good-bye Danny, you two-timing Dan,
Some other man,
Loves your little Fanny — more, more!
That’s a deliberately ditzy nightclub song from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Sung”, in case the source of the lyrics has escaped you. I’m not surprised to find that I remember the lyrics perfectly well, even if I haven’t listened to the original cast album since, oh I don’t know, Nixon’s first term. But why on earth did it pop up right then?
Thus today’s post: a little bit o’ this, and a little bit o’ that, with an emphasis on the latter…
(And congratulations if you can pick up the Broadway reference in that one.)
Reference Books for Program Annotators
We folks who write your program notes require reference materials, but we’re not hardcore musicologists who need to delve into all of the latest academic scrums and bothers. On the other hand, we need up-to-date and timely information, and we are expected to dig reasonably deep into a composer’s life and work. Now, there’s nothing wrong with reading vast tracts of monographs and music histories and the like. In fact, those are critically important in order to give us the breadth we need to put things into the proper perspective. But I can’t be absorbing 2,000 pages of biographical material every time I accept an assignment for a 1,000-word note.
Some references are so handy you can only wish there were more like them. In particular, the Cambridge Encyclopaedias that are each devoted to a single composer are a godsend. But there are only two of them—on Mozart and Handel—and only two of their near-twins, the Cambridge Composer Companions, with volumes on Haydn and J.S. Bach. What wonderful resources they are! Each offers almost the perfect range of information, not only about specific pieces, places, and people, but also about broader subjects and trends. Whenever I write a program note on any of those four composers, those books are my first stops.
A. Peter Brown began a mind-bogglingly ambitious project called The Symphonic Repertoire, planned as a giant multi-volume affair covering the entire history of the symphony in minute detail, with analyses and entries on every individual work of significance. He got a lot of it finished before his death a few years ago, with Volumes 2, 3A and 3B and 4 completed. It’s a doggone shame he never did the first volume, which would have covered the classical guys who weren’t Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But what we have is invaluable; recently it proved its worth yet again when I wrote a note on Louis Spohr’s Symphony No. 2 in D Minor. Even though the volumes are expensive, I invested in a complete set, rather than relying on the SFCM library copies. To be sure, most of the theoretical analysis in the volumes has no place in a program note, but it’s interesting nonetheless, and the background information is worth its weight in gold.
Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music makes for a wonderful grand-overview resource. Often I find myself pulling broad elements from it rather than specifics, but those are just as important to good program notes as the nit-picky stuff.
Grove’s is quite the hit-or-miss affair, oddly enough. I use it mostly for its bibliographies rather than for the articles themselves.
More British Composers
My listening attention continues its drift across the Atlantic as I acquaint myself with more British composers. Lately, I’ve been having a wonderful time exploring the works of Alun Hoddinott and William Alwyn, while continuing my already-launched journeys into the music of Malcolm Arnold and Arnold Bax. Thanks to those fine folks at Lyrita Records and Chandos, it’s all out there in abundance, gorgeously recorded and intelligently annotated. I am particularly taken by the ease with which British composers moved from concert hall to film studio; Bax wrote some great film stuff (including David Lean’s Oliver Twist) as did both Arnold (The Bridge on the River Kwai is his) and Alwyn (less familiar movies on this side of the pond but quite good nonetheless.) Other British composers with enviable film track records include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, William Walton, and Richard Addinsell. One could only wish that American composers had been so flexible, but even allowing for Copland’s occasional forays into film (The Red Pony, The Heiress) as well as Bernstein (On the Waterfront) for the most part our mainline American concert composers have had little exposure in Hollywood, leaving film scoring more to the specialists such as Bernard Herrmann. Personally I think it would have done Roger Sessions a world of good to score a handful of Bugs Bunny cartoons, or maybe a syrupy Bette Davis weepie.
But I also love the way the symphonic tradition has stayed alive amongst British composers; they all kept writing works called “Symphony” that really were symphonies, in multiple movements, honoring the several centuries of now-standing tradition. Malcolm Arnold, Arnold Bax, Edmund Rubbra, William Alwyn, and Ralph Vaughan Williams were all prolific symphonists, while William Walton wrote only a few—but they’re humdingers. Not to mention Benjamin Britten’s fascinating forays into symphonic territory, although there’s no Symphony No. 1 in C Minor per se.
Rediscovering Louis Spohr
Due to my work with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, I’ve been digging into the symphonies of Louis Spohr, a composer who just might have experienced the most precipitous plunge in music history from renown to neglect. In his day he was the biggest of the big boys, considered as the same league as Beethoven. But his light went out after his death (and in fact had been dimming for at least a decade previously) and nowadays you can’t even find printed copies of the bulk of his output. So I’m delighted that his Symphony No. 2 in D Minor is getting a dust-off and performance by the PBO, where it could very well wind up rescued from the charges one hears about Spohr’s being little more than a mild, Beidermeyer-bland composer of pretty tunes. (He’s listed by one particularly crass “best and worst” book as the worst symphonist of all time, egads.)
Perhaps it’s just my middle-aged mind reacting to the solid craftsmanship of Spohr’s works, but I can’t keep from feeling that a whole lot of people would love the Spohr symphonies if they could get to hear them in halfway decent performances. I’m certainly finding them appealing, and in the process of wriing my article I’ve become very fond of the D Minor symphony. I can well understand why it was such a concert-hall staple during the nineteenth century.
I’m heartily sick and tired of critics who define innovative programming as programming contemporary music. There’s nothing particularly innovative about playing new stuff. But digging back into the storehouses of the past and pulling out worthy music for revival is innovative, in my opinion. Thus I consider the PBO’s February program, consisting of the Spohr D Minor Symphony, the Hummel E Major Trumpet Concerto played on a reconstructed period keyed trumpet, and that wonderful Mendelssohn C Minor Symphony (his first—or thirteenth, depending on how you count) as much more innovative programming than any number of contemporary-music concerts.