I have a penchant for exploring composers previously unknown to me. Not absolutely all of them, I should hasten to add. For some odd reason I invariably give a pass to some guy with a doctorate from Columbia who focuses on explorations of planar atonality and audioscapes based on differential equations. That aside, I’m more gung-ho than not.
Thanks to the seductive come-on of a recent Chandos album, I have become lightly familiar with the two symphonies of York Bowen, a 20th century English composer whose abiding Romantic idiom was spiced with just a touch of the French idiom. Bowen was a big deal in his day, played by the high and hoity-toity—Fritz Kreisler, Landon Ronald, Hans Richter, Sir Henry Wood, Adrian Boult, Lionel Tertis, Joseph Szigeti. He was without question a major compositional force in English music, albeit one whose star has dimmed considerably since his death in 1961.
His two symphonies have a great deal to recommend them. They’re marvelously orchestrated, unfailingly attractive, and contain a wealth of good tunes. They’re also prolix, predictable, and emotionally flabby. Still, they’re definitely worth hearing, and more than once.
The first movement of Symphony No. 2, Opus 31 contains a primary theme that opens with a figure that is almost note-for-note, and rhythm-for-rhythm, the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. However, it’s cast in a broad and stately style, meaning that it sounds like Gilligan’s Island belted out by a two-ton-Tessie diva backed up by the massed forces of the Bayreuth Festspielhausorchester. And that’s just funny. No matter how hard I try to avoid the association, Gilligan’s is just too tough a nut to crack. It’s like trying to avoid thinking of The Lone Ranger when hearing Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Well, at least that’s a tricky one for folks of my generation; I have a feeling that today’s youth wouldn’t have the same problem, given that for them The Lone Ranger dwells in a deep vanished past, somewhere between Beowulf and The Pilgrim’s Progress in terms of contemporary viability.
But admit it: can you honestly say that you never once think of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd when hearing Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture?
What about other pieces that bring up unfortunate or distracting associations?
Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto is a case in point. Its first-movement main theme is a dead ringer for the military anthem I Want to be an Airborne Ranger. Typically IWTBAAR would be bawled out by a bunch of sloppy drunk guys staggering out of a Honolulu stewpot at dawn. I doubt that’s what Beethoven had in mind.
One of my particular bugaboos is the Bartók Piano Sonata. Everything’s just fine until the last page of the piece, when the primary theme of the finale is transformed into a version of Good King Wenceslaus performed, it would seem, by the inmates of a hospital for the criminally insane.
Several works from the French tradition conjure up images of Dorothy Lamour, sarongs and hibiscus-flower hairdos. The first is the Franck Piano Quintet’s recurring idée fixe cyclical theme; the other is what one of my theory teachers actually referred to as the “South Sea Islands” section of Debussy’s Prelude à l’apres-midi d’une faune.
Witold Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony keeps interrupting itself with a Cha-Cha-Cha figure that always makes me wonder if Carmen Miranda is about to make a cameo appearance.
None of these associations are the original composers’ faults, naturally. But the human brain evolved to make connections—valid or not. Because of that we get fantasy and whimsy and poetry and crackpottery. And sometimes we just can’t hear an elevated, serious piece of music without breaking into a few titters. Them’s the breaks, I guess.