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Maud Cuney Hare →

Remarkable story, written by Emily Hogstad for Song of the Lark:

Maud Cuney’s cultural inheritance was no doubt a bewildering one to come to terms with. It consisted of rape, poverty, and oppression, as well as self-determination, wealth, and privilege. Ultimately Maud Cuney chose to use that legacy, and the advantages it offered her, to promote the achievements of African musicians.

Despite a lifetime of devotion to that cause, she is almost entirely forgotten today.

Song of the Lark is one of a handful of classical music blogs out there doing really stellar work in highlighting overlooked composers and musicians—in its case focussing on women.

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Hitler’s Jazz Band →

Terrific piece by Mike Dash for Smithsonian Magazine on the Nazis’ jazz band.

Goebbels knew he needed to engage—with an increasingly war-weary German public, and with the Allied servicemen whose morale he sought to undermine. This clear-eyed determination to deal with reality, not fantasy, led him to some curious accommodations. None, however, were quite so strange as his attempts to harness the dangerous attractions of dance music to Hitler’s cause. It was an effort that led directly to the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: a Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra.

The decrees by which jazz had to abide have to be seen to be believed; they’re listed in full in the article.

(Via Scott.)

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DeepNote →

THX:

In 35 yrs we have NEVER shown this! View the never-before-seen score of #DeepNote THX’s audio trademark 🔊 created by Dr. James A. Moorer

It had never even crossed my mind that there might be a written-out sheet for this. Very cool.

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“You cannot imagine the unimaginable” →

I almost criminally let the 50th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey pass without comment (and without rewatching the film). But here I am almost two months late.

The best thing I’ve read for the anniversary is Dan Chiasson’s piece for the New Yorker, rich with details I’d never heard.

In a movie about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced a crucial predicament: what would the aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi offered a dispiriting menu of extraterrestrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly monsters, gelatinous blobs. In their earliest meetings in New York, Clarke and Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched drafts and consulted the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst. For a time, Christiane was modelling clay aliens in her studio. These gargoyle-like creatures were rejected, and “ended up dotted around the garden,” according to Kubrick’s daughter Katharina. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of thinned and elongated humans, resembling shadows at sundown, were briefly an inspiration. In the end, Kubrick decided that “you cannot imagine the unimaginable” and, after trying more ornate designs, settled on the monolith. Its eerily neutral and silent appearance at the crossroads of human evolution evokes the same wonder for members of the audience as it does for characters in the film. Kubrick realized that, if he was going to make a film about human fear and awe, the viewer had to feel those emotions as well.

Of course, it’s also an appropriate time to link back to my piece on the music from the film. (Part two, on A Clockwork Orange, is finally underway.)

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Review: Misunderstandings, Trickery, and Guile →

Lastly, my review of Irish National Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro, starring Tara Erraught and Jonathan Lemalu. INO is firing on all cylinders, and off to an excellent launch year. (I’m especially looking forward to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in October.)

Erraught and Lemalu were a delightful pair, exchanging chaste kisses and loving glances as often as frustrated huffs and glowers. Their voices danced around the trickier passages so readily it was easy to miss the virtuosity.

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Review: Bill Whelan’s Orchestral Music →

Next, Bill Whelan’s recent album of orchestral music. Short version: it wasn’t quite for me, but I thought it did what it did very well, and it was catchy as hell.

There is in Whelan’s work an admirable self-assurance; a tightness in orchestration and harmonic structure, and an unapologetic sweetness in melody. It may be too much for some, too tidy, too sentimental, too carefully designed. These are two sides of the same coin. It’s Whelan’s control of musical design, and his direct emotionality, that have allowed him to create the most popular Irish piece of orchestral music of the past fifty years.

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Review: Leaving Nothing Behind →

As I begin to catch up again on my writing (I’ve been at work, just not very publicly), I realise that I have again left behind a number of recent reviews I’ve written for the Journal of Music.

First, the Kaleidoscope Gala concert felt like it was made for me; I’d be very surprised if it isn’t my favourite concert of the year.

Two refrains amongst classical music listeners are that contemporary music is difficult to programme alongside more traditional works because of the stark difference in style, and that alternative concert venues provide suboptimal listening experiences, and potentially noisy audiences. Smorgasbord concerts like this epitomise the nonsense of these arguments. Four more variegated works would be hard to find, but the audience – as full as I have seen the Sugar Club – was rapt.

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Irish Opera 2: The Sleeping Queen →

And in January, I saw a much more intimate staging of Michael William Balfe’s operetta, The Sleeping Queen, another Irish work. This one was a bit older and a bit less ambitious in scope than Eithne (though, I think, much more successful in execution).

During her introductory remarks, Hunt noted the strong possibility of influence from Balfe’s operetta on the later work by Gilbert and Sullivan. I’m convinced: the works share a playfulness and a strong sense of tonal melody; even the libretto shares lyrical characteristics with the later pair’s work (A neighbouring king ‘Proposes an alliance / Offensive and defensive / With treaties most extensive / Immense and comprehensive…’).

The work has some nice musical tricks, though it burns its best one very early on: the second song features a rapid-fire duet between Agnes and the Regent; a ‘Repeat-after-me’-style oath, broken down to the syllable and shot back and forth between the two characters without room for breath or break.

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Irish Opera 1: Eithne →

Looking at the most recent entry on this blog, I see that somehow I’ve let six months slip by between posts. Time to start catching up.

Back in October, I was lucky enough to cover a unique event for the Journal of Music: a restoration of a century-old opera written in the Irish language, Eithne, by Robert O’Dwyer. While the music didn’t work for me, the night was one to remember. Audience and musicians alike seemed to feel that they were participating in something special:

In hearing the music, perhaps the most striking thing is often the language itself. There was a minor vogue in the early twentieth century for writing opera in the Irish language, but, for a variety of reasons, it never caught on. It is a pity, because the language suits the medium, perhaps surprisingly well. It is bold, earthy and rich, with hard, throaty consonants and long, warm vowels.

When it came to the music, I couldn’t help but feel out-of-step with the audience’s rapturous response, in spite of both the historical significance of the work and the quality of its performance. A review of the 1909 première described O’Dwyer, somewhat damningly, as influenced by ‘what he knows of Wagner’. That more or less gets at the core of the music, in ways both positive and negative. The music of Eithne is superficially Wagnerian: it has Wagner’s warmth of tone, his full-bodied orchestral sound, but it lacks Wagner’s mastery of structure and counterpoint.

What it really lacks, though, is Wagner’s adventurousness. Any time the harmony approaches something daring, it gets cold feet and backs away. In the turbulent musical climate a century ago, it must have felt downright old-fashioned.