Music I Like, #19, Scheherazade, Op. 35 (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)

The possessor of an extremely euphonious name, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote extremely euphonious music. Scheherazade is a three-movement orchestral suite based on One Thousand and One Nights; I had the pleasure of learning and performing it when I was a member of the Oxford University Orchestra, in 2009-2010. 

It was one of the best orchestras I've ever played in, and consequently one of the best musical experiences of my life.What I particularly remember is that the OUO woodwind players (that is, the instruments who sit at the middle of the orchestra--flute, clarinet, oboe, English horn, bassoon, etc) were excellent. Student and amateur orchestras will often have a lot of decent string players (enough to drown fumblers like myself out) by virtue of the fact that lots of people learn to play these instruments. (To be fully accurate, I should say that lots of people learn to play the violin; amateur orchestras typically aren't overrun with violists or double bassists.) Fewer people have the opportunity to learn to play woodwind instruments, they are difficult to play well, and orchestral woodwind sections are usually very small. Which is to say that any mistakes of timing or intonation woodwind players make are much, much more exposed than similar sloppiness by string players. Classical composers often write important melodies or harmonies for woodwind instruments, so it really makes a difference when the players are good. 

There's so much amazing writing for woodwinds in Scheherazade and for the whole orchestra. I love the violin solo in the first movement...the whole piece is just so fun much to hear. It's even more fun to play. When I was in OUO, the viola section sat in the middle of the stage, between the cellos and violins, and in front of the woodwinds. Being a violist in our performance of Scheherazade was like being in the centre of the sea.

Music I Like, #18, Let All Mortal Flesh (Anonymous)

It's not Advent quite yet, but the Christmas lights lining the High Street were turned on this week and are brightening our long, dark evenings. That makes today a good day for a carol.

"Let All Mortal Flesh" has good memories associated with it. I was in a literary fraternity in college and we had a beautiful grand piano in our common room. In the lead-up to the winter break, some of us would get together to sing Christmas carols, including this one.

The original text is Greek, and late antique, and the melody is a late medieval French folk song. The English translation is from the nineteenth century. Together, they make a magical combination.

Music I Like, #17: Oblivion by Astor Piazolla

Astor Piazolla's Histoire du Tango (arranged for piano trio) is a piece I learned and played at the Apple Hill Summer Chamber Music Workshop in the summer of 2007.

Apple Hill is a place that is very, very special to me, in a way that's hard to put into words. Madeline L'Engle, in one of her published journals, describes playing the piano and writing stories in her first studio apartment as part of her deepening. It's hard to say just what exactly she means by that--on the surface of things, it's simply growing up, but also growing up in a way that leads towards curiosity and empathy and love of beautiful things. And Apple Hill was for me a place of deepening. It was where I learned to make music with other people, and music played with other people is always more than music.

Oblivion always brings to mind the following poem.

Special Glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you --
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and my ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses, but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

PS I'd forgotten until wrote this post but that same summer my sister and I were playing tangos, a delightful and charming group of women were celebrating their fiftieth birthdays at Apple Hill--one of them wrote about her experiences here.

(My sister and I are the twins playing violin and piano with daylilies in our hair--though I don't remember seeing the bat!)

Songs I Like, #16, Le Gorille by Georges Brassens

Peter S. Beagle is probably best known as a fantasy writer, the author of The Last Unicorn and many other delights. His short story "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" is one of those pieces of writing that makes me think of what the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler allegedly said after hearing the young Jascha Heifetz play. "Well, gentlemen, shall we all break our fiddles across our knees?" It's an impossibly perfect story.

I read it in, together with the essay, "My Last Heroes" in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, an anthology of Beagle's essays and short stories. One of his last heroes is Georges Brassens, and he writes so passionately about about falling love with Brassens' songs that I promptly repaired to Youtube to discover them for myself. The songs accompanied me all through my PhD and I still put them on every so often, in the right mood. In truth, my French is exceptionally bad; I depend on translations to understand the lyrics of the songs. A great resource for appreciating Brassens is a wonderful blog by David Yendley, which offers English translations and commentary on the songs and what they mean.

There are a few songs that I could share in this month--La mauvais herbe, with its abrupt changes in mood; and Les amoreux des bancs publique, because it's sweet (or as sweet as Brassens ever gets). But I'm picking a third song instead: Le Gorille, which was banned on French radio from its first release in 1952 until 1955.

Le Gorille is an obscene song about a lot of things, among them opposition to capital punishment. The contrast between the between the lively, cheerful music and the acid-black humour of the lyrics amuses me greatly.

Songs I Like, #15: Dialudid by The Mountain Goats

This song contains several of my favourite things:

• lyrics which are half-sung, half-spoken
• a minor key
  
• use of an orchestral instrument in a non-classical context
• specifically, a cello
  
• rhyme, deliberately broken
  
• a story

Gotta love the Mountain Goats.

Music I Like, #14, Se vuol ballare, The Marriage of Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: child prodigy, scatalogical letter-writer, and astonishingly prolific composer. 

There's nothing like the pleasure of watching a Mozart opera and the Marriage of Figaro is such fun. This particular aria is sung by the title character, Figaro, on discovering that his employer, Count Almaviva, plans to trick him and assert this feudal right to sleep with women on his estate. This is a problem, since the woman in the count's sights is Figaro's finance, Susanna. In Se vuol ballare (which translates to "if you want to dance") Figaro sings about his determination to thwart the count's plan.

Operas: long on hyperbolic silliness, not long on realism. People really do sing about being mortally wounded for fifteen minutes before expiring, it's glorious. Or they sing gleeful, bouncy, incredibly catchy tunes while plotting the downfall of their enemies. Like so.

Music I Like, #13, The World is in A Tangle by Jontavious Willis

This song became one of my favourites during the period of the coronavirus pandemic, from early January 2020 to late December 2021, when I was unable to go home and see my family. Jontavious Willis is a multi-instrumental musician and songwriter from Georgia; I first encountered his music on The Blues is Dead? episode of The Bitter Southerner Podcast.

This song makes me so happy. If you can, I urge you to watch the music video too.

And then, if you enjoyed it, go listen to the entire album, Spectacular Class.

PS I've written about both Jontavious Willis and Mississippi John Hurt before in a post about listening to the blues during the pandemic.