FOLLOW-UP FROM WEEK 2:
"Canonic" Composers
Ever since reading you the quote from Berlioz' Journal (about waking with the dream of a symphony and starting to quickly write it down and then realizing that he couldn't FINANCIALLY afford to spend any time composing, at that point in his life), I have been pondering "canon" (that is, who is and is not considered "real" enough to put in the books and to - profitably - perform or record) and the shifts in canon as time passes. Berlioz was hugely influential in his day (mid-nineteenth-century Europe) but was unknown to most of you, here in 2008. It's an interesting phenomemnon.
A counter-example might be Bach, whose name looms large to ALL educated Americans now, but whose music was basically forgotten and unplayed for nearly a century after his death (somewhat resurrected by Mendelssohn, and then after LPs began being marketed was recorded and popularized in the 1950s "Baroque Revival"). In Bach's lifetime, Telemann would no doubt have been considered the more likely to become "canonic." Canon is a fickle thing. Perhaps a bit like the "Most Likely To Succeed" characters in all the high school yearbooks! Just another thought to ponder, as we explore composers and composing.
At any rate, I have chosen one of the YouTubes of Berlioz, and will use it to illustrate a few things in Class 3 and then you can listen to it uninterrupted outside of class later, if you have the time and interest, since even though this YouTube is just ONE of five movements of his Symphony Fantastique it runs ten minutes. It has to be patiently attended to whole, since (I TOLD you!) he is working on a very large conceptual scale, not writing a simple style nor a simple melody, he is going for what are called "programmatic effects." In essence, he was "a film-score composer" before electricity and movies had ever been invented.
As Bill mentioned in class, talking about "The Old Days" and the listener's own imagination, pieces such as this Berlioz symphony invite you to conjure your own internal images of witches gathering to dance around the fire - and who is the burn-ee of the day? Why, YOU of course, as the unfortunate beleaguered main character of this nightmare, YOU are being taunted and tortured by the witches in this macabre circus-tinged mad dance around the flames. You basically "wake up in Hell" one day and do not quite catch on to where you are and what is happening until it's far too late! The traditional Roman Catholic Dies Irae death-knell is sounding before you ever have the chance to escape...
Berlioz wrote elaborate "program notes" describing the whole scenario.
Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on this specific symphony,
and the official Berlioz Site offers Berlioz' original program notes and a WONDERFUL related excerpt from his Memoirs (when he writes about needing "desks" he's talking about "music stands." This fragment from his Memoirs highlights the EXTREME difference between the particpatory madrigals of the Renaissance which we discussed in Class 2, which any educated person could enjoy performing in their household with their friends, to this situation of needing MANY virtuoso specific instrumental professionals and a conductor and a large venue and considerable rehearsal time to prepare something of this enormity, for a passive audience to hear.).
and here is a link to Berlioz' biographical page on Wikipedia
The UNCA Library holds the score so I have signed out the volume containing this movement and we will take a quick peek at the "look" of it in Class 3, as our scan of Music History catches us up to the late Romantic Era (of which this is such a telling example, particularly in its dramatic nature and its extremes of dynamics/ range/ etc).
This work is far beyond anything we have considered so far, in terms of the many many choices the composer must make, in every second of the music, including elaborate orchestration choices, rhythm choices, extreme dynamic choices, and imaginative articulation choices, all beyond the wildest DREAMS of the Early Music composers we talked about in Class 2 - and for that matter, beyond Beethoven (whose mature years overlapped Berlioz youth, but who had died shortly before this Berlioz symphony was written) and beyond most of Berlioz' own contemporaries (Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, etc).
The two main themes in this movement are
1. a circus-like theme first stated by the clarinet, which is a satirical variation of what had been - in PREVIOUS movements of this symphony - the dream-like lyrical theme of The Beloved, now revealed in its grotesque ugliness, and
2. a brass statement of the centuries-old Dies Irae (sung as a chant in Catholic funeral services), stated first ponderously slowly as an unharmonized "chant," and then twice-as-fast and harmonized.
Eventually, the two themes are interwoven, involving fugue-like passages with swelling waves of transition which might remind you of Paul Dukas' "Sorceror's Apprentice" except that THAT was composed in 1897 and Berlioz'symphonie is from 1830...
(If you are curious to see a timeline list of over 1000 composers throughout music history: click here)
By the way, if you haven't stumbled upon sites like the Internet Public Library music history site yet, check this out, it is absolutely fabulous, put together by Juilliard to be very media-rich and accurate and concise. It is, of course, but one of millions of music-history-related pages online.
Since the John Zorn link wasn't there for Class 2, as I was sharing his quotes, here are some Zorn links covering fragments from the past couple of (several distinct phases) decades. And here is the link to his page in Wikipedia
You know I encourage you to listen to as much music as your week allows, every week forever! But if you are working on crafting your own composition right now, you might want to focus on listenings in the style of your own budding work. However, if you want to hear something edgy, these Zorn excerpts are from his avant garde hyper-urban fragmentary music, and I think he explains himself really well in this clip:
(warning: this begins with a scream!) YouTube excerpt of old Zorn documentary, focused on the (crime novelist) Spillane scores Zorn comosed in 1987, giving a context to Zorn's sometimes UN-contexted screamings - murder! The "compositional process" description is fascinating.
brief excerpt from his 1986 "The Bribe" with snippet of film
(the volume on this clip is high, maybe turn your computer's volume down a bit) YouTube example from his early "Naked City" urban-thrash-jazz days, perhaps not entirely unrelated to the Berlioz actually! Electronic and trap-set-oriented, but I could imagine Berlioz IN this band, had he lived a century later than he did. Zorn's the one with the operatically squealing sax.
YouTube example of his current phase, which is involved with middle eastern scales and themes in a jazz combo setting, with those particular scales giving it an almost klezmer feel.