110: Revival
An opera gets new life, an engineering guide, and a mile-high civic battle
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Eric. Here’s your hint: this is one composer’s fantasy on another (bigger name) composer’s original music. We’ll take either name!
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 109
Haydn, Sinfonia Concertante for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon
A very nice round of game play this week: Listener Laurie and First Mate Joseph came in hard with guesses for Haydn. Listener Eric went with Mozart, but hedged with Haydn so we’ll count that too. Listeners Gregor and Jeremy emailed with the exact answer.
Bravi to you all!
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
Morgiane
One of my (Will’s) all-time favorite episodes of the Classical Gabfest was when we talked to a scholar named Sally McKee about the life and music of the Louisiana Creole composer Edmond Dédé. As a lover of light music, I find Dédé’s marches and waltzes quite appealing, but I’m now excited to see that his magnum opus, the opera Morgiane, ou Le Sultan d’Ispahan is going to get its US debut.
In collaboration with the National Opera House, Opera Lafayette of Washington, D.C., and the Consulate General of France in New Orleans, the company will stage the entire 550-page production. People of color will fill as many roles as possible, from singing on stage to working behind the scenes. “It will be completely history-busting,” says Joseph.
“To me, this is what civil rights is about,” Mason says. The history of New Orleans’s composers of color “should be as well known as Rosa Parks. Black culture has so many more expressions than we know.”
Billed as the first complete opera by an African American composer, the manuscript has only recently been rediscovered after 130 years. The production is being led by New Orleans’ Opera Créole, but is being co-presented by Opera Lafayette of Washington, D.C. According to the Opera Créole website, the opera will be performed between January 23 and February 9 in New Orleans, Washington D.C., New York, and Maryland.
Mechanics
Until I (Will) saw this Instagram reel, I never knew how a player piano worked. If you’re similarly ignorant, you might get something from checking this out:
Bad Urbanism
As a little follow-up to my (Will’s) Urbanist take from last week, I present you this story from the New York Times about a pressure campaign from a Salt Lake City sports franchise owner trying to get Abravanel Hall torn down so he can put in a big new arena:
The task was formidable. City and county leaders were pushing ahead with an ambitious plan to remake up to 100 acres of downtown, largely at the behest of Ryan Smith, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Utah Jazz and his newly acquired N.H.L. team that will soon play in downtown Salt Lake City, along with two professional soccer franchises of which he’s a minority owner.
The plan includes moving some of the clunky Salt Palace convention center to create a corridor to connect neighborhoods to the east and west and filling it with gathering spaces, housing, bars, restaurants and shops that would become a centerpiece of the Winter Olympics when they return to the city in 2034. It also calls for the renovation of the Delta Center, the home arena of the Jazz and the hockey team.
Just for the record: I’m all for urban infill that connects neighborhoods with gathering spaces, housing, bars, restaurants, and shops. That’s swell. But at the expense of a concert hall? Come on people. I know literally nothing about the urban fabric of SLC, but I do not believe for a second that the concert hall has to be flattened to make way for a sports arena.
Yes, I’m an urbanist, but I’m also an urbane-ist, and this is not urbane, it’s not mindful, it’s not demure. I’m all for a small weight training gym on every street corner — I’m lucky enough to have one just a few blocks away from me, and I think it should be a civic right — but cities subsidizing professional sports franchises that already make money hand over fist? Fight the good fight.
Tone Praise
Conlon Nancarrow, Study No. 9 for Player Piano
Most people will not be into this and I (Will) can’t say I blame them, but György Ligeti was hugely into the music of Conlon Nancarrow — the American composer who immigrated to Mexico and wrote music of a truly eccentric cast, in which rhythmic/tempo ratios could be as arcane as 1:π — and because of that, I had my own bouts with enthusiasm for this music that is unlike any other. Not really a daily listening thing though!
Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
NTT: the piece being arranged here is, I think such a mainstay of the classical repertoire that I almost feel like we could spoil it in the comments without causing angst for any Tone Prose readers, but I'll be a little cagier than that, and allow you all your glories for identifying the original piece.
Having said that, determining the identity of the composer who would take this piece and arrange it for horn and piano is a much different matter. Listening to the recording, the piano being used sounds like it's a tinkly old thing, maybe a pianoforte, so perhaps this is a period instrument performance that would reflect the fact that the arranger was working in a period similar to the original composer (the 1820s.)
Having said THAT, I wouldn't be so sure, since the original composer was toiling in obscurity during his lifetime, and the melodic capabilities of the horn weren't nearly so developed as to be able to handle the passagework given to the instrument in this recording. So maybe I'm mishearing the piano, because I would think that this horn writing wouldn't be possible until the 1860s or 1870s at the earliest.
Richard Strauss comes to mind, since his father was a great horn player, so perhaps he put together this arrangement for a little bit of family bonding. Other horny arrangers that come to mind are Rimsky-Korsakov and Gustav Mahler.
Now Will’s touching on one of my rabidly held urban development opinions which is that cities should never use public funds to pay for sports arenas (unless the city gets an ownership stake in the team(s) and veto power over future relocation decisions….and even then I’m wary).