Name That Tune
This week’s Name that Tune is a Maestro Will special. There’s no hint, but I will tell you that you can really pit your wits against mine this week, as this was a genuine NTT scenario in the wild for me: I tuned into the radio while I was driving somewhere, and I was able to correctly guess this composer.
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 138
CPE Bach, Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu
Guys, I nailed it, and I’ve gotta give myself some serious props here, because not only did I call out CPE in the comments, I even texted Joey the actual piece. I wasn’t sure enough to not register my guess as a guess, but it turns out I should have been.
I was humble enough to add Haydn to my bucket as a backup, and Listener Eric also registered Papa Joe as a guess, adding Gluck to the mix as well. I’d say both were right on track. Listener Laurie took one a step about a generation forward and guessed Mendelssohn — which makes sense, given CPE’s forward-looking musical language! (And Mendelssohn’s backward-looking one.)
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.
Trouble in Paradise
The Southwest Florida Symphony Orchestra is calling it quits, according to a statement on their website:
After more than six decades of presenting outstanding orchestral performances for the enrichment, entertainment and education of the community, the Southwest Florida Symphony announces its decision to permanently close. The Symphony will continue operations through the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2025.
The unfortunate fact is that classical music is struggling to thrive across the country. There are very few suitable, cost-effective venues in Lee and Charlotte counties and the costs of performances have grown to be very expensive. There is also an abundance of live entertainment options competing for the community’s attention.
As a nonprofit that relies heavily on donors and sponsors, with ticket sales covering a fraction of the orchestra’s budget, this reality has resulted in annual operating deficits. Despite financial prudence and tireless efforts to persevere, repeated annual deficits that the Symphony experiences due to operational restrictions, increased performance costs and loss of state funding are no longer viable.
I feel like I haven’t heard about an American orchestra outright folding in quite a while, and I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come. I can understand the venue issue though — it’s entirely possible that the local high school / college auditoriums (or “Performing Arts Centers”) are booked with touring shows and whatnot. But this might present an opportunity for an enterprising young maestro to put together a new professional chamber orchestra that could play in a large church venue.
Final Score
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has released a video game:
In Final Score, young people aged approximately 11 to 17 years are introduced to classical music in an active and adventurous way, while collaborating online. As they defeat enemies together, they progress through the game and, in a fun and playful manner, learn more about musical instruments, composers, and how music works.
The game features a rich variety of live recordings by the orchestra throughout its different stages and worlds. For instance, Het pand der goden ('The Pledge of the Gods’) by the Surinamese composer Helstone plays in the lobby, while parts from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung set the mood on Volcano Island. Elsewhere in the game, Debussy’s Fêtes and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony make playful appearances. Even the sound effects were specially recorded by orchestra musicians using flute, trumpet, trombone, percussion and even a piccolo.
It appears that the game is for some sort of system called “Roblox.” I have no idea what that is, but if you ask me, it looks bloody awful, and I can not see what the appeal would be to young people aged approximately 11 to 17 years, nor to anyone else, for that matter. If you’re a classically-inclined kid that age, you’re probably getting really into practicing your instrument.
So Much To Hear
Yesterday morning I listened to an episode of one of my regular podcasts, Klassik aktuell from Bayerischer Rundfunk, in which a Bavarian correspondent gave a report from La Scala in Milan about the world premiere of a new opera, The Name of the Rose (“Il nome della rosa”) by Italian composer Francesco Filidei.
This was the first I’d heard about this opera, based on one of the most famous novels of the past 50 years — a great book, if you ask me, that was also adapted into a perfectly decent film starring Sean Connery. Take a look at that YouTube video, and you’ll see that the score is a large-format, handsomely-bound publication by Ricordi, Italy’s top music publisher.
And yet, this is also the dawn of my awareness of the opera’s composer, who, it should be noted, has the decency to dress exactly like you’d expect a contemporary Italian composer to dress, and who has written major works that are given performances by major European orchestras in important halls:
Sometimes, you just can’t help but feel like the world of classical music is so overwhelmingly vast that you’ll never get your hands around it. Here’s a composer who is clearly among the top talents of the current generation, producing major works in a musical style that I am — at least partially — sympathetic to, and were it not for a random podcast, I wouldn’t even know of his existence.
And I’m not just some random schmuck — I’m a working professional composer-conductor who makes a concerted effort to stay on top of the field. And yet, I don’t know that I could even name the most prominent living composer in each state of the US, much less in each country of the world. And that’s just in the realm of “classical” media like symphony, oratorio, and chamber music. Once you get into the worlds of band or chorus or guitar or accordion music, you can absolutely forget it.
Tone Prose readers: have you ever heard of Francesco Filidei? Does the sheer weight of the ever-developing repertoire ever leave you overwhelmed?
Tone Praise
Josquin, “Petite camusette”
A recommendation from Listener Ellen. “A simple little Josquin motet with a perfect canon.”
Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
NTT: a large wind chamber group and fairly "common practice" tonal language... who would write for this? I like Laurie's Reicha guess very much, and other 19th century windy peeps I'll add to my bucket are Weber and Franz Danzi, though those are probably both too early for this.
And I'll also ask - did you figure out the NTT in 40 seconds, Will? Because otherwise it's not a fair wit-pitting ;)
Thanks for recommending Petite Camusette. I hope people love it as much as I do. The words seem to mean ‘Little Snubnose who has put me to death.’ (and we all know what that means in secular music of the Renaissance...). The first time we sang it in Sine Nomine Renaissance choir, we all thought ‘oh, what a charming, simple little piece’ and then we realized that it was meticulously constructed with overlapping perfect canons and what not, by the master of Renaissance polyphony. It’s a hoot to sing in a semi-circle, because the tenors are always singing us altos’ line right before we get to it, but you can miss that in the general hilarity until it’s pointed out. The triplets (thought to be ‘perfect’ rhythm in Josquin’s time because of the Holy Trinity) just slay me every time. Kudos to editor Pat Rice (and others as well, I think), who sussed them out from the original ms. It’s not always easy to recognize triple time in the notation. For some reason, this piece is called a ‘chanson’ rather than a ‘motet,’ maybe because it’s in French (which was a bit daring to use at that time rather than Italian) and because it’s so folksy. But I’m never clear on the distinction.