88: Can You Even Handel It?

A biopic announced, more poor form at the NYP, and the 2024 Pulitzer Prize

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. If I were ranking this like a New Yorker crossword puzzle, I’d say this is a “lightly challenging” edition.

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 87
Carl Nielsen, “Snurretoppen” (“The Spinning Top”) from Humoreske Bagateller, Op. 11

Both I (Will) and Listener Laurie successfully guessed this composer. I had was helped tremendously by the clue, mainly because I just gave a pre-concert talk for the Seattle Symphony about Nielsen’s 4th symphony last month, and the research was fresh in my head.

For those who don’t remember, Joey’s clue was that this composer was married to a famous Danish sculptor. What was really eyebrow-raising to me was the fact that when they got married, Nielsen’s wife changed her surname not to Nielsen, but to Carl-Nielsen. She made her husband’s entire name her legal last name. I even asked the Danish subreddit if this was a Danish thing and everyone thought it was weird.

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.

Movie NEWS!

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Anthony Hopkins, who has embodied a cast of real-life characters in his long career, ranging from Richard Nixon (in Nixon) and Sigmund Freund (Freud’s Last Session) to Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock), and Adolf Hitler (1981 TV movie The Bunker), is set to play composer George Frideric Handel in the upcoming feature The King of Covent Garden.

Minamata filmmaker Andrew Levitas is attached to direct the biopic focused on how the German-British Baroque composer created his 1741 masterpiece Messiah. Tim Slover wrote the screenplay. Dan Lupovitz and Kevan Van Thompson will produce.

In a statement, Levitas said the film’s story will hinge upon “an unlikely pair, who meet each other at their lowest points, and together create a magnificent never-heard-before ‘sound for the people’: the groundbreaking masterpiece Messiah, the annual global bestseller for close to 300 years.” He said Slover’s script “is populated by passionate, real-life experience in all its color and dirt, creating a riveting human story with surprising contemporary relevancy, universal human connectivity and spiritual uplift.”

I (Will) have always thought Handel would make an excellent subject for a biopic, probably best done in three acts: his youth (moving from Germany to Italy), his opera impresario years (in London), and his old age (the premiere of Messiah in Dublin). It seems that this film will focus on just that last bit.

Hopkins, I’m sure, will do splendidly in the role, but it’s worth noting that Handel was 56 when he wrote Messiah. Tony Hopkins is 86.

Unfinished

The situation at the New York Philharmonic has, unsurprisingly, gotten worse. Per the Times:

Two New York Philharmonic players sued the orchestra on Wednesday, saying they had been wrongfully suspended after a recent magazine article revived allegations of misconduct against them.

The players, Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang, filed separate lawsuits in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The men claimed that the Philharmonic had removed them without cause and in violation of an arbitrator’s ruling, which had ordered the orchestra to reinstate them in 2020 after an earlier attempt to fire them.

The players also sued their union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, accusing the organization of failing to provide them fair representation.

Presumably, these guys know that their careers are toast, and they are making one last cash grab so they can live out their lives in relative comfort. We’ll see what happens.

And the Pulitzer Goes To...

The winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music is Tyshawn Sorey for his “anti-concerto” for alto sax and orchestra titled Adagio. You can listen to the premiere performance by Timothy McAllister and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra on Soundcloud here.

The Pulitzer website offers this description (presumably from Sorey’s own program notes on the piece):

ADAGIO (FOR WADADA LEO SMITH) is ostensibly a concerto for saxophone and orchestra, but in many ways, it is an anti-concerto. Concertos are usually showcases for dazzling displays of virtuosic technique. This work requires a great deal of technique, but of a much more subtle variety.  Instead of rapid-fire outbursts of sixteenth or thirty- second notes the soloist and orchestra are asked to play at the glacial tempo of thirty-six quarter notes per minute. The dynamics are extremely quiet. It is more about introversion than extroversion. The players and the listeners need to settle in for twenty minutes as the work unfolds slowly and quietly with beautiful, sustained harmonies and only slightly less sustained melodies introduced via the orchestra or intermittently by the saxophone soloist. This stately but understated work is a welcome respite from the chaos and intrusiveness of modern life.

I (Will) have said this before and I’ll say it again: with prizes, the winner says more about the prize-giver than the prize-winner itself. That’s not to take anything away from Sorey or his accomplishment (although, if I were being uncharitable, I might point out that Sorey’s doctoral work in composition at Columbia was carried out under the tutelage of George Lewis, the chair of the Pulitzer’s music jury.) What I mean by this is that, in a field like music composition, there is so much produced in any given year, and so much of it laudable, that the choice of whom to award will necessarily be a reflection of the tastes and aims of the awarders than a universal fact about the supremacy of any one given work.

You can also hear (and see) one of the runners-up, Esperanza Spalding’s double concerto here, and a significant chunk of the other runner-up, Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Paper Pianos here.

Tone Praise

Florence Price, Colonial Dances

Having just listened to all those Pulitzer pieces, I (Will) feel like Lady Cora in Downton Abbey after the family had been served a salty raspberry pudding (due to Mrs. Patmore’s failing eyesight), demanding that fresh fruits be brought immediately to the table so that they could get the taste out of their mouth.

This little concert opener by Florence Price is just the ticket!

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)