97: Can’t talk babe. New Ravel just dropped.

Ascendance, recording, discovery

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: This composer was an avid trainspotter, and loved them in general. No Googling!

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 96
Pietro Mascagni, Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana

No surprise here — loads of you knew this one. Listener Laurie, Listener Michael, and Listener Jeremy wrote in immediately, and I’m sure many others recognized it just as quickly.

I’ll be honest, I know this piece by ear (after all, I watched pasta sauce commercials in the 1990s) but it would take me a second to remember the exact piece.

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.

NEWS!

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister, and it turns out that he’s quite a music lover! 

According to ClassicFM:

Before he became a human rights lawyer, or leader of the opposition, it seems Sir Keir Starmer was something of a musical prodigy. In his early years he played the flute, piano, recorder and violin, and was once a young scholar at the Guildhall School of Music in London.

The former barrister, who was elected to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party this April, spoke about his early musical years in an interview with On The Hill magazine, in answer to a question about his passions (which, he says, are “music, classical music”).

What kind of music, Starmer, Keir Starmer? “Beethoven piano sonatas”, he replies, pausing to add, “actually all things Beethoven.”

I (Will) watched the entire interview with Sir Keir and found him quite charming and very genuine in his love for classical music. Sir Keir has also made statements decrying the lack of music in schools. Let’s hope he uses his new authority to act on those statements.

The Key of David

Never wishing to squander an opportunity for self-promotion, allow me (Will) to introduce a new recording of a piece of mine:

I made this recording with a cracker-jack pick-up choir in Chicago last month. (Well, really in Evanston — as a UChicago alum, it’s my solemn duty to make that distinction whenever the situation arises.)

I wrote this piece on a commission from the American Guild of Organists, and I have to hand it to the young man playing organ here, Jacob Reed (how’s that for Dickensian nomenclature?) He played brilliantly upon the great E. M. Skinner at St. Luke’s Episcopal.

The music is one part Purcell, one part Vierne, and a dash of Sweeney Todd. If you want to learn more about the piece itself and the extraordinary woman who inspired it, head over to my website.

A Ravel Premiere

Is this newsletter becoming an all-Ravel publication? If it is, I’m not mad about it.

Yesterday, mardi le 9 juillet, a recently discovered work by Maurice Ravel received its premiere at the Radio France festival in Montpelier. It’s a short cantata for voices and chamber orchestra. The performance was given by Les Siècles, conducted not by noted dick-pic sender François-Xavier Roth, but rather by my former boss, Louis Langrée.

From an interview with Mathias Auclair, Head of the Music Department of the French National Library:

Amants qui suivez le chemin is an early work of Maurice Ravel. We believe it was composed between 1900 and 1905, that is the period when Ravel attempts to win the Prix de Rome, and practices the typical composition of this scholarship, which is the cantata, a piece for choir and orchestra. So this is a cantata, and indeed Ravel will no longer compose this kind of work after 1905. It really denotes a particular moment of his life and creative period. 

There is another element that helps refine the dating a little bit better: there is a humming passage in this work, rather peculiar, which can remind of what Debussy did in Sirènes in 1902. We know Ravel loved this work and arranged it for two pianos, so we can imagine Debussy had some influence on Ravel in this piece. Therefore, suggesting a dating between 1902 and 1905 seems realistic and correct.

I listened live and my assessment is that it’s pretty obvious why Ravel never published this piece or even referred to it in a single letter. It’s as slight as slight can get (only about 4 minutes long) and it sounds nothing like Ravel. I’d say he was right to discard it, and his mistake was not burning it (as Brahms most certainly would have done.)

But don’t take it from me: listen for yourself. That is, if you still can. If not, just email me and I’ll send you my bootleg.

Tone Praise

Delibes, “Les filles de Cadix”

I was just reading Anne Hidalgo’s Wikipedia article, and it turns out she’s from Cadiz, which immediately made me think of this song.

I know that I’ve talked and / or written about this before, but I have a *distinct* memory of watching a music video of this song (in this recording) when I was a teen in the 90s. (It probably played between Progresso commercials.) It played either on Bravo or the channel that played ARTE videos and it showed a bunch of Spanish teenagers hanging out in the Cadiz town square. Even before I could put words to it, I was a Europhilic urbanist and I was obsessed.

If anyone has any information leading to the discovery of this music video, please send it my way.

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