Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. No hint this week, but I will say that I purposely decided to choose something that’s not all that obscure. Many of you will recognize this piece right away (and please read the proviso below if you do.) It’s obscure enough that some of you won’t know it though, and I really do encourage you to weigh in with guesses and analysis.
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 classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 40
Debussy, Berceuse héroïque
Thanks to Joey’s hint (and Claude’s notoriety as a cad!) the name Debussy was mentioned in the discussion of this week’s NTT. However, all of us who played along (aka, me, Jeremy, and Laurie) thought it was quite unlikely from a musical point of view that this would be the work of Debussy. In fact, we all seemed to think it must be anyone BUT Debussy, given the multiplicity of styles exhibited in just 35 seconds, none of which sounded like CD.
Apparently, the piece was written in 1914, just as Germany invaded Belgium at the outset of WWI, and there is a Belgian folk song that is briefly quoted. I learned more from the top comment on the above-linked YouTube video:
What led me here (other than love for all the music of Debussy) is that I am currently reading a terrific book about the period of his music I love most, noted Debussy scholar Marianne Wheeldon's "Debussy's Late Style" (Indiana University Press, 2009) which is precisely about this period and abrupt change in style due to both WW1 and his cancer. The “Berceuse” is the first example she examines in detail.
The other composers named in the guessing were: Borodin, Liszt, Glazunov, Stravinsky, Smyth, Balakirev, Arensky, and Scriabin. Perhaps Debussy was returning to some of his youthful enthusiasms here: never forget that he spent a season in St. Petersburg as the private pianist to Nadezhda von Meck (famously the patroness of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky!)
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.
For the Birds
A fascinating little story in the New York Times this past week looked at the musical elements of birdsong, from pitch to rhythm to timbre and form. As an avowed anti-speciesist myself, it was nice to see some uncharacteristic humility and non-human-centered thinking from the researchers involved:
To humans, birdsong may appear to have “a random structure,” Dr. Roeske said. Because of the speed at which birds sing — up to four times as fast as most human music — that rhythm is “hard for us to grasp and appreciate,” she added.
...
“We’ve just scratched the surface,” Dr. Webster said. “Birds are constantly making sound, and I think most of the time we don’t really know why, and we don’t really know what they’re saying to each other.”
Human musicians from Mozart to Messiaen (well... maybe just those two) get name-checked in the write-up, and there are lots of little sound clips that make for interesting listening.
Unfinished
As mentioned in CGF Newsletters 15 and 16, the head of Juilliard’s composition faculty, Robert Beaser, came under investigation after friend-of-the-former-pod Sammy Sussman reported allegations about inappropriate sexual relationships and harassment by Beaser stemming back to the 90’s.
Quoth the New York Times:
The Juilliard School has fired a professor who had been accused of sexually harassing students after an independent investigation found “credible evidence” that he had “engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” the school said in a letter to students, staff, faculty and alumni on Thursday.
Juilliard said the professor, Robert Beaser, 69, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018, had behaved in a manner that was “inconsistent with Juilliard’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students.” The school did not elaborate, saying only that the investigation had found evidence of a past “unreported relationship” and that Beaser had “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.”
Richard C. Schoenstein, a lawyer for Beaser, denied that his client had misled his employer. He said the relationship in question took place three decades ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the school’s findings “unspecific and unattributed” and said that Beaser would “pursue his legal rights in full.”
Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy’s 2023–2024 Season Preview
Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, a non-profit whose mission is to promote the work of female and non-male composers has come out with its annual season review/preview, and its author, Sarah Baer, is unimpressed:
After years of some notable upheavals [...] it now feels as though many ensembles have settled back into comfortable, and unremarkable habits. Though there was opportunity and forward momentum for making significant, positive changes, it seems as though most of the institutions that we track find it is more comfortable to stay with systems that are recognized as inherently unjust and inequitable, rather than take the risk of making a change.
Baer goes on to lay out her findings in considerable detail, providing a series of charts and graphs that are rather eye-opening:
I would encourage everyone to read the report in full. As you can gather from the paragraph quoted above, this is not a work of dispassionate data reporting, nor does it make any claims to be. The author infuses her analysis with her understandable frustration and disappointment.
I had a number of thoughts while reading the report, which I am going to share here. Now please understand when I say that I am fully on board with WPA’s mission. However, some of my thoughts will complicate the picture laid out in the report—mostly in ways that make the situation seem worse!
The data excludes pops, family, and holiday concerts. “The goal is to look at what a typical concert season includes and sells to the largest portion of their audiences.” If I had to guess, including these programs would make the situation seem even more grim than it already is; a holiday concert might offer very little room for inclusive programming. For example, it may just be one work by one man, such as Handel’s Messiah. Ditto pops with a live score rendition of John William’s “Jurrassic Park.” However, there are a lot of dedicated staff conductors and education directors out there who are trying to diversify family programming, and I think that their efforts should be recognized. Oftentimes educational programs will play to multiple houses full of school-aged kids, attending concerts that are free to them. If those concerts include female composers, isn’t that a boon for accessibility and diversity?
The “number of works” may not be the best measure of programming diversity. This is connected to my point from above, and once again, it may paint a less rosy picture of gender-diverse programming. But I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown by minutes of music. One “piece” can be a multi-movement concert-length oratorio, or a 4 minute overture. And let me tell you, there’s a lot of 4-minute overtures doing some heavy lifting out there by ticking off diversity spots.
We need another data set: “Their opportunities to excite, entice, and attract younger audiences is to meet Millennials and Gen-Z where they are: and those young people are actively working to dismantle systems of injustice and oppression that no longer serve them. Playing works by dead, white men are not going to speak to their interests, motivations, or passions.” This seems to me like a fair enough assumption, and I can point to plenty of anecdotes in my own life that would support this line of thinking, but I think it would be valuable to test the hypothesis that millennials and zoomers, as a generational cohort, will prefer to attend concerts with more gender-diverse programming. Because I can also point to anecdotes that would suggest that these young people are plenty happy to attend concerts of classical music by dead white men. I’m genuinely interested in seeing the data!
Is representing gender diversity enough? “...as has been the case since we at WPA have been looking at this data, it is primarily works by dead men and living women that are heard [...] However, this coming season will hear the work of: Grażyna Bacewicz, Margaret Bonds, Lili Boulanger, Louise Farrenc, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Alma Mahler, Dora Pejačević, Julia Perry, Florence Price, Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, and Mary Lou Williams. Note, too, that this list is virtually identical to the list of historic composers heard in the 2022-2023 season. Not to say that their works shouldn’t be heard – but to point out that there are dozens of other truly accomplished composers whose works never see the light of a concert stage.” I personally think this problem is more acute in the realm of living women composers. In her orchestra-by-orchestra breakdown of the coming season, the author lists all the women composers being performed. And it’s true, most of them are alive, but most orchestras are performing music by the same handful of living women composers. The reason I think this is more of a problem than with dead female composers is a) there are more women alive right now writing and publishing music than there ever have been, so more names should be represented and b) I have a suspicion that the dead women don’t care as much as the living ones do. (Note: I could make this exact same complaint about living male composers.)
This is interesting! “We also wanted to look at which conductors are performing works by women composers [...] in the line-up is Nathalie Stutzmann, who is also the busiest woman conductor. Sadly, Stutzmann isn’t leading any works by women this season, unlike everyone else in the top 25 most active conductors.”
Credit where credit is due. This report is focussed on the 25 largest orchestras by budget in the US, and that’s totally understandable. In theory, these institutions should be leading the way. But that’s not how the orchestra industry works. There is tremendously little independent thought in the orchestra industry; the whole apparatus tends to move as a collective blob (see the point that I just made above.) The innovation in the orchestra world comes from the bottom. To give just two local examples, I’m sure that the Seattle Philharmonic or the Seattle Collaborative Orchestra would be delighted to have their programming scrutinized along these lines, and it would be great to see them honored for their work.
Classical Mixtape
Elisabetta Brusa, Merlin
A living woman composer who is most definitely *not* part of the cohort favored by arts administrators—but whose music I happen to enjoy very much—is the Anglo-Italian composer Elisabetta Brusa. She’s got plenty of orchestral works (such as this one) that are gloriously orchestrated and could easily be programmed. Thank goodness for Naxos who has released four volumes of her orchestral music on disc.
Whoops, looks like I clicked on the wrong date for the autosend this week! Apologies to all of you who saw this email in your inbox and thought it was Thursday. You know the saying: “a day early and a dollar tall.”
NTT: Thanks for faking us all out last week, Joey :)
Will, whatever this week's NTT is, it's plenty obscure to me. But even though I don't recognize it, my immediate thought was of Stravinsky's Firebird. The brass timbre, the noodling woodwinds, the strings' pizz, the harmony, the modality, and especially that 2-note chord change motif that opens the 1st 5-6 seconds in particular, reminded me of Firebird. I've been fortunate to play the Suite several times, however, and know that this clip isn't in it. Well, at least not in the 1919 version, which is, I think, the only one my various orchestras have performed. But I know there are multiple versions with different years attached.
I've seen the ballet at least a couple of times at Pacific Northwest Ballet. And I recall that the music for it was actually QUITE different from what I've played. So I wonder if this clip - which sounds very dance-like, might actually still be something from Firebird. And, there is a Magic Egg that figures prominently in the ballet plot, so it seems like I really should put that Egg in my basket.
Or - listening again to those 2 chords - this clip might even have "sprung" from his Rite of Spring. If there is more than one version of that. Reminds me of the moment right before the Dinosaurs issue the Impending Doom Alert! (First impressions are lasting impressions . . . )
I'll throw in a nod to Mussorgsky, too, thinking back to his Pictures at an Exhibition.
Last guess - in a completely different direction - would be Grieg! I know . . . go figure. But that snarly timbre of stopped and/or muted brass reminds me of moments in The Hall of the Mountain King as it starts gearing up. So maybe Trolls are dancing a jig in something from his Peer Gynt. And having seen some trolls in Norway a few months ago, I can picture that . . .