CGF Newsletter 5: Molto Agitato
The Met comes to the small screen; pianists argue about words; That Time Caroline Shaw Got Yelled At On Twitter
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeff. Here’s your hint: This composer once had a whole segment of the Classical Gabfest podcast dedicated to him. That’s it!
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 4
Meredith Wilson, Symphony No. 1 in F “A Symphony of San Francisco”
Congratulations to Listener Laurie who came in HOT at the top of her comment with American composer Meredith Wilson. Wilson is famous for The Music Man and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” She also noted that Wilson’s Music Man beat out West Side Story for the Best Musical Tony award in 1957, now looked back upon as one of the great missteps in the history of that award. I’ll further contextualize it by mentioning that Wilson had been the principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic earlier in his career; Bernstein was just coming on board as that orchestra’s conductor in the late 50’s.
Honorable mentions to Listener Caspian (Berlin, Gershwin, Kern), Listener Eric (Herbert and Steiner) and moi (Berlin, Herbert, Arlen). Herbert seems to have been the listener consensus, and I still think it’s a pretty good guess.
Dishonorable mention to Listener Jeremy for suggesting that German concert halls burn their violas to stay warm.
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 Met Comes to your Living Room
The Metropolitan Opera has been the bugbear of the Classical Gabfest for some time now, but let’s be honest — it offers a quality product and it’s done a lot to expand the market for opera. One of the company’s key initiatives has been its live HD broadcasts to movie theaters throughout the country. Pre-pandemic, this was a big deal in many opera-less communities; several friends have shared with me that people would dress in black tie to attend their local cinema’s opera broadcasts (and you know I like that!)
So I personally greet the news of the Met opening up their live in HD service to private homes with a mix of enthusiasm and worry. The worry stems from the fact that it points to the fact that movie theaters are dying, and I love the movies. Well... I love art house film, which I suppose isn’t “the movies” according to the Pauline-Kael definition.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s dark overlord is quoted in this piece saying: “We don’t want to replace the movie theater experience at this point,” he said. “We want to augment it.” So that’s... heartening, I suppose.
But here’s the thing: I keep coming back again and again to the fact that people should get YouTube Premium subscriptions. There are many, MANY full opera performances just sitting on the YouTube servers that you could watch whenever you want to, and a lot of them are classics. And it only costs like $15 a month, rather than $20 per opera, which the Met wants to charge. Get value for your money, folks!
—Will
Lexicon Valley of the Damned
As with any specialized field, music has its controversial topics that are so rife with emotion and drama that, while in the midst of it, one does not realize how much it doesn’t matter. One of these topics, among pianists who play with other people in a chamber or collaborative setting, is whether to use the word “accompanist” or not.
In this short feature on English pianist Julius Drake in support of this past summer’s West Cork Chamber Music Festival, this debate is addressed for about three paragraphs, and I wanted to put in my two cents. For Drake, the word “accompanist” is not a fitting description in any sort of collaborative endeavor. He says “accompanist implies that you’re something that goes with the main course, rather than being part of the main course,” and that he is always an equal partner in the music. One might immediately try to think of counterexamples, like songs with very simple piano accompaniment parts, but he’s there before you, claiming that “when Schubert wrote a song, even if he wrote ostensibly the simplest piano accompaniment in the world, it’s still an equal partner in pure music.” However, he doesn’t prefer the “very accurate” American term, ‘collaborative pianist.’ He just wants to be called a pianist like any solo performer might.
Alright, enough of his thoughts. What does this pianist think?
As my first paragraph might suggest, I think the debate is overblown. But putting that aside, my opinion is generally that there’s room for both terms, and the hypersensitivity to the word “accompanist” is a little bit silly. First of all, the words “with piano accompaniment” or its translations (mit Klavierbegleitung, avec accompagnement au piano, etc.) appear on the original editions of any number of musical works in any era, implying that the composer, or at least the cultural milieu, considered many piano parts to be accompanimental in nature, whatever that means. Second of all, the piano is a descendant of keyboard instruments like the harpsichord and organ which were often explicitly accompanimental in nature, as in continuo playing of the Baroque era. Keyboard instruments are simply well-suited to outline background harmonies to a melody.
Pianists who collaborate with singers are particularly sensitive to this designation, in my experience. There’s actually a common division within the world of collaborative piano, with instrumental collaborators typically looking down on vocal collaborators as playing wishy-washy and technically easy music, and vocal collaborators describing instrumental collaborators as haughty pianists with good fingers and no musical sense. (Many collaborative piano departments in the United States are brimming with tension about this split.)
In fact, the term is simply more applicable to some music. It boils down to this: the label “accompaniment” originally was a musical term, divorced from today’s (perceived) belittling connotation. The term doesn’t mean that it’s easier to play or learn (often it is quite the opposite), less important to the music (usually quite the opposite), or anything like that. An accompaniment part is just not the memorable or foregrounded aspect of the music. Audiences latch on to melody, and a true accompanimental part usually provides primarily harmony, bass, and texture. Even in much solo piano music, one might describe the left hand’s part as accompaniment. But one would never describe that music as less important!
The last thing I’ll say is that as a pianist who has collaborated with dozens of musicians, I get it. I think the sensitivity to this label is related to the common practice among singers and other instrumentalists of mistreating pianists. Getting music to us slowly and underestimating the time needed to prepare a part, dismissing our ideas and wishing to be the sole driver of musical concept, and — critically — underpaying us; these are all ways in which some musicians betray their opinion of us as fungible tokens. But in many ways we pianists have the most power of anyone — so much music needs us, and our instrument naturally lends itself to learning music theory and music history quickly. So I suppose if we simply unionize, we can shake off our sensitivity to the word “accompanist” once and for all, and re-connote it as a good thing. The Pianists United Will Never Be Defeated!
—Joey
War Stories from the Twitter Trenches
Joey’s review of Caroline Shaw’s new album last week couldn’t help but remind me of an episode from 2019.
I generally don’t like exposing people to the Twitter wars, and I admire people who steer well clear of the bird app. I, unfortunately, am a glutton for punishment, so I do spend a lot of time scrolling my feed (for the jokes! Well, for the jokes and the constant, gloomy commentary by a cabal of enraged Seattle urbanists.)
So what was the deal with Caroline Shaw, so often considered one of the brightest lights in the world of contemporary classical composition? She had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her Partita for 8 Voices, a work that I regard extremely highly, and consider one of the few really deserving winners of the prize in the past 20 years. What I like best about the Partita is that it pays homage to — but skews — the classical tradition, and that it is fun, a quality almost completely eschewed by most contemporary classical music.
One of the things that makes it fun is that it incorporates all sorts of interesting multi-cultural vocal techniques, including yodeling and — crucially — “Inuit throat singing.” And that’s what got her into trouble.
I’ll let the tweets tell the rest of the story. Tanya Tagaq is a Canadian Inuit throat singer:
(As an aside: I never knew that Gregorian chant could get a classical composer in trouble on the cultural appropriation grounds... look out Papa Haydn!)
The thread goes on this way for a while, but here is a bit of Caroline’s response:
And here are some of the first responders:
I’m just presenting the facts and I’m not going to offer an opinion on the conflict itself. The moral of the story is: stay off Twitter!
Classical Mixtape
arr. Rachmaninoff, "Belilitsï, rumyanitsi" ("Powder and Paint")
Recorded 1926
Singer: Nadezhda Plevitskaya
Pianist: Sergei Rachmaninoff
Rachmaninoff composed a piano accompaniment to this pre-existing Gypsy song for the express purpose of recording it with Plevitskaya during her tour of the USA (where Rachmaninoff had emigrated in 1918). A longtime associate of Roma singers, Plevitskaya was noted for the "strain of wild recklessness [that] rang through her song," as Vladimir Nabokov put it. During and after his life, Rachmaninoff was much maligned by opinionated aesthetes disapproving of "lowbrow" stylistic incursions into the elevated realms of concert music. "It is one thing for a Russian composer to write, say, a piece evoking a distant and exotic Spain, and quite another to write a piece evoking the all-too familiar sounds of drunken revelries at local brothels*," but Rachmaninoff remained unbowed in his commitment to blending the accessible & popular with the rarefied & refined.
—Listener Colin
*Marina Frolova-Walker, Professor, Music History | University of Cambridge
"Love Triumphant: Rachmaninoff's Eros, The Silver Age, and The Middlebrow" (2022)
From the clue, I went into the NTT hoping it was gonna be Charles Villiers Stanford, but listening to it, I have to go with John Williams too, which was my other option from the clue.
Also, am I the only one who now wants regular updates on Joey’s efforts to create a collaborative pianists’ utopia via collective action?
Last Week’s NTT #4 Results:
Meredith Willson . . . who knew?!?
And not just one Symphony, he actually wrote two.
Plus a wide variety of other pieces as well. He won a number of awards and had quite a list of accomplishments. Impressive biography!
I enjoyed listening to his Symphony #1 while I was finally allowed to consult the Oracle of Google to learn more about him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Willson
Official Site: https://meredithwillson.com/
Fun fact. The Beatles sang Till There was You from The Music Man during their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance (at 3:24"):
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3xo0uuhttps://fb.watch/g14wZF1Bkh/