Tone Prose 60: You Had to Be There
A juicy new Maestro trailer and stray thoughts from darkened rooms
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: believe it or not, this is the work of a well-known 19th-century symphonist.
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 59
Messaien, Turangalîla-Symphonie: V. “Joie du sang des étoiles”
This week’s NTT seemed to fall into the category of “you know it or you don’t” and several people knew it, including me (Will), Listener Eric, and Listener Kevin, who even identified the specific movement.
Turangalîla, of course, has a very particular sound profile defined by its enormous orchestra, its solo piano, and most importantly, the electronic portamenti of the Ondes Martenot.
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.
New Maestro Trailer
Maestro is upon us (select theaters on Nov. 22, Netflix on Dec 20) and, I (Will) gotta say, the new trailer looks incredible. So so SO much better than the teaser from a month or so ago. I’ll freely admit, my misgivings are melting away and I’m now genuinely excited to see this movie.
Even if I were judging it on costumes and film stock alone, I’d give this trailer a 10/10 in terms of catching the Bernstein vibe.
Concert Report
Saturday, October 21
Byrd Ensemble, Seattle
I (Will) shy away from giving reviews of Seattle-based ensembles, especially of any ensemble that might be considered a peer of my own group, so I’ll just say right off the bat that this was a great performance and I was very happy to have been there.
I more want to focus on two elements of the concert:
Even though the Byrd Ensemble normally performs only the music of the English Renaissance (and maybe a few other tangentially related works) for its 20th anniversary, the group commissioned a new piece by Nico Muhly. It’s called Fallings, and I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think this is Muhly’s fach. Let’s not forget that he made his early reputation with a bunch of church music and chamber music that he wrote for (and performed with) his friends. The more he’s ventured into the worlds of large-scale symphonic and dramatic composition, the less successful his music has been, in my opinion.
This concert ended with a performance of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium. This is an incredibly famous piece that everyone learns about in music history class because of its extravagant scoring for an ensemble of 40 independent voices.
I’d heard the piece on recordings, but never live, and certainly never surrounded in a huge circle by the forty singers it requires to perform. I’m here to tell you that no recording can possibly do this piece justice. I’ve always found the piece underwhelming as a composition, but that’s because I was listening to it flattened down to a pair of stereo speakers.
Even if you set up a room with a speaker for every voice, you still couldn’t get the full effect of the piece, which involves not only hearing the lines as they traverse the room, but also experiencing the singers’ collective struggle, their concentration as they try to keep the whole thing together and deliver the impassioned phrases and stay in tune through the music’s harmonic wanderings.
I’m listening to it again on speakers right now, and I might as well not be.
Opera Report
Handel, Alcina
Friday, October 20, Seattle Opera
OK, another round of commenting on a local Seattle show, but again, I’m trying to talk about a bigger takeaway than critiquing the performances.
As I noted last week in the Tone Prose column, I’m not a big baroque opera guy. First off, there are the plots. Now look, even in the 19th and 20th centuries, opera plots were not always the most logical affairs, but the 18th-century sense of drama has so little connection with the Netflix era that it can be a real strain. I mean, I defy you to read this paragraph and understand it:
The bigger problem (for me anyway) is that baroque composers had still not discovered the duet as a technology, so a baroque opera ends up being an evening of one solo opera followed by another running on for something like three hours. It’s just a bit unrelenting, and when you’re sitting there watching multiple people on stage at the same time — even characters who are in love with one another! — and they won't sing at the same time, it’s just frustrating somehow.
Funnily enough, the feeling of boredom at the opera was just covered in a very clever personal essay by Perri di Christina over at VAN which I can recommend highly. Here’s a bit of it:
Boredom is never just boredom. Boredom is a medium through which other feelings, wishes, and desires can bloom. It’s a fertilizer, a conduit for self-interrogation. Within its emptiness lies space, to imagine and dream, to move, pivot and potentially transform. By accepting the doldrums of a darkened opera house, I give myself the gift of self-knowledge. By accepting my inability to focus on art I deeply love, I give myself the gift of wanting.
Tone Praise
Herbert Howells, “King David”
I (Will) will not relent in my efforts to make Herbert Howells a “thing” among the broader classical music audience. He’s mostly known in church music circles (and rightly so) but he wrote a bunch of other music, including some instrumental pieces that I adore, but this song is a nice transition point where church music people and normal music people could find common ground.
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Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)