Holst, part 2!

Since I didn't quite get my fix from the last post, here's more about Gustav Holst! I will limit myself to one or two things I like about every piece I mention. I left off with the brief version of my First Suite in Eb speech, and I wanted to say a little about the Second Suite in F. Instead of an original melody that grows through each movement, Holst uses actual folk melodies as well as some original ones. What it lacks for me is that sense of unity from the first to the last. Still, it is a great piece, and his setting of the 6/8 Dargason effortlessly counterpointing the 3/4 Greensleeves in the fourth movement is one of the most rousing works I have ever heard. I also like the Song of the Blacksmith. It is more difficult to play than it sounds. It has so much rhythmic interest that listeners don't really know where the downbeat is for far too long. Before I spend too long on that, I want to gush about the Planets. My favorite movement is Jupiter, and I know that puts me with 90% of all other people, but its an amazing piece and the most fun to play. One thing that makes this piece so amazing to me is his use of percussion. The very end with timpani accenting the trombones makes me feel that shock down my spine. He also is able to use the percussion with such a light touch to make a line shine. After the first large cymbal crash and pause, he has a new melody introduced by violas and horns. In the reiteration of this melody, he puts it in a high register and uses the lightest woodwind voices. as they play the melody, the first three notes of every phrase are accompanied by bells. It can escape notice because the bells do not play the entire melody, but the fact that they strengthen the opening gesture and leave the pitch hanging makes the entire line sparkle. I hope if anyone reads this that they will listen to Holst with an ear for the instruments providing "background effect." He used them extremely well, and even though they wouldn't make it onto a Schenker graph (important fundamental things only), they matter. We often miss the point that anyone who knows the rules can write a fundamental and functional piece. The composition masters are great for studying that because it's all there, and we all acknowledge the beauty in their craft of melody, counterpoint, and harmony that made them special, but the tiniest things can often be what makes a piece really special.

Class this week

So I was going to give up blogging for lent, but 3 days in, the insatiable addiction takes over, and here we are. We covered one of my all time favorites in class this Tuesday, Gustav Holst! I was glad we finally got to him and disappointed to leave him behind.
Of all the English composers, Holst is my favorite, but in his own time, the world was not so quick to appreciate him. I could spend an entire post talking about a single piece, but I'll try to fit 2 in. The first is one is his pioneer accomplishment for winds, The First Suite in Eb for Military Band. It was the first serious piece written for modern wind band. The piece did the most important thing that could be done for wind bands; it standardized the instrumentation, and it showed good idiomatic writing for the medium. Before the First suite, wind bands of different sizes were popping up everywhere playing transcriptions of orchestral works and popular music. Composers would not write for them because the ensembles were believed unable to blend, and the instrumentation was too inconsistent. Gustav Holst wrote this work without a commission in 1909. It spent the next decade unknown in a drawer and did not receive a premiere until 1920. It is scored for 19 players with 17 other parts notated ad lib. The extra arts can be used or left out while maintaining the functionality and spirit of the piece. Wind ensembles of the day had anywhere from 20-40 performers, so the piece was, in a sense, made to order. The harmony and cooperation Holst brought out of the winds, brass, and percussion was so stunning that others took notice of the ensemble and began to write new works. I'll spare you the in depth analysis, but the construction and development of this piece is absolutely amazing. From the chaconne, his original folk-like melody grows organically and becomes more interesting through each of the 3 movements. The chaconne maintains harmonic intrigue for the entire movement even though the theme stays on tonic, minor tonic, and inverted on tonic for the entire piece until a half recitation in the dominant at the very end. The intermezzo and the march both use the technique of presenting two melodies and then combining them in a very effective way. The work as a whole has a pleasant form and each movement has its own personal appeal.
I went on very long about this work, so my next post will also be for Gustav Holst covering a couple of other works.

Paper idea refining.

Looking at it more and more, I think I might go with the idea on British Brass Bands, but I want to expand beyond that. There were tons of innovations to wind music during the time like the invention of valved brass, the tuba, and the standardization of families of transposing instruments. In Britain and America both, there were hundreds of interesting characters including composers, band leaders, Italian virtuoso conductors, and eccentric soloists. The repertoire came from places all over. It was both from original sources and transcriptions of orchestral literature. The instrumentation kept changing over the years. The keyed brass were exotic instruments, and the multi-belled brass looked like they were straight out of Dr. Seuss. Even better, there were mass concerts, one such created by Pat Gilmore, which made Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand look like chamber music. His was called the International Peace Jubilee, and it contained over 2,000 instrumentalists accompanied by a choir of 20,000.I like this period of Band history. They were never more popular than this, and they were something far more serious. Today, we look back on them like they belong to this cheesy, naive tradition of music making. On the contrary, they were quite serious and as skilled as any orchestra on the planet. We take Sousa marches for granted, but as a band leader, he was one who commanded respect and did his job with a lot of gravity. There is a story that on his first day of rehearsal for a new season after adding 19 new members to his band, Sousa spent two and a half hours on 16 bars of an overture. Starting with principle clarinetist, he made him play the passage over and over until it met his expectations. Then, he concentrated on the second clarinetist until it was identical to the first, and so on. He did every player in the band like this to achieve the results he wanted. That was the kind of detail they played with, and the concerts were as good as any. I think I can make a decent paper on this. There would be enough small sources, but also, an old teacher of mine wrote the big book on this, so I have a connection to it in that way.

Elgar?! I barely... nah, it doesn't work.

It doesn't make sense with Percy Grainger either, but still just rolls as smoothly as any one of those jokes. Anyway, we have had a very healthy dose of Elgar this week, and it was all new to me. Elgar has always been one of those composers who wrote some good music, but I never thought I would learn any of his biography. He was indeed a character by today's standards. I hope they noticed back then. On the outside he was a gruff-looking military type. He was very manly with an enormous stache that looked like it could subjugate the British colonies on its own. From the old photos, he looks like a straight-arrowing, former boy-scouting, muscular-christianing man with healthy self-esteem and all his scruples in tact. The reality, however, was that he was a mopey self-doubter who surrounded himself with consolers and made arrangements with his wife (who's earnings he lived off of for a quite a time) to have permissible extramarital affairs. I don't think I'm revealing too much or surprising anyone at this point when I say, I don't like his type. Part of me wishes I didn't know these things about him. It seems like no composer ever makes it into the history books with his hands clean. As a composer, it worries me that I may not have (or lack) what it takes to make true art, or I could be corrupted by the future or misrepresented by history. What was interesting to learn, still, were the conditions, environments, and times in which he composed his most famous works. It was helpful to see what was done for the money, what was done because he missed the country, and how accurately we imagine the setting of these pieces today.

Post 2 for this week!

Our second class this week focused on the place of chamber music in Victorian England. I like the topic of chamber music in any context, so I was kind of excited about this one, but admittedly, the articles we read for this became a little dry to me. I started with the Bashford first, and it just had me confused for a while. It started out by talking about the origins of musicology. It focused on what musicology studied and who studied it, and then it stated for several pages the fact that no one writes enough about Victorian music. After such an opening, I thought that Bashford was going to finally write the definitive work about Victorian music that she said was missing from history, but then it just seemed to go on talking about the reasons that there is not enough research over Victorian era music. At this point, I thought that we were not really trying to solve the problem at hand, just excusing it, and I wondered why anyone would want to write an article all about excuses for not writing the article they really want out of life. After getting so far in (amidst 71 pages), I finally realized that it was tying together backwards for me. All of the examples were about chamber music, and the point of the paper was finally making sense. It was proving that the Victorians played chamber music despite lack of evidence. The opening of the paper had led me in the wrong direction. Reading the Temperley article helped to clear it up even further. The journal entries, estate records, and records from publishers and sellers were all compelling evidence showing that performing in small chamber groups was actually quite common as a leisure activity for them. I don't know why it was secretive and somewhat shameful to the Victorian men. I don't know how they saw it as effeminate when they hardly let women play the same instruments as they used. Still, it seems like men playing music together back then would be like men getting together today to paint each others toenails. It's absurd to me, but they had their own views on musicians back then.

Cant think of a title...

I guess all I can do right now is to reminisce about class this week, and rethink the readings we did. Tuesday, we talked about the opera in Victorian times and what it meant to society. The idea of an opera box being a social status symbol was nothing new. It's been like that since the beginning. However, I did not know that it was such a meat market for singles back then. It makes sense to me since they are really showing themselves off and all the wealth that they have. I guess I thought it was only for notoriety. Another new thing I learned was that it was common to talk as loud as one might want to in the opera; like one would do at a rock concert or something today. That would make meeting people a lot easier, and the program would tell you the names of all the rich folks you might want to meet.
I want to go back to that one thing that I glazed over just now that really sticks out to me the most. Should we be so quiet today in opera? or should it be acceptable to ask a little socially in the opera today. There would almost certainly be no competition for volume. Maybe if the seats were spaced to have a little more room and all, whispers wouldn't reach so many people. (If would advocate the whisper room just to get my leg room.) Also, it seems like opera didn't have the reputation of being so boring back then, but it seems that way for most people now. I'm good at following the conventions of performance etiquette, but I wouldn't mind the social mingling at an opera. There is a high chance of meeting someone interesting and knowledgible about music at the opera. Personally, 100% concentration does not show me much more about music than 50% concentration. I give my brain a break at an opera, and I don't analyze or count or dissect; I enjoy it for what it is. I even normally talk if a friend and I are working together on a score study in real time with the music. As a personal preference, I like to multitask socializing with my work as is.

Paper topic?

I'm pretty disappointed in myself for missing class this morning, so I figure the least I can do is think about my paper topic for a few minutes and contribute to my blog.... which for all I know has gone viral. I can't tell just by looking.
Luckily, this period and place contain one of my favorite composers of all time, Gustav Holst! I did an analysis paper on his 1st Suite in Eb for Military Band when I was in undergrad. It was for a class which taught the history of the wind band. That brings me to another possible topic, the British Brass band! Both topics were heavily covered in that undergrad class, and when I have to talk about wind band literature, history, and composers, I feel pretty confident because hardly any other music majors anywhere ever get a class that is all about wind band history. I think I could expand my analysis research on Holst and broaden it to include a few other pieces for additional genres. I would rather do something like that than a biographical paper or the like because my last biographical paper seemed good to me, but it got torn apart. My analyses, however, have always gotten good grades, and I can just write page after page of that stuff without exhausting a single source. It also lets me write more from my own knowledge because it's my analysis. I hate having to take every little thing from a source. Sure it's research, but why write about it if you're not going to introduce anything new? My ideal would be analysis with nothing but the primary source, but it doesn't seem like anyone will ever let me write one of those again.
The other possibility about the British brass bands would be the opposite approach, but it would at least be one that I am comfortable writing about. They played a big part in the music history for Britain, especially during the Victorian era. Musically, there is nothing else that was so uniquely British and that no one else could do as well, except for maybe the Anglican choirs. Still, everyone else has choirs that sing the same anthems, but that's neither here nor there. This topic might work, but I'll need to go back and do more reading on it before I think any more about using it.

This is like my first blog ever!

This is like my first blog ever! I always stayed away from these things because I sincerely believe that so few people really have a talent for being an author, and I am not one of them. Not only am I not one of them, but I can't get into reading blogs because other people who shouldn't be authors can be less interesting than even the slowest and most disappointing day of tv. Not to exclude myself from the rest, I don't even journal because I fall asleep while trying to write my boringness, and hate to subject myself, much less the blogging world, to all those things that only matter to me for just a small time. If you've made it this far, how lucky you must feel to be following my blog that will cover things I'm definitely not an expert on!
I want to sit and muse a little more on my Tuesday's class rather than today's. I had a little more sleep before Tuesday, and I felt like I was all there and participating as much as I should. I was a little intrigued by the topic that Victorians were not so back-asswards as we previously thought. They were not quite as racist as we thought. They still didn't care so much for the poor, but not as in love with the aristocracy as I thought they might be. They also loved thrill seeking and adrenaline-filled entertainment. After mentioning that they were not so stuffy and buttoned up to the top button all the time, we could have stopped there, and I would have happily accepted the thesis. After that, we talked about how progressive they were with examples like eschewing religion and open acts of depravity. We acted like these were the good things that made them even more "progressive" than us in certain ways. The article made page after page of certain scandalous attitudes and vices seem like their redeeming qualities. Granted I see the problems with the puritanical, harsh, public-penalizing theocracy we thought they might be, but the exact opposite isn't any better without some decency and self control. The reason the author seemed to like that side more was because we currently err to the "progressive." Keep in mind progressive isn't bad, but I just don't like it when we can throw all decency and self-control out the window and pat ourselves on the back for advancing human civilization. Also, if they were so much like us (and tons of societies before them which we've found to be progressive), then it's almost like nothing has ever changed with almost any society. Parallels can be drawn from us to the Victorians to the Romans to the Greeks and to almost any other society. We reach a level of prosperity, and then we become addicted to entertainment and more open with indulgences. It's been the same for thousands of years, and it doesn't seem like progress to me at all. Each society is running the same course. It's like the Victorian behavioral culture has suddenly become more predictable, and all that leaves to me is the music, artists, authors, the technological advances, and some funny clothes. More to come on that music. That part will be fun.