After a nice long weekend and holiday, it’s going to take a Grande double-espresso Macchiato to get back into gear this morning. I’ll see your coffee and raise you a Mozart Overture to the Marriage of Figaro.
Muti is lost in the middle of a hot, dry desert. The burning sun is beating down on him, and he is miserable.
“Please, God,” (said in an Italian accent) “… please, just send me two drops of water. That’s all I ask, two drops of water!”
A second later, a small cloud forms above Muti. He holds out his hands in front of him, hoping God has heard his prayer. Two drops of water fall from the cloud and land, one in each of Muti’s palms.
“Thank you God!” Muti yells up to heaven. He claps his hands together, rubs them, then slicks his hair back.
It’s always a struggle to draw clear lines around what is and isn’t Art Music. One good descriptor is a piece’s ability to remain popular long after it was new. Simply put, trends come and go, but the stuff that’s really good lives on for decades or even centuries.
Kile Smith is a living American composer who wrote a large work “Vespers” for two professional ensembles, The Crossing choir and Piffaro renaissance wind band. The movements are in Latin and German; it was premiered in Philadelphia. It uses modern compositional idioms and ancient German hymn tunes. It sounds new and ancient at the same time. It breaks new ground while reminding us of something we feel like we already know.
If you like what you hear, I highly recommend listening to the rest of the work. You can find it on youtube, or (the better option) you can purchase the album from iTunes or Amazon.
Many of the instruments in the orchestra were originally used in the battlefield as a way to quickly communicate over large distances. The shrill piccolo or brassy trumpet will cut through loud gunfire or swordfighting (think about why Yankee Doodle is played on a fife, or a trumpet playing “charge!”)
George Frederic Handel wrote his Music for the Royal Fireworks to accompany an outdoor performance of fireworks. He wisely used the modern descendants of battlefield instruments because of their ability to be heard outdoors while explosives were going off all around them. The score calls for nine trumpets, nine horns, three pairs of timpani, and no less than 24 oboes and 13 bassoons. Even by modern standards, that’s rock & roll; and, just like a rock concert, the first performances of the piece caused a three-hour traffic jam on London bridge, and a building was burned down. Seriously. Rock.
Have a wonderful New Year’s Eve! And here’s some early fireworks for you:
There are videos available with pictures of actual fireworks, but I chose this one because I like the high-speed performance.
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