This week I’m playing trombone in a pit orchestra for a community theater production of Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Jesus Christ Superstar. I was introduced to this show as a teenager and immediately fell in love with it. When I was 16 I played it on piano for a professional theater, and often sang it with friends karaoke-style. However, this was 20 years ago.

The music has been on my mind this week, and not just because I’m actively participating in it. It’s kind of like visiting your old high school or hometown. It might look the same, or maybe it’s completely different. Maybe the visit fills you with nostalgia, or perhaps with hatred, love, confusion, or maybe even a oceanic connection to the past and future. But let’s not get carried away here.

The question I want to pose here is, why do we find this overture easy to swallow (musically speaking) whereas John Adams‘ Dr. Atomic symphony (a post from last week) is much more difficult?

I’m not sure I’m ready to give an answer, but here are some of the questions I’m ponderings and my thoughts:

• Is JCS “Art Music” or “Consumer Music?”
• Are my personal feelings (of nostalgia) clouding my judgment of this music (IE am I giving this piece more credit than is due because I loved it as a teenager) ?
• Am I giving Dr.A more credit than is due because my conservatory education says I should like it?
• Both pieces use highly accented pitch clusters in a rhythmic landscape, and are either atonal or have tonality ambiguity.
• JCS uses a lot more percussion – the familiar drum patterns make it easy to follow the shape of the piece, perhaps making the “ugly” pitch clusters more acceptable
• JCS also uses short, motivic melodic fragments that are later sung to words. Does the word-association with the motifs help us to accept them, even if they are discordant?
• Does the lack of a “rock” drumset in Dr.A make it “highbrow” and the inclusion of one in JCS make it “lowbrow”

Both pieces are actually very similar in my mind. I find much to like in each, though I can also identify their shortcomings. Dr. A is much more interesting, with a wider variation of material and broader palette of musical colors and styles. JCS is beautifully concise and balanced, and the melodic fragments are bite-sized, not overdone – which is a great virtue.

Your thoughts are welcome – listen to the JCS overture, and then the first 4 minutes (or more) of the Dr. Atomic Symphony:

There’s something magical about the big water. A trip to the sea refreshes us, helps us to forget, makes us think about bigger things. I myself have just arrived at the ocean for a week of trying to remember (or figure out?) who I am.

Not surprisingly, the sea has been an inspiration to countless composers. If I were to write a post about every water-themed piece, I would need to spend more than a month at the seaside, and sadly I’m not given that much vacation time.

I stumbled on today’s piece indirectly through my studies on Benjamin Britten (who, incidentally, wrote a TON of sea-themed music.)  Britten was a wee lad of thirteen when he heard Frank Bridge‘s composition, The Sea, and was completely blown away by it – so much so, that Britten sought Bridge out as a composition teacher, thus starting a lifelong, loving relationship of student and mentor. Bridge was considered one of England’s leading composers during his lifetime, but has since fallen into a bit of obscurity; this just means that his music is due for a revival! The Sea was written a few years after Debussy wrote La Mer (the English and the French are always trying to one-up each other.) La Mer is better-known, perhaps, since Bridge’s take on the ocean is much more musically conservative. Even so, it’s a lovely piece, and I’m glad to have found it, even if through the back door.

To dovetail off of yesterday’s post, music has to be in the present in order to exist. Organized dots on a page are not music – it doesn’t become music until it exists either as imagined or real vibrating air molecules, heard by a human. The harsh reality of this is, sometimes great music can be sitting dormant in books (or even a person’s brain), waiting to be heard by others. Take, for example, Edward Elgar‘s Cello Concerto.

The concerto received one of the famously worst premieres in music history – all thanks to an inconsiderate conductor who didn’t allow for enough time to rehearse the piece. When it was first performed in 1919, the orchestra did so poorly that the piece instantly fell into obscurity. It wasn’t until 1960 – 25 years after Elgar’s death – that the piece exploded in popularity due to a particularly stunning performance by Jacqueline du Pré (about whom a film was recently made.)

A twist of circumstances, a poor decision by a person in control, and history can be changed. It might not be fair, but it’s life.