The Fine Art of Listening

I learned the term “homeroom quickie” from my high school Latin teacher. Whenever a large paper or project was due, inevitably among the carefully typed and prepared papers there was one which was hastily scribbled in pencil on line paper, ripped out of a 3-ring binder. The students who turned in these quickies usually did so either with their faces shamefully pointed to the floor, or with a carefree attitude of “yes, this IS my project I’ve been working on for weeks.” It was always easy to identify a homeroom quickie.

Imagine my surprise as an adult to find out that homeroom quickies typically grow up to become office quickies. Take, for example, the Samuel Barber‘s Violin Concerto. Barber was given a due date of Oct 1st, 1939, as the piece was supposed to be premiered in January 1940. Barber, however, failed to turn in the assignment on time; like any good quickie, though, there was a good excuse. He had begun the work in the summer, while he was in Switzerland – but the impending war caused a delay while he fled Europe. Nonetheless, by mid-October he had turned in two of the work’s three movements. With the clock ticking, the premiere approaching, and the violin soloist getting very nervous, the pressure was on to produce quickly. In late November, Barber whipped off a very short, very fast, very difficult finale to the concerto.

With just a little more than a month to learn and prepare this piece, the violinist rejected the work, gave a long list of criticisms and suggested edits, and ended up performing Dvorak‘s concerto instead. Barber stuck to his guns and didn’t edit his work, which was a good thing, because his concerto has since become a staple of the American Art Music repertoire.

So this “homeroom quickie” might have received an F from a teacher, but in the long run, A+. And, if ever a piece sounded like a desperate student trying to frantically write a twenty-page-paper in just three minutes, it’s this one.

 

It’s easy to think of a composer writing a piece as a romantic gift to a potential lover. Wow, lucky guy/girl, we think. But what about when a composer writes a masterpiece as a friendly gift to a 6 & 7 year old girl & boy? Bah, ungrateful little brats!

I’m kidding, of course. But still, we can be sure that this young pair had no idea of the honor bestowed upon them when Maurice Ravel wrote his Mother Goose Suite as a present for them. Though the original composition was for piano, within a year Ravel had expanded the work into a full ballet and orchestrated it. It has since become a beloved classic of “children’s’ music” (that is to say, music for all ages). The suite includes tells some common fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Little Ugly, and Beauty and the Beast. It ends with this gorgeous pastorale, The Fairy Garden, which doesn’t tell any specific story, but instead captures the simple rapture of children listening to a good tale.

 

On this day in 1957, West Side Story opened on Broadway. It has since become a permanent part of American music culture – everybody knows and loves this show and its singing, snapping, dancing gangs. When Leonard Bernstein wrote the music to this show, he had just been appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic. The fact that the conductor of one of the world’s finest orchestras was also writing for music theater showed the depth and breadth of Bernstein’s abilities.