The Fine Art of Listening

June 23rd is St. John’s Eve – that is to say, the day before the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Christian Feast Day that celebrates the forerunner and baptizer of Jesus. But more on that tomorrow.

St. John’s Eve just happens to be the setting for one of the best scary pieces ever written – A Night on Bald Mountain (also titled “St. John’s Eve on the Bare Mountain”), by Modest Mussorgsky. The spooky music speaks for itself. Mussorgsky himself describes how he wrote the piece. I thoroughly enjoy his words (taken from a letter to a friend), because he makes the compositional process seem like a compulsive, drunken all-nighter, with plenty of Russian resentment against the Germans:

“So far as my memory doesn’t deceive me, the witches used to gather on this mountain, … gossip, play tricks and await their chief—Satan. On his arrival, the witches formed a circle round the throne on which he sat, and sang his praise. When Satan was worked up into a sufficient passion by the witches’ praises, he gave the command for the sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy. So this is what I’ve done. At the head of my score I’ve put its content:

1. Assembly of the witches, their talk and gossip;
2. Satan’s journey;
3. Obscene praises of Satan;
4. Sabbath

The form and character of the composition are Russian and original … I wrote St. John’s Eve quickly, straight away in full score, I wrote it in about twelve days, glory to God … While at work on St. John’s Eve I didn’t sleep at night and actually finished the work on the eve of St. John’s Day, it seethed within me so, and I simply didn’t know what was happening within me … I see in my wicked prank an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine, and grown on our native fields and nurtured on Russian bread.”

This piece is now pretty much universally recognized as one of the best parts of Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia, which also included masterworks such as The Rite of Spring and the Pastoral Symphony.

Midsummer is celebrated various ways by various cultures on various dates throughout the week after the Summer Solstice. This is good news for my blog, because, not surprisingly, this mystical, magical, and religiously important time of year has a lot of significant music written about it.

Before Cheech & Chong, the best acid trip entertainment was undoubtedly Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gods, goddesses, fairies, and magic potions, there is even a character named Bottom who gets turned into an ass; now that’s top-quality play-writing! Felix Mendelssohn, like many other composers, wrote incidental music for this play. Here is the rollicking scherzo from the suite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksLWUBXHQ8w

… and the livin’ is easy.

Yes, you know this song. It’s part of the American landscape now, having been recorded over 25,000 times. It is, of course, by George Gershwin, from his opera Porgy and Bess. The 1935 performance featured an all African-American cast, and received poor reception due to the color of the cast as well as the racial themes of the work. Since then, the opera (especially “Summertime”) has exploded in popularity and is one of the most-performed operas today.

Gershwin himself called this a “folk opera”; it lies in that funny “crossover” place between a Broadway Musical and an Opera. The song form of “Summertime” is quite simple – the phrases would be analyzed as A,A’,A,B – like a folk song or a Broadway number. Most people know it as a jazz standard or a popular song, where the vocals tend to be in a much lower tessitura, giving it a sensual, sultry sound. This makes the music sound like a sexy love song that could be sung to your lover over a cigarette and a martini on a sweaty summer night. However, the original idea of the composer, though, was a sweet lullaby that a high, floaty soprano sings to her baby.