The Fine Art of Listening

I am a composer – one of the many things I do to keep myself busy.  For some people, composing comes easy; for others like me, we struggle.

So whenever I hear the music of Felix Mendelssohn, I am filled with two intense emotions. The first is one of great joy and love, because his music is just so amazingly beautiful it hurts. The second is one of jealousy and anger because, dammit, I want to write like that! His music is structurally perfect but never too predictable, emotionally passionate without being saccharine. I think he simply wrote the textbook on what good music is. I dare you to find one less-than-perfect moment in the first movement of his Violin Concerto:

In a time when composers wrote prolifically as a matter of course, Georg Philipp Telemann exceeded all other composers in the sheer amount of music he produced (over 3,000 pieces – and by “piece” I don’t mean a 3-minute ditty for keyboard, I mean a 20-minute cantata or suite for orchestra.) He was a self-taught musician who had a real talent for writing great music – but more importantly, a real mind for business. He did not die a poor penniless pauper (the way many of us imagine musicians die), but instead a successful business person whose work was the rage of 18th-century Europe. More than that, he was a forerunner in the idea that a composer’s work is his/her intellectual property, which helped shape the future of Art Music and publishing.

This short piece from an orchestral suite captures the sound of a Scottish Reel – or, at least what a 18th-century German thought a Scottish Reel would sound like.

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

Often, non-living “characters” play important roles in stories or staged dramas. I’m not referring to a mountain that magically speaks, however. I’m thinking of landscapes, weather, or other things that metaphorically relate to the actions and emotions of the human characters: for example, a movie where, at the moment of greatest tension, a thunderstorm breaks; or, a dry, desert landscape when the story has reached a point of despair and emptiness.

Peter Grimes is an opera by English composer Benjamin Britten, which was first performed less than a month after the European fighting of World War II ended. The plot is dark and disturbing; I wonder, though, if it didn’t seem so creepy when it was premiered, considering the destruction that British audiences saw during the war. From this opera, four musical interludes have been excerpted and used as concert repertoire by orchestras. Within the opera, these “Sea Interludes” set the scene both by painting a landscape, and by establishing a mood.

The first interlude is titled “Dawn”. Unlike the sweet, cheerful “Morning Mood” of Grieg, this morning reeks of a small, poor, fishing village, of closed-minded, spying villagers, of a brutal man, and of the impending doom of a young boy. It’s peaceful, but unsettling at the same time.