The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant)

There are a lot of people that can’t wait for the new upcoming Doctor Who series which is believed to be aired in about a month on August 25. In the first new upcoming episode it also seems like that the Daleks are gonna cause more trouble again since the title of the first new episode is revealed and called ‘Asylum of the Daleks‘.

As a great Doctor Who & Torchwood fan myself i came across a great article about ’50 years of Dr Who Music” written by Jim Paterson from Music Files (mfiles.co.uk).

In this great article he will bring you back to 1963 were it all started and talks about the various music composers involved in creating the Doctor Who Music.

Click here to read the full Doctor Who article on Music Files

Doctor Who 2005 series

Don’t know the Doctor? Then you should watch this great Doctor Who trailer which includes series 1-6. (Don’t forget to listen to the music as well)

Torchwood

Torchwood is a spin-off from Doctor Who and is about a small team of alien hunters of the Torchwood Institute which deals mainly with incidents involving extraterrestrials. Torchwood is created by Russell T. Davies also the creator of the new Doctor Who series. It also contains some of the same music composers from the Doctor Who series. The series contains more mature content than the Doctor Who series. You can watch the trailer below.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales takes a big part in all the music of both Doctor Who and Torchwood and off course many more soundtracks. For the tv shows Doctor Who and Torchwood the orchestra was mostly lead by Ben Foster as conductor of the music Murray Gold created but Foster was also the main composer of the Torchwood soundtracks together with Murray Gold.
Watch the actor Karen Gillan playing ‘Amy Pond’ in the latest Doctor Who episodes introducing the Orchestra and listen to the great music.

Read the full Doctor Who article ’50 Years of Doctor Who Music’ on Music files

Hector Berlioz as child

We discussed Berlioz’ operas in the last entry. One obvious point about opera as an art form is that the music must integrate with a story. Berlioz’ career, though, makes us look at that obvious point in a not-so-obvious context.

Can music tell a story without lyrics or performers? How much narration can instrumental music alone accomplish? Can or should music tell a story sketched out in an extra0-musical way, as through a program of notes provided concert goers?

To begin with:  yes, an orchestra can suggest to our ear a babbling brook or twittering birds. Beethoven’s Pastoral does this.

But if composers want to go much further than that, they often have to give us some written direction, or hope that we’ve read some of the same literary works they have.

The Impurity of Program Music

Program music can and does deal with a wide range of subjects. An audience at a concert can be provided with notes telling them about the ebbs and flows of a particular historic battle, the adventures of Don Quixote, a trip down the Grand Canyon on a donkey, a dialog between God and a sinner, or just about anything else.

A single-movement example may also be called a “symphonic poem,” but in Berlioz’ day multi-movement concerts to a single programmatic theme were quite customary, a custom that was “undoubtedly educational” as Jacques Barzun has written, since the first half of the 19^th century was a time when “instrumental music was expanding its forms and purpose,” so it was only sporting to clue in the audience. Berlioz followed this custom.

This in turn would cause something of an anti-Berlioz backlash among critics in the early 20^th century, when there was a great deal of talk about “pure music” or “absolute music” that would not need any external support.

Anyway, one locus of such debates is Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique (1830). Here’s a bit of that! Please listen to that before reading the next paragraph!

What you are listening to there is from the first movement. What did the program notes that Berlioz wrote say about that movement? That “a young vibrant musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer^[ has called the wave of passions, sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her.”

Is that what you thought when listening?

Listening to Byron and Shakespeare

Berlioz did less writing for his next program symphony, Harold en Italie (1834), because a greater writer had come before him. This music was inspired by Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

We should probably mention that in Byron’s use the word “childe” doesn’t mean “child” exactly. A “childe” in medieval times was a candidate for knighthood, generally a young man.

Byron’s use of “childe,” even so, was not literal. His “Childe Harold” was a brooding young man from a distinguished family, “his name and lineage long.” But he wanted to escape this lineage, and to do that he had to travel, to escape his homeland. As Byron puts it “Then loathed he in his native land to dwell, which seemed to him sadder that Eremite’s sad cell.”

Berlioz’s program had to do little more than let his listeners know that “Harold in Italy” was seeking the traveler’s cure for a young man’s blues, in Byronic style.

Courtesy of YouTube again, here is a bit of it.

The work was composed at the request of a famous viola virtuoso, and throughout the various movements the viola serves as the voice of the protagonist.

Berlioz moved on from Byron to Shakespeare, composing the choral symphony, Roméo et Juliette (1839), which was performed late in 1939. Here, even more so than in the case of the Byronic poem, the audience could be counted upon to know the story. This was not “program music” in that no written notes were necessary for audience comprehension. Further, there are singers, so there are musical words that might be used to do some explaining.

On the other hand, there are long passages in which the instrumentalists hold our ear alone, and they have their own narrative momentum. And f you are a purist about music, if you really want it to be free of extraneous matter, you might well complain of this too, since there is that obvious external support.

Critics and Admirers

Much of the criticism that Berlioz received at the time, though, was not against his use of a familiar story in this way. It was from critics who thought they understood Shakespeare better than Berlioz did. One complained that his Queen Mab scherzo sounded like “badly lubricated syringes.” Another thought that the love scene in the adagio showed that Berlioz was careless in his reading of Shakespeare.

Berlioz himself wrote happily of that adagio that “three quarters of the musicians in Europe who know it put it above everything else I have written.” In the play at this point, Romeo is hiding in an orchard while Juliet soliloquizes at her window. In the symphony, Berlioz uses a disorienting harmony to correspond to the garden. He is letting us know that we, with Romeo, are on hostile terrain.

Romeo is represented by cellos and horns in this scene, Juliet by a high woodwind. A jolting violin represents the intrusion of the outside world, in the person of Juliet’s nurse.

Here it is.

The climax to this piece has seemed to many observers a lot like the climax of Wagner’s liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.

Yet if we have to choose between Wagner and Berlioz it is pretty clear, I think, on which side we ought to come down. Jacques Barzun tells a wonderful story about a conversation between Wagner and Berlioz. Wagner had developed an elaborate theory about music and its place in the universe. He tried to explain this to Berlioz – there exists an inner capacity of the artist, which receives objective impressions from without and which transforms these according to metaphysical principles and so forth.

Berlioz listened patiently and then replied with a wonderful bit of deflation.  “I understand. We call it digesting.”

Conclusion

But our conclusion is even simpler. High-falutin’ talk of “pure music” is goofy. All music ever composed has extra-musical inspirations, and every generation of musical audiences must be taught a new set of references and significances, by program notes or in some other way. Let us let that be the critical point Hector Berlioz teaches us.

Maybe music critics should take to heart the English language idiom; “Get with the program!”

Bearer of Romanticism’s Torch: Part I

I’ve said a bit about Hector Berlioz now and then since I’ve been writing here. But in this and the next entry I hope to put my Berliozian thoughts together, to offer you the Big Picture as well as the details. Berlioz might actually be the high-point of romanticism. He believed, and his admirers echo him here, that he had taken up music at the point to which Beethoven had carried it, and continued its progress. Brian Primmer has written, “His harmonic progressions showed how the grammar of music could be refashioned.”

I’ll write today specifically about the five operas attributed to this great Romantic. I’ll take them up in chronological order.

1. Les francs-juges (1826).

This opera, “The free judges,” is for the most part lost to us. Berlioz, still in his early twenties, composed to a libretto by his friend Humbert Ferrand. But the intended theatre, the Odéon, couldn’t get government permission for a staging.

Berlioz’ admirers have often blamed Ferrand’s libretto for this. One musicologist sums it up by saying that the cloudy and convoluted language “repeatedly befogs the purpose of the words.”

The opera went on a shelf, and at some later point Berlioz, blaming himself rather than his friend, destroyed most of the score. Some fragments remain, among them the overture, to which you can listen here. With due respect, it does sound a bit in parts like Berlioz may have been a young man too determined to seem mature and sententious.

Nonetheless, Franz Liszt, no less, was impressed, and in time created a piano transcription of this overture.

Berlioz’ second opera, or the first that survives in full, is

2. Benvenuto Cellini (1838).

This one, which takes its name from a Florentine sculptor of the 16th century, famously set off a riot in the streets of Paris, so different – so odd – seemed the style.

Cellini himself must have seemed a promising subject. His works include “Perseus with the Head of Medusa,” a remarkable statute (photo on the left) that you may find in the Loggia del Lonzi.

Yet Cellini is perhaps better remembered for his colorful life and his boastful autobiography than for the body of his work.

Berlioz’ opera is a comic reworking of Cellini’s own account of how he came to create the Perseus.

The problem wasn’t with the story, though. It was Berlioz’ still-developing musical style. Not only did it provoke much of the audience into violent reactions, it annoyed some of the performers, too. Gilbert Duprez, the tenor with the title role, found the music too demanding of stamina, too idiosyncratic in tessitura. In his own memoir, written many years later, Duprez would say that Berlioz’ talent “n’était pas précisément mélodique” (was not precisely melodic.)

Here posterity takes Berlioz’ side: Duprez’ precision was another man’s prison!

A fascinating sidebar has come down to us: Cellini opened at a time when Duprez’s wife was heavy with child. She went into labor as he was leaving their home for the third performance. During the final act, Duprez saw a doctor – the doctor – standing in the wings, presumably with news. He was rattled and never for the remainder of that performance quite regained his stride.

[The newborn was a healthy boy.]

One consequence of Benvenuto, and all the attendant drama, for Berlioz’ career was that he received his first sustained notice on the other side of the Channel. London’s Musical World ran a long article on it.

3. La damnation de Faust (1846)

But in the way of all rebels, Berlioz aged, and his audience aged with him. Both became respectable with time. By the time he took on the topic of a deal-for-damnation, Berlioz was famous as a conductor and as the author of a very influential treatise on instrumentation.

As for this next work, Berlioz’ take on Faust, you’ll find it generally listed as a “concert drama” rather than an opera. But I’m including it with his operas, and I’m in good company there. Well-known filmmaker Terry Gilliam (famed for Brazil and Time Bandits as well as for his years in the Monty Python troupe), directed a performance of Berlioz’s Damnation at the English National Opera, in London, in 2011, treating it very much as an opera. Reviewer Rupert Christiansen, writing in The Telegraph, gave it his highest rating, five stars.

Christiansen praised “Edward Gardner’s magnificent conducting, Peter Hoare’s charismatic performance in the title role, Christopher Purves’ gloriously sardonic Mephistopheles [and] Christine Rice’s heartrending singing of Marguerite’s two gorgeous arias.”

That’s a lot to like.

But since this is www.justsheetmusic.com and our focus here is as ever on the music, we’ll offer you a link to one of those gorgeous arias, Marguerite’s D’Amour L’Ardente Flamme. It is sung in that clip by Vesselina Kasarova, a Bulgarian mezzo soprano better known for work in the Mozartian canon. I’ve put a photo of Kasarova at the top of this blog entry.

That aria shows how Berlioz pioneered the use of vocal timbre as a deliberate element in the structuring of a work.

It also shows the determined way in which the music expresses character, as does, to take another example, the starting-and-stopping fugue of Faust’s monologue at the start of Part II, where Faust has been driven to the brink of suicide by his own world-weariness.

4. Les Troyens (1858)

Les Troyens was, also, a distinctive take on a very traditional operatic theme. The theme is the aftermath of the fall of Troy, and most especially the arrival of Aeneas and his band of Trojans on the shores of North Africa, where Aeneas had his notorious fling with Queen Dido.

Between Acts III and IV there is a symphonic interlude known as “Royal Hunt and Storm.”

You must listen!

Hector Berlioz

Much of this is unabashed nature painting. Berlioz wants us to see the hunt, and then catch the scent and the windy force of the oncoming storm.

5. Béatrice et Bénédict (1862)

Berlioz’ final opera. Béatrice et Bénédict came about because Berlioz was fascinated by Shakespeare – a common enough fascination amongst the romantics. He has re-worked Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, (a story with two central couples), so that one of those couples, Claudio and Hero, nearly disappears, and the whole “ado” turns out to be about Berlioz’ title characters.

In this case, as in Les Troyens, Berlioz wrote the libretto as well as composing its musical setting.

Throughout all of this, throughout what Berlioz himself called his long war “against the professors, the routineers, and the deaf,” there was a growth of confidence (he no longer thought he had to rely on someone else for the words) as well as constant invention, a constant pressing against expectation, and thus an expansion of what music could do and mean.

Let us conclude – until we meet again – with a concert hall recording of the Overture.

Go to: Hector Berlioz: Bearer of Romanticism’s Torch: Part II

Tyrants as Music Critics

Dmitri Shostakovich is one of a considerable group of ‘Soviet’ composers: those who continued and expanded upon the Russian musical tradition through the Soviet period, often at grave personal risk from the authorities, because said authorities were trying to force all art into their preferred propagandistic mode, ‘Socialist Realism.’ Shostakovich is often and deservedly mentioned in this connection in the same breath with Prokofiev and Khachaturian.

In 1934, Shostakovich premiered an opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. His music for this production complemented the libretto of Alexander Preis, which in turn was based on a novel of the same name, by Nikolai Leskov.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The “Lady MacBeth” in question, Katerina, poisons her father-in law, then assists her lover (Sergei) in strangling her husband. She and Sergei are arrested and convicted; they are on their way to Siberia, when Sergei becomes infatuated with another female convict, Sonyetka.

Sonyetka makes the mistake of taunting Katerina. Katerina pushes her rival into an icy river, and then falls in herself. The river washes them away (presumably killing them both in the process), and the train of convicts continues its own separate procession.

You can watch a 15 minute segment in YouTube here.

A Tricky Analogy

One has to wonder, in reviewing even such a skimpy plot summary as that: why did Leskov invoke the titular Shakespearian character? Katarina doesn’t seem all that much like Lady MacBeth, and her doomed husband, Zinovy Izmailov, isn’t like Shakespeare’s MacBeth at all! Zinovy isn’t in any sense a co-conspirator of Katerina’s – he is offstage in every sense for her first murder and he is the victim of her second.

To make the analogy work, one might try to see Sergei as the MacBeth-like character. In this case, perhaps Katarina’s father-in-law is supposed to be a Russified Banquo, and Zinovy is Fleance, though less lucky in the outcome than was Shakespeare’s Fleance!

Let us leave all that to the literary critics, though. The Shostakovich/Preis opera was initially quite popular. As it happens, alas, it was during this same year of 1934 that the Communist Party in the USSR issued an official statement about what it wanted from artists. It wanted “a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.” So, on the one hand, there was to be realism, i.e. historically concrete depictions. But on the other hand, the artist was to serve the revolution, to be a good socialist. Hence the term, “Socialist Realism.”

It was on January 1936, that Josef Stalin himself attended “Lady Macbethof the Mtsensk District.” Stalin left the theatre after the third act, not returning for the fourth and final one.

This was signal enough to Stalin’s minions, and they decided the opera was a fit target. Pravda soon ran an anonymous editorial denouncing the production as “Muddle Instead of Music,” and in a not very veiled threat warned that “things may end very badly” for Shostakovich if he continues in this manner. Here is an English translation of that editorial.

One of the many sins of which the editorial accuses the composer (its language seems to leave Leskov and Preis out of the line of fire entirely): is formalism. Indeed, Pravda used scare quotes around that word. “The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois; ‘formalist’ attempt to create originality through cheap clowning.” The work would not be performed again in that country in Stalin’s lifetime.

After the War

Let’s fast forward, past the Moscow Show Trials and the Great Purge, past Stalin’s secret Alliance with Hitler, past his betrayal by that ally and his consequent alliance of necessity with the Western Powers, past victory in 1945, and into the era of the Cold War … let us fast forward all the way to 1947-48. Here we find Shostakovich an older and wiser man at work on his “Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra in A Minor.”

As it happens, Shostakovich is on my mind just now because I recently had the pleasure of attending a performance of this Concerto, by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The music director, Carolyn Kuan, and the First Violin, Leonid Sigal, gave a talk before the music started, and explained some of the context of the piece. They mentioned that this was the time of the Zhdanov decree. Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee, was Stalin’s new right-hand man in matters of culture. Indeed, the two men were so close that the town of Zhdanov’s birth, Mariupol, was renamed “Zhdanov,” at Stalin’s decree.

It is pleasant to note that that town is once again known as Mariupol these days!

The point, though, is that the aftermath of the war seemed a good time for tightening up on real, potential, or imagined domestic enemies, or even cultural tendencies that might eventually allow enmity to fester. Thus, Zhdanov attacked his boss’ old enemy “formalism” and insisted that artists, musicians especially, prove their devotion to the wonderful socialist future.

It isn’t easy to get a handle on what “formalism” is in the arts. It wasn’t merely a Stalinist term of abuse – the word was and is used widely as the name for a tendency in modern and modernist art, even by many who commend that tendency. Formalism, for instance, sees a painting as a composition of light, shapes, and colors. It doesn’t look for the accurate depiction of a landscape or a bowl of fruit, it doesn’t look for or seek to decode psychological symbolism, nor does it seek compelling narrative. It looks for and at the light, the shapes, and the colors.

Likewise, formalism in the criticism or appreciation of music sees an aria or a concerto as a sequence of sounds in time. It is possible that such sounds-in-time may help illustrate the unfolding of events on a stage, or may express grief, or may create an opportunity for people to dance. The point, though, for a formalist, is the form, the internal characteristics of that sequence.

Final Thoughts

Was Shostakovich a formalist in that sense? It hardly matters. Formalism as a category is sometimes useful in discussing critics or theorists. It is never useful is discussing creators. Further, Stalin and Zhdanov weren’t interested in a debate about it. They simply wanted to determine how people thought and felt, which (they thought and felt) could be achieved by riding herd over what they heard.

At any rate, it was under pressure from Zhdanov that Shostakovich put away for a time his work on Concerto No. 1 for Violin. Fortunately for music lovers, Zhdanov died later in 1948. Stalin died in March 1953. In the somewhat looser artistic environment created by the second of those happy events, the Concerto was first performed on October 1955.

Certainly if I had to make a choice between Socialist Realism and formalism I hope I would have the guts to stand with the latter. But I am somewhat embarrassed, having said that, to find that I’ve just written more than a thousand words about Shostakovich and I have yet to say anything about the qualities (formal or otherwise) of his music, the qualities that have made it last: the qualities about which I would have been writing this whole time had I been a true formalist.

As penance, I direct you to his music and ask you to make a judgment about those qualities for yourself. You can follow the above link to enjoy his Lady MacBeth, and you can use this one to experience what he thought a violinist should do with a violin (and an accompanying orchestra.)

Mao's Last Dancer

Mao’s Last Dancer, the highest-grossing Australian movie of 2009, is a story about a Chinese ballet dancer who comes to America, and then refuses to return to his homeland. It was based on a memoir by the dancer in question, Li Cunxin.

Cunxin’s book has been very successful in itself: it has been published and marketed in more than 20 countries, and won the Christopher Award, an annual prize for works of art that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.”

But on to the movie! Christopher Gordon wrote the original music in the score: This includes a lovely opening dominated by Chinese instrumentation such as the dizi flute.

Much of the action of the movie takes place in Houston, Texas, in 1981, (and was filmed on location there), because the plot involves that city’s ballet company, of which Vice President and Barbara Bush were patrons.

Die Fledermaus

We see a bit of a performance of Die Fledermaus, an opera by Johan Strauss II that contains a ballet sequence. The protagonist of the movie, in the manner of protagonists of a lot of show business centered movies, steps in when the member of the company who had been slated to dance in this sequence was not available. There is some panicked talk back stage about whether Li is up to it, and even whether his being Chinese (the dancer is described in the script of the opera as a Spaniard) disables him.

One character reminds another, though, that Marlon Brando played a Japanese villager in the classic 1956 movie, Teahouse of the August Moon. “Oh, I liked that movie,” is the only response, and the matter of Li’s physical rightness for the part is closed.

Back to our movie,

Mao’s Last Dancer

: Li does step in to play the Spanish dancer in the ballet sequence in Die Fledermaus, the show goes on, and proves a great success. A star is born. Unfortunately, I can’t find that particular scene from Mao’s Last Dancer on YouTube or elsewhere. But if you’d like to hear the music, by Johann Strauss, to which he was dancing: click here.

As it happens, Die Fledermaus (The flutter-mouse or The bat) is on most lists of standard repertoire for opera companies. If you haven’t seen a performance, it will be worth your while to be able to fake your way through discussions with those who have. For that purpose, I’ll give you a précis here.

It’s an opera in three acts. In Act One, a servant, Adele, receives a letter from her sister (who is in a ballet company) inviting her to a masked ball to be hosted by Prince Orlofsky. She is a maid who must receive leave from her employer, Gabriel von Eisenstein, to attend such a ball, so she pretends that the letter tells her that her aunt is very sick, and Eisenstein gives her leave.

Eisenstein has his own troubles. He has been sentenced to eight days in prison for a minor offense, a sentence that has come about largely through the incompetence of his attorney Dr. Blind. I’ll insert here a gratuitous but amusing cartoon of an incompetent attorney at work in the 21^st century.

Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalinde, persuades her lover, Alfred, to pretend to be Eisenstein and go to prison to serve his time.

The ball, we learn, was orchestrated not by Orlofsky – though he is in on it – but by a friend of Eisenstein’s, or ex-friend, named Falke who is using it as a pretext to get revenge on Eisenstein for a slight done to him a year before. Falke’s plan is to have Eisenstein’s wife witness Eisenstein in indiscrete exchanges with other women. To this end, of course, he invites both husband and wife.

Yes, I know all that sounds complicated. What’s worse, it only gets us through Act One!

Act Two

In Act Two we’re at the ball, and we watch as Adele and her boss run into each other. Adele is pretending to be an actress. Eisenstein is amazed that she looks so much like his maid, who is of course with her aunt. At the idea that she may be a maid, the actress (maid) takes offense, leading to one of the better-known tunes of the opera, the “Laughing Song.”

Rosalinde arrives, playing an exotic Hungarian countess, and in that capacity elicits from Eisenstein the protestation that he is not married – and he gives the countess the gift of is watch.

After all this comes the ballet – part of the entertainment that Prince Orlofsky (who of course is in on Falke’s machinations) has arranged for his party. In the original this began with a Spanish waltz, changing to music in the Scottish style, and finally something Russian.

But in the long history of performances of this opera since April 1874, there have been lots of interpolated ballets at this point in the plot and party.

We needn’t take our plot summary any further, though we might add that Falke and Eisenstein are reconciled, as are Rosalinde and Eisenstein. All works out for the best in the Panglossian world of comic opera.

Mao’s Last Dancer

Likewise, Mao’s Last Dancer ends quite happily for ,most if not all of its characters. Li is married, refuses to return to China upon command, and receives the protection of the U.S. government in that refusal. Meanwhile, in China, the Gang of Four is arrested, a new regime less hostile to the art of the rest of the world comes to power, and in time Li is allowed to return to his homeland, and dance for his own family and his old friends in the village.

Ballet, as an international language, prevails over ideology.

A Final Word

There were in the days of classic Hollywood a lot of instances of Caucasian actors playing east Asian roles. Sometimes this had a frankly ridiculous effect: John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror, (1956) or Mickey Rooney marring an otherwise great movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, (1961) with a ridiculously stereotypical Japanese accent as Holly’s landlord, I. Y. Yunioshi. But in fairness it must be said that Marlon Brando as the interpreter, Sakini, in the movie version of Teahouse, was not a stereotypical ‘yellowface’ presentation. Brando brought his usual method-acting thoroughness to his portrayal of Sakini and was, in this respect, more like Yul Brynner than like Mickey Rooney.

Also, the Americans of the plot, singing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” in the heart of Okinawa, are sufficient to justify the movie.

The Green Freak

I should say at the start that the headline of this post isn’t especially original. Mark Parisi, of the “Off the Mark” cartoons, drew a courtroom scene in which Santa Claus tells a judge that “this green freak” (the ‘Jolly Green Giant’ of vegetable-sales fame, pictured above) has ripped off Santa’s signature phrase.

And so it goes.

In 2005, Coldplay’s singer, Chris Martin, told a magazine interviewer, “We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.”

He was presumably trying to be humble, and at the same time a bit provocative. Still, in hindsight those words seem reckless.

I wrote in my last blog post about Men at Work, the great ‘80s group, and the recent death of Greg Ham. I mentioned a successful plagiarism lawsuit over their song Land Down Under, and promised further discussion of the broad issue of musical plagiarism. Instead of re-hashing that case, though, I think I’ll highlight another today, because it is better adapted to the broader issues involved.

Long Live Life

In 2008 Martin’s group, Coldplay, came out with an album, featuring the single “Viva La Vida.” Listen to it here.

Soon a nearly-unknown U.S. band, Creaky Boards, claimed briefly that the song was too similar to one of theirs, and a video on YouTube in which they made this claim went viral.

Read about it here.

There is a certain similarity. It is certainly greater and more extended than the overlap between “Land Down Under” and “Kookaburra Sits in the old Gum Tree”!

But in the case of Coldplay and Creaky Boards, there clearly wasn’t copying. According to the theory by Creaky Boards member Andrew Hoepfner, Coldplay’s Chris Martin dropped in on a performance of theirs in New York in October 2007. Hoepfner and his bandmates recognized Martin there on a specified day and were delighted that he seemed to be so ‘into’ their music. Perhaps too much so….

Unfortunately for this claim, Martin was in London at the time he supposedly heard the song. Also, there was a demo version of the song in existence as early as March 2007, long before CB had ever done the similar song of theirs.

So decisive was the proof that Creaky Boards themselves went out of their way (honorably) to say: Oops. “Our bad.” Hoepner himself then offered another explanation of the similarity: “Coldplay and I are just heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda.”

The Legend of Zelda? They get their inspiration from the soundtrack of fantasy video games? Well … I guess everybody gets inspiration from somewhere.

Education is Theft?

But this raises an intriguing question. When, for music, does “influence” become theft? It isn’t a bad thing to be influenced, after all. It is synonymous with education. No musician escapes the influence of colleagues: even Johann Sebastian Bach, as original a composer as ever lived, shows the distinct influence of Dietrich Buxtehude and Antonio Vivaldi.

Antonio Vivaldi

It is precisely because there exists reason to be concerned that influence will be stigmatized as theft that the idea of a “Creative Commons” has taken off recently.

Consider, for that matter, the artwork (above) for the album Viva la Vida. It is simply a reproduction of the Eugène Delacroix painting “La Liberté guidant le people,”(Liberty Leading the People) in which an allegorical figure who looks like a bustier version of the lady in New York Harbor stands on top a mound of corpses holding the tricolor flag in her right hand and urging a new wave of cannon fodder forward.

The only difference between the Delacroix painting and the Coldplay album cover is that the latter has the album’s title superimposed – in a way that looks spray painted, like a bit of graffito.

It isn’t a copyright issue so long as that image is in the public domain. But even in a loose metaphorical sense we wouldn’t think of this as “stolen” from Delacroix unless we thought that Coldplay were somehow trying to take credit for it themselves. Otherwise, we would simply say that they are visually quoting Delacroix.

If you can “quote” visually then presumably you can “quote” musically, too.

Aaron Copland

A quite well known example of this may be found in the use of an old Shaker hymn by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring.

Yet I don’t think that Hoepfner was claiming that Coldplay and Creaky Boards were both paying homage to The Legend of Zelda in the same way that Copland was paying homage to the Shakers. No, there is a degree of “influence” that is neither explicit quotation nor plagiarism/theft. It is tough to get to precision in these matters.

There is a coda. The issue of the originality (or otherwise) of Viva La Vida didn’t go away after Creaky Boards abandoned their own claims. Two other claimants came forward: Joe Satriani and Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens). Satriani said the sing incorporates much of his “If I Could Fly,” whereas Islam says it’s a lot like his “Foreigner Suite.”

What is behind the flurry of claims to have been the source of that particular song?

There is the simple fact that these songs – any songs – are not made by stringing together notes at random. There are combinations of sounds we are “hard wired” to like, and those that we aren’t. You can imagine that a composer is at the piano, or strumming his guitar, plucking out notes. When he hits upon a neat-sounding combination, and it isn’t something he has heard before, he notes it down and smiles.

But you and I, dear reader, have very similar brains. Our wiring is determined by God – or, if you prefer, by the path-dependent history of our species. What may strike you as a neat and new combination of sounds is very likely to strike me likewise. In the case of the common features of Viva la Vida and the similar songs by Creaky Boards, Satriani, Cat Stevens, and whoever composes for The Legend of Zelda!, and so forth, the likeliest explanation is simply that some very plausible, frequently traveled, neural pathway is involved. Let us leave it at that!

And no, Santa doesn’t own “Ho Ho Ho.”

Let’s end this meditation with that tune Copland appropriated, sung wonderfully by Judy Collins:

Gregory Norman "Greg" Ham (27 September 1953 – approx. 19 April 2012)

Greg Ham was found dead in his home on April 19, 2012. The 58 year old musician lived alone, and friends who had not heard from him went to his home to check on his welfare, and found him deceased. The cause remains unknown. Although authorities initially spoke of “unexplained circumstances” more recently they have been saying that the postmortem turned up nothing suspicious.

There has still been no straight answer as to how he died, though. Drug abuse is suspected in some quarters. The Sydney Morning Herald cited an anonymous “close friend” who said he had been using heroin.

Men at Work

Ham will be fondly remembered as a member of the ‘80s group Men at Work, which gave us the album Business as Usual, released in November 1981, with singles “Who Can It Be Now?” and “A Land Down Under.”

In 1978, Aussie Colin Hay (1953- ) formed the band with his buddy Ron Strykert. Though they began as a guitarist duo, over the next couple of years they brought in Jerry Speiser (a drummer), John Rees (bassist) and Greg Ham (who could play any of a number of instruments, as a particular song demanded.) The photo above shows Colin Hay and Ham together: Ham is the fellow with the sax.

In 1981, the resulting group, Men at Work, signed a contract with Mercury Records, which was headed at that time by Peter Karpin. Their first album: “Business as Usual.” This was released in November of that year in Australia. It came to the US in April 1982.

Ham plays his sax to good effect in “Who Can It Be Now.” Listen for a brief solo at around the 1:20 mark of this YouTube video. The song would not have been the hit it was without that wailing sax at that moment. As Karpin said, Ham gave the band color, “both in the recording and [in his] stage presence.”

But “A Land Down Under” has left an even bigger mark. The lyrics of this song are not just, as might seem the case at first hearing, a few Aussie-themed stereotypes humorously contorted. Rather, there is a plot. The song tells the story of a young Australian touring the world, and discovering, perhaps at least somewhat to his surprise, that his homeland has made its mark amongst the different people he encounters, the “strange lady” who thinks of Australia as the land where women glow and men plunder, the man from Brussels who (naturally!) serves his Aussie guest a Vegemite sandwich, etc.

Marcus Breen, the author of Rock Dogs (2006),a history of the Australian music industry, said that the song represented the consolidation of that industry, and its “new state of global engagement.”

Breen quotes Ham on this point, telling us that Ham congratulated earlier Aussie groups for “establishing themselves” in Europe and the US, “It was like a groundswell that served us well.” (He surely had in mind the Little River Band, as well as AC/DC. Even, perhaps, a successful global solo artist, Olivia Newton-John.)

Aussie musicians might have been aided, too, by the global recognition of all those philosophers named “Bruce.” Those comedians from pommeyland, also known as Britain’s Monty Python troupe, contributed to a sort of Aussie chic in the 1970s.

The Implications

In 1983 the band came out with its second album, Cargo. According to Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Christopher Connelly, this album lacked any single song with the “body-slamming intensity” of either of the two great hits from its predecessor. But, he also said, it is still a “stronger overall effort,” extending “the darker side” of their skills.

The darker side is perhaps best exemplified by “Overkill.” Vocalist Colin Hay starts by telling us that he can’t “get to sleep” because he thinks about the implications.

The implications of … what? He doesn’t know, but he does know something is very wrong: “Diving in too deep, and possibly the complications….”

As Connelly also wrote, the first album already had a sense of mild paranoia, but it was the second one extended that sentiment into thoroughgoing solipsism.

If you follow the above link to the YouTube video, you’ll find that there’s a guitar solo around 2:00 with a terrific build-up, until Ham jumps in with his sax at 2:26.

Going Through Changes

Speiser and Rees appear to have been kicked out of the band in 1984.

The three remaining members recorded another album that year, Two Hearts. Strykert left the band even while work on that album was underway, leaving a two-man operation, Hay and Ham. The album’s reception showed the effects of the band’s disarray. Hay and Ham went their separate ways not long thereafter.

In 1996, Hay and Ham re-united for a tour, and gathered around them four musicians new to the “Men and Work” brand: Tony Floyd and John Watson (drums), Stephen Hadley (bass), and Simon Hosford (guitar). Out of this tour came a live album, Brazil.

A critic listening to Brazil tended to become both enthusiastic and nostalgic. “[W]ith a stellar star list composed almost entirely of classic material, it’s nearly impossible to hear the difference between the Men at Work lineups of 1996 and 1983. Positively electric versions of all their hits are here,” one wrote.

In the autumn of 2005, this song “Overkill” was featured in the US television show “Scrubs,” a sitcom with a medical theme.

Final Thoughts

I would like to say again, “Rest in Peace, Greg Ham” and leave it here, leaving the issue of the cause of death to the authorities and questions of the full merits of the group’s music to posterity. I can’t do that, quite. One cannot write in May 2012 about this group or that man without noting the litigation brought against them, and in particular against him, by Larrikin Music, claiming that the song Land Down Under – particularly, that haunting riff from Ham’s flute – was plagiarized from a nursery rhyme.

In 2009, Norman Lurie, then the head of Larrikin Music, decided that Ham’s riff sounded too much like a bit of the song “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,” to which Larrikin owned the rights. Listen for yourself.

Side by Side.

Here is some footage of an actual Kookaburra sitting in an actual gum tree.

I hope to post my thoughts about musical plagiarism, the realities and the accusations, in a few days. In the meantime I’ll only say: Wherever Mr. Ham is now, he is Beyond all that. Rest in peace, sir.

Let us conclude by listening to what Monty Python was telling us about the Land Down Under:

20th /21st Century Music and EMI

Vivendi SA’s subsidiary, Universal Music, plans to buy the EMI Group. This represents the continuing consolidation of the music recording and publishing industries, and the Independent Music Companies Association, a Euro-centered trade group, says it will fight the merger. Furthermore, various regulators and state attorneys general may in principle yet threaten it. But the likelihood remains that EMI – one of the most renowned music studios of the 20^th century – think of Queen, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones! – and these early years of the 21^st century too, will lose its existence as an independent entity. And this occasion requires some reminiscence.

Two Beatles Album Covers

Beatles’ album, Please Please Me

EMI (the letters come from the phrase “Electric and Musical Industries”) dates its corporate history back to 1931. Also in 1931, the new company opened a studio on Abbey Road, in London. Beginning in 1960, their corporate headquarters was at 20 Manchester Square, also in London. The stairwell in the Manchester Square building is featured on the cover of a Beatles’ album, Please Please Me.

For a special trip down memory lane, here’s the full track list from that album:

I Saw Her Standing There

Misery

Anna (Go to Him)

Chains

Ask Me Why

Please Please Me

Love Me Do

P.S. I Love You

Baby It’s You

Do You Want to Know a Secret

A Taste of Honey

There’s a Place

Twist and Shout.

Of course Abbey Road itself, right outside their recording studio, is also featured in a Beatles’ cover – the one in which Paul McCartney is notoriously barefoot.

Many Labels

Nowadays, EMI is known under many labels, divided into groups, many of which have their own distinctive histories. There is the Blue Note Label Group, the Capitol Music Group (which now includes Virgin Records), Caroline Distribution, and the EMI Christian Music Group.

Angel Records, part of the Blue Note Group, has focused on recordings of classical music, notably including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

The mainstay of EMI’s Capital Music Group has been, as one might expect, Capital Records. Its former HQ, the Capitol Tower, constructed in 1957, remains a major Hollywood, California landmark.

Capitol Records

Capitol Records began life as an independent company, founded by singer/composer Jonny Mercer, in 1942. Its first recording session saw Martha Tilton sing “Moon Dreams,” accompanied by The Mellowaires & Orchestra. Johnny Mercer himself was there to supervise.

EMI acquired most of the equity in Capital in 1955.

It acquired Virgin Records in 1983. Virgin Records had been created by Richard Branson, Simon Draper, and Nik Powell eleven years before and its performers – both before and since EMI’s acquisition – have included Roy Orbison, Devo, Janet Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, and so forth. Though Branson has applied the “Virgin” label to a lot of other enterprises since then, including the airline company he set up in 1984, the record company was his first use of that moniker. The “virgin” use of “Virgin,” so to speak.

Virgin Records (Twins logo)

Virgin Records also came into the world with a striking logo, a young naked woman sitting on top a red serpent. We see her in mirrored form – thus, this has become known as the “Twins” logo.

The Spice Girls were an EMI/Virgin act in their heyday, formed in 1994, and according to one survey they were the biggest pop-cultural figures of the 1990s. One of their members, “Posh Spice,” became Victoria Beckham with her marriage to the soccer phenom David Beckham in 1999. Her solo career appears to have been a disappointment: EMI dropped her in 2002.

Along with Virgin Records, EMI acquired the rights to what are now known as the Caroline Distribution labels, an eclectic collection including Nature Sounds and Vanguard. Nature Sounds is a rap label, issuing artists such as Ayatollah, DJ Babu, and Strong Arm Steady. Vanguard began life as a classical label, but nowadays is better known for a variety of folk and blues artists.

EMI also has, as noted above, a Christian Music Group, headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, which has signed such artists as Jon Foreman, Patty Griffin, and Seabird. Foreman has distinguished himself from the rest of the Christian rock fraternity because he has found a place in the soundtrack of a film within the Transformers franchise.

Here’s a sample of Seabird’s music, from their album Rocks into Rivers.

Recent History

In 2007, British financier Guy Hands took over EMI. Hands quickly ticked off a number of people, including Mick Jagger, who soon moved The Rolling Stones’ catalogue to Universal. Ed O’Brien, drummer for Radiohead, was also unhappy about Hands. O’Brien said that EMI had been taken over by “somebody who’s never owned a record company before … they don’t know what they’re dealing with.”

(I’m afraid I write as someone who only knows of the existence of Radiohead because the television show South Park once paid them tribute.)

O’Brien drummer for Radiohead

Nonetheless, O’Brien (pictured right) had a point: the main accomplishment of EMI during the years of Hands’ control was the acquisition of a lot of debt. They were borrowing, specifically, from Citigroup.

In February 2011, after extensive litigation, Citigroup was able to take EMI away from Hands in an effort to recoup its losses.

As Hands has admitted, the whole affair made him look like a “chump.” Heck, the expenditure on lawyers for the futile fight against Citigroup alone cost him $1 million (GB £630,000).

More important, Hands never seems to have worked at the underlying problem facing the music recording industry: it is an industry still in large measure set up to sell tangible things, CDs, in stores. It has still not quite accommodated itself to the very different world created by the internet.

Apple’s success with the iTunes store shows that it is possible for the music industry to make this transition. People are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to purchase songs lawfully over the internet. But if their only choice is either to trudge out to a mall and buy a CD or to stay home in comfort and download a song for free: they’ll do the latter.

But let’s end where we began, with Johnny Mercer.

The owner of Puresheetmusic.com contacted me a time ago with the question about adding his sheet music collection to Justsheetmusic.com.

Since I take this mails very serious I always take a very close look on
the website itself and for the website Puresheetmusic.comm, I had a good look
and was astonished.

PurseSheetMusic.com

The first reason I was amazed first of all was the look of the website
which is really fresh and it has a design that is ready for the future, the website also includes all the things you expect nowadays including formatted sheet music for the iPad, Kindle, Nook and many more.

Puresheetmusic.com is also the first and leading seller of sheet music eBooks on iTunes and don’t forget Puresheetmusic.com is one of the few online sheet music shops were
you can get all the sheet music for a price as low as $1.99.

Lars Chistian Lundholm

Lars Chistian Lundholm owner of purseheetmusic.com

The Website puresheetmusic.com is run by Lars Chistian Lundholm who has 15 years’ experience as an arranger/composer and also has a degree from Berklee College Of Music in classical. He also composed music for movies and video games.

Since I had direct contact with Lars I told him I was astonished and asked him if he was willing to answer some questions for a site review about Puresheetmusic.com.

Below you will find the question and answers by Lars.

15 years experience as arranger/composer, that’s a lot of experience.
What is the accomplishment you are most proud in those 15 years?

Without doubt it’s the launch of Puresheetmusic.

That said, I do and have done other things as well.
I have a degree in classical composition and my love and passion is in writing and arranging music for others to enjoy performing.

I run another project called band-charts.com specializing in arranging sheet music for cabaret shows.

I’ve had my sheet music arrangements performed in shows in Vegas, NYC, London, Sydney and on all major cruise lines and been involved in some great charity projects on Broadway.

About a decade ago I was part of the start-up of what was then called Amazing Music World.
In connection with this I spent time in Russia working with local music publishers and were among the first outsiders to lay hands on a previously unpublished piano piece by Tchaikovsky. It was published in its original form with CNN, NY Times, Financial Times and other media covering the event
as Mikhail Gorbachev joined the project as protector.

More recently my arrangements have been performed by The Czech Philharmonics and I’m this very moment finishing a show for the US Army Air Force Band.

I noticed you have a lot of experience with composing and arranging music, what is the reason you created the website?

The idea comes from a period in my life where I spent a lot of time on the road.
I’ve been blessed to have visited more than 100 countries in the name of music and to have played on all 7 continents (including the Antarctic).
However, this brought a few things to my attention.
So often I’ve had to carry 12 kilos (24 pounds) of sheet music through an empty airport or sitting in a taxi through a crowded city with piles of luggage around me while dreaming of more simple ways of doing things.
During this time I had the great pleasure of meeting so many gifted colleagues from all around the world and the conversation at night after gigs always turned to accessibility and quality of sheet music.
Sitting in a cafe in a foreign country with your laptop, having a cup of coffee while searching for sheet music that you are about to perform that evening can be challenge.
And when you finally find what you need it’s often not the quality you are looking for in the arrangement or it’s a scanned piece of sheet music that is more than 75 years old.
And it gets even more challenging. What do you do when asked to download a piece of software just to print
your sheet music, the price is very high for what you get and there is no way to transfer the file to another device while enjoying that good cup of coffee in that cafe?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could access all your sheet music on your iPad, Kindle or Nook and not have to worry about whether or not your brought a particular piece of music with you that day?
To make a long story short, this is the reason I set out to launch Puresheetmusic.com

To make good quality sheet music available for everyone free of constraints of software and complicated apps. To set the music free!

So I decided to launch a website where all sheet music is priced at $1.99 and where there are no restrictions, an “iTunes for sheet music” so to say.

I wish this to be a place where the music has been set free. A place where it doesn’t matter if you play the alto saxophone or the viola, where you are able to find unique arrangements written for your instrument knowing that these aren’t old scanned copies but newly engraved and that they are arranged by a professional composer/arranger who understand and cares for your particular needs as a musician.

When I look at your website it seems everything is ready for a sheet music website in 2012 with the social media and mobile apps, how did you made this possible?

I had a vision of this pure sheet music website where all sheet music is one low price, where aesthetics matter and I wanted to keep it as simple and as pure possible. The easy solution would have been to hire someone to do the website, set up social media relations and mobile apps implementation but at the end of the
day it goes against what Puresheetmusic means to me.

You have been one of the first and leading sellers of sheet music as ebooks on iTunes. This is a great achievement, how do you compete with the other big sheet music companies.

Well, this has completely taken me by surprise.
I am through Puresheetmusic the first and leading seller of sheet music as ebooks on iTunes and my sheet music arrangements have been:
no. 1 on the UK arts and entertainment best seller book chart,
simultaneously no. 2 and 3 in France,
simultaneously no. 2, 3 and 4 in Canada,
simultaneously no. 3 and 5 in Spain,
no. 4 in Germany,
top 20 in Australia and
top 25 in the US
and the list goes on…
Within the first 3 months of publishing sheet music on iTunes I’ve had more than 100 titles on the top 50 best selling charts around the world.

To me it proves that there is a need for pure and good quality sheet music.
iPad, Kindle, Nook and so forth are tailor made to put on a music stand in front of you.

You are one of the great sheet music websites available right now, how do you make sure it will stay that way and compete with the other big companies.

I had a vision of this pure sheet music website where all sheet music is one low price, where aesthetics matter and I wanted to keep it as simple and as pure possible. The easy solution would have been to hire someone to do the website, set up social media relations and mobile apps implementation but at the end of the
day it goes against what Puresheetmusic means to me.

I’m a real hands-on person who likes to learn new things so I sat down and learned what I needed to and did it all myself.
The next step besides constantly adding more repertoire to the website is to introduce Pure Premium titles.
It will be sheet music that includes mp3 backing tracks of the piano part and you’ll never have to be without a pianist again.

About 90% of all future sheet music titles will be available both as regular titles for 1.99 as well as Pure Premium titles.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned but I don’t believe in every unnecessary feature that modern technology makes possible.
In my eyes it takes away from the very essence of playing music if you are distracted by gimmicks wrapped in apps.
After all it’s the companionship, about being able to express your feelings through music and sharing it with others that really matter. It’s about
pure music!

My one aim is to make the sheet music available to as many music lovers as possible and this is done through accessibility.
I wish to make sure that a musician will be able to purchase pure quality sheet music no matter where he/she prefers to do their shopping and that this sheet music is formatted to his or hers preferred device when not
printed.
We touched upon iTunes earlier but I’m also making the sheet music available at Sony, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith and FNAC.

And in the immediate future I’m expanding it to Amazon, specialized websites in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan as well as Walmart in the US.

I still don’t understand why sheet music has to be so expensive and why you need to download apps and constraining printing programs just to play music.

My sheet music will always be the very best quality, free of restrictions and priced at $1.99.

Maybe I’m idealistic and on a bit of a philanthropic mission here but I’ll compete with the other companies by setting the music free and making it available to as many music lovers as possible.

I really enjoyed this review and your answers. Since you have received the final copy of the results are you satisfied also?

Thanks hugo, I’m so very honored by this. As a website i always make sure everybody gets what he needs, if i receive a problem the first thing i do within seconds  is sent a mail back.

Closing comments

Although it’s one of the first real reviews i did except for the IMSLP website (which mostly doesn’t need a explanation), I’m wondering if any of the site reviews will score any higher.

The reason behind this is that the owners of smaller web shops pay a lot of attention on the users and do everything to keep the users satisfied.
When you have a problem and ask a question you will mostly get a response immediately within a few hours and that’s also the case with PureSheetMusic.com.

I tried to order a sonata from Beethoven which i could find easily, after that i had some small problems figuring out where my shopping cart was but i was soon able to purchase it which i did trough paypal. After the final pay button in paypal i was redirected to the website with my Beethoven sonata’s ready for download. I’ve opened them and played a bit and yes this is great, the arrangement is perfect. With the whole process and testing i did I’m really sure this website deserves attention and that all for $1.99.

See our final score below.

All our site reviews are free and independent, if your looking for a site review please use the Contact link at the top.

Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Halford

I recently attended an extraordinary performance of Verdi’s Requiem, at St. Joseph’s Cathedral, in Hartford, Connecticut.

Hartford is a small but artistically distinguished city about halfway between New York and Boston. It is the site, for example, of the Hartt School, an internationally renowned conservatory, teaching music, dance, and theatre.

(The word “Hartt” in the name of the school has two “t”s, not one, because it is named after one of the founders, Julius Hartt, not after the city itself!)

St. Joseph’s Cathedral, right in the center of Hartford, (near the tourist-trap Mark Twain House), is itself an impressive structure built fifty years ago, entirely of concrete so as never to be threatened by fire. Indeed, the Verdi Requiem was scheduled for the evening of March 16, 2012, in celebration of the 50^th anniversary of this structure.

Giuseppe Verdi

The performers included 400 singers in various choirs (the Hartford Chorale, the Cathedral Choral, the Hartt Choir, etc.), 85 instrumentalists, four wonderful soloists, and as conductor, one should say perhaps as the Maestro, Edward Bolkovac.

The four soloists were: soprano Amanda Hall; mezzo-soprano Lucille Beer; tenor Raffaele Sepe; and bass Ryan Green. For reasons I don’t understand, I find that somebody has posted a YouTube clip of the same Lucille Beer singing on a polo ground. The setting is bizarre, but you will likely enjoy the singing.

The tenor is also available on YouTube, apparently a clip from a television talent show. The clip is a fun listen, although you’ll have to skip to about the 1:40 part on that clip if you want to avoid the inane introductory chit-chat of the TV host.

Since Thomas of Celano’s Day

But let’s say a few words about the tradition of the Requiem itself. A Requiem Mass for the repose of one or more newly departed persons is a very old rite within the Roman Catholic Church, and had taken the form in which Verdi found it as early as the 13^th century, when Thomas of Celano, a follower of St Francis of Assisi, wrote the hymn “Dies Irae.”

Thomas’ hymn begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla!

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

In straightforward unversified English, that is: “The day of wrath! That day will dissolve the world into ashes; As David foretold, and the Sibyll! How much trembling there will be when the judge arrives, and investigates everything strictly! The trumpet will spread a wondrous sound through the burial vaults of the regions, and will summon all before the throne.”

Musical settings of the Requiem Mass became a distinctive musical genre – often performed in concert halls and thus at least topographically separated from the initial purpose of the music – by the mid 16^th century. One of the great composers of that era, Palestrina, set it this way.

Mozart, Berlioz, Liszt

Between Palestrina and Verdi, the outstanding Requiems came from Mozart (1791), Berlioz (1837) and Liszt (1867). Something of a music-history “A Team” there!

Mozart's Requiem manuscript

Of Mozart’s Requiem there is little to be said that hasn’t been said abundantly over the centuries.

Here, though, is a bit of Hector Berlioz’ Requiem (also known as the Messe des morts), not quite so well known as Mozart’s, but just as beloved by those who have known it. This was composed as a Mass for those soldiers who had died during the Revolution of July 1830. Specifically, I present you with Berlioz’ Dies iræ.

There’s an amusing story in connection with the premiere of the Messe des morts. The conductor, Francois Antoine Habeneck, put his baton down in mid-performance in order to take a pinch of snuff! Berlioz was there, and was understandably furious. As he says in his memoir, this was “the one bar where the conductor’s direction is absolutely indispensable”! It came about during the Tuba mirum passage quoted above.

Berlioz leapt up, took a position between Habeneck and the orchestra, and started conducting by himself. I hope Habeneck enjoyed the snuff, because he didn’t get the orchestra back – Berlioz continued this way through the rest of the performance, “and the effect which I had dreamed of was produced,” he reports.

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt’s Requiem of 1867 is historically remarkable because nobody seems to know whose death inspired it. It might have been composed as a lament for the Emperor Maximilian, the unlucky fellow who became Emperor of Mexico with the backing of French Emperor Napoleon III and who was captured and executed by the forces of Benito Juarez in 1867. That’s possible. But the uncertainty on this subject shows that it was no longer all that important: by this time the Requiem as a musical genre has detached itself from its origins: it was still a Mass in form, not necessarily in motivation.

On to Verdi

So we return to Giuseppe Verdi, one of the towering musical figures in the history of the music-mad Italian peninsula. Verdi first began contemplating the Requiem form at the end of 1868, with news of the death of his colleague, Gioachino Rossini (the composer of The Barber of Seville, Otello, and La Cenerentola, among much else)

Gioachino Rossini

Verdi and Rossini had never been friends, and their musical styles are very different, but Verdi of all people understood the depth of the loss. “A great name has disappeared from the world!” he said.

So Verdi set out to organize the outstanding Italian composers of the day in a collaborative effort to create a Requiem worthy of Rossini. Verdi’s own contribution to this joint effort was to be the final movement, Libera me.

The project never came to fruition, and Verdi was left with his Libera me sitting in his desk. Yet since death is the one inevitability in life, it was certain that – if Verdi himself only lived to see it – there would come another death that would affect him sufficiently that he would take up his pen again and write a complete Requiem with that fragment as a point of departure.

That day came with the death of Alessandro Manzoni in May 1873. Verdi’s Requiem was firm performed a year later, in the Church of San Marco in Milan. Verdi himself conducted, thus avoiding any snuff-based threats to its perfection.

Since Vatican II

One sad theological point, though, is that the Roman Church no longer holds the old style Masses for the Dead, with the various hymns that have inspired so many great conductors through the centuries. This all fell victim to the Second Vatican Council’s ecclesiastical reforms. The new “Rite of Funerals,” issued in 1969, does away with black vestments and with words that focus on trembling or ashes. Instead, we are to see death as a hopeful event, a step into a better world for the deceased.

All quite comforting in a sense: but that sense is not musical. The new Rite of Funerals has yet to produce anything analogous to the masterpieces composed on behalf of that Old Time Religion!

In closing, I’m afraid I have to admit that I can’t give you a link to any recording of the performance in Hartford. Perhaps you will accept the following, with my best wishes, pending