Vespers uses Renaissance instruments; The Waking Sun and The Nobility of Women, Baroque. Some people have asked how do I do it, and why. We composers rarely ask ourselves “why” questions, but fair enough.…
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Category Archives: Classical music
Mad Men CD, David Carbonara
My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast with musical excerpts. You can read all my CD reviews here.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of the hugely popular TV series Mad Men—now in its fifth season—works very hard at going beneath the surface to capture the look of the 1960s, from company logo typefaces to office equipment tints to the shine in a pair of trousers. Mad Men composer David Carbonara labors just as much on the show’s music to express that era; he’s a composer of acutely original pieces.
Mad Men, Original Soundtrack from the TV Series, Vol. 1 is filled mostly with standards from artists such as Gordon Jenkins (“Caravan”), Vic Damone (“On the Street Where You Live”), and Ella Fitzgerald, who makes an appearance with “Manhattan.” “Fly Me to the Moon” is Julie London’s luscious pizzicato-tinged string version, not Frank Sinatra’s better-known big-band hit.
But for lovers of music in the cracks—not pop, not concert, but what, exactly—the reason to look for this CD may be David Carbonara himself.
Weiner chooses most of the period songs, but “Lipstick” by Carbonara is a distillation (if you will, given all the imbibing in the series) of music in the twilight: slightly lounge, slightly jazz, and as rebellious as one may appear while keeping one’s hair in place. It’s the sound of muted trumpets, punchy trombones, low flutes, snapping fingers, walking bass lines, one-handed laconic piano playing (necessary while stubbing out a cigarette), and that child of the time, the Hammond organ. His “Mad Men Suite” is likewise all delicately drawn atmosphere.
A big surprise is the inclusion of the traditional round “Babylon,” known by many (anachronistically for the show) from Don McLean’s 1971 album American Pie. In one episode it was worked into a Village mandolin-strummed folk happening (with Carbonara briefly on camera, playing autoharp!). Its text comes right out of Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon, we laid down and wept, when we remembered Zion.”
What that has to do with the advertising world, legions of die-hard Mad Men fans will know. There’s a lot going on here beneath the surface.
Paul Hindemith
Saturday, May 5th, 2012, 5:00-6:00
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963). Five Pieces for String Orchestra, Op. 44, No. 4 (1927). Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Werner Andreas Albert. CPO 999783. 12:00
Hindemith. Trauermusik (1936). Dmitri Jakubovsky, viola, St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Saulius Sondeckis. CBS/Sony 48372. 7:55
Hindemith. Symphony in E-flat (1940). BBC Symphony Orchestra, Yan Pascal Tortelier. Chandos 9060. 29:58
Once the darling of new music and his country’s rulers, Hindemith ran afoul of both groups, and lately it seemed as if nothing was going right.
This was new to him. He was one of the best-prepared composers of the 20th Century. He played violin so well, at 23 he was concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera (he also married the conductor’s daughter). He founded a string quartet, moved to viola, and eventually learned to play every instrument he could find, modern or ancient. He started music festivals, wrote theory books, soloed and conducted internationally. Everything he wrote was immediately performed and published.
But he made some enemies along the way. He had long since rejected the 12-tone orthodoxy in new music’s rising tide, and its influential disciples were quite happy to ignore him.
The new German Reich liked his educational leanings (exemplified by Five Pieces for String Orchestra, written for intermediate players), but finally wearied of his dissonances and thinly veiled swipes at authority. His wife was partly Jewish, and he worked with too many Jews to suit their purposes. Goebbels had him placed on the Entartete (“degenerate” music) list.
In 1936 London he was trying to make the transition to a more international profile, as opportunities in Germany dried up. He was to perform his viola concerto Der Schwanendreher with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The folk-tune-filled Schwanendreher (the person who turns the roasting swan on the spit: always humorous, Hindemith identified with the swan) would be a springboard for his usefulness as both composer and soloist.
But two days before the concert, England’s King George V died, and all performances were cancelled. It was a national tragedy, but a personal blow to Hindemith, trying to patch together a career. A lesser artist might have moped, cursing his fates, but Hindemith was practical to the core. From 11 am to 5 pm he sat down in an office at the BBC and composed Trauermusik (“music of mourning”) for solo viola and strings. Sir Adrian Boult gathered the BBC string players into a studio the next day, and they performed it in a live broadcast with Hindemith as soloist, galvanizing a grieving country.
Trauermusik quotes from Schwanendreher, from Mathis der Maler (his operatic jab at national-socialist repression), and from a Lutheran chorale, usually translated into English as “When in the hour of utmost need.” This last melody made the British perk up, not because they knew it, but because it sounds very much like the beloved “Doxology,” or “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” Hindemith hadn’t a clue, but proved Seneca’s dictum, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Four years later, an almost unknown immigrant in the U.S., he would write his outstanding Symphony in E-flat, and his career re-blossomed, commissions and students flocking to him. Hindemith was nothing if not prepared.
On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.
Response to St. John Passion in Broad Street Review
Thomas Lloyd agrees and disagrees a bit with me in the Letters section of the Broad Street Review. We corresponded quite a bit on this, after my article (itself a response) on Bach, the St. John Passion, and the charge of anti-Semitism. Our emails drifted into the area of historical criticism of the authorship of John’s Gospel, but Dan Rottenberg’s editing spared BSR readers from our wisdom on that topic, for now.
Lloyd directs the Bucks County Choral Society, and choral and vocal studies at Haverford College. Bach is in good hands with Tom’s championing of his music, as I also have been!
Andrea Clearfield, Mendelssohn Club
Looking forward to this Sunday, 29 Apr, 4pm, for the Mendelssohn Club concert (in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Girlchoir) featuring Andrea Clearfield’s fascinating new work Tse Go La.
I’m moderating a panel discussion beforehand, 1:30 at fye, Broad & Chestnut, which will illuminate the work and its background. I know it will be illuminating because of the panelists, who, in addition to Andrea, are anthropologist Sienna Craig, Mendelssohn Club Artistic Director Alan Harler, The Venerable Losang Samten, and Tsering Jurme of The Tibetan Association of Philadelphia.
Also on the concert, the Fauré Requiem. Hope to see you there!
Bach, St. John Passion, anti-Semitism
In the Broad Street Review, I reply to an article…
I’m glad that Steve Cohen has a hard time believing Bach to be anti-Semitic. It’s hard to believe because Bach isn’t. Nor is his St. John Passion, nor is John’s Gospel (which Bach sets verbatim), nor are the churches that read it every year.… “Only those who cry out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chants,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed in 1935.…
Never forget, April 19
WRTI will honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and join with those in our community who remember them, with special programming throughout the day.
Listen in the 2 pm hour for I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Philadelphia composer Charles Davidson. His best-known work, it’s a setting of poems by children imprisoned in Theresienstadt; only 100 of the 15,000 children there survived. I Never Saw Another Butterfly has received more than 4,000 performances throughout the world, and is the subject of two PBS documentaries. Charles Davidson was the cantor of Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park from 1966 to 2004.
You’ll also hear works by composers that the Nazis considered dangerous to the Reich; music labeled Entartete or “degenerate” was banned, and many of the composers of those works were imprisoned and killed.
Read more here.
