Anna clyne
this midnight hourDIVE IN!
Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” in a New York Times profile and as “fearless” by NPR, GRAMMY-nominated Anna Clyne (b. 1980) is one of the most in-demand composers today, working with orchestras, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists around the world.
RESOURCES:This Midnight Hour live performance from 2019Anna Clyne speaks about This Midnight HourHIGHLIGHTS:
Anna Clyne began composing music at the age of 7. Now just 43 years old, she has nearly 90 published works and over a dozen recordings to her name.
Anna Clyne was born in London and currently lives in New York City. She has been composer-in-residence for Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Trondhiem Symphony, and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and will be the 2023-2024 composer-in-residence for the Helsinki Philharmonic.
Anna Clyne has a strong professional relationship with Colorado Symphony Conductor Laureate Marin Alsop. She first worked with Alsop in the summer of 2010 at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, where Alsop programmed Clyne's first orchestral work, <<REWIND>>. Since this time, Alsop has performed nearly all of Clyne's orchestral works, including the cello concerto, DANCE, which was also recorded with cellist Inbal Segev and the London Philharmonic. This concerto will be presented on the Colorado Symphony's 2023-2024 season performed by Segev and led by Alsop!
This Midnight Hour was premiered in 2015, and takes its inspiration from two poems -
Harmonie du Soir by Charles Baudelaire:
The season is at hand when swaying on its stem
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
(Translated by William Aggeler)
La Musica by Juan Ramón Jiménez:
Music –
a naked woman
running mad through the pure night!
(Translated by Robert Bly)
To evoke Baudelaire's "melancholy waltz" Anna Clyne draws on melodic folk elements to create a slightly warped version of a waltz and at one point uses the orchestra to create the sound of an accordion by asking the string instruments to play slightly out of tune with one another. To evoke the Jiménez poem, Clyne uses fast accelerated rhythms and dense textures in the orchestra.
This Midnight Hour is an exciting 12 minute single movement piece of music with a shifting textural palette and a lot of personality. It is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.Enjoy listening!
Joaquín Rodrigo
concierto de aranjuezDIVE IN!
Joaquín Rodrido (1901-1999) was a Spanish composer and pianist. His work for classical guitar and orchestra, Concierto de Aranjuez is by far his best-known work. Its success established his reputation as one of the most significant Spanish composers of the 1900s.RESOURCES:A live performance of the entire concerto.A live performance excerpt of the beautiful slow movement, featuring guest soloist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas."Concerto d'Orangejuice", as featured in this scene from Brassed Off, featuring a very young Ewan McGregor and the late Pete Postelthwaite.HIGHLIGHTS:
Joaquín Rodrigo lost his eyesight at the age of 3 from diptheria. He began studying piano by age 8 and composition by age 16. His first published compositions came in his early 20s. Concierto de Aranjuez was composed in 1939 when he was just 38 years old. He painstakingly notated all his compositions with the help of a transcriber, similar to the famous scene in the movie Amadeus with Mozart describing his musical ideas to Salieri to write down.
Concierto de Aranjuez has captured the imaginations and hearts of listeners throughout the world. It is one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of classical music, having been adapted for other instruments and featured in many popular settings.
The highly dramatic slow movement melody was arranged for jazz trumpet legend Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain" album. Of this powerfully moving melody, Davis said "That melody is so strong that the softer you play it, the stronger it gets, and the stronger you play it, the weaker it gets."
Concierto de Aranjuez is in three movements, the first and third are evocative of typical Spanish folk dances. The second movement features a long beautiful melody, at times languid and ruminative or bursting with heavy emotion. It is said to be a difficult conversation between Rodrigo (the guitar) and God (the orchestra) about the loss of Rodrigo's first child. The English horn statement of the melody at the very opening of this movement is one of the most instantly recognizable moments in the modern classical music repertoire.
A typical performance of Concierto de Aranjuez lasts about 25 minutes.NERD ASSIGNMENTS!
Start with a Conversation:
A concerto is a type of musical form that creates dialogue and drama between a single instrument or small group of instruments, and a much larger group of instruments. What exactly is dialogue? How is dialogue made? Think about constructing a brief dialogue between two people. What can you do to alter this dialogue so that one participant becomes a whole group of people? What are some examples of this type of dialogue you can think of in your every day life? [call and response in pep rallies, a religious service, etc.] Now imagine what it might be like if each person in the large group had an individual response in this dialogue. Would we be able to understand all the responses simultaneously? In music, many different sounds (often called ‘voices’) can be processed simultaneously by the human ear. Because of this it’s possible to have a two part musical dialogue with many individual voices!
Try an Activity!
Go ahead and dive down that internet rabbit hole! Listen to at least three different recordings of Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for comparison and contrast. How do you find the interpretation of different soloists and orchestras affect the overall piece of music? What specific things do you notice? Do you have any favorite interpretations or moments? What draws you toward some and/or turns you away from others?
Listening for dialogue and interpretation
Listen to the performance live and again via recording if possible. Try to listen carefully for musical dialogue and dramatic interpretive elements in this composition. How did the conversation and comparison/contrast activities help you to better engage as a listener?
béla bartók
concerto for orchestraDIVE IN!
Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) is one of the most celebrated composers of the 1900s. In Hungary he is celebrated as a cultural hero and he is considered one of the world’s greatest composers. One of his most important legacies is his research and collection of Eastern-European folk music, leading him to be considered one of the first ethnomusicologists.
A staunch anti-fascist, Bartók protested against the rise of fascism in Europe between the first and second world wars and against Hungary’s antisemitic laws, eventually leaving his beloved home country for the United States in 1940 in disgust after Hungary joined the Axis powers. It was this political upheaval and his perception of the painful disappearance of Hungarian culture that provided the backdrop for Concerto for Orchestra, now widely considered to be the best and most highly respected piece of music for symphony orchestra from the first half of the 1900s.RESOURCES:A live performance recording of the full symphony.
HIGHLIGHTS:
Béla Bartók was born in Nayszentmiklós, Austria-Hungary which is now part of Romania. He took piano lessons beginning at age five. He continued his musical studies in Budapest at the Royal Academy of Music where he met fellow Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodaly. Together they would develop an interest in the collection of folk music which became a major influence on Bartók's music.
Bartók’s compositional output is heavily influenced by his interest in folk music of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. This was true even in fairly early compositions, and the influence of Eastern European folk and urban popular music is evident in his final works as well.
In 1940, after observing the rise of fascism and the toll it was taking on Hungary, Bartók left for the United States. He and his family first settled in Queens, NY and later moved to an apartment in the Bronx. The disruption of his career due to first to his openly protesting against the Nazi party and growing antisemitism in Hungary, and then to the disarray caused by emigration, likely contributed to health problems and a gap of several years in composing before he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra.
It was during a hospital stay in New York City with suspected tuberculosis in May 1943 that Bartók was visited by conductor and patron Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony, who offered him $1,000 to write a new orchestral piece. This offer reportedly gave Bartók a burst of creative energy, and he wrote most of the work over two months while staying at a ‘cure cottage’ in Saranac Lake, NY far from the noise and distraction of New York City.
Bartók worked on the Concerto for Orchestra from August 15 until October 8, 1943 while he was recuperating at Saranac Lake. There is a small cottage in Saranac Lake, NY in which he spent the last summer of his life, composing the Viola Concerto and Piano Concerto #3 which stands today and has been preserved for visitors to learn about him and his time there.
CONTROVERSY AND DRAMA! - Adolf Hitler’s love of Austrian composer Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow operetta was so excessive and so widely known that when Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich composed his “Leningrad” symphony during the WWII siege of that city, he obsessively used a tune from the operetta to represent the German invasion and, more generally, the destructive impact of fascism on culture. At the time he was composing Concerto for Orchestra, Béla Bartók heard Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony in numerous radio broadcasts as it was used during the siege as a morale-booster for the Allies. He was reportedly annoyed that Shostakovich was receiving such great attention for music he considered poorly constructed, and was especially irritated by the use of the insipid Lehar tune. Some scholars believe Bartók included this same Lehar tune in the 4th movement “Intermezzo Interrupted” as a mocking gesture toward Shostakovich. Others believe he was amplifying the anti-fascist sentiment. There’s no reason to believe both couldn’t be true!
The December 1944 premiere performance of Concerto for Orchestra was a huge success and there were numerous additional performances scheduled as a result. The critic present at that Boston premiere wrote "if a composition of transcendental musical art may be defined as one which, in its own way, is a summation of all that has gone before, then the Concerto for Orchestra is a work of art, and a great one.”
Concerto for Orchestra is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings. It is in five separate movements: Introduzione, Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Pairs), Elegy, Intermezzo Interrotto (Intermezzo Interrupted), and Finale. A performance typically lasts 35-38 minutes.Extras!
Video and Photo: Performance recording of a new arrangement of Bartók's Viola Concerto, written in 1945 in the Saranac Lake cottage which has been preserved and turned into a visitors' learning center - complete with the bath tub he used in which Catherine is posing in this photograph like an #obsessed #nerd.
READY TO ENGAGE!
Please share your experience with me – [email protected]!
I’d love to hear about it or see any of your activities, journaling, or creations!
I’d love to hear about it or see any of your activities, journaling, or creations!