The Singer That Got Away

It's that time of the year, when Christmas music comes out two months before Christmas. I don't have a problem with that, because I love the music, even if I prefer the sacred over the secular and all they play is the latter. On my way home from a birthday party last night, I heard "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," one of my favorites. Sung by some recent pop singer, it wasn't half bad, but it and other versions hold nothing to the original Judy Garland one in Meet Me in St. Louis. Then that got me thinking. Soon I realized that Garland was responsible for some of the most iconic, most revelatory recordings in the past century (and her daughter, Liza Minnelli, wouldn't be too far behind). Here are some of the ones I thought of, in no particular order:

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

Halfway through the song, look at the little girl's face: that's me when I hear this song. That was also the face of many, many people who saw this, as the country was in the thick of WWII and their loved ones were not with them for the holidays. Garland, who, though being only 21, was use to doing single takes, was really pushed by the director Vincente Minnelli, who wanted to bring out her great gifts. They would later marry.

There are several Christmas songs that deal with the unhappier aspects involved, such as missing family, friends, scorned lovers, etc., but I cannot think of one that deals with the matter directly like this song does (the others are, forgive me, mostly whining). Granted, the original lyrics are more stark and cutting: 

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past

and

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But the lyrics that Garland sings are still backed with melancholy, just presented now with a more upbeat message. The real clincher is the line "From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow," which should break any walls left standing and allow the tears to flow.

"The Trolley Song"

From the same movie, this song expresses that quintessential emotion of musicals, optimism for love. However, rarely has that emotion been tied in song to actual setting and action. Here, Garland equates the palpitations of her heart with the trolley she is riding, for that is where she was to meet up with her (possible) beau. He seems to miss the trolley, though, and her anxiety builds up; what's wonderful here is that the chorus sings first while she roves about looking for the guy, providing commentary on what's she feeling until she spots him and starts in herself, as though she was choked with fear earlier, but is now relieved enough to sing her optimism. She is just in top form here.

"Ol' Man River"

This one was an unexpected delight. I recently stumbled upon this, and this is hands down one of the three best versions of this song I've heard. 

"Get Happy"

I think we should listen to her. The backdrop is simple but delightful. Her outfit is impeccable (what legs!). Just be happy.

"Somewhere Over the Rainbow"

We need this now more than ever. It can be dangerous to have your head in the clouds and ignore your problems, but if you are only ever looking at the dirt, then how can you expect to reach this fabled spot Dorothy/Garland dreams of?

"Swanee"

I greatly prefer this version to Al Jolson, partly because I don't like Jolson, but mostly because Garland does it much better. The dancing is phenomenal, particularly the cane hitting bit, and like many other movies of the time, they really loved to use color. 

"This is Mrs. Norman Maine"

Lest you think Garland was only a great singer, I would point out that a.) she is "acting" marvelously in all the above clips from movies, and b.) see the above clip for a decidedly weighty bit. A Star Is Born is one of the greatest movie musicals of all time, but unlike most of them from those times, this is an incredibly searing portrait of Hollywood and stardom, and the punches are not held. From the underbelly of movie lot PR to suicide, this is not Singin' in the Rain (not to disparage that magnificent movie). This clip is from the end of the movie, after her husband has drowned himself after sinking into abysmal failure; but the guy who comes to get Garland reminds her that there was one great success in his life.

"The Man That Got Away"

I fibbed earlier when I said there was no particular order: I saved the best for last. This is one of the best scenes Hollywood ever filmed. Done in one shot, something that is incredibly rare in these hyper-prismatic days, the camera never leaves Garland as she sings about lost love. Yet, she is happy; she is frequently showing more jubilant emotions, and ends with a smile. I think she is putting into performance something that British novelist Iris Murdoch said, which is that one of the greatest things we can experience is falling out of love. Perhaps that the exact case here, but joy can be had from loss. This performance, more than any of her other ones, shows her ability to really delve into a (good) song and show its multitudinous aspects, and her gift for a dialectic between music and lyrics, and performance.

Practically any Judy Garland clip or movie you look up will be golden. Now, I think I'll go to my piano and try to do what Garland does.

A Lament for Joy?

After listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral," with it's euphoric final movement, I though about other music that was happy, joyous, euphoric, etc. I was struck but how difficult this was. Even now, I can barely muster a handful or two of pieces that evoke unqualified elation, or almost unqualified. There's the duet for Papageno and Papagena in The Magic Flute, which ends with the bubbliest mirth ever composed (in my humble opinion); the finale to Sibelius' Symphony No. 5, though that might be more heroic than joyous; much of Mendelssohn's music, particularly the Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (has there ever been more revelatory calmness and satisfaction as in the very end of the Overture?). The more contemporary the search becomes, the harder it is. Very few composers seem to be happy these days; then again, not many others are either. Christopher Rouse composed his orchestral work Rapture in response to his own history of downcast works (if I recall correctly); some of John Adams works could be considered fun and perhaps happy, but I doubt that he set out to evoke happiness in them. Unambiguous joy is rather looked down upon anymore, and maybe there is some justification in deriding such works as escapist. However, there is surely plenty of joy yet to be found in our sick world?

I'll list a few works that make me happy. What music brings out your giddier nature?

1. The Magic Flute
2. Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream
3. Symphony No. 5, Jean Sibelius
4. "Jupiter, Bringer of Joy" from The Planets
5. Symphony No. 6, Ludwig van Beethoven

My Top Five Musicals, Part 1

After seeing a passable presentation of an adequate show last night, combined with recent reading about musicals, I have been thinking about my favorite musicals. Without ado, here are five of them, in no specific order.

1.) 1776 

This may be my favorite musical. It's so finely crafted and entertaining that it overcomes my anarchism and even gives great pleasure (and food for thought). It also has an interesting backstory. Sherman Edwards, who wrote the songs, first conceived the show in the '60's. He was a former history teacher who quit his job to be a songwriter (writing several for Elvis). No one wanted a part of it though, so he had to write the libretto himself. Peter Stone learned about it, and became interested enough that he took Sherman's libretto and rewrote it. People were hesitant to back a show that was predominantly male-centric (the two female roles are minor) and which everyone knew the outcome. But Stone had the brilliance the write the show with the same tenseness and desperation present at that Continental Convention, so that one is left wondering up to the end if independence will ever be declared. There is a brilliant scene where we learn that what we take for granted today was nothing such for those men then. They had very real concerns, concerning family and the things they sacrificed for. It is also stressed that this was an earth-shaking moment in history, so hesitance on their part should be understood. 

Making all this drama even greater is Edwards' magnificent score, one of the best ever written for Broadway (I think). What doesn't it have? there's comedy (practically all four songs at the beginning), romance ("Yours, Yours, Yours" and "He Plays the Violin"), situational, or quasi-situational anyway ("Cool, Cool, Considerate Men"), an eleventh hour song, so to speak ("Is Anybody There?"). The show was conceived and premiered during the Vietnam War, and Edwards' ties that conflict to the American Revolutionary with "Momma, Look Sharp," which is sung from the view of a young lad dying on the battlefield as he pleads for his mother to find him (his mother has a response). It's the best anti-war song, in my opinion, because it reveals the real toll of conflict, which is simple but profound (and it is one of the few things that makes me weep with each return). The music fits the period, but it isn't dated or merely adequate, and frequently matches the situation. It wonderfully melodious and delightfully crafted (as John Adams says of Jefferson's writing, it has "a certain felicity of expression"). The lyrics are often witty, complement the story and character, and very moving. It is the only musical (movie) I watch over and over again.

2.) Carousel

I never bawled so hard as when I watched the movie. However, the movie is awful, and after a couple more viewings, I won't watch it again. And since I have yet to see the stage version, I can't comment fully on it, because the movie changed so much. What I can say is that of the songs I have heard, it is the most beautiful score to grace Broadway (at least until La Cage aux Folles and The Light in the Piazza). From the "Carousel Waltz", which opens, to the final chorus, it is the most exquisite music this side of opera and operetta. It captures the setting very well, as Richard Rodgers' music always does, and I always sense a hint of fatalism throughout. "Soliloquy" is almost certainly the greatest song ever written for musicals. Oscar Hammerstein II was an innovator whose experiments didn't always succeed (Allegro), but Carousel was a daring risk; never before had such an anti-hero as Billy Bigelow been the focus of a musical, and violence and sexuality are very important to the events and characters. The subject matter can still make people a bit squeamish today. Also, the opening is done entirely in mime, and a few scenes are entirely done with music. I can't wait to see it at Webster University this coming season.

Review: "Temperament," by Stuart Isacoff

As a pianist of some ten years, I had for a while at the start no notion that other forms of tuning existed. The twelve notes I had at my disposal were all that seemed good, and anything else was "out of tune" (thus my early distaste for Eastern musics). Though I began having doubts during high school, it was not until college that my primitive understanding of tuning was blasted open. Webster University had one of the few Archifoons (Archiphone) in the world, and though it is not working, the fact that it could split the octave in smaller increments than the normal twelve tones was something I had never encountered. During my four years of college, different tunings were touched upon briefly, mostly in Music Theory IV and 20th Century Music History, but never dealt with in much detail (and certainly never put in practice). Thankfully, I recently finished an exceedingly intriguing introduction into the history of tuning systems, Stuart Isacoff's Temperament, its first edition published in 2003 (I read the paperback, which has a new Afterword that I will discuss later).

The subtitle makes clear the breadth of Isacoff's purpose: "How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization." People I would never have thought of having an interest actually had much to say on tuning, such as Newton and St. Augustine; the Chinese come into the picture; and even Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, once proposed to create a tuning of his own (he seems never to have gone past that pronouncement). The opening salvo was made by Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and seeming-prophet, who, according to legend, was so struck by the consonances and dissonances of hammer blows that he experimented and realized that notes forming the simplest ratios, such as 2:1, 3:2, and so on, were the most beautiful. Therefore, a system of tuning based on perfect fifths (Pythagorian tuning) arose. As with many great discoveries and creations, the flaws were as evident at the start as the strengths, and Pythagoras discovered that, once one returns to an octave of the opening note after the circle of fifths, this higher twin was impure, out of tune, and therefore a fatal flaw. In Pythagoras' time, this was of no concern, since music was monophonic and heavily reliant on speech patterns, so complexity of harmony was of no import. But this schism would arise roughly two millenia later, and embittered sides were taken. Among non-musicians, the matter was more theoretical and ideological than practical (though musicians did likewise, naturally). Though Pythagorean tuning was eventually removed from discussion, what replaced it was a debate of temperaments. Tempering involved slight changes to natural notes, and from this arose many different systems of altering what nature hath wrought. The three major temperaments were just-tone, mean-tone, and equal. Of the three, equal temperament (where all twelve notes are equidistant from each other) seems to have received the most vitriol, viewed by many as an affront against nature, and by others as practically impossible; it would take a Chinese man to first discover the mathematical way to bring this about. Isacoff's central concern is the contentious rise of equal temperament as the dominant system in Western Music, and whether music should be guided by nature and what should be, or man's perceptions and the practical. For me, the debate between Vincenzo Galilei  (father of Galileo) and Gioseffo Zarlino is the most intriguing and thorough example of the problem, and Rameau's writings on music theory and tuning the most convincing final word (if there were to be such a thing in an ever-changing issue). 

In his Afterword for the paperback edition, Isacoff deals with criticisms leveled against his book; most importantly, they show how strongly the debate still continues even today, with one critic even demanding the author rewrite his book "to reflect the evils of equal temperament." He also points out that, even though some works of some composers would work just as well, if not better, in well temperament, most were clearly conceived for equal temperament, and that the modern piano is inconceivable without its present tuning. Furthermore, he makes clear that the other temperaments have their own particular charm, and that equal temperament, though most practical, is not perfect. I think the same could be said of his writing: practical, even, and for a general public (in other words, engaging); but, as he himself admits, not perfect (he says that he could have spent more time on mean and well temperaments). Though a musician would find it of greatest value, Temperament is great for any student of Western thought, whether in fields such as philosophy, theology, or mathematics, and will carry any reader along as though it were the latest page-turner; however, this book should be secured an enduring position.

A More Specific Blog

I already have one blog, so why this one? For several months I've been thinking about having my own website, as a composer, so that people can have at least a glance at what I'm about. What has kept me from creating it, aside from the actual creation and upkeep, is that I don't think I really have enough to make it that interesting. For now, then, there is this new blog, The Quodlibet. The word comes from Latin and means "what you will," and is a music genre I particularly like where several different tunes are put in counterpoint to each other. Any topic musical I feel like writing about is game, whether it's a work of criticism, such as of a concert or CD, or about something I'm composing or learning, or about music in general. Enjoy!

Speaking of quodlibet's, here's perhaps the most famous one, which ends J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.