In Milos Forman’s 1984 film, Amadeus, court composer Antonio Salieri seeks out Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at Archbishop Colloredo’s salon in Salzburg. Circling a group of musicians, all dressed identically in powdered wigs and blue uniforms, Salieri ponders, “Which one of them could he be?” But as we soon learn, a homely, giggling fellow, wearing the same court dress as the others but looking disheveled from cavorting with his fiancée in the dining room, turns out to be the musical Wunderkind.
 
How is it that, on the one hand, one of the most sublime composers in history can be portrayed as the grotesque, cackling caricature of Forman’s movie, and on the other, be represented as the smooth-faced matinee idol that graces wrappers of Mozartkugeln? Though both are recognizable to us as Mozart, his true image surely must lie somewhere in between. What did he really look like? For that matter, can we be sure of the portraits of other classical composers? Because we idealize and idolize these artists, we have often felt a strong need to see them as better looking than we are, sometimes even godlike in appearance.

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A few very famous works tend to dominate the classical airwaves when spring arrives: Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, etc. But suppose the winds of fashion and popularity had blown in a different direction over the last 50 to 100 years and a completely different set of composers and works had become the cream of the classical crop? Here follows an alternative universe classical music playlist for springtime.

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In one of Classical Corner’s ongoing features, we look at young composers who haven’t fully made it onto the radar screen of general audiences, but who’ve got distinctive voices and something important to say — these are composers to watch out for. Since a surprising number were born in 1963 and are turning 45 this year, on the cusp of moving out of the “young” category, this seemed like an appropriate time to acknowledge these composers who deserve more widespread recognition.

Composers born in 1963 are young enough to have come of age musically when modernism, particularly serialism, was still the prevailing aesthetic. In the US and Britain, with post-modernism beginning to gain wider acceptance in academic music in the last decades of the century, minimalism and popular music were broadening the scope of aesthetic possibilities. In continental Europe there were some rumblings of change, but modernism has generally been more tenacious there. The critical issue for composers of this generation has been discovering a resolution of the relationship between modernism and post-modern musical developments, and one of the most fascinating things about this group is hearing the variety of responses individuals have come up with. For some of the composers, their aesthetic solutions to the wealth of options open to them could be pretty wild, so for several of the pieces here, be prepared to hold on to your hats!

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How well can you judge a CD by its cover? We put that question to the test by having each classical editor choose an album based solely on its cover, record his/her initial impressions and expectations, and then review the recording. Each editor’s “before” expectations are listed below; follow the links under the entries to see the “after” reviews. And now, on with the judgment!
 
 

Anthony Coleman: Lapidation
Blair Sanderson

At first blush, this CD appears to feature some kind of sparse avant-garde or ambient music, judged solely by the simple abstract art on the cover. There’s a subdued, minimalist feeling to the washed-out colors and roughly repetitive shapes, and the spiral — do you go clockwise or widdershins? — connotes an introspective approach in the music, perhaps of a meditative bent. Does a Japanese rock garden spring to mind? A Zen koan, anyone? Without knowing the work of this composer or how lapidation (i.e., the stoning of a person to death) figures into the musical style, method, or structure, one might guess that the music has some connection to pitched percussion or tuned stoneware, and hopefully not smashed crockery.

Read the review here

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No cemetery in the world boasts more graves of great classical composers and other famous musicians than the massive Central Cemetery in Vienna (Zentralfriedhof Wien), which is the biggest of almost 50 cemeteries in the city. The burial ground, which was opened in 1874, is Europe’s largest in number of interred, holding the remains of over three million people, and the second largest in area. Of course, notables in politics, science, literature, and the arts receive their due among the most visited sites, grouped in the Ehrengräber (Honorary Graves). However, the most celebrated tenants of all are the many musicians, who make this place a natural tourist attraction for Austria’s music capital.

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February 29. Leap Day. That extra 24 hours jammed in between February and March every four years that makes up for the Earth’s revolving around the Sun at approximately 365.25 days per year instead of an even 365. On this day in 1504, Christopher Columbus used a lunar eclipse to frighten natives into providing food for his crew while stranded in Jamaica; in 1892, St. Petersburg, Florida, was incorporated; in 1940 Gone with the Wind won eight Academy Awards; and in 1960 an earthquake struck southern Morocco.

The day does have some musical significance. For one thing, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots was premiered on Feb. 29, 1836, in Paris to overwhelming success. For another, it’s a major plot device in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. And there are musical birthdays: Ja Rule (1976), Dinah Shore (1916), Jimmy Dorsey (1904), and most importantly for our purposes, February 29, 2008, is the 54th actual birthday of Gioachino Rossini (1792). It’s not a milestone birthday, but if your birthday only comes around every four years, you celebrate what you can when you can, and Rossini was the kind of guy who would enjoy a good party.

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The Brits Go to Town

England’s obsession with jazz began in 1919, the day the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to roost in London. The group remained there for over a year, and their success led to a flood of American groups into the U.K., so much so that the crown banned their presence on the island after 1924. Exceptions were made only for Paul Whiteman, who played there in 1926, and Louis Armstrong, who played there in 1932; the ban was finally rescinded for Duke Ellington, who arrived in 1933. Ellington’s impact on British musicians was enormous and long lasting; long after he’d abandoned the whole cause of “tone parallel” Black, Brown, and Beige, a team of British arrangers attempted to reconstruct a practical score of the lost work in the early 1970s. Even before the Duke’s records began to arrive upon England’s shores, however, Britain’s composers were incorporating the sounds of jazz into their works. The earliest to try, it appears, was a very well-known composer noted for a more genteel approach than that of the jazz hybrid.

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At 92, composer Henry Brant is one of the few surviving veterans of the first wave of “modern music” in America. In a composing career spanning seventy years and counting, Brant has advanced Charles Ives’s concept of “spatial music” into the twenty-first century, dividing up orchestras and soloists into distantly placed instrumental groups that talk to one another antiphonally through space and time. Along the way, Brant has picked up two Guggenheim fellowships, honors from the Ford, Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 2002, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his composition Ice Field. Innova Recordings in Minnesota has lately undertaken a fascinating multi-volume recorded edition, The Henry Brant Collection, making available for the first time on record Brant’s wholly unique body of work.

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