Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint: Arnold Schoenberg wrote that this composer “responds to negligence by contempt.” No Googling!
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 38
Dame Ethel Smyth, Mass in D, Sanctus
Two entrants were brave enough to tackle this one: Joey and Listener Eric. Joey went with Reinecke, Franck, and Rubinstein. Eric came in with Weber, Mascagni, and Leoncavallo.
Of those guesses, I’m going to give Joey a gold star for Reinecke, who lived from 1824–1910 and was professor of composition at the Leipzig Conservatory... where he was Ethel Smyth’s teacher! Reinecke is a pretty amazing guess.
Back when I was in college, our music history textbooks were considered pretty darn progressive if they had a half-page inset acknowledging that a handful of women had penned notes to paper in the previous millennium, and Smyth was always given a perfunctory 1-2 sentence bio. It’s only been 20 years since I was an undergrad, but certain things have indeed changed (a bit) for the better!
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
The Sacred Veil
This past weekend, I attended a performance of Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil (Spotify), a multi-movement work for choir, cello, and piano that lasts roughly an hour and chronicles the diagnosis, illness, and death from cancer of the librettist’s wife. It is a big, serious work by a man who is inarguably one of America’s most important composers, if we measure importance by influence and exposure. Since it’s hard to measure it any other way (at least while the composer is alive and working) I think we have to reckon with Eric Whitacre.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Whitacre, you should know that most “serious” (i.e. instrumental/orchestral) musicians would balk at that characterization, because Whitacre mainly works in the realm of choral music (though his first big breakouts were in the world of band music—even more dismissible!) Choral music tends to be much more conservative in terms of its harmonic language than instrumental music, simply because to sing a dissonant intervals—either vertically or horizontally—is much harder than playing them; you have to produce the sound from your body via your mind’s ear, rather than just pushing a button on an instrument. (That goes double in the U.S. where choirs are made up almost exclusively of amateur musicians, though they may be quite excellent.)
So some classical elitists don’t take choral music seriously to start with, and then there’s all the personal attributes of Eric Whitacre that make him even easier to belittle. He looks like a bleach-blond surfer himbo, he’s from Las Vegas, and he has made gajillions of dollars as the choral “engine” of Hans Zimmer’s sprawling film music empire. He’s media savvy like you wouldn’t believe, has a politician’s knack for compelling speech that says (almost) nothing, and his music sounds like cotton candy.
Sometimes. There is no doubt that Whitacre is the heir apparent to the musical style of Morten Lauridsen, what with all the pandiatonic clusters and velvety smooth harmonic motion.
But here’s the thing: there’s pandiatonicism and there’s pandiatonicism. Morten Lauridsen has imitators up the wazoo, and it’s no accident that Eric Whitacre has come out on top. The devil is in the details, and Whitacres clusters are just more luminous and logical than anybody else’s.
So perhaps I sound like an Eric Whitacre defender, and in a way I am, because I do think there’s something there, and I don’t like the snobbery that assumes that music with straightforward harmonies written for choirs and bands lacks value. Some of it has very little value indeed, but there are geniuses at work in every genre, and Eric Whitacre may well be one of them.
OK then, so what to make of this piece? It’s exhausting, it’s draining, it’s depressing. It is, however, affecting, and I do believe that Whitacre achieved what he set out to do. The piece moves extremely slowly for the first 35 minutes. The early movements are Taizé-like in their style and texture, which is to say that they are meditative and repetitive. It’s clear that Whitacre is trying to slow his listeners’ pulses and draw in their attention. And I will say that these movements teetered precariously on the edge of boredom but the next one always started exactly when I was about to roll my eyes.
I will give Whitacre his due because he clearly knew what he was doing: when the drama finally happens, it hits hard. The wrenching moments would not wrench as much as they do were it not for the setup. The movements surrounding the wife’s death (and, even more tragically, the death of her unborn baby) are deeply affecting, and he handles them with musical restraint in a way that feels genuinely respectful.
Now I could stop the review here and just say that I came away with tremendous respect for Whitacre’s craft, and that I think this is a major accomplishment. But I never seem able to leave well enough alone, and there’s just something that nags me about this piece. It put me in mind of Professor Ian Malcolm’s famous line from Jurassic Park.
Now, having written my own depressing, multi-movement choral piece (which stands in philosophical opposition to Whitacre’s), I suppose it’s only natural that I would have an opinion. And my opinion is that The Sacred Veil piece is pretty boring, uncomfortably personal, and of course, I don’t agree with its moral valence. I’d like to be able to set aside that last point, but I really can’t. (This isn’t part of my review exactly, but in genuine frankness, I think there should be some kind of trigger warning in the program, an announcement, and/or the advertising surrounding this piece.)
I hesitate to make this next criticism, because the libretto was written by the husband who lost his wife and unborn child, but I think the libretto has a lot of weaknesses. Much of it is assembled from the wife’s diaries and emails (she is credited as co-librettist) and there is one movement in which she receives her diagnosis; that text is made up almost entirely of medical jargon. I couldn’t help but call to mind the famous exchange on the Golden Girls when Dorothy and Rose are writing a song about Miami:
ROSE: What about this– Miami is nice, so I’ll say it “thrice”?
DOROTHY: “Thrice”–who the hell says “thrice”?
ROSE: It’s a word!
DOROTHY: So is “intrauterine”! That does belong in a song.
It really took me out of it.
In the final estimation, I would say that this piece is proof positive that genius applied to any problem will create something that’s worth engaging with, reckoning with, and analyzing. But sometimes the devil’s not in the details, it’s in the concept, and for me that was the case here. Stories of tragedy and loss are worth sharing, but I feel like this one could have stayed in the family, or perhaps been written as an article or a memoir chapter, and that it would have been better. Something felt wrong about experiencing it in the concert hall. But perhaps that’s just me.
Classical Mixtape
Claude Bolling, Suite for Flute & Jazz Piano Trio
Listener Rebecca, a flutist, introduced this piece to me a few months ago and it’s terribly enjoyable to play. Composed jazz, like the music of Nikolai Kapustin, has always been something I’m fond of (as well as improvised jazz, of course), and this piece by a real jazzer is fantastic fun.
-Joey
I just listened to the Sacred Veil while working….and I will say it made for perfectly good background listening (I don’t think there was any other way I would’ve listened)…except when the lyrics were coming through clear enough that I could make out the words. I have similar reservations to Maestro Will about the subject matter…and I think the found lyrics aspect of it is a huge problem. I’ve been noticing something of a trend here where librettists & lyricists assemble their texts from existing non-poetic/dramatic sources rather than acting as creators (for realism? immediacy? relevancy?). I don’t like it. Writing lyrics is a skill and an art, and the use of everyday documents not intended as lyric just doesn’t cut it.
The Bolling jazz flute suite, on the other hand is delightful.
This NTT is, once again, quite tricky, but I have to say that I *really* liked it. I'll go with Laurie's assertion that it's clarinet, viola, and piano... though I'll sheepishly admit that it sounds to me like it might be a violin and I'm not quite sure which!
I also like Laurie's assertion that it's early-mid 20th century, but I don't hear it as 2nd Viennese school—there's just too many patterns. But it does sound (Eastern) European to me rather than American. I don't *think* it's Soviet, just because the patterning has some interesting overlapping and I think a Soviet composer would have laid out the phrases more neatly.
My bucket: Enescu, Kodaly, and Martinu.