Yesterday’s Music History Monday post addressed two anniversaries: the 337th anniversary of the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach on March 21, 1685, and the 196th anniversary of the premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130, on March 21, 1826. That quartet, like so very much of Beethoven’s late music, demonstrates explicitly the influence of Bach’s music on Beethoven’s own in its sixth (and final) movement fugue. That sixth movement fugue is the key to Beethoven’s conception of the piece, as the preceding five movements of the quartet are related not so much to each other as they are to the culminating fugue. Sadly, Beethoven’s late-in-life infatuation (obsession would not be too strong a word) with both fugues and the High Baroque/Sebastian Bach-inspired aesthetic they represented, was not shared with most members of his contemporary musical community. For all his cantankerous individuality, Ludwig (aka Louis/Luigi) van Beethoven (1770-1827) was still part of a musical community, and it was a community that had long before rejected the Baroque era musical style that had preceded it. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) – one of the intellectual pillars of the Enlightenment – wrote apropos of fugues and the High […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 24
We mark the birth on March 21, 1685, of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, in what today is central Germany. He died 65 years later, on July 28, 1750, in the Saxon city of Leipzig. I can hear the howling now, “Dr. B, hello, Bach was born on March 31, 1685, not March 21; March 31: it says so on Wikipedia!” Chill out and unknot those jockeys; let’s talk. Wikipedia and various other sources do indeed indicate, not incorrectly, that Bach was born on March 31. But according to the irrefutable and unassailable Bach scholar Christoff Wolff writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sebastian Bach was born on March 21. And in fact Bach celebrated his birthday on March 21. So what gives? A Brief Contemplation of Dates (by which we do not refer to one’s social life but the calendar) Old style and new style; in style and out-of-style. It is a question of almost Talmudic complexity. We’re talking about calendars and the confusion wrought by changing calendars. In 46 BCE (two years before his conversion into a human pincushion), Julius Caesar proposed replacing what was the 10-month Roman […]
Continue ReadingIn his lifetime, the composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) was considered the single greatest composer living and working in the German-speaking world. (Whereas his contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach [1685-1750], was perceived as being a composer of third-rate importance, if that.) By the late-nineteenth century, Telemann’s music had come to be considered by many “authorities” – when it was considered at all – to be the work of a fifth-rate talent, hardly better than a charlatan. By the mid-twentieth century, his work had been reappraised once again, and a more balanced and frankly more fair evaluation had been made, one we can live with today. A few quotes will establish nicely these “changing views” of Telemann’s music. In the eighteenth century, Telemann’s music was universally admired, as the following quotes attest. The famed German composer, singer, lexicographer, and music theorist Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) wrote this bit of doggerel in 1740: “A Lully is renowned;Corelli one may praise;But Telemann alonehas above mere fame been raised.” In 1754, the German writer and editor Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae (1726-1777) opined: “Yet who is this ancient, who with flowering pen, full of holy fire, the wond’ring temple charms? Telemann, none but thou, celestial music’s sire.” The […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth of March 14, 1681 – 341 years ago today – of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, in the city Magdeburg, in what today is central Germany. A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) (both of whom Telemann numbered as good friends; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was both the godson and namesake of Georg Philipp Telemann), Telemann was considered in his lifetime the greatest composer living and working in Germany, with our friend Sebastian Bach well down that list. Telemann died in Hamburg on June 25, 1767, at the age of 86. Georg Philipp was the youngest of three surviving children (two boys and a girl) of Maria and Heinrich Telemann. Young Telemann came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. His mother Maria’s father was a deacon, and his father Heinrich Telemann was a Lutheran pastor (as was Heinrich’s father before him). Sadly, Heinrich Telemann died his late 30’s in 1685 when Georg Philipp was just 4 years old, and the task of raising and providing for the family fell squarely on Maria Telemann’s shoulders. Single mothers are usually, by necessity, a tough bunch, and in this Maria Telemann […]
Continue ReadingThe Enduring Magnificence of Flamenco On Sunday, February 27, my Patreon Zoom session (which goes by the rather precious title of “The Dr. is In!”) focused on Spanish music for the piano that has been transcribed for the guitar. Co-lead and largely created by my patron Joe Sullivan, the session featured music by some of the greatest of all Spanish composers: Joaquin Turina (1882-1949), Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909), Enrique Granados (1867-1916), and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946). What all of the music we examined had in common was that it was inspired by the flamenco tradition of Andalucía, in southern Spain. The last piece on the program was the “Ritual Fire Dance” from Manuel de Falla’s ballet El Amor Brujo (“Love, the Magician”, or “Spell-bound Love”, or “The Bewitched Love”, 1925), which has been transcribed for two guitars by the husband/wife guitar duo, the “Duo Kupinski.” Before playing a video of the Duo Kupinski’s two guitar version, I wanted us to hear de Falla’s original, orchestral version of the “Ritual Fire Dance.” Specifically, I wanted to play the flamenco ballet version from director Carlos Saura’s film El Amor Brujo (of 1986). That film (and the “Ritual Fire Dance” in the film) features the awesome flamenco […]
Continue ReadingBefore we go forth to encounter the “unexpected”, a quick birthday greeting to the wonderful Maurice Ravel, who was born in the southern French municipality of Ciboure on March 7, 1875: 147 years ago today. I would direct you to my Music History Monday post of December 28, 2020, a post that celebrated Ravel’s life on the anniversary of his death on December 28, 1937, at the age of 62. Happy birthdayMaestro. “Unexpected Warblers” About my choice of topic for today. Three weeks ago, on February 14 (St. Valentine’s Day), I ran a post featuring some of the most horrific love songs ever recorded. Then, last Thursday, on February 24 (a date that now joins December 7, 1941, for its infamy due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), I ran a post entitled “Phyllis Diller, Concert Pianist: Who Knew?”, a post that celebrated the unexpected keyboard talents of Ms. Phyllis Diller (1917-2012). Today’s Music History Monday combines aspects of both of those posts, as it explores what happens when movie actors not known for being singers actually sing on film. As you might expect, the results are mixed: some of these good people will, in fact, actually surprise us (in a […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on February 28, 1876 – 146 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist John Alden Carpenter, in Chicago, Illinois. He died there in the Windy City at the age of 75, on April 26, 1951. John Alden Carpenter is certainly not a musical household name here in 2022. But 75 years ago, Carpenter was among the best known and most respected living composers, musicians (he was an outstanding pianist), and musical philanthropists in the United States. His orchestral music was regularly conducted by the likes of Walter Damrosch (who conducted the New York Symphony Orchestra), Frederick Stock (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky (the Boston Symphony Orchestra), Fritz Reiner (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Artur Rodzinski (the New York Philharmonic), Pierre Monteux (the San Francisco Symphony), Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter (the New York Philharmonic), and Eugene Ormandy (the Philadelphia Orchestra). The list of great singers, musicians, and chamber groups that championed Carpenter’s music is equally impressive. Carpenter was the only American composer ever to be commissioned by Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his Ballets Russes. The product of that commission was Carpenter’s third and final ballet, Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life […]
Continue ReadingOn February 21, 2012 – ten years ago today – five members of the Russian feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot staged an unauthorized performance on the soleas [so-LAY-us] of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. (For our information, a “soleas” is the sanctuary platform in a Russian Orthodox Church.) The security personnel at the church were not pleased by this impromptu performance and quickly – within a minute – put an end to it. However, following the dictum that “anything worth doing is worth recording,” Pussy Riot recorded their “performance” for posterity; that recording is linked below: Why, oh why would these masked young women so desecrate a Russian Orthodox Cathedral? They had – to their minds – good reason. Vladimir Putin was up for re-election, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (who was born Vladimir Mikhailovich in 1946), had thrown the church’s support behind Putin’s re-election. Later that evening of February 21, 2012 – ten years ago today – Pussy Riot released a music video entitled “Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” Thanks to the internet, that video circulated internationally, overnight. That video is linked below. From […]
Continue ReadingYou Know It When You Hear It For 35 years – from 1984 until 2019 – I was part of a composers’ collective called “Composers, Inc.” As originally construed, we were six San Francisco Bay Area composers that banded together to produce concerts of new American music, concert that would – obviously – include our own, under-performed and under-appreciated works as well. Over the years, we staged hundreds of world and West Coast premieres and contributed mightily, or so we all continue to believe, to the American new music scene. Self-congratulations can be unseemly but, in this case, they are deserved. Fairly early in the organization’s life, Composers, Inc. instituted a composition contest, which came to be known as the “Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composition Competition.” Composers from across the United States were invited to submit chamber works to Composers, Inc. An administrator logged the entries and removed any names and identifying marks from the scores and recordings. Those scores and recordings (usually between 300 and 400) were then divided into six groups/batches. Each of the six composers that made up the “Artistic Board” of Composers, Inc. (the photo above) then listened to two batches of music. (This way, every […]
Continue ReadingOn February 14, 1992 – an even 30 years ago today – the Paramount Pictures movie Wayne’s World was released in the United States. It was both a critical and commercial success. It became the tenth highest grossing film of 1992, raking in $183,097,323 at the box office. (For our information, number one that year was Disney’s Aladdin, which brought in a most respectable $504,050,219 at the box office; that’s over half-a-billion 1992 dollars!) To this day, Wayne’s World remains the highest-grossing film based on a sketch from Saturday Night Live. (The list of such other SNL-inspired flicks includes The Blues Brothers [with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, 1980; to be discussed in next week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post], Coneheads [with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin, 1993], It’s Pat [with Julia Sweeny, 1994], Stuart Saves his Family [with Al Franken, 1995]; and A Night at the Roxbury [with Will Ferrell, 1998].) With my own fond memories of the film, I played Wayne’s World last year for my then 12- and 14-year-old kids. Sadly, it did not go well, as the movie has not aged well. Then again, neither has Mike Myers nor yours truly. Wayne’s World featured appearances by the […]
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