We mark the birth on August 16, 1929 – 92 years ago today – of the jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He died, tragically and all-too-young on September 15, 1980 in New York City at the age of 51. Just a week before his death, Evans had completed a nine-day run (from August 31 to September 8, 1980) at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco. That run was recorded and issued on an 8-cd set entitled The Last Waltz, which will be among therecommended recordings in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Apropos of that appearance at the Keystone Korner, Jesse Hamlin, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle writes: “Evans played with such fervor during that nine-day stint that his enraptured audiences would’ve found it hard to believe that his body was wasting away and that he’d be dead a week later.” All early, unnecessary deaths are tragic. Bill Evans’ death holds a special poignancy in that it was not only self-inflicted, but he had, in the end, lost his will to live. In the end, he was only able to ignore his disintegrating body while he was playing the piano. But not […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 30
Dmitri Shostakovich wrote a lot of chamber music, including fifteen string quartets. From almost the beginning of Shostakovich’s career as a composer of chamber music, the viola, the tenor voice of the string quartet – with its full, warm, restrained, and yet masculine tone – had been his instrumental alter ego: his own, personal musical voice. With Beethoven, it had been the more outgoing and boisterous bass/baritone voice of the ‘cello. But for the more introspective Shostakovich, it was the viola. When Shostakovich had something profound and lyric to say, as often as not, it is the viola that says it. With this in mind, there is something both right and poetic that the last work Shostakovich ever composed was a sonata for viola and piano. (It’s no surprise that Beethoven identified with the sound of the cello, as his speaking voice was a baritone. As opposed to Shostakovich, whose scratchy, tobacco-ravaged voice was a tenor. The video linked below is an interview with Shostakovich filmed in 1975, just months before his death on August 9 of that year. Shostakovich is expressing his opinion that opera should be sung in the language of the country in which it is being […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death on August 9, 1975 – 46 years ago today – of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich at the age of 68, in Moscow. He was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg. Does Stress Kill? If stress kills, Dmitri Shostakovich should never have lived past the age of 30. In his early teens, as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (or what was then called, the “Petrograd” Conservatory), he and his classmates suffered severe malnutrition due to the Russian Civil War (which ran from 1917-1922). But he survived. In 1936, some eight months before his 30th birthday, he was officially purged on the orders of Joseph Stalin himself during the Great Terror. Few people expected Shostakovich to survive, least of all himself. Later admitting to having been suicidal, he lay awake at night, too terrified to sleep, waiting for the van (the feared “Black Maria”), to take him away. But he survived. In 1941, he survived the early stages of the Siege of Leningrad and in 1948, he was once again purged for writing music considered to be too modern and too personally self-expressive, music that did not subscribe to Soviet ideologic dicta. Again he […]
Continue ReadingChávez’s emergence as a composer in 1920 – at the age of 21 – could not have been better timed. You see, 1920 saw the end of the Mexican Revolution and the inauguration of Álvaro Obregón as a constitutional president. According to musicologist J. Carlos Estenssoro: “A new cultural nationalism began to take shape. The government became the chief patron of the arts, with a view to bringing culture to the masses, and great emphasis was placed on the indigenous Indian cultures, particularly those of the pre-Conquest era. In 1921 Chávez met Jose Vasconcelos, the dynamic minister of education and patron of the arts who commissioned him to write a ballet on an Aztec subject. [In composing] El feugo nuevo, Chávez established himself as the first composer to enunciate this new nationalism.” Yes, it is true: as a composer, especially early in his career, Chávez had “nationalist leanings,” meaning that the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian folk music of his native Mexico informed – to varying degrees (though sometimes not at all) – his concert music. But Carlos Chávez was much, much more than merely a “nationalist” composer, and the constant references to him and his music as being so doesn’t tell […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death on August 2, 1978 – 43 years ago today – of the Mexican composer, pianist, conductor, music educator, and journalist Carlos Chávez at the age of 79, in Mexico City. What’s the Problem Here? Allow me, por favor, to express a pet peeve framed as a question: why has the concert music of twentieth century and early twenty-first century Central and South American composers been so rarely performed and discussed in North America? Note, please, that I qualified my pet-peeve-framed-as-a-question with the phrase “so rarely performed.” That’s because such performances are admittedly ticking up, particularly in those states bordering on Mexico: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, had I broached that question before moving to California in 1978, I would have asked – based on my own admittedly spotty experience – “why is the concert music of twentieth century Central and South American composers never performed in North America?” That’s because, speaking personally, in all my years attending concerts in the great American northeast while growing up, I never, not once, ever, heard a piece of authentic Central or South American music performed. Of course there were performances here and there, but not frequently enough […]
Continue ReadingI tried, honest to gods, I tried. My M.O. in these Dr. Bob Prescribes posts has been consistent: if I feature a lesser-known composer in a Music History Monday post, I will follow up in the next day’s Dr. Bob Prescribes with a work (or works) by that same composer. Yesterday’s Music History Monday was about Wolfgang Mozart’s youngest son, Franz Xaver Mozart (1791-1844), and his sadly underwhelming career as a pianist and composer. As we noted yesterday, he didn’t compose a whole lot of music, and almost nothing after 1820, when he was 29 years old. Nevertheless, his music was performed; some of it was published; and some of it is available on recordings today. I would tell you that I choose the topics for my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts 8 – 12 weeks in advance, so I have adequate time to gather resources and purchase and listen to recordings if necessary. As we observed yesterday, Franz Xaver composed two piano concerti; they are his “largest” and most ambitious works, and nice things (or at least, not unkind things) are said about them on the internet. Believing (or at least hoping) that I had discovered […]
Continue ReadingLet us wish a happy birthday to three notable musicians, the third of whom will be the topic of today’s post. On July 26, 1785 – 236 years ago today – the composer, pianist, and teacher John Field was born in Dublin. His Nocturnes for piano powerfully influenced those of Frédéric Chopin. Field died far from home, in Moscow, on January 23, 1837, at the age of 51. We mark the birth on July 26, 1874 – 147 years ago today – of the conductor and double-bass player Serge Koussevitzky in the Russian city of Vishny Volotchok. He served as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949 and was a tireless champion of contemporary music. He founded the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1937 and created the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1942. He died at the age of 76 in New York City on June 4, 1951. Okay: here we go. We mark the birth on July 26, 1791 – 230 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, conductor and teacher Franz Xaver Mozart, in Vienna. He died in Karlsbad, Austria at the age of 53, on July 29, 1844. He also went […]
Continue ReadingIt’s All About Branding Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the use of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as a call sign for a BBC radio show called London Calling Europe, a propaganda/information show broadcast from London into Nazi-occupied Europe. It was an inspired bit of both cultural larceny and branding: using the music of a German-born composer to represent dot-dot-dot-dash: the Morse Code for the letter “V” as in victory over Germany! “Branding.” It’s a newish term, defined as “the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.” We are told that there are four essential steps in “branding”: 1. Determine your target audience. 2. Position your product and business. 3. Define your company’s personality. 4. Choose a logo and slogan. In the case of the BBC program London Calling Europe, one, the target audience was the population of occupied Europe. Two, the BBC positioned itself as the singular purveyor of unsullied information available to that population. Three, the show defined itself as the voice of truth. Four, its slogan was “London calling Europe” and its audio “logos” were Jeremiah Clark’s Trumpet Voluntary and the opening four notes of […]
Continue ReadingOn July 19, 1941 – 80 years ago today – the BBC World Service began using the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 of 1808 as a “linking” device on its broadcasts into Nazi-occupied Europe. Why the BBC chose to use music by a German-born composer, and what those four notes meant makes for quite a story. Background The European phase of World War Two began on September 1, 1939, when Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded its neighbor to the east, Poland. The invasion had been made possible just 8 days before, when the Soviet Union entered into a so-called “non-aggression” pact with Nazi Germany. It was an act that stunned the world: these two greatest enemies, these two most diametrically opposed political ideologies – fascism and communism – had made nice: Hitler and Stalin had cozied up, climbed into the sack, and done the thang with each other. Here are two of the many contemporary political cartoons that satirized the pact: The treaty was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers, respectively, of the Soviet Union and Germany who negotiated the thing: Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The “planned” expiration date of the pact […]
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