Year of the Song As I’ve mentioned in previous Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, I’ve unilaterally designated this campaign and election year “The Year of the Song,” so desperate am I for the distraction and solace only the best popular American songs can provide. We began with Barbara Cook’s wonderful Disney Album on February 6, and my intention is to do at least one such popular American song-oriented Dr. Bob Prescribes post every month until January 2025. Today’s post is as much about introducing you to two very special performers as it is hawking their first album, After the Ball, of 1974. They are the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris (born 1943), and her husband, the composer and pianist William Bolcom (born 1938). I will be prescribing no small number of their albums over the course of this year, so I figure we should get to know them a bit before all of these prescriptions commence. Smarter Than the Average Boor I have, if you’ll pardon me, always been a bit smarter than the average boor. For example. It was in either late 1978 or early 1979. I remember the date because I had just come to California for graduate school, and was […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Robert Greenberg
Before we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story. It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me. The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time. And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro). So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it. Much of the casting was easy. Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on July 3, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the Moravian (meaning Czech) composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher Leoš Janáček. Born in the village of Hukvaldy in what today is the Czech Republic, he died on August 12, 1928 in the city of Ostrava, today the capital of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It’s All in the Name! Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer known for his self-help guides to self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. If he were alive today, he’d be on the speaking circuit, doing Ted Talks and, perhaps, making a fortune through a video self-help network. But given the comparatively limited technology of his day, Carnegie made his living writing books, books with such titles as The Art of Public Speaking (first published in 1915); How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962). But Dale Carnegie’s most famous and influential tome – one that remains in print today after 87 years! – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936. Among the thousands of assuredly useful tidbits […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with the incredulity we should all feel when faced with the astounding magnitude of Wolfgang Mozart’s talent and the beauty and quality of his music. It is appropriate, then, that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post should celebrate at least some of Mozart’s astonishing music, and I have chosen his two Piano Quartets and what is a brilliant and relatively new recording, one released in 2018. Superlatives The title of this album of Mozart’s two piano quartets is “Apotheosis.” The program booklet packaged with the CD defines apotheosis as: “1. Elevation to divine status 2. The perfect form or example of something” With its references to “divine status” and “perfection,” that definition indulges in superlatives: “Something of the highest quality or degree.” Statements of superlatives are dangerous because they can ride roughshod over important details, details that would otherwise force us to qualify those superlative statements. For example. The consensus “greatest baseball player” of all time is Babe Ruth (1895-1948), whose statistics as a power hitter were so far ahead of his contemporaries as to put him in a league of his own. (His stats as a pitcher – had he continued to pitch regularly […]
Continue ReadingHaydn’s Masses During the course of his career, Haydn composed a total of fourteen settings of the mass. This means he set the same words to music fourteen times. One might think that in doing so, Haydn could not possibly have avoided repeating himself, but one would be wrong to think so. Haydn was as devout a Catholic as ever genuflected; he loved and believed to the core of his cockles the words of the mass. As such, he lavished extraordinarily original music on each of his masses, the composition of which was – for Haydn – an act of faith. Haydn as Believer Joseph Haydn was born into a Roman Catholic family on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau. He was raised Catholic and he stayed Catholic; unlike his buddy Mozart and his cantankerous student Beethoven, Haydn’s Catholicism never “lapsed.” Haydn’s personal friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger (1769-1845) described his faith this way: “Haydn was very religiously inclined, and was loyally devoted to the faith in which he was raised. He was strongly convinced in all his heart that all human destiny is under God’s guiding hand, that God rewards good and evil, that […]
Continue ReadingThe Band The group of five musicians that eventually became known as “The Band” began to gather in Toronto, Canada, in 1957. However, it wasn’t until 1968 – after working as the backup group for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan – that the band became “The Band.” As “The Band,” the group recorded and released ten studio albums, becoming one of the most popular and influential rock ‘n’ roll ensembles of their time. Bruce Eder (born 1955), journalist, film writer, and audio/video producer whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Newsday, Current Biography, Interview, the Oxford American, AllMusic, and AllMovie describes The Band as: “one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics as seriously as the music of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” An exaggeration? No. The Band were the darlings of Rolling Stone magazine, which lavished more attention on them than any other group in the magazine’s history. On January 12, 1970, The Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine, only the second rock group – after the Beatles – to be so honored. Both George Harrison and Eric Clapton claimed that The Band had exerted […]
Continue ReadingJoan Sutherland (1926-2010) had a preternaturally big voice, one that spanned three octaves and had the size and punching power of Sonny Listen. Yet she had the vocal “hand speed” of Sugar Ray Leonard and was consequently able to specialize in repertoire ordinarily sung by women with voices lighter, smaller, and presumably more flexible than hers. That repertoire was the so-called “bel canto”, or “beautiful song/beautiful singing” style characteristic of much late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century Italian opera. Here is the textbook definition of “bel canto” from Nicolas Slonimsky, writing in Baker’s Dictionary of Music: “The art of lyrical and virtuosic performance as exemplified by the finest Italian singers of the 18th and 19th centuries, in contrast to the declamatory singing style brought into such prominence by Wagner. The term represents the once glorious tradition of vocal performance for beauty’s sake. The secret of bel canto was exclusively the property of Italian singing teachers. It was, above all, applied to lyric singing, particularly in opera. The operatic repertoire composed to highlight bel canto singers, notably early Romantic Italian opera, fell into disuse until after World War Two, when singers such as Callas, Sutherland, and Sills brought new life to the works […]
Continue ReadingAs begun in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, we will continue to trace what I think of as my compositional apprenticeship up to my 30th birthday, and then on to some music! California and Graduate School I arrived in Berkeley, California on September 9, 1978, to attend graduate school in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley. I moved in with a friend and Princeton classmate, a fellow composer named Eric Moe, who had started graduate school immediately after we graduated in 1976. He found us an apartment in “north side” at 1822 Francisco Street. (For our information: Berkeley is divided into three large regions: “north side”, meaning the area north of the U.C. campus; “south side”, south of the campus; and “west Berkeley”, the large area of flatlands west of the campus going down to San Francisco Bay. There is no “east” of the campus as U.C. extends east all the way to the top of the hills.) September 10, 1978 – the day after I arrived – is a day I will always remember for the following revelatory event. I got up early and decided to walk to Morrison Hall, the music building on the Berkeley campus […]
Continue ReadingOn April 18th, 1954 – 68 freaking years ago today – the American composer, pianist, music historian, and bloviator-par-excellence Robert Michael Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. The Teaching Company-slash-The Great Courses and My Favorite Things Since 1993, I have recorded 32 courses for The Teaching Company, rebranded as The Great Courses in 2006, and further rebranded in 2021 as “Wondrium.” (The less said about that latest rebrand, the better. To me, “Wondrium” sounds like an acne control or irritable bowel medication.) I am frequently asked “which is my favorite course.” That’s always an easy question to answer because the answer is whichever course I most recently recorded. As of today, that would be The Great Music of the 20th Century. (Sadly, it would appear that I am the only person who bears much affection for this course, as The Great Music of the 20th Century has proven to be among the least popular course I’ve recorded. A principal issue is the musical examples. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses could not afford to license the music I needed to play during the course, much of which was still under original copyright. So we hit upon the idea of providing […]
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