Debussy’s “Feuilles Mortes”: A Desolate Landscape

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Feuilles mortes (“Dead Leaves”) is the second piece in Book II of Claude Debussy’s Préludes for solo piano. Composed in 1913, the music suggests the vivid colors and atmosphere of an impressionistic painting. It evokes a bleak and desolate late autumn landscape—perhaps one in which a frost has already descended. Debussy’s interpretive marking is Lent et mélancolique. Filled with jazzy parallel chords, the music inhabits a haunting dreamscape. Quiet, ghostly ostinatos emerge …

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Bach’s Violin Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052R: Virtuosity and Fire

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Bach was a master of adaptation and reuse. He made a habit of crafting harpsichord concerti out of previously written concerti for other instruments. Such is the case with the Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, which is believed to be a transcription of a long-lost Bach violin concerto. The score is filled with passages which fit neatly into the violin as bariolage, “the alternation of notes on adjacent strings, one …

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Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche”: Three Classic Recordings

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The Mooche was one of Duke Ellington’s signature pieces. Composed in 1928 by Ellington and the jazz promoter Irving Mills, it is an example of the Duke’s characteristic “jungle style,” with its exotic, pseudo-African undercurrents. These are the jazz age sounds which filled Harlem’s Cotton Club in the late 1920s. According to Ellington, the title, underscored by the infectiously languid rhythm, refers to “a certain lazy gait peculiar to some of the …

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Britten’s “Hymn to Saint Cecilia”: VOCES8

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Today is Saint Cecilia’s Feast Day on the Roman Catholic calendar. The third century martyr is venerated as the patron of music and musicians. According to legend, despite taking a vow of celibacy, she was forced by her parents to marry a pagan nobleman. She “sang in her heart to the Lord” on her wedding day, illustrating the divine, meditative, and transcendent power of music. Fortuitously, the English composer, Benjamin Britten, was …

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Remembering David Del Tredici

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The American composer, David Del Tredici, passed away on Saturday, November 18, following a battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 86. Describing his early years as those of “an old child prodigy,” Del Tredici began studying the piano at the age of 12 and was concertizing by 17. He started composing during a summer session at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he came to the attention of composer-in-residence, Darius Milhaud. …

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Gerald Finzi’s Elegy for Orchestra, “The Fall of the Leaf”: An English Landscape

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Gerald Finzi’s Elegy for Orchestra, Op. 20, The Fall of the Leaf, is music of the English landscape. It evokes the timelessness of serene pastures and meandering hedgerows. Beyond its lush beauty exists a lingering melancholy and nostalgia. Unsettling twilight shadows pervade this music. We encounter something similar in much of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who shared friendship and frequent correspondence with Finzi (1901-1956), and throughout the works of Edward Elgar. …

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Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A Minor: Spirited Bohemian Strains

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Once, while reflecting on his music, Antonín Dvořák commented, “I myself have gone to the simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious works. Only in this way can a musician express the true sentiment of his people.” Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53 overflows with the spirited strains of the composer’s Czech homeland. Bending sonata form and liberating the traditional structure of the concerto, …

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