What better way to ring in the new year than with a fanfare? Composed in 1986, John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a fanfare for an age of streamlined sports cars and space travel. It is an ecstatic musical joyride which, in the words of the composer, evokes a combination of “excitement and thrill, just on the edge of anxiety or terror.” The inspiration came from Adams’ memory of a harrowing …
Nuit de Noël (“Christmas Night”) is a six-page sketch for solo piano, written in 1908 by the Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). An Impressionistic tone painting of Christmas night, it is music filled with mysticism and atmosphere. Gently floating fourths and fifths evoke the magic of falling snowflakes. The rhythm takes the lilting form of a siciliana. A quotation emerges of the Sicilian carol, O sanctissima, known in German-speaking countries as …
In 16th century England, Greensleeves was already such a popular melody that William Shakespeare referenced it in his 1597 comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor with Falstaff’s exclamation, Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’! The English folk song was first registered in September of 1580 under the title, “A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves.” According to myth, the melody was written by Henry VIII. …
Dreamtime lies at the center of Australian aboriginal culture. A mythology dating back 60,000 years, it is a collection of stories involving the creation of the universe, the origin of life, and humanity’s role in the world. The stories are passed from one generation to another through music, art, and ceremony. It was a work of art—an aboriginal painting titled Water Dreaming from the desert region of Papunya in Western Australia—that formed …
Setting aside its evocative title, we can appreciate December, a 1995 work for string orchestra by American composer Michael Torke (b. 1961), as pure music. Developing from a single spirited motive seed, heard in the opening measures, December unfolds as a spirited contrapuntal conversation. At moments, its shifting bass line forms an ostinato, one of the oldest musical devices. We are reminded of the lush English string orchestra music of Vaughan Williams, Finzi, and Tippett. …
For fifty years, Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36 was treated much like a forgotten love letter relegated to the bottom of a dusty drawer. Completed in 1908, thirty years before Bartók wrote the monumental work we now know as Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, the First Concerto remained unpublished until 1956, after the composer’s death. Its posthumous premiere, performed by Hansheinz Schneeberger, occurred two years later in Basel, Switzerland. …
The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the …