Early musical instruments were designed in the same manner as many other great inventions: by accident. After realizing that ordinary objects could create fascinating melodies, our earliest innovators began testing, shaping, and playing the tangible world around us. Their historic creations have evolved into the unique medleys of science, engineering, and art that exist today.
Below, we’ll peel back the curtain and explore how several of these modern instruments are made!
If we think of music as a mirror of culture, then all music has something to tell us about ourselves and our history. Likewise, the places associated with this music—cities, landmarks, buildings—can teach us about our society and our past, and the powerful and lasting connections between art, architecture, and music.
Countless historic buildings have played a part in the story of music and place: as the sites of premieres, the homes of ensembles, and even as acoustic inspirations. In this list, we’ll take six snapshots of moments in history when music and architecture came together and created something beautiful.
In celebration of World Beard Day (observed every year on the first Saturday of September), Warren Black, your morning host at All Classical, felt it was time for a retrospective on some great moments in composers’ facial hair. That’s why he teamed up with Emma Riggle, All Classical’s Music Researcher, to assemble this chronological gallery of fine classical beards, bristles, ‘staches, mutton (and/or lamb) chops and more. Here is their hail to the laudably hirsute mugs of music history, with something for pogonophiles everywhere.
This summer, All Classical Portland welcomes three new Composers in Residence: Lauren McCall, Jasmine Barnes, and Keyla Orozco! These residencies are co-hosted by N M Bodecker Foundation as part of the Recording Inclusivity Initiative, a program designed to change America’s playlist by recording classical works by composers from historically excluded communities.
The station’s three resident composers and their musical works were nominated by community members and selected from nearly 100 submissions!
We recently welcomed Lauren McCall to Portland for her week-long, in-state residency. A composer and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia, Lauren has had compositions performed around North America and in Europe. Watch the video below to hear more from Lauren about her piece “A Spark and a Glimmer,” her sources for inspiration, what she would share with young composers, and more, as she chats with All Classical Portland’s Artist in Residence, flutist Adam Eccleston.
Stay tuned for more behind the scenes footage, and to meet our other two Composers in Residence, Jasmine Barnes and Keyla Orozco, next month!
John Pitman, director of Music and Programming at All Classical Portland interviews Portland composer Kenji Bunch about an important world premiere happening a few states away, at the Moab Music Festival in Utah, on September 4.
Inspired by the autobiographical accounts of the incarceration of United States citizens – Japanese-Americans, in World War II – “Lost Freedom: A Memory” is a chamber music piece that is woven with words spoken by a man who, as a boy, was one of those citizens forced from their homes and made to live in desolate camps thousands of miles away from where they had lived: Actor George Takei (Star Trek) will take part in the premiere at Moab Music Festival, reading his own words to Kenji’s newly-composed score. Both Kenji Bunch and George Takei join John for this special Arts Blog conversation about the premiere.
Learn more about he Moab Music Festival
Kenji playing his earlier piece, Minidoka:
Check out the video below, and learn more at inalandscape.org
Warmth, reflection, and adventure: summer can be a time for all of these and more, and classical music has explored the season in all its expressions. From Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons, to Frederick Delius’s Summer Night on the River, the literature is full of favorites perfect for summertime. In this list, we’d like to share some lesser-known romantic, modern, and contemporary pieces of classical music for your summer playlist.
Tune in to All Classical Portland at 89.9 FM in Portland or worldwide on our web stream to hear sounds of summer like these—and check out All Classical Portland’s Summer Playlist on Spotify for some of the works featured below.
Cover image: Landscape in Summer by Pierre Emmanuel Damoye, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
American composer and organist Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927) is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara: she taught music theory and composition there for two decades. She composed her three-movement Suite for Violin and Piano for violinist Philip Ficsor, who premiered the work on May 7, 2008, at the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library. “Summer Day,” the work’s opening movement, is cheerful, lyrical, and tonally adventurous.
In 1841, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) completed a cycle of piano pieces entitled Das Jahr (The Year). Containing a piece for each month of the year, this set was an interdisciplinary work: Hensel’s score prefaces each piece with a quotation from a German poem or hymn, and her husband, artist Wilhelm Hensel, adorned each piece’s opening page with a hand-drawn illustration. Fanny Hensel prefaced her somber music for July with a quote from Friedrich Schiller:
“The meadows thirst
For livening dew; people are languishing.”
William Grant Still (1895-1978) composed his piano suite Three Visions for his wife, Verna Arvey. She played the work’s premiere in 1936 in Los Angeles. Still’s daughter, Judith Anne Still, describes the suite as “the composer’s explanation of what happens to individuals, regardless of skin colour, when their time on earth is over. All are judged. Noble persons, who achieve in spite of obstacles and bigotry, find blessings and advancement in the realm of the spirit.” “Summerland,” the work’s ecstatic second movement, is a vision of heavenly afterlife, heard here in a version for string quartet.
Summer Dreams, Op. 47, is a suite of six pieces for piano duet which Amy Beach (1867-1944) composed in 1901. Like Hensel’s Das Jahr, the suite features poetic quotations at the head of each movement: music and literature enjoyed close ties in the minds of many Romantic composers. As the title implies, Summer Dreams explores fantasies. It opens with “The Brownies,” a dance of fairy sprites prefaced by a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The suite continues with a picture of a “Robin Redbreast;” a movement entitled “Twilight,” prefaced with poetry by Beach herself; “Katy-Dids,” with a quote from Walt Whitman; and an “Elfin Tarantelle,” again inspired by Shakespeare. The suite closes with a “Goodnight,” accompanied by lines from Canadian-American poet Agnes Lockhart Hughes.
British composer Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was a multifaceted musician: he was a violist with the English String Quartet, a conductor of both classical and theater orchestras, and he taught composition to a young Benjamin Britten. Summer: A Tone Poem for Orchestra is one of several evocative tone poems Bridge composed on themes from nature and the change of seasons. Bridge completed Summer in 1915, and he conducted the work’s premiere on March 13, 1916 at the Queen’s Hall in London.
Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) is well known for his guitar concertos, but his Concierto de estio (Summer Concerto) is for violin. A neobaroque work, Rodrigo’s concerto takes inspiration from the style and structure of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons; that famous set which first appeared in Vivalid’s Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8, published in 1725. Rodrigo’s 20th-century take on the Vivaldian formula premiered in Lisbon on April 16, 1944, in a performance by violinist Enrique Iniesta and the Orquesta Nacional de España.
Zhou Long (b. 1953) is a Pulitzer-prize winning Chinese-American composer, who was educated at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and Columbia University. Dr. Zhou is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. Words of the Sun is an exquisite work for unaccompanied chorus, setting a poem by Chinese poet Ai Qing. The choir Chanticleer commissioned the work, and it was published in 2002.
The Rev. Dr. Lena Johnson McLin (b. 1928) is a composer, a minister of music, and a legendary music teacher in the Chicago public school system. She has been called the “woman who launched a thousand careers.” Just a few of her famous students include Aretha Franklin, R. Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, and Metropolitan Opera baritone Mark Rucker. McLin’s compositions fuse gospel and classical styles, as can be heard in her joyful work for piano solo, A Summer Day.
American composer Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) composed Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, a five-movement work for string quartet and piano left hand, in 1999. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society commissioned the work, and Higdon dedicated it to Gary Graffman and the Lark Quartet. In her program notes, Higdon draws a parallel between her eponymous poet and the piano within the quintet texture:
“What kind of dreams would a poet have? Because they presumably work in a world of imagination, would their dreams be different than what others might dream? Or are we all poets in our own dream worlds? The poet might be the main character or s/he might also be just a part of the fabric, observing from the sidelines. This also represents the pianist’s role within a piano quintet, prominent but also just part of the story.”
Higdon goes on to describe the second movement, “Summer Shimmers Across the Glass of Green Ponds:” “…here, the stillness is glasslike, as the dreamer sits by a pond, on a Summer’s eve, at twilight, watching the float, which does not even jiggle in the water, at the end of a fishing pole…even the fish are still.”
The Austin, Texas-based choir, Conspirare, give voice to poets and writers from across the spectrum of nationality and gender in their latest recording, The Singing Guitar. Founder and director, Craig Hella Johnson, commissioned new works from composers such as Reena Esmail, Nico Muhly, and Kile Smith that highlight the words of the Sufi poet Hafiz, pioneer and indigenous women in the 1880s; and of the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore.
Giving “The Singing Guitar” an added literal and figurative quality are no fewer than three guitar quartets: the Los Angeles, Texas and Austin quartets are heard most fully in How Little You Are, by Nico Muhly. Cellist Douglas Harvey joins Conspirare for The Dawn’s Early Light, and Craig Hella Johnson’s The Song that I Came to Sing. Listen to John Pitman’s conversation with Johnson to learn more.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, cellist John-Henry Crawford has already made strides in the field of classical music, in one case as First Prize winner of the 2019 International Carlos Prieto Competition; and more recently with this debut release, Dialogo. Crawford chose the title after the unaccompanied cello work by Hungarian composer, György Ligeti. In it, the cello portrays both voices, of the composer and the woman he’d fallen for, hence the “dialogue” depicted in the music.
Mr. Crawford also shares the fascinating history of the cello he plays, which has been in his family for over a century. His grandfather, Dr. Robert Popper, saw “the writing on the wall” as Nazism was on the rise in Austria, made a decision that saved both his life and kept the instrument safe. Crawford shares the full story, as well as insight into the cello sonatas of Brahms and Shostakovich, in his conversation with John Pitman. Love seems to flow through each of the pieces that this American cellist plays and makes the voice of the cello a true treasure, rescued from almost certain destruction.
This Pride Month, we would like to share with you a short playlist of 20th and 21st century music exploring queer experiences. In this list, you’ll find songs, operas, and a symphony: some by LGBTQI+ composers, some exploring LGBTQI+ characters. You can also listen to a similar selection of music in this article’s companion playlist on Spotify.
It was no great secret that English composer Ethel Smyth loved women. Among the most important loves of her life was Emmeline Pankhurst, whom the composer met in 1910. Pankhurst was the co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organization dedicated to women’s suffrage. Smyth became deeply attached to Pankhurst, and joined the suffragist movement, even composing the WSPU’s anthem, March of the Women.
Along with several colleagues, the two spent two months together in Holloway Prison for their suffragist activism. In her autobiography, Female Pipings for Eden (1933), Smyth reminisced, “The ensuing two months in Holloway, though one never got accustomed to an unpleasant sensation when the iron door was slammed and the key turned, were as nothing to me because Mrs. Pankhurst was with us.” (Female Pipings for Eden,209)
Published in 1913, Smyth’s “Possession” is a setting of a poem by Ethel Carnie. The poem is a tender reflection on giving freedom to one’s beloved. Smyth dedicated the song to “E.P.” – Emmeline Pankhurst.
by John Corigliano
Composed in 1988, John Corigliano’s First Symphony is a tribute to friends lost to the AIDS epidemic. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned the piece while Corigliano was serving as their Composer in Residence, and they played its premiere in 1990 under Daniel Barenboim. The work went on to win multiple awards, including two Grammys.
In his program notes for the work, John Corigliano reflects on the genesis of his First Symphony, and its symbolic structure.
“Historically, many symphonists (Berlioz, Mahler, and Shostakovich, to name a few) have been inspired by important events affecting their lives, and perhaps occasionally their choice of the symphonic form was dictated by extramusical events. During the past decade I have lost many friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic, and the cumulative effect of those losses has, naturally, deeply affected me. My Symphony No. 1 was generated by feelings of loss, anger, and frustration.
A few years ago I was extremely moved when I first saw ‘The Quilt,’ an ambitious interweaving of several thousand fabric panels, each memorializing a person who had died of AIDS, and, most importantly, each designed and constructed by his or her loved ones. This made me want to memorialize in music those I have lost, and reflect on those I am losing. I decided to relate the first three movements of the symphony to three lifelong musician-friends. In the third movement, still other friends are recalled in a quilt-like interweaving of motivic melodies.”
From Gay Life by David Del Tredici
American composer David Del Tredici has made a point of exploring gay experiences in his compositions: prominent works include his string sextet Bullycide and his song cycle, Gay Life. Composed between 1996-2000, the texts set in Gay Life include poems by Allen Ginsberg, Paul Monette, Thom Gunn, W. H. Kidde, and Michael D. Calhoun. The San Francisco Symphony commissioned the work and played its premiere on May 3, 2001, with baritone William Sharp and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Del Tredici subsequently arranged the cycle for voice and piano. “Personal Ad,” a setting of a poem by Allen Ginsburg, is the cycle’s third number.
In his program notes, Del Tredici explains, “Gay Life was initially envisioned as a cycle of eight songs, each touching on the ‘gay experience’ from a different angle. The music came to me in a burst — a burst, really, of gay pride. It began in august 1996 as a result of my experience at The Body Electric School’s weeklong retreat called ‘The Dear Love of Comrades’…
…Throughout the world, the ‘personal’ advertisement provides a time-honored method for potential lovers to meet each other. In the United States, such advertisements enjoyed a vogue a century ago; when they in recent years re-emerged in popularity, the gay community embraced the ‘personals’ with enthusiasm. In ‘Personals Ad,’ a businesslike, almost comical, setting is given to what is ultimately a touching poem, full of tenderness and the advertiser’s manifest sincerity. The subsequent interlude builds from near-stasis, heating up (incalzando) to the festive outburst of the fourth song.”
From 27 by Ricky Ian Gordon
27 is an opera by American composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek. Commissioned by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, it premiered in 2014 with American mezzo soprano Stephanie Blythe in the lead role. Gordon knew he’d be writing the opera as a vehicle for Blythe, and inspired by this great contemporary singer, he chose to cast her as Gertrude Stein. “I’ve Been Called Many Things” is Gertrude’s final aria, leading into the finale of Act V of 27.
In his program notes, Gordon reflects on his inspiration for 27: “When James Robinson asked me to write an opera for the great Stephanie Blythe, I thought immediately of a lifelong obsession, Gertrude Stein. At Carnegie Mellon University, at the age of seventeen, I picked up the book Charmed Circle just before catching a terrible cold, and read it in the course of a week in bed. I remember nothing that week but eating tangerines and reading about Gertrude and Alice and their milieu. I was mesmerized by their world. Gertrude was in many ways a perfect role model. She was committed to her own muse, ruggedly individual, unswayed by others’ opinions, and uninhibited in terms of being who she was, loving whom she loved, weighing what she weighed, having opinions and facing the repercussions of them bravely. She loved beauty and was constantly interpreting and reinterpreting what she thought was beautiful. Mostly, she believed in herself with such rigor it fascinated me. And her world – the habitués of her salon, Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, anyone who was doing anything of interest, thinking anything worth thinking – came through her Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, until finally, it was Alice who came through and stole her heart. I believe I was meant to write an opera about these two, about their world, because it what I wanted my world to be. When I left school, I held salons in my New York apartment. Everything I wrote, I premiered there.”
Patience and Sarah: A Pioneering Love Story, by American composer Paula Kimper and librettist Wende Persons, is often identified as the first Lesbian opera. It premiered at Lincoln Center Festival in July of 1998, and has enjoy many productions since. The opera is adapted from the eponymous 1969 novel by Isabel Miller, which was itself inspired by true events: the love story between 19th-century American folk artist Mary Ann Wilson and her partner Florence Brundage.
The Paula Kimper Ensemble’s website on Patience and Sarah summarizes the opera’s story: “Set in Connecticut in the winter of 1816, the opera tells the powerful story of two young women who meet, fall in love and resolve to devote their lives to each other. The artist Patience White, sister to a middle-class Connecticut landowner, and tough-minded, adventurous Sarah Dowling, the daughter of a poor farmer, share a mutual dream of leaving behind their repressive lives to go pioneering together, defying their families’ attempts to prevent it.”
In this scene from a 2016 production by the Paula Kimper Ensemble, Patience and Sarah meet for the first time.
By Laura Kaminsky
As One is a chamber opera by American composer Laura Kaminsky and librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed. It was commissioned by American Opera Projects, and since its premiere in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it has become one of the most popular new American operas, enjoying more than two dozen productions: including a 2019 production the Portland Opera.
As One is an intimate portrait of a transgender character named Hannah. It is scored string quartet and two singers who embody one role. American Opera Projects explains, “As One is a chamber opera in which two voices—Hannah after (mezzo-soprano) and Hannah before (baritone)—share the part of a sole transgender protagonist. Fifteen songs comprise the three-part narrative; with empathy and humor, they trace Hannah’s experiences from her youth in a small town to her college years—and finally traveling alone to a different country, where she realizes some truths about herself.”
