Now I have said before that composer Gavin Bryars was my tutor at Art school in Leicester alongside the noted Art Historian Fred Orton they organised a Duchamp study group which I was a member of and brought in Brian Eno and people like Peter Greenaway The Draughtsmam’s Contract film soundtrack composer Michael Nyman as external lecturers [yeah you never shut up about it - EDRUDE!]
But Gavin also introduced me to many artists and writers (Thoreau) and composers not least his own work ( I think I am close to having everything official) and Charles Ives was one such composer and I have loved his work and appreciated it ever since hence this on the 150th anniversary, there is a new recording of his sonatas
On the latest episode of ‘New Classical Tracks’ with host Julie Amacher, pianist Jeremy Denk collaborates with violinist Stefan Jackiw to highlight Charles Ives’ piano and violin sonatas in celebration of the composer’s 150th birth anniversary. Check out this clip from his interview and listen to the complete episode below!
Soul Music this morning on BBC Radio Four looked at the piece ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me' by Dvorak and also touched upon the Charles Ives version of the same song some fifteen years later after Dvorak had written his original. I think I have mentioned that I was introduced to the work of Charles Ives by my tutor at art school, the composer Gavin Bryars, and I am eternally grateful for that. This piece by Ives, Dvorak’s contemporary, is remarkable I thought though I also very much enjoyed the Dvorak piece itself. The Radio 4 series usually to my experience looks at classic pop songs or things from the more popular canon and this was a welcome change. Hope you enjoy it here too
Antonin Dvorak wrote his Gypsy Songs in 1880. He was passionate about the folk music of his native Bohemia and set a poem by Czech poet Adolf Heyduk to music. Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth song in the cycle.
Songs my Mother taught me
In the days long vanished
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished....
It's a wistful melancholic piece evoking memory and loss. Soul Music hears the stories of musicians, poets and singers from around the world of why they are so drawn to it.
The poet Raine Geoghegan is the daughter of a Romany woman whose life was weighed down with the loss of her father at a young age. Raine identifies with the sadness of the music because it not only represents grief at the loss of her father but also for the loss of a way of life for the gypsy people.
For Emily MacGregor it's all about the music we inherit from our parents. She is writing a book about music and grief and says this piece perfectly represents the bittersweet feeling of listening to music associated with the loss of a loved one. Dvorak had already lost three children in infancy by the time he wrote his Zigeuner Lieder.
Paris based violinist and conductor Bartu Elci-Ozsoy associates Songs with the innocence of childhood and was moved to perform it at a benefit concert he organised in aid of the children affected by the devastating earthquake in his native Turkey and Syria in early 2023.
The Korean soprano Sumi Jo recorded it in honour of her mother and presented it to her a year before she died in gratitude for her determination to see her daughter become a professional singer.
When The Scotsman newspaper commissioned a series of lockdown concerts in Spring 2020 cellist Sua-Lee chose to recreate the concert by Beatrice Harrison a century earlier when she played the piece accompanied by nightingales in her garden in Surrey. Sua set up her cello in woodland near her home in Grantown- on-Spey and performed Songs My Mother Taught Me to a collection of woodland creatures
Singer Ruby Hughes performed the American composer Charles Ives' version of the piece for a collection called Bright Travellers - music curated and composed by Helen Grimes from poems by Fiona Benson. Ives wrote his own version of Dvorak's piece not long after the Czech composer had settled in America. She loves the rocking gentle lullaby sensation created by the lilting melodies of both Ives' and Dvorak's compositions.
Featuring additional recordings by Sua Lee and Zoe Challenor
1. Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat (1st live music concert I ever went to - Sheldonian Theatre Oxford as a schoolboy, I went out and bought it on 10” classical album with my pocket money) 2. Rossini - William Tell Overture (my dad would conduct imaginary orchestras and listen to his
favourites - this was one and quickly became one of mine 3. Gavin Bryars - Sinking Of The Titanic 4. Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question/ Central Park In The Dark 5. Catalani/ Illica - La Wally (by Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) 6. Ravel - Bolero (check 2014 Promenade concerts BBC) I loved this one too from a child and
teenager 7. Pachelbel - Canon in D major 8. Mahler - symphony no 9 in D minor
9. 'Pokarekare Ana'
- This love song arose in Northland New Zealand at the start of World War One where it was modified into an action song telling of Paraire Tomoana's 1912 courtship of Kuini Raerena. I learned this at Primary school and knew all the words throughout my childhood much to my parents bemusement and the melody has stayed with me. I had a New Zealander teacher who taught us aspects of Maori culture, instruments and a number of songs. It is now known and sung world-wide.
10.Mussorgsky- Pictures at An Exhibition (piano) not the Rossini orchestrated version,
discovered on my own I heard this original piano piece on my own listening to my first
transistor radio in my bedroom under the covers
Bubbling under: I saw A Clockwork Orange when it came out and was blown away by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos' soundtrack . . . . . . . . . my dad was horrified when I bought the album!
Thomas Tallis - Spem In Alium religious music is not for me and the simplicity of hymns I do not trust unlike my dad who loved them. The meditative quality of Tallis though is not lost on me
Possibly a juvenile and unsophisticated mixed bag of where music started for me and with some additions largely from my art college tutor Gavin Bryars' influence (Sinking . . , Ives etc)
Gioacchino Rossini: William Tell Overture (1829) London Philharmonic, Alfred Scholz
Heaven 17 on the fuzzy warblers . . . . . . . .
Saturday, November 11, 2017
One of my favourite compositions. In conjunction with 'Central Park In The Dark'. Largely thanks to my art school tutor Gavin Bryars who introduced me to Ives' work . . . . .
Charles Ives: "The Unanswered Question" . (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas) This work was composed as a companion to "Central Park In The Dark" Both works were composed in 1906, and paired together by Ives as: I. "A Contemplation of a Serious Matter, or The Unanswered Question", II. "A Contemplation of Nothing Serious, or Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summertime". Prior to having The Unanswered Question professionally copied, sometime around 1930 - 1935, Ives revised the score, adding many details and changing the woodwind and trumpet parts. The revised version is presented here.