Z is for Bee-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

‘The Bee’ by Emily Dickinson

I love everything about this poem. How does a bee move? Like trains of cars on tracks of plush. So many sounds: trains, cars, tracks – plush. Its movement is so precise. It is a level bee; it is an architect of the air. It is also a knightly bee. And glorious. It is shod with gauze and wears a golden helmet. It has onyx for a breast (a layered and banded form of the black silicate mineral, chalcedony), and the onyx is inlaid with another gemstone, chrysoprase. I’ve just been looking this up, and chrysoprase is also chalcedony, and actually tends to be apple-green – which makes me think of an expanse of plants and early summer flowers reflected onto the belly of this buzzing bee.

And his voice – the music? The bee both chants and gives a tune, it labours and is idle: the dichotomy of metaphors we’ve always laid on top of the bee as a creature. What is your experience, glorious bee, of clovers and of noon? How can you be both busy and idle – and magnificent – all at the same time? I’d like to know that very much.

Listen to Flight of the Bumblebee on Naxos

The Flight of the Bumblebee by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov is a busy piece of music and a very famous one. My colleague, Natasha, mentioned it right at the beginning of this alphabet in a post on animals. Written as an orchestral interlude for an opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, an enchanted swan changes the Tsar’s son into a bee so he can fly away and visit his father who does not know that he is alive. There is a frenetic energy to this piece; it teeters on the very edge of being in control. That’s part of its charm – the control is just about to go, any second now – and then it doesn’t. Phew. I’ve written about my toddler too much in these blogs but it makes me think of breakfasts with him, and trying to get ready for the day. Not surprisingly, we definitely lose the control. Porridge, yoghurt, [ba]NANNAH!: breakfast is a messy business.

Toddlers seem busy to me. We describe our son as busy as he goes about the flat doing his busy toddler thing; he goes to a Busy Bees Nursery (Busy Bees is the umbrella name for the nursery company). Somehow, ‘busy’ is a perfect adjective. Because it makes us laugh when applied to him, and because it describes so exactly his intense concentration as he does whatever he’s up to. Whatever he’s up to, is, for him, both work and play; a mysterious wonderful melding of the two – and almost certainly destructive.  

And then there’s that moment when busy-ness, and tiredness, turn to silliness. When all kinds of nonsense comes out. Nonsense that, in the right hands, is of course quite clever. I’m thinking of Monty Python’s, Eric the Half-a-Bee:

Half a bee, philosophically,
Must, ipso facto, half not be.
But half the bee has got to be
Vis a vis, its entity. D’you see?

Bee, what a fun word. I also think of Edward Lear. Central Library has a really wonderful biography by Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear – and up in the Art & Design Library we have lots of his now quite forgotten topographical work, and a big Taschen volume of plates containing his parrots (142 big beautiful reproductions of his hand-coloured lithographs). Bees, of course, feature in his nonsense and drawings. Here are a couple:

The Book of Nonsense,There was an Old Person of Dover
Edward Lear, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Book of Nonsense, There was an Old Man in a tree
Edward Lear
Dmitrismirnov, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Listen to The Wasps on Naxos

The buzz of a bee can be confusing. Is it a bee (be kind; they die when they sting you) – or a wasp (wasps don’t die when they sting you, but be kind anyway). Not the message in John Vernon Lord’s Giant Jam Sandwich, that’s for sure. And our relationship as humans to the buzz of an insect is complicated. On wasps, my colleague Douglas, recommended a favourite: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ composition for a production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps. He wrote it in 1909, for Trinity College, Cambridge. I love the name of the piece, “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils”, and listening to it, it is clean, grey, and efficient. Bang, clash, go the kitchen utensils, march on, march on, march on.

Chopin wrote an étude which is sometimes known as “The Bees” – Opus 25, no. 2 in F minor. It’s written in polyrhythms: the right hand plays quaver triplets, so the natural accent is on the 3^rd and 6^th notes; and the left hand plays crotchet triplets. Matching them together, that’s the difficult part. But it’s soft and skidding and beautiful.

Another beautiful one, by the English madrigalist, John Wilbye – “Sweet Honey-Sucking Bees”. It’s sung a capella, and as it’s polyphonic, each voice takes it in turns to lead the line. It makes me think about flight.

There are many many songs and pieces of music about bees, of course. And insects. One last one – Muddy Waters wrote a lot about bees, and I love “Honey Bee” – “Sail on/ Sail on my little honey bee sail on… She been all around the world making honey/ but now she is coming back home to me.”

Last autumn, we made a long visit to my parents’ house. It was nice, nice on all fronts, and it was the first visit in a long time because of Covid. They live not far from the New Forest, and one day we took a trip to Lepe beach. The season was turning and the weather was changeable. The sea and tide were high, and the sky a steely blue-grey. It reminded me of the beach in David Copperfield where Pegotty’s family boathouse stood. We walked – not very far, because my dad was very sick – and we collected flint pebbles; filled our pockets with them. I still have the flint pebbles, they sit in a line in our bedroom by the window. But another memory I have, sharp as glass when time is precious, is of a cliff-face of bees. It seemed so unusual for the air to be filled with bees, so late in the year and right beside the sea. The day was wild, and the rain was about to blow in. There were hundreds of them.

Driving home I looked them up – they were Ivy mining bees. They fly late in the autumn because they feed almost exclusively on the nectar and pollen of ivy flowers. It’s nice to remember them buzzing about in the landscape of that day. An intangible aural/visual memory.

Bees and insects are, we know only to well, utterly central to our lives. We also know the bees’ plight, and we worry. To think seriously about bees feels like standing on eggshells; there is something always shifting under our feet. And I suppose, unfortunately, we must learn to balance and walk on this shifting surface. A tricky thing to do.

A few other bee-related thoughts, because really, I don’t want this alphabet to end.

A colleague reminded me of the bee-loud glade in W. B. Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and my partner, of the illustrator, Chris Ware’s Branford: the best bee in the world in his (very big) compendium Building Stories. Also, of the Breughel picture of beekeepers with their basket masks and woven hives.

The Beekeepers, c1568
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve known for a while that commercial beekeeping isn’t always a pretty business, but this is a brilliant podcast from 99% Invisible.

And this looked like it was a great Words and Music programme on Radio 3. It’s not available anymore unfortunately but you can see the programme.  

I could write a whole post on bees and bestiaries. There’s a British library blog on their medieval manuscripts collection called Birds and Bees, which is image after image of the most exquisite pictures.

And on the garden and little garden creatures, we have a gem of a book in the Art & Design Library by Kitagawa Utamaro called Songs of the Garden. He did a book on insects too, and it’s possible to browse a little of it on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Finally, please do continue to explore our streaming services: Naxos and Naxos Jazz, and Medici TV!

And here ends our musical alphabet. We’ve loved doing it and hope you’ve enjoyed it too.

Y for Yamashta

For the past 25 weeks or so, we have been writing articles based on our A-Z of music, music inspired by Space, RSNO, Trains, Nixon in China, Joe Hisaishi and so on. As we go to the end of the alphabet we have been putting some thought to XYZ and who or what should be represented in those articles. I immediately thought of Y for Yamashta, Stomu Yamashta (or Yamash’ta), a Japanese born percussionist and composer who created the Red Buddha theatre and the show “The Man from the East”.

When we were carving up the alphabet between us, I claimed Y for Yamashta and thought no more of it till just this week when I actually sat down to write this article. I began to think about why my first thought was Stomu Yamashta. Was it because it is probably the only Y I know, which it probably is, and what did I actually know about him, what did I know of his music?

The truthful answer is not much, and I realised that whole wish to write this is based on a 48 year old experience which has remained with me and although the images are not strong, the feeling and the effects that the music and the experience had on me, is. The music has been with me, I had the soundtrack album on vinyl and then on CD so, the music has always been with me.

I have owned a copy of the soundtrack album, since practically the day after I saw the show, and now in these days of downloads and streaming I can access it on the internet whenever it pops into my head, which because I am writing about it, it is now an ever present earworm.

I was a very young 12 year old with an fledgling talented musician, older brother, who was trying to experience and soak up as many musical happenings as he could. Thinking back that seems an easier thing to do to then, than now. I have a feeling that my brother had heard of Stomu Yamashta and his Red Buddha Theatre and its mix of Jazz, Rock and Japanese Kabuki theatre, and thought to himself that this was something that he should see and more importantly that I should see also. Somehow he persuaded our father that he should allow us to go.

A few things strike me at this point, I was 12 and this show’s content should, almost certainly, have come with a warning. The show contained nudity and scenes which must have been upsetting and unsettling, given its subject matter, the events in Hiroshima only 28 years before this show was devised, the dropping of the nuclear bomb.

Perhaps, Glasgow City Council, in those far off days of yore were less aware of theatre content. Even as I say that, I doubt that is not fully true, I can remember the furore over the performances of Hair the Musical, which played at Jimmy Logan’s Metropole Theatre. I can remember my parents going to see this, to see what the fuss was about, I was nine or ten and “The Fuss” was never explained to me.  And so a 16 year old and his 12 year old brother were allowed to attended The Man from the East, a much sought after ticket – a theatrical event.

As far as I can remember these performances took place twice in Glasgow. I saw it at the Kings Theatre in 1973 and then the performance was repeated at the Proms the following year, 1974.

I wish I could remember more of this experience, but the images are few. A sunrise, a busy commuter subway, homeless older people scrabbling for food and young girl and her grandmother desperately looking for somewhere safe to lay down their heads. Layering of images, mixing multiple things on stage at one time. Being a mix of Kabuki and Rock/Jazz Music there were performers with masks and highly decorated faces and costumes, a spectacle which jarred with some of the more ordinary naturalistically dressed performers. Even as I write that I wonder how true my memories are, or if I have devised my own show to go with the music I know well.

Music by Stomu Yamashta is available to listen to on Naxos

I am afraid to say we do not have much of Stomu Yamashta’s work in the library’s collection. We used to have a copy of the Man from The East on CD, I think, many years ago before I worked here. I persuaded the then Music Librarian that he should have a copy of this in the collection, unfortunately it is no longer the case. Perhaps someone liked it as much as I did.   

Tsutomu Yamashita, or as he called himself, Stomu Yamashta was born in Kyoto on the 15 March 1947. He attended Kyoto Academy of Music in 1960 and one year later joined both the Kyoto and Osaka Philharmonic Orchestras as a percussionist. He also worked for the Tokyo Film Studios, a prodigious and precocious talent who made his debut as a soloist in 1963. A year later he was in America studying first at the Interlochen Arts Academy, then at Berklee School of Jazz in Boston. In those study years he also took on many engagements as a player and a soloist, notable a bravura premiere of Heuwell Tircuit’s Concerto for Solo Percussion, playing more than 47 different instruments.

Listen to El Cimarrón on Naxos

He was sought after by the most noteworthy of the 20th century’s composers Hans Werner Henze, Toru Takemitsu, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies with Henze and Davies writing works for him.

With Steve Winwood, Michael Shieve, Klaus Schulze and Al Di Meola he formed the legendary group supergroup GO, they recorded two albums Go, and Go Too and a concert performance in France, Yamashta started the group in 1976 and they were active for two years. With Morris Pert he formed Come to the Edge, a collaboration which produced the album Floating Music and Morris Pert was also part of the Red Buddha Theatre. Yamashta formed and was the driving force behind the Red Buddha Theatre and their successful performances in London Paris and Glasgow and further European tour. His wife, violinist Hisako Yamashta has joined him in many of his projects most notably East Winds, a project which produced two albums One by One and Freedom is Frightening.

Some of his music was used by Nicolas Roeg in the film The Man who fell to Earth. He also collaborated with Peter Maxwell Davies on the score for Ken Russell’s The Devils and with John Williams for John Altman’s film, Images. A driven innovator whose musical stylings straddled the worlds of the 20th century avantgarde to rock and jazz. Equally at home and equally a master of all these styles.   

Listen to Stomu Yamashta’s collaborations on Naxos

There are examples of the work of Stomu Yamashta and a lot of his collaborators on our Naxos Classics and Naxos Jazz music streaming sites. You can search there for Stomu Yamashta, Steve Winwood, Morris Pert, Al Di Meola, Michael Shrieve and Klaus Schulze.

To find out more about Stomu Yamashta, see also:

Perfect Sound Forever: The Infinite Horizons of Stomu Yamash’ta
Listen to the world: Stomu Yamash’ta, The Man from the East

or explore Stomu Yamashta’s other bands:
East Wind
Go
Come to the Edge.

X is for… ‘X-ray’

“Rock on bones”, Gramophone record (USSR, 1950s)
Dmitry Rozhkov, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

These days, of course, we have a lot of music. We have streaming services, podcasts, the radio – cds and records if you still listen manually… Press a button, tap a screen, and another space opens up around us, an aural space that can take us anywhere and everywhere. That magical thing that is music. In our society, we’re in a time of abundance and glut. Often, I draw a blank as to what to put on because there’s TOO MUCH out there. I appreciate a playlist or a radio show, the curation of an album, because music can be incessant and unwelcome and treated so very very lightly – this magical mysterious thing.

So imagine now, the reverse of this. Imagine 1950s Soviet Russia, imagine sitting in a kitchen there. Say something like this – 

4Y1A1495 Saint Petersburg, from Museum of Political History of Russia
by Ninara via search.creativecommons.org

– in St Petersburg (then Leningrad). And imagine that music was a heavily censored thing. No jazz was allowed, no rock ‘n’ roll, no foxtrot even, if you’re a matronly lady remembering your young and heady days; no no no, for that might lead to dissolute behaviour. No mambo, no tango – no saxophone, for a while; no émigré music; no songs from the gulags, definitely not. No, to pretty much everything except patriotic fervour. Culture had parameters and had to be approved. Veer away from this and life got dangerous. 

In the 1940s, when music was smuggled through – by sailors, by diplomats – it was extremely expensive. That is, until a young demobbed soldier with a recording lathe in St Petersburg (Leningrad) worked out how to make a record from an old hospital x-ray. Bootleggers jumped on it and suddenly records made out of x-rays were everywhere. Although in a hidden shh-shh kind of way. But they were cheap, and easily transportable, and a teenager could buy one for a rouble or a rouble and a half. 

A youth subculture was on the rise, that of the stilyagi (literally “a style hunter; stylish”). A stilyagi was enamoured by western dress, and western culture generally; they were Beat generation Russians, and naturally, they listened to these forbidden x-ray records. They might have looked something like this:   

Ekaterina Vilkova and Igor Voynarovsky, filming Stilyagi
Tatyana Pankratova Русский: Татьяна Панкратова, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

(The picture is from a musical comedy, Stilyagi, made in 2008 but set in mid-50s Moscow.) The KGB did clamp down on these bootleg records. They flooded the market with fakes, and they forbade home recordings of this hooligan trend – but the hooligan trend had taken hold.  

Various names emerged for x-ray records: bones; bone music; ribs; music on the ribs; jazz on bones. Physically, the x-rays were cut into raggedy 7” discs, and the middle was burned through with a cigarette so they could sit on a turntable. They were played at 78rpm but they only lasted for 5-10 plays. They were ephemeral, and hugely varying in sound quality. Examples and reconstructions of what a bootlegger’s room might have looked like, and what the recording lathes looked like can be seen here.   

And of course, there are the records themselves to browse through.   

X-rays were easily obtainable from hospitals and medical archives because they were flammable, and people wanted rid of them. Sapphire needles to cut the grooves on the plastic could be bought from a flea market, and all you needed then was a big coat and a shady street corner, or the park after dark.   

Here is a link to a page of songs, that if you were a 1950s stilyagi you might be asking that guy in the coat for.

Contemporary musician Stephen Coates has produced a wonderful project around this story, including an accompanying online exhibition, a short film, and a fantastic BBC Between the Ears programme.  

These records seem such beautiful broken objects, ringing with history. They feel eerie and menacing – the image of them, the haunting sound: they smell of both fear and freedom; they make my chest feel tight. Do explore them if you’ve time, and then head over to our streaming services Naxos and Naxos Jazz. There it all is, and so much more. For free, for everyone. Let’s be thankful.  

‘W’ is for Woodwind

I can’t say I come from an overly musical family. My dad was one of the few people in the world that I would claim was completely tone-deaf and my mum likes to have a quiet singalong to herself but that’s about it. Despite the fact my parents didn’t create music themselves, they did surround my younger brother and I with it, listening to a wide variety of genres (though you’ll get an idea of the favourites here). Through various avenues, we did become hugely involved in music-making and two distinct paths became clear for both of us: we sang in choirs and we played woodwind instruments. Consequently, our family suddenly became very musical indeed, with over a decade of rehearsals and concerts being attended during our school years. So, as the Musical Alphabet reaches W, I thought I’d write a little about my experience with a few woodwind instruments.

A particular chill can overcome some parents when they discover their child has begun to learn the recorder at school. The instrument has gathered a somewhat unfair reputation for being shrill and squeaky, often viewed as nothing more than a training instrument for players to transition to other woodwind instruments – most have the same foundations in their fingering as recorders do. A type of fipple flute – a term with debated meaning but, in relation to the recorder, it indicates an end-blown flute with a block-and-duct mouthpiece – recorders are relatively easy to produce sound from and therefore act as a good starting block for any budding woodwind player. 

I myself went through a similar process to many: joined the Recorder Club at school when I was eight or nine, acquired my plastic Yamaha descant recorder, learnt how to play Hot Cross Buns and London’s Burning before advancing to trickier pieces such as the Star Wars theme… but then, one afternoon, when I was in Year 5 and all my friends weren’t at practice because they were competing in a netball match, I started to understand the magic of the recorder. My Year 4 teacher and talented musician, Mr. Johnson, let me join the three Year 6 girls who were also present in learning the treble recorder.

This was very exciting. The treble was slightly bigger than the descant, its tone a little heartier and lower. Its fingering was different too, more reminiscent of a clarinet rather than a flute or saxophone like the descant was. I got to play harmonies which helped to cut through the dozen descants, whilst Mr. Johnson played the bass recorder. I had to keep my own time much better than I had before as I was playing a different line to the melody. This – alongside joining the school choir solely to escape History lessons about the Anglo-Saxons – opened my eyes to the joys and possibilities of music making.

Listen to Trio for Recorders on Naxos

I came back to the recorder just less than a decade or so later. My brother and I were members of several groups in the utterly brilliant local music service and, upon his suggestion, I joined him in the Early Music Group. Recorder repertoire largely consists of Renaissance and Baroque music so the group was a fitting way to showcase what the instrument can do. My brother was one of the treble players this time and I got to play the tenor recorder, which I was very pleased with as I descended further into bassier tones. Gone were the squeaky renditions of childrens’ rounds and in came pieces such as Paul Hindemith’s Trio For Recorders and arrangements of works by Michael Praetorius. We also got to try our hands at Renaissance instruments such as the crumhorn: a curious capped reed wind instrument that looks like a giant umbrella handle, sounds like a duck, bemused any audience we performed for but was wildly enjoyable to play.

Crumhorn
Sönke Kraft aka Arnulf zu Linden, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Recorders aren’t commonly used in popular music yet, despite this, they happen to feature in one of the most famous songs of all time. Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this November, is an eight minute epic that challenges the preconceptions of what a rock song should be. Stairway To Heaven consists of several distinct sections: guitarist Jimmy Page begins the piece with finger plucked acoustic guitar before transitioning to electric, culminating in that impeccable solo at the song’s climax; Robert Plant’s soaring vocals crescendo towards his powerful falsetto near the song’s end before closing with a plaintive acapella line; the powerhouse that was drummer John Bonham doesn’t even begin playing until after halfway through the track. But it’s Zeppelin’s bassist, John Paul Jones, who provides the most unusual element of the track. Alongside the acoustic guitar in the introduction, Jones plays all four recorders that can be heard, cut together to create the illusion of a quartet playing in a Renaissance style. The addition of these often overlooked instruments add layers of complexity to an already intriguing song, emanating ethereal qualities that reflect the band’s historical, mythical, and fantastical inspirations. I could wax lyrical about Stairway To Heaven all day; it just happens to be my favourite song for so many reasons, but those I mention above definitely contribute.

As I mentioned, the recorder is often a gateway for players to learn other woodwind instruments. My primary school had run a recorder club for a number of years but, as I reached Year 5, they offered something new. Woodwind lessons. Specifically flute and clarinet lessons, led by a teacher from the aforementioned local music service. I was very keen to try out for this, as there was a limited number of places available. There was a short aptitude test with the mouthpieces of each instrument, each child asked to try and make a sound. We were given a choice as to which instrument we wanted to try out and, for reasons I cannot quite understand, I only wanted to try the clarinet. I don’t know why I didn’t want to try the flute as well. I’d grown up knowing just what the flute was capable of, particularly considering my family are huge Jethro Tull fans. Listening to the self-taught Ian Anderson – who has admitted that he realised he’d been playing with the wrong fingering for decades after his daughter had flute lessons in school – play with such fire and produce such interesting effects provided quite the contrast to more traditional playing. But no, I only wanted to try the clarinet. I didn’t make a sound when trying to perfect the embouchure, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, the teacher told us. Alas, I was not selected. Places were competitive.

Clarinet family
Buffet Crampon + Yamaha, Editor=User:Gisbert K, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I might not have gained the chance to learn the clarinet but, four or so years later, my brother did and started having lessons. He became very good too, and whilst in Year 6 he joined the Elementary Wind Band at the local music service. Over the years, progressing in difficulty, my brother joined pretty much every group that a clarinettist could, especially after he became one of the few bass clarinettists at the centre. Consequently, he performed a huge variety of pieces. There was Instant Concert by Harold Walters which was a Youth Wind Band staple – the conductor would always ask the audience to guess/count how many pieces are included in this medley composition. There was Semper Fidelis by John Philip Sousa, a piece dedicated to the United States Marine Corps which later became their official march. There was Incantation And Dance by John Barnes Chance, a renowned concert band composer who inspired others to incorporate percussionists more in their music as he did in this piece. There were musical medleys, arrangements of Frank Zappa in the Contemporary Music Group and, of course, there were always performances of the Pirates Of The Caribbean theme.

Listen to Rhapsody in Blue on Naxos

The clarinet is an incredibly versatile instrument, having firmly cemented its place within the standard orchestral set up, whilst also featuring heavily within jazz and blues music and, on several occasions, cropping up in pop music. Players such as Benny Goodman and Sidney Bechet showcased the clarinet’s jazz credentials, whilst Acker Bilk’s Stranger On The Shore was a chart hit (and was my grandad’s main request of my brother’s playing). Paul McCartney requested the addition of the two clarinets and one bass clarinet throughout When I’m Sixty-Four, a song he wrote when he was fourteen and appeared on the St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The band Supertramp often utilised the clarinet in their songs through woodwind player John Helliwell, most memorably in the Klezmer-inspired solo from the song Breakfast In America. And, of course, when asked to think of a piece that showcases the clarinet, I imagine most would immediately bring to mind Rhapsody In Blue by George Gershwin, which opens with that fabulous glissando.

My musical life has mainly flourished in choirs but when I was fourteen, the chance to learn my favourite instrument presented itself. A lifelong fan of The Simpsons, I always thought it was so cool that Lisa could play the saxophone. By its very nature, it’s such a soulful instrument and one that can be rather chameleonic. It’s not usually found within an orchestra but when it appears it can really shine – just have a listen to Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 2, Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto or Debussy’s Rhapsody for orchestra and saxophone. Of course, it’s one of the principal jazz instruments, with the likes of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins becoming masters of their craft. It’s also arguably the most common woodwind instrument in pop music, often providing memorable solos: Baker Street, Careless Whisper, Who Could It Be Now?… I could go on. So many talented performers and amazing pieces for the saxophone to inspire budding players, but Lisa Simpson was the reason my interest was first piqued.

Listen to Watermelon Man on Naxos

Our music service offered a variety of lessons to my secondary school and I jumped at the chance to play alto saxophone. I was taught by the remarkably laidback Mr. Prince, a woodwind multi-instrumentalist who I always likened to a ‘jazz elf’ (whether he’d find that favourable, I’m not too sure). There were four of us who had lessons and I remember playing pieces such as Watermelon Man by Herbie Hancock, A Groovy Kind Of Love by Phil Collins, and I Feel Good by James Brown (my favourite to play).

I love the feel of the alto saxophone. You have to rest it on your right hip, so it gives you a little swagger. Saxophones are generally made of brass so they shine and glimmer when the light catches them, leading the eye down the body of the instrument before it swoops towards the bell. Instead of holes like the recorder, it has keys to adjust the pitch which make a small but satisfying clunk each time you press them. And, despite the fact it is a single-reed instrument like the clarinet, I could make a sound on the saxophone and I loved it.

Alto saxophone (not too dissimilar to the one I learnt on!)
Yamaha Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I had lessons during my last two years of secondary school and then, for various reasons, I was unable to carry on with them and so my saxophone playing stopped. I’m ashamed to say that my beautiful sax has remained mostly ignored for the last fifteen years or so. Of course, lockdown would have been a perfect time to reacquaint myself and start from scratch but my saxophone remains back in my hometown with my mum for the time being. I’ve been eyeing some beginners’ books in the Music Library so I’ll be putting those to good use once my sax and I are reunited.

Funnily enough, whilst writing this blog, I stumbled across this wooden treble recorder in a charity shop. It’s missing its foot joint so it can’t properly be played but it has spurred me on even more to get to grips with playing again.

Listen to Gallimaufry on Naxos

To finish, I recommend what will possibly remain my favourite piece composed for wind band. Gallimaufry by Guy Woolfenden was inspired by William Shakespeare’s two plays about Henry IV, and the piece is reworked music that he had composed for Trevor Nunn’s 1982 productions of the plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company; Woolfenden was head of music with the company for 37 years. The word ‘gallimaufry’ means a hodgepodge, a jumble, reflecting the nature of the piece which is formed of six sections. I find it such a hugely moving piece, the opening and closing sections – Church and State and Church and Status Quo – particularly evoking a few tears with their rich fanfare-like melodies, over the top of which the flutes dance. This became somewhat of a signature piece for the Youth Wind Band in which my brother was a member (it was for this piece he was taught how to play the bass clarinet). I saw him perform Gallimaufry with the group many times but the real icing on the cake was their performance at a national band competition in Glasgow. I was still studying in Edinburgh at the time so I hopped on a train to watch the day’s programme. The band were sensational and who should be on the adjudicating panel but Guy Woolfenden himself. He offered the highest praise for my brother and his peers: he stated he had not been so impressed and so moved by a performance of Gallimaufry since its premiere, given nearly thirty years earlier in 1983 by the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra. Woolfenden sadly passed away a few short years later, so what an honour it was for all involved in that performance of a piece that really showcases just what woodwind instruments can do.

The Music Library has a range of music for woodwind instruments – including beginner and instructional guides and music for solo and group pieces – as well as books about various instruments, related performers and, of course, CDs and our Naxos catalogues to listen to!

Examples of Music Library stock available to borrow

‘V’ is for valve

————–Valve (i). A mechanical device for altering the basic tubing length of a brass instrument by a predetermined and fixed amount while it is being played. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) ————-

————–Transposition. The Notation or performance of music at a pitch different from that in which it was originally conceived or notated, by raising or lowering all of the notes in it by a given interval. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)————

————Natural Notes – Natural Harmonics- Harmonic Series. The notes of the harmonics series of a brass instrument, particularly of a “natural” instrument i.e. one not provided with valves, slide or keys in order to change the tube length while playing and therefore confined to one series of harmonics or to such other series that are made available by changes of crook. The French expression ‘sons naturels’ is also used in music for horn to countermand ‘sons bouches’ (stopped notes) and in music for violin, harp etc., to countermand playing in harmonics. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)————

————Crook ( Fr. corp de rechange, toned rechange; Ger. Stimmbogen). Detachable lengths of tubing inserted into brass instruments for the purpose of changing the tube length and hence the pitch. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)————

————Natural Horn. Term applied to the many different types of valveless horn. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)————

————The Modern Brass Family Trumpet, Trombone, Eb Tuba, Bb Tuba, Horn, Cornet, Euphonium, Baritone, Tenor Horn, Flugel Horn, Wagner Tuba, Mellophone, Sousaphone, Sudraphone, Helicon————-

————The Renaissance, Medieval, Classical Brass Family Natural Trumpet, Natural Horn, Sackbutt, Serpent, Slide Trumpet, Buccin, Ophicleide, Cornet, Cornett, Cornettino, Russian Bassoon, Chromatic Bass Horn————–

V for Valve  

The invention of the valve is a bit of a dry old subject, the history of brass instruments a tad more interesting, if you love brass instruments. Putting these two things together rather like the addition of the valve to the natural trumpet or the hunting horn and looking at the impact that those subjects had in adding colour and texture to the modern orchestra and the flourishing of the modern brass band, now we might just have an article.

In approximately 1814, this new valve, and its addition to the horn and the trumpet allowed us a fully chromatic brass family and changed the nature of the music being written for it, and what was being asked of players in the orchestra, as soloists and chambers players. In some cases the changes in writing for certain instruments happened in relatively short time.

Beethoven’s Sonata for Horn and Piano was written in 1800, a work firmly placed in the classical period and written for the natural horn. Only fifty years later in 1849, Schumann wrote one of the great horn works the Adagio and Allegro (op70) a virtuosic work for the valved horn which would have been impossible prior to the invention of the valve in 1814.

The changes in the music being written for the instruments and the changes in the instruments themselves meant that the players in town bands and orchestras had to acquire new skills or be left behind.

Inventionshorn,
Mikael Bodner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Henri Chaussier, a virtuoso hand horn player with a good reputation as a soloist found himself engaged as an orchestral player in Germany. German orchestras had embraced valved horns and expected all their players to use valved horns. Overnight, Chassier had to acquire the skill of transposition which he had never had to do before, things that had been simple for him on his natural horn became difficult on his fully chromatic valve horn. Chaussier survived this year in Germany and went on to invent a valve system of his own.    

The first mention of a means to altering the sounding length of a brass instrument, and therefore its pitch, other than by detachable crook, (an additional piece of tubing added to the instrument), was by Bohemian musician Ferdinand Kolbel (1735 – 1769). In 1766, Kolbel demonstrated his chromatic horn. There are surviving drawings but this did not obviously capture the imagination. A few years later in 1788, Irishman Charles Claggett put forward his ideas for a “chromatic trumpet and horn” but neither of these survived.

The first real working valve was invented and first added to brass instruments in around 1814. But before we look at that, I think we should whizz through a not-at-all comprehensive, several hundred/thousand year tour of brass instruments and their ancestors.

Trumpets, trombones, horns, tuba or the instruments of modern orchestral brass section; cornets, flugelhorn, tenor horn, baritone, euphonium, trombones, tubas, known as  the modern brass band – all these instruments have valves, even some trombones. All of these lip vibrated aerophones have common roots. Animal horns and conches, which were blown through with vibrating lips as the ‘noise’ being amplified. As metal work became refined this technique was applied to lengths of metal tubing. The Celts did this with a warlike instrument called a Carnynx, the romans had a Cornu, a G-shaped military and ceremonial instrument. Two trumpets, simple straight lengths of metal, mouthpiece at one end and bell at the other, were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, one of silver and one made from copper, both about 25 inches long.    

There is some truth in saying that these ancestors of the modern brass instrument were as stated, either warrior instruments or ceremonial fanfare instruments. And in the later case of the horn, used for hunting and or signalling.  It is only when they were brought indoors and ‘domesticated’ that they were given other functions being part of different consorts, early orchestras.  

Trombone with seven bells, Adolphe Sax
Antique brass instrument on display at the Musical Instrument Museum
Robin Davis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Russian bassoon
Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Chromatic Bass Horn
Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Serpent in C horn
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s set aside all the instruments of the modern brass band or the saxhorn family of instruments and also the trombone which started life as the sackbut and has changed little since.     

Listen on Naxos to Trumpet Concertos (The Mystery of the Natural Trumpet) – SPERGER, J.M. STAMITZ, J. OTTO, J. Kováts, L’arpa festante, Hesse, Voskuile

To get to where it is today the trumpet has taken some odd paths and ended in some dead ends, this is a few. The natural trumpet is a direct descendant, shaped like a trumpet, with no valves, players of this instrument used its higher natural harmonics to great effect in many of the great early trumpet repertoire concertos by Vivaldi, Purcel, Haydn, Leopold, Mozart and Hummel. One dead end was the keyed bugle. As the name suggests, a bugle with what looks like saxophone keys, not a winner. A successful instrument for a time and a rival to the trumpet was the cornett and its little relative, the cornettino. The cornett was a curved wooden instrument like a recorder with six holes and a cupped mouthpiece like a trumpet mouthpiece. Very difficult to play but when done well is the most sweet and beautiful sound.

Klappenhorn in C
Museum of Art and Crafts Hamburg, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Cornett is used to great effect in the music of Monteverdi and that style of antiphonal church music.

Listen on Naxos to Monteverdi: Vespers of the Blessed Virgin

GABRIELI, G.: 1615 – Gabrieli in Venice – King’s College Choir, Cambridge, His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts

A less successful relative of the natural trumpet is the slide trumpet. Unlike the forerunner of the trombone, the sackbutt, the slide trumpet’s whole body slides up and down a single main mouthpipe, making it an ungainly and difficult to control arrangement.    

Baroque trumpet and natural horn, Museum of Musical Instruments, Berlin
Joan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The horn, derived from the hunting horn the Corno di Caccia, Cor de Chase. The rough outdoors instruments were brought in to the opera house and the ballet to play in dance sections depicting hunting scenes then they were left indoors and by careful use of the instrument’s natural harmonics and the insertion of the players hand in the bell notes could be manipulated to produce something approaching a scale.   

Again, many great works were written for the horn in this period including concertos by Mozart, Haydn and others and a sonata by Beethoven.    

Listen on Naxos to Beethoven, L. van: Horn Sonata, Op. 17 (Brain, Dennis. Matthews, Dennis)

One more thing to explain before the invention of the valve, I have twice mentioned the natural harmonics in connection with the trumpet and the horn. The arrangement of all the aerophones which have a mouthpiece at one end, a length of tubing and a flared bell at the other, creates a set of natural harmonics, natural notes, a series of notes that can be sounded by that length of tubing and the player vibrating their lips and then changing the tension of their lips. If the length of the tubing is changed then so does the set of harmonics. A natural trumpet has a length of about 4 feet, the natural horn about 12 feet. 

Lengthening the tubing was basically covered by the Sackbutt/Trombone. Trumpet players and horn players used different techniques to produce scales and fill in the blanks in the Harmonic series.

Listen on Naxos to Haydn, J.: Trumpet Concerto, Hob.VIIe:1 Horn Concerto No. 1  Keyboard Concerto, Hob.XVIII:1 (Immer, T. Brown, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood)

Horn players used their hand in the bell and by ‘closing’ the bell with their hand could raise or lower the sound by a full tone. So in the scale above D, F and A could be filled in by closing the bell and the flattened Bb could be raised to a b natural by semi-closing the bell. This had an effect on the sound quality and these notes are muffled and therefore easy to spot. Trumpet players could not use the hand in the bell technique so their solution was more difficult, more taxing on the lips and far more precarious. The trumpet players of that time used the very top register of the trumpet’s scale. Known as the clarino register, all the notes are very close together and changed by the lip/embouchure control of the player. This can be heard to great effect in the 2nd Brandenberg Concerto by Bach, I have heard trumpet players come to grief on this work with a modern trumpet so I am amazed that anyone would tackle this with a natural trumpet. 

Listen on Naxos to Bach, J.S.: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6 (Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood) 

In the years just before the invention and application of the valve, horn players would carry lengths of tubing called crooks which they could place on their horns to lengthen the tubing to the key required by the music. A trumpet player would have a whole instrument in a different key to suit the piece they were to perform, trumpet players might have to carry two or three trumpets with them.   

————–Valve (i). A mechanical device for altering the basic tubing length of a brass instrument by a predetermined and fixed amount while it is being played. (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)————-   

Two valve systems were patented around the same place but seemingly independent of each other. The systems, one by Freidrich Blumhel (1777 – 1845), the second by Hienrich Stolzel (1777 – 1844).   

Freidrich Blumhel was a German inventor and musician. Blumhel was a coal miner who learned to play several instruments. By 1808 he was calling himself a Berghautboist or a Mine Musician and was playing the horn and the trumpet. Bluhmel had been inspired by the ventilating pipes and faucets of the Silesian Blast furnaces in a period between 1810-1813. In 1816, he demonstrated a working model of a trumpet and horn with two box valves fitted on each and shortly after he showed a trombone with three valves fitted. After his demonstration of the trombone he joined forces with Stolzel and they were awarded a joint patent for their works.  It was just after this that Stolzel bought Blumel out by paying him 400 thaler to surrender all further rights to him. Blumhel continued to invent and work on valve systems, trying in the years leading up to 1828 to secure a patent for a rotary valve.

Hienrich Stolzel was a German inventor and musician. The only son of Municipal musician Christian Stolzel, Hienrich was a member of Prince of Pless’s private band and in 1818 a member of the Royal Opera Orchestra in Berlin. He retired from this post in 1829 with a pension but died in poverty in 1844.

Stolzel demonstrated a tubular valve called a Rohrenschiebventil or in French, Piston Stozel. His primacy with this valve was contested by Blumhel and it was then that they joined together to obtain a patent, the rights to which Stolzel would later acquire from Blumhelm.

Although the box valve was considered by many to be the superior system it was Stolzel’s tubular or cylindrical valve which found the most popularity. It was cheaper and easier to produce and this was the version that became the basis for many valve systems to come.

It would be at this point that, if this article was to be pages and pages long and a more detailed treatise on the valve and its invention, we would use diagrams to explain how the valve worked. Describing how the air column is diverted at the depression of the valve into some addition of tubing, lengthening the instrument and lowering the pitch by a tone or a semi-tone. Also we could go in to detail about the many slightly different variations in valve that appeared at that time – the piston, the rotary valve, the vienna valve and where and how they were placed on the trumpet or horn. We could also discuss the impact of the development of the valve on the the development of the Saxhorn family of brass instruments and the rise of the brass band and its long term and positive effect on many, many hard working communities in the industrialised world.  

It would be at this point we should do that but there are many books you can read from our collection or online explaining this far better than I have just done. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians entry on the valve runs to 7 pages with none of our digressions. We shall leave the in-depth explanations to them and say, new is not always better than old, but when you have something which makes the job at hand so much easier, why not use it.

Suggested listening:

Listen on Naxos to Dictionary of Medieval and Renaissance Instruments

Listen on Naxos to The Instruments of the Orchestra – author and narrator, Jeremy Siepmann

Listen on Naxos to The Virtuoso Ophicleide, Trio Aenea – Patrick Wibart

Listen on Naxos to The Art of the Cornet

Listen on Naxos to a Dennis Brain horn recital.

We’ve created a playlist on Naxos which includes some of the suggestions above and some other works featuring some great brass playing.

‘U’ is for ukelele

Some of the histories of the ukulele are quite exact about when its inventors arrived in Hawaii, their names, their place of origin and how the name ukulele came about.

Let’s start with the name. Most of the ukulele histories, if they mention where the name originated, tell the story of the last king, and penultimate monarch, of the islands, Kalakaua. Kalakaua, himself a ukulele player, watched a player demonstrate their skills on the ukulele, their fast finger work and strumming techniques and the King likened the player’s finger work to that of a jumping flea, a ukulele.

—- The Hawaiians had the word, ukulele, before the instrument appeared, it is the word that the islanders used for cat fleas. —-

This tale is recounted often in many slightly different ways, by many different people, this version is told by Alvin D Keech, ukulele player, teacher and maker and Hawaiian resident until 1915. Told as if he had actually been there, which he hadn’t, in an article written in 1931, which was reprinted in The Hawaiian Steel Guitar and Its Great Hawaiian Musicians.

—- There is another version which has it that ukulele translates as ‘the gift that came here’. ‘Uku’ can translate as gift and ‘lele’ as coming or comes here, not jumping. —-

King David Kalakaua of Hawaii
Menzies Dickson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The instrument most mentioned as basis for the ukulele is the Machete de Braga or Braguinha, a 4 string, steel or gut strung instrument popular in Portugal and the Maderia Islands. In one very exact retelling of the arrival of this instrument in Hawaii, the Musician Joao Fernandez arrives in Honolulu Harbour in 1879 and plays his Braguinha and sings Portuguese folk songs, this retelling also mentions three Portuguese craftsmen, Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias, and Jose do Espirito who arrived in Honolulu Harbour around the same time, and this version of the history of the ukulele, credits them with building the first true Hawaiian ukuleles, adaptions of Fernandez’s Braguinha. As with most stories the world over, when a tale has a recent past every family will have a version, some families will know someone who was the brother of the friend of someone who once knew the man/woman who held the strings as the maker of the first ukulele strung the first ukulele. There are many variations, differing slightly from the above, some more exact and detailed, some vaguer and blurry round the facts.

The Harbour, Honolulu. Engraving by George Pearson, after George Henry Burgess, 1869
George Pearson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The main points to take from all the histories are that small 4/6 stringed instruments arrived in Honolulu from Portugal in the late 1870s. The instruments built on Hawaii based on the instruments brought into the island became what we know today as the ukulele. The instrument on which the ukulele is based, is most often cited as the Machete de Braga or Braguinha or Brinquinho. There seem to be many versions of these size of small string instruments often listed as sub-sets of the lute family. In an ethnomusicological listing they, ukuleles, are known as a composite chordophone. They appear the world over, their appearance and size is a requirement of their need to be portable. They are the instrument of the traveller, the sailor or soldier. Which explains why very similar sized and sounding instruments are found in many different places around the globe. The names are also very similar Machete de Braga, Braguinha, Brinquinho, Cavaquinho, Cuatro, Cavaco.

Many of these instruments stayed in their eventual homes of Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela but the ukulele was the version of this family of instruments which conquered the world and continues to enchant, delight and entertain.

Some of the Music Library’s many books of songs, arranged for the uke player.

In 2015 the BBC, published a few online articles about the history of the ukulele and how to be a famous uke player etc etc, one of these articles included this list of ‘famous’ uke players Joe Strummer, Elvis Presley, George Harrison, John Lennon, Phil Jupitus, Paul McCartney, Adam Sandler, Frank Skinner, Gloria Swanson, Marlon Brando, Kate Pierson, Mick Fleetwood, Noel Fielding, Russell Brand, Poison Ivy, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush, Barack Obama, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Adrian Edmondson, Benny Hill, Buster Keaton, Harry Hill, Joni Mitchell. This is a list a of famous players with a wide appeal, and this is not a comprehensive list. There are players from earlier generations and later, younger players who have a wide following on different social media channels. Fans following of uke players from the very earliest of superstars like Cliff Edwards known as Ukulele Ike, in the thirties, who was also the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, or George Formby, in the forties and fifties to recent stars like Jake Shimabukuro, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and James Hill, mean that the uke has gone in and out of favour, as the stars who played the uke moved in and out of favour. It so happens that at the moment it is enjoying an especially purple patch.

Quarantined for 21 days after their return to earth, the crew of Apollo 11 were entertained by their captain and first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, who had his ukulele with him in the isolation chamber.
NASA on The Commons, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

The main overriding reason for its popularity and its longevity is, the uke is easy to pick up. Ukes are small, portable and within a short time, very short in some cases, you can know enough chords to sing along to your favourite hits or karaoke hot picks.

J. Edgar Robinson advert for banjo-ukeleles from Washington Times, 17 July 1919
[unknown], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ukes are also relatively inexpensive, not an easy thing to quantify, my inexpensive is different from the next uke player. I bought my first uke about eighteen years ago and it cost about £15, it was purple, and I got it from Rae Macintosh which at that time was still on Queensferry Street and it was a good starter uke. A criticism of lower priced starter ukes is that they don’t hold their tuning, slip out of tune easily, which can be true but my first one didn’t. If you look carefully good lower priced ukes are out there to find. Most of the tutors and teaching websites advise paying slightly more than that. Which is probably true, most of those sites recommend that paying between £40 to £80 which will get you a good first uke. After that, the sky is the limit on what you want to pay for a uke, a hand-built uke made to measure to your own preferences could start at around £5000. With my birthday coming up, my fingers are crossed.

“Ukuleles. Everybody’s playing them, playing them, playing them. So easy to learn- Such fun to play- And here they are-heaps and heaps of them with books of instructions and lots of catchy music and all at ‘Bon Marche’ prices.”, Seattle star, 21 August 1917
From the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ukes come in various sizes, soprano, concert, tenor, baritone and bass. The ones probably most seen are either the soprano which is about 17/19 inches long or the concert which is slightly larger at about 21 inches in length. The four strings of the soprano or concert uke are tuned to G,C,E,A. The G string is normally tuned higher than the C string, so in uke circles they say, it sounds like, or to use the ‘My Dog Has Fleas’ tuning. This kind of tuneful mnemonic refers to the way American children were taught in the sixties. This tuning is known as re-entrant tuning, although, some players prefer to tune the G string lower than the C string this is known as linear tuning. Some players prefer to tune their ukes to ADF#B, this one tone higher makes the string tighter. The GCEA tuning is most common for the soprano, concert and tenor ukes, The baritone is different as usually it is linear tuned DGBE which is the same as the top four strings of the guitar. Soprano, concert, tenor, baritone is a matter of choice and what feels most comfortable in your hands.

There is also a wide variety of shapes and colours of ukes out there. In the beginning of the uke, most resembling a small guitar. Then there was, what became known as the pineapple uke which, as its name suggests has the curving shape of a Pineapple, without the knobbly bits. In approximately 1916/17, the banjolele’s first appearance is credited to makers Alvin D Keech and John A Bolander. Marketed as a banjo ukulele or banjolele it had the body of a banjo and the neck and tuning of the ukulele, so it is a cut and shut job!

Most famously, this was the instrument of choice of George Formby, world-famous, English comedian, actor and singer-songwriter.

Uke Tales: a story often told
APRIL 11, 2019
by Sandor Nagyszalanczy
On this web blog, Sander tells a long story about buying a uke in the home of uke’s Hawaii and about the importance of how you make your choice, play it and if it sounds right to you, then that’s probably your uke. 

With the most recent upsurge in the popularity of the uke you can find all shapes and sizes, there are flying V ukes, round ukes, cigar box ukes, oil can ukes, electric ukes, resonator ukes.

Digital cigar box ukelele
Greg Francke, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I mentioned I got my first uke about eighteen years ago. I first came across the ukulele, properly when watching the “Concert for George” broadcast on the BBC on the 16 April 2004.

Joe Brown on stage
Garry Knight, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

George Harrison, Beatle, film producer, composer, lyricist, husband, guitarist, ukuleleist, died on the 29 November 2001. One year later, on the 29 November 2002 his widow, Olivia Harrison organised a ‘Concert for George’. The Concert for George was a get together of a lot a George’s friends, mostly musicians that he had played with over the years. It was a happy joyous jam session/concert which was rounded off by the incomparable Joe Brown, one of George’s oldest friends and fellow uke player. He sang the beautiful Gus Kahn/Isham Jones song, “I’ll see you in my Dreams”, which I, tired and emotional after wrangling my children to bed found Joe Brown’s unsentimental delivery, emotional and moving.

As with a lot of things in this world, I am almost sorry this song has become so popular. I wanted this to be my little secret, my favourite song which I could choose to let people know about, but I think lots of people know about it, and since the Concert for George, this song has practically become Joe Brown’s theme song. This for me is part of the joy of the uke and instruments like the uke. They are fun, plinky plonky, cheery happy-go-lucky little musical instruments which shouldn’t hold much emotional sway but they do, and is that the musician, the song or the time and the place? Maybe its all of the above, music and its impact on you is such an amalgam of time and place, story and people, music and musician.

This little jumping flea packs a joyous punch in many ways. The uke is one of the wonders of the world, which makes everyone just a bit more equal and a bit more happy, whether you are strumming your three chord version of Stairway to Heaven or fingerpicking your own arrangement of a Bach Violin Partita for the uke, you are a uke player like all the people mentioned in this article, now try not to let it become an obsession.

*******************************************

As a wee postscript, my birthday has just passed and there was no ukulele, hand-built to my specifications, at an eyewatering price, but there was a rather lovely banjolele, given to me by my lovely family. They are yet to find out just how annoying I can be with, My Little Ukulele in my Hand.

We have made two playlists with some suggestions for uke listening on Naxos Music Library and Naxos Jazz.

T is for trains

In our musical alphabet, we’ve reached the letter ‘t’ – and for this week, ‘t’ is for ‘TRAINS’. Old trains. Trains that go chuff and choo.

Image of train 6115 in station from the documentary film Night Mail by the GPO Film Unit
GPO Film Unit, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1936, only a decade or so after the first films were made with sound, the General Post Office’s production unit released Night Mail. It is a documentary, which was also a new concept for films at the time. Night Mail is about the overnight postal train which ran from London to Scotland; to Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, Alberto Cavalcanti looked after the overall production, and Benjamin Britten looked after the sound. Britten described his job as “writing music and supervising sounds”, which I like as an image. It makes me think of a playground full of sounds that – if sounds had arms and legs and bodies – were running around, and there, in the middle of them all, was Benjamin Britten, with a whistle round his neck supervising them. For the closing sequence of the film, W. H. Auden wrote a poem to accompany the footage of the travelling train. It’s often included in poetry anthologies and English classes, and so the words are familiar perhaps:

This is the night mail crossing the Border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder…

You can watch the film for free through the British Film Institute Player. It’s 24 minutes long, and Youtube have the final Auden part (as well as a sequel, Night Mail 2, from the 80s).

And of course, it’s also on our streaming service, Naxos – here. 

The rhythms of the poem against the velvety footage of the steam train, knitted together with Benjamin Britten’s score, is just fantastic. Well worth a listen and a watch; taut and tight and satisfying.

The GPO film unit was set up in 1933, under the directorship of John Grierson, a big name nowadays in film history, and a pioneer in documentary film-making. He was also influential in developing the necessary funding structures, and production and distribution structures, to support film documentaries as an art-form. 

In 1927 the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act was passed and hence the power of the postal union in the early 30s had shrunk. Moral was low, and so the scope of the film was to demonstrate the integrity of postal workers and the postal service as a whole. 

There are some wonderful parts to the film. Firstly, all the old stuff: machinery, systems; latches, levers, buttons, pigeon-holes… The mail was sorted on the train as the train went along, and each postal sorter was allotted 48 pigeon-holes for a town. The town was chalked up above the holes, and when that town’s mail had been sorted and bundled, the old town was rubbed out and a new town replaced it. 

In my notes from watching the film I’ve also written “leather pouches!”, with a big exclamation mark. Because, to deposit a mail sack at a station, the letters were packed up into leacher pouches and suspended from the side of the train. As the train passed through a station – at a big-mile-an-hour in the middle of the night – the leather pouches were caught in a net on the trackside. To get the shot, Chick Fowler, the main camera man, hung out of a window while someone else held onto his legs. Meanwhile, his assistant, Pat Jackson, sat on top of the coal car holding a reflector, and narrowly missed losing his head to a bridge… eep.

In the Music library, there are many books on Benjamin Britten on the shelves, and our collection also includes his diaries; it’s interesting to leaf through them. On the 18th December 1935, he writes:

Go to Blackheath (via business at Soho Square) all morning to prepare for afternoon’s recording of train noises (realistic imitations [but sic] by compressed steam, sand-paper, miniature rails, etc.) for T.P.O. [this was the working title for the film]. It goes well.”

I love this. Another book, Britten & Auden in the Thirties, by Donald Mitchell, includes a score for the film notating: “I, Steam (compressed air); II, Sandpaper on slate; III, Rail (small trolley); IV, Booms (clank) [I’m unsure what this is but it sounds noisy]; V, Aluminium on Drill and Motor Moy [a hand-cranked, chain-operated camera]; VI, Hammer on [Conduit and Boom?], and a Syren; VII, Coal falling down shaft”. It is early musique concrète in its use of found recorded sound, it is fresh, and avant-garde.

Page showing Britten’s score of Night Mail

As a child, whenever we visited my Granny and Grandad’s house, I remember there was a model steam engine which sat in a glass case in the corner of their living room. On the front of it were painted the initials “JP” and “83”: my initials; my date of birth. Funnily enough no-one ever acknowledged this, and I was always too shy to ask (my Grandad was tall, tattooed and famously cantankerous; we lived far away and didn’t see them often, and I scarpered from him much as their cats did from beneath his unsteady feet). Recently, when my Dad was sorting out my Granny’s bungalow, he offered it to me – because of those initials and that date – why, of course it was mine, and I had never plucked up the courage to ask about it. Goethe, apparently, owned a model steam engine, one of the earliest there ever was, which he sat on his desk, and, at some point before he died, he gifted to his grandchildren. It was a model of Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, presented to him by English well-wishers in 1829 (www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n01/ian-jack/the-railway-hobby).

What a lot that engine has changed for the human species. The whole notion of industrialisation, and all that that entails. All that industrialisation has meant these past, coming on for 200, years.

And, even though steam trains were phased out in the 1960s, the steam train has embedded itself in our imaginations. Babies born last year know what steam trains look like, trains go choo. They are peas on forks; toothbrushes; they are toys, and all over picture books. Except they don’t choo, do they. No, says my son’s toddler pal this week as we set off for Dunbar. Trains go “hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm”.

In the Art & Design Library we have many books relating to trains and railways. Books on railway architecture, on railway posters, railway seat design, railway photographs, railway pottery, and graffiti… There was an exhibition put on by Liverpool’s Museums and Galleries in 2008, some of the text is still available which makes for an interesting browse.

And finally, some favourite endorsements of train-related imagery and music:
Turner’s famous painting, Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844.

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway
J. M. W. Turner, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rowland Emett’s cartoons and sculptures (one of the trains was also repaired recently on the BBC’s Repair Shop). 

John Burningham’s, Oi, Get off our train, 1989.

Lois Lenski’s, The Little Train, 1940.

And Eric Ravilious’ painting, Westbury Horse, 1939.

A song I love – Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train is Bound for Glory”, and then there’s Bob Dylan’s themed radio hours on the topic of trains. He made two of them.

The podcast, 99% Invisible has also produced some interesting episodes on trains. Here are two I particularly enjoyed:
Bio-mimicry: how train designers are learning from the natural world

Defining Moments: trains and the ushering in of time zones.

The Final Frontier: music inspired by space

We’ve reached S in our Musical Alphabet and Natasha from the Music Library invites you to turn your gaze skywards and listen…

Space. It’s the final frontier, or so they say. An infinite inky blanket, bejewelled by galaxies, nebulas, planets, comets, moons, and stars. So vast it’s almost unfathomable, so much unknown that it can be a little disconcerting, so breathtaking in its awe-inspiring beauty. It’s fascinated me for the longest time; for many years, my parents’ Collins Gem book entitled The Night Sky would often accompany me on my adventures. I might not have been able to digest the technical language when I was 6 but it didn’t stop me from pouring over page after page of constellation maps, pretending to charter my own journey to the stars (in a very similar fashion to Daffy Duck in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century). I still find myself involuntarily craning my neck towards a clear sky to see how many stars and constellations I can spot (even with that Collins Gem book being omnipresent, I can still only really identify three). It’s little wonder that space and its mystique provides huge inspiration to so many and musicians are certainly no exception.

Listen to The Planets by Gustav Holst on Naxos

Almost certainly the most famous original composition inspired by celestial bodies is Gustav Holst’s The Planets, an orchestral suite in which each of its seven movements is inspired by a planet in our solar system and its significance in astrology. A conversation about astrology whilst on holiday in Spain in 1913 with composer and teacher Balfour Gardiner and the Bax brothers – composer Arnold and writer Clifford – set the groundwork for Holst’s composition as he became greatly intrigued by the subject. Inspirations for the piece are said to include Five Pieces for Orchestra by Arnold Schoenberg – Holst having attended one of the performances held in London in 1912 and 1914 – and the booklet What is a Horoscope? by astrologer Alan Leo. The movements Mercury, the Winged Messenger and Neptune, the Mystic take their names from Leo’s works.

Gustav Holst
by Herbert Lambert (1881–1936), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Holst’s daughter, Imogen, stated that her father struggled with the structure of pieces such as symphonies and so enjoyed composing a suite in which each movement is distinct. The instrumentation for the suite is intentionally grand in order to capture the scale and colour needed to convey the subject matter. The Planets‘ premiere took place on 29th September 1918, a private performance conducted by Adrian Boult, organised by Gardiner and given as a farewell to Holst, who was about to be stationed in Salonika to teach music to troops during the final stages of World War I. It was a hastily organised affair: the orchestra only saw the music two hours before the performance and the soprano and alto chorus needed for Neptune was recruited from both Morley College and St Paul’s Girls School, institutions at which Holst taught. Holst inscribed Boult’s copy of the score: “This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused the Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst.” The first three public performances of the suite were incomplete. The first of these, held on 27th February 1919, was again conducted by Boult and he made the decision to only perform five of the seven movements, his reasoning being that the public was not ready for the new musical experience the work presented. Holst disliked incomplete performances, and was particularly dissatisfied if Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity was the last movement. He felt this provided too much of a happy ending compared to real life (the suite’s final movement Neptune is much more open-ended and eerie). The entirety of the suite wasn’t performed in public until 15 November 1920, marking the first time Neptune was played for the public.

Composed between 1914 and 1917, Holst had originally planned for the seven movements to match the order of the planets, starting with Mercury, the last to be composed in 1916. However, Holst decided that planetary order should give way to musical merit, beginning the suite with the much more sinister Mars, the Bringer of War, the first movement to be completed. Despite Holst’s preference for the work to be a unified piece, sections such as Mars and Jupiter have become incredibly famous away from the rest of the suite. Part of this is down to Holst himself; he agreed to the central theme of Jupiter, Thaxted (named after the village where Holst lived for much of his life), to be used as the tune for the hymn I Vow To Thee My Country. Imogen Holst noted that when her father was asked to set Sir Cecil Spring Rice’s words to music, he was relieved to find that they fit to Thaxted as he was over-worked. Though initially maligned by critics, The Planets has become one of the most popular and recognisable works of classical music of the last hundred years.

Pluto by NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The dwarf planet, Pluto, was discovered thirteen years after the completion of The Planets and four years before Holst’s death in 1934. Holst had no interest adding the new ninth planet to his work as he had become frustrated that the suite’s popularity eclipsed his other work. Other composers have taken up the challenge of portraying Pluto, including Leonard Bernstein’s improvised Pluto, the Unpredictable. The most well-known depiction, Pluto, the Renewer, was composed by Colin Matthews, having been commissioned by Kent Nagano and the Hallé Orchestra in 2000 as an addition to Holst’s suite (Pluto was still classified as a planet at this point). In his thoughts listed in the piece’s premiere programme notes, Matthews notes he felt Holst’s work finished perfectly with Neptune fading into deeper space, wondering how he could add to it. With Pluto’s astrological significance proving a little hazy and, having labelled himself a sceptic, Matthews decided to forgo this aspect (bar the piece’s title) and chose to start Pluto where Neptune finished; he even adapted the end of Neptune to run straight into Pluto for performance. Matthews has stated that, with so little known about Pluto, he was inspired by solar winds and comets on the edge of the solar system, informing the fast tempo and bombastic elements of the piece. Matthews dedicated the work to Imogen Holst, with whom he had worked with, and notes that he “suspect[s she] would have been both amused and dismayed by this venture”.

Listen to John Williams’ composition for Star Wars, Episode IV, “A New Hope” on Naxos

Holst’s suite has been a source of inspiration to many over the years and a very notable example is another iconic space-themed score. John Williams’ work on the Star Wars films has become so instantly recognisable that even those unfamiliar with the series can easily hum the main theme or The Imperial March. Williams was recommended to George Lucas, the writer/director of the first Star Wars film, Episode IV: A New Hope, by Lucas’ friend, Stephen Spielberg. Williams’ work on Spielberg’s film Jaws certainly helped add an extra dimension to the story – primarily with the infamous, incredibly threatening main theme – and he was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Lucas originally wanted to use existing music for the soundtrack to Star Wars (something he later came to deny), stating that the music would help the audience connect to the fantastical setting. This stylistic choice would have echoed the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a great source of inspiration for Lucas’ epic space-opera. The composers and pieces Lucas chose served as basis on which Williams developed his score. Consequently, there are some striking similarities within Williams’ score to Holst’s Mars movement, Erich Korngold’s theme for the film Kings Row, and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Williams also scored the other eight films within the three Star Wars trilogies, with nods to contemporaries such as Hans Zimmer, Tan Dun, and Howard Shore.

John Williams performs movie music with the Boston Pops, 28 May 2011
Chris Devers, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Star Wars scores contain a large number of leitmotifs, most representing particular characters or concepts. These themes aren’t always used to fit the narrative (i.e. the character they are written for isn’t the main focus of the scene) but instead they are used to compliment the atmosphere of the scene. Williams incorporated as much new material as possible with each passing film, though several themes are present across the series: for instance, Old Ben’s Theme, which later became known as The Force Theme, appears more than one hundred times across the trilogies. The result is a behemoth of film music; Williams won, amongst many other awards, the Best Original Score Academy Award for the original Star Wars soundtrack, whilst the album became the best-selling symphonic album of all time.

Listen to music from Star Trek on Naxos

In the battle of the main space media franchises, you’ll find Star Wars in one corner and its predecessor, Star Trek, in the other. The Star Trek canon is now comprised of ten TV series, thirteen films, and various other adaptations but it all began with the Original Series, first broadcast in 1966. Created by Gene Roddenberry, the series followed the crew of the USS Enterprise as they explored the reaches of space. If you were ever unsure of the premise of the show, the opening monologue before the theme tune would always enlighten you, with the Enterprise’s mission detailed by the ship’s captain: Captain James T. Kirk immortalised by William Shatner’s unusual cadence in The Original Series, followed by an updated version given in Sir Patrick Stewart’s sonorous tones as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the The Next Generation (my personal favourite series in the franchise), which first aired in 1987.

The theme for The Original Series was composed by Alexander Courage and featured soprano Loulie Jean Norman singing the wordless melody. Roddenberry had written lyrics for the theme, though these were never used. This was his intention in order to claim a co-composer credit and earn half of the theme’s royalties. Courage, who was displeased with Roddenberry’s unethical strategy, was not the only one who suffered in such a fashion: Norman’s singing was removed from the third season theme so she wasn’t paid any royalties. The Next Generation’s theme is an adaptation of the theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, composed by Jerry Goldsmith. The first two series’ themes begin with the same quiet opening notes to introduce their captains’ monologues, before diving into fast-paced and sweeping melodies to stir up a sense of adventure in the viewer. The themes for the third and fourth entities in the Star Trek canon, Deep Space Nine and Voyager – composed by Dennis McCarthy and Goldsmith respectively – are much more sombre in tone to reflect the more sorrowful storylines. All the themes utilise brass instruments to help set the tone of each series, evoking feelings of grandeur, anguish, and daring.

Jerry Goldsmith
fuxoft, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Listen to the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack on Naxos

Of course, there is one giant of the science-fiction genre that does not use any original music at all. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey features a soundtrack that is entirely comprised of existing classical music. Pieces by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, György Ligeti, and Aram Khachaturium are used in the film inspired by the prolific science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel (Clarke also co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick). The juxtaposition of the music and the visuals in the film help raise each element to new heights; it’s almost impossible to hear Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra and not picture the Dawn of Man sequence, or Johann Strauss II’s waltz The Blue Danube without envisaging the space station-docking scene (or any of the many parodies these scenes have spawned). Ligeti’s music was suggested to Kubrick by his wife, Christiane, and Charlene Pederson, who heard pieces on the BBC whilst creating sculptures of aliens for Kubrick. Ligeti’s work certainly helps to bring a sense of the unearthly and unease to the film, particularly considering much of the film is dialogue-free. The sweet love song Daisy Bell, written by Harry Dacre, takes on a different tone when sung by the computer HAL 9000. This was included in the screenplay and subsequent novel by Clarke as he had seen the first instance of computer speech synthesis, which happened to be an IBM 704 programmed to sing Daisy Bell in 1962.

Listen to Alex North’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey on Naxos

However, a number of composers were approached to score 2001 during production. The first, British composer Frank Cordell, has said that his work was primarily arrangements of Gustav Mahler pieces; this score was never released.  A full score by American composer Alex North, with whom Kubrick had worked on Sparticus and Dr. Strangelove, was recorded after North persuaded Kubrick that guide tracks were not needed and he could achieve Kubrick’s vision with entirely new music. Despite North’s efforts, Kubrick disliked and dismissed the score and chose to use the guide pieces that we hear in the film. Kubrick later stated that he did not see the point in using work by film composers, however good they may be, when they were never going to be as good as composers such as Mozart or Beethoven. North was unaware his work was scrapped from the film until he attended its premiere, leaving him devastated and humiliated. In 1993, two years after North’s death, the aforementioned Jerry Goldsmith conducted and produced a recording of North’s 2001 score and a later recording, produced in 2007 by Intrada Records, contained cues to allow the listener to match the music precisely to its intended place in the film.

Listen to Eric Whitacre’s Deep Field on Naxos

One of the most recent and notable pieces drawing on space for inspiration is Virtual Choir 5: Deep Field by Eric Whitacre. Beginning with Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque in 2009, Whitacre has championed the ability to create music with others without the need to be present together. Virtual Choir 5 featured in a 2018 film detailing the story of the Hubble Space Telescope and its Deep Field images: Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe. From one (relatively) small section of sky in the Ursa Major constellation, the Hubble Space Telescope captured images of over 3,000 galaxies that were previously undiscovered over an eleven day period in December 1995. In collaboration with scientists and visualisers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, Whitacre’s music echoes the beauty and magnificence of the astounding images. The choir itself is composed of over 8,000 voices from 126 countries. Whitacre thought that Virtual Choir 5 would be his last, having stated he had no idea how he could follow the majesty of space. However, the overwhelming need for a sense of community during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in Whitacre writing a new piece specifically for Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently; over 17,500 singers from 129 countries participated (I was fortunate enough to be one of them).

Ultra Deep Field: This is a composite image showing the visible and near infrared light spectrum collected from Hubble’s ACS and WFC3 instruments over a nine-year period.
NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

New discoveries about the universe are constant and no doubt will be a source of inspiration for many more musicians to come. Of course, there are many pieces and songs that I haven’t touched upon here – Debussy’s Clair de Lune, David Bowie’s Space Oddity, Terry Riley and Kronos Quartet’s Sun Rings, to name a few. For now, I’ll tilt my head back towards the sky and hum the Red Dwarf theme to myself.

You can find a playlist of these space-related pieces on our Naxos Classical catalogue, as well as related items in our collections at the Music Library.

S is for…

The Music Library’s Musical Alphabet takes a break this week but watch this space for ‘S’ coming soon…

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

This week the musical alphabet moves onto ‘R’ with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO). The Music Library gives a potted, selective, history of the 130 years and more of Scotland’s Symphony Orchestra.   

A long time ago a part-time musician could pick up work playing for choral societies and choirs, amateur opera companies and musical societies.  The groups would have a band fixer, often their Musical Director, sometimes not, who would put together an ad hoc group of musicians, who often on one rehearsal would perform alongside the choral society in a performance of a Bruckner Mass or a Requiem or a Stabat Mater or the ad hoc orchestra. I was lucky enough to get a lot of this kind of work in the early eighties in Edinburgh, not because I was good but because of who I knew – both my brother and my teacher fixed bands.    

This is not so very different from the start of the RSNO back in the 1840s. Before they even had a name, the band that would become the Royal Scottish National Orchestra were an ad hoc band put together to accompany the Glasgow Choral Union. The Orchestra that accompanied the Glasgow Choral Union was always an ad hoc assembly of players, but those players could be got from far and wide.   

Glasgow Choral Union programmes

We are fortunate to have a good selection of programmes of the Glasgow Choral Union for the years between 1860 – 1889 and even a very brief scan through our collection shows orchestras made up, in different years, by players from major orchestras in Manchester, London, Germany and Italy. In some instances, the orchestra is listed by the name of the professional player and “An Amateur”, the amateur not good enough to get their name in the programme. Even when the decision was taken to form the Scottish orchestra, it was not a full-time salaried ensemble, this would not happen till much later in its history. To digress, the first full-time salaried orchestra in Scotland was the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra formed in 1935. The BBC SSO started life as the BBC Scottish Studio Orchestra but soon became the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In the same year the BBC had formed the Symphony Orchestra in Wales, five years after the main BBC orchestra in London had been established by Sir Adrian Boult. 

From the 1840s to the birth of the Scottish Orchestra in 1891 this was the pattern, a group of players brought together by a music director to play for the Glasgow Choral Union and bolster that with a short series of concerts. Sponsorship for these ventures was mostly on annual guarantees from the great and the good of Glasgow. A capital sum of £20,000 from west of Scotland shipowner James A Allan made the possibility of a proper Scottish Orchestra feasible.  

This “Scottish Orchestra” played its first concert in 1893 and it remained the Scottish Orchestra until 1950, when to honour its new status as a full-time salaried orchestra a name change was muted and after much deliberation the Scottish Orchestra became the Scottish National Orchestra (SNO). During this 40 year period until its next name change, the SNO and under its first Scottish conductor Sir Alexander Gibson, enjoyed a flourishing period when it became an internationally, renowned orchestra. In 1990 with the opening of the Royal Concert Hall, the SNO’s new home and Glasgow’s city of culture status, the SNO was awarded royal status and became the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra was thought the be a bit of a mouthful, so the ‘National’ was dropped and for a time, the orchestra was known as the Royal Scottish Orchestra. But this wasn’t popular and a growing vocal support advocated for the reinstatement of the ‘National’ and so in 1992, the orchestra reverted back to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.  

Since it’s formation in 1893, the Scottish Orchestra/SNO/RSNO has had a succession of fine conductors, great soloists and its ranks have been graced with some famous names.  

Herbert Lambert (1881–1936), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the years from 1900 to 1904, a young Gustav Holst appeared as the Scottish Orchestra’s second trombone.  Some notable players who played in the SNO are oboists Leon Goosens and Evelyn Rothwell, horn player Barry Tuckwell and double bass player Stuart Knussen, father of the composer, Oliver Knussen, and his own father, Erik Knussen is listed as Orchestra Manager.  

Barry Tuckwell by Terry Lane, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One other famous alumni of the Scottish Orchestra is the wonderful Max Jaffa, who spent a short time as Leader of the Orchestra at the tender age of just 20. Max Jaffa with his Palm Court Trio and his long-running series of concerts from the Spa, Scarborough, firmly based in the light classics seemed to be the butt of many a joke in the Saturday night light entertainment world of the late sixties/seventies. Jaffa, was a firm favourite of conductor Landon Ronald, who took up the baton with the Scottish Orchestra several times, and was in charge of the orchestra when Max Jaffa spent his short time there. 

The list of conductors the orchestra had in its early years is a remarkable list but a list which demonstrates a lack of stability. In the period for 1893 to 1950, the orchestra had approximately 50 conductors. Since 1950 they have had about 10 conductors with guests and associates. It is this kind of permanence and stability of musical direction, and also of playing staff who have permanent full-time positions, which has given the orchestra the solid platform to build its enviable reputation.    

50 conductors in as many years, seems odd in a time when conductors can be associated with an orchestra for long periods, in some cases almost all their working lives. That can be said for some of the conductors who guided the fledgling Scottish Orchestra, John Barbirolli known for his building of the Halle Orchestra was an early visitor to the Scottish Orchestra.  In 1923, winding his way across Europe, and eventually settling in America, the great Serge Koussevitzky took charge of the Scottish Orchestra, just before his 25 year tenure, 1924 – 1949, of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Sir Adrian Boult took up the baton to lead the SO in 1923 but in his subsequent career was known for establishing the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1930 to 1950, when he then took charge of the London Philharmonic Orchestra whose star had been waning but which was re-established under the influence of Sir Adrian.  

As mentioned earlier, the most significant period of growth in the life of the Scottish National Orchestra was under the baton and leadership of Motherwell-born Sir Alexander Gibson. Gibson’s tenure of the orchestra is the longest of its history and in terms of tours, recordings and commissions of works by Scottish composers, was perhaps its most fruitful. In 1962, Gibson established an opera company for Scotland, Scottish Opera, and the SNO was its main orchestra from 1962 to 1980 when Scottish Opera formed its own orchestra.   

So, in that period the orchestra would undertake its usual season of concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow. With regular additional appearances in either Perth, Aberdeen or Dundee, they would also accompany opera performances throughout the year in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Add to that a schedule of recording sessions and rehearsals of new works being added to the repertoire. This was for some a very full-time job. 

There have been over the orchestra’s 130 year history, some notable firsts, visitors and events and we will quickly zip through some of them. In 1896, the orchestra took its first overseas tour, two weeks in the Netherlands. The composer, Richard Strauss conducted a programme of his music in 1902 which included Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration. In 1915, the orchestra accompanied the great Artur Rubinstein in performances of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. In 1947, the orchestra took part in the inaugural Edinburgh Festival and have been regular visitors ever since.  From 1960 to 1990, and started by Alexander Gibson, the Musica Nova festival featured new contemporary compositions. 

The orchestra accompanied one of the “three tenors” in 1992 when Luciano Pavarotti appeared at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. The RSNO have a huge catalogue of recording but in 1996 it under took a series of recording sessions with the composer Elmer Bernstein, making 3 CDs of his film scores for The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and my favourite, To Kill a Mockingbird.  

The Orchestra’s most regular home in its early years was the St Andrew’s Halls near St Georges Cross in Glasgow. This hall was built in 1877 but was unfortunately almost completely destroyed by fire in 1962. Its facade survives and this façade is now incorporated into an extension of the Mitchell Library and the Mitchell Theatre. The SNO moved to the City Hall in the Candleriggs in Glasgow but in 1990 it took up its new and purpose-built home in the Royal Concert Hall. In Edinburgh, almost all of its appearances have been at the Usher Hall. 

To round off this potted history, in 2018 after 127 years, the orchestra finally appointed its first woman conductor, Elim Chan.  

We are fortunate in the library to have an extensive programme collection. A collection which gives a good picture of the cultural life of Edinburgh through the past 200 or so years.  As mentioned, we have a collection of the programmes for the Glasgow Choral Union, we also have a very good collection of the Edinburgh appearances of the Scottish Orchestra, the Scottish National Orchestra and the RSNO. Our programme collection also includes other professional and amateur music-making in the capital.   

Books in the Music Library collection:
Playing for Scotland : the history of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra by Conrad Wilson  

The story of the Scottish Orchestra : an address given in the Glasgow Art Galleries on the 12 March 1945 by R.W. Grieg, Esq J.P.  

We have created a playlist, a short selection of music played by RSNO on Naxos where there is much much more to explore. 

Quincy Jones

If you use computers, and I am thinking you might as you are reading this, type the word “Quincy” into a Google search, and the top two results are Quincy M.E. and Quincy Jones. Quincy M.E. was a fantastic American medical mystery drama, which ran from 1976 to 1983, and starred the wonderful Jack Klugman, as the eponymous Quincy, who solved crimes using his forensic pathology skills. Jack Klugman appeared in all but one of the 148 episodes, which are still being shown today on some terrestrial channels.

Although I could spend lots of time talking about the many hours spent watching the wonderful Quincy M. E., our main subject today is Quincy Jones – band leader, record producer, film and TV producer, composer, arranger, actor, singer and activist.

Kingkongphoto & http://www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Quincy Delight Jones Jr was born on the 14 March 1933 to Sarah Frances, a bank officer and apartment complex manager and Quincy Delight Jones, a semi-pro baseball player and carpenter.

In an epilogue to the film documentary, simply entitled ‘Quincy’, co-written and co-directed in 2018 for Netflix by his daughter, Rashida Jones and the film maker Alan Hicks, his achievements are listed as “over 2,900 songs recorded; over 300 albums recorded; 51 film and television scores; over 1,000 original compositions; 79 Grammy nominations: 27 Grammy awards; 1 of 18 EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony); “Thriller” the best-selling album of all time; “We are the world”, the best-selling single of all time; 63 million dollars raised for famine relief in Africa and Seven Children.

Quincy Jones’ musical career started around the age of 20, touring with the Lionel Hampton Band, as a trumpet player and arranger. He had been studying at Seattle University on a scholarship where a young Clint Eastwood was one of his fellow students. Then he gained another scholarship to attend Berklee College, when the lure of the open road and the music touring circuit became more attractive than graduating.

For the next few years, Quincy played with the likes of the Dorsey Brothers on their TV show, and as musical director for Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1957, Quincy moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messian.

Years touring in Europe followed. These tours were critically acclaimed but unsuccessful financially, which prompted Quincy to say later in an interview,
“We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”

At that time Quincy had also been a music director for Barclay, a French record company which was a part of the larger Mercury records. Quincy eventually became Vice President of Mercury Records. It is from here that invitations and opportunities come thick and fast.

Listen on Naxos Jazz

TV soundtracks, film soundtracks, musical arrangements for a staggering list of performers including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Nana Mouskouri and Sarah Vaughan and solo recordings of songs like Mello Madness, I Heard That, Walking in Space and Gula Matari.

A collaboration with Lesley Gore produced four singles all of which sold over a million copies. Lesley Gore was a singer and actress, possibly better known to all for her portrayal of Pussycat, an associate of Catwoman, in Batman the TV Series.

On a production of the Wizard of OZ entitled The Wiz, where he was a music supervisor conductor and orchestrator, he met Michael Jackson. Initially unconvinced by Jackson as an actor, Jackson’s work ethic and talents grew on Quincy.

His first outing as a film producer was The Colour Purple which received 11 Oscar nominations and introduced the world to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

Quincy has worked with a great many stars from the world of music, but in his long career, two musical alliances stand out.

His long working relationship with Frank Sinatra lasted from 1958 until Sinatra’s death in 1998. In 1958, Princess Grace of Monaco asked Quincy to arrange a benefit concert at the Monaco Sporting Club, at which Frank sang. Quincy had a long association with Sinatra working with him often as an arranger, musical director and record producer, their last record being L.A. is my Lady, which was released in 1984. Quincy and Sinatra remained friends until the singer’s death in 1998. When Sinatra passed away, he bequeathed to Quincy Jones a ring, which Jones has described as his passport to Sicily.

Michael Jackson had worked with Quincy on The Wiz and had asked if Jones could recommend any producers. Quincy suggested a few names of which none suited Jackson, he then put his own name forward which brought together a partnership which would go on to create one of the greatest selling albums of all time: Thriller. Their first album together was Off the Wall, followed by Thriller, then Bad. Whatever we may think of certain individuals and the way they chose to live their lives and we now seem to have developed a way of rewriting our pasts to better suit our present. At the time of their collaboration, any alleged wrongdoing in Michael Jackson’s life was unproven and the subject conjecture, and that continues to be the case. Arguably, their collaboration could be said to be one of the most significant musical pairings of all time. It is, though, interesting that Quincy Jones despite professing his devastation on the death of Michael Jackson, had distanced himself from Jackson on a few occasions before his death. In 2013, four years after Jackson’s death, Jones was suing Michael Jackson’s estate for breeches of agreements, deprivation of royalties and wrong or missing credits.

KarleHorn, CC BY 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Quincy has been responsible for many film and TV soundtracks. Some of the titles which stand out are:- In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Anderson Tapes, The Wiz and The Color Purple.

Throughout his long life and career he has been known for his activism, philanthropy and his vocal support of the Democrats in America. Over the years he has endorsed and spoken for Presidential and Senatorial candidates, his timely endorsement of Hilary Clinton is mentioned, perhaps by Jones himself but it is often mentioned. He has appeared at rallies and played and organised fundraisers.

In an interview in 2018 in Rolling stone Magazine, Quincy had a lot to say about a lot of people. Some of it nice, a lot of it not, for which his family staged a mini-intervention, persuading him to make some retractions/apologies. On reading the apology, it is one of those, looks and sounds like an apology, but it’s not. What he did clearly regret was diluting his message in amongst his “wordvommit” and “badmouthing”, whatever he said about anyone, he did not want those words to distract from his message on racism, inequality, homophobia and poverty.

In the same year he says much the same thing in an interview on the Vulture, New York Magazines digital destination site and seemingly unapologetically. What is clear from both interviews is that he has lived a long life and has a lot to say about that life. He has met a lot of people, and has a lot to say about those people and doesn’t much care what people think of him. He has built a huge reputation on being the best and working with the best and he has a vast catalogue of work which has and will stand the test of time.

We have made a short playlist on Naxos Jazz including a track featuring Quincy Jones the Bandleader, the Trumpeter and the Composer:

Listen to a Quincy Jones playlist on Naxos Jazz

And a few tracks from the small selection on Naxos Classic, which all feature Quincy as a composer:

Discover Quincy Jones’ music on Naxos Music Library

P is for…. Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf

When I was 8, I remember having a violin lesson one afternoon at school. I remember the practice room, and my teacher, Mr Chambers. He was a tall man; long and elegant, sprucely dressed, and – my unrefined 8 year-old self knew only too well – he really didn’t like giving violin lessons to children. That afternoon though, he began to draw little pictures all over the top of the music I was practising. He drew the sun, animals, and a hill; and together, to go with that piece of music I was so badly playing, we made up a story. Something happened then, and I understood. Sound could capture all of these things: a running animal; the height of a hill, what high is, what running is; light and colour… Everything. Emotion – and it was a revelation to me.

“Prokofiev Peter And The Wolf – Haydn Toy Symphony -remastered- Peter Ustinov With Herbert Von Karajan And The Philharmonia Orchestra Emkay Remasters” by iClassicalCom is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In 1936, Natalia Sats, the spirited director of the Moscow Central Children’s Theatre, approached Sergei Prokofiev with a commission. She wanted a symphonic tale for children, a pedagogical work to introduce the different instruments of the orchestra. They sat and ate apples together, and thought about how a duck might move if it were sound – how it would quack; how a bird might fly (Natalia Sats suggested the flute to characterise the bird); how the cat might climb a tree. The original text was written by a young poet, but Prokofiev rejected it. It was too clichéd, he thought, and he took on the work himself.

Listen to Peter and the Wolf on Naxos Music Library

And so, amidst a flurry of ideas, in a four-day sprint, Prokofiev put his composition together. The following week he orchestrated it, and that was that. In the 1930s there was a demand for works for children, he wrote in his diaries, and so he got to work. Then he charged the theatre a fee of whatever they could afford. For him, it was a present: for the young pioneer audience in their red neckerchief ties and badges; and for his two sons. He shared an affinity with children, and of course, the piece has become an integral part of many childhoods, and many children’s understanding of music.

Peter (the string instruments) is our hero. He opens the gate to the meadow and walks on through. A clarinet (the cat) tries to catch a flute (the bird), and a bassoon (Peter’s grandfather) biffs Peter on the nose for wandering off to a place where there might be French horns (a wolf). The wolf arrives, huge and grey, the strings shimmer, and the brassy sounds grow big.

In 1936, a darkness was unravelling in Stalinist Russia. Prokofiev had just returned from years abroad in Paris and New York, but it was also the beginnings of the Moscow show trials against prominent old Bolshevik leaders, and Stalin’s Great Purge. The following year, in August 1937, Natalia Sats was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to 5 years in a Siberian work camp as the wife of a traitor of the motherland. Socialist realism was to be at the forefront of all art, and Prokofiev increasingly found himself currying favour with the regime, and towing party lines. Can Peter and the Wolf be read as an allegory? Is it also about the youth and the old? External threats, the fear and the danger beyond the gate and over in the meadow? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Interestingly, Peter and the Wolf has a different history in Russia than in the west. It’s vaguer there in a Russian memory of childhood. In the west, it took a different turn. Disney’s animation is certainly significant in its popularisation – I watched it on youtube for this blog, all 15 wonderful minutes of it. Prokofiev visited Los Angeles in 1938 and met Walt Disney there, “le papa de Mickey Mouse”, he called him in a letter to his sons, and initially Walt Disney thought the piece might be a good fit for Fantasia. But World War II arrived, and with all that that entailed Peter and the Wolf wasn’t released until 1946 as part of the film medley, Make Music Mine, with Sterling Holloway as its narrator. In Disney’s version, each character is given a name – there is Ivan the cat, Sasha the bird, Sonia the duck – and in the end, Sonia the duck isn’t eaten after all.

There is also a more recent stop-motion animation that the animator Suzie Templeton made in the Polish Se-ma-for studios in Łódź in 2006. It won several awards, including an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2008. I’ve hunted around as to where to watch it, and Apple TV have it, although there is a rental cost of £1.49. Well worth it though, I think. In an interview for (an excellent) Archive on 4 on Peter and the Wolf, Suzie Templeton speaks of how the first thing she did was draw a picture of Peter, and how it turned out to be a picture of a troubled boy. She also wanted him to be a hero, and talks of how catching a wild animal now means a very different thing to catching a wild animal in 1930s Russia. It’s not such a heroic thing to do.

Listen to Peter and the Wolf with David Bowie narrating on Naxos Music Library

One last thing I’d like to mention is the long sparkly line of celebrity narrators. Everyone who’s anyone seems to have narrated Peter and the Wolf. The narration sits in some deep warm place from childhood. My favourite is David Bowie’s but that’s only because that’s the version I’ve heard most. Dig about, there are, of course, a lot. Our music streaming service Naxos has many Prokofien treats, as has Medici TV.

O is for….

H-h-h-hoff-nOrchistra!

Gerard Hoffnung’s Symphony Orchestra

Plinkity-plink, la-la-la-laaaah: BANG!

Ta-dum-diddledee
            Fiddle-diddledee:     Hooooot!
ta ra-ra-ra-raaaaaaaaaa –
SQUEAK!

And a ticka-plink, bang! A-dum-jingle-tam.
Pa-rum-pa-pa-rum     pa-pom-pee-pee-pum    da-dom-dee-dee-dum     and a
clonk

ping-a-ling

Plop.

What’s not just perfect about Gerard Hoffnung’s musical drawings? They were published as a series of little books from the early 1950s. Pocket-sized, if you have a big pocket, each book is a different colour although the basic cover design is the same. They were first published by Dennis Dobson of Dobson Books in London, and they’ve remained bestsellers ever since. We have them in the Art and Design Library, sitting on the shelves in their sweet wrappers alongside various other books, including a lovely sunny biography, Hoffnung, written by his wife, Annetta, and a memorial anthology, O Rare Hoffnung, full of anecdotes and reminiscences.

In the preface to his biography, Annetta Hoffnung writes,
“His secret, I am convinced, was his enormous humanity and warmth; after all, only these qualities can arouse reciprocal feelings of trust, enthusiasm and laughter.”

His drawings are like a bag of wriggling tadpoles, teeming, exuberant, and about to burst with the love of it all. And of music especially. He was a lover of music, and a wonderful listener. His ability to observe was fantastic: he drew musicians and their instruments, musicians playing their instruments; and all the bumps and crashes in between. His flair was for visualising sound – and noise – through gesture and shape. Silly gestures, ridiculous shapes.

If the music made by a grand piano were a person, how would it look, and how would it behave? Well, says Gerard Hoffnung, she would be dressed in a long evening gown, with her puffs and powders and perfumes beside her; a triptych mirror in front of her where the music would normally rest, and drawers full of trinkets toppling over the keyboard. Of course she would. There’s so much expansiveness, and space, and elegant finesse to a grand piano, and choosing the simile of a ladies’ boudoir is just right. We’ve always known somehow that a boudoir perfectly resembles a grand piano – we had never thought about it, but now that we see it, we recognise it straight away. Tee hee. We’re tickled, his drawings tickle us, in a domestic, comfortable, cheery sort of way.

Other favourites – the animal ones… He draws the castanets’ player with a napkin around his neck and a plate of oysters on his lap, and the Cor Anglais player lays an egg… He’s so good with movement too. Visually, a trombone is all about the slide, and so he shows the trombone player sitting face on as he pushes the slide right out of the middle of the page. The bell of the instrument sits beside the trombonist’s ear – which is corked – and so, with the slide still in our stomach, the rest of us falls down the brassy ear canal of the trombone. Do google these if you can, or borrow the book, because they’re so fun, and a description really isn’t the same as a joke. 

The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra was published in 1955. After Gerard Hoffnung died, the animator duo, John Halas and Joy Batchelor, worked with the BBC on a series of cartoons called Tales from Hoffnung which you can watch on Youtube. It includes his musical drawings and also his collection Birds, Bees, and Storks, narrated by Peter Sellers. Gerard Hoffnung’s wife, Annetta, writes of her reservations for the project. Inevitably lifting an artist’s work off the page and altering its character is a tricky thing to do (and she also writes of an oversight in the contract giving the Hoffnung estate very little gain from it) – but I definitely have a weakness for the animations…

Gerard Hoffnung died extremely young, at 34, from a cerebral haemorrhage, but those 34 years he filled with so many things. As well as an artist, he was a keen player of instruments, especially the tuba. There are some cracking pictures in the Hoffnung biography of him playing it, and a great photograph of him and Annetta in the garden with an alphorn (a very very long wooden alpine horn). There were always instruments to pick up around their Hampstead house. Gerard Hoffnung was a well-known BBC figure, a raconteur, and a lover of jokes. In 1956 he organised the first of his Hoffnung Festivals, which showcased both clowning and classical music. And then there was the side of him that was drawn to Quakerism and was passionate about many political issues – prison reform in particular.

There are various recordings available on Soundcloud of interviews and broadcasting excerpts to explore. You can also listen to him on Desert Island Discs. Learn more about Gerard Hoffnung on his official website. And, on the library’s streaming service, Naxos, is a compilation recording of his Hoffnung Music Festivals.

Nixon in China

From the Music and Art and Design Team, our A – Z alphabet of music brings us to N for Nixon, ex-President Richard Nixon and his visit to China, events which inspired one of the great, late 20th century operas.

Almost 50 years ago in February 1972, Richard Milhouse Nixon, became the first US president to visit mainland China whilst in Office. The party included, Nixon, the 37th President of the United States of America, his wife, the First Lady, Patricia Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Foreign Secretary, White House Officials and press people including a large contingent from television news.

Almost 35 years ago the creative team of composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars brought the tale of Nixon’s visit to China to the operatic stage. ‘Nixon in China’ was premiered at Houston Grand Opera on 22 October 1987.

The large White House/press group flew, via Hawaii, Guam, then to Shanghai and from there, arrived in Beijing, for an unprecedented and historic visit. Awaiting the President’s party was a muted reception made up of the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and the top table of officials for the CCP Chinese Communist Party, whilst the ailing Chairman of the CCP, Mao Zedong, and his wife, Jiang Qing, waited at home.

Nixon had seen an opportunity to create a relationship with China much earlier than the actual 1972 state visit and set in motion actions which would bring about this visit. In the years preceding his election he wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, an American magazine of international relations and US foreign policy. In the article written in October 1967, Nixon says:
“There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”
Nixon, with the world, watched a deteriorating situation of border skirmishes and undeclared military conflicts between Russia and China, and began to make overtures to the Chinese leadership, with Kissinger as a secret go-between.

In 1952, when Nixon joined the Eisenhower ticket to become the nation’s 36th Vice President, it was his strong anti-communist stand that attracted him to Eisenhower and the electorate. Twenty years, a very long time politically later, Nixon, still no great admirer of communism saw the need to make the first move and reach out to quell a failing situation, and also, securing a legacy of becoming the first US president to visit mainland China whilst in office.

This could have been one of Nixon’s greatest achievements if his presidency hadn’t been tainted and brought to a full stop by the Watergate Scandal – the scandal which all scandals are now named, every scandal or political wrongdoing has “gate” added to the end of its name to signify the scale of its treachery.

The Nixons disembark from Air Force One upon their arrival in China, 1972
Ollie Atkins, White House Photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Nixons et al, arrived in the then Peking, Beijing Airport to a muted reception from the country’s leadership. The Nixons were greeted at the airport by the country’s premier Zhou Enlai.

Within hours of their arrival and not part of their scheduled itinerary, they were invited to meet with the Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Unbeknownst to all of the American party, Mao had been hospitalised in the weeks prior to Nixon’s visit but felt well enough to meet with the President. This short, hour-long meeting, hastily arranged by Mao, happened without the knowledge of most of the American delegation. Mao’s people phoned Nixon at his guest house and asked him to come and meet with Mao. Nixon threw on his coat and with Kissinger and one security person, left for what was to be their only meeting.

President Richard Nixon Shaking Hands with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, 21/2/1972
Series: Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 – 8/9/1974 Collection: White House Photo Office Collection (Nixon Administration), 1/20/1969 – 8/9/1974, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the week that followed, Nixon met with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese officials nine times, and at the end of their visit, they issued the Shanghai Joint Communique which outlined their political, social and ideological differences but stated their shared principals of non-aggression, non-interference, equality and peaceful co-existence. Their packed trip saw the Nixons and the Americans visit Beijing Zoo and Beijing Hotel. They attended The Great Hall of the People to see a performance of “The Red Detachment of Women”. Then to Evergreen Peoples Commune, Spirit Way – the entrance to Mings Tomb, a section of the Great Wall and the Capital Gymnasium to see a display of Acrobatics and Table Tennis. Nixon and the White House press department saw the importance of the immediacy of television news and events from China being beamed back into the living rooms of the American electorate and around the world, as quickly as possible. The week the Nixons spent in China was widely felt to be a great success and every leader of America since Nixon has visited China during their Presidency.

Of the six main players in the Nixons’ visit, only Henry Kissinger is still alive, time will tell whether he will, on the 50th anniversary of this momentous trip, make any comment. The Nixons died within months of each other in 93/94. Zhou Enlai was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1972, but his diagnosis was kept from him by Mao, and treatment not offered till it was too late. Zhou Enlai died early in 1976, followed later in the year by the ailing Mao, whose illnesses had been hidden from his people. Mao’s widow spent a lot of the 80s in prison. She was released to hospital for treatment for throat cancer, but took her own life in 1991, leaving a suicide note which decried the new regime, and exalted her husband and the revolution.

The Nixon in China three act opera centres around some of the events of the trip but diverts into fictionalised accounts of the viewpoints, hopes, dreams and reflections of the protagonists in the story.

Act 1 – The President’s plane, the Spirit of ‘76 appearing on stage is one of the non-musical highlights of this opera, The opera opens with this and the arrival in China of the American party then they are all greeted by Zhou Enlai with speeches and lots of handshaking, Nixon meets with the enigmatic and philosophical Chairman Mao and then, at a Grand Banquet toasts are drunk long into the evening.

Act 2 – Follows the First Lady’s trips around Peking (Beijing), to the Great Hall of the People, The Evergreen Peoples Commune and a Glass Factory.

Act 3 – The last evening in Peking, all the pomp and circumstance have disappeared and the leading players, The Maos, the Nixons and Zhou Enlai in their separate bedrooms, discuss past lives. Mao and his wife dance, Richard and Pat Nixon discuss the early part of their marriage during the Second World War and Zhou on his own seems to sum up the Opera asking whether anything they did was good.

‘Life imitates art’ or ‘artistic licence’ are phrases bandied about when one discusses an opera, play or other artistic endeavour which places real events on the stage or screen. Max Frankel travelled with and reported on the 1972 trip to China and writes in an article entitled, ‘A Witness Sees History Restaged and Rewritten’ published in the New York Times on 10 Febrary 2011, about his experience of comparing the actual trip and people involved with what appears in the opera. Of his remembrances, it is maybe Kissinger who comes off worst in real life and in the opera and in Frankel’s article. Frankel says Kissinger is still living “and surely sulking” at his treatment as a lecherous landlord in the performance of the ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ at the Great Hall of the People. Most of the main players fair better on the stage in Adams/Goodmans/Sellers’s opera than in Frankel’s article.

Nixon described by Frankel as devious is seen by Adams as perhaps a heroic dreamer. Mao is seen full of pithy impenetrable maxims repeated verbatim by his secretaries. History gives him a much darker despotic truth which Frankel suggests, to millions of Chinese, Mao has a lot to answer for and Madame Mao is called vicious in her domination of the cultural revolution. The Adams/Goodmans/Sellers rose tinted, plotless, portrayal of the events of 1972, is far from Frankel’s reported trip and the truth of 1970s China.

Nixon in China was Adams first opera, and was the first of two Operas by this artistic team of composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars. The second was the controversial Death of Klinghoffer. Arguably two very important late 20th century operas, not without controversy, either because of their subject matter or their main characters and how the artistic team chose to represent those people.

The team of Goodman, Adams and Sellars started work on a third collaboration, Doctor Atomic, but Goodman left the project after a year and Sellars took over as Librettist.

The controversy of The Death of Klinghoffer effectively silenced Goodmans’ writing as librettist and poet. In her words, she became uncommissionable, saying almost the same for her collaborator John Adams, if his next work hadn’t been a violin concerto with no words, he would have been shut down.

Goodman, a convert to Christianity in 1989, was ordained as an Anglican Priest in 2001 and now ministers to a congregation of approx. 6000 in Cambridgeshire, England. Goodman studied English and American Literature at Harvard and Girton College, Cambridge, she also received a Master of Divinity Degree from Boston University School of Theology.

Sellars and Adams continue to work together most recently in 2017 on The Girls of the Golden West. A production inspired when Sellars was directing a production of the Puccini opera – La fanciulli del west.

One of my favourite parts of this opera is not actually from the opera. A puzzling thing to say. The Chairman Dances, a foxtrot for orchestra, is how I first became aware of the music of John Adams and the opera, Nixon in China. Adams, describes this work, commissioned for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, as outtakes from the Act 3 of Nixon in China which he was working on at the time. It is full of dance and dancelike music and is playful, restful and joyous. If it had stayed in the opera, it would, I think, have been a welcome interlude.

We have created playlists on Naxos Music Library containing the full opera, Nixon in China and The Chairman Dances and other short Adams works.

John Adams playlists on Naxos Music Library – listen online or download

Medici.TV is another of our music streaming services and it has a wealth of concerts, documentaries, operas, ballets, recitals and masterclasses to watch. Explore Medici.TV for free with your library membership and discover a concert of John Adams works conducted by John Adams and a link to a selection of operas directed by Peter Sellers.

Mouse Music: Mickey Mouse and Fantasia

“Night on Bald Mountain concept art by Kay Nielsen for Fantasia (1940)” 
by gameraboy is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Walt Disney’s Fantasia – beautiful, deft and bold – was made in 1940, at a time, as now, when media platforms and technology were shifting fast. Sound was a big thing, and to make a feature-length animation as ambitious as Fantasia was new. No Disney empire existed yet (no sequels); this film was number three. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had been released at the end of 1937 to critical acclaim and Walt Disney was feeling triumphant. 

Here is a link to the original trailer and to the libraries’ music streaming service, Naxos, to wet behind those childhood ears and give the feeling that everything is alright with the world.

The story goes that Walt Disney happened to meet the (very famous) conductor Leopold Stokowski in an L.A. restaurant, Chasen’s. He’d been working on a Mickey Mouse short, originally as part of his Silly Symphonies series – short films that were animated to accompany pieces of music (see: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf!”) – this Silly Symphony gave Disney its first hit song, and here’s the Wikipedia list of all 75). But production costs had soared for the Mickey short, they were 3 or 4 times higher than the usual Silly Symphony, and the decision was made to expand the project into a longer film to make the money back. 

Classical music was to be at the heart of it, and the animation was to play a secondary role. “I would love to conduct that for you”, says Stokowski over dinner, and The Concert Feature as it was known as, began to take shape. Together, Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski brought onboard another famous name, the composer and music critic, Deems Taylor, who was to act as master of ceremonies. He would introduce each piece and tie the film together. They wanted to democratise classical music; Disney wanted to bring it to the people who, like him, “had walked out on this kind of stuff”. Which has always been the nub of the film; for some, this democratisation has always gone that bit too far. 

Fantasia exists in 8 segments, seven of which were performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Segment number one is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and the animation is a colourful, semi-abstract response. Late in 1938, Walt Disney hired the filmmaker and painter, Oskar Fischinger. Fischinger steered the way for the segment, but ultimately he left without credit as his designs were deemed too abstract for a mass audience. You can watch some of Oskar Fischinger’s work on Vimeo and have a play on a google doodle to honour his 117th birthday. For the final version, the Disney studios introduced more representational components, dancing lines become the tips of violin bows for example; and the pull of Walt Disney the storyteller prevails. 

Next comes Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, where the Disney artists took natural forms instead of ballerinas as their protagonists. They drew mushrooms and fish, thistles and flowers – and made them into the most graceful of dancers. The movement is so perfect; each hand-drawn cell, each 1/24th of a second, so supple and nimble and assured. 

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the Mickey Mouse segment and the original Silly Symphony short. It’s set to Paul Dukas’ 1897 composition of the same name. Big expressionist shadows tower up the walls as Mickey, the sorcerer’s apprentice, casts a spell on a broom to make it do his bidding. He wants it to fill a cauldron with buckets of water, but the brooms keep on multiplying and the cauldron overflows and Mickey cannot put a stop to it… The story is based on a Goethe poem, Der Zauberlehrling, published in 1797 (which each of the 700 staff members were given a copy of). In early Mickey Mouse designs, Mickey is made up of circles, but for Fantasia he underwent a redesign. The animator Fred Moore worked on him in particular: he modelled his body into more of a pear shape; he enlarged his head as a child’s is enlarged; and he altered the pupils in his eyes – all to give him a greater expressive range. 

Following Mickey, comes Igor Stravinksky’s The Rite of Spring. Originally Stravinsky wrote the piece for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes company in 1913 – Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed it, and Nicholas Roerich invented the costumes and stage designs (we hold a gem of a book on the Ballet Russes in the Art and Design Library, many others on the subject too, but this one really is fantastic). It was to be about the coming of spring, and old Russian rituals – a young girl is chosen to be sacrificed and dances herself to death – so it’s not light or pretty. In Fantasia Walt Disney decided the piece would be perfect to tell the story of the dinosaurs, and prehistoric life on earth, and his dinosaurs are not light or pretty either. They are heavy, weighty creatures. He brought iguanas and a baby alligator to the studios for the animators to draw from. They consulted renowned palaeontologist, Barnum Brown; biologist, Julian Huxley; the astronomer, Edwin Hubble – and they drew the sky from the Mount Wilson Observatory. There is also, undeniably the influence of Winsor McKay of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and his dinosaur, Gertie. The link takes you to a page where you can watch her – and in the history of animation, Gertie the dinosaur is early, her reputation as weighty as her feet. 

In Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 in F Major, Opus 68 – his Pastoral Symphony – horses fly, and centaurs, fauns and unicorns run and dance. It is also the section where, in the first showings of the film before its rightful omission, a black child centaur polishes the hooves of a white centaurette, Sunflower, as she was known. 

After the Pastoral comes Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours. It is the finale in the opera La Gioconda and is often performed as a ballet- the joke here is in the dancing, as the ballerinas are elephants and alligators of course, then ostriches and hippos. The animators studied at Griffith Park Zoo in L.A.; they also studied famous ballerinas and actresses, and how their different bodies, with their different weights, might move. The lead ostrich – Madmoiselle Upanova – is based on the Russian ballerina, Irina Baronova. The German artist and illustrator, Heinrich Kley, inspired the elephants and alligators – and the cartoonist T.S. Sullivant was the  influence behind the hippos and ostriches… Walt Disney’s studios had a reputation for meticulous research and drawing. 

And lastly, my favourite, Night on Bald Mountain by the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky, and Franz Schubert’s, Ave Maria. Directed by Wilfred Jackson with Vladimir Tytla as the lead animator, the Slavic god of bad fate, Chernabog, writhes above a swirling witches’ sabbath. The Danish artist and illustrator, Kay Nielsen, worked on much of the concept design for this segment, and the length of line, the trees, the arches, and the catharsis in the candlelit procession – all distinctively bear his hand. It took six full days and nights to film the Ave Maria: nine men filmed one long take over the full 154 foot length of the studio sound stage – using a horizontal multi-plane camera….

In terms of its sound production Fantasia was innovative and expensive. Coined “Fantasound”, the wizardly technicians developed a new surround sound system with RCA, a large American electronics company. Walt Disney had plans for a 1940’s 3D cinema experience too, a wide-screen finale and incense… but these plans were laid to rest. In reality, although Fantasia was well-received, World War Two was also being fought, and the European market for the film was uncertain. A roadshow release (where the film would be shown in chosen theatres and chosen cities) had been decided upon, and the intricacies of installing all its technical wonders made for a costly and complicated endeavour. Fantasia sits out on a limb in the Disney canon perhaps, but it has endured, and is also, undeniably, very wonderful and deeply loved.  

I’ve embedded inks to the libraries’ music streaming service, Naxos, and to the Art and Design Library in the text. Please do explore!

‘L’ is for lullabies

Douglas and Jen from the Music and Art & Design Libraries look at lullabies…

What is a lullaby? The simplest definition of a lullaby would be, a soothing song to lull a baby to sleep, they often have a 6/8 metre and are confined to a range of about five notes.  

A better question might be, what does a lullaby do, and to answer would perhaps take longer than we have here. The lullaby creates an intimate bond between caregiver and child, it creates an illusion of safety which perhaps, just over the threshold in the real world, may for some children not exist, but for those few moments between wakefulness and the land of dreams, they are completely safe in the arms of the one they love, and the lullaby is an anchor which will always have that calming effect. So much so, that in moments of fretfulness a child can be calmed by the singing of their lullaby. Hannah Reyes Morales in her 2020 article, ‘What the lullabies we sing to our children reveal about us’ in the National Geographic recounts the stories and experiences of parents, mother, fathers and caregivers, and the lullabies they sing and the effectiveness of those lullabies in war-torn countries, in times of uncertainty and in times of Covid.   

The lullabies sung can be well known, like ‘You are my Sunshine’ or ‘Que sera sera’, the Doris Day hit from the film, The Man Who Knew Too Much; ‘Morningtown Ride’, ‘Mockingbird’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ – it is sometimes a bit strange, what becomes a child’s personal favourite. They can be made up and unique to the one it is being sung to; they can be a family song handed down from parent to child then on through the generations. All cultures and countries round the world have lullabies. In some African cultures it is believed that babies bring the lullabies to the mother before they are born.  

Lullabies are like secrets. To hear one not directed at you, and not sung by you, is like listening in on a daydream. 
Rivka Galchen New York Times 2015 

The safety created by the simple act of singing, a perhaps, simple song, lasts for years and is proven to be beneficial not just for the infant but also for the caregiver. The songs are interesting enough to catch the attention of the infant but not too interesting to keep them awake, which is a good thing because superficially some lullabies are dark, and have a subject matter which if interrogated could keep one awake for hours.  

Rock a bye baby
On the tree top,  
When the wind blows  
The cradle will rock  
When the bough breaks  
The cradle will fall  
And down will come baby  
Cradle and all.  

This is one which we all might know. It relates to, depending on which history you read, the Kenyon Family, who lived in a huge yew tree and put their eight children in a hollowed-out cradle on its branches. There are also links with this lullaby to the House of Stuart and the offspring of James II of England, who had an infant smuggled into the birthing room, providing an heir, when he didn’t or couldn’t. The rhyme is dark and scary and the sort of thing to keep a child awake rather than lulling them to sleep. There is a more modern version with a last verse which finishes with the line, “Mother is near”. Perhaps that comfort might come a little too late for some little ones; this was a particular problem song for my daughter, who cried whenever it was sung.  

One of the earliest recorded examples of lullabies is on an (approximately) 4000 year old Babylonian tablet, written in Cuneiform and recently translated. Again, it is quite a dark text and could keep the feint heart from its slumbers. In its lyrics a god is woken by a baby and vice versa and each seem to cry at the other until they are calmed by wine. A questionable habit of giving a fretting child some alcohol to calm it.  

So, for many thousands of years and in all cultures around the world, parents have swaddled their beloved and most precious little ones with simple songs which calm and reassure. The songs fill the infant with a sense of a place which is warm and safe. This tradition continues with the Lullaby Project from the Carnegie Hall in New York, which pairs emerging composers and musicians, with soon to be mothers, tasked with writing their own lullaby for their own child. The scheme is now being run in Britain by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Our Music and Art & Design departments are twinned, and Jen has added a few thoughts on the lullaby from a visual perspective:

Throughout art college I didn’t know about the paintings of Paula Modersohn-Becker, but since having a child last year, I’ve thought of them a lot. Through pregnancy too. Born in 1976, her paintings are important in the history of early expressionism. To me, her work sings – of her feelings towards being a mother, about having a child and children; and existing in a domestic interior. Her paintings say so much and I’ve found it helps – when nights are broken, and the lullabies just do not work – to think of them.

I’ve singled out two pieces. The first was painted in 1906 and shows a mother lying down as she breastfeeds her child. It makes me think of deep lulling sleep, and the more peaceful times of day (night or early morning…). It really was unusual at this point to paint the female nude as she does, and to convey all that she does: about the relationship between a mother and her child, and how they rest together. 

Reclining Mother and Child by Paula Modersohn-Becker
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The second painting I’ve included is a self-portrait Paula Modersohn-Becker painted on her 30th birthday, which by calculations means she wasn’t actually pregnant (as far as we know) at the time – her child, Mathilde, was born in November 1907. Interesting. I find it so gentle and tender. The greatest lullaby, as the baby sleeps tucked up there in the womb. 

Selfportrait at 6th wedding anniversary
Paula Modersohn-Becker,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We’ve books in the Art and Design library, and Paula Modersohn-Becker also wrote a lot, despite her very early death (at 31, 19 days after Mathilde was born), in letters and journals. We hold these too. Our collection service is running, and we’re hoping to open the department very soon so please do explore. 

Naxos
It is normally at this point we would put in a list of suggested listening on our music streaming services but that is difficult. As we have mentioned, lullabies are a personal choice with many memories and our list may not be everyone’s list.  

If you enter the word, ‘lullaby’, in the search in both of our streaming sites you get lots of results. Perhaps you won’t get Doris Day, or a rendition of “You are my Sunshine” but there will be lots of results. On Naxos Jazz there are a lot of recordings of the ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ or ‘The Lullaby of Broadway’ but there are much, much more, and likewise at Naxos Classical, Brahms’ Lullaby crops up a lot but so do lullabies by Gershwin, Whitacre and Leroy Anderson. 

Oliver Knussen

Oliver Knussen the composer/conductor died aged 62 in 2018. Knussen was a much sought-after conductor and interpreter of the 20th century repertoire, especially of the works of Benjamin Britten. As a composer, he was perhaps best known for his work with the writer and artist Maurice Sendak, producing two operas based on Sendak’s books, ‘Where the wild things are’, and ‘Higglety Pigglety Pop!’ 

Where the wild things are – Jim Henson studios
by JeffChristiansen from United States, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Knussen lived most of his adult life in London or in his beloved Snape in Suffolk. It might therefore be wrong of us to try and claim one of the world’s foremost composer/conductors as a Scot, but Oliver Knussen was born in Glasgow, to Jane Alexander and Stuart Knussen, so Scottish he was. 

Oliver Knussen
17.IX – Orchestra Mozart, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Knussen, it is said by those who knew him, would have scoffed at the idea of him being a child prodigy, but he did start to write music from the age of six, and had his first symphony played by the LSO, London Symphony Orchestra, at the age of fifteen, a performance which he conducted himself.  

Having a father, Stuart Knussen, as Principal Double Bassist with the LSO, gave the young Knussen remarkable access and insight in to the workings of the symphony orchestra. The first performance of this commissioned, youthful, 1st symphony was to have been by the LSO’s principal conductor Istvan Kertesz, due to his illness, the baton was taken up by the 15-year-old Knussen. The composer has since withdrawn this symphony from his list of works. 

Knussen’s father Stuart, also played for the English Opera Group and the English Chamber Orchestra, so was involved in first and early performances of the works of Benjamin Britten. In an article in the Guardian in 2013 entitled Oliver Knussen: ‘Britten pointed me on the right path in the simplest, kindest way’, Knussen recounts how he met and was encouraged by the great English composer. In one amusing anecdote, Britten asked who Knussen’s composition teacher was, to which Knussen replied “John Lambert, who was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger”. At this, Knussen says that Britten didn’t say anything rude about Boulanger, which seemingly he normally did. 

Benjamin Britten
by Szalay Zoltán, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Teacher and composer Julien Anderson said of Knussen’s 2nd Symphony, written and performed in 1970/71, with this work, “Oliver Knussen’s compositional personality abruptly appeared fully formed”. A phrase, more than once attached to descriptions of Knussen’s works, is, its crystalline concision, complexity and richness. Knussen was not a prolific composer, Thomas Ades, the British Composer, when writing in tribute of Oliver Knussen said “Olly Knussen taught me that a work takes as long as it takes. He worked only to his own timescale and it was like a diamond forming”. His output then was periodic and sometimes short. He seemed to work on a principal, why take ten minutes to say something when you can say it in less, sometimes much less. A modernist expressionist composer, his works are difficult but very approachable. Knussen was a fiercely intelligent council to his colleagues, friends, and fellow composers, with a formidable knowledge of 20th and 21st century music and music-makers. His “crystalline concision” as a composer was mentioned earlier, but this attention to detail and precision was also expected as a conductor of his orchestras. His ability to hear detail is mentioned by many. Hearing things that he didn’t want to in the fore of a recording, or the opposite, not hearing a detail he felt should stand out. Knussen’s extraordinary ear/hearing is often mentioned and made him an exacting musician to work with.  

Knussen married Sue Freedland in 1972. Before her marriage to Knussen she had been a freelance horn player, and worked as assistant to Leonard Bernstein, preparing the Unanswered Question Lectures, after coming to Britain, Sue worked for both the BBC and Channel Four as a Music Producer. The couple had unfortunately separated in the period before her untimely death at the age of 53 in 2003. Knussen completed his Requiem: Songs for Sue in 2006, and described the work concisely: ‘It’s not a huge work… but it’s a big piece emotionally’. 

Although not prolific Knussen has a formidable list of works including two operas, three symphonies, many chamber works for small groups in many differing formations. His recorded output is extensive, not only of his own work, but that of others, and a long list of teaching, conducting and performance appointments, this is just a few in no order at all – 

Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival 1983 – 1998
Head of Contemporary Music at The Tanglewood Music Centre 1986 – 1993
Principal Guest Conductor Hague Residence Orchestra 1993 – 1997 
Musical Director of the London Sinfonietta 1998 – 2002 
Artist-in-Association BBC Symphony Orchestra 2009 – 2014 
Knussen co-founded the composition course at the Britten Pears School of Music in 1992
In 2014 Knussen was the inaugural Richard Rodney Bennet Professor of Music in the Royal Academy of Music, School of Composition and Contempory Music. 

We have created three short playlists containing some examples of Knussen’s Opera and Orchestral Work, and a small selection of Knussen as conductor. There are many more at edinburghcitylib.naxosmusiclibrary.com

Oliver Knussen playlists on Naxos Music Library

 

J is for Jazz

We’ve reached J in our Musical Alphabet and what could be better than to turn our attention to jazz! Jazz music has grown into such a huge, diverse genre, having stemmed from its roots in ragtime and blues and originating over 100 years ago in the African-American communities of New Orleans. With such a wealth of music to explore, some of our colleagues share a few of their favourites and recommendations:

Bronwen from the Art & Design and Music team recommends Abudullah Ibrahim’s work:
I was lucky enough to see Abdullah Ibrahim performing at the Queen’s Hall in the 1990s. I love the vibrancy of the music from his native South Africa which Abdullah Ibrahim fuses with influences from the American jazz music of New Orleans and the music of Thelonius Monk and Duke Ellington. Pianist and composer, Ibrahim’s music is calming and meditative – I describe it as rolling round and round as it improvises and switches between tempos with ease.

Naxos Jazz has much to choose from – I think my favourite piece is Soweto which is on the Cape Town Revisited album. 

Eamonn from the Digital Team enjoys Water from Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane’s 1973 album The Elements:

Spiritually minded cosmic jazz from Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane, in a rare role as a side musician. 

I’m a big fan of Alice Coltrane and her impact can be felt throughout this record. I’m also a sucker for minimalist drone music like Tony Conrad’s Outside the Dream Syndicate and the hillbilly minimalism of Henry Flynt, so this record really appeals to me. 

The music is an unusual assemblage of hypnotic drones, desert funk and open-ended blowing, with a heavy emphasis on sounds and scales from North Africa, the Middle East and India. 

Water, in particular is stunning – heavily processed in the studio, the live interplay is treated and spliced with all manner of electronic dubwise effects. No-holds-barred World Music before the term was used (and subsequently over-used).

Fumiko, who’s normally based at Morningside Library but has been working with the Central team for the past few months, is a huge jazz fan and wants to share this love with you!

Vocal

Ella Fitzgerald: Studio Recorded Duets (with Louis Armstrong)

Ella Fitzgerald: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
“One of my favourite songs.”

Nina Simone: Triple Best of

Nina Simone: Little Girl Blue

Nina Simone: The Amazing Nina Simone
“She has a strong and determined voice. She also plays the piano.”

Etta Jones: Don’t Go To Strangers

Etta Jones: From The Heart

Saxophone

David Murray: Black Saint Quartet: Live in Berlin
“I have this signed CD!”

Charlie Parker: Charlie Parker Collection (1945-1947)

Joshua Redman Quartet: RoundAgain

Bill Evans Trio / Stan Getz: But Beautiful

Jazz piano

Keith Jarrett: Somewhere Before – The Keith Jarrett Anthology (The Atlantic Years) (1968-1975)

Bill Evans Trio: Waltz For Debby

Herbie Hancock: Hancock Island (The Music of Herbie Hancock)

Vijay Iyer Trio: Historicity

Iain from the Edinburgh & Scottish and Reference team shares a mixture of old and new suggestions with Andrew Wasylyk and Charles Mingus:

For a modern jazz track I would pick Last Sunbeams of Childhood by Andrew Wasylyk. The Dundee based flautist who releases his stuff on Edinburgh record label ‘Athens of the North’. It’s not on Naxos but can be found on bandcamp.

For something more traditional I would choose Charles Mingus – Goodbye Pork Pie Hat from my favourite jazz album ever Mingus Ah Um from 1959 available via Naxos.

Janette from the Digital Team loves to listen to The Manhattan Transfer:

My pick of Jazz artists would be The Manhattan Transfer. Most people will know them from Chanson D’Amour which was a big hit for them in the mid 70s. The tracks I have picked are from three of The Transfer’s albums available on Naxos Jazz. 

You Can Depend on Me – Louis Armstrong first recorded this in 1931 but this sounds very different, their four part harmonies and solos giving another slant to the song. From the self titled album, The Manhattan Transfer.

Until I Met You (Corner Pocket) – Count Basie made a well known recording of this on his 1957 album April in Paris and here the group add vocals and brings it to life superbly.  From the album Mecca for Moderns.

Birdland – originally on the album Extensions but featured on The Very Best of on Naxos. The song gives celebration to the famous New York Jazz club Birdland.  A remake of the Weather Report song, again The Transfer added vocals and is regarded the signature tune of the group. 

Jeanette from the Art & Design and Music team dances along to Billie Holiday:

Billie Holiday has so many wonderful songs but Them There Eyes is such a joy to listen to. It’s one I go back to again and again. Holiday has several different recordings of this song, my favourite being the 1949 recording with Sy Oliver and his Orchestra. It has a big swing sound, is upbeat and catchy and has her voice weaving in and out of the trumpets. The song builds and has a fabulous call and response part between her and the band. Great to play whilst cooking the tea after a tiring day at work. Be prepared to kick off your shoes and transform your kitchen into a dancefloor!

Jen from the Art & Design and Music team is a great fan of Nina Simone:

I just love Nina Simone… her voice, her piano-work; it gets me every time. Feeling Good is a firm favourite, especially with coffee in the morning, but having a look through Naxos Jazz I’ve just discovered a lovely version of Hush Little Baby I never knew she did that I’m excited to play my hooligan toddler – with the hope I can soften his soul a bit. And another one I want to play him is It Don’t Mean a Thing; written by Duke Ellington, the lyrics by Irving Mills; doo-wah doo-wah oh yeah…

Natasha from the Art & Design and Music team relaxes listening to Fergus McCreadie:

A hugely talented pianist and composer, Fergus McCreadie hails from Clackmannanshire. I first came across his music when his debut album with his trio, Turas, was shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year in 2019. I was intrigued by the snippets I’d heard so I managed to get tickets to see the Fergus McCreadie Trio live. McCreadie’s work is inspired by both the Scottish landscape and traditional Scottish music and there was something so magical about listening to his music in such an intimate setting on a dark, cold, autumnal Edinburgh evening. I could close my eyes and instantly imagine myself by lochs, at a harbour or nestled in the Highlands, at the break of a day or in a creeping dusk. David Bowden on bass and Stephen Henderson behind the drums complete the trio and the three compliment each other beautifully. Cairn, the trio’s second album, was released earlier this year and I’m certain it shall be the soundtrack to many lazy summer evenings to come.

All of these suggestions have been put into a playlist on Naxos Jazz called J is for Jazz which you can access with your library card. Happy listening!

Instruments of the Orchestra

Writing a great tune is only one part of completing your master work, your symphony, overture or tone poem. Harmony, counterpoint, form, structure but perhaps most importantly, orchestration. What instrument plays that great tune and how they play it, is key. Choosing whether to have your tune played by a muted trumpet offstage or muted strings on stage, or unmuted strings plucking the strings. 

Strings, collectively bowed and plucked instruments, woodwind, brass or together blown instruments and struck instruments or percussion. All the different instruments that make up the four sections of the orchestra, can be played in different ways to produce a variety of tones or timbres. All of which are available to the orchestrator to colour your master work. 

Jeremy Seipmann, 1942 – 2016, was born and educated in America, on completion of his studies he was persuaded to come to London by Sir Malcom Sargent, where after a career at the London University he became a broadcaster, writing and producing music programming for the BBC World Service. 

Siepmann’s The Instruments of the Orchestra is a wonderful lecture on all the possibilities capable by the members of a musical ensemble. In the string section the narrator introduces all the instruments and goes through them, allowing them to demonstrate to us all the tones they can produce. Open strings, muted strings, plucked strings or pizzicato, playing rhythmically with the back of the bow on the string, known as Col Legno. 

The narrator goes through all the sections of the orchestra likewise asking them to demonstrate the techniques available to them – the woodwind, brass and percussion. Also Jeremy Seipmann asks the members of the orchestra to demonstrate pieces of music where the techniques displayed are used by composers to evoke mood and texture in an orchestration. 

Apart from a few opening statements which date this CD in another time when attitudes were different, it is a thorough and thoughtful introduction to all the options available to the composer, orchestrator arranger. Two other series of CDs by Jeremy Seipmann are available to stream on Naxos, Classics Explained, where he, bar by bar talks us through some of the great classics.  Life and Works, as the title suggests, Siepmann takes us through the composer’s life highlighting their greatest works along the way. 

This introduction to the Instruments of the Orchestra is narrated by David Randolph, 1914 – 2010, an American conductor, Music Educator and Radio Host. Drier, and not as informative as Siepmann’s Instruments of the Orchestra but the CD available from Naxos is a worthwhile listen. 

This CD also contains a performance of Benjamin Britten’s wonderful Young Persons guide to the Orchestra originally written in 1945 for a British educational documentary “Instruments of the Orchestra”. This work introduces all the instruments in a similar way to the CDs we have looked at, but in a musical setting of theme and variations ending with a fugue and grand replaying of the theme. 

Marin Alsop
Governo do Estado de São Paulo,
CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In a version on Medici TV, The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra is conducted and narrated by the wonderful Marin Alsop, she gives us the original script, written by Eric Crozier which is now rarely performed. 

There is one more CD at Naxos to mention –  

Yehudi Menuhin, taking us through all the instruments of the Orchestra, in a very similar way to the previous CDs mentioned, except his narration is all in German, so for those German language learners also wishing to acquaint themselves with the instruments of the orchestra, this CD is for you. 

These CDs, available to stream on Naxos, pretty much comprehensively layout all the instruments and their capabilities, of the western orchestra. 

Unfortunately, as one travels around the world there are no CDs similar to introduce us to the instruments of the Chinese Orchestra or the Russian Folk Instrument Orchestra or a Turkish Orchestra.  

All over the world, ensembles fall into familiar families of instruments, plucked strings, bowed strings, blown instruments and struck instruments or percussion. The instruments contained within these sections are in some cases vastly different from, but are relatives of, the instruments we are perhaps more familiar with. 

There are, thankfully, CDs at Naxos and documentaries and concerts at Medici.tv which contain works which amply demonstrate the depth and beauty of music played by some of these ensembles. 

Kamran Ince’s work, Concerto for Orchestra, Turkish Instruments and Voices, is scored for the conventional western orchestra with the addition of Kurnaz, an Oboe-like instrument strident and not known for subtlety. A ney, an elegant and beautiful end-blown flute and a kemance, a sort of bowed fiddle shaped like a mountain dulcimer. 

Russian folk music orchestras contain the balalaika, domra, bayan, garmon and svirel, to name just a few. 

Central Broadcasting Folk Orchestra and the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra, two ensembles available to stream on Naxos, play Chinese and western classical music on traditional Chinese instruments erhu, pipa, dizi and the sheng. 

Formed in 2000, by legendary cellist Yo Yo Ma, The Silkroad Ensemble eclectic ensemble brings together the finest musicians from many different lands. Originally formed with the question “what happens when strangers meet”. You can enjoy their performance at the Tanglewood Music Festival on Medici.tv.

We have prepared a playlist on Naxos for you to explore containing these CDs and more. 

Instruments of the Orchestra playlist on Naxos

Joe Hisaishi

Focusing on H in our Musical Alphabet, Natasha from the Music Library looks at the revered Japanese composer, Joe Hisaishi.

If you’ve ever watched a film by Hayao Miyazaki, one of the co-founders of the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli, you’ll no doubt have been swept away in the emotive storytelling, the wonderful character design, and the gorgeous, lush scenery. I’m sure you’ll have also been struck by the beauty of the music, composed by Joe Hisaishi, an almost constant in Miyazaki films.

Joe Hisaishi
by Franciszek Vetulani, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born in Nakano, Nagano, Japan in 1950, Hisaishi’s birth name is actually Mamoru Fujisawa. As his work became increasingly more well known, Fujisawa decided to create an alias for himself. Inspired by the prolific musician, composer, and producer, Quincy Jones, Fujisawa took this name and transcribed it into Japanese: ‘Hisaishi’ can be written using the same kanji as ‘Kuishi’, the Japanese pronunciation of ‘Quincy’; ‘Joe’ originates from ‘Jones’.

At the age of four, Hisaishi began to learn to play violin using the method developed by Suzuki Shinichi. He and his father also began watching 300 films a year, the two events shaping Hisaishi’s future. In 1969, Hisaishi studied music composition at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, developing his passion for minimalist music, a genre associated with composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. The minimalists and Japanese electronic musicians such as the group Yellow Magic Orchestra certainly inspired Hisaishi and he released his first album in 1981, MKWAJU, forming the MKWAJU Ensemble with, amongst others, acclaimed percussionist Midori Takada. The album explored ‘Ma’, the Japanese concept of negative space. His second album, Information, was released a year later.

Listen to Works, volume 1 by Joe Hisaishi on via Naxos

Hisaishi had already scored for anime series in the 1970s but 1983 would become a real cornerstone for Hisaishi’s career. Tokuma, the publishing company which had distributed Information, recommended Hisaishi to produce an image album for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an animated feature-film adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s manga series of the same name. An image album is intended to give an indication of a character’s personality, and Miyazaki played Hisaishi’s effort frequently during production. The film’s producer – another of Studio Ghibli’s co-founders, Isao Takahata – recommended that Hisaishi compose the soundtrack. This started an enduring partnership and great friendship between Miyazaki and Hisaishi, leading to comparisons with Steven Spielberg and John Williams; Hisaishi has scored all but one of Miyazaki’s works with Studio Ghibli, which was released prior to Nausicaä. Some of the scores Hisaishi has written for Studio Ghibli films have developed into a family affair: his daughter, Mai Fujisawa, sang the requiem at the end of Nausicaä at the age of four, and performed on the image album for Ponyo.

Piano scores are a prominent feature of Hisaishi’s cinematic work. A key example of this is his most famous piece, One Summer’s Day from the Spirited Away soundtrack. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Spirited Away enjoyed huge commercial and critical success; until last year, it was the highest-grossing film ever in Japan and won, amongst many other awards, the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars in 2003. Hisaishi’s music plays a huge part in the success of the Studio Ghibli films, the scores so emotive and warm, reflecting the breathtaking animation on screen. Miyazaki often asked Hisaishi to write parts of each film’s score early on in production to allow the music to influence the writing and direction of the project.

Listen to Joe Hisaishi presents Music Future 2015 on Naxos

The work with Hayao Miyazaki is not the only successful collaboration Joe Hisaishi has enjoyed. He has composed for several films by ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, who may be more familiar to some as the titular character in the gameshow Takeshi’s Castle. Kitano’s films often depict the yakuza, and Hisaishi’s soundtrack for his film Sonatine won the Japanese Academy Award in 1993. The track Summer from another of Kitano’s films, Kikujiro, is another of Hisaishi’s most recognisable pieces. In total, Hisaishi has won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Music seven times, and even won against himself with his score for Ponyo in 2009, triumphing over his work for the film Departures (which was the first Japanese film to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar that same year). Hisaishi was presented with a Medal of Honour with a purple ribbon by the Government of Japan in 2009, the purple ribbon indicating academic and artistic contributions and accomplishments. In 2013, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences extended a membership invitation to Hisaishi, with members needing to have “demonstrated exceptional achievement in the field of theatrical motion pictures”.

Taking inspiration from various sources, including both Japanese and European classical styles, as well his passion for minimalism and electronic music, Hisaishi has created a sound that is unmistakably his own. There is a real humanity to Hisaishi’s work, a prolific career with over 100 scores and albums to his name. Particularly when I think of his work with Studio Ghibli, no matter how fantastical the scene, Hisaishi’s music evokes a sense of nostalgia and belonging from the audience. There is a timeless quality which enamours the listener to Hisaishi’s music; I defy anyone familiar with the main theme to My Neighbor Totoro to not feel the same glee as they did when they first heard it. We can only hope there is more to come from this remarkable composer and musician.

You can listen to some of Joe Hisaishi’s work through our Naxos Classical Catalogue, which you can access using your library card.

Listen to Piano Recital by Mayuko Iguchi on Naxos

Listen to:

Works, Vol. 1 by Joe Hisaishi

Orchestral Music, Joe Hisaishi presents Music Future 2015 by Joe Hisaishi

Piano Recital by Iguchi, Mayuko (Hisaishi, J. / Kako, T.