Symphony No. 50 ("Mount St. Helens") (1983): III Volcano
Alan Hovhaness (March 8, 1911 - June 21, 2000) was an American composer of Armenian and Scottish ancestry, but the inspiration for his mature work was as much Eastern as Western.
His music is accessible to the lay listener and often evokes a mood of mystery or contemplation. The Boston Globe music critic Richard Buell wrote: "Although he has been stereotyped as a self-consciously Armenian composer (rather as Ernest Bloch is seen as a Jewish composer), his output assimilates the music of many cultures. What may be most American about all of it is the way it turns its materials into a kind of exoticism. The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mystical, nostalgic."
He was among the most prolific of 20th century composers, his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts indicate over 70) and 434 opus numbers.
However, the true tally is well over 500 surviving works since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.
Samuel Osborne Barber II (March 9, 1910, West Chester, PA - January 23, 1981) was the son of Marguerite McLeod (née Beatty) and Samuel LeRoy Barber.
At a very early age, Barber became profoundly interested in music, and it was apparent that he had great musical talent and ability. At the age of nine he wrote to his mother:
“Dear Mother: I have written to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now, without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlete. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing. -- Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. -- Please -- Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).”
He wrote his first musical composition at the early age of 7 and attempted to write his first opera at the age of 10. He was an organist at the age of 12. When he was 14, he entered the Curtis Institute, a conservatory where he studied piano, composition, and voice.
Barber was born into a comfortable, educated, social, and distinguished Irish-American family.
His father was a doctor, and his mother was a pianist. His aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera and his uncle, Sidney Homer, was a composer of American art songs. Louise Homer is noted to have influenced Barber's interest in voice. Through his aunt, Barber had access to many great singers and songs. This background is further reflected in that Barber decided to study voice at the Curtis Conservatory.
Barber began composing seriously in his late teenage years. Around the same time, he met fellow Curtis schoolmate Gian Carlo Menotti, and the two would form a lifelong personal and professional relationship. At the Curtis Institute, Barber was a triple prodigy of composition, voice, and piano. He soon became a favorite of the conservatory's founder, Mary Louise Bok. It was through Bok that Barber would be introduced to his one and only publisher, the Schirmer family. At the age of 18, Barber won a prize from Columbia University for his Violin Sonata (now lost or destroyed by the composer).
From his early to late 20's, Barber wrote a flurry of successful compositions, launching him into the spotlight of the classical music community. Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such famous artists as Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Overture to the School for Scandal (1931)
Barber’s compositional style has been lauded for its musical logic, sense of architectural design, effortless melodic gift, and direct emotional appeal as evidenced in Overture to The School for Scandal (1931) and Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933). These characteristics remained in his music throughout his lifetime.
Barber intensely played and studied the music of J.S. Bach. He also was an adherent of Brahms, from whom he learned how to compress profound emotions into small modules of highly charged musical expression (Cello Sonata, 1932). In 1933, after reading the poem "Prometheus Unbound" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Barber composed the tone poem Music for a Scene from Shelley. In 1935, the work was premiered at Carnegie Hall, and this was the first time the composer heard one of his orchestral works performed publicly.
String Quartet (1936): Adagio (Adagio for Strings for string orchestra)
First Essay for Orchestra (1937)
Second Essay for Orchestra (1942)
Through the success of these works, plus the Symphony (No. 1) in One Movement (1936), Adagio for Strings (1938), (First) Essay for Orchestra (1937), Violin Concerto (1939), and Second Essay for Orchestra (1942), Barber garnered performances by the world’s leading conductors -- Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Charles Münch, George Szell, Artur Rodzinski, Leopold Stokowski, and Thomas Schippers.
At the young age of 28, Barber's Adagio for Strings was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Arturo Toscanini in 1938, along with his first essay for orchestra. The Adagio had been arranged from the slow movement of Barber's String Quartet op.11. Toscanini had only very rarely performed music by American composers before (an exception was Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2, which he conducted in 1933).
At the end of the first rehearsal of the piece, Toscanini remarked: "Semplice e bella" ("simple and beautiful").
Barber served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, where he was commissioned to write his Symphony No. 2, a work he later suppressed (which was resurrected in a Vox recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Schenck). Composed in 1943, the symphony was originally titled Symphony Dedicated to the Air Forces and was premiered in early 1944 by Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He revised the symphony in 1947, then decided to destroy the score in 1964. It was reconstructed from the instrumental parts.
Capricorn Concerto (1944)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947)
Medea (1948)
Vanessa (1957)
A Hand of Bridge (1959)
Piano Concerto (1962)
His compositions would later include characteristics of jazz, polytonality, atonality, and 12-tone technique, in such works as Excursions (1944), Symphony No. 2 (1944), Medea, (1946) Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), Vanessa (1957), A Hand of Bridge (1959), and Nocturne (1959). Although not pathbreaking, Barber's compositions distill an eclectic blend of the “musical currents hovering about in his time.” John Corigliano succinctly described Barber's style as "an interesting dichotomy of harmonic procedures -- an alternation between post-Straussian chromaticism and often diatonic typical American simplicity."
Gian Carlo Menotti, whom Barber had met at Curtis, supplied the libretto (text) for Barber's opera, Vanessa, in which the title role was originally written for Sena Jurinac who later declined the offer. Barber's beautiful baritone voice and vocal training were more than adequate to impress Rudolf Bing. In 1956, Barber sang him the score of his opera Vanessa; the impresario was so astonished that he accepted and produced the work immediately. Vanessa would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and gain acclaim as an American “grand” opera.
Menotti would also go on to contribute the libretto for Barber's chamber opera Hand of Bridge and direct the production of many of Barber's operas. Barber's Antony and Cleopatra was commissioned to open the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. The elaborate production designed by Franco Zeffirelli was marred by numerous technological disasters; it also overwhelmed and obscured Barber's music, which most critics derided as uncharacteristically weak and unoriginal. In recent years, a revised version of Antony and Cleopatra, for which Menotti provided collaborative assistance, has enjoyed some success.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1963)
Barber spent many years in isolation (eventually diagnosed with clinical depression) after the harsh rejection of his third opera Antony and Cleopatra (which he believed contained some of his best music. "This was supposed to have been my opera!" he said).
The opera was written for and premiered at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House on September 16, 1966. After this setback, Barber continued to write music until he was almost 70 years old. Barber’s music in his later years would be lauded as reflective, contemplative, but without the morbidity or unhappiness of other composers who knew they had a limited time to live. The Third Essay for Orchestra (1978) was his last major work and critics received it as having all the vigor and imagination of his earlier works.
Barber died of cancer in 1981 in New York City at the age of 70. He was buried in Oaklands Cemetery in his hometown of West Chester, Pennyslvania.
Barber was president of the International Music Council of UNESCO, where he did much to bring into focus and ameliorate the conditions of international musical problems. He was also one of the first American composers to visit Russia (which was then a constituent republic of the Soviet Union). Barber was also influential in the successful campaign of composers against ASCAP, helping composers increase the share of royalties they receive from their compositions. Barber was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the Rome Prize (the American version of the Prix de Rome), two Pulitzers, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
"How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society" – Samuel Barber
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T-Bone Walker (May 28, 1910 — March 16, 1975) was an American blues guitarist, singer, pianist, and songwriter who was one of the most important pioneers of the electric guitar. He was the first blues musician to use an electric guitar.
In September 2003, he was ranked #47 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
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"Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)" (also known as "Call It Stormy Monday" or just "Stormy Monday") is a blues song written by T-Bone Walker and first recorded in 1947.
Confusingly, it is also sometimes referred to as "Stormy Monday Blues", although that is the title of a 1942 song by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine. Walker titled his song as he did to avoid the name collision.
The song is based in the standard 12-bar blues format. The lyrics portray a person who is separated from their love, and is suffering from guilt in some way because of what they have done.
The original recording appeared on Black & White Records, produced by Ralph Bass, and was one of Walker's breakthrough sides in pioneering the idiom of electric blues guitar. This recording also featured smoky trumpet work from sideman Teddy Buckner. It reached #5 on the R&B charts in 1948. B.B. King has said that "Call It Stormy Monday" inspired him to begin playing electric guitar.
Walker re-recorded the song with better fidelity and a somewhat different arrangement on his classic 1959 Atlantic Records album T-Bone Blues.
The song became a standard for blues and blues rock artists, and over the years was recorded by Albert King, Eva Cassidy, Question Mark and the Mysterians, Jethro Tull, Eric Clapton, Shake Your Hips!, Lee Michaels, and others. Trouble ensued when artists named it "Stormy Monday Blues", however, as for instance Bobby Bland did on a well-known rendition, as it was mis-credited and royalties went to the Hines-Eckstine song rather than Walker's. This may have also happened on some of the treatments that were just called "Stormy Monday".
The Allman Brothers Band included a live performance (as "Stormy Monday") on their album At Fillmore East in 1971. It garnered considerable airplay on progressive rock and album-oriented rock radio formats during the 1970s.
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Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976), better known as Howlin' Wolf, was an influential American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player.
With a booming voice and looming physical presence, Burnett is commonly ranked among the leading performers in electric blues; musician and critic Cub Koda declared, "no one could match Howlin' Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits."
Many songs popularized by Burnett—such as "Smokestack Lightnin'", "Back Door Man" and "Spoonful"—have become standards of blues and blues rock.
At 6 feet, 6 inches (198 cm) and close to 300 pounds (136 kg), he was an imposing presence with one of the loudest and most memorable voices of all the "classic" 1950s Chicago blues singers. This rough-edged, slightly fearsome musical style is often contrasted with the less crude but still powerful presentation of his contemporary and professional rival, Muddy Waters - although the two were reportedly not that different in actual personality - to describe the two pillars of the Chicago blues representing the music.
Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Little Walter Jacobs, Willie Dixon, and Muddy Waters are usually regarded in retrospect as the greatest blues artists who recorded for Chess in Chicago. Sam Phillips once remarked, "When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.'"
"Evil", sometimes listed as "Evil (Is Going On)", is a Chicago blues standard written by Willie Dixon for Howlin' Wolf, Chester Burnett, first released on Chess Records on May 25, 1954.
It was included on the 1959 compilation album Moanin' in the Moonlight and was re-recorded in 1969 for The Howlin' Wolf Album. The song was also a hit for Muddy Waters, who released it in June 1977, a year and a half after Burnett's death.
The single features the sidemen Hubert Sumlin and Jody Williams (guitar), Otis Spann (piano), Willie Dixon (double-bass), and Earl Phillips (drums). Wolf achieves a coarse, emotional performance with his strained singing, lapsing into falsetto.
The song, a twelve-bar blues, is punctuated with a syncopated backbeat, brief instrumental improvisations, upper-end piano figures, and intermittent blues harp provided by Wolf.[2] The music heightens the meaning of the lyrics, that of the "evil" that takes place in a man's home when he is away: "you better watch your happy home", Wolf warns.
The song has been recorded by numerous artists, including: Luther Allison, Canned Heat, Captain Beefheart, Derek and the Dominos, Gary Moore, Cactus, The Faces, Monster Magnet, and Steve Miller.
Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Devine (1944)
Vingt Regards sur la Enfant Jesus (1944)
Hawari (1945)
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Turangalila Symphony (1948): IV
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Exotic Birds (1956)
Catalogue of the Birds (1959)
Chronochromie (1960)
Seven Haiku (1963)
Colors of the Celestial City (1963)
Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964)
La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (1969)
Canyons of the Stars (1974)
Olivier Messiaen (December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and numbered Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré among his teachers. He was appointed organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death. On the fall of France in 1940 Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and while incarcerated he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four available instruments, piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners to an audience of inmates and prison guards. Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941, and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod (who later became Messiaen's second wife), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and George Benjamin.
Messiaen's music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources), and is harmonically and melodically based on modes of limited transposition, which were Messiaen's own innovation. Many of his compositions depict what he termed "the marvellous aspects of the faith," drawing on his unshakeable Roman Catholicism.
He travelled widely, and he wrote works inspired by such diverse influences as Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Messiaen experienced a mild form of synaesthesia manifested as a perception of colours when he heard certain harmonies, particularly harmonies built from his modes, and he used combinations of these colours in his compositions. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrization associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many exotic musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works), and he also championed the ondes Martenot.
Messiaen found birdsong fascinating; he believed birds to be the greatest musicians and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer. He notated birdsongs worldwide, and he incorporated birdsong transcriptions into a majority of his music. His innovative use of colour, his personal conception of the relationship between time and music, his use of birdsong, and his intent to express profound religious ideas, all combine to make it almost impossible to mistake a composition by Messiaen for the work of any other western composer.
[C Whole-Step/Half-Step and Half-Step/Whole-Step Octatonic Scales,
C Lydian and Dorian Blues Scales, I-IV-V Richard Berry progression]
Miklos Rozsa (April 18, 1907 - July 27, 1995) was a Hungarian-born composer, best known for his film scores, most notably the score to the 1959 epic Ben-Hur.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia - August 9, 1975)
[Birthplace of Shostakovich (now School No. 267), with commemorative plaque at left]
was born at 2 Podolskaya Ulitsa in St. Petersburg, the second of three children born to Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Shostakovich. His family was politically liberal (one of his uncles was a Bolshevik, but the family also sheltered far-right extremists).
He was a child prodigy as both a pianist and composer, his talent becoming apparent after he began piano lessons at the age of eight with his mother. On one occasion, his mother suspected that by playing him the music first, she was not helping him learn to read music, but that he was only pretending to read and mimicking what she had just played for him. She then deliberately put the wrong music in front of herself and played something different. When he played what she played while looking up at the music, she realized she needed to take a different tactic in teaching him to read.
He was 11 when the Russian Revolution was raging in 1917.
In 1918, at 12, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party, murdered by Bolshevik sailors. The next year, he was allowed to enter the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov, and completed his Scherzo, Op. 1.
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Scherzo in F# Minor for orchestra, Op. 1 (1919)
Eight Preludes for piano, Op. 2 (1920)
Theme and Variations in Bb major for orchestra, Op. 3 (1922)
Two Fables of Krilov for mezzo-soprano, female chorus and chamber orchestra, Op. 4 (1922)
Three Fantastic Dances for piano, Op. 5 (1922)
Suite in F# Minor for two pianos, Op. 6 (1922)
Scherzo in E-flat Major for orchestra, Op. 7 (1924)
Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 8 (1923)
Three Pieces for cello and piano, Op. 9 (1924)
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Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10 (1926)
I. Allegro
II. Scherzo
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At the conservatory, he suffered for his perceived lack of political zeal, and initially failed his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926. His first major musical achievement was the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in 1926), written as his graduation piece at the age of 20.
It is a key work of his earlier period, a symphony which combined the academicism of the conservatory with his progressive inclinations
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1927 marked the beginning of the composer's relationship with Ivan Sollertinsky, who remained his closest friend until the latter's death in 1944. Sollertinsky introduced Shostakovich to the music of Gustav Mahler, which had a strong influence on his music from the Symphony No. 4 onwards.
Symphony No. 2 ("October") (1927)
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After graduation, he initially embarked on a dual career as a concert pianist and composer, but his dry style of playing (Fay comments on his "emotional restraint" and "riveting rhythmic drive") was often unappreciated. He nevertheless won an "honorable mention" at the First Frederic Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. After the competition Shostakovich met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by the composer's First Symphony that he conducted it at the Berlin premiere later that year. Thereafter, Shostakovich concentrated on composition and soon limited performances primarily to those of his own works. In 1927 he wrote his Symphony No. 2 ("To October").
The Nose (1928)
Beginning
Interlude
While writing the symphony, he also began his satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Gogol, which has been characterized as "The most uncompromisingly modernist of all [the composer's] stage-works." In 1929, the opera was criticised as "formalist" by RAPM, the Stalinist musicians' organisation, and it opened to generally poor reviews in 1930.
In the late 1920's and early 1930's he worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack.
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Symphony No. 3 ("The First of May") (1929)
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The Age of Gold (1930)
Polka
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The Bolt (1931)
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1932)
Much of this period was spent writing his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; it was first performed in 1934 and was immediately successful, both on a popular and official level. It was said to be “the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party" and that such an opera “could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture.” The work precipitated the Shostakovich's denunciation two years later.
Even outside the Soviet Union, however, Shostakovich's style was criticized as vulgar and strident: Igor Stravinsky wrote of Lady Macbeth: "brutally hammering … and monotonous" -- as if the older composer hadn't hammered in his day...
1932 saw Shostakovich's open marriage to his first wife, Nina Varzar. Initial difficulties led to divorce proceedings in 1935, but the couple soon reunited.
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1933)
Prokofiev's influence on Shostakovich is most apparent in the earlier piano works, such as the first sonata and first concerto.
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The Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 35, was completed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1933 and premiered the same year by the composer at the piano and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite the title, it is a true piano concerto rather than a double concerto in which the trumpet and piano command equal prominence. The trumpet parts frequently take the form of sardonic interjections, leavening the humor and wit of the piano passage work.
The concerto comprises either three or four movements, depending on the interpretation:
Allegretto Lento Moderato Allegro con brio
The Moderato is sometimes seen as an introductory passage to the Allegro con brio rather than as a separate movement. However, it is usually considered to be the third of four movements, as the moods of the two are very different. Some recordings feature only three movements, with the last marked as Moderato – Allegro con brio.
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Articles published by Shostakovich in 1934 and 1935 cited Berg, Schoenberg, Krenek, Hindemith, "and especially Stravinsky" among his influences.
Symphony No.4 (1936)
In 1936, Shostakovich fell from grace. The year began with a series of attacks on him in Pravda, in particular an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music. The campaign, which condemned Lady Macbeth as formalist, "coarse, primitive and vulgar," was thought to have been instigated by Stalin; consequently, commissions began to dry up, and his income fell by about three quarters. The Symphony No. 4 entered rehearsals that December, but the political climate made performance impossible. It was not performed until 1961, but Shostakovich did not repudiate the work: it retained its designation as his fourth symphony. A piano reduction was published in 1946.
This symphony has been described by Grove as "a colossal synthesis of Shostakovich's musical development to date." It was was also the first in which the influence of Mahler came to the fore, prefiguring the route Shostakovich was to take to secure his rehabilitation, while he himself admitted that the preceding two symphonies were his least successful.
More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of the composer's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. His only consolation in this period was the birth of his daughter Galina in 1936.
Many commentators have noted the disjunction between the experimental works before the 1936 denunciation and the more conservative ones which followed; the composer told Flora Litvinova, "without 'Party guidance' … I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage."
In the years after 1936, Shostakovich's symphonic works were outwardly musically conservative, regardless of any subversive political content. During this time he turned increasingly to chamber works, a field which permitted the composer to explore different and often darker ideas that did not, however, invite external scrutiny.
While his chamber works were largely tonal, they gave Shostakovich an outlet for sombre reflection which was not welcomed in his more public works. This is most apparent in the late chamber works, which portray what Groves has described as a "world of purgatorial numbness." In some of these he included the use of tone rows, although he treated these as melodic themes rather than serially. Vocal works are also a prominent feature of his late output, setting texts often concerned with love, death and art.
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Symphony No. 5 (1937)
I. Moderato
II. Allegretto
III. Largo
IV. Finale
Shostakovich's response to his denunciation was the Symphony No. 5 of 1937, which was, musically more conservative than his earlier works. It was a success, and is still one of his most popular works. It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonic pieces. In September of that year, he began to teach composition at the Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with his own creative work.
Shostakovich taught Galina Ustvolskaya from 1937 to 1947. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as "tender" and Ustvolskaya claimed in a 1995 interview that she rejected a proposal from him in the 50's.
However, in the same interview, Ustvolskaya's friend, Viktor Suslin, said that she had been "deeply disappointed" in him by the time of her graduation in 1947.
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Shostakovich's son Maxim was born in 1938.
Symphony No. 6 (1939)
The Gamblers (1941)
Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad") (1941)
After the outbreak of war between Russia and Germany in 1941, Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad, enduring the siege, during which he wrote the first three movements of his Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad"). He also contributed to propaganda efforts, posing as a fire warden and delivering a radio broadcast to the Soviet people. In October 1941, the composer and his family evacuated to Kuybishev (now Samara), where the symphony was completed. It was adopted as a symbol of Russian resistance both in the USSR and in the West.
Six Songs (1942)
Symphony No. 8 (1943)
In spring 1943, the family moved to Moscow. While the Symphony No. 7 depicts a heroic (and ultimately victorious) struggle against adversity, the Symphony No. 8 of that year is perhaps the ultimate in sombre and violent expression within Shostakovich's output, resulting in it being banned until 1956.
Symphony No. 9 (1945)
The Symphony No. 9 (1945), in contrast, is an ironic Haydnesque parody, which failed to satisfy demands for a "hymn of victory." Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his Second Piano Trio (Op. 67), dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a bitter-sweet, Jewish-themed totentanz finale.
In 1948 Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Most of his works were banned, he was forced to publicly repent, and his family had privileges withdrawn. Yuri Lyubimov says that at this time "he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn't be disturbed."
The influence of Russian church and folk music is very evident in his works for unaccompanied choir of the 1950's.
In the next few years his compositions were divided into film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation, and serious works "for the desk drawer". The latter included the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. The cycle was written at a time when the post-war anti-Semitic campaign was already under way, and Shostakovich had close ties with some of those affected.
The restrictions on Shostakovich's music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, in order to secure his participation in a delegation of Soviet notables to the U.S. That year he also wrote his cantata Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as the "great gardener." In 1951 the composer was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet.
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Symphony No. 10 (1953)
I. Moderato
II. Allegro
III.
IV.
Stalin's death in 1953 was the biggest step towards Shostakovich's official rehabilitation, which was marked by his Symphony No. 10. It features a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH [D Eb C B-natural] and Elmira [see below] motifs), the meaning of which is still debated, while the savage second movement is said to be a musical portrait of Stalin himself. It ranks alongside the fifth as one of his most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the "desk drawer" works.
Shostakovich had a relationship with another pupil, Elmira Nazirova, which seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely through his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich's first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954.
In that same year, Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture, Op. 96.
He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced three years later.
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Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957)
I. Allegro
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Symphony No. 11 ("The Year 1905") (1957)
II. January 9 (Allegro)
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In 1957, during a visit to Paris, Shostakovich recorded his two piano concertos with Andre Cluytens, as well as some short piano works. These were issued by EMI on an LP, reissued by Seraphim Records on LP, and eventually digitally remastered and released on CD.
In later life, Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill health, but he resisted giving up cigarettes and vodka. From 1958 he suffered from a debilitating condition which particularly affected his right hand, eventually forcing him to give up piano playing.
The year 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: his joining of the Communist Party. This event has been interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, or as the result of political pressure. On the one hand, the apparat was undoubtedly less repressive than it had been prior to Stalin's death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, and he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal. Around this time, his health also began to deteriorate. Shostakovich's musical response to these personal crises was the String Quartet No. 8, composed in only three days. Like the Symphony No. 10, this quartet incorporates quotations and his musical monogram.
Symphony No. 12 ("1917") (1961)
In 1962 he married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, he wrote, "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable."
According to Galina Vishnevskaya, who knew the Shostakoviches well, this marriage was a very happy one: "It was with her that Dmitri Dmitriyevich finally came to know domestic peace... Surely, she prolonged his life by several years."
In November Shostakovich made his only venture into conducting, conducting a couple of his own works in Gorky: otherwise he declined to conduct, citing nerves and ill health as his reasons.
Symphony No. 13 ("Baba Yar") (1962)
1962 also saw Shostakovich again turn to the subject of anti-Semitism in his Symphony No. 13 ("Baba Yar").
The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of the Jews during the Second World War. Opinions are divided as to how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media, and was not banned, but it remained controversial. After the symphony's premiere, Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem which said that Russians and Ukrainians had died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar.
Shostakovich's relationship with Stravinsky was profoundly ambivalent; as he wrote to Glikman, "Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise."
He was particularly enamoured of the Symphony of Psalms, presenting a copy of his own piano version of it to Stravinsky when the latter visited the USSR in 1962. (The meeting of the two composers was not a great success, however; observers commented on Shostakovich's extreme nervousness and Stravinsky's "cruelty" towards him.)
In 1965 Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was unjustly sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests together with Yevtushenko and fellow Soviet artists Kornei Chukovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests Brodsky's sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. At that time Shostakovich joined the group of 25 distinguished intellectuals in signing the letter to Leonid Brezhnev asking not to rehabilitate Stalin.
That year Shostakovich was diagnosed as having polio, he also suffered a heart attack the following year, and several falls in which he broke both his legs.
In 1967 he wrote in a letter:
"Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective. All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order.)"
Symphony No. 14 (1969)
A preoccupation with his own mortality permeates much of Shostakovich's later works, among them the later quartets and the Symphony No. 14 of 1969 (a song cycle based on a number of poems concerning the theme of death). The subject matter of this work also coincides with Shostakovich at his most extreme in terms of musical language, with 12-note themes being used throughout as well as dense polyphony.
Shostakovich dedicated this score to his close friend Benjamin Britten, who conducted its Western premiere at the 1970 Aldeburgh Festival.
Symphony No. 15 (1971)
The Symphony No. 15 of 1971 is, by contrast, melodic and retrospective in nature, quoting from Wagner, Rossini and the composer's own Fourth Symphony.
Shostakovich suffered a second heart attack in that same year.
String Quartet No. 15 (1974)
Viola Sonata (1975)
Shostakovich died of lung cancer on August 9, 1975 and after a civic funeral was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. The official obituary did not appear in Pravda until three days after his death, apparently because the wording had to be approved at the highest level, by Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo.
Even before his death he had been commemorated in the naming of the Shostakovich Peninsula on Alexander Island, Antarctica.
He was outlived by his third wife Irina, his daughter Galina, and his son Maxim, a pianist and conductor who was the dedicatee and first performer of some of his father's works.
Shostakovich himself left behind several recordings of his own piano works, while other noted interpreters of his music include his friends Emil Gilels, Mstislav Rostropovich, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Maria Yudina, David Oistrakh and members of the Beethoven Quartet.
Shostakovich's musical influence on later composers outside the former Soviet Union has been relatively slight, although Alfred Schnittke has taken up his eclecticism, and his contrasts between the dynamic and the static, and some of André Previn's music shows clear links to Shostakovich's style of orchestration.
Shostakovich's conservative idiom has nonetheless grown increasingly popular with audiences both within and beyond Russia, as the avant-garde has declined in influence and debate about his political views has developed. According to Grove, he has now become "the most popular composer of serious art music of the middle years of the 20th century."
Shostakovich's music shows the influence of many of the composers he most admired: Bach in his fugues and passacaglias; Beethoven in the late quartets; Mahler in the symphonies and Berg in his use of musical codes and quotations. Among Russian composers, he particularly admired Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina he re-orchestrated.
One prominent criticism of Shostakovich has been that his symphonic work in particular is, as Shostakovich scholar Gerard McBurney summarizes, "derivative … trashy, empty and second-hand."
Modern composers have also been critical. Pierre Boulez dismissed Shostakovich's music as "the second, or even third pressing of Mahler."
The Romanian composer and Webern disciple Philip Gershkovich called Shostakovich "a hack in a trance."
English composer and musicologist Robin Holloway described his music as "battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion."
It is certainly true that Shostakovich borrows extensively from the material and styles both of earlier composers and of popular music; the vulgarity of "low" music is a notable influence on this "greatest of eclectics."
McBurney traces this to the avant-garde artistic circles of the early Soviet period among which Shostakovich moved early in his career, and argues that these borrowings were a deliberate technique to allow him to create "patterns of contrast, repetition, exaggeration" which gave his music the large-scale structure it required.
The Trotskyist theoretician Alan Woods puts much of this criticism down to anti-communist politicking and the professional jealousy of less accomplished composers, pointing out that Shostakovich "made no secret of his debt to Mahler and many other composers: Bach, Stravinsky, jazz and popular music, Jewish and Russian folk music. But was the music of Beethoven not rooted in the music of Mozart and Haydn? Of course it was. But did it not evolve into something entirely different - something that is unmistakably Beethoven? Of course, it did. And who can deny that the symphonies of Shostakovich, taking their starting point from Mahler, developed into an entirely different musical idiom that is unmistakably Shostakovich and nobody else but Shostakovich?"
Shostakovich was in many ways an obsessive man: according to his daughter he was "obsessed with cleanliness"; he synchronized the clocks in his apartment; he regularly sent cards to himself to test how well the postal service was working. Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered indexes 26 references to his nervousness. Even as a young man, Mikhail Druskin remembers that the composer was "fragile and nervously agile."
Yuri Lyubimov comments, "The fact that he was more vulnerable and receptive than other people was no doubt an important feature of his genius."
In later life, Krzysztof Meyer recalled, "his face was a bag of tics and grimaces."
In his lighter moods, sport was one of his main recreations, although he preferred spectating or umpiring to participating (he was a qualified football referee). His favourite football club was Zenit Leningrad, which he would watch regularly.
He also enjoyed playing card games, particularly Patience. Both light and dark sides of his character were evident in his fondness for satirical writers such as Gogol, Chekhov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The influence of the latter in particular is evident in his letters, which include wry parodies of Soviet officialese. Zoshchenko himself noted the contradictions in the composer's character: "he is … frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child … [but he is also] hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured).
He was diffident by nature: Flora Litvinova has said he was "completely incapable of saying 'No' to anybody."
This meant he was easily persuaded to sign official statements, including a denunciation of Andrei Sakharov in 1973; on the other hand he was willing to try to help constituents in his capacities as chairman of the Composers' Union and Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Oleg Prokofiev commented that "he tried to help so many people that … less and less attention was paid to his pleas."
Shostakovich's response to official criticism and, more importantly, the question of whether he used music as a kind of abstract dissidence is a matter of dispute. It is clear that outwardly he conformed to government policies and positions, reading speeches and putting his name to articles expressing the government line. It is also generally agreed that he disliked the regime, a view confirmed by his family, his letters to Isaak Glikman, and the satirical cantata Rayok, which ridiculed the "anti-formalist" campaign and was kept hidden until after his death.
It is also uncertain to what extent Shostakovich expressed his opposition to the state in his music. The revisionist view was put forth by Solomon Volkov in the 1979 book Testimony, which was claimed to be Shostakovich's memoirs dictated to Volkov. The book alleged that many of the composer's works contained coded anti-government messages. It is known that he incorporated many quotations and motifs in his work, most notably his signature DSCH theme.
His longtime collaborator Evgeny Mravinsky said that "Shostakovich very often explained his intentions with very specific images and connotations."
The revisionist perspective has subsequently been supported by his children, Maxim and Galina, and many Russian musicians. More recently, Volkov has argued that Shostakovich adopted the role of the yurodivy or holy fool in his relations with the government.
Shostakovich's widow Irina supports the general revisionist thesis but denies the authenticity of Testimony. Other prominent revisionists are Ian MacDonald, whose book The New Shostakovich put forward more interpretations of his music, and Elizabeth Wilson, whose Shostakovich: A Life Remembered provides testimony from many of the composer's acquaintances.
Many musicians and scholars (notably Laurel Fay and Richard Taruskin) contest the authenticity (and debate the significance) of Testimony, alleging that Volkov compiled it from a combination of recycled articles, gossip, and possibly some information direct from the composer. Fay substantiates these allegations in her 2002 article Volkov's Testimony Reconsidered' showing that the only pages of the original Testimony manuscript that Shostakovich had signed and verified are in fact word-for-word reproductions of earlier interviews given by the composer, none of which are controversial. More broadly, they argue that the significance of Shostakovich is in his music rather than his life, and that to seek political messages in the music detracts from, rather than enhances, its artistic value.
Harold Arlen (February 15, 1905 – April 23, 1986) was an American composer of popular music.
He was an important composer of 20th-century popular music, with over 400 songs written, a number of which have become known the world over. He is thus highly regarded in the Great American Songbook.
Joseph Copeland "Joe" Garland (Aug. 15, 1903, Norfolk, Virginia - April 21, 1977, Teaneck, New Jersey) was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger, best known for writing In the Mood.
Garland studied music at Shaw University and the Aeolian Conservatory. He started by playing classical music but joined a jazz band, Graham Jackson's Seminole Syncopators, in 1924, where he first recorded. He had a long run of associations as a sideman on saxophone and clarinet, with Elmer Snowden (1925), Joe Steele, Henri Saparo, Leon Abbey (including a tour of South America), Charlie Skeete, and Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920's. The 1930's saw him playing with Bobby Neal (1931) and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band; he was both a performer and an arranger for the Blue Rhythm Band from 1932 to 1936, when Lucky Millinder replaced him. Following this he played with Edgar Hayes (1937), Don Redman (1938), and Louis Armstrong (1939-42). In the 1940s he played with Claude Hopkins and others, and then returned to Armstrong's band from 1945-47. Following this he played with Herbie Fields, Hopkins again, and Earl Hines (1948). In the 1950's, he went into semi-retirement.
Garland wrote a number of well-known swing jazz hits, including the
Glenn Miller hit In the Mood and Les Brown's Leap Frog.
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
