Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphonies Nos 1-20

A recent reading of a biography of the remarkable composer Charles Ives by the equally distinctive composer Henry Cowell and his wife Sidney, included some interesting perspectives by Ives about the "pretty music" made by composers of bygone eras.  This also came out in a reading several years ago of Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music.  In both cases, highly idiosyncratic composers seeking to exercise their creativity in breaking molds and expanding ideas outside traditional areas of melody, harmony and time offered pointed criticisms of "pretty music."

For this listener, music is usually about mood.  In other words, what do we feel like listening to today based on a number of factors?  Where Ives, Partch and many others felt the need to make a clean break, at least theoretically, from their precursors, there may be times for this blogger in which their music, say, Ives' "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" or Partch's "The Bewitched" sounds really appealing.

Then again, there are those times when "pretty music" is best suited for a certain frame of mind.  As often as we may have heard Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and other purveyors of "pretty music," those composers and their works just happen to fit a mood at a given time.

The reasons are not entirely clear from a technical standpoint to this amateur, but the music of Franz Joseph Haydn is particularly appealing a great deal of the time. It stands to reason that his brilliance in perenially writing beautiful, flowing, lilting melodies with a steady and confident handling of harmony in a consistent and reliable sense of time make his music so attractive that it is easy to go back regularly to indulge in the richness and emotionally uplifting dynamics of his work.

An excellent presentation of the master's 104 symphonies is through the Esterhazy recordings by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra led by conductor Adam Fischer on Nimbus Records.  The orchestra was built to play the composer's music with a conductor and performers deeply committed to performing these works with the passion and feel that shines through on these recordings.

The only reason that this initial set of the first numbered symphonies, which are not necessarily those in order of actual composition, though they are all early (meaning around 1760), is the subject of this post, rather than some other set in the series, is that, eventually, the whole run will be featured.

Basically, for this admirer, the work of Haydn is full of "pretty music" that will be uplifting at just about any time. As much as more atonal and dissonant work has interest, given the mood at the moment, it's hard to go wrong by listening to Haydn's symphonies at any time, especially when they are as well performed as they are by the orchestra on these recordings.

Henry Cowell: A Continuum Portrait, Volume 1

This compendium of wide-ranging works from the long career of composer Henry Cowell is titled based on the excellent performances of the collective called Continuum, which has released several recordings on the Naxos labels over the year.

Cowell, whose Smithsonian Folkways release of his own piano performances has been spotlighted here before, was an experimental composer who drew heavily on folk music, including that of Ireland, where his forebears were from, as well as other places around the world, but was also someone who combined his modernism with beautiful melodies and a strong sense of harmony, too.

These were qualities he shared with his friend, Charles Ives, as the two men, a generation removed from one another, helped usher in a distinctively American form of modern composition.

This record begins with Continuum co-director Joel Sachs performing beautiful solo piano renditions of four piano pieces that feature Cowell's trademark tone clusters and strumming of the instrument's strings along with plaintive melodies (especially on the gorgeous "Deep Color") and interesting explorations of sound, including a wild "Tiger."

A modern take on the Baroque instrumentation of flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord is featured on a quartet composition with the other co-director Cheryl Seltzer on the keyboard instrument.  A highly memorable melody and a fine collective performance by the ensemble are of note.

Humor and satire mark Cowell's "Three Anti-Modernist Songs" with Seltzer on piano and Ellen Lang, an excellent mezzo-soprano.   On "A Sharp Where You'd Expect a Natural," the lyric includes the admonition that "no rule observe but the exceptional" and that when it comes to sequencing the music "which [bar] follows which, you really needn't mind."  

With "Hark! From the Pit a Fearsome Sound," Cowell plays with the concerns of concertgoers unnerved by modern music "that makes your blood run cold" with "symphonic cyclones," a "muted tuba's dismal groan," and fancifully fictional instruments like the "sarrusophone," "tonitruone," and "heckelphone."  There's even a nod to Richard Strauss and his modern form of opera.

Finally, Cowell defends Stravinsky in "Who Wrote This Fiendish 'Rite of Spring'?"  The lyric is written from the perspective of a horrified attendee, presumably at the Paris premiere in 1913, who cries "what right had he to write the thing / against our helpless ears to fling / its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bank, bing?" and asks why the composer couldn't write bird-like melodies and "proper" harmony.

A contemplative and touching violin and piano suite by Seltzer and Mia Wu follows and is beautifully performed, as is a short Polyphonica for a small orchestra.  Finally, there is the Irish Suite, with Seltzer's piano and the orchestra conducted by Sachs performing the piece quietly and subtly.  This is a bit surprising, especially with "The Banshee," which Cowell played on the aforementioned Smithsonian Folkways recording with far greater volume, power and menace, as the strings are scratched and strummed to mimic the mythical banshee creature.

Henry Cowell was a true original, whose ideas of experimenting with sound, harmony and sources were exceptional in his time and remain so today.  This recording by Continuum captures many facets of the composer's long and varied career and the group and Naxos are to be given kudos for excellent work.

Henry Cowell: Piano Music

This fascinating and utterly individualistic recording of composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965) performing piano pieces was issued originally in 1963 and then in a 1993 CD edition under the Smithsonian/Folkways label and features nineteen works and a 13-minute commentary by the composer.

The pieces are short, ranging from just under a minute to one that is less than four-and-a-half minutes in length.  They feature Cowell's use of "tone clusters," in which the palm, side of the hand, and forearm are used to play tonal groups of from three to twelve adjacent notes for unusual effect, sometimes a cluster is formed and keys pressed and then another key is pressed silently and then the cluster is released, creating a stunning ring-like sound.  He first received attention for this technique on a tour of Europe in 1923, but finished a book on what has been called "dissonant secundal technique" four years before that, when only 22 years old.  This challenged the primacy of intervals in thirds.

Another favored technique is what Cowell called "string piano," in which he strummed, plucked or used objects directly on the soundboard's strings and held down keys silently while strumming and then depressing the key for that ringing sound mentioned above, but with a different tone.

In 1929, Cowell published New Musical Resources, in which he explained his novel theories and his concept of overtones played above the usual pitch in the piano, this being displayed most notably in the aptly-titled "Sinister Resonance" conjoined with "The Aeolian Harp," which employs the ringing from the tone clusters mentioned earlier.  He also explored ways to sustain multiple rhythms simultaneously and it should not be surprising that he worked with Leon Theremin, namesake of that infamous "instrument," on electromechanical sound production.

Cowell also was deeply steeped in modal concepts from Asia and was barely in his teens when he became familiar with religious modal music from an organist in San Francisco.  Raised without any real exposure to "classical" music directly, the composer did have much experience with Irish and American folk music through his parents and the music of Chinese families living around him.  He later studied the music of China, India, Indonesia and Japan, as well as "traditional classical" forms, but only after he had rigorously created his own independent and idiosyncratic approach to composition.

It is especially interesting to hear Cowell, in his unusual patterns of speech, discuss the works on the recording, dating as far back as the first piece, "The Tides of Manaunaun," which he composed at age 14.  Most striking in its daring and dissonance is the self-explanatory "The Banshee," in which the composer stood at the end of the piano and had someone sitting at the keyboard to press the damper pedal while Cowell rubbed lengthwise and then played pizzicato on the strings in two distinct themes.  The wail of the banshee is depicted vividly in his manner of writing and playing the tune.

All the songs on Piano Music date to 1928 or before. but were recorded in the early 1960s.  In the interim, Cowell, who was bisexual, was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a staggering 14 years on a "morals" charge involving a relationship with another man.  He wound up serving 4 years at San Quentin, where he immersed himself in musical activity of all sorts, was released in 1940 and pardoned two years later. 

By all accounts, however, the harrowing experience changed him and his music dramatically and his political and music radicalism essentially ended, though thematically Asian concepts and inspirations still animated his work.  By the time he recorded this album in 1963, though, Cowell had become more experimental in his work again, a reflection of social and musical changes perhaps that encouraged him, though the composer died in 1965 at age 68.

Piano Music is a great opportunity to hear a true original performing, and explaining, his works in a way not often presented and the Smithsonian/Folkways project of the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies for the Smithsonian Institution (which also produced the important 1959 John Cage/David Tudor recording Indeterminacy) has provided a great service in issuing this great recording.