obscure composers
Jun. 15th, 2009 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIf you read about the early history of classical music in America, you'll find reference to a couple of homespun fellows of the 1830s-50s, the first American composers of orchestral music, whose works have really colorful titles. The frustrating thing is that the titles are so attention-grabbing that the writers never say anything about the actual music. Curiosity finally drove me to find the few available recordings in the library, so I'm here to try to describe "Santa Claus: A Christmas Symphony" by William Henry Fry and (brace yourself) "The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or, The Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras" by Anthony Philip Heinrich.
Fry's piece, despite its title, is no symphony but a specific scene-painting tone poem. It's not very jolly or Santa Clausy, however. A full 20 minutes is taken up in slow, gloomy, bone-chilling depictions of winter. Santa finally shows up in the last five minutes, in the cheery but theologically dubious form of "Adeste Fidelis", first played in a pianissimo shiver in the strings and then later turning up louder.
As a composer, Fry is somewhere in the Berlioz-Liszt line, though less imaginative than either. His orchestration is blocky, with usually one instrument or group, or two opposing ones in contrast, but it has the virtue of its simplicity, being bright and clear. He seems to have a pocketful of orchestral tricks that he picked up somewhere along the way, which he pulls out of his pocket and applies one at a time. Another Fry work on the same disk was a so-called "Niagara Symphony," in which the falls are depicted by strings rushing over a rumbling background of multiple timpani. The only other works I've heard anything like it are the attempts of Alan Hovhaness and Jon Leifs to depict erupting volcanoes.
Heinrich is also a blocky composer, but more one interested in dialogue than a series of effects as Fry is. First the strings twitter, then the winds twitter, then the timpani and percussion twitter, then the strings again. His orchestration is very much influenced by Beethoven, especially in the winds and the heaviness of the tutti passages. In slow movements he can be tuneful - violins and flute are a favorite mixture - but his fast music is more characteristic. It's highly driving and forward, and full of those brief short-note motivic passages describable as twittering. Despite the elaborate title, the Condor isn't a storytelling tone poem, but a series of portraits. Heinrich is very aware of harmonic motion, but he doesn't have Beethoven's or Mozart's gift for driving at a cadence from far off.
Fifty years later and an ocean away comes the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky, whom I've been wasting time on lately trying to figure out how many symphonies he wrote. The works called Nos. 1 and 2 in recordings are Nos. 2 and 3 in most catalogs, so this gets complicated. It's even more complicated with reference to an unknown symphony whose score is unavailable in private hands, and which might (or might not) be the same as a lost tone poem called The Mermaid. The final twist came when I noticed that there were several recordings in print of this lost Mermaid, so obviously she wasn't so lost as all that.
Turns out that the mysterious score wasn't a symphony at all, but The Mermaid, which Zemlinsky had locked away when its first performance in 1905 got bad reviews. Now it's being revived, but from my perspective the bad reviews were right. It's Mahlerian goop all the way.
Fry's piece, despite its title, is no symphony but a specific scene-painting tone poem. It's not very jolly or Santa Clausy, however. A full 20 minutes is taken up in slow, gloomy, bone-chilling depictions of winter. Santa finally shows up in the last five minutes, in the cheery but theologically dubious form of "Adeste Fidelis", first played in a pianissimo shiver in the strings and then later turning up louder.
As a composer, Fry is somewhere in the Berlioz-Liszt line, though less imaginative than either. His orchestration is blocky, with usually one instrument or group, or two opposing ones in contrast, but it has the virtue of its simplicity, being bright and clear. He seems to have a pocketful of orchestral tricks that he picked up somewhere along the way, which he pulls out of his pocket and applies one at a time. Another Fry work on the same disk was a so-called "Niagara Symphony," in which the falls are depicted by strings rushing over a rumbling background of multiple timpani. The only other works I've heard anything like it are the attempts of Alan Hovhaness and Jon Leifs to depict erupting volcanoes.
Heinrich is also a blocky composer, but more one interested in dialogue than a series of effects as Fry is. First the strings twitter, then the winds twitter, then the timpani and percussion twitter, then the strings again. His orchestration is very much influenced by Beethoven, especially in the winds and the heaviness of the tutti passages. In slow movements he can be tuneful - violins and flute are a favorite mixture - but his fast music is more characteristic. It's highly driving and forward, and full of those brief short-note motivic passages describable as twittering. Despite the elaborate title, the Condor isn't a storytelling tone poem, but a series of portraits. Heinrich is very aware of harmonic motion, but he doesn't have Beethoven's or Mozart's gift for driving at a cadence from far off.
Fifty years later and an ocean away comes the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky, whom I've been wasting time on lately trying to figure out how many symphonies he wrote. The works called Nos. 1 and 2 in recordings are Nos. 2 and 3 in most catalogs, so this gets complicated. It's even more complicated with reference to an unknown symphony whose score is unavailable in private hands, and which might (or might not) be the same as a lost tone poem called The Mermaid. The final twist came when I noticed that there were several recordings in print of this lost Mermaid, so obviously she wasn't so lost as all that.
Turns out that the mysterious score wasn't a symphony at all, but The Mermaid, which Zemlinsky had locked away when its first performance in 1905 got bad reviews. Now it's being revived, but from my perspective the bad reviews were right. It's Mahlerian goop all the way.
