Music

My setting of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music poetry on by

I’ve written and recorded a musical setting of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” It’s one of the most ambitious compositions I’ve done, and it pushes my vocal abilities, but I think you’ll find it listenable. If you caught it when I first uploaded it, you might want to go back. Last week I remixed it to strengthen the vocal line a little and fix a bad note.

Yeats uses the word “gyre” in a personally specific way. It’s only loosely like Lewis Carroll’s “gyre and gimble.”

About a year ago, I posted some thoughts on the poem. I still stand by them.

A note on Fanny Mendelssohn

This entry was posted in Music and tagged biography history music on by

Fanny Mendelssohn, also known by her married name Fanny Hensel, was a sister of the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. While she wasn’t nearly as famous as her brother, she was an excellent composer herself, and she doubtless would have been better known if 19th-century European society didn’t discourage women from professionally writing music. The website HenselPushers is devoted to publicizing her music and making it available in printed form. The site maintainer’s name isn’t given, but it’s been going for quite a while and appears reliable.

A recent article pointed out a common mistranslation of a statement by her father, Abraham Mendelssohn. Her biographer, R. Larry Todd, translated a sentence in a letter from Abraham to the 14-year-old Fanny as: “Music will perhaps become his [Felix’s] profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.” That sounds as if he was discouraging her from making music important in her life.

The actual quote, according to HenselPushers, is “Die Musik wird für ihn vielleicht Beruf, während sie für dich stets nur Zierde, immer Bildungsmittel, Grundbaß deines Seins und Thuns werden kann und soll.” The usual quotation has “niemals” (never) rather than “immer” (always), reversing the meaning, and omits “Bildungsmittel” (means of personal development). He recognized that the chances of her becoming a professional musician were slim at best, but he still regarded music as very important to her future.

This is just a short signal boost, so I won’t get into the reasons for the misquote, which HenselPushers thinks was an intentional alteration by her son Sebastian Hensel. I haven’t independently verified the analysis, but the translation of the German lines looks right to the best of my understanding. “Grundbaß” (spelled “Grundbass” today) means the “ground bass” or bass line of a piece of music; if it had a secondary meaning in the Mendelssohns’ time, it’s dropped out today. Abraham was using the word metaphorically.

Fanny is believed to have contributed to some of the compositions Felix published in his own name, though we’ll never know the exact extent.

Here’s a sampling of three of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words.

Credit the songwriter!

This entry was posted in Music Writing and tagged music writing on by

The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.

(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)

I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.

It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.

When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.

This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.

Comparing four Beethoven recordings

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music on by

I’ve never been very good at noticing differences in performances of classical pieces and picking a favorite. Occasionally one really jumps out, like the Zurich Tonhalle’s recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but usually the differences are subtle. It takes careful listening even to notice that there are differences. As an exercise, I picked out four recordings of a piece I know well and listened to them repeatedly to compare them. There really are differences.

The piece I picked was Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. The recordings were:
(more…)

In memoriam: Leslie Fish 4

This entry was posted in Music News and tagged fandom filk music obituary on by

Leslie Fish, one of the best-known members of the filk music community, has died. She was talented, opinionated, outgoing, and just weird (in the best sense of the word). I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen, heard, and talked with her on many occasions. Other people who knew her better will write about her, but I should give my perspective here.

She appeared on the fannish scene around 1975. With a group called the DeHorn Crew, she produced a vinyl LP called Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet. Another, Solar Sailors, came out the next year. The songs focused on Star Trek and space travel. In addition to being a fan, she was an anarcho-syndicalist, associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka the “Wobblies.” She was no fan of central economic planning, and her politics often ran in a libertarian direction.
(more…)