Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) wrote perhaps his most famous work, In the Hall of the Mountain King, in 1875. It was part of his Peer Gynt Suite. Today, 144 years later, this famous melody line is used in commercials and films worldwide. I heard it the other day in a GEICO Insurance commercial. The commercial depicts two fans of rival baseball franchises (KC Royals and St. Louis Cardinals) vying for a parking space. Take a look:
I don't see any historical correlations nor connections between Grieg and baseball. When it was premiered in 1876, baseball was indeed a professional sport in the Untied States. But Grieg never came to the United States, so he never attended a baseball game. Whether or not he even was aware of the game I can't say. But none-the-less, his music graces this commercial.
Today is the 4th of July. My neighborhood is coming alive with fireworks this afternoon following a rain shower. By dusk, it will be a war zone. I am listening to music with headphones on, trying to ignore the explosions.
This is our National Birthday...Happy Birthday America. You are my country and I love you. I am also am very ashamed of you...the genocide of our native peoples, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, violence against gays and lesbians, industrial poisoning of our environment, corporate greed, inequality for, exploitation of, and marginalization of women, antisemitic immigration quotas in the 1930's that prevented so many Jews from escaping the Holocaust .....deep breath....and on and on.
How does this place work? I don't know...but it does. As fucked up as so much of our past is...and our present, I still would not want to live anywhere else. I pray that we all can take a deep breath and figure out how to make the future better for our children. So HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA.
My current listening project: listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, 1-32 in order. I just finished no. 20. So far , no. 8 stands out as my favorite. No. 14, the Moonlight Sonata, holds up very well. In fact, I realize that I have taken it for granted all these years. It is one of the best known pieces of music in history, one that I have turned away from. But I rediscovered it's greatness this week.
I have the same feeling about baseball as I do about America. It's my favorite sport...I love it so much. But I am also very conflicted by it's dismal history of exclusion, bigotry and labor unrest. But I love it none-the-less. And I am also a fierce critic of the game as it stands today. I feel like the game is out of balance. Offense is the goal now...home runs in particular. I don't get excited by home runs. I get excited by pitchers who know how to throw strikes...keep the ball down in the zone, and change speeds. Alas....I am a dinosaur. Last weekend, the Red Sox and the Yankees played two games in London. Baseball is trying to develop a global presence. The first game was Saturday. Cheryl and I watched a good part of it before we left to go kayaking. Three hours later when we came back, the game was still on. And it continued for another hour. When it was finally over, the Yankees had won 17-13, and it took 4:42 minutes. This was the third longest 9-inning game in MLB history...those poor British bastards. A four hour game is crap. I found a box score for a game in 1897 between the Chicago Colts (soon to become the Cubs) and the Louisville Colonels (soon to fold) where the Colts won 36-7. The Colts scored in every inning, a feat that has only occurred twenty times in history. This game only took 2:15 to play. Imagine how long it would take today...
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Back to the first part of this post...America...our country is so beautiful. I am so blessed to be an American. Classical music is alive here too. We have so many incredible musicians making music in the USA. There is no shortage of talented, and gifted performers here. I am thankful.
Father's Day was yesterday. I took time to slow everything down and think about what that means to me. It means everything. My grandmother used to tell me...constantly...that I could never understand how much she loved me. I was a gift to her. She lost a child after my dad was born, His name was Daniel. He only lived a few weeks after he was born...he had a heart condition that could easily be corrected today, but not so in 1944. When her only son had a child, me, I filled the void left by her loss of Daniel, and my parents gave me his name as my middle name. Timothy Daniel Hazlett. My dad told me he remembered the day they came and put Daniel in a small box after he died and took him away. So heartbreaking. His loss never left her. When my children were born, I totally knew what she meant about love...and now I tell my children the same thing she told me..."you can never know how much I love you." We end every phone conversation with "Love You.". And every in-person conversation ends the same way..."Love You." I pray every day for their safety, health and well being. I pray that they find their way to God...that their faith is strong in Him. Father's Day is not about golfing and barbecue for me...it is about praying to God and giving thanks for my children. It is a gut-wrenching realization of how the love of your children will bring you to your knees and make you weep for joy.
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I remember when Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in 1986. It may be John Hughes' best movie, and it still holds a special place in my heart. Hughes was the master of modern-day teen angst, and he had a keen ear for great music. One example is this instrumental arrangement of the Smith's song Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want by the band The Dream Academy.
I love how this arrangement uses a church organ, acoustic guitars hitting a major seventh chord hard, a synthesizer with chime sound, and last but not least...a beautiful English horn. (David Gilmour, the awesome guitarist from Pink Floyd, produced the Dream Academy's debut album.)
I was born in the '60's, came of age in the '70's and reached manhood in the '80's. This music means a lot to me.
Another song I will share from the Dream Academy, and used in another great John Hughes film called Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is called Power to Believe. It's used at the end of the film when Steve Martin and John Candy finally reach the end of their epic journey and go their own way. Steve Martin finally figures out that John Candy is all alone. It is a very moving moment.
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I enjoy a dram of scotch or bourbon most evenings, usually with a few ice cubes. I look at my arms and hands extending from my body to the keyboard. I don't understand fully what is happening, but my fingers start hitting the keys and out come these words. I am thankful that I can write. I am thankful for the music that inspires me. They go together perfectly.
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I will end this post with a piece of music that truly touches my heart. Fratres by Arvo Part (1977).
I watched Saving Private Ryan the other day...it was June 6th, 2019 to be precise...the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944. The Greatest Generation...these Bands of Brothers saved the free world. Fratres means Brothers, When I listen to this, I think about those young men..those boys...those Brothers...charging the beaches of Normandy on that cold morning. Withering machine gun fire. Blood. Death. Sacrifice. I played in a jazz big band for many years after college. I was in my 20's...the rest of the guys were in their in their 60's. A couple of them served in WW2 and took part in the D-Day landings. We played so many gigs, and we had a lot of time to talk on breaks. But they didn't say much about what the did or saw in the War. Our drummer Earl was almost deaf, and he had the shakes. Our piano player told me once that Earl suffered from shell shock. He told me that Earl had seen German soldiers lined up after capture and run over by Allied tanks. Earl was a shell of his former self. But I will always appreciate and honor what he went through so I could play great big band music in a free country.
Louis Vierne (1870-1937) was a French organist and composer. I love organ music, and I have long enjoyed Vierne's music. My favorite work by Vierne is his 24 Pieces en style libre, op. 31. No. 15 in this composition is the Arabesque. A stunning, haunting, soft, moving, slightly disturbing, melancholy, and profoundly original work. You know me...I get something in my ear and I listen to it over and over and over. This is just such a piece.
The 24 Fantasy Pieces were composed in 1913-14. Thirteen years later, Vierne came to America for a concert tour, and he performed in Kansas City at the Westport Presbyterian Church on April 1, 1927. I found the review of his performance in the Kansas City Times.
Louis Vierne , French Organist, Heard at Westport Presbyterian Church.
Louis Vierne, who played last night the new Reuter organ in the Westport Avenue Presbyterian church, would have commanded the honest respect of his audience even had he been less generously endowed musically.
For M. Vierne is almost without sight, an affliction that in any musician is sufficient to blast a career, and one that is especially hard for an organist , since no two organs are alike, and all are controlled from scattered stop pulls, inconspicuously placed pistons, and irregularly located foot pedale-to say nothing of the pedal keyboard and such ordinary matters. So that the loss of sight means usually the loss of a career.
But not with M. Vierne. He solves a good part of his difficulty by carrying with him a young secretary, who not only assists him in the usual secretarial ways, but also pulls his stops and sets up his combinations for him. The remainder he does by pure ability, and so well he need ask quarter from no one. The element of spontaneity was lacking; its inclusion would have been too much to ask. The interpretations had a fixed character, and gave an impression of "predestination" thoroughly in keeping with certain religious faiths.
But for the remainder, the audience had reason to be thankful. The organist has, for one thing, a delicate sense of color values, and he is not of the type that startles an audience periodically with sudden roaring of the full organ. His climaxes were subtly prepared, and more subtly led away from than usual. His dexterity was sufficient, and his fingers (and feet) were extraordinarily accurate considering the fact that sight did not direct them.
A good deal of the music was M. Vierne's. For the most part it is a strange mixture of French sureness of touch and neatness with German sentiment, especially the closing set of six "Fantasie Pieces," each of which was very surely wrought, and definite in character.
The visiting organist came under the auspices of the Kansas City chapter of the National Association of Organists, of which chapter Hans Fell is president. M. Vierne is titular organist of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
My mom and I meet for coffee and breakfast every Friday morning. Often, she will pick me up and I will ride with her to our local Panera. Last Friday, as we were driving, she had the radio on...tuned to Sirius XM's Symphony Hall Channel 76. She had it turned up because The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana was playing. She told me a wonderful story about how she and my dad, while they were teenagers, would go to a record store on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, and they would play music in the listening booths, and he would tell her about the piece playing. She has a vivid memory of the time in 1956 that they listened to The Moldau with him explaining what was happening musically to bring the piece to life as they listened to it. I could see this in my mind. My dad loved music so much, and he loved sharing it and talking about it. My mom said he opened this musical door for her, and to this day, she has a great love, appreciation, and understanding of not only classical music, but all forms.
I still listen to vinyl. And it has been making a big comeback in this digital world of ours. I am too young to remember the listening booths that many record stores had that allowed you to hear a record before you took it home. Of course, now you get a sample of a download before you buy it. But the listening booths did the same trick back in the day.
The Moldau, which is from a collection of symphonic pieces by Smetana called Ma Vlast, was composed in 1874. The Moldau is a river, also known in Czechoslovakia as Vltava. Smetana creates a musical description of this river from it's birth as a tiny brook, steadily growing in power and size to it's majestic enormity. This piece is so easy and fun to listen to. The melody is infectious and widely known though concert performances, recordings and TV/Commercial/Film use.
Musical doors await. Someone may open it for you. All you have to do is walk through.
My last post was about my friend Webb Chiles and his amazing accomplishment of sailing around the world...for the 6th time. During his many passages, he listens to a lot of music. Here is a video he shared on YouTube from the final leg of the journey from Panama to San Diego. On this occasion, he is playing the soundtrack from Out of Africa by John Barry. I made the comment that this music was intended to capture the majestic landscape of Africa, but it does the same capturing the majesty of the ocean.
I saw a great commercial this week. Volvo is selling a new car and using the the music of Mozart to do so...the Queen of the Night Aria from The Magic Flute, first performed in 1791. Enjoy.
Erik Satie is one of my favorite composers. I have shared some of his music in previous entries of this journal. I know that he was an eccentric dude, but I did not know that he wrote a Mass...the Messe des Pauvres 1893-1895. He actually invented his own religion called the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Satie served as the High Priest. This Mass is scored for 2 voices and Organ. It was not published during his lifetime. Fellow composer Darius Milhaud unearthed it and brought it to the public a year after Satie died (1926). It is absolutely weird. But it is equally fascinating...and I have probably listened to it ten times in the last month.
My friend Webb Chiles just completed his sixth circumnavigation of the planet earth. Yes, he has sailed around the world six times. This sixth voyage was completed on April 29, 2019. He sailed 30,000 miles all by himself on a Moore 24...a 24 foot sailboat. He started in San Diego in 2014 and finished there last week. Webb is 77 years old and blind in one eye. He has read more books, listened to more music, traveled more miles, and lived more life than many of us combined in all of our lives. He is a special person in so many ways, and I feel lucky to call him a friend. I don't know much about sailing, but Webb knows a lot about classical music, and thus our friendship is rooted in that shared passion. Webb listens to a lot of music at home and out at sea. Much of it is classical, though, like me, he has a wide appreciation of many types of music. Bach is his favorite composer. He says of Bach, "he's the man." I can't disagree with that. On the last leg of this sixth journey, he also listened to The Creation Oratorio by Haydn. I revisited this piece again this week thanks to his mention of it in his passage log. As I listened to it, I thought about what it must be like all alone on a small boat in the vast ocean. The thought overwhelms me, just as the thought of this tiny planet we live on "spinning in infinity" (thanks Paul Simon) in the vastness of space.
Congratulations Webb. You are truly an amazing man.
