Wagner’s extensive use of leitmotifs, in which musical phrases represent people, places, and even emotions, is appropriated here in Game of Thrones so that people, places, and great houses all have their own musical material. Using Wagner’s Ring as a model, I examine the dramatic deployment of both diegetic and non-diegetic musical cues in a Game of Thrones episode titled, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (S8E2).In many ways, this episode is unusual: most of the main characters are gathered in one place, awaiting the army of the dead; and it functions like a giant anticipation, or upbeat, for the upcoming battle. The episode avoids action in favor of quiet contemplation, and reunites many pairs of characters (and swords) that have been long separated.Ramin Djawadi’s musical score, which combines both diegetic and non-diegetic cues, enhances these quiet moments with additional layers of information. In the first scene of the episode, Jaime Lannister—known as the Kingslayer—arrives in Winterfell, despite having fought against the forces assembled there nearly his entire life. He does so at great personal risk, which only subsides once Lady Brienne vouches for him. After this point, Djawadi includes a musical reference to Jaime’s past, a direct callback to the first statement of Jaime’s “Kingslayer” theme, heard in the episode titled, “Kissed By Fire” (S3E5).
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Just running slightly behind The Music Salon, Alex Ross has a piece up at The New Yorker about the new recording of two symphonies by Mieczysław Weinberg.
Weinberg, a Polish-Jewish composer who spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, has recently stepped out of the historical mists, encroaching on the mainstream repertory. He lived from 1919 to 1996 and long dwelled in the shadow of his older contemporary Dmitri Shostakovich. As more of his huge output emerges, though, his originality becomes clear. The Quatuor Danel has recorded Weinberg’s seventeen string quartets and is now playing them widely, honoring a body of work that rivals Shostakovich’s cycle in heft. A new Deutsche Grammophon recording of Symphonies No. 2 and No. 21, with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony, is an even greater revelation. The “Kaddish” is a gaunt requiem for a succession of twentieth-century tragedies, of which Weinberg experienced more than his share.
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Also at The New Yorker is another piece by Ross on conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler:
It certainly seems the case that some of the most intense musical statements in the 20th century came out of extreme circumstances. One immediately thinks of the Symphony No. 7 of Shostakovich, the first movement of which was written in Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis.The moral quandary inherent in the Furtwängler box set is addressed forthrightly in the liner notes, which take the form of a hundred-and-eighty-four-page hardback book. The lead essay, by the musicologist Richard Taruskin, is one of the finest things ever written about Furtwängler, who has inspired a shelf’s worth of books, along with a Broadway play and a film (both titled “Taking Sides”). Taruskin, a ferocious critic of the fairy tales we tell ourselves about the autonomy of art, would be the last to argue that we should ignore the context to which Furtwängler belonged. Instead, Taruskin confronts the reader with a quotation from a 1943 Philharmonic program book, one that pits the noble art of Beethoven against the atrocities supposedly being committed by Germany’s enemies: “It is our world that sounds forth when the bows are set in motion, the world of a spirit that no enemy air raid can destroy, nor any bomb.”Such a statement forces us to consider the possibility that the nimbus of greatness around Furtwängler arises not in spite of the historical situation but because of it. The conductor and his musicians were working “as if there were no tomorrow,” Taruskin writes, in discussing the last item in the set—the final movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, recorded amid the inferno of January, 1945. “The music builds unbearable tension, abjures all ‘Brahmsian’ restraint or relaxation, and its raging subjectivity hits dumbfounding extravagances of tempo at both ends of the scale. . . . The bloodiest of all wars brought the foremost classical musician in the country with the most distinguished tradition of classical music to the pinnacle of his career, setting a standard neither he nor any other symphonic conductor was ever moved to duplicate.”
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I love those articles about the lesser-known corners of the music world, that street in Paris where all the best bow re-hairers have their shops, the secrets of the Cremona violins, and today, an article in NY1 magazine about the role of the opera prompter. Sadly, the piece is so incoherently written that it is hard to determine what the job is, exactly:
“The prompter has to be a highly trained musician. She can hear if they made a wrong entrance she'll do something like that and ask him to hold up a second wait a minute wait a minute you have two more measures before you come in okay now. That's why the singers love the prompter because they put them back on track,” MET Opera Archives Director Peter Clark said.The job is like that of the prompter in any live theatre: if the performer misses an entrance or forgets a line, the idea is to give them a hint in time to rescue the performance! Just exactly how this is done in various situations I would love to hear, but we don't learn much from this article!
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The New York Times has a piece on rebel hipster viol player Liam Byrne:
You know, I think I know exactly what he means!This week, Mr. Byrne releases his debut album with the cult label Bedroom Community. Titled “Concrete,” it stirs together an eclectic compound of ingredients. A graceful showpiece by the high-Baroque French viol master Marin Marais is bookended by two works by Mr. Muhly. Ambient works by the contemporary Icelandic composer-producer Valgeir Sigurdsson sit cheek by jowl with five-part Renaissance counterpoint in which, through the magic of multitracking, Mr. Byrne plays every single line.“I like finding connections,” Mr. Byrne said in an interview, describing how his three most formative musical influences were the American composer Steve Reich, the English composer Orlando Gibbons and the girl group TLC. He grinned. “New York minimalism, Renaissance polyphony and early ’90s R&B. That’s the only music you ever need.”
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The Guardian continues its neverending crusade to ensure that every niche and realm in the world of music is exactly gender equal, or, preferably, biased in favor of women: Girls to the front: why gender is still a headline issue at festivals.
“We need to change the ‘pale, male and stale’ paradigm,” explains Marta Pallarès, Primavera’s head of press. “We wanted to show that the likes of Tame Impala, Guided By Voices or Stereolab can happily live together with trap divas and reggaeton queens.” It’s this commitment that means the Primavera lineup isn’t just one of the most right-on bills of the summer, but also one of the best. The middle-aged blokes are still there (hello Jarvis, Primal Scream and Interpol!), but there’s a thrilling diversity in sound as well as gender thanks to the three-day event’s fresh approach. Like a whistlestop tour through your most genre-hopping friend’s Spotify account, they’ve got London MC Flohio up alongside pop royalty Robyn and Carly Rae Jepsen, DJ Peggy Gou, Solange, Neneh Cherry, Lizzo, Tirzah and basically every woman who’s released music in the past year that made you go “Oooh, not bad”.
Pallarès is open about how this move did not actually require much work aside from a passion to shake up the industry. “It can be done now and it should be done now, but you need to want it. We hope that our move can spark change,” she says. So is anyone else following their lead?Moral preening at the Guardian, it never gets old.
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And now, time for our traditional envoi to herald the weekend and may yours be fulfilling and bountiful. Here are a couple of clips by hipster viol-player Liam Byrne. First, a sarabande by Marin Marais with theorbo player Jonas Nordberg:
And here is something more contemporary: Lines Curved Rivers Mirrored by Edmund Finnis:
13 comments:
I skim the Guardian's homepage every morning for the amusement that is almost always available there; 'moral preening' indeed. The presumption that 'we' are all cheering for the same goal or team (which appears in nearly every sort of article or review-- it's particularly funny when someone is writing about a restaurant menu: I guess I can't really appreciate 'archly bouji champagne sauce' unless I'm on board with the whole G. project) becomes tiresome fairly quickly, however. Noticed a video yesterday or a couple of days ago of Owen Jones interviewing a black Tory candidate for something, the front page image of which captured such a look of puzzlement/concern/disbelief on Jones's face: that's it in a nutshell, though, isn't it? the bien-pensants really don't 'get' it, that their way isn't the only one and true. Very rarely laugh aloud in my morning cursus but I did at that photograph.
Listening to Concrete now-- thanks! I would've have missed that Dickson article in the Times altogether. As it happens, at some point during the coming week (during the conference that'll see the Perti and Colombani oratorios performed over at the University) there'll also be this:
"Dubbed the James River Music Book, this newly discovered manuscript contains the first known solo music for viola da gamba in an American source, the earliest known organ music in an American manuscript source, and fragments of other early eighteenth-century musical items, including a Handel aria and excerpts from English music theory texts. Subsequent eighteenth-century hands have added a wealth of dances and tunes for fiddle and flute. Paleographic and codicological evidence establishes the JRMB as having resided in the (now) Southeastern U.S. since the 1730s, and the contents point to a lively, multi-generational musical culture that brought together diverse European and American musical influences."
Loren Ludwig, the presenter, who's a member of the ensembles LeStrange Viols and ACRONYM, will be performing some pieces from the JRMB. Of course as it happens I want to go to that and can't, unlike the Alex Ross that I could've gone to but didn't, tsk.
Wow, American music for viola da gamba!
I would love to hear about the conference events if you make it to them.
Perti's La Beata Imelde last night was a treat! Five soloists, then an ensemble of violins, cellos, bass, lute, harpsichord. Perti called for a theorbo, too; am not sure if the bass or the second cello substituted for that. The oratorio exists only in manuscript, in Perti's own hand, evidently, and the musicians were using photocopies of the MS. pages. Perhaps 70 minutes in length. This was the first repeat performance after the premiere in 1686-- quite how that is known, am not sure.
There is a video at the Musicking Conference Facebook site; they did a live feed last night.
Student amateurs, the performers; there were passages of fine singing but... imperfections also. But Testo, the 'narrator', Imelda, and the Monacha Prima were fine throughout.
An English translation or paraphrase of the Italian text was projected behind the stage.
I said three decades of the rosary while waiting for the show to get started-- delays because they had to find more chairs for audience seating-- and apart from the many beautiful and lively parts of the oratorio itself what most struck me was the spectacle of the interplay of the very Counter-Reformation Baroque Catholicism of Blessed Imelda's legenda and the text of the oratorio itself and the 21st c audience: contingents of academics, HIP Baroque enthusiasts, adepts of feminist theory/history. (Imelda was a child whose passionate desire to receive the Lord in the Sacrament of the Altar [this was reserved to adults only at that time], at last satisfied via a miraculous sign, died. I will leave to your imagination-- think Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa-- what the theorists etc do with that.)
Thanks for the report, Marc! Wish I had been there. This was in Portland, correct?
No, no, here in Eugene at the University of Oregon. This is the fourth annual Musicking Conference over there.
Prizewinning opera is anything these days, at the Venice Biennale anyway. In case it flies below your radar, there is this, the Lithuanian effort. Thirteen seconds is at the website; seems like enough to me. But climate change!
The concert tonight (called Circling Corelli: The Trio Sonata Before 1700) included pieces by Giuseppe Scarani, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Battista Buonamente, Giuseppe Maria Placuzzi, Giovanni Maria Bonocini, Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, Domenico Gabrielli, Corelli, and then Antonio Caldara-- the two latter being the only ones I know at all: the earliest birth date there is 1595 and then Caldara died in 1736. A lovely variety of music of course but ninety minutes and I was reaching enjoyment's limit after a day at the office. I think there must be some of the Ballo del Granduca of Buonamente in Biber somewhere, but of course I can't be sure where what I thought I heard is. Buonamente used the already current Ballo in his version (according to Wikipedia, ahem), so who knows.
The James River Music Book presentation earlier was interesting but brief; I imagine that Dr Loren Ludwig is working on an edition, since the information page is marked 'not for citation' some dozen times (perhaps I exaggerate). He performed two suites for viola da gamba from the MS (on a borrowed instrument: one way to avoid having the airlines destroy your instrument). "The earliest layer [of the MS] holds 15 pieces for solo viola da gamba, including two Cibelles by Lully and Purcell, instructional material, a keyboard arrangement of Handel's aria Si t'amo caro from Teseo (1713), and three 'fugues for the organ'."
Had to look up cibell. There are some 'consonances' between the JRMB and a manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge the number of which I neglected to commit to memory. LL did also spend a few minutes going on about the need to account for the contributions of Black people to the colonial musical culture of the late 17th c/early 18th c Atlantic region; my own observation: of the hundred people present, a quick surreptitious search noted only one Black person (and she was obviously a student, not a member of faculty). Only now has it occurred to me to wonder if the five parts of the first suite and the five of the second count as ten of those 13 pieces for solo viola da gamba, or as two of the 13. Hmm. 34 pages of manuscript, so some sixty 6" x 7.75" inch pages. The hall was committed to another use after an hour and so the question-and-answer session was unhappily curtailed.
As it turns out, a viola da gamba ensemble he plays in recorded a version of Arvo Pärt's Fratres a few years ago-- made no connection between that and LL until I checked out his website. I remember listening to it when you were writing about Pärt a couple of years ago.
Thanks Marc, for these very informative reports. I have been very busy with other matters so not able to make much of a reply.
Re the question about ten pieces or two pieces, it reminds me of an anecdote Philip Glass tells in his memoir. Early in his career just after he wrote Music in 12 Parts which at that time was around 35 minutes long if I recall correctly, he played it for a friend who wasn't familiar with his music. Afterwards she said, "where are the other eleven parts?"
The Quirino Colombani oratorio Il martirio di Santa Cecilia performed last night was a happy glimpse into another world! the vocalists and the 'University of Oregon Oratorio Orchestra' (four baroque violins, two baroque cellos, bass, harpsichord) gave a bright, lively performance of the work that had premiered in Rome (1701; with at least two other performances, one in Perugia and the other in Spoleto). The two MSS consulted are at the Bibliothèque National and lack "the inner musical voices" i.e. (as I understand it) only a low part and a high part are present with the other players being expected to improvise within that framework. The Musicking Conference animators, Mark Vanscheeuwijck (musicology professor) and Holly Roberts (doctoral candidate whose dissertation has to do with 'musical ecstasy' in this period) put the MSS into modern notation and provided the other parts. And the composer/doctoral candidate Samuel Kalcheim wrote the preludial Sinfonia. (Perti's own MSS for the parts of La beata Imelde, sung Monday, survive and were used for that performance. I wonder if I have misunderstood: why do the Colombani into modern notation and not the Perti? or, put the other way round, why do the C. into modern notation if that wasn't necessary? My capacity for misunderstanding is enormous.)
The Valeriano (Sarah Brauer) and the Almachio (Dylan Burnett) gave exceptionally fine performances. Think I will stop at that.
Both the Colombani and the Perti ended with arias performed by the eponymous heroines-- no grand Handelian choruses here; that is characteristic of the Italian style in the last quarter of the 17th c, perhaps, or more generally.
Ms Roberts advanced the hypothesis that Alessandro Scarlatti's Il martirio di Santa Cecilia was intended to be the second part, the continuation, as it were, of Colombani's, which ends with the martyrdom of Cecilia's husband Valeriano and his brother Tiburzio but with Cecilia remaining still in this life, suffering an unbloody passion; Scarlatti begins after the brothers have been killed. The known dates fit but of course who knows.
I felt the lack of libretti. The fact is that there is a third MS of this Colombani oratorio, at the British Library; Add. mss. 34.264-- don't ask me where I stumbled on that datum but it was an Italian website found via Italian Wikipedia; it must have been a bit awkward for Ms Roberts to acknowledge last night that she had only recently discovered its existence. Noted to myself during the Perti that I doubted the translation in a couple of places and I imagine (judging solely, in this case, from the terribly... awkward projected English text) that one would be right to do so for the Colombani. A prodigious amount of work was dedicated to the presentation of Beata Imelda & Santa Cecilia so it seems ungenerous to cavil; still.
The oratorio was first performed at the Oratory of San Girolamo della Carità with the title L'Ape industriosa in Santa Cecilia, which curious fact Ms Roberts did not elucidate, although she speculated that it was the French manuscript copyists/editors who adopted the present title. 'The industrious bee', however, is from the second and sixth responsories at Matins of St Cecilia's office (derived in turn from the spuriously ancient legenda: O beáta Cæcília... quasi apis argumentosa Dómino deservísti, O blessed Cecilia... like an industrious [how the Latin argumentosa acquired the sense 'industrious' is an interesting question] bee you served the Lord.
The Musicking Conference sounds absolutely marvellous! Thanks so much for your reporting on it. Do they do this every year? This kind of archival work leading directly to performance is some of the most exciting musicology you can do. Wow!
Yes, the four events I was able to make it to were wonderful (and the recordings of the three concerts are on Facebook: how long those 'live feeds' are kept there, I have no idea). This is the fourth year.
'Musicking' is evidently a term of art, meant to encompass the Musicology Now-ish preoccupations with the notion that 'musio' by itself isn't sufficient-- one must deal with every act of everyone who is any way or form involved in the making of it e.g. the unremembered slaves and wives and sisters and copyists and all their various and presumably polyvalent identities, the under-classes and over-classes and elites, the finances, the necessary oppressions and subordinations etc etc. Much of which I can see the or some value in studying of course (how much is 'musicology', however?) but the concert performances were almost entirely free of it. The directors making sure in their pre-concert remarks to thank the housekeeping staff who arranged seating-- okay, why not, I suppose, but I'd react less cynically if I thought it was a sincere expression of gratitude and not a political act.
Politics tends to ruin everything, doesn't it? I think what keeps the music world more or less sane is that the act of performing music for audiences of real people, and the need to satisfy them MUSICALLY, acts as a kind of weather-anchor keeping the field connected to reality.
The archival work that was the necessary prolegomena to these concerts is the kind of real musicology that is not subject to the vicissitudes of fashion.
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