Broadway at night

I grew up on musicals. My sibs and I used to sing selections from Broadway and Off-Broadway shows in the car when we were on trips. When we get together, we still sing the same songs. All of them have children, at least three of whom have had parts in high school productions of musicals. So those of us approaching codgerdom have learned plenty of new songs.

In the years since learning all of those great musicals by Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Irving Berlin, and others, I have read so much about the death of the American musical that I frankly stopped paying attention. Then I heard excerpts of some current shows on the radio. I would enjoy learning and singing some of those tunes.

This year there are 47 musicals running on Broadway. Here are a few of the most popular:

The Lion King

The three most popular musicals, as listed by Broadway.com, are adapted from movies. Back in my day (I groan to say), movie musicals were based on successful Broadway plays. The first musical play adapted from a move that I ever saw that was Singing in the Rain.

I went with more than a little skepticism, thinking it would never work. It did. Brilliantly. If someone can stage the scene where Gene Kelly sings the title song, anything is possible.

The Lion King is based not only on a movie, but an animation at that. Human actors must therefore portray already familiar lions and other animals. Traveling to New York so I can actually see these musicals is way out of my research budget, but this play won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It has recently passed Phantom of the Opera as the highest grossing show on Broadway and is now its sixth-longest running show.

Elton John provided the music to lyrics by Tim Rice. Their “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” won an Oscar. Some scenes may be disturbing to young children. Parent will be able to predict their childrens’ reaction based on how they responded to the movie. With that caveat, The Lion King is family friendly.

Wicked

Wicked, number four on Broadway.com’s list by popularity (as viewed May 12, 2012), is the most popular running musical not based on a movie. Even at that, it functions as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz.

Before Dorothy’s house fell on her, the Wicked Witch of the West was a powerful figure in Oz. Wicked gives her the name Elphaba. The story revolves around her life and includes her friendship with Glinda, whom it does not exactly portray as good.

Many people nowadays might not realize that The Wizard of Oz was the first of a whole series of books by L. Frank Baum about Oz and Dorothy. How Elphaba, the passionate crusader against injustice, became known as wicked and the spoiled rich girl Glinda became known as good is not found in Baum’s works.

The whole series, however does provide plenty of hints about a much darker side of Oz than appears in the movie. In particular, the Wizard of Oz is a self-confessed humbug whose actions were not all meritorious. The all-powerful but somewhat bumbling Wizard of the movie appears as a much more troubled man.

There is a vogue nowadays for retelling old fairy tales, etc. and turning them on their ear. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods is one well known musical example of challenging the standard take on goodness and wickedness. Wicked represents the same tradition.

Steven Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics. He also did the same for previous hits Godspell and Pippin. Wicked is every bit as family friendly as The Wizard of Oz. For example, children scared of the flying monkeys in the movie won’t like them any better on stage. By third grade, I suppose, no one will find any of it scary.

The Book of Mormon

I generally steer clear of topical satires. I find modern ones too eager to offend and seldom either thoughtful or funny. The only reason I even considered describing The Book of Mormon in this list is that I heard an interview with creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone on the radio.

Predictably, neither are Mormon. I gather neither are Christian, either, but instead of using Mormons as the hapless butt of some kind of anti-religious diatribe, they made a great effort to understand Mormon culture and deal with it sympathetically. They said that not only were most Mormons not offended by the play, but that they hear laughter from the audience at inside jokes that non-Mormons would never get.

The music played as part of that interview does not resemble rock or any other current pop style. While no one would mistake it for the musicals of fifty years ago, it has all of the tunefulness and compositional sophistication of the best of the Broadway tradition. I found it very refreshing.

The story involves two young missionaries as they go through their training, become cocky about how well they’ll succeed, and then find themselves in the middle of Uganda’s AIDS epidemic and squalor. One of the young men has a great talent for getting in trouble. All of that allows the musical to spoof not only religion, but issues of race, poverty, and the developing sexual attitudes of young men raised in strict households.

Parker and Stone also created South Park. They added Robert Lopez of Avenue Q to their creative team for The Book of Mormon. The show’s language is often crude. I suppose if it were a movie it would have a PG-13 rating. I doubt if I’d go see it, but it did win nine Tony Awards.

Mary Poppins

My family sang songs from this old favorite movie in the car. They have since been supplanted in the family repertoire by newer stuff, but I still love them and sing them at home.

I wonder how the umbrella scene, the tea party on the ceiling, or popping in and out of chalk pavement pictures could possibly work on stage. But then if a midwestern repertory company can stage a downpour while someone with an umbrella does a song and dance, I’m sure those scenes are wonderful.

One common fault of all of the plays I saw at that theater was that, if I knew the movie, the production stayed too close to it. Didn’t movie adaptations of Broadway musicals always include new songs?

Anyway, the Broadway Mary Poppins will make it as difficult as possible for any other theater merely to imitate the movie. In addition to songs from the film by Richard and Robert Sherman, it has new ones by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. Hmm. Maybe they punted on some of the more spectacular movie special effects and cut the scenes.

This definitely G rated show has been running on Broadway now for five years.

Chicago

Chicago has a long history of gangsters and corruption. Chicago the musical is set in the roaring ’20s. The place must have roared like not quite anywhere else. Two young women both killed men in 1924. Both were acquitted of murder after spectacular trials.

The reporter who covered the trials wrote a play about it, called Chicago, which ran on Broadway for 172 performances beginning in 1926. Cecil B. DeMille’s silent film version appeared in 1927. The 1942 Ginger Rogers movie Roxie Hart is loosely based on the same play.

In the 1960s, Gwen Verdon wanted her husband Bob Fosse to make a musical on the 1926 play, but they couldn’t get the rights until the author’s death. Once they did, Fosse enlisted Fred Ebb to write the book and lyrics and John Kander to provide the music.

This version of Chicago opened on Broadway in 1975 and had a run of 936 performances. What’s running on Broadway now is actually the 1996 revival.

Many Broadway musicals depend on elaborate scenery and huge production numbers. This one is simple to the point of minimal scenery and mostly black costumes. Lots of skin, too. It’s a funny take on adultery and violence, and the bad girls get away with murder. Even so, it’s more family friendly than lots of what the networks offer on prime time TV.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Peter Vanderheyden.

Exceptionally large instruments, including contrabass trombone (no. 2)

Trombones come in several sizes. Tenor and bass trombone are the most common. Orchestral trombonists frequently use alto trombones. Soprano and contrabass trombones remain novelties. The latter is by far the older of the two.

Someone described a performance on a contrabass trombone (probably) in 1568. Michael Praetorius provided the first really comprehensive description of the trombone in the second volume of his Syntagma musicum (1619). He described and illustrated sizes from the alto trombone to the contrabass.

The contrabass must have been an oddity in his own lifetime, because his description is rather vague. The one pictured here is proportionately the same as the ordinary (tenor) trombone, but twice as long so that it sounded an octave lower.

Today, contrabass trombones aren’t exactly oddities, but they’re not common, either. What’s odd is that two very different instruments go by the name contrabass trombone. Do you find that confusing? Blame the bass trombone.

What’s a bass trombone?

The bass trombone itself has a convoluted history. Praetorius describes two different sizes, neither of which corresponds to what we call a bass trombone today. He described all three of the lower trombones not as bass or contrabass, as we do today, but according to their relationship to the ordinary trombone.

He called the bass trombones “fourth” and “fifth” trombones and the contrabass “octave” trombone. An inventory taken in Stuttgart in 1589 mentions a “third” trombone, which would also be a bass trombone.

Nowadays, we name trombones according to their fundamental note in first position. The tenor trombone in in B-flat. Trombones a third, fourth, or fifth lower would be in G, F, or E-flat respectively.

The trombone in G was the standard bass trombone in England throughout most of the nineteenth century up through the Second World War. The trombone in F was nominally the bass trombone in Germany at the same time. Berlioz considered the E-flat trombone the authentic bass, but noted that it was no longer available in France.

From the late eighteenth century, some writers insisted that alto, tenor, and bass trombones were all B-flat instruments. The only difference was the mouthpiece. B-flat instruments were certainly the only trombones used in France, but elsewhere the idea of using a B-flat instrument as a bass trombone must have been fairly common as well.

Christian Friedrich Sattler, a German maker, introduced the so-called tenor-bass trombone, a B-flat instrument with the wider bore of the F trombone. He added a thumb-valve (what Americans call the trigger) to this kind of instrument in 1839.

With the trigger, a B-flat instrument had both the bore size and most of the usable range of a trombone in F. It probably supplanted the lower-pitched bass trombones anywhere the slide trombone had not been supplanted by valve trombones. Except of course in England, where they kept their G basses for more than a century afterward.

Since the 1960s, “bass trombone” has meant a B-flat instrument with an even larger bore and two triggers. Even before that time, if anyone still played the old F trombones, they called it a contrabass trombone instead of a bass trombone. And it probably had a trigger.

What did everyone have against the long trombones?

At least as early as 1816, some thought that the bass trombone was unreasonably difficult to play. It was so long that the player needed a handle to reach the outer positions. Even on a B-flat instrument, the player may need to move the slide as much as two feet from one note to the next. It must have been fatiguing to play.

In that year, Gottfried Weber suggested that instead of two tubes, the trombone slide should have four. That would cut the distance between adjacent positions in half. His idea never caught on. The valve trombone came along shortly thereafter and Sattler’s trigger not long after that.

Meanwhile, writers of orchestration textbooks throughout the nineteenth century continued to complain about how physically taxing the long basses are to play and how the handle made intonation and any kind of rapid movement unreasonably difficult.

The fact that Sattler’s B-flat/F instrument had replaced all but the shortest of the older bass trombones indicates that these authors merely reported what most players thought. But there are always some outliers.

As I said, some continued to play F trombones and started to call them contrabass trombones. But I also said that the contrabass trombone refers to two different instruments. The other is a modern monster.

Sometime, probably in the very late nineteenth or early twentieth century, someone resurrected Weber’s four-legged slide. But instead of using it to shorten the positions on a regular B-flat trombone, he made an “octave” trombone and used the four-legged slide to give it the same positions as a regular tenor. Weber, I assume, would have been very dismayed to learn that.

And what of modern orchestration textbooks? Those that mention the contrabass trombone at all counsel against using it. It is too physically taxing for the player! Listen to the following two videos. What do you think?

Here is a contrabass trombone in F. . .

. . . and here is a special contrabass trombone in BB-flat–evidently getting ready for Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

(Sorry, I couldn’t find anything with both a well-played extended passage for this instrument and a good view of it. I decided to go with the view.)

Les Préludes, d’après Lamartine

Symphonic poems have two basic characteristics. Musically, they contain all of the structural characteristics of a traditional four-movement symphony within a single movement. They also attempt to unite music and literature by means of a preface, or program, that Liszt provided.

The program

For Les Préludes, Liszt prepared a prose interpretation of a poem from Nouvelles méditations poétiques by Alphonse de Lamartine:

What else is life but a series of preludes to that unknown hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death? Love is the enchanted dawn of all existence; but what fate is there whose first delights of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, whose fine illusions are not dissipated by some mortal blast, consuming its altar as though by a stroke of lightning? And what cruelly wounded soul, issuing from one of these tempests, does not endeavor to solace its memories in the calm serenity of rural life? Nevertheless, man does not resign himself for long to the enjoyment of that beneficent warmth which he first enjoyed in Nature’s bosom, and when the ‘trumpet sounds the alarm’ he takes up his perilous post, no matter what struggle calls him to its ranks, that he may recover in combat the full consciousness of himself and the entire possession of his powers.

For a long time, musicians supposed that Liszt had that poem in mind as he composed his piece. It is remarkably easy to fit the music to the program. I wrote a high school term paper about it. I suppose if I looked hard enough, I could find plenty of similar approaches in the older literature about Liszt.

As it turns out, Liszt wrote the music long before he ever read Lamartine’s poem. Liszt met another poet, Joseph Autran, in 1844 Marseilles, where he was honored with a banquet. He set one of Autran’s poems for mixed chorus and piano and had it performed locally almost immediately. The next year he wrote three more choral pieces to Autran’s poetry.

Later, when he started learning orchestration, he decided to write an overture to these four pieces, which he called Symphonic meditations. Apparently he only intended this overture as an orchestration exercise, but then Autran sent Liszt some more poems. They reminded Liszt of his earlier pieces, and he determined to do something with them someday.

Someday came between 1852 and 1854. He recomposed the old overture, but instead of making reference to any of Autran’s poems, he found that Lamartine’s more nearly evoked the emotions he wanted to put across. Thus the new title,Les Préludes, and the program based on Lamartine.

The music

Structually, Les Préludes sort of resembles a sonata form, but it isn’t. It has a slow introduction, just like so many of Haydn’s symphonies, but what follows includes all the tempo changes, meter changes, key changes, and harmonic relationships that would occur over the course of an entire four-movement symphony.

In a classical symphony, each movement would have its own thematic material. Occasional exceptions include Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which quotes from the third movement in the fourth movement. Later composers built an entire structure, called cyclical, on the idea of using the same material in more than one movement.

Liszt also used cyclical procedures in his orchestral music, but he took them an important step farther. The entire Les Préludes comes from a three-note motive heard at the very beginning. There is nothing very distinctive about it. Plenty of other composer’s used it. Caesar Franck’s (cyclical and multi-movement) D minor Symphony opens with the same motive.

Liszt developed a technique known as thematic transformation. He drew a longer theme from the motive and then transformed that theme into all of the other themes. Sometimes listeners can hear the germ motive easily. Other times, Liszt disguises it. It’s still there, but requires several hearings to notice the relationship.

Liszt began his musical career as a popular piano virtuoso. The audience for classical music disdained that entire scene. Later, both Liszt and concert life in general came to an artistic crossroads.

The merger of the aristocracy with the upper middle class and the merger of the audiences for classical music and high-status popular music provided Liszt with the opportunity to take an interest in learning to orchestrate.

But as someone formerly associated with the rivals of classical music, Liszt saw no need to follow classical ideals. His cyclical structure and thematic transformation displaced the traditional classical sonata form. He also had a radically different approach to orchestration.

By Liszt’s time, everyone wrote for orchestra differently than Beethoven had, but there are important differences between Liszt’s procedures and those of traditionalists like Brahms. One innovation was introducing concepts of chamber music within orchestral parts.

Collectively, the innovations in form and orchestration made Liszt’s symphonic poems more difficult than Brahms’ symphonies for orchestras to play and mistakes harder to cover up.

For a single example, listen to the famous horn quartet. Even small city professional orchestras today have strong players in every seat, but even the best nineteenth-century orchestras had weak musicians. They tried to bury them in places where they’d do the least harm. Fourth horn was a convenient place to put the lesser musicians that the orchestra had to hire in order to provide full instrumentation.

Fourth horn parts in Romantic orchestral music are frequently boring to play. Why risk anything important since chances are the person playing the part isn’t very good? Once you have heard the Les Préludes horn quartet a couple of times, listen specifically to the fourth horn part, the very bottom of the texture.

You’ll have no trouble hearing it. Liszt makes sure not much else is happening. The fourth horn part is rhythmically distinct from the rest of the section. It plays moving parts while the others hold chords. It may not require great technique, but it certainly requires solid musicianship and confidence.

Here is a recording that contains some lesser-known Liszt tone poems to give you a chance to compare this familiar war horse with some of its companions.

Liszt: Les Preludes ; Orpheus ; Tasso ; Festklänge / Rafael Fruhbeck De Burgos and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra from ArkivMusic, $19.99

The rapid growth of towns like Brodhead

Members of the Brodhead band, with leader E. O. Kimberly at top left.

In the decade before the Civil War, railroads spread across the country, or at least the North, and towns sprang up and grew (often rapidly) in their wake. The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway needed a town in south central Wisconsin and acquired land from a group of men headed by Edward Brodhead. The village of Brodhead was platted in 1856, and a year later some of the citizens decided it needed to develop the amenities of a real town, including a town band.

As The Americans: the National Experience by Daniel Boorstin shows, such rapid growth was commonplace at the time. Newspapers, bands, and other institutions helped town boosters recruit new businesses and residents. No one in Brodhead had any formal training in music, but ten young men under the leadership of Edwin Oscar Kimberly decided to give it a try.

They bought cheap instruments to learn on, so they were first known as the Brodhead Tin Band. They had to teach themselves how to play the instruments and how to read the music. Soon enough, they were invited to play for a political rally in Beloit, an event expected to attract such a large crowd that the organizers invited half a dozen bands.

The boys from Brodhead had learned three pieces by that time, but cheerfully accepted the invitation. By the end of the day, they had been voted the best band and given the keys to the city.

No wonder they were invited the next year to entertain the crowd at the Lincoln-Douglas debate held in nearby Freeport, Illinois. By this time, they were the 14-piece Brodhead Brass Band, having acquired new instruments and learned a lot more music.

First Civil War Experience

Instruments with over-the-shoulder bells, typical of those used by Civil War bands

Once the war started, patriotic fervor swept the country. Everyone in the North figured it would be easy to defeat the rebels and capture their capital city of Richmond, Virginia. The now 26 members of the Brodhead Brass Band eagerly enlisted and took the train to Washington as the band of the 3d Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.

Instead of joining the assault on Richmond, which ended so disastrously, the 3rd Wisconsin volunteers found themselves sent to Camp Pinckney in Maryland. There, under Gen. Nathaniel Banks, they would be sent to the Shenandoah Valley. Banks proved unequal to the task of fighting Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.

Aside from the battles with the Confederates, the band had to contend with other difficulties:

• The man appointed to be band master proved incompetent. Kimberly, who probably should have gotten the position in the first place, became leader some time later.
• The shoddy government-issued brass instruments kept falling into disrepair.
• Disease, brought on by deficient food, hygiene, and medical care, swept through all the various army camps, infecting bandsmen as much as anyone else.

A healthy soldier could fight. A healthy bandsman with an dysfunctional instrument couldn’t play. Just imagine the difficulty of making music when all the cornets were absent!

Because of Banks’ miscalculations and unpreparedness, one battle ended in a rout. Thousands of men dropped their equipment in order to flee for their lives. More than half of the members of the 3d Wisconsin Regimental Band lost their instruments. The regiment had no money for new instruments, so it sent the bandsmen back home.

Second Civil War Experience

Unidentified band at Lookout Mountain, 1864

Apparently, some in Brodhead wanted the band to reenlist as a brigade band. Understandably, the band had little interest for about a year and a half. In February 1864, they changed their mind, and in April of that year 20 musicians from Brodhead set off for Huntsville, Alabama as the 1st Brigade Band.

This time, they went without the earlier youthful cockiness. They also went with instruments and uniforms they had purchased at their own expense and leather-bound part books with 62 marches, dance tunes, dirges, popular songs, and operatic selections suitable for every occasion.

By 1864, the Union was winning the war. At least partly for that reason, the 1st Brigade Band did not suffer any of the problems it had before, except, of course, the rampant illness in army camps. One day at the end of August 1864, Kimberly could only muster eight healthy musicians.

In May, their first month in Huntsville, the band played four pieces every morning, afternoon, and evening. They began to acquire a reputation for excellence. In their first military action, they boarded a gun boat plying the Tennessee River. Before the gunboat began firing on a small Confederate fort, the band got off the boat and found a place where the rebels could easily hear them.

As the boat razed the fort with its shells, the band taunted the fleeing rebels with “Yankee Doodle” and other Northern battle music. The brigade kept moving into Georgia. There, the 1st Brigade Band got into a battle of the bands one night.

The evening began in an ordinary enough way. The 1st Brigade Band played some tunes outside one of the generals’ headquarters. He asked them to serenade a colonel from Michigan, which they did. After three or four pieces, the Wisconsin group went back to their own camp to play for the acting division surgeon.

As soon as they played one piece, another band began to play, the one from the 15th Michigan Infantry, whose colonel they had just serenaded. They traded pieces for a while until the Michigan band responded by playing exactly the same piece. An insult! The Wisconsin band determined that they would play the last piece if it took all night.

It nearly did. It was 3:00 in the morning before the Michigan band finally missed their turn. Wisconsin played Yankee Doodle and shouted, “Victory!” For the last couple of hours of the contest, probably neither band was at its best. Both of them had been drinking freely from the beginning.

After a brief furlough, the 1st Brigade Band joined Gen. Sherman’s march from Georgia to North Carolina. When the Union captured Columbia, South Carolina, a dozen bands, including the 1st Brigade, massed to play “The Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore.

After the war

Display case at the Brodhead Historical Society

Throughout this second enlistment, the 1st Brigade Band earned a reputation for musical excellence. Gen. Sherman called them the model band of his entire army. In the eventual victory parade in Washington, it was the only band mentioned by name in the newspapers. They returned to Brodhead as heros.

Not long afterwards, Gen. Grant returned to his home in Galena, Illinois. Locals wanted to give him a spectacular homecoming and, even though Grant was famously tone deaf, wanted the best music available. Many of the veterans they consulted said that the 1st Brigade Band would be the best to invite.

Of course, they were eager to oblige, but they had sold their old band wagon before their second enlistment and had no time to build another. They borrowed one from a band in nearby Shullsburg. And so the Galena papers rapturously praised the wonderful music provided by the 15th Corps Band from Shullsberg.

Until after the Second World War, the US did not keep much of a standing army in peace time. Towns remained proud of their bands, but usually stopped using their military names. The Brodhead musicians traded in their now old-fashioned over the shoulder saxhorns for modern bell forward cornets, bell up euphoniums and tubas, and trombones. As the Brodhead Silver Cornet Band, they continued to entertain until after the turn of the century.

Once easy access to phonographs and the radio enabled people to enjoy music without leaving the house, many town bands, including Brodhead’s, withered and died. Various generations of the band’s instruments ended up in the local history museum.

Then, in 1964, the town of Galena wanted to re-enact Grant’s homecoming. They contacted Fred Benkovic, an instrument collector from Milwaukee, to find period instruments and train people to play music from the old part books on them.

That band did not simply play for a reenactment and disperse. Instead, the 1st Brigade Band permanently reorganized. It is now an affiliate of the Wisconsin Historical Society and maintains a busy schedule of performances. It has made numerous recordings of Civil War music.

Main source: 1st Brigade Band

Annie

Popular poet James Whitcomb Riley issued “Little Orphant Annie” in 1885. It must have remained popular for some time, because Harold Gray based his popular newspaper cartoon strip Little Orphan Annie on it. The strip debuted in 1924 and, according to a poll in Fortune, was the most popular strip by 1937. Like Al Capp with his Li’l Abner,, Gray used the strip to comment on current events. Gray died in 1968, but the strip survived until 2010.

During Gray’s lifetime, Little Orphan Annie inspired a number of other works, including a radio show in 1930 and movies in 1932 and 1938. Annie opened on Broadway less than a decade after Gray’s death. Given the length of time required from original conception of a musical until it reaches Broadway, Gray’s own work must have been fresh on the minds of everyone involved. Thomas Meehan wrote the book for the musical, Charles Strouse the music, and Martin Charnin the lyrics.

The story takes place in the 1930s against the backdrop of the New Deal. Eleven-year-old Annie, hoping that her parents are still alive, manages to escape from an orphanage run by Miss Hannigan, who hates orphans. Eventually she winds up as the Christmas guest of “Daddy” Warbucks, who at first is not pleased to have her around. Soon enough, they come to like each other and he promises to help her find her parents.

Annie sings on the radio twice, once at the insistence of President Roosevelt himself. On the first occasion, Warbucks announces a $50,000 reward to her parents if they come forward. That get’s Miss Hannigan’s brother and girlfriend plotting to claim to be her parents in order to claim the money. Roosevelt and his Secret Service come to the rescue, identifying Annie’s real parents, who died when she was still a baby. The Secret Service arrests the imposters and Miss Hannigan and everyone sings the praises of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Among the songs in the show, “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” remain the most popular. Here’s a video of “Tomorrow” from the soundtrack of the 1999 Disney movie, with stills from various professional stage productions from 1977 to 2006.

Annie (Original 1977 Broadway Cast)

Evita

Lyricist Tim Rice heard a radio play about Eva Peron, former Argentine First Lady, in 1972. Shortly afterward, he saw a TV film about her and thought she would be an interesting subject for a musical. In fact, he became so fascinated that he traveled to Buenos Aires to learn as much about her as he could.

Rice had already worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar and tried to interest Lloyd Webber in another collaboration. At first, Lloyd Webber rejected it in favor of a project with a different partner. When that flopped, he returned to Rice and began working on what later became Evita.

As they had with Jesus Christ Superstar, the pair released a recording with the music before it was ever presented on stage. In most of the world the Evita album was more popular than its very successful predecessor. One excerpt, Julie Covington’s “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” reached no. 1 on the British singles chart shortly after its release in October 1976. Several other songs also became international hits.

Covington later turned down the chance to create the role of Evita on stage, but here’s a video of her performance on the concept album:

Lloyd Webber and Rice wanted Harold Prince to direct the stage version, but he was not immediately available. Rehearsals started in May 1978 and clearly went very well; the musical opened in London’s West End at the end of June. The Broadway premiere took place the following year.

Although Rice had studied plenty of original documents in Buenos Aires, he seems to have relied most heavily on an anti-Peronist biography by Mary Main, Evita: The Woman with the Whip. Peron’s reputation within Argentina remains complicated, and Peronists were in power when the 1996 movie Evita appeared. The government released its own film to counter what it considered distortions in Rice’s lyrics.

The musical opens in a Buenos Aires movie theater, where an announcer interrupts the film to tell the audience that Eva Perón had died. The heartbroken audience sings a Requiem in Latin, but the cynical narrator Che has his own take on the national grief. Che, by the way, was not intended by Rice to represent Che Guevara. That was Harold Prince’s idea. Most other productions consider this character a more anonymous man in the street.

Che then narrates Eva’s life, beginning in 1934 when she was 15. She sleeps with a tango singer, blackmails him into taking her to Buenos Aires, then dumps him. Sleeping her way to the top, she becomes a well known model and actress. Meanwhile, Col. Juan Perón is clawing his way up the political ladder.

The two meet in the town of San Juan, where the colonel has organized a charity concert to benefit the victims of a recent earthquake. Of course, they sleep together. Eva moves in with him and sends his former mistress packing. After being promoted to general, Perón runs for President with Eva’s encouragement.

Perón wins a sweeping victory, and Eva sings “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from the balcony of the presidential palace to tell her adoring fans that she had made a mistake seeking fame and glory. Now she seeks only to serve the Argentine people. At every step of the way, Che takes a dimmer view of her motives. Eventually they have a confrontation, but Eva has cancer and not much longer to live.

Meanwhile, the military tires of her meddling in politics and her high profile and demands that the President force her to leave politics. She responds by deciding to run for Vice President. That puts Perón in a predicament, because he loves her dearly, but fears being ousted in a coup.

Eventually, her health forces her out of politics, and she bids farewell in a radio broadcast in which she asks again swears her love for the people and asks forgiveness for any mistakes she made. She dies, so the musical ends as it began. Che has the last disparaging word.

Evita [2006 London Cast Recording]

“That must have made it hard to sleep.”

“It sure would have. Fortunately I was still practicing my trombone”

I know I’ve had trouble finding apartments where I could practice, And I’m never up that late. I told prospective landlords that I would do my practicing mostly in the early evening and never practice late at night or early in the morning. Little did I realize that trombonists had had similar troubles for more than a century and a half.

L’Enragé Musicien, a lithograph by Bourdin after an image by Robert William Buss (1838)

Here, it’s not a landlord rejecting a prospective tenant. The neighbors are upset by the sound of a bass trombone. They’re wearing night clothes, so that clock doesn’t say 2:30 in the afternoon. Even the picture of Handel looks disgusted.

Hardly anyone at that time specialized in bass trombone. This dedicated musician also played double bass, an instrument that probably would not have created such outrage. But why did the artist choose to make the trombone the butt of his joke? Why not a trumpet or horn?

Because they were legitimate musical instruments

It’s amazing how many times reviews of classical concerts say something to the effect that trombones playing too loudly ruined an otherwise perfect performance, or that the trombones showed admirable restraint. Popular concerts featured well-respected trombone soloists.

The same newspapers that complained about trombones in orchestral concerts or opera orchestras commented favorably on them. But then again, they don’t say anything about the trombones in the orchestra, which in popular dance tunes, etc., had much more active and prominent parts that in symphonic concerts.

At least from the time the trombone became a permanent member of the symphony orchestra (around the 1830s), it has been known mostly as the instrument that’s always too loud. Trombone parts in the orchestra at that time seldom had any thematic significance. Most composers added them to increase the volume.

Mediocre composers thought just having lots of brass would add excitement and cover up their dullness and lack of inspiration. (They still do, by the way.) Critics of the early nineteenth century uniformly considered Rossini a mediocre composer who overused and misused trombones. And because he frequently puts three trombones in unison fortissimo on after-beats, it’s hard to disagree with them.

Oh, and the “bass” trombone part seems to have considered the principle part, even though outside of Germany hardly anyone actually played it on one.

Maybe that’s why the picture shows a bass trombonist.

Photo credit: Public domain. There are a lot more where this one came from, Will Kimball’s Trombone History Timeline

Rests (indications of silence) used in musical notation.

Music is the silence between the notes ~Claude Debussy

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. ~Marcel Marceau

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. ~Lao Tzu

When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed. ~Bill Evans

Music and rhythms find their want into the secret places of the soul. ~Plato

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. ~Edith Sitwell

Those who danced were thought quite insane by those who could not hear the music. ~Angela Monet

Avant-garde composer John Cage once entered an anechoic chamber so that he could experience silence. To his disappointment, even there he heard two distinctly different sounds, one high in pitch and one low. So he asked lots of scientists for explanations and determined that the high sound he heard was his nervous system and the low one was the blood circulating through his body. He concluded that if silence has to mean absence of sound, there is no such thing as silence. Silence can only mean absence of intentional sound. That realization became the impetus for his most famous, or notorious piece, 4’33″–the length of time a performer should remain on stage not making a sound, but quietly divide the piece into three distinct movements.

Cage’s 4’33″ is about the only piece that is pointless to buy at one of these sites!

George Frederick Root was born in 1820 in Sheffield, Massachusetts to a musical family. He studied piano with George J. Webb and, in 1845, moved to New York to establish a career as church organist and music teacher. After touring Europe in 1850, he returned to Boston and worked with Lowell Mason, the leading “reformer” of American Hymnody. After spending some time and energy teaching and composing music based on European models, he had a change of heart.

I saw that mine must be the “people’s song,” still, I am ashamed to say, I shared the feeling that was around me in regard to that grade of music. When Stephen C. Foster’s wonderful melodies (as I now see them) began to appear, and the famous Christy’s Minstrels bagman to make them know, I “took a hand in” and wrote a few, but put “G. Friedrich Wurzel” (the German for Root) to them instead of my own name.

“Hazel Dell” (published in 1853 by William Hall & Son in New York) and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower” (1855, by Russell & Richardson in Boston) were the best known. . .

It is easy to write correctly a simple song, but so to use the material of which such a song must be made that it will be received and live in the hearts of the people is quite another matter.

“Battle Cry of Freedom” (1862), easily Root’s best known song to this day, sold 350,000 copies in sheet music. That figure doesn’t count the number of times it appeared in collections or arrangements for piano or guitar.

In an 1889 testimonial banquet in Root’s honor, former Union soldier J. W. Fifer said,

The true and correct history of the war for the maintenance of the Union will place George F. Root’s name alongside our great generals. Only those who were at the front, campoing, marching, battling for the flag, can fully realize how often we were cheered, revived, and inspired by the songs of him who sent forth the “Battle Cry of Freedom.”

If Root had written nothing else, that one song would assure him a place in America’s musical history. One site, which from the small size of the little bubble on the scroll bar promised to have extensive biographical information, instead comprises mostly a list of his complete output. The following list of his songs related to the Civil War, taken from the Library of Congress Civil War Sheet Music Collection, is quite long enough. It does not include pieces that Root merely arranged. A few of the songs will probably be familiar to many readers.

• The Battle Cry of Freedom
• Brother, Tell Me of the Battle
• Can the Soldier Forget?
• Columbia’s Call
• Comrade, All Around is Brightness
• Comrades, Hasten to the Battle
• Farewell Father, Friend, and Guardian
• Father Abraham’s Reply to the 600,000
• The Flag with Thirty Four Stars, or Hurrah for the Dear Old Flag with Every Stripe and Star
• Foes & Friends
• Forward Boys! Forward!
• Glory! Glory! or The Little Octoroon
• God Bless Our Brave Young Volunteers
• Good Bye Old Glory
• Good Bye, Jeff
• Have Ye Sharpened Your Swords?
• How It Marches! the Flag of the Union
• I Wonder Why He Comes Not
• Just After the Battle
• Just Before the Battle, Mother
• Lay Me Down and Save the Flag
• The Liberty Bird
• North & South
• Oh Come You from the Battlefield?
• O Come You from the Indies, or Robert’s Return from the War
• Oh Haste on the Battle
• Oh Will My Mother Never Come?
• On the Field of Battle, Mother
• On, On, On, the Boys Came Marching, or The Prisoner Free
• Ring the Bell, Watchman
• Sleeping for the Flag
• Stand Up for Uncle Sam, My Boys
• Starved in Prison
• They Have Broken Up Their Camps
• 

  This edition was published in the Confederate capital. Not all Civil War songs were partisan. This one expresses a universal sentiment.

  ‘Tis Finished
• Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)
• The Vacant Chair, or We Shall Meet but We Shall Miss Him
• We’ll Fight It Out Here on the Old Union Line
• Within the Sound of the Enemies Guns

Root continued to work for his brother’s firm until it burned in the 1871 Chicago fire. He received an honorary doctorate in music from the University of Chicago in 1872. Eventually he returned to New York and to teaching. Most of the songs he published after the demise of Root & Cady were in collections of hymns or teaching pieces. At his death in 1895, he was very well respected.

Apparently he never tried to keep up with new trends in popular music or produce hits. In any case, a few of his war songs are all that remain well known. Probably on the strength of those songs, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

Sources:
Yesterdays: Popular Song in America / by Charles Hamm (Norton, 1979)
George F. Root

Portraits of Root and sheet music covers are public domain.

Tchaikovsky in 1863

Peter Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies have such a firm place in the repertoire that perhaps no one misses the first three. They appear on concerts much less frequently and certainly get less air time on the radio. Some music does not receive many performances because it is mediocre music, or perhaps because it is unreasonably difficult to perform. Neither is the case with Tchaikovsky’s early symphonies.

Early in his career, Tchaikovsky struggled with the absolute disconnect between western European musical forms, especially sonata form, and traditional Russian culture. Russian culture created static forms, unlike the goal-oriented sonata form. Tchaikovsky himself much preferred to write complete melodies, rather than the kind of fragmentary themes suitable for sonata form’s development section.

By the time he started the Fourth Symphony, the formal innovations Franz Liszt introduced in his symphonic poems basically solved Tchaikovsky’s problem by giving him a more congenial form for symphonic writing. That fact hardly makes failures of his formal struggles in the first three symphonies. Listening to them, one would never know the musical and emotional trouble they caused him, and they are better music than some much better-known orchestral pieces.

Symphony no. 1 in G minor, op. 13 (Winter Daydreams)

Tchaikovsky began his First Symphony in March 1866. Later that spring, he wrote to his younger brother Anatoli that he was finding it extremely difficult to make progress with it and that he was afraid he’d die before finishing it. He was ready to start orchestrating in in June, but suffered the worst nervous attack of his life, with frightening hallucinations, in July. He never again worked on any composition at night.

He was unable to complete the symphony that summer, but he decided to show it to Anton Rubinstein and Nikolay Zaremba in hopes of getting approval for a performance with the Russian Musical Society concerts in St. Petersburg. They disapproved of it vehemently. After some revisions, they accepted the second and third movements.

The audience proved indifferent after the first performance of the third movement in December 1866. Both movements were performed, with better success in February 1867. The first performance of the entire symphony took place in February 1868 and was received with enthusiasm. In 1874, before the symphony’s publication, Tchaikovsky wrote a new second subject for the first movement and made some other minor changes.

Tchaikovsky himself named his First Synphony “Winter Daydreams.” One would never know by listening to it the nightmares it caused him.

Symphony no. 2 in C minor, op. 17 (Little Russian)

Tchakovsky in 1874

In contrast to the number of references to the First Symphony in Tchaikovsky’s correspondence, he did not write to anyone about the Second Symphony until it was almost finished. According to a letter to his brother Modest in November 1872, his colleague Nikolai Kashkin called the new symphony a work of genius.

Tchaikovsky himself considered it his best work in terms of its form. Two weeks later, he wrote in another letter that he didn’t think it proper for him to boast how pleased he was with it.

After the work’s premiere in January or February 1873 (the Russian and Western calendars differing by 12 days), Tchaikovsky wrote to his father that it was so successful it was scheduled to be repeated later in the same season and that he had received a royalty from the Russian Musical Society for it.

Despite this success, Tchaikovsky was less pleased on hearing the symphony than he had been while he was composing it. He had it published both in full score and reduced for two pianos later that same year. In 1879, however, he rewrote the entire first movement except for the introduction and coda, drastically revised the third movement, and shortened the Finale. Only the second movement escaped the revision unscathed.

Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony is known as the “Little Russian” Symphony. That seems odd for his closest approach to date to German symphonic form, but he did not assign the nickname.

Symphony no. 3 in D major, op. 29 (Polish)

This symphony, again known by a nickname that Tchaikovsky himself didn’t use, presents at least three features that distinguish it from all of his other symphonies. It is the only one in a major key, and it has five movements. The third distinguishing may not mean a lot to many music lovers, but, well, there aren’t very many symphonies at all that have a trombone solo!

The Third Symphony has even less of a paper trail than the Second. In one letter during the summer of 1875 Tchaikovsky wrote that he was working on a new symphony, but not spending all his time on it.

Nonetheless, he noted on the title page of the full score’s fair copy that it was started on June 5, 1875 and completed on August 1 of the same year. In other words, without putting any pressure on himself, he finished the final orchestration less than three months after he began the first sketches. By the way, the autograph scores no longer exist for the first two symphonies.

The premiere took place in Moscow in November 1875, on the first concert of the season. Tchaikovsky thought its craftsmanship was a step forward for him, but that none of the thematic ideas were especially good. The symphony as a whole succeeded admirably, but he expressed no great enthusiasm in his description of it.

If these three early symphonies rarely turn up on concerts, there is no shortage of recordings. Here’s one that has all three together:

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos 1-3 / Markevitch, London Symphony Orchestra, $16.99

Ulysses S. Grant certainly scrapes the bottom of the list. He was tone deaf and famously commented, “I only know two tunes. One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t.” I haven’t located any musical references at all for most Presidents beyond occasional mentions of listening habits and taste. Some, however, played at least one musical instrument. Here are the top 10 musical presidents, ranked in order of how many instruments they played.

Number 10 Musical President Franklin D. Roosevelt

I confess to doing all of the research for this post on the Internet. A couple of things I read about Presidents in general asserted that Roosevelt played organ. When I investigated further, I could not find any mention of that talent in any article or list of facts specifically about Roosevelt. Let’s give him an honorable mention.

Number 9 Musical President Chester A. Arthur

A couple of general sites say that Arthur apparently played banjo. One of them claimed that he was our only banjo-playing President. I don’t know if he played it or not. But at least I have proof that he posed next to one for a photographer. Hmm. Why would he pose with a banjo if he couldn’t play it?

Number 6, 7, and 8 Musical Presidents John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, Woodrow Wilson

These three Presidents are kind of tied. Adams played flute. Tyler and Wilson played violin. I can’t say how dedicated they were to music, how well they played, or whether they continued to play while they were President. I expect Adams rates higher than the other two. Perhaps I’ll look into it some time later. If I find anything especially interesting, I’ll let you know.

Number 5 Musical President Harry Truman

Truman played piano throughout his presidency and beyond. He is the earliest of our musical Presidents whose performances were captured on film and are therefore available on YouTube. His daughter Margaret had aspirations of becoming an opera singer. Truman’s rage against a critic who panned her performance is legendary.

Number 4 Musical President Bill Clinton

Clinton played saxophone well enough to win first chair in his all-state band and consider music as a career. By sixteen, however, he had set his sites on elective office. He continued to practice saxophone daily. As a Presidential candidate in 1992, he appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show and played “Heartbreak Hotel” with the show’s band, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a much more colorful tie than most politicians of the time. That performance appears to have been a turning point in the campaign. He passed incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the polls for the first time shortly afterward. Political analysts point to a number of reasons why that was no coincidence.

Number 3 Musical President Richard Nixon

Besides being an accomplished pianist, Nixon played accordion and violin. Not only did he play three instruments, he is the first American President who composed any music that came to public attention. The following clip from the Jack Paar Show features Nixon performing a short piece he composed, accompanied by an ensemble of “Democratic violinists.”

Number 2 Musical President Thomas Jefferson

I had a real hard time deciding which order to put Nixon and Jefferson. Jefferson, like Nixon, played three instruments: violin, cello, and clavichord. If he ever composed any music, it has not come to the attention of scholars or the sort of people who post interesting trivia to the Internet. I give Jefferson top billing because of the depth of his musical involvement.

He practiced three hours a day in his college years. The music-loving royal governor regularly invited Jefferson to play chamber music at his palace. In those days, people played chamber music for personal recreation, not for an audience. So Jefferson played along with other fine musicians for the pleasure of making music with them and also enjoyed what he later called “more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversation than in all my life besides.”

Music also played an important role in Jefferson’s courtship with Martha Wayles Skelton. She played piano, an instrument Jefferson had apparently not encountered before. He ordered a solid mahogany piano for her. After they married, he made sure his children became proficient musicians as well. His daughter Martha became so proficient on harpsichord that the traveled to Philadelphia and Paris to find teachers.

Jefferson, as is well known, collected books avidly and later donated his personal library to start the Library of Congress. In 1783, he compiled a catalog of his music collection. There was chamber music for strings and harpsichord (especially that of his favorite composer Arcangelo Corelli), song collections, ballad operas, and orchestral music. He also acquired instruction books for violin, harpsichord, flute, and “musical glasses,” as well as books on music history and theory.

And the Number 1 Most Musical President . . . Warren G. Harding!

Harding easily played more instruments than any other president. He once remarked, “I played every instrument but the slide trombone and the E-flat cornet.” How well did he play any of them? Apparently well enough to join the band that celebrated his nomination in 1920.

I notice something interesting: by the standard I used, three of the four most musical Presidents will forever be remembered for the scandals that marred their administrations. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Their only rival in being remembered for scandal was the utterly unmusical Grant.

Oh, besides the high-school chorister Clinton, did any Presidents have any kind of formal vocal music in their background? Please comment if you know and can provide an authoritative link.

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