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| 2016/07/30 06:56:40瀏覽168｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
Sowash: “Variations on Hiking Song” for piano. What about the term “the Fine Arts?” Fine arts as opposed to what? The Crude and Clumsy Arts? Same with “Classical Music.” What? Other kinds of music “ain’t got no class?" For some, the very notions of “Fine arts” and “Classical music” ring false. Folk art and popular music can sometimes be very fine indeed. Take dear old Grandma Moses. Was she not a fine artist? Think of Stephen Foster, J.P. Sousa, Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon. Their best works are classics …. and classy, too! Oh, I know the definitions of these terms. If “Fine” and “Classical” imply exclusivity, it’s not intentional, only an accident of semantics. Still, I wish we could come up with a better term for what we call “classical” music. I’ve tried and failed. Seemingly, no one else has succeeded either. We suspect the term puts off potential listeners, but we’re stuck with it, I fear. There is a legitimate warning here: When we narrow our sensibilities, as when we categorize some things “classical” or “fine," we imperil our openness to and understanding of expressions that we can’t readily categorize. A cultivated friend, aware of this danger, told me, “If ever I write my autobiography, I am going to title it: 'Impaired by Snobbery.’” Ha! The reason that’s funny is because we know that my friend “isn’t the only sucker in town.” We’re all hobbled by snobbery, one way or t’other. It’s comes with being human. The Tao Te Ching warns against this, implicitly urging us to see through the fallacies we erect. "When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad.” We instinctively organize everything into opposites. Beautiful vs. ugly. Good vs. bad. Right vs. Left. To name a few. It’s useful, short-term, but it’s a childish way of looking at the world. One of my oldest friends, Dick Ferrell, whom I’ve known since I was eleven years old, wrote a delightful little poem satirizing our tendency to reduce everything to opposites, coaxing us to move beyond that way of thinking … simply by hiking. Hither and Yon I've been to Hither many a time, But I've never been to Yon. I think I'll travel there sometime. I'll wake up with the dawn. I'll lace my boots, And grab my hat, I'll put my backpack on And prob'ly be 'bout halfway there Before they know I'm gone. Have you ever wanted to visit a place With a name like To or Fro? Or If or When, or This or That, Or maybe High or Low? Or These or Those, Or Now or Then Or maybe Fast or Slow? It's such an easy thing to do. Just get up and go. Listening to music, we’ve often ‘hiked' through and beyond the opposites of that art form ... loud-soft, fast-slow, major-minor, high pitch-low pitch. These examples are purely musical, but music is also rich with stylistic opposites. “Classical” vs. “Popular,” for instance. In my music I often attempt a reconciliation of musical opposites, but also of stylistic opposites, seeing what happens when the gestures of disparate genres, such as “Classical” and “Popular” are juxtaposed. American composers have a knack for this. It is one of the blessings the comes with living in a democracy, but no one, to my knowledge, explored that set of possibilities before Charles Ives (1874-1954). Ives pioneered the reconciliation of the popular music and classical music by mixing Civil War songs, hymns, band music and ragtime into his symphonies and sonatas. That’s partly why Ives, for my money, is our greatest American composer. He’s one of my heroes. Others pushed further yet, exploring this impulse to reconcile musical gestures that had seemed hopelessly disparate; Gershwin blended elements of jazz into a rhapsody, a concerto and a tone poem; Copland worked cowboy songs into two of his ballets and, in another, rendered world-famous the Shaker folk-hymn “Simple Gifts.” Bernstein’s score for “West Side Story” is another example. In the music of those composers, the Popular and the Classical are presented simultaneously, each enriching the other, as opposites do when skillfully aligned. Which brings me — at last! -- to the music I want to share with you today, my Variations on a Hiking Song for solo piano. The theme is the well-known tune, “The Happy Wanderer.” You know it, don’t you? The chorus goes: "Val-de-ree, val-de-rah!” But the variations are not exactly on “The Happy Wanderer.” In fact, that tune is never actually heard, as such. Instead the piece begins (and ends) with the bare, skeletal outline of the tune. It’s pared down so much that it’s almost unrecognizable. You’ll have to listen carefully to realize that the source of the lean, spare theme that opens the piece is “The Happy Wanderer.” My idea was to reduce the tune to its barest minimum at the beginning, and again in the final variation, and then, in between, to ‘flesh out’ the skeletal tune through variations that alternate, more or less, between the Popular and the Classical. The music swings back and forth between those two supposedly opposing styles, even going to extremes, invoking the clichés of Popular music in one variation followed by an elegant “Classical” expression in the next. The distinctions between the two stylistic worlds are increasingly blurred as the piece goes on; gradually the music becomes ambiguous. Is a particular variation intended to be Popular or Classical? ironic or sincere? a parody or an homage? But there is no doubt at the end. The final variation, a Requiem, is heartfelt, touching and sincere. It’s like a benediction; it brings closure to the piece. Why did I end a delightful piece with a Requiem? Because the piece was composed in 1992, in memory of my father, Richard Sowash, who died in 1991. To hear my friend Phil Amalong give a marvelous rendition of my Variations on a Hiking Song, click here: http://www.sowash.com/ To see a PDF of the score, click here: http://www.sowash.com/ |
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| ( 興趣嗜好｜其他 ) |
