Tag Archives: Jazz

Classics

Classics – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week I'm discussing what the word "classical" means to me in musical as well as historical and political terms. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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During my high school years in Kansas City, I would often listen to either NPR or 1660 AM, the local classical music station, on my 30 minute drive south to St. James Academy. In those years I continued to embrace Classical Music, especially opera, as an art form that remains a particular passion of mine, even to the point of several ill-fated attempts at composing.

Still, it strikes me that our term classical has a rather complicated set of meanings and uses. In the musical sense, it’s used to refer to the most highbrow of our genres, the rare musical tradition that still sees performances of music composed within the last 400 years rather than the decade-based music that usually makes the Pop and Rock charts. Classical Music tends to embrace the trappings of old European and American elite while also providing a gateway for the rest of us to enter that refined space and hear the radiant melodies and harmonies that have been the soundtrack for generations.

I began to explore Classical Music in my middle school years, like many Americans my introduction to this wide scope of music was through jazz and Gershwin’s blending of the classical and jazz orchestras. I’ve been wanting to write a blog post all about my appreciation for Gershwin’s music, though my continuing uncertainty regarding copyright law has kept me from ever publishing it or trying to record a podcast version of it. From Gershwin I jumped backwards to Mozart, Beethoven, and the other big names before settling both in the Baroque world with Lully and in the realm of the Romantics with the likes of Johann Strauss II, Verdi, Wagner, and Mahler. Today, I still love the music from all of those composers, yet I’m also drawn to more recent works written by the likes of Debussy, film music that fits in the 20th Century late Romantic tradition embodied by Prokofiev and the German film composer Gottfried Huppertz, who longtime Wednesday Blog readers and listeners will remember is the composer of the score for Fritz Lang’s 1926 science fiction film Metropolis. 

In the last couple of years, I’ve returned to my first unwitting introduction to classical music through the film music of the likes of John Williams and Elmer Bernstein and found myself drawn to electronic-classical compositions of Vangelis, which inspired the theme for the Wednesday Blog, and the choral classical-crossover albums of Christopher Tin and 2022’s The Moons Symphony written by Amanda Lee Falkenberg. I’ll gladly spend an afternoon listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s themes for the various Star Trek series and Mr. Williams’s compositions for Star Wars as much as I’ll choose to hear a Mozart piano concerto or Bernard Lallement’s Missa Gallica.

I’ve long thought that classical music saw its greatest innovation in the last century when its venue diversified from the concert hall alone to include the sweeping compositions that breathe life into films. Film music to me fits in the long tradition of ballet music. This comes out of the great silent film tradition of a century ago which reached its zenith in the late 1920s with epics like the original Ben-Hur and Phantom of the Opera films as well as with Metropolis and the other great German expressionist films. Sound film took some of the storytelling need off of the music as now the characters on screen could too be heard, yet the power of music in film was already clear. I relish the chance to hear the Kansas City Symphony perform a concert of film music, because even when it’s disassociated from the pictures that score was originally created to accompany that score often holds up on its own as a concert piece.

It is interesting then to consider that within the world of Classical Music the term “classical” generally only refers to a short span of musical composition within the long history of the wider “classical” genre. The Classical Period in music matches up with the Neo-Classical Period in art, architecture, and literature that ran from around 1750 to 1820. This period includes great composers like Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, all of whom worked in Vienna the beating heart of Europe’s music industry in this period. Yet by this definition the word classical implies a separation from the present, clear limits to its scale and span, and an air of antiquity.

In many other contexts the term classical refers to the far older Classical Antiquity of European History, the centuries during the height of Greek and later Roman civilization from around the 8th century BCE to the 5th century CE. When I write about the classics in my work, I am most often referring to people and ideas conceived during this 13-century long span of time. The classical fathers of Western philosophy––Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle––continue to be required reading in modern philosophy studies, while Aristotle and Pliny the Elder have a foundational role in my own discipline in the History of Natural History. Those two, Aristotle and Pliny, were central influences for the naturalists who defined the Americas in the sixteenth century, people like the focus of my dissertation André Thevet, as well as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and José de Acosta who both wrote natural histories of the Spanish Americas, and Conrad Gessner & Carolus Clusius whose works were written about distant worlds from the comfort of their own homes back in Europe.

Classical is a tricky word because it can be interpreted as something which is removed from common life. It stands apart from popular things because of its high status. I’m often struck by the adoption of mannerisms and norms from the classical music world in popular music, there was one concert I attended nearly a decade ago where the musicians on stage went from dancing in circles playing their violins to suddenly, briskly, taking chairs and sitting in a neat orchestral row in them as though playing the part yet ever with a wink and a nod about it. There has been a general loosening of expectations and normalities in our culture, a sort of reaction to the manners of past generations. I tend to see our present moment as responding to the norms of the 1980s and 1990s, politically we are in a period of unstable transition from the Reagan Conservativism and Clinton centrism of the 80s and 90s, though that needle continues to move forward in time and it does feel now that American conservativism and liberalism now seems to be working in response to the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations as our youngest generation of voters now were born after the Millennium. I’m happy to see more classical musicians on social media releasing short videos of their performances, rehearsals, and daily practice for all to see. That’s one way for the classical to remain vibrant in the present moment. Still, it worries me that today in 2023 classical and jazz tend to be the exception in popular performance compared to pop, rock, and country.

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Culture

Culture – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some thoughts on what keeps a culture alive.

I really enjoy going to concerts and hearing all sorts of musicians from all around the globe perform. I’ve been lucky enough to attend some historic concerts, such as the 2012 performance of the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City. It was their first performance in the United States since the beginning of the embargo on Cuba in the 1960s. In that moment I could feel echoes of a vibrant and lively culture living alongside my own in the same moment in time. The way the musicians put their own spin, their own rhythm on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to make it sound Cuban was wonderful to hear. Still, the setting of the concert hall where there is a clear physical barrier between the performers who stand or sit on a stage frozen in place with an audience watching all around does sometimes give me chills. 

There have been many other concerts that I’ve attended where music or stories from particular cultures are played or told, relayed to us an audience foreign to those artists’ culture. Yet the way they’re transmitted, removed from the physical surroundings of those artists’ home, placed on a sterile stage where we can hear and see everything in perfect clarity, takes something out of the performance. It worries me that in America we’ve come to expect that particularly “cultural” things, especially if they’re foreign or “ethnic” ought to be neatly packaged in an expected format and set up. That way they can be interpreted through our own cultural lens in such a way that if I see a bottle of Italian seasonings in the grocery store, I’ll be able to tell first and foremost that those are seasonings. Yet in that standardization of culture to fit a set mold into which all its many and contradictory elements can be poured and melted down, we lose a great deal of the memories and the life that those cultural artifacts embodied.

My own people, the Irish Americans, have an interesting relationship with this. We still maintain some elements of a distinct culture from other European-descended ethnic groups in the United States, though I know some reading or listening to this might object to my use of the word “ethnic” to describe a community so assimilated into mainstream American society. The problem for me arises in trying to answer how our culture is still even partially Irish. Here in Kansas City, we have plenty of people who play Irish music, myself included, as well as a couple of local Irish dance schools. We even have a local Irish Center where classes in the Irish language are taught. Yet when most of those cultural milestones are performed, they are often more so in delineated places and situations where they are expected, say at the Kansas City Irish Fest, rather than more organically on a regular basis as a daily part of life. 

One of the great exceptions to this rule is with music, after all some of my favorite concert memories have been sitting in on the jam sessions at the Irish Center and at other venues around town, even in the homes of friends. There, an element of our Irish American culture is still being performed organically, like a group of friends getting together one evening for a party. It just so happens that instead of playing the Top 40 Hits at that party they might pull out their own instruments and play their own top 40 for themselves.

Culture is fundamentally performative, and to survive it must flourish organically in the setting where it exists. This past weekend I had the honor of serving as a groomsman for one of my best friends who is Greek Orthodox. The wedding took place in his church, and clearly seemed to be an unfamiliar ceremony to many of those present who weren’t themselves Greek (myself included). Still, I found the chanted prayers and hymns––most of which were performed in English––to be fairly easy to learn, and after the first one I was able to add my own voice to the congregation. Later that evening the typical wedding reception DJ hits were freely interspersed with Greek dances, which likewise for the average participant were far easier to pick up on than any of the Irish dances I’ve done over the years. There’s a culture that’s still vibrant in how ordinary its performances tend to be for the people who live it every day.

It struck me that the idea of having Irish music played at an Irish American wedding reception would probably be met with shock, after all most of us don’t know the steps for the jigs and reels that make up Irish dance today. Furthermore, someone is bound to be annoyed by some inconsistency with what is properly Irish American, meaning that trying to toe the line of ensuring that one’s Irish American cultural practices are so highly regulated that they become harder than necessary to follow. I for one would love to try and introduce some elements of jazz into the jigs, reels, and airs that I’ve learned to play on the tin whistle, and if I do ever get around to joining in a specifically Irish dance again you can bet that I’ll let my arms move more freely than is expected.

I worry that a culture which isn’t performed as a daily routine will gradually become fossilized. Such a culture, if confined only to special events that aren’t expected or normal for the everyday, will surely die, leaving its participants poorer as a result. Perhaps one of the greatest differences between Greek American culture and Irish American culture is that our ethnic church, Roman Catholicism, did not preserve our Irish language as the language of liturgy and spirituality. Rather, Catholic priests continued to say the Mass in Latin until the 1960s, by which point so few Irish Americans still spoke Irish that there are hardly any Irish Masses performed here in the United States today. I’ve only ever been to one such Mass that was done entirely in Irish. It was said on a stage at the Dublin Irish Festival outside Columbus, Ohio where we the congregation watched on as if gazing at some exotic ceremony stuck out of place and out of time. That most essential element of any culture, the way in which it speaks and sings and laughs and cries, its language, is vital to that culture’s survival. And in a country where we make up a good portion of English-speaking Catholics, our Church has assimilated faster than our hopes for a distinct Irish American culture may have wanted.

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