Dr. Music

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When you think of a concerto, most often you think of a piece for solo instrument or instruments with orchestral accompaniment--piano concerto, violin concerto, trumpet concerto, etc.  What about a concerto for orchestra? That is exactly what the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók wrote in 1943 while he was living in New York City. One of his most popular pieces, Concerto for Orchestra, displays the kind of virtuosic performance technique one would expect from any solo concerto, except that the solo passages are performed by not only individual soloists, but entire sections of the orchestra. Experience Bartók's unique musical language and also his sense of humor as we listen to notable excerpts from all five movements!

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This episode features the podcast's very first interview with a professional musician!  I am privileged to know Dr. Jerry Felker, an educator, arranger, band director, and performer, holding a Doctor of Musical Arts in trombone performance. Dr. Felker will be speaking about his extensive career, ranging from his experience playing in an army band, to both chamber and concert performances of jazz and classical music, to arranging various works in the trombone repertoire. Regardless of whether you know a professional musician, you will find his story both interesting and enlightening. At the conclusion of the episode, you will hear a recording of Dr. Felker playing a movement from Vaughan Williams's Concerto for Bass Tuba!  (Of course on a trombone.) And perhaps he will inspire some of you out there to begin taking instrumental lessons -- it's never too late!

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The idea of listening to a "death dance" may not be very appetizing...until you hear one by Franz Liszt.  His 1849 composition for piano solo and orchestra, Totentanz, is a tour de force in virtousic performance, featuring Liszt's "transcendental"  piano technique.  The piece is a set of variations on the 13th century monophonic chant, Dies Irae, or "Day Of Wrath." In the hands of Liszt (and he had two very large hands), these variations encompass styles ranging from Baroque imitative counterpoint to the cutting edge new Romantic style of the mid to late 19th century. You're in for quite a rollercoaster ride with piece, and don't worry--this "death dance" is completely safe for your musical health!

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As a companion to Episode 5, we will take a look at another German lied - not by Schubert, but by his successor, Robert Schumann.  Like Schubert, Schumann wrote some of the most beautiful song cycles in the history of western European music.  Perhaps his most popular cycle, Dichterliebe, is based on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and contains a wealth of musical poetry.  How, in the space of only a minute and a half, can  Schumann so vividly evoke the meaning of the text through his manipulation of keys and harmonies? We will gain a clear insight into how this is accomplished by examining the first song in the cycle, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,  or In The Beautiful Month of May. 

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Hearing a jazz chord automatically makes us think of the jazz idiom, but who actually wrote the first jazz chords?  Those rich sonorities actually have their beginnings in the Romantic period with composers like Chopin and Liszt.  But  we can actually hear the beginnings of the jazz style in the music of late 19th century French impressionism.  In this episode, we will revisit the composer of Season 1, Episode 1, Claude Debussy, one of the most important composers of the Western European music tradition. As we examine one of the preludes from Debussy's second book, Heather, we shall see how he synthesizes basic tonal progressions of his predecessors with a new approach to how music can paint a picture. And when you hear those jazz progressions, remember that "jazz" as a historical current has not been invented yet!

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Edvard Grieg is certainly the most famous composer of Norway, though he rightly has secured a position among the top composers of the 19th century.  Besides his well-known incidental music for Peer Gynt (discussed in Season 1, Episode 12), Grieg's Piano Concerto In A Minor, the only one he wrote, is one of his most popular compositions, and a standard of the genre. Like many great pieces of music, the themes have hidden connections that the casual listener may miss.  That is why it is Dr. Music's duty to reveal those connections! So sit back as we take a peek at the first movement, and explore what it is that makes this music so enduring.

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Out of all the classical music you've ever listened to, have you ever listened to the music of Josquin des Prez?  If you've never heard of him, don't feel bad. He's not a household name like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Musicologists  refer to him affectionately as "Josquin," because he is by far one of the most famous composers of the entire Renaissance Period. The music of the Renaissance is quite different than the tonal music we are all so familiar with, but no less beautiful. It is a singular beauty that has endured to this day.  This will become immediately apparent when you listen to Josquin's lovely motet, Ave Maria, the subject piece of this episode. 

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Peter Tchaikovsky is known mainly for his popular ballets, like The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty,  but he was more fond of his  serious larger works, especially his symphonies.  In this episode, we will take a look (and listen) at the first movement of his great Symphony No. 5, a work that continues to enjoy a healthy life in the standard symphonic repertoire.  Like we saw in the last episode with Gershwin's Concerto In F,  a composer of the Romantic style like Tchaikovsky is very concerned with creating tension and extending it as long as possible. We shall see what it is about Tchaikovsky's procedure that makes him so exceptional!

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If you've listened to prior episodes of this podcast, you know that a little bit of music theory goes a long way in unlocking the mysteries of why musical gestures produce certain effects. Great composers like George Gershwin possessed an innate sense of how simply voicing a chord in a particular way can dramatically change how a listener experiences the muslc.  In this episode, we will focus on about 20 measures from the first movement of Gershwin's fabulous piano concerto, Concerto In F.  Within the framework of a unique genre, symphonic jazz, these measures are a lesson on how tension is created and sustained -- in the spirit of the entire Western European tradition!  

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If you are familiar with the ragtime classic, The Entertainer, it is possibly due to the 1973 hit film, The Sting. Scott Joplin's rags, of course, were performed and admired long before that movie was released. While we don't often associate Scott Joplin with classical music, he can certainly be credited with elevating the art of ragtime to a hitherto unseen level. This is particularly true of his later pieces, which expand the established dictates of what a rag is "supposed" to sound like.  In this episode, we will examine one of these works, Euphonic Sounds, and discover what it is about Joplin's rags that merits their inclusion among the vast pantheon of masterworks: namely, their unique transcendence of its own genre.