Frederick Delius: Romantic Music Master

Frederick Delius                                                            Jelka Rosen Delius, 1912

Many years ago I had the opportunity to sit alone on a dock immersed in a Florida sunset across the St Johns River not far from Solano Grove. The following music was in my head. 

I'd be perfectly honest saying that all the beauty of La Florida was in my heart that day. The sensations were obvious; the music of Frederick Delius made them sublime. A century earlier, he had likely walked that very shoreline, watched the same sun glistening on the water, heard the insects and the wind rustling the reeds and nearby palmettos, and felt the evening move over the landscape.

Frederick Delius was born on this day in Yorkshire, England, in 1862. At 24, he lived the classic story of breaking away from the family business - wool, no less - to pursue a love for the arts, in this case, music. The break was interesting for it took him first to Solano Grove and an orange plantation on the banks of the St. Johns River south of Jacksonville, Florida. Later, he would teach music in Danville, Virginia, before returning to Europe for formal education in Germany. He took the sounds of American culture with him. In 1888, he settled in Paris, later married the painter, Jelka Rosen, and devoted his life to composition. In his last sixteen years he was tortured by the pain of a slow death from syphilis contracted during his early years in Paris. In the four years before his death in 1934, he was blind and essentially paralyzed from the neck down. He composed and completed some of his most significant work during this period, all of it reaching paper through the notations of his loyal amanuensis, Eric Fenby.

Delius patterned much of his music after that of his friend and fellow composer, Edvard Grieg, but tempered it with English impressionism, his love of naturalism, and folk themes he heard among African Americans working on his father's grapefruit plantation near Solano Grove. The result was a unique and demanding music for performer and listener alike and one that almost demands an acquired appreciation. From his death until the 1970's many in the classical music industry thought his compositions were "too sweet" and trapped in immature cliches. Today, his popularity continues to grow wherever classical music is performed and appreciated. 

In 1968, Ken Russell directed a biography of Frederick Delius for the BBC. I saw the program purely by chance in its U.S. premier during the summer of the following year. I was in full cultural rebellion at that time having renounced much of western culture but the unique lyric quality of this English composer's music was like a magnet. Eventually I outgrew my bitterness over the lost decade (1964-74) of the Johnson-Nixon years, but never outgrew my fondness for the music of Delius. There was no escape from the compelling soundscapes with such rich, complex imagery and depth.

Today, with renewed interest in his music the Delius recording catalog has never been larger in spite of the music being some of the most difficult to realize in performance. Here is a fine Telegraph article by the cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber, about Delius and the current revival.

Almost fifty years have passed since that first sunset near Solano Grove. That's a long time to explore and mature in one man's music. It remains a most satisfactory experience - brushstrokes of sound. Different, immersive, and timeless.

In 1929 The New York Times wrote this about the composer:

Delius belongs to no school, follows no tradition and is like no other composer in the form, content, or style of his music.

Almost a century later the quote remains very much intact.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Delius portrait, by his wife, Jelka Rosen, painted in Grez-sur-Loing, France, 1912. Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, Australia

Text:
The Delius Society, website and Facebook page
Mary E. Greene,  Before the Champions: Frederick Delius' Florida Suite for Orchestra, M.A. Thesis, University of Miami, 2011
Radio Swiss Classic, Frederick Delius
wikipedia.org,, Frederick Delius

Jazz Manouche And The Quintette Du Hot Club De France

Jazz manouche - gypsy jazz - swept the clubs of Paris in the mid-1930's. The club responsible for this new sound was the Hot Club de France, founded by jazz fans and promoters, Hugh Panassie and Charles Delaunay. They brought together two performers who would become the core of their house ban, the Quintette.  That band's music continues to both influence jazz and be enjoyed by listeners today. Our post commemorates those two performers, guitarist, Django Reinhardt, and, violinist, Stephane Grappelli, who share birthdays this week.

The 20th century produced a number of fine guitarists in the fields of classical and popular music. And then there was Django Reinhardt, born January 23, 1910 in Belgium.  He was a poor gypsy who by the age of twelve could earn his way playing the guitar in the streets and small clubs around Paris. At seventeen a trailer fire left him with a severely injured hand but he soon developed a new fingering style and with it a unique sound. By 1930 Reinhardt developed an appreciation of American jazz and began incorporating its elements in his playing. In a few years he would go on to meet the violinist, Stephane Grappelli, an equally free musical spirit and innovator. They soon formed a new group, the "Quintette du Hot Club de France", and a "hot swing" sound that would make music as well as music history for the next twenty years. At its core was the Reinhardt style that has influenced guitarists for more than eight decades.

And here is the Reinhardt sound as part of the group he co-founded with Grappelli.

Reinhardt died in 1953 at the age of 43, but his impact has lived on for decades. Even today, almost every celebrity guitarist in the world of popular music, jazz, blues and rock and roll would acknowledge Reinhardt as an influence in their music. Here is an entertaining musical link to an NPR Jazz Live blog expanding on Reinhardt's legacy. We commemorate his birthday today (in 1910) with this documentary excerpt:

Stephane Grappelli, born in Paris on January 26, 1908, was an unsurpassed master of the jazz violin who entertained audiences almost to the very day he died in 1997. There was happiness and optimism in virtually every note of his music, even when those notes brought nostalgia and its touch of sadness to mind. No question he loved what he did and it flowed straight to his listeners.

Like his friend, Django, he was a self taught musician who developed a unique playing style that would have broad influence in the worlds of jazz and popular music. Fortunately, much of that influence was direct as he outlived Reinhardt by nearly fifty years. He loved people almost as much as he loved music and brought his jovial, upbeat personality and style to audiences young and old, large and small, performing both solo and with many of the jazz greats of the twentieth century. 

Portrait of Stephane Grappelli, London                             Allen Warren, 1976

One would think that a jazz virtuoso would be well known in the country that birthed the genre but he was little known in the United States even after thirty years of success in Europe. His American debut in 1969 brought him wide publicity and the international "rediscovery" that followed kept him on tour before adoring audiences for almost three decades. 

Yep. Simply stunning.

To conclude, here is the Quintette du Hot Club de France in their classic performance of Minor Swing, composed by Reinhardt and Grappell in the mid-1930's:

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Reinhardt photo, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress
Grappelli photo, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

Text:
wikipedia.org

theguardian.com, Nigel Kennedy article, December 19, 2007
nytimes.com, Stephane Grappelli obituary, December 2, 1997
Louis Miner, Paris Jazz: A Guide From the Jazz Age to the Present, The Little Bookroom, New York, 2005

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Credits: National Park Service

Edgar Allan Poe: Remembering His 210th Birthday

Today marks the 210th anniversary of the birth of the American writer,Edgar Allan Poe. He was born in Boston, , spent his lifetime living and working between the coastal cities of Boston and Charleston, and died Baltimore in 1849 wrapped in the mystery and tragedy that surrounded him during much of his life. 

Four years before his death he wrote the poem, The Raven. It brought instant fame and ensured him a secure place in American literature. Poe's appeal to readers rests in his dark subjects, fantastic plots, ethereal settings, netherworlds, and rich, descriptive writing. Few American writers have had such a broad impact on the arts. In his 2009 commentary on the bicentennial of the author's birth, Jeffrey A. Savoye, Secretary/Treasurer of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, said this:

We can see that his writings still work their magic on succeeding generations of readers, and yet Poe’s secrets remain distinctively his own. We can ape and parody the form, but legions of would-be disciples have too often created mostly pale imitations, and scholars have laid waste to forests of trees in printing articles and books that attempt to explain the essence of his genius. Yet, traces of Poe’s influence can be seen in the writings of such diverse authors as Jules Verne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle and Ray Bradbury, Charles Baudelaire and Allen Ginsberg. (His writings have also been translated into every major language. One Japanese author and critic so greatly admired Poe that he changed his own name from Tarö Hirai to Edogawa Rampo.) And this influence has not been limited to the written word. Such artists as Gustave Doré, Arthur Rackham, and Édouard Manet have illustrated his works. Sergei Rachmaninov, Leonard Slatkin, Philip Glass, and many others have composed musical tributes. In an interview published in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock, the great movie director, commented that “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.”

I don't recall when Poe's work first entered my life, but I was reading him long before high school. Little did I know that Poe and I would eventually share a bit of history at Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. He was stationed there for about a year beginning in 1827. The fort and island are the setting for his short story, The Gold Bug. During my career, I spent several weeks walking the damp tunnels, the grassy terreplein, and studying the character of this historic fort and those who garrisoned it over the centuries. I watched the sun rise and set over its walls, and stood at the gun emplacements at midnight listening to the invisible surf breaking on the beach or watching ship traffic moving in and out of Charleston harbor. For all I know, Poe's shadow watched my every move. For certain his work and legacy will continue to provide all of us with fantastic entertainment. 

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

A treasured, well-worn , 60 year-old item from my library

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
public domain photograph by Edwin H. Manchester taken November 9, 1848 in Providence, Rhode Island

Text:
eapoe.org
poetryfoundation.org

Remembering Elvis Presley On His Birthday

Elvis on The Milton Berle Show in 1956

Just imagine The King still with us and turning 84 today. He wouldn't need to swivel a hip or sing a note to lead news stories everywhere. Whether you're a fan or not, Elvis Presley occupies a big chapter in the history of the American experience and deserves the attention of readers - and listeners - young and old. In 2011, Powerline's Scott Johnson posted two fine stories about the "King of Rock and Roll." Your links are here and here. Neither story has much biography. The first relates the realization of what would become the Elvis persona. The second story details one of the strangest meetings of music and politics ever.

Presley released his first record 65 years ago. Michael Hann, writing in The Guardian in 2015, had this to say about the event:

The yellow label didn't exactly signify an earthquake. Above the cut-out centre of the 7in single ran the word Sun, a drop shadow beneath it. Behind the text lay rays of sunshine, and around the perimeter of the label were staves of music. The bottom half of the label contained the important information: the song title, That's All Right; the writer, Arthur Crudup; and the artist, Elvis Presley, with Scotty and Bill credited in smaller lettering. And at the very bottom, proudly, in yellow text reversed out of black, was the place of origin: Memphis, Tennessee.

Nevertheless, that disc, which arrived in Tennessee record shops 60 years ago, on Monday 19 July, 1954, did cause an earthquake. It was the first commercial release by Elvis Presley, the first tremors of a sensation that would soon transform popular culture and create the modern cult of celebrity. "You'd had teenage music before," says the pop historian Jon Savage, "but Elvis was the first to make music as if it was by teenagers, rather than for teenagers. And he was still a teenager when he made that record. After that, the industry realised they had to make music teenagers liked."

Read the rest of the article at this link. And below you can listen to the early sounds of that new music called Rock and Roll. 

A little primitive...catchy beat...good voice. May have some potential.

Epiphany 2019

Today is Epiphany, a celebration of the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus, and their recognition or revelation of Him as the King of Kings.

An image for this day comes from the mind of William Blake, the great torchbearer in the forefront of the Romantic Era.

The Adoration of the Kings                                                William Blake, 1799

In closing here is the pioneering Modernist writer, T. S. Eliot, reading his poem, Journey of the Magi.

Christmas 2018: The Twelfth Day

The quietness of the penultimate day of Christmastide 2018 has given way to the Twelfth and last day This day is important among Christians who maintain liturgical traditions: it marks the end of the twelve day festival celebrating the birth of Christ, it is the eve of Epiphany, and it is the beginning of the carnival season ending with Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent. Those who are reluctant to bid Christmas farewell can take heart knowing that the tradition of Christmastide extends through February 2 or Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple.

For some the Twelve Days of Christmas will end with elaborate costumes, masks, feasting, music, dancing, and theater at Twelfth Night festivities where misrule is the only rule. They are indeed topsy-turvy events. Only the Surveyor of Ceremonies will appear without a mask. He will direct the company through a series of games and other activities beginning with the distribution of the Twelfth Cakes. When all the party goers have arrived, each will select a small festival cake or cake slice. Three of those cakes contain a hidden bean or token designating them as the king cake, queen cake and fool cake. The lucky holders of the royal cakes oversee the evening's activities before returning to their normal lives, most likely "below the salt."

These Twelfth Night traditions have been part of western culture for over a thousand years. Some traditions carry over the night into Epiphany, January 6. This is the case in New Orleans where Twelfth Night parties have been popular for centuries due in part to their role as opening events of the Carnival season.

Twelfth Night activities in New Orleans in 1884

We trust that you have experienced a wonder-filled Christmas. May you live throughout this new year in the spirit of Twelfth Night, finding joy and happiness in what often seems a disordered world. In the words of William Shakespeare, who had a bit to say about this evening in Twelfth Night, (Act II, Scene 5):

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Great or common - What you will!

And speaking of greatness here is music for the day, Johann Sebastian Bach's Magnificat.

Christmas 2018: The Tenth Day

The church calendar is rather quiet on this tenth day of Christmas. And here is some profoundly simple and beautiful music written in 1894 by the American composer, Charles Ives, to match the quiet. How sad that his music was not taken seriously until many years after his death. 

Little star of Bethlehem!
Do we see Thee now?
Do we see Thee shining
O'er the tall trees?

Little child of Bethlehem!
Do we hear Thee in our hearts?
Hear the angels singing:
Peace on earth, good will to men!
Noel!

O'er the cradle of a King
Hear the Angels sing:
In Excelsis Gloria, Gloria!
From his Father's home on high,
Lo! for us He came to die;
Hear the Angels sing:
Venite adoremus Dominum

And in case you didn't meet a chimney sweep or kiss a pig on New Year's Day to ensure yourself a year of good luck, perhaps these postcards from the Vienna Succession's Wiener Werkstatte will work.

And if two chimney sweeps, a pig and pretty girl don't leave you with high hopes for the fortunes of the new year, this music from the genius of Igor Stravinsky should do it. The music is a fresh and inspiring today as it was when he composed it a century ago.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
postcards, theviennasecession.com

Christmas 2018: The Ninth Day

With New Year's Day and the Eighth Day of Christmas behind us we move on the Ninth Day, a rather quiet day in Christmastide. In the Catholic tradition it is the Feast of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the Church. It is a day to celebrate the virtue of friendship. Christmastide does indeed focus us on the memories of family and friends. Over many years the happenings of this season become riveted in our memories as significant and unforgettable emotional events. In the quiet hours following Christmas Day and the coming of the new year, I sit conversing with the faces in the fire. My thoughts meander over those Christmases past, of friends one time near and dear now lost in time, of family and our traditions in America now reaching their eleventh generation.

Although German traditions remain strong in our family one of my dearest memories is that of my Welsh bloodline introduced by my grandmother's parents who immigrated to the United States from Cardiff, Wales, in the early 1870's. Although I don't remember my grandmother - she died before my second birthday - my father always reminded me of her Celtic pride and Welsh ancestry expressed especially in a love for song and singing. It wasn't until the 20th century that Wales produced artists in English who were know internationally. One of them was was the poet, Dylan Thomas, whose compelling recitations approached hypnosis where words became song.
My family likely became aware of Thomas through his trips to the U.S. made over a span of about four years beginning in 1950. His trips always made sensational news for he was not only a rising star worshiped in metropolitan and university salons but also a boisterous character prone to drunkenness and colorful language. Indeed, his trip in 1953 ended in death from pneumonia while in New York. One could say he covered the full spectrum of life and when he spoke of it in verse or prose he made music. I first heard Thomas reading his work in elementary school English class sometime in the mid-1950's. I've read and listened to him since then. What follows has been a favorite Thomas story in my family for over sixty years. In that time I read it or portions of it to women I loved, to a thousand students, and to my children.
When Dylan Thomas brings voice to his work it makes for some of the finest readings in the English language. When he reads A Child's Christmas in Wales it is magic. It is my gift to you in this holy season:

Here is some music for the season by the internationally known Rhos Orpheus Male Choir headquartered in Rhosllannerchrugog, Wrecsam, Wales:

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
themagpiesfantasy.blogspot.com; photo still from Marvin Lightner production of A Child's Christmas in Wales, 1963.

Text:
catholicculture.org
wikipedia.org