Music other than Mozart's in 12 Days

[StephenO]

Hand on heart, how many of us sit down and say to ourselves - " I think I'll have a nice bit of Rawsthorne today" or Hoddinott, or Musgrave. It isn't that they are not very worthy composers, but do they really stay in the mind? I've not neglected any of these artists, but I can't honestly rank them with Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton or Britten.

There are many other British composers whose music is unjustly neglected, on radio and in the concert hall if not on disc. I'll never understand why Alwyn and Bax aren't better known, for example. IMO they were in the same league as Vaughan Williams and Holst. Alwyn's Piano Concertos are masterpieces and there's far more to Bax than just the admittedly wonderful Tintagel. Doreen Carwithen (Alwyn's secretary and later his wife) is another composer who deserves much greater recognition but whose works I can't remember ever having heard on R3.

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

So: now that all the Prom programmes are searchable on-line, should one go through and identify the composers who were thought of as important at the time, and listen to a sample, to see if they're being unjustly neglected now? It should prove possible to reconstruct even the more obscure ones, given the range of available recordings, with an occasional piece of special pleading directed to the BBC Concert Orchestra [they did that CD of Foulds, after all]. Should there be a special "Where Are They Now?" programme, for one-work wonders?

Why should one do it? Fairness, of course - but also in order to appreciate even more why the better composers are better. [One doesn't want to clog the stage with Dekker, Marston, Massinger or even Ben Jonson - but a little bit now and then, played as if it were better than it is, shows up the difference between the good and the great, which can be obscured if all you ever hear are relatively routine performances of Beethoven symphonies etc.]

Should the drivetime programmes be obliged to contain a percentage quota of the short but obscure? Bantock's Sea-Reivers, a snip at 3"44', or Kishmul's Galley? Geirr Tveitt's HardangerTunes would fill many a gap very memorably.

R3 does do these things every now and then. A recent Understanding Music looked at Arnold the Symphonist and persuaded me to listen to a few of them again. And Naxos is doing sterling work [though I did leave one half-price secondhand Rawsthorne in the shop, because I couldn't remember any of the themes straight after I'd listened to them [I'm assuming it wasn't David Lloyd-Jones' performance, because I really enjoyed his way with the Stanford symphonies]].

[Flosshilde]

Slightly going off the thread topic but Petroc Trelawny said that in Vienne, they played Blue Danube with the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Do we have nothing better to represent London than some pop songs? With all those British composers… Well, all right. Nothing wrong with pop songs and everybody knows them but all the same, it’s … a bit sad.

Isn't the 'Blue Danube' essentially a pop song? Wasn't Johan Strauss an equivelant to Stock, Aiken & Waterman, churning out catchy tunes for people to dance to?

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

Isn't the 'Blue Danube' essentially a pop song? Wasn't Johan Strauss an equivelant to Stock, Aiken & Waterman, churning out catchy tunes for people to dance to?

Then why did Brahms write out the first bars in somebody's album and add underneath "Not, alas, by Johannes Brahms"? Not just regret for the money and the fame, I think. And Strauss didn't have an arranger to do his orchestration, either. How many squaddies would want tickets to the Last Night of the Proms? [The Austrian Army gets the gallery at one of the pre-performances.] It's an issue of National Kulcher. Waltzing, ski-ing, drinking wine, beer and schnaps.

[Flosshilde]

No, sorry, the Strauss waltzes are essentially light music written to satisfy a demand for new music to dance to. That doesn't neccessarily make them bad, just that they were pop music of the time, so they are hardly worth putting on a higher pedestal, or saying that the Viennese celebration of New Year is superior to London's because one had 19th century pop music & the other had 21st century pop music.

Whether Brahms regretted not writing the Blue Danube or not isn't really relevant. (& who knows - he might very well have regretted the money & fame)

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

Oh, let's have an argument! 1. What's 'pop music'? There was a time when I thought I knew, but nowadays there are too many sub-genres: hip-hop, techno, house, garage [I tell those who I ask that I go for 'conservatory music', but they don't get the joke]. 2. If you define pop-music in C19 as the music of the people, then in Vienna there were many other kinds of music that could have been so described more appropriately than music written for the upper middle classes and the nobility to dance to. [I will only say "Schrammel"; and the songs that were written for Nestroy's plays, and so on.] To show my fairness, I give the full context of Brahms' remark [which I didn't know till I googled it]: "When Strauss's stepdaughter, Alice von Meyszner-Strauss, asked the composer Johannes Brahms to sign her autograph-fan, he wrote down the first bars of The Blue Danube, but adding "Leider nicht von Johannes Brahms" ("Alas! not by Johannes Brahms")." So, there will have been an extra-musical reason for his modesty, though he wrote waltzes himself, and was photographed with Johann II [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jo...in_Vienna.jpg]. Strauss waltzes have been subsumed into High Culture, because, for their proper performance, they need the apparatus and skills of High Culture, i.e. the late C19 symphony orchestra. In Austria, this tradition still has a [tenuous, conditional, factitious, undeniable] link with contemporary reality. The UK does not have any such link with its cultural past or present, in terms of High Culture. [Alba is a little different; it has Burns' tidying up of the words to an auld sang, which was current in the 1840s, for sure, because it pops up in Micawber's mouth in David Copperfield.] So, the best we can do is to use songs that everyone knows TODAY. Will they still know them [will they still feed me?] in 2064? How far is endurance/permanence a value? When you're celebrating a moment of transition, like the turn of the year, I think it probably is. Otherwise, what links you to your past? Speaking personally, Albert Chevalier's rendition of "My Old Dutch" reduces me to tears, and is a "popular" reflection on transience, permanence and mortality, such as would be appropriate to New Year, but I can't see it catching on. [BTW, must check to see if B, JH or CMvW did a piano trio version of "Auld Lang Syne"...]

[BBMmk2]

If, my memory serves me correctly, R3 don't broadcast much in the way of 'The Strauss Family' muisc, or that genre, generally speaking?

[doversoul1]

Isn't the 'Blue Danube' essentially a pop song? Wasn't Johan Strauss an equivelant to Stock, Aiken & Waterman, churning out catchy tunes for people to dance to?

I see your point about Blue Danube being popular music, though not sure if I’d call it a pop song, but Mike (#21) summarises my point: it is about the link to or rather the lack of, the place’s cultural tradition. What would (or did) Paris, Berlin or Prague play on an occasion such as this? Or even Washington? I suppose you could say that those pop songs represent London today but I have a feeling that 90% of the world would think all pop songs are American.

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

Wenn Richard, dann Wagner; wenn Strauss, dann Johann

If, my memory serves me correctly, R3 don't broadcast much in the way of 'The Strauss Family' music, or that genre, generally speaking?

Does that tell us about the music or Radio 3? This forum is full of complaints about Radio 3 doesn't play.

Are we talking light music vs. heavy music, or sticking to Duke Ellington's two categories, good and bad?

[BBMmk2]

Does that tell us about the music or Radio 3? This forum is full of complaints about Radio 3 doesn't play.

Are we talking light music vs. heavy music, or sticking to Duke Ellington's two categories, good and bad?

Mine was just a general comment, to another post. This thread is supposed to be about music other than Mozart's, who board member's would like to hear, in the 12 days.