Tag: instrumental

Cécile Chaminade | Concertino in D Major for Flute and Piano, Op. 107

“The pianist and composer Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was admired by the British Queen Victoria, for whom she often performed at The House of Windsor.” (I Care If You Listen). In 1913, France awarded her the Légion d’Honneur. But after her death, Chaminade was virtually forgotten. “George Bizet, a household friend at the Chaminade residence in Vésinet, a stylish suburb of Paris, lovingly called her ‘My little Mozart’. He advised her parents to send young Cécile to the Paris Conservatoire to study piano and composition. Papa, director of an insurance company and amateur violinist, refused permission, however: ‘Bourgeois girls are predestined to become wives and mothers.’”

Nonetheless, Chaminade gradually built a career in France as a composer and a performer. Eventually, she wrote 400 works and “not only succeeded in getting all her four hundred works performed, but also got them published – not a matter of course for a female composer at the time.” Despite her father’s reductionist attitude towards her career, after his death in 1887, Chaminade “had to support herself and her mother with her compositions and recitals, and this may be the reason why she concentrated on chamber music hereafter. The often-heard assessment that her music ‘doesn’t transcend the level of salon music’ is an affront. Yes, her writing is easily accessible and shies away from the drastic dissonances Wagner or Schönberg offer, but it is very well made and shows a remarkable control of classical counterpoint.”

Chaminade’s Concertino in D Major for Flute and Piano, Op. 107 (1902) is so prominent in the flute literature that among flutists it’s generally referred to simply as “The Chaminade.” Originally written for flute and piano, it was later also arranged for flute and orchestra. The piece was dedicated to the prominent French flutist and educator Paul Taffanel.

Beginning and ending in D Major as advertised, it cycles through quite a few other tonalities along the way, as this score-based video illustrates.

David Sanborn | Snakes

Alto saxophonist David Sanborn’s 1992 album Upfront featured a jaw-dropping who’s-who list of some of the best players at that time: Marcus Miller (production, keyboards, lead guitar, bass guitar, bass clarinet), Steve Jordan (drums), Hiram Bullock (guitar), Naná Vasconcelos (percussion), Randy Brecker (trumpet), Ricky Peterson (organ), and many more.

Sanborn’s “R&B crossover” sound, as AllMusic calls it, is clearly in evidence here on the album’s opening track “Snakes.” After a start in G minor, a straight-ahead funk feel drives an extended section built around the tonic; from 1:10-1:27, the bass continues the a pedal point tonic while a procession of compound chords tug at our ears underneath Sanborn’s climbing sax line as it leans into every curve. The pattern continues until 3:24-3:41, where a shift to Eb minor, built around a more Latin-infused feel, makes a vivid appearance. The Eb minor section returns at 3:24-3:40 and again at 4:30, this time to stay.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Piano Concerto #1, 2nd movement (Tedd Joselson, piano)

From the CBC’s feature on Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto (1866): “It’s among the most popular works in the entire classical repertoire, a favorite of concert pianists headlining with symphony orchestras the world over … The concerto was an immediate success and has been a staple of the repertoire ever since, its penetration into pop culture later being confirmed by its use on The Simpsons, Mad Men and numerous films. Its most famous performance happened at the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 — the height of the Cold War — when pianist Van Cliburn played it in the final round. It took approval by then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev for the jury to award the first prize to an American.”

Radio Free Europe reports that after Russia’s name, flag, and anthem were banned from all major sporting competitions from 2021 to 2023 by the World Anti-Doping Agency due to violations, Russian nationals competing in the Olympics instead heard a fragment of the Concerto when Russian athletes at those events won a gold medal.

After pizzicato strings and a soaring flute begin the piece gently in Db major, the piano states the theme. After an early transition section starts at 1:08 with a mischievous sense of mystery, we land in D major at 1:24 for a full feature by the woodwinds. Thereafter, plenty of other dramatic shifts continue, with the orchestra refusing to take a back seat to the piano in most sections.

Pat Metheny | In Her Family

“Pat Metheny’s love of Brazilian music comes into full bloom on 1987’s Still Life (Talking); it’s not the only stylistic element at play here, but it’s the most striking one,” (Apple Music). “The band is highly polished and coupled with Metheny’s crystalline production, the sound of the title track — and the rest of the album — sparkles.” Sierra Music describes “In Her Family,” the album-closing track, “one of Pat’s most haunting, pensive, and beautiful ballads.”

After a start in Ab minor, a simple, largely stepwise melody is greatly magnified by a bridge which takes flight over sweeping multi-key terrain (1:22-2:12). At 2:12, we’ve reverted to the original key, with short melodic phrases once again allowing the harmonies to take center stage.

John Powers | Test Drive (from “How To Train Your Dragon”)

“Test Drive” is a cue from John Powers’ Academy Award-nominated score for the 2010 Dreamworks film How To Train Your Dragon, accompanying the moment that Hiccup first rides his dragon, Toothless. “I was certainly trying to get a bit more epic,” Powers said in an interview discussing his score. “I just felt the animation and the visuals were giving me a broader palette to play with. As a kid I remember watching The Vikings with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and I always liked that score.

“[The directors] were really very specific a lot of the time. They did want size and depth and emotion. They wanted a feeling of the Nordic musical past. You could say the symphonic musical past was Nielson, the Danish symphonist. Sibelius. Grieg to a certain extent, although I think he was a little bit more Germanic than he was Nordic.

“We looked at all the folk music from the Nordic areas. And I’m part Scottish and grew up with a lot of Scottish folk music, so that came into it a lot.”

Multiple critics named it as the best score of the year, though Powell ultimately lost the Oscar to The Social Network. The cue begins in D major, and at 1:21 becomes somewhat tonally ambiguous before the sky clears into E major at 1:53.

Jeff Beck | You Know, We Know

In its review of Jeff Beck’s Flash, Rolling Stone ranks it as “one of Beck’s best ever, a record of awesome guitar prowess and startling commercial daring. It is also irrefutable proof that his kind of flash never goes out of fashion.”

Trading on the huge cachet he’d built up during the 1960s and 1970s with garden variety music fans and tech-obsessed guitarists alike, Beck rested on his laurels a bit in the 80s: 1985’s Flash was his first release in five years. His work with The Yardbirds in the late 60s was legendary, but “while he was as innovative as Jimmy Page, as tasteful as Eric Clapton, and nearly as visionary as Jimi Hendrix,” explains AllMusic, “Jeff Beck never achieved the same commercial success as any of those contemporaries, primarily because of the haphazard way he approached his career. After Rod Stewart left the Jeff Beck Group in 1971, Beck never worked with a charismatic lead singer who could have helped sell his music to a wide audience. Furthermore, he was simply too idiosyncratic, moving from heavy metal to jazz fusion within a blink of an eye … releasing only one album during the course of the ’90s. All the while, Beck retained the respect of fellow guitarists, who found his reclusiveness all the more alluring.”

“You Know, We Know,” the closing track of Flash, is based on a simple hook. After an intro in C major, the hook is first stated at 0:33, along with a rasping unprepared modulation to C# minor. Another jarring key change to D minor drops at 4:35. The mid-80s production fingerprint of Chic’s Nile Rogers, catching perhaps the most synth-centric sound of the entire decade, couldn’t be clearer on this track. Robert Christgau’s snarky review gave the album a B grade, opining that Beck “turns in the best LP of his pathologically spotty career by countenancing Rodgers’ production on five tracks. So what do we have here? We have half a good Nile Rodgers album, more or less.”

Ludwig van Beethoven | String Quartet Op. 18 No. 4, Movement 1 (Dover Quartet)

Kai Christensen of Earsense.org describes the context for Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 18 #4: “Beethoven worked painstakingly for two years to produce his first string quartets, Op. 18, published in 1801 in the fashion of the time as a set of six. Pre-dating them are the complete string quartets of both Haydn and Mozart, Haydn having written his last two complete quartets in the same years, finishing in 1799. Just as later composers were daunted by the supreme achievements of Beethoven before them, so Beethoven was acutely aware of the rich legacy of quartet literature already preceding him.”

CarnegieHall.com, in its Short Guide to Beethoven’s string quartets, provides an overview:

“String quartet: A composition for solo string instruments, usually two violins, viola, and cello; it is widely regarded as the supreme form of chamber music. (Grove Music Online). That’s the textbook definition. Beethoven inherited the string-quartet tradition from his predecessors and shaped it into something unsurpassed in virtuosity, invention, and expressiveness. The definition could well read, ‘Beethoven’s quartets are widely regarded as the supreme form of chamber music.’ He wrote 16 string quartets, and they reveal his evolution as a composer and a man. It’s all there: earthy wit (yes, Beethoven could crack a joke), volatile temper (his fury was state of the art), and personal sorrow (he had plenty to weep about).”

One of several modulations in this movement alone, there is an emphatic shift from Eb major (complete with a plagal cadence at 2:11) to G minor at 2:19. This energetic yet precise performance is by The Dover Quartet, which The Chicago Tribune reviewed as possessing “expert musicianship, razor-sharp ensemble, deep musical feeling and a palpable commitment to communication …”

Franz Joseph Haydn | String Quartet in F major, Op. 50 #5, 3rd movement

From James MacKay’s paper “Another Look at Chromatic Third-Related Key Relationships in Late Haydn: Parallel Keys and Remote Modulation in Selected String Quartet Minuets” in the journal HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 8.2 (Fall 2018): ” … third-related shifts in Haydn’s instrumental music occur earlier than 1790, especially in his string quartet Minuet-Trio movements, often built around a parallel major-parallel minor pairing of keys and their relatives. For instance, in Haydn’s String Quartet in F major, Op.50 no. 5 (Der Traum), third movement, Haydn effects a chromatic third modulation in two stages: touching briefly upon the parallel key (f minor) in the trio, then moving immediately to its relative major, A-flat (i.e. flat III of F major).”

Haydn, who lived from 1732-1809, wrote this string quartet (one of his six “Prussian” quartets dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia) in 1787. A nephew of Frederick the Great, Frederick William was one of the most notable patrons of music in eighteenth-century Germany and also an avid amateur cellist, according to the classical record label Hyperion.

This performance is by the Festetics Quartet, known for performing on period instruments. The third movement of this complete four-movement video begins at the 11:43 mark. At 13:20, the shift to Ab major is complete (note: the tuning in this performance is a far cry from A440!)

Modern Jazz Quartet | Over the Rainbow

” … it seems improbable that a group which came together as the rhythm section for one of the hottest players in Bebop’s genesis era, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, could morph into a standalone group that was the epitome of grace, elegance and cool dignity,” AllAboutJazz.com concludes. “But that’s exactly what happened when Gillespie recruited pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Kenny Clarke, giving the quartet an opportunity to shine as a discrete unit when it came time, during his sextet’s exhausting sets, to give the horns a break, calling, ‘OK, band off!’

The pairing of Lewis and Jackson proved an ideal tension, demonstrating how different musical interests can, indeed, come together to create something altogether new, the pianist’s interest in classical music dovetailing perfectly with the more overtly jazz-centric and grounded vibraphonist … A duo version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ (1956) focuses on Lewis and Jackson’s adept skill at reshaping music from external sources with Modern Jazz Quartet‘s classically informed modus operandi.”

After a piano-led intro in C major, Jackson’s vibes are the focus at 0:15 as the tune shifts to Eb major. At 1:03, we seem to retroactively discover that we’ve stumbled into Db major, but at 1:32, we’ve returned to Eb major for the balance of the tune. There’s plenty of evidence here of the ensemble’s understated yet pioneering sound: “For those operating under the misconception that the African-American jazz tradition was monolithically linked to the blues …” AllAboutJazz continues, “As far back as the 1930s, clarinetist Sidney Bechet was liberally quoting from Italian operas in his solos, but it was perhaps less obvious, less visible, than when John Lewis began looking at ways to bring the intimacy of classical chamber music to a jazz context. In direct contrast to bebop’s fire and unbridled energy, MJQ was one of the earliest examples of cool jazz.”

for Travis

Graham Rorie | Babiche

“Orcadian fiddle and mandolin player Graham Rorie is an award-winning folk musician based in Glasgow,” his site reports. “A finalist in the 2021 BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year and graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Traditional Music Degree, Graham has been making a name for himself as a performer, composer, session musician and producer.”

The bio continues: “While still in the early stages of his career, Graham has gained a wealth of performance experience appearing at festivals including Glasgow’s Celtic Connections, Celtic Colours (Canada), Festival Interceltique de Lorient (France) and Celtica Valle D’Aosta (Italy).” The piece “Babiche” is part of “a new suite of music composed by Rorie to tell the story of Orcadians who traveled to Northern Canada between 1600 and 1900 to work for The Hudson’s Bay Company. Orcadians, according to the history website Orkneyjar, are “the indigenous inhabitants of the Orkney islands of Scotland. Historically, they are descended from the Picts, Norse, and Scots.”

Starting in E major, a middle section in an inversion-heavy C# major (2:14) returns triumphantly to the main melody and original key at 2:54. Many thanks to our champion contributor JB for submitting this tune!