Greg Stepanich

A conversation with Sam Arlen

Toward the end of his life, Harold Arlen wasn't too happy about the direction popular music had taken.

"He didn't know what was happening to music," said Sam Arlen, his adopted son and only child. "He wanted to know: 'Where do I fit in now? Where do my contemporaries fit in?' He didn't understand it."

Something of a dispiriting close for Harold, as his son refers to him, but Sam Arlen will tell you that his father, whose contributions to the American songbook include Over the Rainbow and Stormy Weather, was nevertheless, at all times, the soul of civility.

"He was a perfect gentleman. He was a gentle person, he was not rude, he was not an angry person," Arlen said. "He did his reprimanding of me in a gentle manner."

And that squares with what everyone else has said about him, said Arlen, noting that he and his wife, Joan, have traveled much of the globe and met many people who knew or worked with his father.

"Sooner or later, you would expect someone to say something negative," Arlen said. "But not once, not ever, has anyone said anything negative about Harold."

Arlen, who controls his father's catalog of work as the proprietor of S.A. Music Inc., a publishing concern based in Smithtown, N.Y., is also a tenor saxophonist and stepfather to two daughters. He's extra busy this year handling the centennial celebrations associated with his father, who was born in 1905 in Buffalo, N.Y., and died in New York City in 1986.

Those celebrations include yearlong national tours of Arlen concerts by Faith Prince and Tom Wopat, guitarist John Pizzarelli, and a celebration in April at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosted by Michael Feinstein (there's a schedule at www.haroldarlen2005.com). Sam Arlen, who played at a Carnegie Hall gala last week that honored his father, also has released a CD of performances of his father's music called Arlen Plays Arlen.

Sam Arlen, who's 47, said he was six or seven years old when he became aware of what his father did for a living, though at that time Harold Arlen was near the end of his career. It took a few more years after that for him to appreciate how his father had crafted songs such as Last Night When We Were Young, one of Sam's favorites.

But Harold Arlen didn't do a lot of explaining of the process, Sam said.

"He was not really one to talk about himself a lot," he said. "It was always all about the music."

Harold didn't have a regular routine for writing, Sam said, depending instead on the inspirational exigencies of a particular job, be it a finished lyric from a collaborator or a couple of chord changes.

"If he was working on a project, he might get an idea walking down the street. He got the idea for Over the Rainbow while he was on his way to a show," he said, relating the familiar story of how Arlen conceived the melody outside Schwab's drugstore in Los Angeles. "He might carry manuscript paper with him so he could jot down an idea until he could get to the piano to work it out."

Arlen wrote whenever necessary, be it in the early morning hours or in the middle of the afternoon, Sam said.

When it came time for Sam to strike out on his own musical path, his father expressed concern because he knew how difficult the music industry could be.

"He didn't want me to have to suffer like most in this business have to," Sam said, but he didn't discourage him from pursuing it. "He would say, 'Whatever you do, do it well.'"

Many of the stories Sam Arlen tells about his dad took place before Sam was born, but that doesn't diminish his pride in the composer, or in the Arluck family generally. Praising his father's open-mindedness, he singles out the same quality in his grandfather Samuel, who was a cantor.

In Buffalo, the Arlucks rented out the top floor of their house to an African-American family, which for the time "was very unusual," Sam Arlen said. But both families became good friends, and it's that crossing of ethnicities -- European Jews and American blacks -- that gave Harold Arlen's music its distinctive sound, and the framework of 20th-century American entertainment culture generally.

Which leads Sam to one more story, this one about how his grandfather would audition Harold's music for his unsuspecting congregation at the Pine Street synagogue.

"He would listen to Harold's songs and weave the melodies into the service," Sam Arlen said. "If people came up to him afterward and told him they liked what he was singing, he would tell Harold, 'I think you'd better keep that one.'"

These strong strands of family, culture and faith helped make Harold Arlen who he was, not just as an artist but as a man, Sam said.

"It speaks to who he was as a human being," he said, and it came out in music that was joyous and lighthearted on the one hand and something quite different on the other.

"He had a deep and personal side to his character," Sam Arlen said. "He was able to understand what people were going through. And I think he felt this heavily."

Celebrating Harold Arlen

In the end, Sgt. Conway couldn't cut anything.

And after I got done playing all that music, I could see why.

It might have been a little much for our audiences, but for me, a couple of the singers and the sergeant, there was no such thing as too much Harold Arlen, even when we were closing in on Hour Three and we still hadn't gotten to Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

Arlen was born 100 years ago last Tuesday in Buffalo, N.Y., as Hyman Arluck, and the general critical consensus that he is one of his country's finest songwriters still doesn't give his name the household recognition that it deserves. His best-known song undoubtedly is Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and his best-known score the movie it came from, The Wizard of Oz.

But a list of songs I'm looking at right now gives some idea of his range, and also many pleasant shocks: I didn't know he wrote that! Some of his better-known songs outside of Oz and Groucho Marx include:

Get Happy, I Got a Right to Sing the Blues, It's Only a Paper Moon, Stormy Weather, Let's Fall in Love, Blues in the Night, That Old Black Magic, Come Rain or Come Shine, Last Night When We Were Young, Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe, One for My Baby (and One More for the Road), Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, The Man That Got Away, The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea, I've Got the World on a String, Ill Wind, My Shining Hour.

Then there are two personal favorites of mine, late songs sung memorably on the only Barbra Streisand recording I've ever really liked, A Sleepin' Bee and I Never Has Seen Snow.

That's a pretty good selection right there, and a fair sampling of highlights from American popular music history. In these songs we can hear Arlen's great strengths: A gift for memorable melody; a jazzy rhythmic sense that evokes the instrumental lines of dance bands (he did some arrangements for Fletcher Henderson early on); and perhaps most importantly, a dark, rich harmonic vocabulary steeped in the blues and jazz. It's this quality that makes his tunes so popular with jazz players, but maybe slightly remote for the average listener.

Take The Man That Got Away, for example. Like others of his songs there are a lot of repeated notes and melodic fragments that change color only because the harmony does. The tail end of the second 12 bars (the words are by Ira Gershwin) -- No more his eager call/The writing's on the wall/The dreams you dreamed have all/Gone astray -- is a melody of 21 notes, 16 of which are exactly the same. Two additional notes are only a short distance away, letting off the tiniest bit of steam as the other 16 push achingly, relentlessly toward their release over a bed of shifting, sliding, bluesy chords.

This is the kind of thing a certain kind of musician -- the Chord Freak -- really likes. The French composer Camille Saint-Saens once said that true musicians could derive absolute pleasure from a simple series of chords, and that appears to be the case with Arlen. He jumped into the jazz pool with both ears as this new music of his youth seized the passions of the country and much of the Western world, and that immersion gives his writing a unique flavor, closer to writers like Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington than, say, Irving Berlin or even Arlen's good friend George Gershwin.

His ability is critical to the success of The Wizard of Oz, and to my mind, the most important reason for its status as a classic. Try to imagine the film with a different score; the one I like to point to is Danny Elfman's score for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Elfman's music is interesting and well-suited to Tim Burton's weird vision, though it isn't memorable. And yet the distance between Burton's fantasy and the Wizard of Oz isn't all that far. So if you married a score like Elfman's to Wizard, you'd have film historians writing about a daring cinematic experiment in the late 1930s in which a beloved children's book was unsuccesfully brought to life. Fascinating, they'd say, but it doesn't work.

But Arlen, who died in 1986, saves the day, and he's the true hero of The Wizard of Oz. It strikes me on reflection that he must consciously have tried to write music he thought would work for a film kids would go to, and the result is a triumph. Think of that movie even for a second, and Arlen's score simply sparkles into your head.

With Arlen, Wizard is one of the great movies of all time. Without him, it's a bizarre cinematic confection with limited appeal.

Fans of Arlen's music can't get enough, which brings me back to Sgt. Frank Conway.

When I was a kid in northern Illinois, I did a lot of piano playing for theatrical efforts of every stripe. This is what happens to you when you can play the piano with a reasonable amount of competence and you like playing somewhat unfashionable things. I couldn't play very well, and I'm even worse today, but in those days I played adequately enough to have a pretty good time and keep my teenage years very busy.

One of the recurring activities for which I served as keyboard man was a succession of themed cabaret shows in which a small group of singers and I would present "An Evening With..." and regale an audience with the best-loved selections of Richard Rodgers or some other major luminary of the Broadway world. In addition to Rodgers, we did an evening with Schmidt and Jones (The Fantasticks, 110 in the Shade), and Harold Arlen.

We played many different venues from nursing homes to an insurance company's annual banquet, and on one memorable occasion, the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis. A great gig for a boy in high school, as you might imagine. Lovely, uh, pianos there, as I recall.

Anyway, Sgt. Conway was a theater enthusiast who liked to direct, and he wanted us to do an Arlen show at Fort Sheridan, which we were happy to do, especially after we started going through the music. It soon became apparent, though, that we had far too much material and some things were going to have to go.

So let's ax Lydia. No, it's comic relief, one of us said. Happiness? A personal must-do, another said. Acc-Cent-Tchu-Ate? We're doing this at an Army base. We can't cut a World War II favorite.

And so it went. We kept everything, the show lasted well over three hours, and our small, oversatiated audience just wanted us to shut up and go home. But even those who reprimanded us for well outstaying our welcome told us how much they loved many of the songs, and how surprised they were to discover just how much music they knew by this composer they'd never consciously heard of.

I live in a 50-year-old house with hardwood floors. My father-in-law loves to do woodwork, and once years ago right after we bought the house he took a close look at the floors. It's good stuff, he said. These guys knew what they were doing.

So it is with Harold Arlen, a great craftsman of music. Many lovers of his work might not know his name, but his songs are a beautiful, enduring part of our American music, and I think they always will be. In this his centenary year (see www.haroldarlen2005.com or just www.haroldarlen.com), I'm planning to take some to reacquaint myself with the music of this superb writer, and marvel again at just how resplendent a heritage has been built in our country out of a relatively uncomplicated form: The song.

New history of American classical music looks promising

Joseph Horowitz's new Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall has just crossed my desk, and I'm eager to go through it and see what he makes of our country's achievements in this art form.

Paging through the book I see two little nits I'll pick right now. He's got the author of Opera in America: A Cultural History identified as "John Diziges," but readers of this blog will know that the author of that work is John Dizikes.

He also says in the opening that he wrote the book because "there existed no history of classical music in the United States." This does not take into account A History of American Classical Music, written by John Warthen Struble and published in 1995 by Facts on File. I like Struble's book, but it's mostly a history of classical composers (it's subtitle is MacDowell Through Minimalism); Horowitz makes a point of saying the performers of American classical music have occupied a greater pride of place in our musical life, and he's surely right.

Much to think about already, and that's without having read it yet.

Here's something from Struble's book that I marked, and thought worthwhile:

...By far the worst result of the deterioration in public music education during the serialist era was the loss of momentum in the drive toward public music literacy, an effort in which America had led the world since the days of Lowell Mason. It only required one generation of American youth raise without even minimal ability to read notation or to recognize the fundamental themes of the major classical composers (both European and American) for the entire context of public musical literacy to be lost. And the ramifications of that loss are profound.

Well put, and a good sketch of what happened to midcult in general. Still, human creativity being what it is, classical music finds a way to survive, even if it's a different kind of vernacular reimagined for older instruments and more ancient forms. If an interior designer, for example, can be born in a young person who discovers a passion for English country houses without having been across the Pond but having become enamored of cable TV shows or certain issues of Architectural Digest, there's no reason a classical composer can't arise out of a person who has no basic musical education but follows instinct and ear to create what he or she likes.

In other words, I'm hopeful going in to Horowitz's book.

Grammy update: John Adams' On The Transmigration of Souls won all three awards for which it was nominated. An impressive achievement, though I stand by my contention that it's more of an aural theater piece than pure music. Then again, changing definitions are what our time is all about.

Adams' 'Transmigration': Remembering Jimmy

When the Grammy Awards are handed out tonight, it seems likely that at least one award will be going to composer John Adams for his Sept. 11 "memory space," On The Transmigration of Souls.

The piece, a 25-minute work combining sound collage, recited names, choral singing and orchestral music, has been nominated in three categories for its recording featuring the New York Philharmonic, conductor Lorin Maazel, the New York Choral Artists and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus: Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

The work was written in 2002 on a joint commission from the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center as a memorial to the victims of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for composition in 2002, and the New York Philharmonic recording was issued on Nonesuch last year, complete with a booklet of text, Ground Zero photos and a fine essay by composer David Schiff (it appeared first in the April 2003 edition of The Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200304/schiff).

I hadn't listened to Transmigration until recently for a couple reasons, the first being the subject matter. My cousin Jimmy Geyer, a father of three and second son of my own father's late sister, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of Tower 1 at the World Trade Center. He disappeared that awful morning, and it's still difficult for me to see too many reminders of that day without getting upset, and that's true even though it's been more than three years, and I didn't know Jimmy as well as I should have.

I was reminded of how unforgivably scant my knowledge of him was, and is, during his memorial service a couple weeks after the attack. Jimmy received moving tributes from family and friends; one of the most striking was that from the members of the girls' soccer team he coached on Long Island -- all of them came to the church in Rockville Centre wearing their red uniforms. As I listened to story after story, beautiful on beautiful, it struck me that the world needs more people like Jimmy, not fewer, and that so many of the good people we learned about in the weeks after Sept. 11 were simply, plainly, wonderfully that: Good people.

It was the only positive thing that came out of Sept. 11 for me. All of those people were so deeply loved by the ones they left behind, and it was heartbreaking and yet affirmative in the most profound sense, to see how many other lives the lost ones were bound to. It was at once hope for the future and a ringing validation of the present, sounding amid a landscape of tears.

But it's still impossible for me to watch any documentary coverage of the events themselves. It's too personal yet.

Another reason for my avoidance of Transmigration until now is my ambivalence about Adams (his Website is http://www.earbox.com). I saw one of the first performances of his opera Nixon in China at the Kennedy Center in Washington; in fact, I was in the audience along with at least three Reagan administration officials -- David Gergen, then-new FBI chief William Sessions, and Richard Perle, whom I ended up sitting behind. I wasn't persuaded particularly by the opera, though the audience shrieked with delight at the Air Force One replica on stage and the depictions of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger belting away.

I find better Adams in The Wound-Dresser, his 1988 setting of one of Walt Whitman's Civil War poems, and in much of El Nino, his "nativity oratorio" of 2000. In particular, his treatment in that work of "La Anunciacion," a poem by Mexican writer and diplomat Rosario Castellanos, seems to me an appropriate rendering of the words and a piece of music with a curiously attractive flavor of delicate melancholy.

Transmigration is an unusual work, though perhaps it shouldn't be, seeing that it's been more than a century that we've had technology that allows us to preserve ephemeral sound. Adams' piece makes prominent use of spoken voices and recorded street sounds, and it does that successfully. Most such experiments sound gimmicky (that nightingale in Respighi's Pines of Rome excepted), but this one works.

Formally, Transmigration is a slow, somber meditation for two choirs (children and adults) and large orchestra, flanked on both ends by street sounds and spoken words, the latter of which also are heard throughout the piece. It also follows a clear dramatic arc. It begins quietly and ends that way, but builds to a massive orchestral peroration a little more than halfway through after a chorus insistently intones words from a widow quoted by The New York Times in one of the newspaper's "Portraits of Grief": "I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is."

One of the chief models for the orchestral fabric of much of Transmigration is Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question from 1906, which is echoed here as an hommage, trumpet and all. If you listen to Transmigration and The Unanswered Question back-to-back, you'll hear how much the mood of the new work owes to the older composer. Ives' static chords are solemn and sad, the perfect forms on which to drape his angular solo lines.

They work every bit as well for Adams, and that's where we find the real music of this piece. As Schiff points out, I think correctly, Adams has in Transmigration redefined "the relation of music to non-music and of the concert hall to everyday life." He also has wisely made use of the found art that accompanied the event: The language of the posters seeking missing family members ("We love you, Louie. Come home"); the words of a doomed flight attendant ("I see water and buildings"); and the painful, flat recitation of the names of the dead.

And as a powerful document of a horrible time, Transmigration does tastefully what it is supposed to do. It is a well-conceived aural memorial to the 3,000 who were murdered that day, and listening to it puts you in a museum-like inner space of shock and numbness that is hard to shake.

Perhaps that was the only way to respond musically to Sept. 11. But it seems to me that while Transmigration is a success on its own terms, it's less successful as pure music, as sound constructed by a musician in contemplation.

Ives had to show Adams the way to express what seems inexpressible, and Transmigration's approach is beholden to it. In the passages that depart from this, the music sounds more like a soundtrack to the 9/11 movie we're all playing in our heads than a separate response, more like the elements of an artwork whose content is dictated by external events than the cohesive vision of a solitary, changed human being who has internalized those events and crafted them into something greater than the sum of their parts.

Still, I found On the Transmigration of Souls to be a fitting evocation of the loss our family and others suffered that day, and I am grateful that it gives me a kind of side chapel of the mind where I can repair to think about Jimmy in private.

It appears that more years will have to pass before a purely instrumental consideration of Sept. 11 can be written, one that acquaints the listener with the wound from which the music bleeds but also says something about the essential tragedy -- and joy -- of all human affairs.

On the road, dreaming of bel canto

Here's the opening to an important book from 1958:

On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. It was a clear wintry day. The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas — Donizetti's Lucia du Lammermoor. So with the beauty of the countryside, the inspiration of Donizetti's inimitable music, and the splendor of the skies, the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively long drive — especially when one is alone — was dispelled in pleasant diversions.

The book was Stride Toward Freedom; the man driving to Montgomery was a 25-year-old cleric named the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
I didn't know King was an opera fan, but a little research on the Met Opera's Web site reveals that the day in question was Jan. 30, 1954. Lily Pons and Jan Peerce starred that day in Lucia, and Fausto Cleva conducted.

Michael Tippett at 100: A worthy composer?

I have a dim memory from the late 1970s of a great deal of commotion being raised over the premiere in Chicago of a new symphony by an eminent British composer, though I can't recall what the reaction was to the piece.

That was at around the same time -- and I remember this better -- that the classical music world was in a high state of excitement over the new Symphony No. 15 of Dmitri Shostakovich, who had died not too long after that work's debut. (It was a fascinating piece, though I didn't understand it at the time, particularly the brief quotes from the William Tell overture -- what was he trying to say?)

It seems to me that in those days major premieres were major news events, and that all of us who were interested, no matter how young and unformed we were, were cognizant that something in our artistic universe was about to be changed.

When the musical world sets aside a year to observe a significant anniversary, some of that feeling comes back; we remember a time when the names and lives of these artists loomed large in the culture, and we try to look at the body of work with fresh eyes, seeing flaws we didn't see before, or finding great depths that had been there all the time, but that we hadn't paid enough attention to chart.

The case of Sir Michael Tippett is instructive in this regard. Tippett, who died in 1998, was born 100 years ago in London. His centenary is being celebrated in Britain with performances of his opera The Knot Garden (the Scottish Opera's run ended Saturday) and his most popular work, the oratorio A Child of Our Time, at the English National Opera. Los Angeles' opera company is doing The Knot Garden, and the Lyric Opera in Chicago will mount The Midsummer Marriage in December.

So says Andrew Clark of the Financial Times, (www.ft.com) who goes on to call Tippett something of a visionary, though one anchored in the past:

And with the passage of time, what anchors Tippett's music is his classical attitude of mind, something that...relates his compositional and philosophical spirit to the central European tradition. The issues that preoccupied Tippett -- injustice, interdependence, renewal -- now look prophetic. And judging by the other pieces I have been reacquainted with (recently), his music has never sounded less dated.

That's quite a contrast with the view expressed by the leading British critic Norman Lebrecht. In his weekly online commentary (www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/041222-NL-tippett.html
he calls Tippett "a composer to forget":

There is something admirable about their stubborn advocacy of a genuine English eccentric, an affirmation that not all in cultural life has to be ruled by box-office, or logic. That said, I cannot begin to assess the damage to British music that will ensue from the coming year's purblind promotion of a composer who failed so insistently to observe the rules of his craft.

I've spent the last couple days listening to a good deal of Tippett, including A Child of Our Time (1939-41) and another oratorio, The Mask of Time (1980); the first four string quartets (1935; 1943; 1946; 1979) of his five total; and the Second and Fourth symphonies (1957; 1977). I couldn't get my hands on any of the operas for the purpose of this entry, but I've got a much better sense now of what his music is all about.

And I have to say I'm more with Clark than I am with Lebrecht. I think it's fair to say that Tippett's music was uneven in many respects, and part of the reason for that might be that he had a late start as a composer, and pursued an unorthodox path thereafter. The current intellectual climate also makes it fashionable to smirk at his leftwing philosophy and stand aghast at his conscientious objector status during World War II (for which he spent time in prison).

But it's the music at issue now, and on balance, the pieces I've studied impress me as original, daring and rewarding.

The most remarkable thing about this music is its unusual rhythmic sense. Tippett's themes and compositional structures are often built around unconventional pulses that give his pieces an exceptional sense of life; this is music that brims and pulsates.

And Tippett seems to have a better understanding of the rhythms that make the American popular music he knew -- and greatly admired -- jump and swing. Where so many American composers self-consciously jazzed up their material during a time when their concert works were getting drowned out by every combo that could snag a gig, Tippett's rhythms sound naturally jazzy. He's not afraid to let the rhythms go where they want to go; he never seems to say "Right, that's enough," and reach for the 4/4 harness.

His textures, too, are clear as can be. He drew much inspiration from Renaissance madrigalists, who wrote in shifting rhythms along with the meter of the text, and who composed with individual musical lines in mind. Much of the music I listened to (some with a score in hand) was genuinely polyphonic, not just a collection of decorative lines flowing in and out of a preconcieved structure. For Tippett, those lines make up the structure; each individual voice has its own path to follow, though they converge at the same dramatic high points, which is where the composer shows himself in command of his material.

Tippett's musical language is rarely easy on the ears (most of A Child of Our Time excepted), and it got more difficult as he aged. And yet, even the angularities of the Fourth Symphony -- written for the Chicago Symphony and premiered in 1977 -- never sound ugly or harsh. Severe and uncompromising, yes, but somehow genial and humane even at its most nearly atonal. The leaps and jumps of the individual lines outline various tonalities as they shimmer and burble, and there's a strong architectural sense by which Tippett is able to build a compelling narrative.

Here's a short overview of the Tippett I listened to:

A Child of Our Time. This oratorio on a text by Tippett was inspired by the turbulent political situation in Europe of the late 1930s, and in particular by the assassination of a Nazi official by a young Polish Jew. (The reprisal for that killing began with Kristallnacht.) Tippett's text is aphoristic more than direct -- "The words of wisdom are these:/Winter cold means inner warmth, the secret nursery/of the seed" -- and the music bears the marks of a wide variety of outside influences.

But it's engaging music nonetheless, especially in Tippett's use of five black spirituals: Steal Away; Nobody Knows the Trouble I See; Go Down, Moses; O, By and By; and Deep River. Tippett's respect for this material helps this work's eclectic grab-bag of styles sound coherent and logical, when it could easily have been embarrassing. (Recording I used: Soloists Jessye Norman, Janet Baker, Richard Cassilly, John Shirley-Quirk; BBC Singers, Choral Society and Symphony under Sir Colin Davis, recorded in March 1975.)

String Quartets 1-4. A substantial contribution to the quartet literature, by turns serious, dramatic and deeply lyrical. No. 1, in three movements, starts off with the muscle of late Beethoven, and concludes with a energetically offbeat fugal finale. The slow second movement is an austerely beautiful series of gently unfolding long lines. The first movement of No. 2 is built around another Beethovenian theme with a gentle rhythmic kick, while the second movement is a somber Andante generated from a Bachian fugue subject. Two lively themes dominate the delightful third movement, and the quartet ends with a movement in which an anguished opening contrasts with an agitated but dance-like secondary subject.

The five-movement Third Quartet is also rich in imitation, and gets underway with a driving theme and a treacherous fugue subject that follows. There are two slow movements: the second, marked Andante, is darkly songlike, while the fourth, marked Lento, starts in stationary fashion and then ripens bluesily until it breaks into a passionate outburst. The third movement alternates an aggressive main theme with nearly manic elaborations, and the finale is confident and strongly rhythmic.

The language of Quartet No. 4, written much later than the first three, is also far more advanced tonally. Written in four continuous movements, it spans the gamut from dense tone clusters and sharp outbursts of sound in the faster movements, to a slow Bartokian buzz in the slow movement. The final movement seems to tear itself apart as it lurches along; it's strongly reminiscent of the Beethoven Grosse Fuge. (Recording: The Britten Quartet, recorded in 1990.)

Symphonies 2 and 4. The Second Symphony is a marvelous work to my ears, a piece rich in color, fascinating texture and intense lyrical moments. As always, there is a vast collection of varied rhythms at work here, several of them operating independently of each other at the same time.

The Fourth Symphony features a gimmicky idea: Recorded breathing that comes in at the beginning and end. Tippett said he was trying to write a "birth-to-death" piece, and the music does travel over a wide range of emotions. Tippett again exploits his gift for instrumental color, elaborate rhythmic patterns, and contrapuntal mastery. The tonal language is sharper than that of the Second, but it never obscures the essential clarity of the compose's conception. (Recording: BBC Symphony, conducted by the composer. Issued in 1995 in the BBC Music Magazine.)

(I also gave a quick listen to A Mask of Time, which struck me as somewhat unsuccessful in marrying its Ages of Man theme to effective music. I'll have to give it another listen to more fully take its measure. Downloads of his music can be had at www.michael-tippett.com)

All in all, I hope Tippett's 100th birthday brings some of his music, particularly the first three quartets and the Second Symphony, back into the repertory in a more regular way. These are deserving works, well-crafted and written with the highest purposes in mind. They would make good additions to the libraries of string quartets and orchestras everywhere.