Greg Stepanich

The Stars and Tchaikovsky forever

As we head toward the Fourth, it's time to think of the holiday's most prominent symbols: The Declaration of Independence, parades, flags, fireworks β€” and Tchaikovsky.

Across the country, orchestras everywhere on Independence Day will salute the day the Founding Fathers said "Thanks, George, but no thanks,β€? to the king of Great Britain by playing the 1812 Overture, a piece that commemorates the Russian victory over Napoleon in that year.

I wasn't aware until I did a little Websearching that the tradition came from Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. All the sources I saw credit him with starting the custom in 1974 for a July 4 concert on the Esplanade by the Charles River. Here's a link that tells the story, as well as another article from a couple years ago that has some good comments about it.

It seems to me that the original reason for playing the piece β€” that it was big, noisy and had actual gunfire β€” was a good one. It's hard to resist hearing the old Russian national anthem come booming back at you at the end as cannons go off in the distance.

I once saw an indoor performance that was pretty creative; behind the curtain, someone fired a rifle into a big trash can. It worked beautifully.

My favorite recording of this piece was one I got in the early 1970s, with Igor Buketoff leading the New Philharmonia. The gimmick of this record, now much repeated, was that a chorus sang the words of the hymns, folksongs and anthems Tchaikovsky used for the piece. Once having heard it that way, I find I prefer it.

(That record also had some rare Rachmaninoff choral music: the cantata Spring and the Three Russian Folk Songs. Lovely stuff. Here's a link to a Web discussion of the lyrics to the songs used in the 1812.)

Years ago, the late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko tried to launch a contest for an American composer to write something to replace the 1812 on the Fourth. I don't think anything ever came of that, but it probably would be difficult to replace audience affection for the piece at this point. We don't know what it is we're hearing, exactly, but it sounds like great fun and goes real well with the fireworks.

Still, if anybody's got any ideas for an American piece other than Sousa that would do the trick, now's the time to say so. And maybe it would be a good idea to resurrect that contest for an American composer to come up with replacement for Pyotr Ilyich's big noise of 1882.

Either that, or feature readings of War and Peace along with the Declaration.

Meeting the Muse on foot

Found an interesting bit of by-the-way business in the course of reading a new title in the Amadeus Press series of music appreciation volumes, a Parallel Lives review of the music and lives of Benjamin Britten and Samuel Barber (Britten and Barber: Their Lives and Their Music). Author Daniel Felsenfeld points out that Britten was able to buckle down to his music even in the midst of World War II, when the skies over Britain were filled with the sounds of aerial combat:

Britten was able to work diligently for hours at a stretch without trouble; he did the bulk of his planning on walks, during tea, and some say even while he slept.

I don't know that the mystical element that's introduced here with the words "some say even while he slept" is really necessary, but I applaud Felsenfeld for devoting a mention in his brief account of Britten's life to his work habits. The one that sticks with me is that he did some of his work while out walking.

I find there's much to be gained in a walk when it's time to fire up the creative stove. For myself, I find it hard to concentrate on the task at hand if I'm sitting in front of the piano working on something; the passion for doodling seems to take over. But if I head out into my neighborhood for a constitutional, I find the music there in my head, ready to work on.

And the ideas I come up with seem to be better, too. I don't really consider myself to be working on anything seriously unless I've taken it on a few spins through the walking workshop.

This appears to be a popular way to stay creative. Beethoven and Brahms walked most days as part of their routines, and undoubtedly it helped get their ideas into fighting shape (here's a link to a text about how Brahms conceived of his Horn Trio). I certainly find it valuable, and the mental space I find for working out compositional problems probably has something to do with cutting out most distractions as you put key brain chemicals on the move.

Certainly most days you can hear the creative conversation going on upstairs, but it's always drowned out by your interior voice checking off another entry on the list of the quotidian, and that can be quite frustrating. In fact, there are some days when there's little other time in a busy workday to run through extracurricular projects then on those morning walks. I find that I need to write things down as soon as I get back, and then try to make sure I can carve out some time to work on things after I get home.

Here are a couple links to some other thoughts about walking and creativity: One of them a paper about Wordsworth, the English poet, and something else a little New Age-y about tools for unlocking creativity. It does remind me that Mahler always walked when he got blocked.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else finds walking a good way to meet the muse.

Renaissance Chamber Orchestra offers 'Summer in the City' concerts

Our part of the country is still a place that sways to the rhythms of the seasons, and around this time of year there's not a lot of concert music to be had.

Over the years, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival and the late Florida Philharmonic's Beethoven by the Beach concerts have helped get us through the months of hurricane fear. This year, a good young string orchestra has stepped into the summer music-drought breach with a series of six concerts that begin July 7 in Delray Beach.

This is the Renaissance Chamber Orchestra, founded in 2002 by Israeli violist Amichai Hendel, which began concertizing only last September at the Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, where the group is based. (Here's the Web site with all the concert and ticket information.) I went down there in December for one of their concerts (see my blog of Dec. 1), and came away quite impressed. This was an ambitious 13-member ensemble with chops, programming taste and dedication.

Now Hendel and his colleagues are almost ready to mount a series of concerts they call Summer in the City. There will be music from the group almost every week through Sept. 28 (the group will take the weeks of Aug. 25 and Sept. 1 off) , and much of it will be in Palm Beach County, where the orchestra has performed only once before, at a Holocaust memorial concert last month in Palm Beach Gardens at the Eissey Campus Theatre of Palm Beach Community College.

The concerts include much Baroque music, with concerti by Vivaldi (including The Four Seasons), Bach (the Double Concerto for Violins, and his D minor keyboard concerto), Telemann (a viola concerto and a double viola concerto), and Handel (the B minor concerto grosso, Op. 6, No. 12).

Former Miami String Quartet violinist Felicia Moye will join the group for an early violin concerto by the 13-year-old Mendelssohn, as well as one of his teenage string symphonies, and what Hendel calls "a lovely string arrangement" of the Scherzo from the composer's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Mozart, Haydn and Grieg are on the bill this summer, too, and a host of 20th-century composers, including Hindemith (his Trauermusik, a searing viola-solo funeral ode for England's King George V), Gershwin (the youthful Lullaby of 1919), and two English composers: Gustav Holst, represented by his St. Paul's Suite, and Sir Edward Elgar, whose E minor Serenade is on the final programs.

The first season was conducted by violist Richard Fleischman, who's currently playing principal viola in the orchestra at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. Hendel said the group is "still negotiating" with Fleischman about the future, though the Web site says he'll be leading the 2005-06 season. Some of the summer concerts will be conductorless; others will be led by guest conductors including Clotilde Otranto of the Naples Philharmonic.

The summer concerts β€” which contain several selections the group played during its first season β€” are being given mostly on Thursday nights at the Temple Emeth in western Delray Beach and the Museum of Art in the arts district of downtown Fort Lauderdale (where Program 4 will be given on Saturday, Aug. 20). Next season, the synagogue will be a regular concert venue for the group, as will be the Eissey Theatre at the Palm Beach Gardens campus of Palm Beach Community College.

Hendel told me he wants the group to play in Stuart, Jupiter and Vero Beach sometime in the future, which is one of the reasons the RCO has decided to come aboard in Palm Beach County at the Temple Emeth.

"It's a very good location, and it's very close to Boca," Hendel said Friday. "We are about all sold out in Delray Beach, which shows that people need us.β€?

Considering that the RCO only gave its first concert less than a year ago, it's remarkable that it has expanded its reach so quickly, and has scheduled so many concerts for the upcoming year, including out-of-state gigs in Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. Hendel says that's because his orchestra has no plans to expand beyond its chamber size β€” "No, no, no. That's a no-noβ€? β€”, though it will continue to welcome soloists and the occasional non-string instrumentalist. In the 2006-07 season, for example, Hendel already is planning to add two oboes and two horns for a performance of the Symphony No. 29 (in A major, K. 201) of Mozart.

"If the community really wanted to have something like the (Florida) Philharmonic, the community would have had the Philharmonic,β€? he said. "The community just doesn't want it anymore.β€?

One other interesting thing, especially in light of the union difficulties that precipitated the Philharmonic's collapse in 2003: On Monday, the RCO will sign a contract with the musician's union, making it one of the only area classical music organizations (another is the Palm Beach Opera orchestra) with unionized players.

"We're very proud of this,β€? Hendel said. "I want the musicians to know we support them.β€?

Given the excellence of the performance I attended, and these very carefully plotted expansion plans that lay an ambitious footprint for the future, I'd say the RCO is a group to keep your eyes and ears on. I'm looking forward to catching at least one of these evenings.

Technology puts career in composer's hands

Ran across something in an article by California-based composer Alex Shapiro, written for the journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, that I find compelling, and true:

There has never been a better time to be a composer than right now. Desktop publishing and the Internet have given us access to innumerable potential audiences and musicians, as well as considerable control of our art and of the opportunities we can create .Β .Β . All that is required is the belief that what we create has worth, coupled with the skills to build a resulting economic stream. What a positive economic model this can be.

My desktop computer at home has recently gone to the Great Silicon Chip in the sky, and that means I'm going to have to get someone to get all the compositions I did with my Sibelius software off the hard drive. No, I didn't back anything up on a separate disc; it's not something I gave much thought to, probably because I thought of the printed versions I created as being somehow a publishing process that was separate from my actual composition.

My piece was still scribbled on paper in pencil and pen, and transcribing it on Sibelius was an activity that gave my music validity and permanence. But it was a different sort of activity that worked my brain in a different way; it was a piece of enjoyable fussiness that nevertheless wasn't completely necessary for the success of the music.

How foolish I was, and how much I miss my little pieces, locked away on my dead hard drive. I was writing out a string quartet movement the other day, and I could see in my head how nice my messy handwriting would look once it was turned into the printed version on my computer, which goes to show my memory is failing, that I like to live in Fantasy Land β€” and that in some way I've made the intellectual transition to the contemporary technological world.

Shapiro makes the excellent point that you have to be a one-person creation and publishing house in one in order to get your music out in the public arena these days without having to go through industry middlemen. She might have added that if you don't do the work of presentation yourself as well as the composing, you're not likely to be taken as seriously as you want to be.

I've probably mentioned in this blog previously how shocked I was a few years back when I tried to get a local hornist to play my new horn sonata, only to discover that while he liked what he could read of my piece, he wasn't going to have anything to do with it unless it was written out with good notation software. Technology has made it possible, and now preferable, to leave the ancient ways behind if you're going to write something you want other people to play.

And while in some ways that's limiting, Shapiro is surely right when she says that having all this tech at your fingertips actually gives you more power over your work. I think the busy-entrepreneur model she outlines in her article is probably the way things will be for some time to come. It's not enough these days to just be a composer. These days you have to wear many more hats.

Which makes me pledge to myself that I'll soon return my pieces to another computer hard drive and rejoin my fellow 21st-century composers. If you can hold out long enough, maybe one day not too long from now, I'll tell you where you can buy copies of the music and recordings β€” if I can get anybody to make one.

Public broadcasting helps keep classical music in mainstream

You can't talk about classical music in our country without also talking about public broadcasting, which is why I'll add my voice to those who deplore the possible funding cut of 25 percent looming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In the days before the CPB was invented, there was still enough momentum in the culture at large to allow for classical music programming on the major networks, but things changed in the 1960s, and since then it's been the public television and radio stations that have provided a home for this art form in parts of the country where other outlets didn't provide exposure to it.

It's true that you can find classical music all over the Internet and satellite radio, and sometimes on non-public TV. But the beauty of public TV and radio is that it makes classical music a normal part of the average American's listening experience. Players and devotees of classical music, covered by cloaks of weirdness assigned to us by the rest of the culture, are delighted to be able to turn on the radio or TV and casually bump into an opera, or hear a cellist scaling the battlements of one of the Bach solo suites.

Yes, normal Americans really do listen to, and enjoy, this kind of music. It's part of a centuries-old tradition of music-making that connects us, in an immediate way, to the thoughts and feelings of human beings who lived in very different societies hundreds of years ago. Only theater offers us a similar kind of living connection to the past, which is why good performances of ancient works impress their modern-day auditors as relevant, contemporary and moving.

I'm not going to dignify the argument by those who want to cut the funding that this is about trimming things in a time of deficits. The proposed cuts have nothing whatever to do with fiscal management and everything to do with politics. I don't want to go too far in that direction, either, because these blogs are about entertainment. Heaven knows there's plenty of partisan gasbagging going on all over cyberspace, and there are lots of people out there who can say things in this regard better than I can.

But it seems to me that our current masters, whose power cannot now be seriously checked, want to kill public broadcasting, and they will get their wish. Those of us who think that's a terrible idea are inadequately represented, and apparently will be for the foreseeable future, so we're going to have to start adjusting right now to get along without the CPB.

For those of us who love classical music, it means that while we won't lack outlets for the music, we will lack a presence in what remains of the American mainstream. And that's not good, in the same way that the marginalization of newspapers is not good. You have to be able to hear and see things from across the spectrum of human experience, presented as an everyday part of life, so that you can explore whatever strikes your fancy. In this way, you see and hear more things, and you grow.

Without a regular home for classical music on public radio and TV, Americans who can't come into contact with the music on a daily basis won't see it for what it is: A normal part of human creativity. Audiences will shrink, when there's no intrinsic reason in the music itself that those audiences shouldn't grow.

I hope I'm wrong. I certainly have been impressed over the past few years with the sheer volume of activity in classical music nationwide, and as I've said recently, people these days have an incredible variety of things to listen to, and they do it. There may be enough energy there to get past the slow death of public TV and radio.

I've contributed money to three different public TV and radio stations over the past decade or so, and I thought that was a worthwhile thing to do. I also believe it's good to have tax money stand up for the arts, and I don't mean just classical music, either.

But for classical music, the attack on public broadcasting puts this vital, useful, enriching, transcendent form of creation off to the sidelines. It is a source of never-ending despair to me that music that has so much to say to ordinary people should find it so difficult to find a place in the public arena to stand.

Time out for good reading: Origo on marriage

Browsing the other day with the Iris Origo volume I picked up for a buck in Seattle, I found this lovely description of marriage. I like it particularly because it recognizes there are two individuals in the union, and also recognizes that they create something else entirely.

Thinking about this especially today, after a trip to Naples for a visit with my dad on Father's Day. On the way down Alligator Alley, one of the tires on my wife's car blew out, and I had to put the doughnut on under the multiple assaults of biting flies, scalding sun and blistering drive-by traffic. But after we got back on the road, and later got a new tire, it occurred to me how often Sharon and I have been through these sorts of dumb, incovenient things, and how after all the time we've been together, these things stopped happening to me or her, but happened to us.

And in this passage from her autobiography, Origo speaks to this idea:

Tolstoy's famous sentence is far too great a simplification: not only unhappy but happy families are serene or troubled not in one, but in innumerable different ways. I am always amazed when I hear people talking about other people's marriages: "This was his fault, that was her fault.β€? How can they think they know? Have they never considered their own marriages and how much, in even the happiest unions, remains unknown to each of us about the other? We are all not islands but icebergs, more than half under water. What husbands and wives do know, after many years of living together, is surely not acquired through any process of the mind, but rather through a kind of symbiosis, a slow assimilation of one nature into another, so that, as in the tale of Philemon and Baucis, the branches of two plants, however different their original roots, become slowly, intextricably intertwined to form a single tree.
β€” Iris Origo, Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (1970)

It's a nice piece of writing, and it says a lot to me.
(For this little entry, I've nicked a title from Jacques Barzun, who uses "Time Out for Good Reading" in his wonderful book on writing, Simple and Direct.)

Anka's rock remakes β€” sometimes β€” got that swing

At some point in the not very distant future, the very word "crossover" might be something of a relic, describing as it does a musical performance paying a visit to a neighborhood in another genre.

Most people I know these days will listen to all kinds of things, though there are still plenty of people who favor one kind of music over another as a signifier of identity. But my experience is that people who really like music like many different kinds, and that brings me somewhat tentatively to Paul Anka.

Anka, who just picked up the Order of Canada the other day, is one of those Rat Packish Vegas-style crooners who provide so much easy fodder for comedians, the embodiment of that part of our entertainment culture that loves swagger, tuxedos, and hyper-sincerity. Like this:

A lot of heart and soul went into this project, and I sincerely hope that the content causes people to listen and enjoy what has been a labor of love and great passion. For I truly believe, behind the perfection of a man's style, lay the passion of a man's soul. (sic)

But the great difference between Anka (that's from the liner notes to his new album) and the singers like him who dominated mainstream pop from World War II to the arrival of the Beatles, including Sinatra, Bennett and just about everyone else with the exception of Mel Torme and Nat King Cole, is that Anka is a songwriter himself. He first hit the charts as a teenager in the 1950s with Diana, and since then he's recorded albums mostly of his own music.

He's just issued an album β€” Rock Swings β€” of rock and pop tunes from the 1980s and 1990s, done up in all-out swing style, including Smells Like Teen Spirit, Wonderwall and Black Hole Sun. I saw him do the Nirvana anthem on Letterman the other night and I had to check out the rest of the record. As you might expect, it's a stunt, and there's a high potential here for embarrassment and Muzaky smarm that Anka does not entirely avoid.

But heaven help me, some of this thing rocks.

Two very important things make this album work overall: The arrangements are unabashed, full-throttle swing charts in the great tradition of the big jazz bands, and second, Anka, even at 63, has a muscular voice and a musical intelligence that allow him to bring real commitment to his performances. So what you have here, ironically enough, is honesty. This is old-fashioned big-band playing and singing, and Anka gives it everything he's got.

Let's start with the worst things first, because this project by its nature invites ridicule. Smells Like Teen Spirit doesn't succeed, despite a clever arrangement by John Clayton (buzzing saxophones at "a mosquito," for instance), primarily because there isn't a lot to work with melodically or lyrically, and the same goes for Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, which depended in the original on a driving rhythm and mannered vocal tricks. Stripped of those, there isn't much there.

The Jackson tune wasn't any good to begin with, while Smells Like Teen Spirit is a great rock record. Another fine rock record, Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, owes its strength to Chris Cornell's vocal and its attractive harmonic structure, but it's not so good in the Anka version because the lyrics are too impressionistic for the concreteness of the Basie-style chart. I incline to the view that many pop songs suffer from McCartney Syndrome, anyway: A songwriter comes up with a melody and some random words that scan, but can't bring himself or herself to spend a few minutes to write something that makes some sense.

The same problem afflicts Noel Gallagher's Wonderwall and Billy Idol's Eyes Without a Face, which are well-arranged and effectively sung, but the lyrics aren't good enough to make the songs work in this setting. In this kind of singing, the lyrics are much more important because they're so exposed.

Now to the good stuff. The big surprise here is how some songs that are truly awful in the original work very well here, partly because the songs themselves have a little bit of meat on them. Bon Jovi's It's My Life, a monumentally cheesy anthem, has grit and power in this version, thanks to Randy Kerber's first-rate chart and Anka's emphatic vocal. Kerber does the same heroic makeover for Survivor's wretched Eye of the Tiger, and Anka matches him with an over-the-top vocal (and a goofy growl at the end); still, it's a kick to listen to.

I also like Anka's dumb-but-fun version of Van Halen's Jump, with its band members shouting "Jump!" and "Hey, you!" The key here is the huge, explosive chart by Patrick Williams, which is hard to resist.

The most successful rock-to-swing translations come in the songs that are less rock-y to begin with: REM's Everybody Hurts, Lionel Richie's Hello, Spandau Ballet's True and the Pet Shop Boys' It's a Sin. The last two, along with The Cure's Lovecats, are probably the best cuts, with Anka really enjoying himself on It's a Sin, which works very well indeed in taste-of-Latin style, and True, which shuffles along in Sammy Nestico-Neal Hefti fashion to strong effect. Lovecats is also attractive, but Kerber's shag-rug-1970s arrangement, full of soft brass, strings and harps, is a little excessive.

I realize I've probably said too many positive things about this disc; it's so easy to make fun of it, and there are some things here that are just plain hilarious. But if you like this sort of music, and you find it interesting to see how songs out of their original environment hold up in another one, it's a worthwhile listen.

I don't know that I'll return to it too often, but at its best, it really does swing, and that was the idea.

New World's upcoming season has bounty of American music

In the mail yesterday, a brochure laying out the upcoming 21-concert season of the New World Symphony, and it's going to be a good one.

Major American composers are represented, including Gunther Schuller (Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee and Of Reminscence and Reflections), on Nov. 12, in a concert conducted by Britian's Oliver Knussen; George Crumb (An Idyll for the Misbegotten) on a Dec. 4 chamber music concert featuring cellist Laurence Lesser; Steve Reich (For Strings) on Jan. 7 and 8, 2006, on an all-American concert with violinist Gil Shaham playing the Violin Concerto of William Schuman, and the New World doing two works by Copland β€” Quiet City and the Dance Symphony.

New World music director Michael Tilson Thomas offers his own Poems of Emily Dickinson on Jan. 12 with soprano Barbara Bonney; Charles Wuorinen is represented by two works (the Horn Trio and Epithalamium) in an April 9 chamber music concert, and Christopher Rouse's percussion concerto, Der gerettete Alberich, is played April 14 and 15 with soloist Colin Currie.

That means almost a third of the New World's coming concerts will contain contemporary American music. That's not a bad showing at all.

Other concerts offer contemporary British music (Knussen's The Way to Castle Yonder and the U.S. premiere of Julian Anderson's The Book of Hours on Nov. 12); a piece by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke ((K)ein Sommernachtstraum, on Dec. 10 and 11); the Violin Concerto of Hungarian-born film composer Miklos Rozsa (March 3 and 4, played by Robert McDuffie); Olivier Messaien's From the Canyons to the Stars (March 11, with pianist Benjamin Kobler); and on March 25 and 26, the Six Pieces for Orchestra of Anton Webern (mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Mahler's Ruckert Lieder on the same concerts).

Add to that performances of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony and the Elgar Second, and a string quartet by Juan Arriaga, and there's more than enough for me to imagine taking several trips down to the Lincoln Road mall for an afternoon or evening of music at the Lincoln Theatre. I quite enjoyed my last trip there, for music by Mozart and Nielsen (under Paavo Jarvi), and programs like these β€” with challenging music and fresh listening experiences β€” should be supported whenever there's an opportunity.

Diamond remembered: Local composer Clare Shore studied with David Diamond at Juilliard, where she earned her doctorate. In an e-mail message to me (and which she allowed me to quote), she had this to say about the composer, who died this week:

I was a student of David's in the doctoral program at Juilliard. He was my primary instructor, also (Vincent) Persichetti and (Roger) Sessions. He was a remarkable teacher, always paying close attention to each student. Perhaps the best testament to his teaching is that his students' music vary so widely in styles, very few sounding like Diamond's, in fact (exception - Lowell Lieberman).

David did enjoy quite a bit of attention in his later years, thanks largely to Gerry Schwarz.

And she recommends some things to listen to by Diamond:

In addition to his symphonies, be sure and listen to other orchestral and chamber works - and songs. The songs were where I first discovered Diamond.

Romeo and Juliet for orchestra is a gorgeous, romantic work. And the Elegy in Memory of Ravel is available in a couple of different arrangements. He greatly admired Ravel.

.Β .Β . Diamond wrote his Partita for oboe, bassoon, and piano when he was quite young, and dedicated it to his sister Sabina, whom he loved dearly. It is a wonderful piece; I think I saw that it has been recorded within in the last few years. You probably know his Rounds for string orchestra. Mitropoulos commissioned it for the NY Phil during the War. He wanted a piece that was not droll like most of the pieces of that era - something joyful sounding, and indeed it is.

.Β .Β . As for the later symphonies, I made the trip from D.C. to NYC in 1985 to hear the premiere of David's Symphony #9, with Bernstein conducting at Carnegie Hall. It was good to see David, but I admit that the work is not among my favorites. On the other hand, when I attended the premiere of his Eleventh Symphony, with Kurt Masur leading the NY Phil, I had tears of joy in my eyes. Finally he had begun to use the formal principles that I so admire, layering of diverse materials.

Shore said she's putting together a Festschrift in the composer's honor which she hopes to have finished before a memorial concert being planned for sometime this fall.

Many good suggestions for listening (and I've got the Eighth Symphony on right now), and the best way, it need hardly be said, to remember a man of music.

David Diamond: Another master passes

And now David Diamond has passed on.

Just days after the death of George Rochberg, composer Diamond has died at 89 in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y.

Diamond was fortunate in that he lived long enough to find himself the subject of a renaissance of interest in his work. He was one of the vital composers of the mid-20th century in America, a time in which these writers were as close to celebrity status as they ever came.

Atonality came to dominate the field of classical composition after that, only releasing its hammerlock on creativity's neck and moving into unfashionability around the late 1980s, it seems to me. At that time, Diamond began to profit from the work of Gerard Schwarz, conductor of the Seattle Symphony, who recorded a wide variety of American classical music by Diamond and his eminent contemporaries.

And there was a great deal of fine music written at that time by serious, committed composers who believed the symphonies, chamber music, operas and concertos they were writing were an important contribution to American life. The country's intelligentsia thought so, too, but after the spread of visual media and the dissemination of popular music on the radio, these creators were forgotten.

The most ironic thing for me is that the spotlight left this generation of composers just when it should have shone brightest, when they could rightly claim to be the first distinguished group of truly American classical writers in our country's history. The Boston Classicists who arose in the late 19th century were more beholden to contemporary European models, but composers such as Diamond, Paul Creston, Norman Dello Joio, Aaron Copland and others carved out an aesthetic that truly sounds American.

Diamond, of course, has his own particular style that fits in well with the overall character of the music being written at that time. Listening to the Fourth Symphony (1945) now, having not heard it for some time, I'm struck by its abundance of melody, and not just of the immediate kind. The second movement of this short work, for example, alternates long, warm string melodies with monumental brass chords, and underneath some of those phrases countermelodies are pulsing away.

There's that familiar open-air, confident feeling to the music that marks it to me as distinctly American. This is positive, hugely emotional music written in an unapologetically direct manner: It's the music of someone who has something important to tell you, and he's not afraid to bare his soul while doing so.

One thing to note about Diamond and his colleagues is that had they been able to continue being the central figures of American classical music β€” instead of the conductors and soloists who did, as Joseph Horowitz has rightly pointed out β€” the whole idea of serious American composition wouldn't seem so ivory-tower and somehow inauthentic to so many people (that's been my experience, anyway).

In a properly ordered world, Diamond would have been thought of in the same breath with the serious writers, poets, actors, painters and directors of our time. It's at least good that Diamond lived long enough to be restored to the public sphere, and we can only hope that a higher profile for their work is in the offing for today's writers of American classical music.

Update: Here's a review from the Web of Carole Farley's Wigmore Hall concert featuring music by Rorem, Liebermann and Bolcom. Rorem was not able to make this show, either, just like in West Palm, but it sounds like the music came off well.

Berklee's free music lessons show how songs work

Back in March, someone wrote to me about Harold Arlen and his chord choices, and wondered whether there was any other source of information out there that would explain the technical aspects of songs.

The response to my airing of that question was underwhelming, so it is with some pleasure that I can report that I've just bumped into a site on the Web that might be able to help.

It's called BerkleeShares, and it's a free collection of music lessons offered by Boston's Berklee College of Music. I won admission to that college after high school, but opted to go elsewhere, and I always have wondered what might have happened had I pursued an education there.

So I've got a soft spot for Berklee. I went over to the BerkleeShares Web site and downloaded a 9-page analysis of A Hard Day's Night. It's an interesting look at the song and what makes it work; I think the analyst β€” John Stevens β€” is trying a little too hard at some points, as for instance in this passage:

The F# that begins the primary bridge comes as a surprise, because it supports the tonality of G major rather than G Mixolydian, which was exploited in the verse sections. The change is so dramatic it just takes your head off!

I don't know about that, but it does sound fresh and unexpectedly dark (Stevens is talking about the part of the song that begins: When I'm home .Β .Β . ). And it's a lot of fun to play when you're just learning your way around the guitar, too.

The rest of the analysis contains chord symbols and some notation, but not a great deal. The musical examples feature only central notes around which the melodic line is built, not the line itself. This helps make things less confusing for people who are less familiar with formal notation (and pop music notation is mostly an approximation, anyhow).

The analysis also features some thoughts about the merit of the song as a whole, and concludes that John Lennon effectively conveys the workaday life of the song's protagonist through the kind of melody and lyric he writes. It's worth looking at, and even if you can't read music, you might get something out of it if you can play a few chords on the guitar or piano.

This particular part of the BerkleeShares site offers free lessons called Film Scoring Essentials, Blues Progressions in Songwriting, Phrase Balancing and Writing a Chorus, among other things.

If you're interested in this art form, and you've got a little bit of working knowledge, you could benefit from some of the technical wisdom dispensed here.

Eight-hand concert a reminder of how we used to make music

Back in 1986, as he prepared to go back to Russia for the first time since leaving it in 1920s, the late pianist Vladimir Horowitz talked about his youth for the cameras (it can be seen on the Horowitz in Moscow DVD or tape). I'm quoting from memory, but he said something about how his family used to play music together, and one time his parents, sister and himself played the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven on two pianos, with eight hands.

They don't do that anymore, Horowitz said. The chief culprit is technology, which gave ordinary people access via recordings and radio to orchestral performances, so that they no longer needed to recreate the music on the piano at home. For much of the 19th century, music lovers discovered what the great works of symphonic literature were like by sitting with friends, lovers and families at the keyboard, and music publishers provided plenty of arrangements for that market.

I'm thinking of all this because I dropped in on a concert this afternoon at Florida Atlantic University by four pianists, all playing at the same time. Heather Coltman, Fedora Horowitz, Irena Kofman and Krisztina Kover played an interesting program of well-known works (with one exception), several of them originally for orchestra, in eight-hand arrangements.

You haven't lived until you've heard Khachaturian's Sabre Dance done on four pianos, and one of the things that strikes you about hearing this well-worn ballet excerpt (and campy novelty pop hit back in the 1950s) is that you can really hear the ostinato rhythm in the bass, and that something about the four pianos brings the harmonies to the fore β€” they're a bit livelier and more colorful than I remember.

The four women also did the Egmont overture of Beethoven, and the overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn. Inevitably, you miss out on some of the color provided by the strings, winds and brasses, but the structural niceities of both works stand out more sharply. The same was true of another selection, the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saens, with its little fugal fit towards the end, and its overall sense of elegance. I also liked the rich, sensual way Kofman, a Russian pianist, played the main theme of this piece, which I can't say I've heard much in recent years. It once was quite popular, but seems to have vanished from the repertory.

The one rarity on the program, a polonaise by the Russian composer Sergei Lyapunov (1859-1924) is a charming miniature, and a good example of the kind of well-written character composition that would have been a challenge for those parlor pianists. The rest of the program featured American works by MacDowell (To a Wild Rose), Scott Joplin (four of his best-known rags in an arrangement by Kevin Olson), Gershwin (I got plenty o' nuttin') and John Philip Sousa (The Stars and Stripes Forever).

The Sousa was the occasion for some clowning around, as Kofman stood for the legendary piccolo descant in the trio section, and then all four women stood to play the trio recap after the dogfight. The music immediately lost some volume and strength β€” playing the piano while standing up is tricky β€” but it was a fun stunt, and the audience was clapping loudly along anyway, so it didn't make much difference.

I have many good memories of playing four-hand music at one piano, and playing in two-piano settings, as well. There's something much like sports about playing music this way: You're very aware of the other person's capabilities as you both attempt to create something worth hearing off the notes on the page.

It's when I think about those times β€” especially when I recall a late friend, a composer, with whom I used to play four-hand Mozart and Schubert β€” that I acutely miss making music with other people, and vow to change that. Something special was lost when people stopped playing music for themselves in favor of collecting performances by other people, and it's made music somewhat more mysterious than it has to be.

The greatness of exalted musical creation is always a mystery, but interacting with that music doesn't have to be. I hope Sunday's concert gave some audience members a good example of how much fun you can have when you sit down to make music by yourself β€” or with several of your closest friends.

Bach song discovery is cause for joy, reflection

A researcher working in Germany has discovered a previously unknown piece by J.S. Bach, dating from October 1713 and apparently a sacred song written for the birthday of Bach's boss at the time, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.

Judging by what I can read of the manuscript at the Bach Archive site, it's a sturdy, straightforward piece that will be welcomed by Bach devotees the world over when it's published later this year and recorded by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the British conductor and specialist in early music. (Here's a news story about the find, plus another comment about the music.)

We possess a great deal of Bach's enormous output, but we've also lost quite a bit, so this discovery is welcome news. Studying the work of Bach is an endless occupation, and it's worth every minute. I've played the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier for years, and I'm nowhere near reaching their depths. A critical reason is, as I've mentioned before in an earlier blog entry, that there's so much music in even his sparest textures.

When you see how Bach makes so much out of so little β€” that's when you start to see how vast the art of composition really is. It's overwhelming, but also inspiring. It tells the composer that he doesn't have to try so hard to come up with great foundation material, and that the skill is in making something wonderful out of what might be a routine impulse: A four-note riff, a chord change, a fragment of a melody.

In that respect, Bach is the father of much of the Western classical music tradition, so I'm eager to hear this nearly 300-year-old piece restored to life.

In October 1713, Bach was 28 years old, and had been court organist at Weimar since 1708. According to some nifty figures I've dug up from a standard reference on Bach's life and works, the composer's salary that year was 232 florins, 10 groschen, and 6 pfennig, which, using a table in Christoph Wolff's biography, works out to a little shy of $14,700 a year (in year-2000 dollars).

It appears to be quite good money for the time; a church pastor made around $2,000 less at roughly the same period.

In addition, there were benefits: "18 bushels of wheat, 12 bushels of barley, four cords of firewood and 30 pails of tax-free beer," Wolff writes. Bach and his first wife brought six children into the world during his stay in Weimar, two of whom β€” twins named Maria Sophia and Johann Christoph β€” died days after their birth in February of that same year of 1713.

And by the time he wrote this newly rediscovered work, his wife Maria Barbara was pregnant with a boy they would call Carl Philipp Emmanuel (b, March 8, 1714), who went on to become one of the most well-known and respected composers of his time, and also the keeper of his father's flame.

These things might seem scarcely worth mentioning, but they help put this piece in the context of Bach's increasingly busy life at the time. It also helps us understand the very real person behind the notes that have lain silent for so many years; indeed, probably since not long after they were first performed as a royal entertainment and filed away.

Dreadful Tonys show was a disservice to theater

It's not fashionable any more, but I always watch the Tony Awards, largely out of solidarity with all the friends I used to have when I did a lot of theater.

There's something truly special about live theater, and it's only when I go back and sit in an audience again am I reminded how enlarging an art form it really is.

The Tonys have the same problem the other major award shows do β€” a very small pool of works is up for all the honors β€” and there's something faintly silly about entertainers dressing up to be saluted by their peers. Yes, part of it's for the audience at home that they don't see, but nonetheless there's a good deal of phoniness connected with these shows.

Still, the Tonys are my chance to hear a little bit of the new music that's playing out on Broadway, see some production numbers, and check out some of the dramas. I always look forward to it despite how geeky it is; it's always worth getting a small taste of what's going on out there in that universe.

But this year's show was without question one of the worst Tony broadcasts I've ever seen, as well as a terrible awards show in general. It was not only frustrating to sit through, it was actually disrespectful to not only this group of creative artists, but the arts in general.

I know: It sounds dumb to defend people who are in many cases big stars, and I don't want to say we need to genuflect in front of theater people because what they produce provides solace and enlightenment, belly laughs and righteous anger. Far from it, especially when we consider all those anonymous folks who do the heavy lifting in society and keep it running smoothly.

But for heaven's sake: if you're going to put on an awards show, at least treat what you're awarding seriously.

The big problem with Sunday night's broadcast is that it gave us virtually nothing that made some Tony Awards shows in the past worthwhile β€” actual excerpts from the plays, substantial portions of the music β€” and gave us a bunch of useless stuff we didn't need, such as Hugh Jackman's solo piece, as well as his duet with Aretha Franklin.

We heard virtually nothing of the plays (in the past there have been good chunks of a scene) and saw an In Memoriam section in which major figures got a second or two of silent headshot exposure. But worst of all:

Thanks for everything, now hurry up and get off the stage. Edward Albee, one of the nation's most important playwrights of the past three decades, gave a very short, gracious speech in recognition of his lifetime achievement award. But he had to speak it over music, implying that he was out of time before he even started. He deserved more time to speak, and his time should have been preceded by about 5 minutes of career retrospective: scenes from plays, a review of his work.

Major figures died last year, but we can't tell you what they did. Lyricist Fred Ebb and composer Cy Coleman were among two major writers who died last year, but we didn't get a chance to recall what they'd done. Coleman in particular deserved a couple minutes of retrospective, so we could hear the contribution he made and weigh its impact on the present. That's the way we come to understand what a living tradition is all about.

We love regional theater, but only for a second. Minnesota's Theatre de la Jeune Lune got a couple seconds of stills and exactly one sentence of live airtime before the camera panned away to something else. Again, it wouldn't have killed anyone to devote two or three minutes of airtime to the work of this group. We would have enjoyed it, and most likely we would have learned something.

Next year, keep the production numbers from the major musicals, but get rid of most of the revival numbers. Don't let the host do anything but host, and don't bother adding celebrity singers coming on to sing a show tune. Give us play excerpts, dance excerpts, real time with the regionals.

People who work in art forms that aren't mass culture anymore need to educate us every time they get the spotlight. Show us why theater is a vital art, and most importantly, give us some sense of how good the best of our fellow Americans are at this, and why they do honor to their country when they're at their best. Our arts culture tells the rest of the world a lot about what kind of nation we are, what kind of people we are, what we think about, giggle about, sing about.

It certainly should say we know enough about our own artistic traditions to give them the proper respect when it's their time to stand up and be recognized.

Review: Pianist Perez favors the poetic side

In the late spring of 1854, the 22-year-old Johannes Brahms offered an act of homage and support to good friends by composing a set of variations on a late piano miniature by Robert Schumann, who had just been committed to a mental asylum.

These early Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann (Op. 9) are not as well-known as some of Brahms' other sets, but they are the work of a composer with contrapuntal know-how, an ear for pianistic color and most importantly, a powerful imagination.

The young Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez brought this work, along with pieces by Beethoven and AlbΓ©niz, to a concert Sunday afternoon at the Steinway Piano Gallery in Boca Raton.

Pianist Vanessa Perez. Photo by Greg Stepanich.

Perez is a pianist whose proclivities lie on the poetic side, and her absorption in the music was evident from her gestures: closed eyes, rapt facial expressions, head bowed down low over the keys, neck snapping in time with the faster moments. She has good strong fingers, too, that showed themselves to best effect when it came to sustaining melodic lines.

What was missing Sunday afternoon was a certain clarity of texture and structural intent. Perez already is an exciting, dynamic player, but she's not yet the complete pianist she has the potential to be. For that, she needs to deepen her internal bench by paying more attention to the overall shape of what she's playing as well as polish more of the small interior details.

In the Brahms variations, for example, Perez was at her finest in the more songlike moments, such as the 10th variation and especially the 15th and 16th variations, which begin in tender commentary and end in dreamy stasis. There was admirable crispness in the march rhythms of the second variation, and plenty of fire in the fifth variation, with its rat-a-tat nervousness and its sudden jumps to other parts of the keyboard.

But I think the piece would have made a stronger impact had each of the variations been more individually distinct.

The piece is a collection of separate ruminations on the opening theme, and while some of the variations are closely related to each other, each should have a character of its own. That way we can hear how the theme has been reimagined each time, and also grasp the effect of a good set of variations, which is like a necklace of rare stones: Each one dazzling in its own way, but contributing to an even more brilliant whole.

Perez opened her recital with a very Romantic performance of one of the great masterworks of the solo piano literature, the Moonlight Sonata (No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2) of Ludwig van Beethoven. There was a slight hesitation before each chord underneath the soft triplets of the first movement's opening bars, and the overall mood was soft and rich; even the stabbing minor ninths didn't disturb Perez's placid surface.

The second movement Allegretto was played crisply and rather fast, with an emphasis on the tune. That made for good contrast, but there was little of the wit that makes the movement such a gem. Perez seemed to want to get right to the tempest of the third movement, and you could feel the audience β€” which was a full house in the gallery's small recital hall β€” being won over to her side as she played.

And it was a strong performance with plenty of sweep. It would have been better with more precise detail: When the left hand takes the main theme, the sixteenth notes after the dotted eighths went almost missing, and Perez took few opportunities to relax and let the repeated iterations of the theme breathe over the roiling waves of the accompaniment. Again, that kind of interior drama adds shading to the narrative in general, and makes it a more fulfilling musical experience.

The concert closed with two selections β€” El Abaicin and Lavapies β€” from Book III of Isaac AlbΓ©niz's monumental Iberia. These are quite difficult pieces, written by a virtuoso to amaze the audiences of his day.

In these Spanish works, Perez hinted at greater potential. The opening guitar-like riff of El Abaicin was wonderfully precise and perfectly evocative, and the pianist did a good job in both pieces of cutting through the Lisztian lollipops in AlbΓ©niz's writing to bring out the highly colored, sensual music beneath.

Vanessa Perez has plenty of qualities that already make her an interesting pianist, not least of which is her evident commitment to her art. If she is able to marry her natural gift for musical poetics with greater attention to structural mechanics, she will win more heartfelt audience receptions such as the one she got Sunday afternoon in Boca Raton.

George Rochberg: Looking back, he forged ahead

The American composer George Rochberg had hoped to be in a New York concert hall Sunday night for a performance of his Piano Quintet.

But it was not to be. He died May 30 at age 86, and he's being remembered for his turning away from atonality following the death in 1964 of his son Paul. He had found that the 12-tone method of composition he was then pursuing couldn't support the expressive weight of what he wanted to say, so he turned back to tonality.

That's a little oversimplified, but it's how he's going to be remembered. Still, I found this quote from the New York Times obit telling:

"Everyone must find his own voice," he said. "I reserve the right to compose 12-tone music in the future β€” or any other music I choose. I've tried very hard to rid myself of that stultifying conception of historical line, and if I want to contrast dissonant chromaticism cheek by jowl with a more accessibly tonal style, I will do so. All human gestures are available to all human beings at any time."

In April 2004, a recording of the restored version of his 1974 Violin Concerto, long familiar in an Isaac Stern-trimmed version, was released with the violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved, accompanied by conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee leading the Saarbrucken (Germany) Radio Symphony Orchestra. I've been listening to this recording this week, and it's impressive.

Listeners unfamiliar with the composer's work might assume from the press reports that Rochberg began composing old-fashioned post-Romantic works with tunes you could hum sitting atop Brahmsian harmonic language. That's not the case; this concerto, for example, is clearly 20th century, and written in a compositional language some auditors would find difficult.

But what Rochberg really brought back was a more traditional concept of musical composition as an exercise in dramatic communication (here's another view from a 1998 retrospective). The paradigm worked out over centuries of Western music called for pieces to have a sense of narrative, even when the piece was a tiny morceau. The music had to start you somewhere and take you somewhere else. That, too, is oversimplified, but what Rochberg realized was that music has an expressive power that can be wonderfully utilized in some of the older structures.

This Violin Concerto is a work completely consistent with a centuries-old tradition, though its style might puzzle a resurrected Vivaldi. I think it's a fine piece, deeply expressive, at once somber and grand, and an admirable contribution to the American classical music tradition. Here's a link (I'm following the lead of Sequenza 21 here) to other Rochberg pieces that can be downloaded from the Web.

In the meantime, I'll be searching out other pieces of Rochberg's; I've heard a few but I don't any of them well. Now seems a good time to spend some time getting to know the art of this important American creator.

'Crazy Frog' a symbol of our experimental artistic times

And now, it's time for a little Crazy Frog.

This ringtone-based novelty song is driving everyone in Europe out of their minds, and right now, it's the number one single in the United Kingdom, having been released May 23. It's apparently the first song based on a ringtone to have reached the pinnacle of pop success, and that's some sort of landmark.

Writing in the Globe and Mail up in Toronto, columnist Russell Smith fills the story in rather nicely, and then points out something important:

(Crazy Frog) illustrates how contemporary taste moves increasingly to the eclectic, to the mixed up and heterogeneous; as a corollary, it shows how technology has made the whole idea of distinct musical genres seem quaint and passΓ©.

He's right: The mixture of things evident in how this pop-culture artifact came to be is all about using what's at hand. What's composed here is the assemblage, not the original song.

This is not a phenomenon restricted to pop music. There's something very Harry Partch about putting music together from a variety of sources without reference to category, and about creating music out of non-traditional instruments. (Here's another Partch site.)

I might be stretching things a bit there, but there's no question that there's a feeling of looseness and creativity in the world of music overall, and that's all to the good. All of us consumers seem to be trying on a dizzying number of shirts in the cultural dressing room, then moving on in search of more stimulation.

In some sense, it's a throwback to earlier times of great creative ferment and genre-busting innovations. Renaissance noblemen stuck music on top of drama and dance and came up with opera, while Franz Liszt shook up the early Romantic era by insisting that you could have an entire evening of music just devoted to a piano player.

We're in the same kind of wide-open period right now, and because of the pace of technological change, and more importantly, everyone's access to its power, this period is likely to stick with us for some time to come.

We may be in a time of more or less permanent experimentation, in which individual artists fashion their own syntheses and stand out from the din, but behind them all the time will be a constant process of change and adaptation. Those great artists who pull everything together and put forward a new paradigm that sets the standard β€” Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, for example β€” might not be possible anymore.

Instead, what we'll have is the smaller craftsmen, whose art will be no less wonderful for being less broadly influential. It seems the likely result of the World of Niches toward which we seem to be hurtling.

Last thoughts on 'Star Wars'

Assorted Star Wars observations:

1. After seeing the sixth and final film, I'm wondering: What is it about this cultural phenomenon that would possess a man in his 40s or so to bring a large toy light saber to the theater?

And what is it about this franchise that made the guys in front of me in line express real excitement over hearing the music as it roared over the Boca Muvico speakers into the hot midafternoon parking lot, and then agitation as it occurred to one of them that the show might be sold out? Both guys had to be in their late 30s.

There's more to it than just relentless marketing. Some of these people in the theater definitely were returning to their younger days, and in some sense taking part in a ritual (I've said this before about the papal drama and certain aspects of the Christmas season).

And as with all rituals, there's a certain element of showing up because you're expected to, and because that's what we do at times like these: A Star Wars film is announced, we dutifully go to the theater.

It may be in the near future, with home entertainment getting so comfy and the choices so varied, that we will only go to the movies, only take part in a public theater experience, for films like this. Only certain kinds of movies will be deemed suitable for a public exposition, and the rest will be supplied in some more personal way β€” downloads by e-mail, or some such thing.

And that would be life echoing art echoing life: Star Wars imitates the machinations of the Roman republic, then we future Romans go to the movie Colosseum when there's a spectacle like Star Wars to be had.

2. Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker is great fun to read, and pretty much on point, though I do enjoy these films more than he does. He's right about the antiseptic nature of so many things in these badly written space operas, and he's on to something important when he calls George Lucas a "vulgarian genius."

But in some other sense, these stories already belong to the people in an old-fashioned mythical sense. Like the old myths, they're written so sketchily over so wide a canvas that we fill in the gaps however we want, and that way we get ownership of this particular tale of good and evil. Certainly things are underdeveloped in Revenge of the Sith; no reason there couldn't have been a little more development and texture to go along with the CGIs.

3. In common with a lot of people, I wanted to see the first Star Wars again after seeing the new one, to see how the two linked up. After a long search β€” several retail outlets we called were sold out of the DVD trilogy of the first three films, at $69 a pop β€” we located a rental VHS copy for $2, and watched it.

It's interesting how reflective of the 1970s it is, with its giant boxy computer consoles covered in buttons β€” and a tiny screen; its take-charge female heroine, still kind of a novelty at that time; and of course, sideburns, a key male facial hair decorative element in its day and now as precise an identifier of a period as car fins were in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It's also a film redolent of World War II, not so much for the obvious reasons of storm troopers manned by a ruthless dictator, but more for the films of World War II. The first Star Wars film could have come right out of the 1940s: Cloak-and-dagger spies, gun emplacements straight off a battleship ("We must sink the Bismarck!" Churchill thundered), and its derring-do air force pilots, the most dashing of that war's miracle workers. It also has those World War II tropes of sacrifice for a greater good, and wing-and-a-prayer fighting against seemingly insuperable odds.

I'm sure this was more readily apparent when I first saw the film, but over the years I've forgotten it. This time around, it looked more than anything like an hommage to the propagandistic formula films of the war against Hitler.

4. In Revenge of the Sith, the score is almost continuous, which is a good thing because it helps bind the story together when the script isn't working very hard. The textures, particularly those pyramiding brass instruments, are thick and hugely powerful. The music is completely derivative but extremely effective, largely because John Williams' melodies are better than average.

In the first movie, the score is a crucial player in the drama, but there are many moments where it's silent or not doing a lot. In the new film, the music is everywhere.

And that makes Williams' work in this film an even more important part of the Star Wars story.