Day 30: April 16 - Homage Is Where The Heart Is
Musical homages, from Kurtag to Grande, Bob to Bowie, and Ravel to Brahms.
Interstitial: Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok III: 50. Hommage a Marta Kurtag
Hungarian composer and pianist Gyorgy Kurtag is known for his miniature modernism. Most of his works consist of many small movements, often under a minute long. His most famous set, Jatekok (Hungarian for ‘games’), are miniatures for piano which try to bring across the feeling of a child, at a piano, playing, the fun, non-performative kind. Many of these movements are hommages to friends, family, and other musicians. This first one is an homage to Kurtag’s wife, pianist Marta Kurtag. It is anchored around a confident pure chord, between which softly weaving melodies unfold. Played here by the hommagee herself, Marta Kurtag
Ariana Grande - ghostin’
From her latest album, pop star Ariana Grande’s ghostin’ is something of a tribute and a frank and painful dissection of a complicated grief following the death of her ex, rapper Mac Miller, while she was engaged to comedian Pete Davidson. Grande eloquently and movingly manages to delve into both her struggles within herself and within her relationship as she processed the death. Without advocating for a side, she balances in a guiltless, all-encompassing position between her grief and her appreciation for her current partner, even while wanting her departed ex more. It’s one of my favorite tracks from a really amazing album. The background synths are rumored to be from Mac Miller’s track Swimming, but slowed down, adding a depth of sentiment that really makes this track outstanding.
Interstitial: Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok II: 17. Hommage a Kabalevsky
An homage to Soviet composer Dmitri Kbalevsky, this Jatekok is bouncy and full of joy. It’s relatively conservative harmonic language may be a reference to Kabalevsky’s conservative language.
David Bowie - Cactus
Bowie covered the grunge icon Pixie’s Cactus on his 2002 album, Heathen, giving it a depth and polish that was intentionally absent in the sparse, grungy original. Bowie expands the soundworld significantly, added layered guitars, insistent pianos, and vocal overdubs. There not better than the other, in my opinion, where Bowie is great (execution, vocals, production, ingenuity) he lacks from the original Pixies (immediacy, relatability, urgency). When Bowie tries the kind of strained vocal fry from the original, it comes off weak and artificial. I prefer the Pixies, probably, but I really enjoy Bowie’s take, which clearly came from sincere adoration but, thankfully, doesn’t try to recreate what made the original work.
Interstitial: Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok IV: 5. Dot and Spot. Hommage a Laszlo Sary
This Kurtag homage does what it says on the tin. The texture is dotty and spotty, roaming around the piano playing slightly uncoordinated gestures in the right hand while the left pokes out notes. Like two children just fiddling around, but ones with a deep understanding of aesthetics.
Maurice Ravel - Le Tombeau de Couperin, M. 86 (Arranged for Orchestra): 4. Rigadoun
French composer Maurice Ravel originally wrote his Le Tombeau de Couperin as a piano suite in homage to the Baroque French clavichord style, epitomized by Francois Couperin, and in memorial to friends he lost during the First World War. He later orchestrated four of the six movements, providing a different clarity to the impressionistic piano suite (Again, like the Bowie/Pixies homage, this is a matter of mood/taste rather than of better/worse). Listen for the variety of orchestral colors, for how the instruments interact or are slightly transformed. There is a horde of details to scour, such as choice of mutes or why melodies are in certain tessituras (low/middle/high ranges of instruments). When pressed why these memorials to slain soldiers weren’t more somber, Ravel replied: “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence,” which I’ve found true about grief. Performed here by Cleveland Orchestra under Pierre Boulez, who’s exacting ear is perfect for the detail of a Ravel orchestral work.
Interstitial: Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok III: 41. Harmonica Hommage a Laszlo Borsody
An homage to Hungarian fencing legend Laszlo Borsody, who took his own life rather than be humiliated and tortured by the Nazis for being Jewish. It says something, I think, that Kurtag felt moved to write this decades after Borsody’s death. You can hear in the texture something like fencing: long, tense pauses, punctuated by short flourishes.
Bob Dylan - Song To Woody
Before he was the enfant-terrible of 60’s folk, Bob Dylan was Minnesotan Jew Robert Zimmerman. In 1960, Dylan dropped out of college and hitchhiked to New York to start a folk career. By then, he was known as Bob Dylan, having changed his name to escape his family, avoid the rampant anti-semitism he encountered at college, and, most importantly, to craft his own mythology. He arrived in New York with a guitar, a fake drawl, and a tall tales about his life. The debut album of this famous songwriter was almost entirely covers except this one: an homage to Woody Guthrie, who he based his mythology on and whom he had travelled to New York to find. He not only is speaking to Guthrie, but imitating him in both style and voice. I love this whole album. Dylan’s love for this music shines through and his embryonic Self is wonderfully thin and desperately ill-fitting.
Interstitial: Gyorgy Kurtag - Jatekok I: 4. Hommage a Verdi
This homage to Italian Romantic opera composer Giuseppe Verdi is pointillistic. I wish I knew more about either this piece or Verdi to help guide an informed listening, but I don’t. I jsut like the modd, the interplay between the fixed pitches and the moving lines, how they’er obscured, and how the resonance builds up over the movement.
Johannes Brahms - Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9
Like young Bob Dylan, young Brahms was, in addition to stupid hot, figuring himself out. This early work begins as an homage to his mentor, pianist, composer, journalist, Robert Schumann. While working through the typical variation technique (alterations in tempi, time, mood, key and reharmonizations and imitative counterpoint), but Brahms shifts halfway through, following Schumann’s attempt to kill himself and subsequent admittance to a mental institution. There’s much to be read into this shift. The latter half seems to include these life events: subdued, sentimental, and thematic variations where there might have been greater virtuosic textures. Furthermore, Brahms introduces a variation on a a variation of Robert Schumann by Robert’s wife, pianist, composer, artistic manager Clara Schumann, for whom Brahms is believed to have had a flame. These additions seem like Brahms suggesting he has a place in their marriage, in their life, or in their lineage. The last variation, which might normally be a grand finale, is sparse and funereal. It seems to suggest death and remembrances of the theme, of Robert Schumann. Brahms showed this work to an approving Schumann as he was in hospital recovering. Performed here by Sylviane Deferne.