Emily's sister Julia is visiting from Boston. As it was a beautiful morning, I thought I'd take her to my favorite neighborhood spot: the T.S. Roberts bird sanctuary. We arrived mid-morning to the tune of whistling cardinals and chattering chickadees. White-breasted nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers spiraled around the trees. The recent melt had stopped and ice crusted over the snow. As we walked through the woods I mentioned to Julia to keep an eye out for owls, as this might be a good place to find some in winter. I of course didn't actually think we would see an owl, but a little excitement couldn't hurt.
Five minutes later. Julia: "Is that an owl?"
Perched right above the path was a beautiful great horned owl!
We stared in admiration for some time, and then stooped to look for owl pellets.
Just as I found a good one, we were found by a flock of crows, who quickly figured out that we weren't hanging around this tree by random. They spotted the owl and soon some twenty crows were putting up a huge fuss, taking turns making rather cowardly show-dives at the owl but nowhere near his sharp talons.
We backed away and eventually the crows got bored and left to find more pleasurable (and perhaps less dangerous) trouble elsewhere. Having bothered the owl enough, we continued along the snowy path.
Five minutes later. Julia: "Is that another owl?"
And so it was, another great horned owl, also perched almost directly above the path, and this time without any intervening branches blocking our view. Quixotically, I attempted to take a picture with my little digital camera pointed through one barrel of my binoculars:
We walked a little closer and looked up at her, mesmerized by her penetrating yellow gaze and the massive lethal talons--capable of taking skunks and great blue herons--curled around the perch. She fixed us with her stare, and then blinked, unconcerned.
A man walked along the path coming the other way, seemingly purposefully not looking up to see what we were ogling. I tried to catch his eyes but he avoided eye contact. He turned away from us at a fork in the path without stopping, never once noticing the owl. It is amazing what you can miss when you're not looking. Not wanting to attract the crows again, we left our second owl in peace. Likely the two are a pair, and before long there will be little great horned owls somewhere near the park, coughing up squirrel parts in the dark. The city is considering building a dog park right next to the bird sanctuary. I wonder what these owls think of the idea.
Last weekend Emily and I headed up North to check out some of the more unique environments in the wonderfully diverse state of Minnesota. 45 minutes or so northwest of Duluth is a few thousand acres of black spruce/tamarack bog known as the Sax-Zim Bog (named after two now defunct towns located in the vicinity). The bog's flora is comprised of largely the same species that checker the boreal forest for hundreds of miles to the north, and thus not surprisingly the bog is an excellent place to see birds that enjoy such boreal habitats. In particular, the bog is famous for its wintering population of northern birds such as great gray owls, rough-legged hawks and northern hawk owls. Although we missed out on these great birds, soon after arriving at the bog we found one of the most sought after of the bog's boreal birds: the boreal chickadee. He was not exactly hidden, as the bog had a few feeder stations nestled beside the road, and four birders had already stopped and staked out a particular suet feeder much favored by our special chickadee.
Soon the boreal chickadee arrived for his suet breakfast, and the birder paparazzi snapped away. Boreal chickadees look much like their cousins, the far more common black-capped chickadee, but have a beautiful powdery brown complexion instead of their cousin's black, and their call is noticeably more scratchy. Accompanying the chickadee at the feeders were flocks of common redpolls scratching in the snow and gangs of richly colored pine grosbeaks stuffing their faces with seed, along with black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers and even a few inquisitive gray jays. It was boreal bird paradise.
Driving slowly along the snow-packed roads, we spied a tall lump far across a snowy field perched high in a tree. I pulled out the scope and it became clear that we were looking at a gorgeous juvenile northern goshawk, the terror of North America's wilderness forests, a wild and manic bird that dives through the trees in search of sizable prey such as ruffed grouse and snowshoe hare. Well, I don't really know if goshawks are truly manic, but I had recently read T.H.White's classic story Gos, about White's attempts at becoming an austringer. An austringer is one who trains and flies forest hawks like a goshawk (and related accipters like cooper's hawks and sharp-shinned hawks) as opposed to a falconer who hunts with falcons. And if White is to believed, to be an austringer is to work with a mad-man. Gos, White's hawk, was a beautiful feathered knot of fury. I stared across the snowy field at our delicately patterned lump, admiring her (she seemed too big to be a he) creamy white eyebrow, speckled breast and barred tail, and felt positively ecstatic to get such a good look at a bird normally hidden deep within the forest. We left her as a light flurry started to fall.
The rest of the bog was relatively quiet, with most of our sightings consisting of deer scattering across the road at our approach. But as we twisted our way through the southern edge of the bog we did stumble across three ruffed grouse perched high in a tree. Future goshawk food perhaps. The grouse, gorgeously patterned chicken-like birds, looked ridiculous, delicately balanced on slender bending branches as they reached for the very tips of twigs where the best seeds and buds were still uneaten.
Late in the afternoon we were cruising our last road through the bog when the sun finally came out. I stopped the car to look at all the tracks crisply outlined in the afternoon light. It was wonderfully still, the only sound coming from the gentle whistling of wind and rustling of snowy branches. Moose tracks pock-marked the snow amidst the bone-white birch trees. And out there somewhere a great gray owl, the sage of the boreal forest, sat hidden surveying his domain.
Have you ever wondered if there existed a 16 minute musical tragicomedy produced for Canada public television in 1968 chronicling the rise and fall of the Great Lakes?
The National Film Board of Canada has put much of their back catalog online, and it is a true treasure trove of North Woods documentaries. Thanks Canada!
Johannes Brahms' was a complex man, and his music often seems torn between deep pathos and rigorous discipline. The result is an often otherworldly beauty, as evident in Brahms' most famous piece, his lullaby.
Brahms' life was soap-operaesque, and would provide good fodder for a television biopic. He spent much of his youth destitute, playing the piano at brothels, and perhaps this can partly explain his lifelong pathological relationships with women, particularly his relationship with his mentor and good friend Robert Schumann's wife Clara (soon to be widow, after Robert died relatively young following a tragic bought of mental illness). Brahms had a number of ill-fated loves, including Clara's daughter it appears. But as best as his biographers can tell, his only intimate relationships were with the prostitutes that lined the wooded parks of downtown Vienna. There is a sense of loss in much of Brahms' works, and perhaps his forever failing love life is part of the story. Certainly the stormy opening to his first piano concerto seems inspired by emotional unrest; a great mind trying to seize control over a chaotic situation.
But Brahms' music is far more than just a soap-opera accompaniment. Perhaps as much as any other composer, Brahms was a perfectionist, and his scores exhibit great attention to detail and craft. The ending of his first symphony is a perfect example of this precision. Expansive but economical themes come in close succession, with tightly unwinding development leading to a truly splendid finale. Here is a taste:
Brahms, although known as something of a musical stick-in-the-mud (he was often derided by the followers of Wagner and the new more loose and romantic style of composing that was in vogue during the last half of the 19th Century), was in his own way quite an innovative composer. The gypsy musicians Brahms heard in the parks of Vienna inspired wonderfully exotic passages that occur throughout Brahms' Clarinet Quintet, as in this brief sample:
But perhaps above all Brahms was a composer of uniquely graceful emotional depth, as in his German Requiem. There is sadness, and rage, and joy, in this piece, but it is most striking for its simple tenderness and grace. Music like this, music at its best, can expand our emotions, maybe even our capacity to experience life itself.
Brahms. Number 7.
Yes, Wagner. It's true, Wagner was quite possibly a wretched person. Even his early admirer Nietzsche tired of his egomania and antisemitism. Nonetheless, I couldn't leave him off the list, his music is just too powerful, both in the effect it had on classical music and the effect it still has on the receptive listener. Without Wagner you would have no Bruckner, no Mahler, no Strauss, no Sibelius (all composers I deeply love and had to leave off my top 10 list because of space--Wagner must stand in for them in their absence). He even created new instruments--the Wagner Tuba--in order to develop the rich bassy brass sound he needed to hear his thoughts realized. Actor Stephen Fry, a Wagner devotee, recently starred in a documentary attempting to salvage Wagner's music from his reputation. I'm not quite sure it was successful, but I found the sheer enthusiasm Fry (who is Jewish) had for Wagner convincing enough to not leave Wagner off my list out of a sake of decorum.
And truly, what music! For me Wagner boils down to three great works: Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, and the Ring Cycle (which of course is four operas in and of itself). Much has been written about the opening chords of Tristan, which prefigure the adoption of atonality in music; this is music without a key, without a sense of home.
But for me it is the end of Tristan worth talking about. Her lover dead, her world in shambles, our heroine Isolde seems utterly spent. For hours the soprano tasked with the part has sung line after line of such emotive richness that the opera seemingly has to no choice but to end by gracefully petering out. But no, Wagner spends the last half hour building up achingly slowly to the most extraordinarily thick, kaleidoscopic climax, where Isolde imagines her dead lover arising, and then, finally, falls dead herself, her heart shattered. When done well, this ending is the ultimate portrayal of musical ecstasy, the operatic equivalent of Bernini's Ecstacy of Saint Theresa. Here, in a stand-alone performance, is the legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson (who was a simple farm girl before being discovered in the Swedish countryside). As you listen to her voice, you can see why one director of Tristan and Isolde cast three different Tristans to accompany her Isolde. Just one man couldn't possibly keep up the energy necessary to match her intensity and depth of expression the whole Opera through, so a new Tristan was subbed in for each act. Damn what a voice.
Parsifal was the last opera Wagner wrote. There are no great arias like in Tristan, and the music never gives you an unforgettable tune like the Ride of the Valkyries from the Ring Cycle. But its score might be the most beautiful of them all. It has a strange otherworldly quality to it, appropriate accompaniment to a rather bizarre plot involving a quest for the holy grail. There is a humbleness, even gentility, to much of the score, almost as if Wagner needed a tonic after the hubris of the Ring Cycle. It comes across strongly here in the Good Friday Music from Act III:
Which brings us to the most amazingly over-the-top statement in all of music:
Der Ring des Nibelungen. Four operas, each some four hours long, brimming with musical inventiveness, imaginative orchestral textures and some mighty fine tunes. The use of musical motifs (short little recognizable snippets of music) to represent nearly every character and theme of the opera has been widely copied by composers and in particular film score composers up until the present day (listen to the movies Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings for examples). Everyone has heard the Ride of the Valkyries, which now seems almost synonymous with the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. But if you can listen to only one other part of the thing, make it the beginning, a pure distillation of the power of music. The whole thing is one grand unfolding of a rich warm e-flat major chord. The actual musical idea is almost boring, but Wagner's brilliant scoring of it, and the sustained majesty of it, makes it the perfect opening for such an enormous undertaking as 16 hours of Wagnerian Opera. This is the music to accompany the start of all things, the organic evolution of tonality itself.
A modern day Robin Hood going by the name DrAdrianSmith has placed nearly all of David Attenborough's documentaries on youtube. Many of them have already been taken down after understandable BBC complaints. But one of them, The Private Life of Plants, remains up. This is great news for American documentary fans, because The Private Life of Plants was never released for Region 1 DVDs, and thus is only available to North American viewers on VHS. Watch it while you still can!
"We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it — for without it, we will surely perish."
-David Attenborough's closing line in The Private Life of Plants
Ravel composed the first piece of classical music that really floored me. As a teenager my main musical love was jazz, and although I found classical music pleasant it didn't really grab me in the same way as Miles Davis or Thelonious Sphere Monk did. I was then taken in by a trojan horse, a track on a cd of Gershwin music produced by Herbie Hancock. Hidden amongst the modern takes on Gershwin's oeuvre were a few recordings of classical pieces that had influenced Gershwin. One of these pieces was Maurice Ravel's piano concerto in G, composed 1929-1931, near the end of Ravel's life. The whole concerto was deeply soaked in jazz, an art form that had recently gone huge in Paris as well as America. In Ravel's hands, these early jazz licks took on the most extraordinary poignancy, with the slow middle movement positively breathtaking. This was music!
Do yourself a favor and spend nine minutes with this Adagio, here in a recording conducted by zen master Celibidache and performed by a reserved Michelangeli. The moment when the orchestra first joins in (about three minutes in) is about as beautiful as music gets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftJ-gJ-l5HQ
Perhaps the most well known piece Ravel composed is one that he later expressed some embarrassment over: Bolero. Originally composed to accompany a dance performance, it has become standard to hear it performed by itself, a throbbing tutorial in the art of orchestration. The work has become ubiquitous and crops up everywhere. Here, for instance, it accompanies a gold-medal winning Olympic ice-dancing routine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2zbbN4OL98
Ravel also composed brilliant chamber music and solo piano works. His piano trio, composed in 1914, is gorgeous. The main themes are built around simple pentatonic lines that when combined create hauntingly evocative harmonies. The piece clearly shows the link between Ravel and Debussy, the preceding French "impressionist" composer, but there is a deep sadness that is pure Ravel. Here is the third movement played by the Beaux Arts Trio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mJF55j5WnY&feature=related
His piano suite Gaspard de la nuit is often referred to as the most difficult piece of piano music ever written. Martha Argerich--perhaps the greatest living pianist--has mastered the work; here she plays the last of three movements, Scarbo, in which the music conjures up the writhings of some ghoulish figure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlFT1QGgu6Q
Ravel is also the greatest orchestrator of all time. The amount of tones he can draw out of a full symphony orchestra, or for that matter nearly any combination of instruments, is unrivaled. His symphonic orchestration of Modest Mussourgsky's piano suite "Pictures at an Exhibition" is probably (although sadly, in my view, as the piano work is neglected despite its genius) more well known than the original work. But his most triumphant showpiece has to be the ballet Daphnes et Chloe (1909-1912). Listen to all the colors (an awkward term, of course, these are sounds not colors) that explode out of just this three minute segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMck8f0UH5w
Stravinsky wrote an enormous amount of music in all sorts of genres, but he makes it into my top ten almost solely on the basis of his ballets. To be honest, I don't much care for the rest of his music. But that really doesn't matter when you're the composer who wrote The Firebird, Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, and Apollon Musagette, just to name a few.
There is a great Stravinsky quote from his book Poetics of Music, where he describes the compositional process this way:
"A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out. What urge of the composer is satisfied by this investigation? The rules with which, like a penitent, he is burdened? No: he is in quest of his pleasure."
This almost perfectly captures my sense of my own improvisatory composing. It also might explain why Stravinsky's music retained a great vitality even after undergoing a number of radical stylistic changes--he was always grubbing around for something fresh.
All of his ballets shimmer with beautiful, dynamic, pulsing music. Stravinsky at his rawest creates some of the most crunching harmonies and wrenching rhythms of all. But when he wants to, as in the famous end of the Firebird, he can effortlessly spin the most lyrical and noble of melodies out of that chaos. But even then, all is not as it may seem--the meter of that great punctuated coda is in an unusual 7/4, as you can see conducted in this video of the maestro himself (wait for the timpani whack at 6:07--I played that timpani part in high school and man what a blast): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGA6bpscj8
After conversing with Dr. Maloney about the NY Times' recent entrance into the labyrinth of classical composer list-making, I thought I too would make a go at the minotaur. It turns out that my picks aren't all that different from Tommasini's over at the Times, but there are some interesting differences. All the usual caveats apply--this was not done scientifically or empirically or whatnot, and is subject to change at a moment's notice. Revealingly, I had already written up a list of my top thirty favorite composers a few years ago, but I decided not to look at that beforehand (I had forgotten who was on there) so I would not bias myself. I compared the two lists after my new list was finished, and there were only two different composers in the top ten, although the order is a little bit different. So it appears my tastes are pretty consistent, although who knows what fancies await. But for the moment, what follows would be my current list of the top ten greatest classical composers. Hopefully soon I'll get around to explaining why.
