A short introduction by Steve Newman for a much longer piece on the composer…

Buy the Choral Works

As a composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is still one of those constants of English music, and although he has been dead now for the best part of fifty years his presence and his magnificent music haunt us still.

I remember, in the late 1970s buying two huge box-sets of his work - one contained the nine symphonies, plus a collection of smaller orchestral pieces, with the other a collection of all his choral compositions, something like twenty LPs in all. The majority of both collections were recorded in the 1950s and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, with VW close at hand throughout the sessions. They are without question definitive recordings with very few later ones coming anywhere near. These recordings have real depth as if somehow Vaughan Williams is putting his musical thoughts and passions (and his music tells us what a passionate man he was) straight from his heart to the disc, that the orchestras involved - the London Philharmonic, and the New Philharmonia - were part of his heart and brain - in other words there is an immediacy. Obviously it is Sir Adrian Boult’s conducting ( and that of David Willcocks on some of the choral pieces) and his own intuitive scholarship and love of the music, and great friendship with and love of VW, that helps bring out this feeling ( he did the same with Elgar’s work), creating a sense that the music is simply part of the air we breath, and of the pulsing of our own hearts. It is very very personal music fashioned out of love, memory, hurt, danger, and the violence of the 20th century which, with the genius of the man, is writ large for those of us who want to share not only his music but something that is now as much a part of our heritage and culture as Shakespeare and Barbara Hepworth. And I use those two examples because Vaughan Williams was both traditional and extremely modern, he is a continuation of the emotionality and melodic and ochestrating genius that was Sir Edward Elgar, and one of the greatest inspirations for the atonal red-bloodedness of Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

Original box-set recordings: HMV SLS 822 ( The Symphonies)
” ” HMV SLS 5082 ( The Choral Works)

To Be Continued…

Michael Tilson Thomas, 61, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, has a new project, the ambitious Keeping Score which he hopes will help make symphonic music less intimidating.

Chron.com reports: “Envisioned as a five-year, $23 million project, Keeping Score features a PBS series, a national radio series, an interactive Web site and outreach programs that organizers hope will involve 500 teachers and 75,000 students around the country.”

Thomas commented: “It presupposes the idea that there are intriguing things to find out about classical music– about the back story of the particular performance, and certainly the back story of the piece itself and the era of which it comes, and that it’s all fun to actually learn to comprehend things about the way music itself works.”

With Thomas in the updated Bernsteinesque role as guide, the TV series will debut in November, promising three ear-opening documentaries over successive weeks exploring Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Aaron Copland’s life and music.

The radio series, “The MTT Files,” will feature eight hourlong installments about life, music and art, including a Thomas interview of soul singer James Brown.

“The website will help novices and sophisticates better understand the piece’s themes, structure, orchestration and mood-changing keys. As the music plays, users can follow the score even if they can’t read notes. In a variation of follow the bouncing ball, the main themes will be highlighted as the music plays, enabling users to see how the composer tosses around melodies and harmonies to different instruments”.

David Kennard, who worked with Michael Tilson Thomas as co-producer of the TV series, said: “You can produce all that ‘Tubby the Tuba’-type thing, which these days doesn’t go down. What we tried to do is to capture him talking to us as individuals, to the single documentary camera, to really share why he constantly puts himself on the line in terms of exhaustion and everything else. There are you know a number of great conductors. But he’s a great conductor who can actually talk.”

Research has confirmed listening to classical music can have a significant positive impact on perception of chronic pain, says the BBC.

“US researchers tested the effect of music on 60 patients who had endured years of chronic pain. Those who listened to music reported a cut in pain levels of up to 21%, and in associated depression of up to 25%, compared to those who did not listen.”

This has been known about for many years along with music’s ability to aid learning. But only certain types of music seem to work. Mozart and Bach are particularly good for Super-learning, soothing classics for pain relief and relaxation.

The Journal of Advanced Nursing study also found music helped people feel less disabled by their condition. The patients who took part in the study were recruited from pain and chiropractic clinics, reports the BBC.

“They had been suffering from conditions such osteoarthritis, disc problems and rheumatoid arthritis for an average of six-and-a-half years. Most said the pain affected more than one part of their body, and was continuous.”

Carnegie Hall, January 2006.

The New York Times reports today that the rumors of classical music’s demise are dead wrong.

Everyone has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales decline. Music education has virtually disappeared from public schools. Classical programming has (all but) disappeared from television and radio. And 17 orchestras have closed in the last 20 years.

Has American culture given up on classical music? The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing, there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America.

Read the whole article.