(program)
Orion Mast Recording, printed in the U.S.A.
Cecile Chaminade (1857-1944)
Concertstueck for piano & orchestra (1908)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Paul Freeman
Pianist: James Johnson
Well he’s tall and good-lookin’
and he always knows just what to say..
by the time that they love him
Señor Blues don’ gone away
“” Senor Blues — Dominick Farinacci
This is not a woman who composes, but a composer who is a woman. “” Ambroise Thomas on Cecile Chaminade
Cecile Chaminade
there was a bit of a cringe-factor at the onset of writing this week’s entry: for it felt like i was putting together another tokenistic post about a female composer—considering that i can count on one hand all the female composers that i’ve featured on here in the last three years. it’s unfortunate how difficult it is to find vinyl recordings of works by female composers, but that’s the truth. when i first started this journal, i related that scarcity to there simply not being enough female composers compared to men in the classical cannon, but you quickly come to realize that not only has there been female composers right along their male counterparts in the history of western music, but they have, albeit in only a few instances, been more successful than their historically more favoured male peers. and that’s one way to put the problem of the exclusion of women in classical music: music history and the men that write it have been unkind to the contributions that women made to the classical canon as it stands.
how is it possible, for example, that musicologist Robert Philip wrote a 949-page anthology on the classical canon titled The Classical Music Lovers Companion, which admittedly has been a frequent resource for this blog, but not one of those pages is about a female composer? that really is an astounding thing. that is a fact that cannot be dismissed as an oversight, but is evidence of a very conscious exclusion of the collective repertoire of female composers. but before i go throwing stones i have to admit that on here, too, it has a been a gallery of mostly dead white men.
a huge part of that homogeneity has to do with by being unable to afford the hundreds of dollars it would cost to the purchase rare and no-longer-extant collectable vinyls of female composers on sites like Discogs and the like. the mostly-male powers that be, who have been in charge of producing recordings on vinyl, as in other platforms, have neglected the works of female composers, on account of alleged fears of being able to sell them. thus a self-perpetuating fallacy. it does require significantly greater effort to find vinyl recordings of female classical composers, but this is an effort that i’m consciously committed to making for the next batch of 52 weekly recordings that begins in August.
an example of a female composer that in her day was an international celebrity, and has since been relegated to obscurity, is French composer Cecile Chaminade. this is the first i’ve heard of Chaminade, and it is unbelievable that this work is so under-performed. if you combined the explosive marriage of brass and high strings that opens Sergei Prokofiev Symphony No. 3 and the cacophony of cymbals and trumpets that punctuate the length of the third movement of Sergei Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto, you would still come short of capturing the frivolous iciness and metropolitan energy of Chaminade’s Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra. it is, alternatively, a concerto for broken glass—at least that’s what the cymbals that clash above the opening sentences uttered by english horn at the top of the single movement piece (though the percussion section in the video above makes a real mess of their parts, try and find a studio recording to really get the impact of the first ten or so bars).
like the aforementioned Khachaturian Concerto, that theme on english horn—a slightly morose phrase with an ethnic accent—is the concentrate that the piece dilutes with splashes of vivid color and intermittently quiet moments on solo piano in style of her contemporary French pianists. there is as well a modernity to the work’s character, undeniably out of the mind of a rowdy cosmopolitan. it is repetitive but nonetheless inventive, and possessed by a singular rhythmic drive that pushes the boundaries of a purely classical work. Chaminade cut her teeth on the piano at a very young age, enjoying the audience and tutelage of some eminent Parisian composers of the early 20th century.
the trunk of her fame, however, came from an international audience. particularly the burgeoning gaggle of American sympathizers who actively vied for their orchestras to perform her compositions. and so this Concertstück premiered in Philadelphia in 1908, near the peak of Chaminade’s renown. but just a couple decades later, her name and discography would pass from public consciousness into obscurity, which it has remained for the most part since.
my hope is that, alongside the ongoing and much needed surge in support of the performance of music by black composers, orchestras and their music directors will also take this as an opportunity to completely revise the script on the prevalence of dead-white-men in their regular offerings. and in the spirit of variety, i can’t remember the last time i saw a “concertstück”on a concert program, it’s such an effective vessel for delivering musical idioms that would otherwise be engulfed by a full-length concerto.
this post is as well a tribute to my very short sojourn at Chaminade College, an all boys school i attended in my first year of High School many years ago. i only lasted a year in that setting until my more gynephilic instincts rose to the fray and demanded the more fertile grounds of coed schooling. (boredom is, i think, ultimately the most consistent argument against any type of a sausage fest: at a certain point you realize how absolutely unnatural it is for any social organization to be dominated by the views and experiences of one gender at the expense and exclusion of the other).
(song of the week: “Señor Blues” — Dominick Farinacci)
found this song thanks to the resident Tivoli radio at the Daily Dumpling Wonton Co. at College and Ossington (but dumplings west of Spadina imo) in February 2019—one of those songs that you know you absolutely have to have in your life when first you hear it. it’s an old jazz number recorded by Horace Silver and Blue Mitchell in 1957, refurbished here by contemporary jazz artist Dominick Farinacci with some lyrics and the more regular syncopated rhythm of a samba groove, in comparison to the originals 6/8 time tempo. it’s the second song off of Short Stories, his 2016 album, mostly a compilation of similar jazz classics reworked for modern sensibilities. Farinacci’s rendition isn’t merely a throwback, you’d think this is an original composition by him, and what he does on trumpet is really the thing that makes this song inexhaustible. his reminds me a lot of what i like the most about Arturo Sandoval’s style: the ability to make the trumpet wail like a dancing piston.
Throwback to: YR1 Week51
Click here for the full 2019/2020 roster of composers