Quiz: Mystery scores

[lukeottevanger]

Also as a btw, the only problem with PDF-ing the thread, and specifically the list of scores, is that it is hyperlinked (thus a quick and simple way of getting to each score sample); obviously that won't be the case in a PDF.

[greg]

Also as a btw, the only problem with PDF-ing the thread, and specifically the list of scores, is that it is hyperlinked (thus a quick and simple way of getting to each score sample); obviously that won't be the case in a PDF.

but PDFs often have links to other pages in documents..... like where you can click on the table of contents and go to any page.... though i'd have no idea if this is easy or not

[lukeottevanger]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what is being proposed, in fact, but when you print out a whole thread from here, using the 'print' button at the top of the page, all formatting disappears (you are left with lots of [] and [/] instead), as do images - click it and see. Which is how a standard PDF of the thread would end up looking; there may be a more sophisticated way to do it, of course.

[greg]

there may be a more sophisticated way to do it, of course.

use vibrational fields.

[lukeottevanger]

...Perhaps I will reveal my remaining ones too, in a little while...

....so here goes - an early Christmas present: these last stragglers cleared up.

LO 44 - the composer of this one had already been guessed: Jehain Alain, one of the greatest of French organ composers, killed in action in WWII. He was greatly influenced by Indian rhythms, modes etc. separately and contemporaneously with the earliest works of Messiaen; there are also several works with extremely complex layerings of tuplets (such as 5:6:7) etc.. The piece is one of his most well known and extraordinary, the second Fantasie.

LO 59 - this is a Prelude by Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago but as a young man determined to be a composer; a reverent disciple of Scriabin, as can be seen in the piece given.

LO 60 - the other Scriabin-linked score, this is another Prelude, by Scriabin's child prodigy son Julian, who died aged 11 in a drowning accident (like another extraordinary prodigy, Thomas Linley); he wrote this piece when he was 10

LO 72 - this is the beginning of the second movement of the String Trio by Gideon Klein, a work which I know for a fact some frequenters of this thread know, and which has been recorded numerous times. It is an extraordinary piece, perhaps the single finest work to be written by any composer whilst in a concentration camp. Klein was the youngest of these composers, aged I think 25 when he wrote this piece, his last work, before he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. This movement is a set of variations on a Moravian folksong.

LO 77 - it was established that this is Delius; I didn't think it was such a hard thing from that point to get to The Song of the High Hills, which is by some considered Delius's finest work, never let down by longeurs and profoundly felt.

LO 87 - the Viola Concerto by John Woolrich - we see quotations from both Mozart and Beethoven (the latter the recurrent 'Lebewohl' which haunts this whole desperately nostalgic work).

LO 88 - the Concerto for Orchestra by Roberto Gerhard - a piece which is surely known by many here, one of Gerhard's finest and most interesting works, with a completely original attitude to musical time.

LO 100 - well, this was determined to be Slonimsky - it is a page from his rather wonderful, very imaginative and frequently hilarious set of 'Minitudes' for piano. The set mixes parodies and musical jokes (e.g. what would happen if you took the square root of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; or, again, look closely at the DC markings of the piece on the right in my sample.....) side by side with typical Slonimsky harmonic experiments (Slonimsky was, amongst many other things, the 'discoverer' of what he termed the 'Grandmother chord', a chord exploited in some of these peices)

LO 102 - the Fourth Symphony by Malcolm Arnold. I thought we had plenty of Arnold-ites here, but maybe not. This piece was once memorably described as 'one of the most banal [symphonies] ever written'.

LO 104 - an even better-known composer. This is taken from the Sinfonietta by Poulenc, one of his best works, but perhaps not as well-known as it should be.

LO 116 - the one whose lack of identification really shocks me. This is the first page of Ravel's L'heure Espagnole!! Complete with metronomes, helping Ravel set the scene in Torquemada's clock-filled emporium.

LO 124 - another extremely famous composer. Richard Strauss. This is the 'On the Heath' movement of his op 9 piano pieces.

LO 127 - Terry Riley's Keyboard Studies.

LO 130 - Russolo's infamous (maybe not!) futurist piece Risveglio di una citta, scored for, wailers, whilstlers, roarers etc. etc. To be heard here.

LO 133 - despite leaving the composer's name on the score, not identified: Rawsthorne's Third Symphony, pretty well-known by some here.

LO 134 - a spatially-organised piece by Harry Brant. The piece itself, Voyage Four, would be almost impossible to identify; I'd have been happy just to get the composer's name

LO 135 - a famous page from Cardew's experimental music masterpiece The Great Learning. The piece to which the term 'minimalist' was first applied (by Michael Nyman) though it's not exaclty what we think of as minimalist nowadays.

LO 139 - tricky, this one, I admit, but my clues made it easier, I thought - the composer would have been quite easy to find, and the piece is one of a fairly small number; the skeletons on the score limiting it to only one choice, I'd have thought: Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Questo ful il carro della Morte

LO 140 - I'm shocked the composer wasn't identified at least - his one of the most idiosyncratic styles, both visually (all those boxes and circled dynamics, for example) and verbally (on this page, for example, 'small swells', 'very feelingly', 'right hand does'nt [sic] slow off'). It is Grainger's In a Nutshell suite, one of his best and most extreme works.

LO 141 - harder, but not impossible given the clues. This is Obouhow's Le temple est mesure, l'esprit est incarne. The interesting thing here is the proposed method of notating black notes with cross noteheads.

LO 142 - the opening of Medtner's Third Piano Concerto - another work which many here know, I am sure.

LO 144 - the 'Arab Village' movement of Schuller's Paul Klee pictures. An American classic.

LO 145 - very hard, but the composer, a great English eccentric, is identifiable from my clues. This is John White's Drinking and Hooting Machine, to be played by people sitting round a table drinking.

LO 147 - the title of this piece is all over the score sample: I love the Lord, one of the best known of Jonathan Harvey's important series of religious choral works.

LO 148 - tricky, perhaps, and I'd love a recording of this piece. It is a collaboration between classical composer Matyas Seiber and jazz musician John Dankworth, Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra.

LO 150 - the style doesn't look like it, but the handwriting and the Satie-an notational humour (look at the weird accidentals and the odd spellings) certainly does look like the act of Satie's most famous fan, Jon Cage. From his Songbooks (downloadable at Ubuweb)

LO 152 - like the Knaifel, this score is contained in the CD sleeve notes, and the label is the same, ECM. This is from Hans Otte's Das Buch der Klang, a classic work of its type.

LO 156 - and another classic of its (quite similar) type, recorded on ECM by the same pianist as the Otte (Herbert Henck) but also by its own composer - this is from Mompou's masterpiece, the Musica Callada. I can't imagine a series of comparably quiet, intense, intimate piano pieces that is the equal of these wonderful works, which temper Mompou's impressonistic Spanish style with some pretty extreme but always gorgeous harmony at times.

LO 159 - I'm disappointed - this composer has an extremely well-known style, illustrated to perfection by this sample. This is Steve Reich's Tehilim.

LO 164 - enormously tricky, but good fun to look at - this is Schaffer's Apocalypse of St John, of which every page is as intricately decorated as the two I put up as samples.

[Guido]

LO 72 - this is the beginning of the second movement of the String Trio by Gideon Klein, a work which I know for a fact some frequenters of this thread know, and which has been recorded numerous times. It is an extraordinary piece, perhaps the single finest work to be written by any composer whilst in a concentration camp. Klein was the youngest of these composers, aged I think 25 when he wrote this piece, his last work, before he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. This movement is a set of variations on a Moravian folksong.

Ooh, controversial! The only other famous piece as far as I am aware hat was composed inside a concentration camp was The Quartet for the end of time - do you really prefer it to that? I remember liking it very much, but I can't quite say that it was as good as the Messiaen. Will give it another listen.

[lukeottevanger]

Ooh, controversial! The only other famous piece as far as I am aware hat was composed inside a concentration camp was The Quartet for the end of time - do you really prefer it to that? I remember liking it very much, but I can't quite say that it was as good as the Messiaen. Will give it another listen.

#

Well, I was distinguishing concentration camp from POW camp.... the musical quality of the two is pretty finely poised, I think.

[Guido]

Please excuse my boorish understanding of history...

What other pieces were you thinking of then?

[lukeottevanger]

Other pieces written at Terezin, above all.

[lukeottevanger]

And it's not a boorish understanding at all - but the distinction, in my mind, is that Messiaen wasn't staring death in the face - privation and difficulty, certainly, and presumably a deeply disturbing time, psychologically. Both the privation and the psychological turmoil are discernible in his quartet. But Klein (and Haas, Ullmann and Krasa, and Schulhoff elsewhere, and others too) were in a more perilous position, and I think one sense that in Klein's trio - the bleached out, fake jollity and desperate dancing in the outer movements, and above all the second movement. I think that there are things in this piece that go deeper than just the notes, and touch very sensitive places.

[Maciek]

Guido, while you're here (if you still are): take a closer look at MM 68 - it's a piece you know and admire, probably as much as I do.

Re the pdf - I might have made up the pdf part but I was alluding to this post by Larry:

I think we should wait. Otherwise everything gets too confusing. And I would like to capture all the images into a file as a kind of anthology.

[Guido]

Of course - It's Mi-Parti by Lutoslawski. You are right I love this work. The beginning actually reminds me alot of Ives - specifically the Three Places in New England, The Pond, and Central Park in the Dark.

[Maciek]

I knew I could count on you!

[lukeottevanger]

Re the pdf - I might have made up the pdf part but I was alluding to this post by Larry:

I'll try to knock something up, perhaps, once we know all of yours.

[Maciek]

Hint of the day:

www.eclassical.com features daily free mp3 downloads (available from their title page). One of today's free tracks is a certain movement from a certain piece by a certain Polish contemporary composer... 0:)











(hint no. 2: for a more specific hint check today's The Broadcast Corner)

[Maciek]

Guess I should have called that "hint of the year"...

Wasn't much help anyway, apparently. Greg, where are you?

[lukeottevanger]

No, I saw it and downloaded it. One of the three Gorecki Pieces in Old Style. But I haven't had a chance to see which of yours it is yet. As far as I remember, none of them are for string orchestra except that fast-ish one in D minor which I don't remember from the Gorecki piece.

[Maciek]

Ha. This is where the "more specific" clue should come in - you've been swayed in the wrong direction, I'm afraid (actually, I think the piece in question may have disappeared before you arrived). I'll quote my Broadcast Corner post:

I don't know how I've managed to miss this fact but www.eclassical.com features daily free downloads!

The first one is available on their home page - at the very bottom (under the heading Today's free classical MP3). Click on Get more free titles from eClassical.com and you will be taken to a page with a few more tracks (but NOT INCLUDING the one from the home page!). Here's what they're offering today:

A Polish Requiem/1: Lacrimosa , Antoni Wit , 5:02
Krysztof Penderecki
(this is on their title page)
a hint for those playing the mystery score game: you might want to download this!

(and on the "more" page:)
Mazurkas/1: Sustenuto,Jerzy Godziszewski,2:11
Karol Szymanowski

Pictures at an exhibition/02: Gnomus,Antoni Wit,2:41
Modest Mussorgsky

Pictures at an exhibition/09: Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks,Antoni Wit,1:16
Modest Mussorgsky

Three Pieces in Old Style/II,Andrzej Markowski,2:14
Henryk Górecki

Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor/3: Allegro con fuoco - Allegro moderato,Bartlomiej Niziol,6:12
Henryk Wieniawski

(dunno why but today's theme is apparently Polish music/performers...)

And I'm cooking up another major batch of hints as we speak (to get us going for the new year, so to speak).

(BTW, Luke - it is as I suspected: you never leave this room, do you? just go into hiding behind the divan sometimes, I guess... )

[lukeottevanger]

Ha. This is where the "more specific" clue should come in - you've been swayed in the wrong direction, I'm afraid (actually, I think the piece in question may have disappeared before you arrived). I'll quote my Broadcast Corner post:

Ah, I never saw that post. Comes from never looking outside this thread, as you imply:

(BTW, Luke - it is as I suspected: you never leave this room, do you? just go into hiding behind the divan sometimes, I guess... )

No, at the moment there isn't much on the board tempting me outside this thread!

I have the Penderecki Polish Requiem, as it happens. Can't say I've listened to it much, though....

[lukeottevanger]

In passing, is no 72 from the same geezer's St Luke Passion?