Compositions On Composers

Welcome back to Compositions on Composers! It saddens me to say that this will be our eighth and final post together. On our journey, we have learned about classical, jazz, romantic, and even early Japanese electronic music. What an interesting journey it has been for me and, I hope, for you too! I sincerely hope that these posts have opened your minds to different genres and composers and that you have enjoyed reading my ramblings. This all brings us to the topic of our final post. Last week, we learned about French romantic composer Claude Debussy. Today, we will discuss the life and works of a fellow Frenchmen who was influenced by Debussy, Alexandre Desplat. I absolutely adore film scores because of their intricate use of music in an amazingly expressive medium. Desplat, who primarily composes for film, has created some of my favorite scores and has greatly contributed to my love of film music. In fact, my first blog post on last semester’s blog was about his score to The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). How fitting for us to both begin and end with Alexandre Desplat. So, get ready to learn about an amazing composer who composes artistic scores that are just music to my ears.

Alexandre Desplat was born on August 23, 1961 in Paris, France. Like many of the other composers discussed in this blog, Desplat first found music through starting to play piano at age five. Desplat would also later learn to play the trumpet and his main instrument, the flute. From a young age, Desplat was also known to enjoy the works of French symphonists Ravel and Debussy and to collect soundtrack albums from composers such as Max Steiner and Georges Delerue. These composers all interested him and inspired his style, but it wasn’t until Desplat heard John Williams’s score to Star Wars (1977) that he decided to become a film composer. From that point on, Desplat would begin to study many kinds of music from Brazilian to African in order to develop a holistic understanding of music and the emotions and deep cultural meanings that it carries. Among his chief influences today, his loving marriage to gifted violinist Dominique LeMonnier, whom he met during his first feature film recording, would spark his creativity and inspire his compositions. However, his theater scores for La Comédie Française influenced his career the most through teaching Desplat the importance of dramaturgy. This focus allowed him to compose and to adjust scores to actors’ performances, which gives his film scores a precise and brilliant feel.

Desplat has been the master behind many critically-acclaimed, award-winning film scores. Among Desplat’s most notable film scores are those to The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), and Argo (2012). In fact, Desplat won the Oscar for Best Original Score for both The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and The Shape of Water (2017). He also received Oscar nominations for The Queen (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), Argo (2012), Philomena (2013), and The Imitation Game (2014). I encourage you to explore any of these scores; they are all great to listen to while studying or working.

I would like to focus my attention on describing some of my favorite Desplat scores. I believe that the score to The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is my favorite, but seeing as I already wrote a whole blog post on it on my other blog, I will just link it here. To summarize, this score creates an excellent atmosphere with its unique use of the balalaika and periods of silence. It has a whimsical and lively feel that charms and delights the listener. Desplat’s dramaturgy studies really shine through in this score. Another great score is the one to The Shape of Water (2017). With a very graceful, emotional, and French sound, this score highlights Debussy’s influence on Desplat. The main theme, Elisa’s Theme, best represents the score. With the Parisian accordion, unique string parts, and the heavy use of the flute, this song speaks volumes for the silent, gentle, caring Elisa. Many of the score’s pieces such as Underwater Kiss and Overflow of Love feature the flute and strings predominantly and excellently construct the world of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). I would also like to briefly mention Alexandre Desplat’s next upcoming score. It will be featured in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018), which releases in theaters this weekend. Desplat has worked with Anderson several times before and it will be exciting to see how his next score highlights the unique Japanese setting and stop-motion animation.

Thank you for reading this post! Though these posts have been part of a school project, I have enjoyed researching for and writing them. It has been my pleasure to do so. I hope that you continue to explore these composers and many more talented ones like them beyond this blog. Thank you and have a great day. 🙂

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After a short hiatus, we are finally back here at Compositions on Composers! With Spring Break now behind us, we will move into our final section. Classical music is one of my favorite genres, we started this blog with it and I now hope to end the blog in a similar fashion. Through the Mozart/Mackey section, we learned about the basic characteristics of traditional Classical music. In this final section, we will dive into my favorite Classical period, the Romantic/Impressionist period. Though we could focus on any one of my favorite Romantic/Impressionist composers such as Liszt, Rachmaninoff, or Chopin (my all-time favorite, check him out!), today, we will learn a bit about Claude Debussy.

Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France in 1862, Claude Debussy grew up in utter poverty, but after becoming acquainted with Russian millionairess, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, Debussy began to travel with her, experiencing the world and gaining an appreciation for music through playing duets with her and her children. Debussy first displayed his musical gifts through piano lessons at age nine. Madame Mauté de Fleurville, an associate of Frédéric Chopin, taught Debussy and helped him to pursue his interests in piano and composition from an early age. By 1873, Debussy, age 11, began to study piano and composition at the Paris Conservatory, where he would later win an award, the Grand Prix de Rome, for his composition L’Enfant Prodigue (The Prodigal Child). A beautiful 35 minute composition, the gentle orchestration, swells of emotion, and careful use of the oboe and female operatist make this piece absolutely stunning and breath-taking. After leaving the Conservatory, Debussy moved to the Villa Medici in Rome, where he spent two years composing. The scholarship from the Grand Prix de Rome would have allowed him to stay for three years, but he found the place bothersome and moved back to Paris as soon as he comfortably could. He then engaged in a number of affairs, married twice, gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, and suffered under the constant stress of suicidal thoughts. Though difficult and full of hardships, Debussy’s complicated and emotionally-charged life enabled him to compose beautiful, gentle, and poignant pieces.

Among Claude Debussy’s most notable pieces are Children’s Corner, La Mer, Clair de Lune, and Rêverie. Clair de Lune is by far his most well-known composition. Several years ago, I played this piece on the piano. In order to really master the song and bring out the beauty of the piece, you had to delicately touch the keys like flower petals and take artistic liberties with the tempo and dynamic expression. Listening to this calm and somewhat mysterious piece changes your outlook and feels refreshing and relaxing. Rêverie grabs me in much of the same ways. Its beautiful solo piano composition feels like a peaceful state of mind wrapping itself around me. As the song slowly and methodically progresses, a wave of complete calm and tranquility overcomes any stressors. On La Mer, this late Debussy composition achieves many firsts in symphonic composition and musical expression. Inspired by the English Channel outside of Debussy’s hotel room in Eastbourne, La Mer creates a beautiful and majestic atmosphere. Finally, in Children’s Corner, dedicated to his daughter Claude-Emma, Debussy created a six-movement suite for solo piano. One of his final compositions, this piece fully culminates his development as a composer.

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Came to learn a bit about great innovative composers from around the world? Well you have come to the right place! Welcome back to Compositions on Composers!  This week, we are featuring Koji Kondo, an amazing Japanese video game composer who has proved how video games can be an important medium for creating and showcasing innovative music. When many people hear about video game music, they rarely take it seriously. They say it’s simplistic, tinny, or for people living in their mom’s basement. Due to this bad reputation, some video games containing very artful and inspiring soundtracks can easily be overlooked. While it’s true that video game tracks at times overuse temp tracks and samples (as is also true in many films), we will see that this view doesn’t represent all video game soundtracks. In the 1970s, as we learned last week, technology advanced so that developers could use computers to create hundreds of unique and interesting electronic sounds. These electronic sounds would be utilized in the early techno and synth music around the world by composers like last week’s Ryuichi Sakamoto but also by composers for the newly created medium of video games. So let’s dive right in, but first, a little bit of video game history.

If you asked your parents about what kinds of video games were around during their childhoods, they would most likely mention Pong and Pac-man. Maybe if they were involved in early video game culture they would even mention having an Atari 2600 or frequenting the local video game arcade with their friends to play games like Space Invaders or Dragon’s Lair. Regardless, these simple little games defined early video culture. By the early 1980s, these short games and an influx of video game consoles from Japan and the United States flooded the market, many very expensive, and all trying to bring gaming from the arcade to the home. Unfortunately, the heavy market saturation and high prices led to an enormous recession that almost completely destroyed the video game industry. This catastrophic event would later be named the Video Game Crash of 1983. During this recession, it seemed that video games would forever be limited to being simple arcade experiences for kids, but then one company changed this forever, Nintendo.

Though now a multinational company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 as a Japanese Hanafuda card game company. The company stayed small for decades, and by 1963, company head Hiroshi Yamauchi, grandson of founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, realized that their market was limited and that they needed to refocus their product lines and target audience in order to grow. They attempted to enter many industries but all attempts were failures. They didn’t hit their stride until they finally tackled the Japanese toy industry in 1966 with toys such as the Ultra Hand and the Love Tester. In the 1970s, as video games become the new popular toys for children, Nintendo began to move into this market. It was around this time that a young product developer named Shigeru Miyamoto was hired to work in the new medium. Miyamoto would design the Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Arcade games, which concretized Nintendo’s position in the market. After the Video Game Crash, Nintendo was the company to revitalize the industry in 1985 with their famed home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The console single-handedly brought the industry back from ruin and the company would continue to make critically-acclaimed video games for the following decades. The launch of the NES was when our composer, Koji Kondo, finally came into the picture after being hired in 1984 to work on the console.

Koji Kondo was born on August 13, 1961 in Nagoya, Japan. He first began playing music in his electronic organ lessons at the young age of five. Throughout his childhood and teen years, Kondo joined a cover band, enjoyed listening to early electronic music (maybe even YMO from last week), and played video games at local arcades. He then attended the Osaka University of the Arts, and though he was never classically trained in music, he worked in electronic music, making him an appealing candidate for Nintendo. When sent a recruitment message in 1984 to become a sound programmer, Kondo excitedly accepted and joined the rapidly expanding company. He was hired alongside Hirokazu Tanaka and Yukio Kaneoka in order to score each video game and design all of the sound effects. His first project was the widely popular Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out in 1984, which took much of its inspiration from Rocky, an American film. Kondo helped to compose the game’s opening theme among other tracks. Despite the NES’s hardware limitations (only five possible sound channels with hardly any options for dynamics or the like: two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise generator, and one digital sample channel), the three composers worked to make fun and fitting songs for their games.

Kondo would move on to compose the soundtracks for Nintendo’s biggest and best game series including The Super Mario series and The Legend of Zelda series. The first editions of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda sold over sixty million copies worldwide and will forever be cherished as video game classics. Of his first main project, the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack, the first piece he composed was “Water Theme”. He actually composed it before the “Main Theme”! Kondo wanted to help convey the game’s main theme of having fun, so he used bright and catchy melodies with fun beats. The “Water Theme” features a waltz time signature (3/4), which was unique since most compositions are in 4/4 time, and the “Main Theme” exudes cheer and child-like fun. He would compose the soundtracks for the following installments in both series until after completing the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). From this point on, Kondo began to collaborate with fellow composers in his works or act as a supervisor.

Melody is Kondo’s biggest strength when composing. With his melodies, he creates amazing and fitting atmospheres that perfectly suit Nintendo’s games. He can compose touching and emotional moments such as in “Grandma’s Theme” from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (2002) which plays when the main character Link must leave his grandmother and home island in search for his kidnapped sister. It’s bittersweet as we hope that Link will see his loving grandmother again soon. He also greatly captures adventurous and exciting moments such as in “The Great Sea Theme” from Wind Waker. The bass arpeggios in the left hand create the waves and the bright trumpet melody expresses Link’s joy as he goes on the adventure of his life looking for his sister and trying to save the kingdom.

In the soundtrack for Super Mario Galaxy (2007), Kondo composes space-age pieces from another world full of cheer like in “Gusty Garden Galaxy”, empty tranquility like in “Space Junk Galaxy”, and epic drama like in “Final Battle”. In his soundtracks, Kondo also uses dynamic composition. This means that the music changes as the player moves or engages in certain activities. Maybe when the player goes underwater the music distorts or becomes calmer or as they approach certain places the volume changes. To pull from Super Mario Galaxy again, in one world, the Freezeflame Galaxy, there are two separate areas, fire and ice. The same song plays throughout the level, but depending on which area you are in, the music instrumentation changes. In the fire area, African drums and low reeds are used to create a song of heavy and sweltering heat. In contrast, in the ice area, light and high-pitched choral electronic sounds create a frigid and distant sound. These artistic choices make video games more interactive and immersive, improving the experience for players.

Thanks for reading to the end of this post! I was only able to scratch the surface of Koji Kondo’s career as he has composed hundreds of pieces for dozens of games, but I hope you enjoyed this post nonetheless. I just found it so interesting how Kondo interpreted the innovation of new electronic sounds in such a different way from last week’s Ryuichi Sakamoto. See you next time on Compositions on Composers!

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Welcome back to Compositions on Composers! This week, instead of introducing the most famous and quintessential composer of a genre and then introducing a modern composer influenced by them, we are taking a slightly different approach. We will explore how two separate composers were inspired by electronic sounds, which were newly available due to technological advancements, and how they implemented them into their music. Electronic sounds are commonplace in music today, but they have only really existed for the past 50 years. When you consider the many centuries of music history, half a century of time covers a very small amount of such an expansive history. So, how did composers and their music adjust to the advent of electronic sounds? There was no precedent for the technology and it provided opportunities to break musical conventions in many unique ways, but who took a chance on this risky technology? Though many experimental bands and composers in Europe and North America pioneered in the world of electronic sound (Kraftwerk, Art of Noise, etc.), we will travel to Japan to observe two of their approaches to the new technology. To start this journey, today, we will learn about the revolutionary and ground-breaking Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto. (By the way, special thanks to a classmate for introducing him to me in the comments on the Mozart post.)

Sakamoto was born on January 17th, 1952 in Tokyo, Japan. Born in a time soon after World War II, Sakamoto came from humble beginnings. His father was an editor and his mother a hat designer. Japan was still recovering from the war during Sakamoto’s childhood, but Western intervention and post-war growth led to a booming Japanese economy. The new economic growth and Western involvement helped Japanese culture to grow and expand and allowed for Western technologies and music to enter the country. Sakamoto cites English rock and French Impressionism as the two most influential genres of his career. In fact, “Tell Me” by the Rolling Stones was his first record and French composer Claude Debussy left an important mark on him by influencing his perspective on left and right hand melodies. Sakamoto started playing music himself by age 3 when he first began learning to play the piano, and he started composing his own music by age 10. He would continue his music education at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he graduated with a master’s degree in music in 1976. It was at university where Sakamoto first became acquainted with electronic music.

During and in the immediate time after his studies at Tokyo National University, Sakamoto freelanced with a number of collaborators. Two that he particularly bonded with were Haroumi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. The three young musicians would then form the group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) together in 1978. YMO, like their contemporaries, were far ahead of their time. They took elements of classical music, traditional Japanese scales and melodies, and brand-new digital electronic sounds and techniques in order to create a fresh and innovative sound. At the time, the kinds of sounds and techniques that they were using were perceived as oddities by some. For example, see how baffled and confused the host of Soul Train was when the band came on to perform Tighten Up in 1980! However, many others and music visionaries around the world viewed the band’s pieces as futuristic masterpieces and would soon follow in the band’s footsteps towards a more electronic sound. YMO influenced the New Wave, synthpop, electro, and video game music genres that came after them with songs like Ballet, Firecracker, Tong Poo, and Technopolis (surprisingly, this came out in the 1970s).

After YMO “broke up” (never made official) in 1984, Sakamoto remained relevant with an extremely successful solo career. His first solo album, Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto, came out in 1978 while the group was still together, but the album made it clear that Sakamoto had the potential to continue growing on his own beyond YMO. This first album only had six tracks, but each one made a significant impact on the music industry. More specifically, Thousand Knives and Plastic Bamboo were outstanding tracks, and Grasshoppers showcased Sakamoto’s potential as a pianist, which he would increasingly show as his career progressed. Sakamoto also collaborated with many other bands and artists such as the Talking Heads, David Sylvain, Iggy Pop, and Thomas Dolby among many others.

As Sakamoto grew older, he began to compose more classical piano albums such as Playing the Piano (2009) with songs like Amore and A Flower Is Not A Flower. He has also composed over thirty film scores, including those to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) with David Bowie, The Last Emperor (1987) which won a Grammy and an Oscar for Best Score, Black Rain (1989), and The Sheltering Sky (1990). He has even composed video game soundtracks and mobile phone ringtones. Over the course of his decades-long career, Sakamoto has won many awards and has also made an everlasting mark on the music and film industry.

Thanks for reading today’s post! I really loved learning a bit about Sakamoto and the music scene in late 20th-century Japan and I hope that you did too. Sakamoto is still quite a celebrity in Japan today and continues to compose amazing music and soundtracks, so if you liked what you heard here then I encourage you to look up more from him. Among Sakamoto’s most recent works, he scored the Oscar-winning movie The Revenant and released a more ambient and relaxing album called async, with some of my favorites on it being honj and ubi. Next week, we will explore another approach to the new electronic sounds that a Japanese composer took around the same time. See you then!

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After last week’s introductory exploration into the roots of jazz came to a sudden end in the 1950s, many questions were left unanswered. What tree grew from those great jazz roots? To answer this, we look to revolutionary jazz composer and bandleader Wynton Marsalis. Inspired by classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven and influenced by the likes of Duke Ellington, Marsalis has modernized the jazz genre but always kept its roots at heart. He composes and performs in all sub-genres from classic to contemporary and best represents the changing genre today.

On October 18th, 1961, Wynton Marsalis was born in New Orleans, the very same city where jazz was born several decades before. He received his first trumpet at the age of six, and soon after, his parents realized that Marsalis possessed an extraordinary amount of talent and skill in playing trumpet. By age eight, Marsalis was performing in the Fairview Baptist Church band, playing traditional New Orleans music. As a teenager, he started branching into playing for more professional bands, including the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, the New Orleans Symphony, and the Creators, a popular New Orleans funk band.

At the age of 17, Marsalis was admitted to Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was the school’s youngest ever admitted student. Excelling in his studies and musical performances, Marsalis was awarded Tanglewood’s prestigious Harvey Shapiro Award for outstanding brass student. In 1979, he then moved up north to New York City to study at Juilliard. Walking in the footsteps of Duke Ellington, Marsalis began gigging in small clubs and at minor events. Word of his talent quickly spread and Marsalis soon signed on to Columbia Records. His first jazz album with the record company sold well and was critically acclaimed. By 1981, Marsalis had formed a band and started touring the United States. For the next fifteen years, he inspired the next generation of aspiring musicians with his swinging melodies and reminiscent jazz tunes. Above, you can see Marsalis from this touring time period of his life. In the photo, he is playing trumpet for the Haydn Trumpet Concert in Eb in a Boston Pops concert.

Today, Marsalis has won 10 Grammys, in both classical and jazz recordings. Marsalis has also received The National Medal of Arts, an Honorary Membership to Britain’s Royal Academy of Music, and the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He even won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1997, the first jazz musician to ever receive this great honor. The Pulitzer Prize was for his two-hour jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. The piece recognizes the cruelties on which this country was built through bringing attention to slavery and the harsh treatment of Native Americans. In terms of the general auditory experience, this piece stirs lots of different emotions and can feel harsh at times and hazy at others. If you are overwhelmed and having trouble picking out which sections to listen to, I recommend Forty Lashes and Move Over.

Besides Blood on the Fields, some of Marsalis’s other notable songs are Black Codes (I love this one), Cherokee, and Jig’s Jig.

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Here we are in our third week of composers! This week, we are moving genres from classical to jazz. Jazz is a tough genre for me. Whenever I hear jazz live, I am physically engaged. I’m leaning forward in my seat and sometimes even tapping my foot to the beat. It’s so much fun when the hall fills with jazz’s fun, rhythmically-diverse music. I especially love to hear the amazing improvisational solos. However, whenever I try to listen to it while doing homework or walking around campus, it doesn’t have quite the same effect on me. I believe that jazz is something to be a part of rather than to observe from a distance, but regardless, let’s just jump right into jazz! Today, we are learning about one of the best jazz composers of all time, Duke Ellington! With 11 Grammy wins and international recognition and acclaim, Duke Ellington has left his musical mark on history and changed the world with his amazing jazz compositions.

On April 29, 1899, in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington D.C., Edward Kennedy Ellington was born to two musically-inclined parents. His mother Daisy Kennedy was a pianist and wanted to instill her passion for music in her son. At age 7, Daisy started sending him to piano lessons. She also wanted her son to learn manners and proper conduct from a young age, so she dressed him up nicely and taught him grace and integrity. The neighborhood boys took notice of this and gave him his lifelong nickname “Duke”. Ellington didn’t enjoy playing piano from the start. In his memoir, Music is My Mistress, he describes skipping many lessons, but after he began sneaking into poolrooms and listening to the pianists there, Ellington found his appreciation for music and started to enjoy his piano lessons. Inspired to keep improving by those pianists, Ellington wrote his first composition by the age of 15. This first composition, “Soda Fountain Rag,” was inspired by his job as a “soda jerk” at the time. A “soda jerk” was the name for the person operating the soda fountain machine in a drugstore or ice cream parlor.

Throughout his teen years, Ellington became obsessed with ragtime music. He would mimic the poolroom pianists and try to amplify their style. Eventually, Ellington starting playing gigs around D.C., and in 1916, he turned down an art scholarship to the Pratt Institute in order to continue playing professionally. For the first several years, Ellington participated in bands and moved around, playing gigs up and down the East Coast from D.C. to Harlem. His career finally took off in October of 1926 when Ellington met with agent-publisher Irving Mills. They made an agreement together that allowed Ellington and his band (called the Kentucky Club Orchestra at the time) to record numerous hits, which launched his popularity and gave him the means to climb higher. By September of 1927, Ellington signed a deal with Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. Especially with its weekly radio broadcasts, Ellington and his band gained fame and recognition.

In a career lasting over half a century, Duke Ellington went on to create several bands, win numerous awards, tour Europe twice, and define the genres of jazz and big band music. Ellington died on May 24th, 1974 from complications with lung cancer and pneumonia. 12,000 spectators attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The great number of spectators coming to pay their respects speaks to his influence and significance.

As for Duke Ellington’s songs, there are thousands of compositions worth mentioning. One of his most famous pieces was Take the A Train. It perfects that classical jazzy sound. The focus on the trumpet soloist and the use of the mute created an entertaining and fun composition. Another famous piece by Ellington and one of my favorites of his was Satin Doll. The careful repetition of the saxophone melody combined with the crisp and bright piano in the background create an elegant and graceful sound. Towards the middle of the piece, Ellington takes control with a beautiful and simple piano solo with light bass and drums in the background. The piece embodies the sophisticated and chic sound of the 1960s. Out of all of his pieces, I feel that the most recognizable would be It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing). This piece has an upbeat tempo but combines this with a darker and deeper sound. In many versions of this song, including the version in the link, Ivie Anderson provides the vocals. A very famous female singer of the time, Anderson sang many of the band’s hit pieces. The amazing Ella Fitzgerald also sang versions of this song and others of his. With the fun and energizing vocal “shoo bop do bops” the piece really springs to life. A few of his other famous compositions include Prelude to a Kiss, Sophisticated Lady, Mood Indigo (his first recording to be inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1975), and Caravan, which he co-wrote with Juan Tizol, the band’s trombone player. Some of you may remember Caravan from Whiplash, which I talked about in a post on my blog last semester. Tizol also went on to compose Perdido for the band. These two songs added a unique and exotic Spanish sound that really grabbed the listener.

Thanks for reading this post. So after hearing a bit about Duke Ellington… Do you like jazz? Well, I sure hope that you do because get ready for more jazz next week where we will learn about a famous modern jazz composer who was greatly influenced by Duke Ellington. See you next week on Compositions on Composers!

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As we start our second weekly post, I welcome new and recurring readers to the blog! As some of you may have guessed from last week’s hint, we are traveling from 18th century Europe to 21st century America. However, we will stick with the Classical genre to see what changes the genre has undergone over the course of nearly 250 years. This week, we will learn a bit about John Mackey, a contemporary classical composer, who excellently represents Classical music in the modern day. So grab your headphones and prepare to listen to the compositions of a living composer!

John Mackey was born October 1, 1973 in New Philadelphia, Ohio. Though Mackey’s parents were musicians, Mackey never took music lessons from them or formally learned how to play an instrument. Instead, his introduction to music came through his grandfather, who played clarinet, oboe, and flute in a local community band and owned a nearby music store. Wanting to instill the joys and passion of music in his grandson, Mackey’s grandfather taught him how to read music as well as use computer programs to compose music of his own. The first of these programs was the Music Construction Set for the Apple IIe and later for the Commodore 64. This basic and limited piece of software could only play three notes at a time, but it would inspire a lifetime love of music. Throughout the 1980’s, Mackey spent dozens of hours working with his arbitrary music software.

On his Osti Music blog in 2015, Mackey talks about the pieces he composed and painstakingly transposed throughout his early teen years on this software as well as on another called SidPlayer. Above is a video recording of what Mackey believes to be his earliest surviving piece. This piece, a Lacrimosa, was inspired by the award-winning Amadeus (1984), a film about Mozart’s life. You may recall our discussion on Mozart’s Lacrimosa from last week’s post. Mackey recounts being obsessed with this movie and describes how it motivated and inspired him. He tried to follow the sound and style of the piece in his own interpretation. Interestingly, the “clarinet” part in this composition was intended for Mackey’s grandfather to play. Though this piece may sound dreadful now, it would later lead to an artful career.

Mackey would pursue his passion for music in an undergraduate Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1995. He would then travel to New York City afterwards to receive his Masters in Music from Juilliard in 1997. From then on, Mackey narrowed his focus on composing for dance and for symphonic winds in the Classical genre. His compositions have been played around the world, from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall, and he has received numerous grants and awards for his innovative work. Some of his most notable songs include Aurora Awakes, Asphalt Cocktail, and Hymn to a Blue Hour.

One of my personal favorites of Mackey’s would have to be Sheltering Sky. Though one of his simplest and easiest to perform, this composition has beautiful swells of emotion throughout that make it both memorable and breathtaking. The calming suspensions with soft oboe and trumpet memories give the piece the ethereal and uplifting feelings that one gets upon looking into the sky at the clouds. Another piece that resonates with me is Foundry.  Meant to sound like men working in a foundry, a metal casting factory, the song uses lots of unique percussion instruments such as “four piles of metal” and “clangs”. As with many of his songs, including Liminal and Wine-Dark Sea, percussion is greatly showcased and full of many challenging and driving parts. The song also features large brass-filled melodies, typical of most of Mackey’s compositions. In Foundry, the brass-filled melodies constantly swell to represent the sweltering heat and slow movement in the infernal foundry.

I hope you enjoyed learning about a living composer this week. Sometimes it can seem difficult to connect with a composer and their work when they aren’t alive, but with Mackey, you can visit his website, Osti Music, or even support his SoundCloud account. It can be exciting to wait for his next release and it’s always amazing to hear his interpretations of his compositions instead of a pianist or conductor’s interpretation hundreds of years down the road. If you would like to hear more from Mackey, I encourage you to listen to his most recent piece, The Night Garden. It was commissioned by The Senzoku Wind Symphony and first premiered on December 3, 2017. It differs from his more recent music and strikes a new chord (pun intended).

Thanks for reading this post! Next week, we will venture into another genre that comes from the heart of New Orleans and Harlem. Come back next week for more Compositions on Composers!

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Welcome to Compositions On Composers! In this blog I will do weekly posts that give backgrounds and portfolio summaries on various notable composers. I would like to not only cover the cliché European composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (though all made very important contributions to music theory and composition) but also focus on composers from multiple genres, contrasting cultures, and diverse regions of the world. That being said, I could not overlook Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in this blog series. He composed hundreds of influential operas, concertos, and symphonic masterpieces. Through his iconic music, Mozart revolutionized Classical music just as Bach had shaped the music of the Baroque period. Today, almost any American can recognize Mozart’s most famous tunes including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Rondo Alla Turca, and Marriage of Figaro Overture without any musical training or sometimes without even knowing Mozart by name!

Additionally, Mozart and his beautiful music hold a special place in my heart. My very first introduction to music came through listening to his mesmerizing and emotional songs in the Baby Einstein Baby Mozart series as a baby. For those who haven’t heard of the series, – I don’t blame you – it was a collection of videos with children’s toys and Mozart music in the background. My mother played them for me everyday because she believed in the now-debunked Mozart Effect. Ever since, I have always appreciated Mozart’s music and have even had to play many of his pieces for piano including the famous Piano Sonata #16 in C major. One of my personal favorites of Mozart’s is his Symphony #40 in G Minor because of its enchanting and compelling composition. I also love the lesser-known melancholic Fantasy in D Minor. Due to all of these factors and more, I would now like to introduce you to Mozart and his work.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg to Leopold Mozart, a composer and music teacher. By the age of 5, Mozart had already composed several pieces of music and possessed great prodigious talent. By 8, he had composed his first symphony of dozens still to come. As a child, W. A. Mozart’s father remained his teacher and traveled alongside him as he played for European royalty, but in his later teen years, Mozart began distancing himself from his father and played as a musician at the Salzburg court. However, after only a short period of time, he left his position and moved to Vienna. Most of his remaining life would then be spent in Vienna, where he gained fame but not necessarily fortune. Here, Mozart lived a poor man’s life with little money at times and with only two of his six children living past infancy. Despite these challenges, Mozart’s talent and dedication enabled him to write many memorable compositions and to establish his posthumous fame for the ages.

Mozart has many famous and interesting compositions, but one in particular holds special acclaim as well as an intriguing story. Soon after Mozart had finished his opera The Magic Flute, in 1791, Mozart was tasked by Count Franz von Walsegg to write a piece for the Requiem mass of the Count’s wife. Many rumors remain around the Requiem, Mozart’s magnum opus, but it is universally accepted that Mozart did not complete the work. This was due to Mozart’s unfortunate death on December 5, 1791 after an excruciating and difficult illness. In fact, of the composition’s fourteen movements, most of them were not completed until after Mozart’s death. Rumors around the piece claim anything from Mozart having no part in the rest of the piece’s completion to Mozart leaving frameworks and pieces of the song sprawled on tiny scraps of paper all around as he could not stop thinking of the piece and desperately desired to complete it. Instead, several other minor composers, including Eybler and Süssmayr, finished the composition in secret. Mozart’s widow Constanze then took the completed transcript, forged Mozart’s signature, and passed it off as his complete work to the Count so that she and her two children could receive the payment and future royalties. According to later accounts by Constanze, Mozart felt as if he were writing for his own funeral and that the song haunted and consumed him. The final version of Requiem (partial) remarkably communicates those haunting and terrifying feelings of sorrow, death, and judgement to the listener. The varying minor keys, frequent changes in tempo, and multi-layered SATB (choir) and orchestra parts create a jarring and intense experience.

The best way to describe Mozart’s style would be Classical. This comes from the fact that Mozart almost single-handedly created the Classical genre of music. Classical music, like Mozart’s, is lighter and more clearly-defined than the pieces of the Baroque period that came before. The genre consists of mostly homophonic music, which contains a strong melody with an accompaniment of defined chords. Despite the new simplicity of the structure, the emotion, from whimsical to moody, remained intact and was further mastered by Mozart. Later in his life, after studying Bach transcripts, Mozart began to take elements of the Baroque style and implement them into his work. Several of his symphonies excellently capture this such as Symphony No. 29 in A Major. Mozart’s style later influenced many composers, including Beethoven, who composed within the Classical and Romantic periods. Today, Mozart’s music continues to influence composers and listeners alike.

Thanks for reading this post! I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction to Mozart, his life, and his compositions. Join us next week when we travel to another continent to a country which was only gaining its independence during Mozart’s time.

Image and Information Credits:

Figure 1: Image 1

Figure 2: Image 2

Figure 3: Image 3

Source 1: Site 1