Paul Simon Borrows from Bach (and Others), Producing Two Masterpieces

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My Own Take on Originality

Interesting question: is anything actually original? John Lennon summed up the answer nicely when he said that 99% of popular music was reminiscent of something which had come before. But it isn’t just popular music—it’s everything. It’s all been done before, or, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “there is nothing new under the sun.” (Which had probably been said before.) So how do we determine the quality of art, if it all builds on the past? Well, it’s complicated, and so much of it is subjective. For instance (don’t judge me here), I have never been all that impressed with the Beatles. Or Bob Dylan. Or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. I just don’t get it, or them. One man’s horrible daub is another man’s inspiration for life. (Did I hear anyone say “Thomas Kinkade”?)

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Aaron Copland Does More than Required for his Old American Songs

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Copland, the Commission, and the Composition

Once again I’m on the hunt for the origins of a famous piece of music. Aaron Copland’s suite of early American tunes was commissioned by none other than Benjamin Britten and was presented at that composer’s newly-launched Aldeburgh Festival in 1950. Britten had developed a keen interest in performing American folk music, at least partly because of his long visit to the US from 1939-1942. While there he and his partner Peter Pears had spent a lot of time with Copland; he said later that Copland was “by far the best American composer.” Perhaps because of Pears’ abilities as a singer, he and Britten regretted the dearth of songs in the Copland catalog. So they decided to do something about that, and in 1950 commissioned a set of American folk songs to be performed at the Festival. Well! Copland dove into this commission head first, only coming up for air after he’d ransacked the sheet-music archives at Brown University for material. He did an enormous amount of work for what turned out to be a set of pieces that together total less than 13 minutes’ worth of performance time. But this wouldn’t be the first time Copland got completely caught up in writing music that he didn’t think would result in much return on his investment; he said about  the ballet music for Appalachian Spring, “It took me about a year to finish and I remember thinking how crazy it was to spend all that time because I knew how short‑lived most ballet scores are, but [it] took on a life of its own.”1

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Virgil Thomson Sets Thomas Campion to Music

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Image access via Wikipedia

Virgil Thomson is right up there in the pantheon of 20th century composers along with Aaron Copland and Benjamin Britten, men whose works he criticized rather harshly and whose greater popularity and success he envied. Alas! Even the greatest artists can have feet of clay. But he had much in common with these other two towering figures, not the least of which was an abiding interest in the proper setting of texts to music. How he ran across the four poems of the Renaissance poet Thomas Campion is unknown; I consulted the only authoritative biography available about him and saw no fascinating backstory such as the one I discovered about Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Thomson did believe, however, that Campion’s poetry and music displayed the same qualities that he strove for: simplicity and directness, with the music serving the text instead of the other way around.

Campion wrote in various genres, but in these brief lyric poems he typically shows a delicacy of feeling about his subject: an idealized woman. Campion is not writing about real flesh-and-blood females in whom he has a romantic interest but is instead presenting a concept of beauty itself. If you read these poems as descriptions of real romantic relationships you might find them a bit depressing, but the metaphysical realm is always inspiring, I guess. Here one can go haring off into Platonic love and courtly love and the whole nine yards, but I do try to keep these posts somewhat reasonable in length. I will just say that the poet is striving for a certain effect and doesn’t necessarily have any emotional skin in the game. Beyond that it’s impossible to know what was going on in his head as he wrote his poems. He never married, so perhaps he preferred the ideal to the real. As for Thomson, we know his interest in the concept of female beauty was theoretical and not personal, as his romantic pursuits were confined to men.

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The Deeper Meaning behind Copland’s “Ching-A-Ring-Chaw”

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PictureNote: This post was written about an earlier concert of the Cherry Creek Chorale in which we sang Part 2 of Copland’s “Old American Songs.” We will be performing the songs from Part 1 for our upcoming concert on March 6 & 7 2026. But there’s so much interesting background on Copland in general below that I wanted to go ahead and post it again.

Sometimes I start researching these posts thinking that I know what’s what and I just need to fill in a few blanks, only find out that my ideas have been completely wrongheaded. Other times I think there’s not too much to say and end up with enough material for a doctoral dissertation. This post fulfills both conditions. Racism and the transformative power of art are all packed into this one short selection.

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The Shakers’ Simple Music Inspires Dance and Song

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By Unknown author - Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons. Shakers dancing.

It seems a little unfair that the word “Shakers” nowadays calls up only a furniture style and, probably, the tune “Simple Gifts,” when this religious group had such a long and fascinating history. Honestly, the Wikipedia article about them is well worth a read if you’re at all interested in early American history and/or revivalist religious movements.

I’m going to get into Shaker music, but I do need to explain their beliefs and practices a bit in order to do so. This sect, which got its start in Britain around 1750, was a fascinating mixture of strict rules on the one hand and ecstatic outbursts on the other. Absolute celibacy was required for full membership; the sexes were housed separately and could not even shake hands or pass one another on the stairs. (I’m assuming the latter rule was in place because the staircases were so narrow.) They also lived communally and were strict pacifists. Yet their worship services were a mixture of music, dancing, and manifestations of spirituality that included twitching, jerking, and shouting, usually in some type of unknown language. (Those outward physical actions gave the group their name; originally they were called the “Shaking Quakers” and were an offshoot of the original Quakers.) They had to let off steam somehow, I guess. In spite of all the kerfuffle, though, the music itself was very plain, with no musical instruments used for accompaniment and no harmonies, just the melody. You can do a lot with a little; as our friend Wikipedia says:

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A Song of Hope Whatever the Version–“Bashanah Haba’ah”

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Image by dae jeung kim from Pixabay

When a career as a lyricist ends up totaling around 1,250 songs, one might think that massive output would dwarf the importance of any individual piece. One would be wrong, of course. Ehud Manor, one of Israel’s greatest songwriters, was capable of producing deeply personal and meaningful words. Such is the case with his 1970 hit “Bashanah Haba’ah” (“Next Year”). Ehud had lost his younger brother two years earlier when Yehuda was killed during the 1968 War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt, and he wrote his lyrics in Yehuda’s memory. What would Ehud love to do if he had his brother back again? Here’s what he wrote:

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Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” with its Many Meanings

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Image accessed via Pixabay

Introduction and Origins

As readers of this blog know by now, I’m obsessed with origins, especially the origins of creative ideas. So I’m fascinated that Lin Manuel-Miranda was inspired to write his musical Hamilton by reading the Ron Chernow biography of this fascinating figure. (35 hours in audio form, folks. I know this from experience.) Stephen Schwartz got the idea for Wicked from a conversation on a snorkeling trip in Hawaii, when someone mentioned having read the book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. He says, “As soon as I heard this I had one of those light bulb moments where something just said this is a really great idea.” And Anthony Lloyed-Weber says that he bought a copy of the original Phantom of the Opera novel by Gaston Leroux for a dollar at a used-book stall in Paris and fell in love with it.

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The Great Tito Puente Writes Fewer than a Dozen Words—And Creates a Hit with “Oye Como Va”

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By Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA – Tito Puentes, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74769220; image accessed via Wikipedia.

I had no clear idea who Tito Puente was until I started researching his massive hit from the 1960s, “Oye Como Va.” Just reading his Wikipedia page was quite an experience. He grew up in New York City’s Spanish Harlem and drove the neighbors crazy when he was a boy because he was constantly pounding on pots and pans, so his mother signed him up for 25-cent piano lessons. And it only got better from there as his musical talents expanded into any number of instruments. He ended up serving in the US Navy during World War II on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A list of his duties as noted in Wikipedia included:

playing alto saxophone and clarinet in the ship’s big band as well as occasionally drum set, piano during mess hall, acting as the ship’s bugler, and serving as a machine gunner in the battles of Leyte and Midway. (And when did he learn to operate a machine gun? Not clear.)

This wartime experience led to two great influences on his later music career: he went on a tour of Asia, traveling for several months after the end of the war, and he attended Julliard on the G.I. bill, where he studied orchestration and conducting. (His conducting teacher there was Japanese, thus cementing those Asian influences from his travels.) From there he went on to a rich and varied career in music, becoming especially known for his playing of the timbales, a type of shallow metal drum. Because Puente was such an active and engaging performer he was usually put at the front of bands so that people could see the show he put on. (I can’t resist pointing out here that a timbale resembles an overturned flat-bottomed stew pot.) Eventually he started his own band and was a mainstay at the Palladium Ballroom during the 1950s and 60s. If you want to get more info about this remarkable man, follow this link below to his Wikipedia page.1 I, however, had better get on to the ostensible subject of this post, “Oye Como Va.”

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Folk Song? Three Mexican Folk Songs with their Many Meanings

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Image by Martin Mariano Hernandez Tena from Pixabay

I’ve written approximately one ton about how true folk music evolves and develops over time. Let me just summarize those ideas once more as I venture into the meanings of the three Mexican folk songs my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, sang in October 2025 at our “Spells, Spirits & Mariachis” concert.

So, as you probably know already, a “true” folk song cannot be traced back to an original version since it wasn’t written down at its inception. Instead, it has been passed down orally for some time and has no known author. At some point, though, there’s always an attempt to preserve songs that have become popular. The results can be quite varied, since one transcriber may get different wording from that of someone else. And a folk song or tune doesn’t have to be ancient; the familiar song “Buffalo Gals” has a panoply of variations that may date back only to the 1830’s. (“Bowery Gals,” “Philadelphia Gals,” “Round Town Gals,” and even a song to that tune that addresses “Lubly Fan,” [“Lovely Fanny”] and was performed in a minstrel show.)

But I must pull myself back here and get on to my main subject, the song suite arranged by the prolific American composer and arranger David Conte. I can’t do his career justice here, so rather than shoehorn him in I’ll link to his website1 and you can take a look if you’re so inclined. I’ll just mention as an instance of his thoroughness that he’s written three sets of arrangements for these songs, one for SATB, one for SSA, and one for TTBB. Sweet!

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Has the Chorale Gone Over to the Dark Side by Having a Halloween Concert?

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Years ago a woman I knew said that she had become concerned that by celebrating Halloween she was advocating wickedness and evil, and she had decided to stop doing it. Apparently she had been into this holiday big time, with tons of decorations and traditions, probably up to and including cakes sporting spiders and fake cobwebs strewn everywhere. She threw it all out and explained to her kids that they would no longer be participating in any of these activities. She substituted a more innocuous “harvest” holiday, so they didn’t miss out entirely.
 

I’d be the last person to criticize this woman. She was totally sincere and believed that she was doing right by her family. And yet . . . in order to be perfectly consistent, she would have had to also eliminate Christmas and Easter celebrations from her household as well. Both of those Christian holidays have traditions with pagan roots.

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