Behind the Music

A Litany of Sad Lives–but with a Prayer for Hope and Peace

December 11, 2020October 12, 2015 by debisimons

I first had the opportunity to sing Franz Schubert’s lovely “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen” (Litany for the Feast of All Souls) in a concert with a Hallowe’en theme. Weird, huh? Well, actually not. I’m going to take a little time here to explain this Roman Catholic holiday, an occasion that’s not at all well known today. There are actually three holidays in a row right at the beginning of winter: Halloween, or “All Hallows’ Eve,” “All Hallows’ (or “All Saints'”) Day,” Nov. 1, and then “All Souls’ Day,” Nov. 2. These three days together form “Hallowmas Season.” I’d encourage you to follow the link above to my other article if you want more information. Basically, though, what it boils down to is that the Roman Catholic church, and to some extent other denominations, took advantage of existing traditions in pagan cultures and put a Christianized spin on them. As winter approached it was natural to think of the death of loved ones as the year itself was dying. The saints (those who, according to RC doctrine, were especially holy) got their day first on Nov. 1, and then everyone else (“all souls”) came in on Nov. 2.

Monsters at the Concert

December 11, 2020October 3, 2015 by debisimons

Back in October 2015 my choir gave a concert titled “BOO!” We had so much fun with doing a Halloween-themed program. Here are three short essays about songs we sang that include some kind of monster theme.

A Medley from Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas”

December 11, 2020September 28, 2015 by debisimons

Medleys from musicals or films are a popular way for a choir to be able to give its audience a taste of the original without having to worry about staging the entire work. Listeners who are familiar with the source material will be given an opportunity to hear it in a different venue; listeners who aren’t familiar with it may be encouraged to seek it out. These opportunities also apply to the performers. For instance, I had never seen Guys and Dolls, but when my own choir performed a medley from that musical, I was inspired to watch the film. And the same thing happened to me with Nightmare. I have to say that it sounded pretty icky to me when we first got our music, but I decided to watch the movie anyway so that I’d have a good basis for this post. Guess what? I totally fell in love with it. So very, very creative!

Is There Any Truth at all to the Story of the “Phantom of the Opera”?

December 11, 2020September 21, 2015 by debisimons

Phantom of the Opera Mask

It’s always fascinating to search for the inspiration of a creative work, and that’s certainly true of The Phantom of the Opera. I tried to read the original 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux after seeing a performance of the musical some years ago, but I found it to be pretty much impenetrable. (And I just took a look at it again before writing this post; it hasn’t changed.) To me there were two questions I wanted to answer: 1) What is the reason for the Phantom’s physical disfigurement? And 2) What so-called “real events” gave rise to the legend of the Phantom in the first place?

There doesn’t seem to be any reason given for the Phantom’s horrible face in the original novel, which describes it as a “noseless, lipless, sunken-eyed face which resembles a skull dried up by the centuries, covered in yellowed dead flesh.” It is simply the way the child, christened Erik, was born. The epilogue of the novel gives a brief synopsis of Erik’s early life, saying that his own mother couldn’t stand the sight of him and he therefore ran away from home as soon as he could, with the intriguing tidbit that his father (who died before the Phantom’s birth) was a master builder. While I couldn’t get into the original version by Leroux, I found the1990 novel Phantom by Susan Kay to be utterly compelling. If you’d like to read a re-telling of the Phantom story told with great empathy from several points of view I’d recommend this book. Kay adds some intriguing twists to the story at the end, but I won’t tell you what they are! In a couple of film versions there are specific reasons given for the deformity: an acid attack and an accident with a record presser. (That second one is set within the cutthroat world of the early music industry.)

What’s the meaning of the weird ingredients in “Double Trouble”?

December 11, 2020September 11, 2015 by debisimons

This selection is from the third film in the Harry Potter franchise, HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s performed by the Frog Choir, a group of Hogwarts students who don’t appear in any of the actual books but whom J. K. Rowling really loved when she saw them in the movie. They perform at the welcoming feast that begins the new school term and each carries a toad, one of which croaks during the song. (Why aren’t they called the Toad Choir? I don’t know.) The music is, of course, by John Williams. Isn’t everything?

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

October 21, 2024September 6, 2015 by debisimons

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.

An Introduction to Carmina Burana and “O Fortuna”

October 26, 2021August 24, 2015 by debisimons

Please note: The choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is performing “O Fortuna” in its October 2021 concert. (Follow the link to the Chorale’s home page.) This article was written for an earlier concert, so don’t be confused!

Back in the fall of 2013 I had the incredible opportunity of singing a full performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with my own choir and a Denver-area symphony orchestra. We didn’t have a ballet to go along with it (although I’ve since attended a performance that included that element), but it was quite an evening all the same. Back then I was trying to figure out how I could create some type of venue to explain the meaning of the lyrics. This question engaged me particularly in the case of Carmina, since not only were the texts very old, but they were also in medieval Latin with a sprinkling of German and French. Since the music itself was very challenging and we were under a demanding deadline, there was no chance for any type of in-person commentary to be given at our rehearsals. How could I get the ideas in these texts across to my fellow choir members so that they wouldn’t just be mouthing syllables? I eventually settled on writing short essays on the words, and here I am today, still doing the same thing here on this website and making the material available to any and all who are interested. Following is some brief introductory material. If you find it intriguing, I’d encourage you to purchase the book I eventually wrote that covers the entire work.

Why Did Beethoven Put a Chorus In His Ninth Symphony?

December 11, 2020July 31, 2015 by debisimons

Short answer: We don’t know. Where does any creative artist get the idea for any of his creations?

So much for that. We’ll never know how the thought welled up in Beethoven’s mind that it would be a cool idea to have a choir march out at the end of the fourth movement. We do know, however, that he had been interested for some time in creating new forms of music. He had already created a hybrid piano concerto/choral work in his “Choral Fantasy,” a 20-minute piece whose words and music are very much a precursor to the Ninth; Beethoven himself said in a letter that the symphony was “a setting of the words of Schiller’s immortal ‘Lied an die Freude’ in the same way as my pianoforte fantasia with chorus, but on a far grander scale.”

The Inspiration for Sid Robinovitch’s “Canciones por las Americas”

December 11, 2020May 4, 2015 by debisimons

Rainy night — Image from Pixabay; reference is to “Noche de Lluvia,” the first of the three songs in the “Canciones.”

One of the great pleasures of writing the posts on this site is that I’m sometimes able to get in touch with living composers and badger them with nosy questions. I was extremely curious about this set of songs because they all have Spanish texts, and yet Sid Robinovitch is Canadian, has a Jewish background, and wrote the pieces as a commission for the Association of Canadian Choral Conductors. There didn’t seem to be much of a Latin tango connection in any of this. So originally I professed my mystification and moved on, but later it occurred to me that I could just ask. I e-mailed Robinovitch after looking up his contact info on his website, and here is part of his very gracious and prompt reply:

A Choral Commission

December 11, 2020April 30, 2015 by debisimons

Have you ever noticed the words “commissioned by” or “in honor of” at the top of a song or other musical composition? My own choir has actually commissioned several works over its history. I wrote this piece about a new one, and our relationship to both the commissioner and the commissionee was pretty special.