Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Esoteric, hollow, enjoyable Victorian propaganda
Just because it's charming and lovely doesn't mean you can like Songs of the Sea
Charles Villiers Stanford
Video:
Charles Villiers Stanford - Songs of the Sea (1902)
Songs of the Sea is the Esoteric Pick of the Week. If you haven’t been spending much time at the beach, you’re missing out. El Niño is here and the water feels so good, you might be inspired to sing your own song of the sea.
There are too many compositions about the sea to count. There are the famous compositions such as La Mer, “Scheherazade” and the overture to The Flying Dutchman. There are the less famous such as Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, and Delius’s Sea Drift.
There is even a new composition by John Luther Adams entitled Become Ocean which the La Jolla Symphony will perform in its upcoming season.
There are several largely unknown compositions about the sea by composers such as Elgar, Bloch, Coates, McCunn, Einaudi, and Charles Stanford.
Charles Stanford wrote Songs of the Sea in 1902 and it is lovely. Charming and lovely. Those are two concepts that have been vacated by composers of “serious music.” No one wants to be charming or lovely, let alone both. Music must now hold us all accountable for our inauthentic, bougie lives.
If we were to chose cynicism we could discuss this music as informal Victorian propaganda much the same way as the waltzes of the Strauss family and the operettas of Lehar could be discussed as Habsburg propaganda.
1902, the year this music was premiered, was a politically difficult one in Britain because of the atrocities of the Second Boer War.
Atrocity is a strong word but there is really no other way to put it. We get the terms of “scorched earth policy” and “concentration camps” courtesy of this war. Was it coincidence that in 1902, King Edward VII asked Elgar to set words to his famous Pomp and Circumstance tune, resulting in the iconic Land of Hope and Glory?
It is easy for us to look back on Victorian composers such as Stanford and condemn them for writing music which enabled and coddled the bourgeois while Oliver Twist starved in the streets of London and all of India was treated as a collection of sub-humanity.
As is the current case in the United States, the general population of the British Empire was blissfully unaware of how their wars were fought and how the policies of their government subdued the populations on distant shores. Was their some willful ignorance? Probably.
Add to that the fact that Stanford was a conservative, which had many of the same connotations as in current politics, and you get music that is saccharine and proud of itself.
Having said all that, I like Stanford’s music and I like his Songs of the Sea just as much as I like The Merry Widow by Lehar, and any of the Strauss waltzes.
I think Stanford would find a welcome reception in many concert halls as a programming substitute for, say, a Tchaikovsky overture.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Esoteric, hollow, enjoyable Victorian propaganda
Just because it's charming and lovely doesn't mean you can like Songs of the Sea
Esoteric, hollow, enjoyable Victorian propaganda
Just because it's charming and lovely doesn't mean you can like Songs of the Sea
Charles Villiers Stanford
Video:
Charles Villiers Stanford - Songs of the Sea (1902)
Songs of the Sea is the Esoteric Pick of the Week. If you haven’t been spending much time at the beach, you’re missing out. El Niño is here and the water feels so good, you might be inspired to sing your own song of the sea.
There are too many compositions about the sea to count. There are the famous compositions such as La Mer, “Scheherazade” and the overture to The Flying Dutchman. There are the less famous such as Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, and Delius’s Sea Drift.
There is even a new composition by John Luther Adams entitled Become Ocean which the La Jolla Symphony will perform in its upcoming season.
There are several largely unknown compositions about the sea by composers such as Elgar, Bloch, Coates, McCunn, Einaudi, and Charles Stanford.
Charles Stanford wrote Songs of the Sea in 1902 and it is lovely. Charming and lovely. Those are two concepts that have been vacated by composers of “serious music.” No one wants to be charming or lovely, let alone both. Music must now hold us all accountable for our inauthentic, bougie lives.
If we were to chose cynicism we could discuss this music as informal Victorian propaganda much the same way as the waltzes of the Strauss family and the operettas of Lehar could be discussed as Habsburg propaganda.
1902, the year this music was premiered, was a politically difficult one in Britain because of the atrocities of the Second Boer War.
Atrocity is a strong word but there is really no other way to put it. We get the terms of “scorched earth policy” and “concentration camps” courtesy of this war. Was it coincidence that in 1902, King Edward VII asked Elgar to set words to his famous Pomp and Circumstance tune, resulting in the iconic Land of Hope and Glory?
It is easy for us to look back on Victorian composers such as Stanford and condemn them for writing music which enabled and coddled the bourgeois while Oliver Twist starved in the streets of London and all of India was treated as a collection of sub-humanity.
As is the current case in the United States, the general population of the British Empire was blissfully unaware of how their wars were fought and how the policies of their government subdued the populations on distant shores. Was their some willful ignorance? Probably.
Add to that the fact that Stanford was a conservative, which had many of the same connotations as in current politics, and you get music that is saccharine and proud of itself.
Having said all that, I like Stanford’s music and I like his Songs of the Sea just as much as I like The Merry Widow by Lehar, and any of the Strauss waltzes.
I think Stanford would find a welcome reception in many concert halls as a programming substitute for, say, a Tchaikovsky overture.
Comments