Jazzy & kaleidoscopic

 The world is Derrick Skye’s concert hall. Unbound from any single musical culture, Skye integrates musical practices from far and wide into his music, creating fascinating tapestries of sound that gather disparate cultures under one sonic roof.  

“Music, for me, has always been a doorway into understanding other cultures and different ways of living,” he writes. “Through learning the music of other cultures, I believe that the opportunity for dialogue rather than conflict between strangers is opened, and we can become a society with less conflict due to cultural misunderstanding.” That’s a pretty tall order, but Skye is more than up to the task. His education is broad, including studies in West African drumming and dance, Persian music theory, Hindustani classical music, and Balinese gamelan, in addition to basic training in composition from UCLA and California Institute of the Arts. Nor does he limit himself to music alone; he works extensively with swimmers, dancers, and choreographers to bring body movement into his compositions. 

Prisms, Cycles, Leaps blends music from the Western tradition with that of the Balkans, combined with the multi-layered rhythmic patterning of Ghana and melodic lines inspired by North Indian Hindustani classical music. It all starts with a quiet weave of polyrhythms – multiple rhythmic patterns happening simultaneously – not only in the instruments, but also with hand clapping added to help listeners stay grounded amidst all those dense patterns.  

The melodic lines can be either brief repetitive bundles of notes, or extended and florid weaves, for example, in the more relaxed central section with its oboe, flute, and trumpet solos that channel Hindustani idioms, all punctuated by gentle handclaps. Around midpoint the brass leads in an overall temperature increase as rhythmic complexity intensifies. Handclaps and drumbeats add joyousness and physicality as short melodic patterns resume. Underneath it all, long sustained tones hint at a Lutheran chorale à la Bach. Finally, snare drums and cymbals end the work in a quietly exuberant whirl. 

© Scott Foglesong

Only serendipity saved Paul Whiteman’s January 1924 jazz-meets-classical “An Experiment in Modern Music” from becoming yet another instance of a certain well-known road paved with good intentions. It was long, it was boring, it was pretentious. The pieces all sounded alike. Aeolian Hall’s ventilation system was on the fritz. 

The aforesaid serendipity arrived with George Gershwin, second-to-last on the bill, and his Rhapsody in Blue, a score so new that he hadn’t even written out the piano part. Whiteman simply waited for George’s nod to cue in the orchestral entrances. It has become an article of faith that Gershwin wrote the score with blinding speed (either four days or three weeks, depending on your source), but Gershwin’s own account hints at something more like two months, from about December 1923 through January 1924. Given Gershwin’s experience in the hurly-burly of musical theater, where songs were written overnight and entire scores were prepared within a few weeks, two months represents a relatively lavish time frame, even allowing for Gershwin’s lack of formal training and subsequent struggles with the nuts and bolts of symphonic composition. 

In fact, his inexperience was such that Whiteman house arranger Ferde Grofé provided the orchestration. He was also a neophyte as to musical form, so the Rhapsody is more potpourri than an organically unified structure. Nor was it a set-in-stone, unchanged and unchangeable entity. A recording by Gershwin and Whiteman from the summer of 1924 – a streamlined version whittled down to fit two sides of a 78 RPM record – demonstrates that the piano solos were still works in progress. But no matter. It brought down the house in 1924, and it still does. 

Nowadays, with the Rhapsody in the public domain, it has become increasingly common for soloists to offer their own take on Gershwin’s piano part, as witnessed by jazz pianist Makoto Ozone’s spellbinding embroideries. Such is quite in keeping with the Rhapsody’s essentially free-form and fluid spirit, Jazz Age anthem, and radiant American classic that it is. “How trite, feeble, and conventional … so stale, so inexpressive!” sniped New York critic Lawrence Gilman. Definitely a minority opinion.  

© Scott Foglesong

Ask your average music lover to make a list of important Czech composers, and you’re likely to get some combination of Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, and (let us hope) Martinů. But probably not Josef Suk. And that’s a crying shame, because his music is eminently worth exploring – a fusion of Romantic and modern idioms, personal, vigorous, and memorable. 

Suk was Dvořák’s favorite student and eventually son-in-law after he married Dvořák’s daughter Otilie. Early in his career he tended to write faux-Dvořák, but by the turn of the 20th century, his own vivid personal style was making itself felt. Twin tragedies darkened his outlook when his cherished mentor Dvořák died in 1904, followed by wife Otilie a year later at the tender age of 27. Suk’s music thereafter often leaned morbid or even tragic, such as the gigantic Asrael funeral symphony of 1906. He was, by and large, an instrumental composer with only a smattering of vocal works; unlike Dvořák, he never wrote an opera.  

His outlook was still optimistic in 1903 when he composed the Scherzo fantastique, Op. 25. In naming the piece a ‘scherzo’ he was honoring a long tradition of energetic single-movement orchestral works such as Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream scherzo. Then there’s ‘fantastique,’ which channels the Gothic strain of Romanticism; consider Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with its opium delirium of a witches’ sabbath. For all its lyricism, there’s something of the danse macabre about the Suk Scherzo fantastique, a dance of death based on a deliberately simple waltz tune that Suk takes through a series of transformations, interrupted by a midnight-dark central interlude. Suk himself dismissed the piece as a “spiritual nothingness,” but for the rest of us, it’s thoroughly engaging, filled with kaleidoscopic orchestral colors and terrific string writing.  

For trivia buffs: Josef Suk won a silver medal at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. He was 58 years old, and no, it wasn’t for the high jump. Until 1948 there was an ‘art’ competition, for which Suk submitted a march that won the only awarded prize. He was tickled pink about it. 

© Scott Foglesong

In the early 20th century, ballet conjured up images of nutcrackers and swans and sleeping beauties, a place where everything was beautiful and true love always won out in the end. Even allowing for the rare outlier such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, ballets were mostly inhabited by fair princesses and charming princes whose problems were strictly of the first-world variety. 

Then along came The Miraculous Mandarin, a gruesome creepshow involving thugs and prostitutes and a torture-and-murder scene worthy of a midnight slasher movie. Its 1926 premiere in Cologne took place to a storm of angry catcalls from the audience, followed by reviews that were, if anything, more blood-curdling than the show itself. It was promptly banned for its moral turpitude. (Imagine that ever happening to Swan Lake.) To this day Mandarin hasn’t caught on as a ballet – you really shouldn’t take the kids to it – so we usually encounter it as a sizzling orchestral suite that encompasses about two-thirds of Bartók’s original score, with its hyper-modernistic harmonic language and astonishing orchestration intact. 

The frenzied opening music invokes an angst-filled modern city in which a trio of thugs use a young woman to entice potential robbery victims into their apartment. After two unsuccessful attempts, a mysteriously poised wealthy Chinese man appears; he lusts for the woman, the thugs attack him, he resists, and they proceed to torment him in a number of ways best not described. But he won’t die. Eventually, the young woman embraces him, and with his longing fulfilled, he expires. 

The suite tells the story up through the chase scene in which the ‘Mandarin’ pursues the young woman, fortunately omitting the music from the more – ahem – lurid post-chase episodes. 

© Scott Foglesong