“Cantelina” by Paul Schwartz [1999]

My attempt at writing about Latin music most days fizzled in my busy winter break. Travels to Minnesota for family, Chicago for a conference, and then (finally!) Costa Rica for a fantastic honeymoon left little time. For now, I don’t plan to write much, but I still want to share all the great music. Plan on seeing posts nearly every day, but with less description or context than in the past. I am also going back to the original format of this blog: click shuffle and post the first song, no matter what. As always, enjoy the music!

First up, a short neo-classical/New Age meditation by Paul Schwartz.

“Poetic Tone Poems, Op. 85, No. 6: Sorrowful Reverie” by Antonin Dvořák [1889], performed by Rudolf Firkusny [1974]

My grandfather’s funeral yesterday was difficult for me, but it was moving to see how many people showed up to see him one final time. Today, I vowed to move on, so this will be the last post related to his passing. My grandfather was a full-blooded Bohemian (Czech to those of you a little fuzzy on your historical Old World geography), so I looked through my collection of Antonin Dvořák, the greatest Czech composer, for a piece that would honor his proud heritage. (In fact, my grandfather’s great grandmother, whom he knew well because she lived into his high school years, was born just a few years after Dvořák and less than a dozen miles away.)

“Sorrowful Reverie” captures the mood of my grandfather’s funeral perfectly. Sorrow filled the room, but so did memories of his greatest passion: flying. Soaring above the earth is a sort of reverie, naturally sending one into “a state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing.” Before he died, my grandfather requested that a certain poem be read at his funeral. The words express the dream-like characteristics of flying and make clear my grandfather’s appreciation and gratitude for the world around him. I gathered enough composure to share with those gathered what he chose to be his final words:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air… .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

(High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.)

Emotive music was written for such occasions, but thanks for putting up with my personal life anyway.

“Snowy Morning Blues” by James P. Johnson [1927]

I feel much the same way today James P. Johnson did when he woke up to snow in NYC during the winter of 1926-27. He recorded “Snowy Morning Blues” at two sessions in late February and early March. It was among the best non-stride jazz recordings he ever put to wax.

(Photo taken in Mankato, MN, by my fiancee’s sister about two hours ago)

“Ten Czech Dances, Book 2: 9. Sousedská” by Bedřich Smetana [1879]

Performed by Rudolf Firkusny [1979]

Music History has previously covered a number of works which fall under the various categories of nationalist music from the Romantic Era, from a simple piano rendering of a Polish mazurka by Dvořák (1880) to epics like Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia” (1880) and Bedřich Smetana’s own Ma Vlast (1875). From the same period comes Smetana’s compilation of short piano pieces based on traditional Czech dance styles.

In 1853 Hungarian composer Franz Liszt published a series of solo piano pieces based on local folk melodies. It started a trend. Those Hungarian Rhapsodies likely informed Johannes Brahms’ 1869 publication of 21 Hungarian Dances (though the two were fairly different in form and style). Within a decade of Brahms, Czech composer Antonin Dvořák released his first set of Slavonic Dances. That work was the most obvious influence on fellow Bohemian Smetana’s 1879 10 Czech Dances.

The piece posted above was the ninth of the set. Smetana titled it Sousedská, “Neighbor’s Dance,” and it was essentially a Czech waltz. As offensive (and anachronistic) at it is to say this, the repetitive hammered chords make me think of this movement as a 19th century power ballad. Sousedská is simply a fun power waltz.

“Lullaby” by Michel Petrucciani [1989]

Just because sales of jazz declined steadily throughout the 70s and 80s doesn’t mean that great music wasn’t still being made. Michel Petrucciani, a French pianist in the vein of Bill Evans, released a number of critically acclaimed albums in the 1980s. “Lullaby” appeared on Music, Petrucciani’s last album of the 1980s. 

Though born with brittle bone disease, Petrucciani’s hands, arms and musical genius were obviously not affected. After a historic concert at New York’s Town Hall in 1985, the young pianist became one of the leading lights for Blue Note Records. Unfortunately for the jazz community, Petrucciani’s disability eventually caught up with him. He died of a respiratory infection in 1999, indirectly caused by his shrunken chest.