Rainer Maria Rilke in Music

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:  

The quiet of images. You, language where 

languages end. You, time  

standing straight from the direction  

of transpiring hearts.

- Rilke, To Music

"Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 –1926), was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets." - Wikipedia

"By sheer dint of prayer, I knew bread."

"Rilke's conservative forms, lyrical diction, rhyme and brevity are qualities that have historically commended themselves to the masters of the German lied, but prolific ones like Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner and Othmar Schoeck ignored Rilke and turned readily, among contemporary writers, to Hermann Hesse, whose purely poetic gifts were of a lesser order.

The modernists dabbled: Schoenberg, Berg and Webern each set a Rilke lyric or two, but with unmemorable or sometimes jarring results. Paul Hindemith made a cycle of "The Life of Mary" that many admire. But the list is very short.

Rilke is by far the most-read German poet in English translation; there are at least 12 translations of the sonnets alone, most of them still in print, and when the poet's name comes up in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," it isn't an obscure reference. Yet though there must have been some previous American or British settings of the sonnets, none has come my way." - NYT, A 'Musician' in Spite of Himself

Though the author is on record as having only contempt for musical settings of his work, many more Rilke settings were composed and recorded since the above 1992 NYT article; I collected more than 60 classical works for this playlist. Not all of them are masterpieces that are worthy of the original text; I put my favourite ones at the beginning: Morten Lauridsen's Chansons des Roses, Krenek's O Lacrymosa, and Lieberson's Rilke Songs. Other notable works include: Brad Mehldau's Love Sublime, Rautavaara's setting of the first Duino Elegies, three settings of Sonnets to Orpheus (by Rautavaara, Danielpour and Eric Moe), and four settings of Rilke's only major prose poem: The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke (by Earl Kim, Frank Martin, Viktor Ullmann and Paul von Klenau).

Here's the Spotify playlist: Rainer Maria Rilke in Music (336 tracks, total time: 20 hours) Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view. See song texts here. For further readings, I recommend any good anthology with Letters to a Young Poet, and The Complete French Poems.

St. Patrick's Day Playlist: W.B. Yeats In Music

For St. Patrick's Day I compiled a playlist of songs and classical works based on the writings of the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

Some of Yeats' poems have become part of the Irish folklore: Down By The Salley Gardens has been performed by hundreds of singers, from James Joyce's friend John McCormack, to contemporary folk singer Maura O'Connell (both renditions are included here). First part of this playlist is consisted of non-classical works: it opens with The Waterboys' heartrendingly beautiful musical treatment of The Stolen Child; then continues with Joni Mitchell's majestic Slouching Towards Bethlehem (based on The Second Coming); besides Yeats songs from renowned Irish acts like Van Morrison (Crazy Jane On God), The Chieftains (Never Give All The Heart), Christy Moore (Song Of Wandering Aengus), Sharon Shannon (A Song Of The Rosy Cross), it also features a full album dedicated to the poet: The Waterboys' An Appointment with Mr. Yeats.

Second part starts with Donnacha Dennehy's Yeats song cycle That the Night Come, commissioned and performed by Dawn Upshaw. Songs from dozens of composers including Barber, Elgar, John Tavener, Tippett and Vaughan Williams are followed by Harry Partch's opera King Oedipus (based on Yeats' translation of the Greek drama), and Jonathan Harvey's piano piece Four Images After Yeats.

Here's the Spotify playlist: William Butler Yeats in Music (128 tracks, total time: 8 hours) Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view. Some song texts can be found here. In my previous playlist The Poet Speaks, you can hear Yeats reads and talks about The Lake Isle Of Innisfree.

Below is a video of Leonard Cohen reciting the first lines of Yeats' In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz, in Lissadell House.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Guillaume de Machaut: Complete Recordings on Spotify

Notre-Dame de Reims (Our Lady of Rheims)

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 – 1377) was a Medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available.

According to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer. - Wikipedia

Machaut is the first in the line of great composers; this playlist gathers all recordings of his works available on Spotify in one place. Machaut tracks from medieval music compilations (like Where Beauty Moves And Wit Delights) are put at the beginning. They are followed by albums feature only Machaut's works (loosely arranged by genre: Lais, Mass, Motets, etc.). The playlist ends with New York Polyphony's beautiful paraphrase of Ma fin est mon commencement (My end is my beginning) from 2012.

Get this collection in one Spotify playlist: Guillaume de Machaut: Complete Recordings on Spotify (415 tracks from more than 60 albums, total time: 26 hours). Ctrl (CMD) + G to browse in album view. More about Machaut on medieval.org, and more pictures of Reims Cathedral (where Machaut worked From 1338 until his death) here.

This brings the French Composer series to an end. Adieu.

The Poet Speaks: Poetry and Speeches on Spotify

Spotify is not only the best online music collection, it also offers many great recordings of historical speeches, audiobooks and poetry read by the poets. You can hear Dylan Thomas reads The Speech Of Oedipus At Colonus, T. S. Eliot reads The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, W.B. Yeats reads Lake Isle of Innisfree, and many more, includes Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake  read by James Joyce himself and remixed by DJ Spooky.  And beware, Oscar Wilde has an old witch's voice... For the speeches playlist, I also put in the classic radio shows from the young, hungry, pre-"Citizen Kane" Orsen Welles, who was then still eager to make his mark on the world.

Here's the Spotify playlists: The Poet Speaks (497 tracks, 23 hours) and Historic Voices & Great Speeches (728 tracks, 3 days). 

Bridge George Crumb Edition & A Few More

George Crumb was one of the most distinctive compositional voices to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. A charter member of the "New Virtuosity" movement, Crumb developed an expansive musical palette noted for its emphasis on extended instrumental and vocal techniques, its rich and sophisticated musical allusions, an evocative theatricality, and a poet's sense of sonorous detail. - AllMusic

...Examples include seagull effect for the cello (Vox Balaenae), metallic vibrato for the piano (Five Pieces for Piano), and using a mallet to play the strings of a contrabass (Madrigals, Book I), among numerous others. He is not an electronic music composer, however many works call for amplification of instruments, such as Black Angels (string quartet) or Ancient Voices of Children (mixed ensemble). Crumb's music contains an intense humanism, which is reflected in his personal definition of music: "a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse." - Wikipedia

"Bridge's decision to embark on a complete edition of George Crumb's music remains one of the most significant recording projects currently in progress, as well as one of the most artistically successful." - ClassicsToday

Bridge Records added many recordings to Spotify this week, all eight released volumes of the Elliott Carter Edition are available now (last week there were only three); I have incorporated them into the Carter playlist from last December.

Today's playlist gathers all 15 volumes of the ongoing George Crumb Edition, except for vol. 14 which is a DVD, in one place; together with some significant Crumb recordings on other labels, such as Anne-Sophie Mutter's Four Nocturnes, Kronos Quartet's Black Angels, and Eighth Blackbird's Voice of the Whale. Start with these works and Music For A Summer Evening if you are not familiar with the composer. Vol. 9, featuring the hauntingly beautiful Ancient Voices of Children, is also a good starting point.

Get this collection in one Spotify playlist here: Bridge George Crumb Edition & More (315 tracks, total time: 19 hours) Ctrl (CMD) + G to browse in album view. See the Bridge site for more information about this edition, which the composer has not only supervised all of the recordings, but has also taken part in them as pianist, percussionist and narrator.

e.e. cummings in music | Help New Amsterdam Records Rebuild

in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems - e. e. cummings

"e.e. cummings was a paradoxical poet who combined playfulness with seriousness; close attention to rhythm and rhyme with wild experimentation in grammar, spelling, and punctuation; and complicated ideas and images with simple words. His poetry's vividness and quirkiness have attracted many composers, who usually provide his poems with delicate, subtle settings to showcase their typically whimsical tones." - AllMusic

Inspired by Tin Hat's gorgeous new album on New Amsterdam: the rain is a handsome animal (17 songs from the poetry of e. e. cummings), I compiled this playlist, which includes cummings songs by Aron Copland, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, Eric Whitacre, Luciano Berio, and over a dozen more composers. Also featured are pop music based on cummings's text, from Joan Baez, Ra Ra Riot and others. At the end there's three tracks of cummings reading his poetry from three albums.

Get this collection in one Spotify playlist: e.e. cummings in music (121 tracks, total time: 6 hours).Ctrl (CMD) + G to browse in album view. Some song text can be found here.

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The New York based New Amsterdam Records is a central force in creating the "indie classical" scene since 2008, and so far has released dozens of compelling (both sonically and visually) albums that otherwise might never be heard. Unfortunately its headquarters in Red Hook, Brooklyn was devastated by Hurricane Sandy. If you would like to donate to their recovery effort (I did), please visit this official page. Thank you.

W. H. Auden in Music

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. - W. H. Auden

"Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. Some critics have called Auden an “antiromantic”—a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for universal patterns of human existence. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive, ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of scientific knowledge." Poetry Foundation

To celebrated Auden's 105th birthday, I put together a playlist of music based on his poems and translations, including Auden songs from Barber, Britten (Fish in the Unruffled Lakes), Foss (We're Late), Henze, Rorem and many more; libretti, including The Rake's Progress and Elegy for Young Lovers; and compositions inspired by his writings, like Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 The Age of Anxiety.I also included jazz pianist Andreas Schnermann's Tell Me The Truth About Love, which set 12 Auden poems to music.

Here's the Spotify playlist: W.H. Auden in Music (163 tracks, total time: 9 hours). Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view. See song texts here. For further readings, I wholeheartedly recommend his prose collection: The Dyer's Hand, one of the best books on reading, writing, Shakespeare and music that I have read, and this blog post: W.H. Auden as Muse. You can also hear Auden reading his poems from this previous playlist.

Chinese Contemporary Classical Music

I just made a Spotify playlist of Chinese and Chinese-born contemporary composers' works. These are not traditional Chinese music, just like Takemitsu's music are not Gagaku, though many of these composers did draw inspirations from the tradition.

Just for fun, I also included Der Abschied from the new BIS recording of Mahler's Song of the Earth, in which the vocalists sang the original Chinese text of the Tang poetry, in Cantonese. Der Abschied was based on Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei's 送別 (Farewell), you can find more about him on this page, it also includes a translation of his poem Hut Among The Bamboo, upon which Zhou Long set the first movement of his orchestral suite: Poems From Tang. About other titles of the works: Tu for Orchestra is from Zhou Long's wife, China's leading female compose Chen Yi, Tu means the picture or the map. Meng Dong means haze or ignorant, Wu Xing means five elements.

Biographies of these composers:

Bright Sheng, Chen Qigang,Chen Yi, Ge Gan-ru, Lei Liang, Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Zhu Jianer, and the Butterfly Lovers(traditional).

Zhou Long – Out Of Tang Court
Orchestre National De France – Wu Xing: L`eau (Water)
Orchestre National De France – Wu Xing: Le bois (Wood)
Orchestre National De France – Wu Xing: Le feu (Fire)
Orchestre National De France – Wu Xing: La terre (Earth)
Orchestre National De France – Wu Xing: Le métal (Metal)
The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto
Bright Sheng – H'un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-1976
Shanghai Quartet – Poems From Tang: I. Hut Among The Bamboo
Chen Yi – Tu For Orchestra
Qu Xiaosong – Mong Dong
Tan Dun – Orchestral Theatre II, "Re"
Arditti Quartet – Lei Liang: Serashi Fragments
Chen Qigang – Three Laughs
Zhu Jianer – Symphony No. 4: Symphony No. 4 "6.4.2 - 1"
Ge Gan-ru - Chinese Rhapsody
Gustav Mahler – VI. Sung Bit - Der Abschied Ending Of Cantonese Version

Click here for the Spotify playlist. Check out their full works if you like the sampler, most of these composers have more than one album on Spotify, just search for them yourself. I hope Spotify will add some Wen Deqing and Wang Xilin's works soon.

Click here to read Alex Ross' article "Symphony Of Millions" on the Chinese classical music scene.