Happily sharing a link to an interview with Interlude’s Maureen Buja. A conversation about my latest album, DIE ERSTE ELEGIE, and other recent musical activities.
[button color=”steel_blue” link=”https://interlude.hk/sighs-and-cries-an-interview-with-stanley-grill/” size=”default” target=”_blank” block=”true”]Sighs and Cries – An Interview with Stanley Grill[/button]
Thrilled to share this review of THE BRIDGE by Take Effect magazine.
Announcing the release of my latest album, DIE ERSTE ELEGIE, featuring soprano Lisa Rombach and conductor Marek Štilec leading the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. The album begins with SYMPHONY OF SIGHS, an addition to my MUSIC FOR UKRAINE series, followed by a five movement symphonic setting of the first of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Duino Elegies.
SYMPHONY OF SIGHS. Composed in response to Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, a series of musical sighing gestures evolved into this single movement symphony. Unable to change the course of events, instead I sat at home crying notes.
DIE ERSTE ELEGIE. It is Rilke, more so than any other poet with whom I am familiar, who writes about the invisible world around us. Other poets describe the beauties (or the terrors) of the world we can see, but Rilke uses words that may be rooted in that world only to leave it and open a door beyond that to what we cannot fathom. Although I do not believe that angels, in the ordinary meaning of that word, exist, I had an immediate visceral, gut acceptance of Rilke’s words when I read “Every Angel is terrifying.” It reminded me of my love of studying stars when I was a child, and the terror that I felt when I began to understand, in a small way, the immeasurably vast distances between stars and how minute in comparison to the scale of the universe we all are (despite our species’ limitless capacity for self-aggrandizement). That terrifying realization put a quick end to that line of study for me. And he does, at least to my understanding, clearly describe how in the face of that vastness, humans shut themselves down, to shield themselves from the enormity of what surrounds us in order to protect ourselves. His opening line of the first elegy so powerfully expresses this – “Who, if I cried out would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed in his more potent being.”
But, more than an expression of humanity’s relationship to the infinite, invisible world, the poems are elegies – laments for the dead. But it is not just the dead that concern Rilke, but the relationship that the living have to those who have left the world of the living. The perhaps inevitable result of the too early death of my own father, this subject has never been far from my mind. How it is that we can bear such grief of loss is at the heart of these poems. While most people seem to me to find ways to ignore their mortality, or push it down to some deep place where they can avoid thinking about it, that has never been the case for me. And, as I grow older, it becomes still harder to ignore. The division between the living and dead is always present for me, and that, perhaps, is the thing that attracts me to Rilke’s ten elegies.
Composer: Stanley Grill
Soprano: Lisa Rombach
Conductor: Marek Štilec
Orchestra: Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice
Producer: Jiri Štilec
Recording Engineer: Vaclav Roubal
THE POEMS
To Brooklyn Bridge: the music begins looking down into the swirling dark waters beneath the bridge – then up through the cables of the bridge, like a giant harp, playing against the sunlit sky.
Ave Maria: Columbus crosses rough Atlantic seas on his first voyage home to Spain, his mind filled with visions of Cathay.
The Harbor Dawn: A chilly fog-filled dawn at the Bridge, fog horns and buoy bells call out through the fog. Then the sun.
Van Winkle: The modern world is evoked, as gun-grey macadam crosses the American continent. The sounds of a grind-organ elicit memories of childhood.
The River: Spanning America are signs of commerce – jingles, advertisements, telegraph poles – and hobos riding the rails, which gradually transition to a great vision of waters, the river of life, flowing down to the sea and taking everything with it.
The Dance: An ecstatic vision of the old pre-Columbian world, in which an Indian warrior seeks the spirit of America in the guise of Pocahontas, a princess who becomes corn, the land.
Indiana: a mother of the prairie bids farewell to her son, who leaves home, likely never to return, for a life of adventure on the high seas.
Cutty Sark: The poet, in a bar in South Street, meets an old sailor who regales him with tales of the sea. After wandering drunkenly through the streets, the poet returns home, to collapse into bed dreaming of the great sailing ships of old.
Cape Hatteras: A great vision, spanning vistas of time, as the great continent arises from the sea, later to become the earth mother of the pre-Columbian world, later the ground upon which Walt Whitman walked and saw his vision of America, the Wright brothers sailed the air – to transform into WW I young Americans fighting in the air over France.
Southern Cross: the first of three songs, the poet’s imagining of the idyllic woman, makes it impossible to find love in the real world. He imagines Eve, Magdalene, Mary and Venus.
National Winter Garden: a different vision of woman – the one presented on stage at the burlesque shows popular in the 1920s.
Virginia: A young man waits for his girl to emerge from her office tower in Manhattan, with dreams of a good time. But she leaves him flat.
Quaker Hill: an vision, encompassing all of time, that leads to a particular moment in time in a quaint historical village in upstate New York.
The Tunnel: a dark vision of Hell, symbolized by a descent into the subway. As the subway rider descends, overhead, the great East River flows on.
Atlantis: In a culminating, ecstatic vision, the bridge emerges, like the lost continent, to connect past to present, coast to coast, city to prairie, all in one song, one bridge of fire.
MUSICAL REFERENCES
Ave Maria – Con amores, la mi madre (Juan de Anchieta)
The River – Deep River (traditional); My Old Kentucky Home (Stephen Foster); Casey Jones (Wallace Saunders); Some Sunny Day (Irving Berlin)
Indiana – The Lousy Miner (folk song)
Cutty Sark – The Rose of Stamboul (Leo Fall)
Cape Hatteras – Panis Angelicus (Saint-Saens)
Southern Cross – Maria Magdelene et altera Maria (Francisco Guerrero); Maria Magdelene et altera Maria (Andrea Gabrieli)
Virginia – I’m Coming Home Virginia (Donald Heywood)
Quaker Hill – How Can I Keep from Singing (Robert Lowry); The Bells of the Angelus (anonymous); Angelus (Victor Herbert)
The Tunnel – Te Deum (Bruckner)
THE BRIDGE, a symphonic fantasy for viola & orchestra, inspired by the 15 poems in the American poet Hart Crane’s epic poem of America.
A small, blue edition of Hart Crane’s masterpiece has been living in my library for decades. The thought of doing something musically with it popped into mind now and then, but I never quite mustered the courage to do anything with it. However, during the early days of coronavirus driven isolation, when the importance of human connectedness, so aptly symbolized by the image of the Brooklyn Bridge, had been driven home by a tiny virus, the time had come.
For those so inclined, read the poem. The Bridge, over the course of its 15 chapters, is an attempt to capture the essence of America in the 1920s, as Crane experienced it. I think he succeeded in capturing the complexities of America – from its violent beginnings as the culture of native Americans was crushed by expanding European cultures to the crass commercialism that erupted at the turn of the century (and still exists, in spades, today), tempered by the buoyant optimism and hope for mankind in spirits like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and the American transcendentalists. But above all, the poem relies upon the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of connectedness, spanning the myriad of events across time and geography that culminate in what America is today.
Crane’s poem attempted perhaps too much. The span of the Brooklyn Bridge became a symbol of everything connected to everything else – the past to the present, urban America to rural America, a vast dream of America from its pre-European existence to the bustling America of big, industrial cities and great railroads spanning the continent.
In this music, the solo viola, in its middle range, spans between the musical soundscapes that represent the images evoked by the poem. It reaches between the low and high instruments, between the dark, swirling eddies of water beneath the bridge to the searing sunlight, piercing the harp-like cables of the bridge, while seagulls soar overhead. It also is the voice of the poem’s protagonist, seeking redemption in a violent and crassly commercial world.
Scattered, like leaves, in the music, are musical apparitions from the past – a fragment of a melody from a court composer to Ferdinand and Isabella, a made-up Irish gig, American folk tunes, bits of jazz and flashes of tunes from the 1920s that Hart Crane would have heard during his days in New York.
CREDITS
COMPOSER: Stanley Grill
VIOLA SOLO: Brett Deubner
CONDUCTOR: Marek Štilec
ENSEMBLE: Komorní filharmonie Pardubice
PRODUCER: Jiří Štilec
RECORDING ENGINEER: Václav Roubal
RECORDING DATES: September 19-21, 2022
RECORDING LOCATION: Dům hudby, Sukova třída 1260, 530 21 Pardubice
RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2023
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GLOBAL MUSIC AWARDS SILVER MEDAL WINNER March 2023
CLOUZINE MAGAZINE BEST CLASSICAL ALBUM FALL 2023
“In this music…Stanley Grill has captured the idiom of the nation well and unmistakably”
PIZZICATO – Remy Franck's Journal of Classical Music
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As occasionally happens, yesterday in a conversation with a performing musician, I was told that she feared that learning music theory might stifle her musical creativity. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that, as that thought seems somewhat commonplace. Nevertheless, whenever I hear it, I am taken aback. Music has a history that dates back to the very beginnings of our species and as it exists today, is the product of thousands upon thousands of years of accumulated experience and knowledge. That anyone who has made music their calling can willfully ignore all of that on the presumption that their creativity is somehow tied to their lack of knowledge of their own craft is, at best, depressing.
That misconception has at its root yet another misconception about music theory, namely, that theory is a rigid set of rules that sets boundaries about what can and cannot be done in music. It is not a set of rules. To the contrary, it is simply a vocabulary that allows us to describe what happens in music. As an example, I have on occasion read remarks that even Bach occasionally “broke the rule” against parallel 5ths. There is no such rule! Rather, there is an accurate observation of the music composed during Bach’s time that parallel 5ths were generally avoided in order in order to maintain the independence of the different moving voices. Earlier periods of music used parallelism extensively, but as Western music became more contrapuntal, that changed. That’s not a rule, it’s a description and explanation of the techniques employed by composers in order to achieve a certain kind of sound.
It is the descriptive language of music theory that provides the analytical framework to understand what is happening in any sort of music – and, more importantly, to understand what differentiates great music from the rest of the pack. That is the opposite of a drag weight on creativity – but rather an essential tool to create better music. Music is a craft, and like any other craft, the more you know about it, the more you practice it, and the harder you work at gaining both a deep and broad understanding of it through the ages, the better musician you will be.