12-24: John Dunstaple ( Dunstable ) / Orlando Consort 1995 - Bernard Hermann Film Music / Salonen 1996 - Alban Berg Chamber Concerto Boulez / Barenboim 1967 | Violin Concerto Boulez / Zukerman 1984 - Alec Wilder : Hansel & Gretel / Barbara Cook | Rudy Vallee 1958

Not shown: Friedrich Klose, Francisco Pujol & Alan Fluck

1453 – John Dunstaple [Dunstable] (English composer, astronomer, astrologer & mathematician)
1823 – Philipp Christoph Kayser (German pianist, composer & poet, friend of Goethe)
1862 – Joseph Funk (American music publisher, composer & teacher)
1898 – Eugeniusz Pankiewicz (Polish composer & pianist, brother of Józef)
1908 – François-Auguste Gevaert (Belgian composer & organist)
1930 – Oskar Nedbal (Czech violist, composer & conductor)
1932 – Eyvind Alnæs (Norwegian composer, pianist, organist & choirmaster)
1935 – Alban Berg (Austrian composer)
1941 – Siegfried Alkan (German composer)
1942 – Friedrich Klose (German composer)
1944 – Joseph Gustav Mraczek (Czech-born German composer & conductor)
1945 – Francisco Pujol (Spanish choirmaster, musicologist & composer)
1961 – Guy de Lioncourt (French composer)
1966 – Gaspar Cassadó i Moreu (Spanish cellist & composer)
1972 – César Geoffray (French composer, violinist & conductor)
1975 – Bernard Herrmann (American film & concert composer & conductor, associated in particular with the films of Alfred Hitchcock)
1980 – Alec Wilder (American multi-genre composer)
1980 – Siggie Nordstrom (American model, actress, socialite & lead singer of The Nordstrom Sisters)
1987 – Betty Noyes (American actress & singer, dubbed singing voice of Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain)
1992 – Bobby LaKind (American conga player, backup drummer, singer & songwriter, The Doobie Brothers)
1994 – Rossano Brazzi (Italian actor & singer, Three Coins in the Fountain, South Pacific)
1997 – Alan Fluck (English music teacher, Farnham Grammar School, pupils included Jeffrey Tate)
1997 – Anthea Joseph (English manager of London folk music venue The Troubadour & co-producer at Witchseason Productions)
2000 – Nick Massi (American bass singer & bass guitarist, The Four Seasons)
2002 – Luciano Chailly (Italian composer & music administrator in radio & television, father of Riccardo & Cecilia)
2002 – Jake Thackray (English folk singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet & journalist)
2006 – Braguinha aka João de Barro [Carlos Alberto Ferreira Braga] (Brazilian composer & singer of sambas & marchinhas)
2006 – Kenneth Sivertsen (Norwegian multi-genre composer, singer, guitarist, poet & comedian)
2010 – Eino Tamberg (Estonian composer)
2011 – Johannes Heesters (Dutch actor & singer)

Here we have some notable composers who worked in multiple genres... one of the all-time great film composers... and two important figures in the British folk-music renaissance of the 60s & 70s. But most prominently, we have the earliest truly great English composer; and the composer who more than any other represents the point of continuation between the Austro-German Romantic tradition that ended with Mahler and Strauss and the atonal modernism of the 20th century.

Both Dunstaple and Berg can be thought of as transitional composers. With Berg, it's easy to hear why. Berg's highly expressive 12-tone music recalls the overripe Romanticism of the late music of Mahler to a greater extent than does that of Schoenberg, and to a far greater extent than does that of Webern - those other two main representatives of the Second Viennese School.

With Dunstaple, one has to put on 14th- and 15-century ears to appreciate how his late-Medieval music anticipates an important feature of Renaissance music. In medieval Britain, musical practice had developed in a more independent fashion than it had on the continent, one salient result of this being that the interval of a 3rd is far more prevalent in it, lending it a greater sweetness than is found in French and Italian music of the period.

Starting in the late 14th century, that sweet sound of 3rds starts to catch on outside of England. As the decades wear on - and thanks in no small measure to the popularity of Dunstaple and other English composers of his day - we find more and more that those 3rds start being treated as stable sonorities. It's when the 3rd starts finally being admitted all over Europe as a true consonance alongside the perfect 5th and octave that we can say the transition from Medieval harmony to Renaissance harmony is complete. Or something like that.

10-19a: Son House 1941-1942 Library of Congress - Jacqueline Du Pré : Elgar | Delius | Saint-Saëns 1

1758 – Johan Helmich Roman (Swedish composer, the "Father of Swedish Music")
1786 – Pietro Alessandro Pavona (Italian organist, composer & church music director)
1932 – Arthur Friedheim [Артур Фридхайм] (Russian pianist, conductor & composer, active in Britain, the United States & Canada, pupil of Liszt)
1956 – Isham Jones (American jazz bandleader, saxophonist, bassist & songwriter, "It Had To Be You")
1959 – Stanley Bate (English composer & pianist)
1960 – Günter Raphael (German composer & music editor)
1961 – John Fernström (Swedish composer, conductor, teacher, violinist, poet & author)
1987 – Jacqueline du Pré (English cellist, spouse of Daniel Barenboim)
1988 – Son House (American blues singer, guitarist & songwriter)
1992 – Maurice le Roux (French conductor & composer, pupil of Messiaen, known for soundtracks)
1995 – Don Cherry (American jazz pocket trumpeter, cornetist, pianist & composer)
1997 – Glen Buxton (American rock guitarist & songwriter, Alice Cooper)
2000 – Hortense Ellis (Jamaican reggae singer, younger sister of Alton)
2005 – Dallas Cook (American ska-punk trombonist, Suburban Legends)

Jacqueline du Pré, Son House, and Don Cherry. There are three names that likely wouldn't be mentioned in the same book, much less in the same phrase, if it weren't for October the 19th. But they do have one other thing in common, which is that all of these musicians were at the absolute top of the heap within their respective genres - namely, classical violoncello, Delta blues, and avant-garde jazz. Let's examine the three of them chronologically, but according to year of birth, rather than year of death, as above.

Son House was not from that very first generation of Delta bluesman who were born in the 1880s and 90s, and which was occupied by the original himself, Mr. Charlie Patton. However, with a birthdate of 1902 he lay, along with Skip James, in a middle-ground between Patton's generation and that second generation of Delta bluesman, represented most famously by Robert Johnson (b. 1911). But any way you wanna slice it, it cannot be denied that with Son House's passing in 1988, it really was the end of an era, because it meant that the very last of the old-time Delta bluesman who'd made their first commercial recordings in the 1920s was now gone.

And what a great bluesman he was. Often using a slide on his National steel guitar, House infused his fervent vocal performances with a rare amount of borrowings from the style of 19th-century black spirituals, and the hypnotic repetitiousness of plantation work songs. It may represent as close a performance style as many 20th-century performers ever got to the proto-blues of those years before recording technology existed, or before people who had access to such technology thought music of this sort was worth using it for.

Don Cherry, player of both the tiny pocket trumpet and the normal-sized cornet, was one of the pivotal figures in some of the most exciting developments in avant-garde jazz in the 1960s thru 80s. He's most associated with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, nine of whose albums he played on between the late 50s and early 70s. He also appeared with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and was one of many players to appear on Carla Bley's avant-garde jazz opera Escalator Over The Hill.

But Cherry also led a couple dozen visionary sessions of his own, in which his musical explorations led him to what would become known as "global fusion," a style which signaled jazz finally dissolving into the larger world of music, incorporating not just jazz and rock but potentially all music of all peoples into its improvisational framework. In the hands of Cherry, and similarly-minded individuals, jazz was now becoming not just the music of African-Americans, and of hip and educated European-Americans, but of the whole planet.


(more on Jackie later...)

10-04a: Schoenberg Erwartung | Pierrot Lunaire | Lied der Waldtaube / Boulez | Martin | Minton | Norman 1977-79

Arnold Schoenberg: Vision (Satire) - Oil on cardboard (undated).

As I promised earlier today, here's an extra post dedicated to the memory of Marie Gutheil-Schoder, the soprano who created the solitary role in the original production of Schoenberg's Erwartung in 1924. She was known in her day as not just a great opera singer, but as a great operatic actress. Gustav Mahler called her a musical genius. That's something that should certainly make you sit up and notice! Unfortunately, Gutheil-Schoder left behind only a very few recordings: a couple excerpts from Carmen, an aria from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and some duets from Tales of Hoffmann, all recorded in 1902. But her legacy did live on in the form of the great mezzo Risë Stevens, who was one of her students.

So, it's a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. You're feeling a great emptiness in your life... a vast, gaping hole, one that only post-Romantic Expressionist atonality can fill. You've come to the right place! (Read more below...)