At a glorious concert about America’s past, I think I found some implications for the future of classical music in America.
The performance was of “A Hundred Years On,” an oratorio by the composer Peter Boyer and the librettist Mark Campbell celebrating the Centennial Exposition of 1876, America’s first grand fair. The exhibition was a sprawling, boisterous display of America’s technological might, with exhibits from all of the 37 states and other countries. I enjoyed the oratorio at the Highmark Mann open-air concert venue — celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer — in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, where the centennial fair took place.
Boyer and Campbell crafted a soaring portrait of five people at the fair — a homemaker, a young man besotted by Alexander Graham Bell’s demonstration of the telephone, a mother who lost a son in the Civil War and is appalled at the display of military weaponry, a Polish immigrant woman and a Black man working as a waiter in one of the restaurants.
But as I took my seat, I was troubled to learn that the oratorio would be accompanied by large-screen projections.
It’s not uncommon for orchestras to play film scores while the film itself is shown. It helps fill seats, but the whole idea has always seemed a little low-rent to me.
Now I think I was wrong to have such a narrow sense of what a “real” concert should be.
For one thing, movie music can be as complex, subtle and even sublime as classical music written for the ear. Before the oratorio, the orchestra played a brief John Williams piece, “Liberty Fanfare,” that sounded a lot like his film scores — and, in isolation, textured and exciting. Even without starships and such, the piece held my ear and left me wanting more.
Watching the old adventure movie “The Sea Hawk” some time ago, I found myself almost wanting to turn off the picture and hear the music alone. It turned out to be by the esteemed Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, backing Errol Flynn with music as stirring as his operas like “Die tote Stadt.” And wouldn’t you know, it’s available as a stand-alone symphonic piece.
It has also been common in the classical world to suppose that music written to follow action, movement and words is less serious than music written only to be heard. But as my friend the conductor John Mauceri points out to me, Richard Wagner was explicit about exactly which actions and expressions were to correspond to his opera scoring, and yet there is nothing tacky about “Tristan und Isolde.”
Even the scoring of “Looney Tunes” can be not just catchy but quite fine, and in the lesser-known ones, too. In “Little Red Riding Rabbit” the composer Carl Stalling tied the song “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” to Bugs Bunny and the Big Bad Wolf doing a chase up and down a staircase, resulting in a kind of self-standing piece of music. (I hum it to myself all the time, and not enough credit goes to the man who scored Stalling’s music for the orchestra, Milt Franklyn.)
Nevertheless I carried into the oratorio my bias against mixing classical music with pictures. At first I tried to look away from the projections, but gradually found that they made the piece a more complete experience. Boyer’s gorgeous music suggests an aerial view of the exhibition? The projections showed us one. Campbell’s lyrics gave voice to human beings, and the projections showed us what they saw — cannons, the first telephone. What really got me was when the oratorio got to the titanic Corliss steam engine that powered the fair’s machinery hall, turned on at the start of the fair by President Ulysses Grant and the visiting emperor from Brazil, Dom Pedro. The projections did a Ken Burns-style climb up a photograph of the 45-foot-tall engine. You might expect Boyer to have written music that churned like an engine or blared mightily. But he instead went into a harmony that sounded cowed and almost disturbed — I’m pretty sure I heard what musicologists know as the Mixolydian mode (think of the harmony in “Old Devil Moon” under the words “look at you”). It was a deft portrait of how that dinosaur-size engine would have made many people feel — “What is this thing going to do???” — and the audience could see the thing as the music described it.
I came away thinking that audiences should more often encounter classical music with projections even when the music was not written for a movie.
Ever more by the year, students in my music history class ask for visual accompaniment to the selections we listen to in class. Maybe just a series of evocative backgrounds. Or, orchestras are also showing abstract shapes moving with the piece as a kind of visual music, and my students also like to at least just see the performers as well as hear them.
I playfully ask them, “Why do you have to see it?” But I know why. They have grown up seeing music as much as hearing it. With iPhones steeping the modern human being in images 24/7, listening to extended forms of music without visual illustration will appeal ever less.
If we knew only television, we wouldn’t think of pictureless television — i.e., radio — as more “real.” These days, most seem to prefer FaceTime as an advance over the telephone.
After “A Hundred Years On,” I thought of the Black composer William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” of 1934. It is so gripping that it played Carnegie Hall at a time when lynching was common. My students like it on first hearing. They would like it even more with stirring projections created by serious filmmakers (Spike Lee?). And then maybe even starting to listen to the music alone, thus being primed to listen to other extended pieces that way.
But for now, I am keeping “A Hundred Years On” with me as music with pictures. I (almost) hate to admit that it will stay with me longer.
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