throatybeard
11-15-2010, 11:25 PM
The very, very sad news that Górecki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_G%C3%B3recki) has died came over the New York Times Twitter Friday afternoon at perhaps 2PM our time. I had thought frequently about him in recent years, as he was getting up there in years, but I didn't know he was sick. He was very sick. He was apparently always sick (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/12/henryk-gorecki-obituary).
This hits me hard. I started writing this 72 hours ago, but I wasn't finishing it. The only contemporary composer I feel as much for is Glass, probably not Glass even. Arvo Pärt? He also struck me as the sort who would continue to produce into his 80s or 90s if he made it. I bought a NYT on Saturday just for the print obituary. I don't think I've felt a musician's death like this since Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (06), or Johnny Cash (03).
(In 2003-04, the last year I was in Durham, I knew of Cash's death all day, from the moment the guy on NPR said "Country Music Legend..." Shalay didn't because she was at Holt. I got home before she did and drew a Cash death stick figure (http://duke.edu/~bct1/images/CashMem.jpg). I showed it to her when she walked in the door and we both bawled for like 20 minutes).
If you read the obituaries (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/arts/music/13gorecki.html?ref=todayspaper), the Third Symphony will shape the narrative. And it's unspeakably beautiful. But my favorite has been his Miserere, which he dedicated to protest victims of military violence in Poland in 1981. Miserere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(G%C3%B3recki)) shares some of the other Górecki hallmarks, it's modal, the cantus firmus, the huge, arching dynamic contrast from beginning to middle to end, the dynamic contrasts over all, the meditative repetition, the religious (not necessarily, though often, Catholic) texts.
But there are two simple but astonishing effects in Miserere. First, the most amazing thing to me has always been, it's all men's voices, until about 13m in, and then the women's voices come in, the sopranos, and the effect is like...gold? And then, the only...melody?...it's not that the other phrases haven't been melodies exactly...but the only treble line that is, all, balls-out, like check me out, I'm a melody, is written for the sopranos at about 18m. Even then, it's only balls-out by comparison to the meditative composition that precedes it.
The second is that, while the Latin text comprises but five words, (Domine Deus noster, miserere nobis) three dominate...dominate is the wrong word...three only are present in the first half hour of the piece. This underscores the intensity of the meditation. It's 90% Lord Our God, and just 10% Have Mercy on Us. (And 0% God loves me personally, check me out. Really, I think that's how it should be). The poetic effect is utterly simple yet potent. When "miserere nobis" comes in late, the effects are simple but the impact is huge. The architecture of the tonal structure of the work is more complicated, and equally powerful: to quote the liner notes on the 1994 Chicago SO Chorus recording of Miserere,
Miserere comes to rest on a chord of a-minor, the root of the entire piece and a unifying device that is a familiar feature of Górecki's music. In this instance, the subtleties of the opening are contained in a new and contrapuntal approach to animating this underlying harmonic idea. The eight parts enter in turn from the bass upwards, over an extraordinarily sustained span of some twenty five minutes. Górecki gives a different melody to each of the eight voices as it enters. But they are unified by a background chord built up in thirds from the second basses' first A-natural: each subsequent voice is centered on the next note in this arpeggio of thirds (A-C-E-G-B-D-F) until the note A is reached again with the entry of the first sopranos. The architectural procedure is very close to the canon at the beginning of Górecki's Third Symphony, except that the time-scale is three times magnified. The significant difference here, however, is that each voice starts off with its own melodic identity.
O Domina Nostra, Beatus Vir, Good Night, Kleines Requiem, Totus Tuus, Amen some of the SQs, these are all great pieces. But it always comes back to that Third Symphony, doesn't it...I've read things that said that exasperated him to some degree.
It's difficult to overstate what a miraculous phenomenon the sudden, viral popularity of his Third Symphony was in 1992. It was already sixteen years old, so it's not like it was a new work that was getting press because of performances. A lot of people don't pay attention to Classical, and of those who do, a lot of Classical people barely pay attention to Contemporary--fewer did back then. Then the Zinman/Upshaw record made it to #6 on the United Kingdom overall pop charts. Not the Classical charts, the whole deal, and this, back when people paid for music. Nonesuch said they were selling 10K copies a day in the US. It displaced Itzhak Perleman and Kathy Battle's The Bach Album on the US Classical charts, an album that had held the top spot for over a year. I was in 11th grade; it was on in the Buckhead Tower Records in Atlanta where previously they never would have played Classical in the main room. The effect was greater in the UK from what I read. And, it's in Polish. English language audiences aren't exactly progressive about listening to things in other languages, especially if you throw out Italian/French/German. By 1993, they were using the Third in things like the PBS documentary on the National Holocaust Museum. Indeed, the second movement, a Polish Ave Maria, has sort of become the equivalent of Adagio for Strings but for the Holocaust and WWII.
The Nonesuch recordings of the Third and Miserere are still available. I miss him. He's very important.
This hits me hard. I started writing this 72 hours ago, but I wasn't finishing it. The only contemporary composer I feel as much for is Glass, probably not Glass even. Arvo Pärt? He also struck me as the sort who would continue to produce into his 80s or 90s if he made it. I bought a NYT on Saturday just for the print obituary. I don't think I've felt a musician's death like this since Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (06), or Johnny Cash (03).
(In 2003-04, the last year I was in Durham, I knew of Cash's death all day, from the moment the guy on NPR said "Country Music Legend..." Shalay didn't because she was at Holt. I got home before she did and drew a Cash death stick figure (http://duke.edu/~bct1/images/CashMem.jpg). I showed it to her when she walked in the door and we both bawled for like 20 minutes).
If you read the obituaries (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/arts/music/13gorecki.html?ref=todayspaper), the Third Symphony will shape the narrative. And it's unspeakably beautiful. But my favorite has been his Miserere, which he dedicated to protest victims of military violence in Poland in 1981. Miserere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(G%C3%B3recki)) shares some of the other Górecki hallmarks, it's modal, the cantus firmus, the huge, arching dynamic contrast from beginning to middle to end, the dynamic contrasts over all, the meditative repetition, the religious (not necessarily, though often, Catholic) texts.
But there are two simple but astonishing effects in Miserere. First, the most amazing thing to me has always been, it's all men's voices, until about 13m in, and then the women's voices come in, the sopranos, and the effect is like...gold? And then, the only...melody?...it's not that the other phrases haven't been melodies exactly...but the only treble line that is, all, balls-out, like check me out, I'm a melody, is written for the sopranos at about 18m. Even then, it's only balls-out by comparison to the meditative composition that precedes it.
The second is that, while the Latin text comprises but five words, (Domine Deus noster, miserere nobis) three dominate...dominate is the wrong word...three only are present in the first half hour of the piece. This underscores the intensity of the meditation. It's 90% Lord Our God, and just 10% Have Mercy on Us. (And 0% God loves me personally, check me out. Really, I think that's how it should be). The poetic effect is utterly simple yet potent. When "miserere nobis" comes in late, the effects are simple but the impact is huge. The architecture of the tonal structure of the work is more complicated, and equally powerful: to quote the liner notes on the 1994 Chicago SO Chorus recording of Miserere,
Miserere comes to rest on a chord of a-minor, the root of the entire piece and a unifying device that is a familiar feature of Górecki's music. In this instance, the subtleties of the opening are contained in a new and contrapuntal approach to animating this underlying harmonic idea. The eight parts enter in turn from the bass upwards, over an extraordinarily sustained span of some twenty five minutes. Górecki gives a different melody to each of the eight voices as it enters. But they are unified by a background chord built up in thirds from the second basses' first A-natural: each subsequent voice is centered on the next note in this arpeggio of thirds (A-C-E-G-B-D-F) until the note A is reached again with the entry of the first sopranos. The architectural procedure is very close to the canon at the beginning of Górecki's Third Symphony, except that the time-scale is three times magnified. The significant difference here, however, is that each voice starts off with its own melodic identity.
O Domina Nostra, Beatus Vir, Good Night, Kleines Requiem, Totus Tuus, Amen some of the SQs, these are all great pieces. But it always comes back to that Third Symphony, doesn't it...I've read things that said that exasperated him to some degree.
It's difficult to overstate what a miraculous phenomenon the sudden, viral popularity of his Third Symphony was in 1992. It was already sixteen years old, so it's not like it was a new work that was getting press because of performances. A lot of people don't pay attention to Classical, and of those who do, a lot of Classical people barely pay attention to Contemporary--fewer did back then. Then the Zinman/Upshaw record made it to #6 on the United Kingdom overall pop charts. Not the Classical charts, the whole deal, and this, back when people paid for music. Nonesuch said they were selling 10K copies a day in the US. It displaced Itzhak Perleman and Kathy Battle's The Bach Album on the US Classical charts, an album that had held the top spot for over a year. I was in 11th grade; it was on in the Buckhead Tower Records in Atlanta where previously they never would have played Classical in the main room. The effect was greater in the UK from what I read. And, it's in Polish. English language audiences aren't exactly progressive about listening to things in other languages, especially if you throw out Italian/French/German. By 1993, they were using the Third in things like the PBS documentary on the National Holocaust Museum. Indeed, the second movement, a Polish Ave Maria, has sort of become the equivalent of Adagio for Strings but for the Holocaust and WWII.
The Nonesuch recordings of the Third and Miserere are still available. I miss him. He's very important.