Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

Mahler once said this to Bruno Walter, his protege and great advocate of Mahler's works: "What one makes music from is still the whole—that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human being "   You could almost just stop there with the last movement of Mahler 9.  This is music so full of feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, but also of also acceptance and consolation, that words fail...

It's easy to forget that Mahler, for all of his ubiquitous success nowadays, was much better known as a conductor during his life than as a composer.   He had basically one major success in his compositional career: a performance of his 8th symphony in Munich in 1910 that finally seemed to give him the approval he craved from the audience.   But for much of his compositional life, Mahler was misun...

Remember where we ended in the first movement of Mahler's 9th symphony? After a 27 minute farewell which touched on the two poles of rage and acceptance, while filling in every conceivable emotion in between, we ended in total peace, calm, and acceptance .   There is a lot about this symphony that is traditional - it has four movements, it's tonal(for the most part), it uses(mostly) traditional fo...

Two events, occurring on the same day, drove Mahler to the brink. His daughter Maria died at the age of just 4, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that would prove to be fatal. He became consumed even more so than he ever was before with the idea of death, the afterlife, and all the philosophical trials and travails that came with these thoughts.  These ideas of death did not...

Shostakovich is one of the easiest composers to do podcasts about because his life and his music is full of such incredible stories. But as easy as it is, it's also complicated. Shostakovich's music is sometimes heard as a musical history book, a testament, which it often is, but we should never lose sight of the fact that Shostakovich was a composer first, not a politician.  So today we're going...

Barber's Adagio seems to access a deep well of sadness, heartache, passion, and nostalgia in the listener that is very difficult to explain.  As dozens of commentators have noted, there is nothing in particular in the piece which is particularly remarkable.  There are no great harmonic innovations, no formal surprises, nothing NEW, at all. In fact, the music was completely anachronistic for its ti...

There are many reasons why Schubert's Unfinished Symphony remains a mystery to this day -  the literally unfinished form, the unusual way of the symphony's emergencee into public consciousness, and probably most importantly, the character of the music itself, which seems to inhabit a different realm altogether, whether in its brooding first movement or the heavenly second movement.   When Schubert...

Brahms' two piano concertos could not possibly be any more different.  The first, written when Brahms was just 25, is dramatic, stormy, and impulsive.  This makes sense seeing at it was written practically as a direct response to the attempted suicide of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann.  The second, written 22 years later when Brahms was a seasoned and mature composer at the height of his ab...

How do you orchestrate a painting? How do you take the detail and the visual imagery of a painting and translate that into something that is so vivid that even if you've never seen the painting before in your life, you can picture it as clearly as if it was right in front of you? Most people look at a painting for no longer than a minute or two at a museum, so how do you sustain that image over ne...

While the inspiration for the show today is likely obvious, I'm also very happy to get the chance to share this wonderful music with you, separate from the current horrors going on right now. Here's a little quiz for you - name a Ukrainian composer. Were you stumped? Well, so are many people by that question. Despite a long line of brilliant composers throughout history, the music of Ukrainian com...

In 1888, Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony was premiered. It was enthusiastically received by the audience, and by Tchaikovsky's friends. But Tchaikovsky's nemesis, the critics, were not so happy with the piece.   One utterly tore apart the symphony, writing after a performance in Boston: "Of the Fifth Tchaikovsky Symphony one hardly knows what to say ... The furious peroration sounds like nothing so muc...

In 1902, the great French composer Gabriel Faure said this: "It has been said that my  Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.  As to my  Requiem , perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is though...

The year is 1910. Imagine that you are a young composer, and the music world is in flux all around you. Mahler is dying, and with his death many agreed that the great Austro-German symphonic tradition that stretched from the late 18th century with Haydn all the way through Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert and more, was over and done with. Wagner's music dramas had inspired an entir...

Rimsky-Korsakov, above anything else, is regarded as a master of orchestration, the art of creating orchestral sound and color. As Rachmaninoff said about Rimsky-Korsakov's music: "When there is a snowstorm, the flakes seem to dance and drift. When the sun is high, all instruments shine with an almost fiery glow. When there is water, the waves ripple and splash audibly throughout the orchestra … ;...

In May of 1937, R. Nathaniel Dett's oratorio "The Ordering of Moses" was premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony. The performance was carried live on national radio by NBC, but about 3/4's of the way through the piece, the broadcast was halted due to unspecified scheduling conflicts, the origins of which remain mysterious and highly speculated on. And since its premiere, The Ordering of Moses has bee...

"I never really thought of them as walls. I thought of them more as boundaries. Walls are a much more serious matter. You're not supposed to be able to get through, while boundaries at least you can crossover and I think the whole crossover thing is basically what the history of music in the second part of this century is about. It's about crossing over these boundaries." If there's one quote that...

Sibelius never gets mentioned on "most" lists, the most innovative, modernistic, romantic, beautiful, conservative, ugly, violent, peaceful etc. In fact, no one is ever sure where to put him on these lists, and that's partly due to that lifespan that began when Brahms was 32 and ended when Pierre Boulez was also 32 years old. And this uncomfortable place between Romantic and Modernist is exactly w...

Last week I told you the story of the genesis of Shostakovich's 5th symphony. We talked politics, but we also talked about just the music itself. Today, I'll take you through the second half of the symphony, again first from a musical point of view. But by the end of the piece, the political conversation and the debate over the ending itself becomes unavoidable. There is no other piece whose chara...

Shostakovich's life and career was so wrapped up with his relationship to the Soviet government that it is sometimes hard to appreciate that, all else aside, he was one of the great 20th century composers. His 5th symphony is the meeting point between Shostakovich's music and the political web he was often ensnared in, and it is a piece that is still being vociferously debated. This week we're goi...

If you're not a violinist, you might not be familiar with the name Eugene Ysaye. But this violinist and composer was called "The King of the Violin" at the turn of the 20th century. Ysaye's biggest compositional achievement was inspired by a performance by the legendary Joseph Szigeti in 1923. Enraptured, Ysaye went into his studio and 24 hours later (!), he emerged with 6 solo violin sonatas, eac...

This week, on part 2 of this look at Mahler 1, we're going to take a deep dive into the third and fourth movements of this massive and massively ambitious symphony. We'll talk about Frere Jacques, bizarre woodcuts, Klezmer bands, cries of wounded hearts, the most touching consolation, terror, rage, standing horn sections, and one of the most exhilarating endings of any symphony. Mahler's 1st symph...

No one makes a grand statement quite like Gustav Mahler, and his first symphony, nearly an hour long, was one of the boldest statements ever made by a young composer. Today I'll take a look at the history behind the early inspirations behind the piece, Mahler's turbulent life, and the first two movements of the symphony. As the great Bernard Haitink said, Mahler had a talent for suffering, but thi...

There are composers whose influence outstrips their popularity. The Baroque composer Heinrich Schutz falls into this group, due to his total focus on writing sacred vocal music. But for those who know his music, he is essential. He was the most important German composer before Bach and was vital to the development of music. Today I'm going to take you through some of Schutz's greatest musical achi...

Bartok's Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste is a perfect encapsulation of Bartok's musical output. Each movement provides us with a magnifying glass into some of the qualities that made Bartok one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. But for how spectacular a piece it is, it isn't played as often as it should be, partly because of its extreme difficulty. Today, I'm going to talk yo...

Arrangements of Bach's music have been happening essentially since his music was "rediscovered" by Mendelssohn in the 19th century. But Mozart and Beethoven arranged Bach's music too, and Bach himself would recycle works for different groupings of instruments. Today, I'm going to take a look at some of those arrangements, and what kind of insights we can gain into Bach's music, the styles of the t...