You might've just laid an egg listening to our hens and roosters-themed show. Here are nine of our favorite musical poutly from this week's Ether Game.
Modeste Mussorgsky (1839-1881) Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel) When Mussorgsky died, he left many of his compositions unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov finished Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina and created performing editions for other works, including the piano suite Pictures from an Exhibition. In addition to the ballet of unhatched chicks, this suite also includes a representation of a cottage perched on the legs of a hen. Pictures from an Exhibition has proven attractive to orchestrators. We just listened to Maurice Ravel’s setting, the best known, which he completed in 1922. A decade earlier, he even orchestrated his own piano music featuring some musical poultry: his Mother Goose Suite.
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Symphony No. 83 in g 'The Hen' By the early 1780s, Haydn had established an international reputation as a popular composer. In 1785, Haydn received a commission from Count d’Ogny to compose six symphonies for performance in Paris. For his work, Haydn received 25 louis d’or for each symphony. Some measure of Haydn’s popularity can be seen by the fact that Mozart had been paid only five louis d’or for his Paris symphony just a few years earlier. Half of Haydn’s Paris symphonies received nicknames, reflective in part of his celebrated wit. “The Hen” symphony earned its nickname due to the “clucking” sound of the first movement’s second theme.
Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) The Chicken Reel This might be one of those instrumental pieces you’ve always heard but never knew had a name. The Chicken Reel was originally published in 1910 by Joseph Daly as a novelty song about dancing, but has entered the American folk repertoire as a popular fiddle tune. It became ubiquitous with chickens after being used often in cartoons to accompany farm activity. As a composer of many light instrumental tunes which are thoroughly embedded in American culture, Leroy Anderson’s arrangement of The Chicken Reel was one of his first pieces written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, and was one of conductor Arthur Feidler’s favorites. The cockle-doodle-do at the end is achieved by a clarinetist blowing through a detached mouthpiece.
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) The Golden Cockerel: Suite Rimsky-Korsakov’s final opera, The Golden Cockerel, was quickly composed, but getting the work past the censors was a different matter. The work’s portrayal of a lazy dictator and wasteful warfare struck a raw nerve in the wake of Russia’s defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. It was probably also not a good idea to have the work end with the king being killed by the cockerel, who pecks him on the head! The censors were fighting a losing battle, since the libretto was based on a Pushkin play already in wide circulation. Not only was the opera finally performed in 1909, but it also entered the repertoire outside of Russia. As it happens, Pushkin based his false folktale on two stories by Washington Irving: “The House of the Weathercock” and “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer.”
Heinrich von Biber (1644-1704) Sonata Representativa Biber’s reputation as a master violinist was already flourishing by the 1670s, and he later would be hailed as the best violin composer of the 17th century, known for pushing the boundaries of both the instrument and chamber music. Many of his compositions use highly characteristic effects which predate the conventions of programmatic music by nearly a century. The Sonata Representativa incorporates bird calls which were famously transcribed into musical notation by Athanasius Kirchir for his 1650 treatise on the science of music, the Musurgia Universalis. Biber’s sonata includes the hen, the cuckoo, nightingale, rooster and quail, but also the frog and the cat. A triumphant Musketeer’s March appears at the end, which is suggested by Biber to already be popular and was “borrowed” from an unknown source.
Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) Fables, H. 138 The twentieth-century composer Bohuslav Martinů left his home in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s for Paris, where he abandoned the Romantic style for a more neo-classical approach to composition. He would have likely remained in Paris for the remainder of his years had it not been for the threat of the Nazi regime. He escaped to America in 1941. Though Martinu was trained as a violinist, he was a very prolific composer and wrote music for all kinds of instrumentation. Of his four hundred-some compositions, eighty works are written for piano. His five-movement suite titled “Fables” was written soon after Martinu emigrated to Paris. The composition does not actually refer to a specific canon of fables, instead evoking folk-like abstractions of the sorts of characters who might appear in fables, such as monkeys, rabbits, chickens, and an angry bear.
Guillaume Dufay (c.1400-1474) Ave regina caelorum Duke Philip of Burgundy was given to rather elaborate ceremony and festivities. In 1430 he founded the Golden Fleece, whose membership was limited to 24 noblemen. In the year 1454, Duke Philip tried to drum up support for a new Crusade, following the Turkish capture of Constantinople. Known as the Feast of the Pheasant, this spectacle was open to the public. Wandering about the grounds, guests could see elaborate models, and even a giant pie in which were seated 24 musicians dressed in black. This caused such a sensation that it is immortalized in a Mother Goose rhyme:
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
They all began to sing.
Now, wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the King?
Sally Beamish (b. 1956) Four Songs from Hafez: No. 2 Peacock (arr. for baritone and piano) Sally Beamish spent a decade as a professional viola player in London before switching to composition in the mid-eighties. Many of her works are inspired by literary sources, including her setting of four Persian poems by the 14th century Sufi mystic Hafez. In Hafez’s love poems, birds and animals are used as poetic imagery to describe longing for the Beloved, or the ideal love. Beamish composed these settings for the Leeds Lieder Festival in Yorkshire in 2007, and used the translations of a Glasgow-based calligraphy artist whose name coincidentally is also Jila Peacock.
Traditional Cluck Old Hen We’ve featured the virtuosic bluegrass band Punch Brothers several times on Ether Game, but the band’s banjo player, Noam Pikelny, is a respected recording artist in his own right, with three billboard-charting solo albums. This arrangement of the Appalachian modal tune Cluck Old Hen is the fourth track on Pikelny’s 2011 solo album Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail, and features a collaboration with Steve Martin, who presented Pikelny in 2010 with the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo (Pikelny was the first recipient of the award). The tune showcases two distinctive banjo playing styles: Pikelny playing three-finger melodic style, which was developed for virtuosic playing by Bela Fleck, and Martin playing claw-hammer style, the old-time, pre-bluegrass way of playing the banjo, that was probably developed by 19th century black banjo players. The tune Cluck Old Hen was probably first composed by clawhammer banjo players, who use a percussive technique to add lift to their dance tunes which is called “clucking.”