I did not like this piece on first listen – then I read about it’s background: the description of Janacek’s unrequited love and pining. And now the piece is very powerful to me.

Janacek once wrote: “I maintain that a pure musical note means nothing unless it is pinned down in life, blood and locale; otherwise, it is a worthless toy.”

And that is exactly true for this piece, the “Intimate Letters”. How many songs do we each have in our personal lives that are tied to a certain event or emotion that triggers our memory when we hear it? Or to have a piece like this framed with new information so the performance takes on a deeper perceived meaning.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He-c3K18sb4

The following from:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94294582

At age 63, Czech composer Leos Janacek began his most unusual writing project — a constant stream of more than 700 love letters written to a married woman 37 years his junior. It’s remarkable, considering that the young woman, named Kamila, expressed little feeling for Janacek or his music.

Even so, Janacek filled his letters with passion. At an age when most people slow down, Janacek, fueled by his own unrequited love, went into high gear. He composed some of his best music, including the String Quartet No. 2 — called, appropriately, Intimate Letters.

Commentator Rob Kapilow pinpoints a section from the third movement of the quartet which he says reveals much about Janacek’s unique sound-world. The passage is actually a musical portrait of Kamila, one that Janacek described to her in a letter: “It will be very cheerful, and then dissolve into a vision of your image, transparent, as if in the mist.”

Power-Packed Emotional Nuggets

“As obsessed as he was with Kamila,” Kapilow says, “Janacek was obsessed with short musical ideas that could convey maximum emotional impact in the fewest possible notes.”

Janacek’s portrait begins with simple-sounding repeated notes for the viola. The music speeds up, Kapilow says, but not in the usual way.

“It’s not just a note speeding up,” he says. “It’s actually the blood quickening at the thought of Kamila, and it runs through the whole passage.”

Janacek tells us all he feels for Kamila in a compact, rhythmically clear set of notes: short-short, long-long, and a repeated note, Kapilow says. The same pattern is heard over and over, but every time it’s a little different, more complicated, with anguish at every step.

“Each time, it’s taking us deeper into his feelings for Kamila,” Kapilow says. “All these note changes are in the favor of emotion, and they are constantly surprising and shifting, just like the letters he would write — every mood would shift at an incredibly fast pace.”

Janacek once wrote: “I maintain that a pure musical note means nothing unless it is pinned down in life, blood and locale; otherwise, it is a worthless toy.”

Reading through Janacek’s letters, Kapilow says there are hints that the composer was aware of his own fictionalized love affair. Yet the fiction must have been incredibly real, driving him to compose piece after piece.

“Maybe in the areas of inspiration, the distinction between fiction and reality is unimportant,” Kapilow says. “In any case, we should all be as lucky and creative with our fictions as Janacek was with his.”

Introduction to Orchestration by Thomas Goss. See my “Orchestration” category here on my blog for more music orchestration study tips.

Thinking horizontal vs. vertical and the continuity of each instrument.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVkeFh9Qto

Thank you Thomas so much for posting your videos. I found them very helpful in many ways. One of the ways it helped me was on my setup. I’m in Macau, China and don’t have all my gear, but I have a MacBook Pro, several sound libraries from East/West Quantum Leap (Strings, Piano, Goliath, RA, Fab Four, Ministry of Rock, etc,) and a Roland JV 2080 with several sound cards. It’s been killing me the amount of time I’ve been spending in setup and trying to get the “perfect” template for my current project setup with Sibelius music notation software. Between your videos and seeing the two piano reductions of Holst’s PLANETS – I was shown it doesn’t matter if the sound is perfect – I need to just hear it in my head the way it should be; and use the notation playback with a grain of salt knowing the playback is very rough. Now I’m back on track and working on my project (and waiting for the next Thomas Goss Youtube videos of course!)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydiKMUAPSGw

Texture, Balance and Function

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcyuESHHAIg

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58OUqhYYdMQ

About Thomas Goss:

Thomas Goss’s credits as a composer include music written for dance, film, television, and the concert stage. His works have been commissioned and premiered by such groups as Marin Symphony, Earplay, Onyx String Quartet, and the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Ensemble, and he has created concerto repertoire for soloists such as violist Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca and erhuist Xiaofeng Zhang.

Goss is involved in ongoing residencies with several artistic organizations. With the Santa Rosa Symphony Young People’s Chamber Orchestra, his 4-year residency has produced a body of new work for string orchestra.

As composer/orchestrator for the Punk Rock Orchestra, Goss has arranged punk rock for orchestra, transformed classics into punk anthems, and is helping to develop a punk opera. Recently retired from the position of resident composer for Moving Arts Dance Collective, his output included collaborations with choreographers Charles Anderson, Robert Moses, and Anandha Ray.

As an educator, Thomas Goss’s activites are international in scope, with appearances as mentor and guest lecturer at Brown University, San Francisco Conservatory’s preparatory program, and at the Composers’ Association of New Zealand’s Young Composers Workshop at the Nelson School of Music in New Zealand. He helped to create the successful Composer-in-the-Schools program at School of the Arts and Lowell High School in San Francisco, now in its seventh year.

“Tane and the Kiwi,” his tone poem for narrator and orchestra, was written in collaboration with noted children’s entertainer Jennifer Moss, and premiered by Moss with the Auckland Philharmonia in several performances of the “Kiwi Kapers” series, which teaches children about both music and ecology.

In promoting the cause and awareness of contemporary music, Goss has participated in the commissioning and presentation of hundreds of works by American composers, particularly in Northern California as a director of New Release Alliance and as a member of the steering committee of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the American Composers Forum. Goss is a well-known and prolific commentator on new music and the West Coast classical music scene. His reviews, interviews and observations have appeared regularly in the journals Sounding Board, 20th/21st Century Music, and San Francisco Classical Voice.

The Thomas Goss Haircut

Now since Thomas has been posting videos for a while we’re able to compare different haircut styles. I think I prefer the shorter cut but I think Thomas should post a video and let his subscribers vote.