Landscapes… Music for deserts, parks, rocks, islands and an entire continent.

The Music

The Talking

Hello everyone. Welcome to the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast. Five hundred years of incredible music.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and if you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. You don’t have to… and perhaps more importantly you don’t need to… but there really is some amazing music just waiting for you to discover!

 One of the challenges is where to start when there is just so much music to choose from… and it could all get annoyingly random… so each show is going to be tied together with a bit of a theme.

In the background you are listening to David Porcelijn conducting the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in a piece called ‘Penguin Ballet’ by the composer Nigel Westlake written for the 1991 documentary ‘Antarctica’.

And I’m playing it because all the music in this episode is connected by the theme of landscape or place… where composers have taken their inspiration from somewhere geographically pretty specific.

 This mix of landscapes and composers is going to be… a cave off Scotland described by Felix Mendelssohn, a rocky outcrop in Australia’s Northern Territory from Peter Sculthorpe and William Barton, New York City’s Central Park from Charles Ives, Peter Maxwell Davies in the Orkney Islands and finally Ralph Vaughan Williams coming all the way back to Antarctica.

In 1830 the composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote a ten minute piece for orchestra. He based it on a theme he had written whilst exploring the island of Staffa off the coast of Scotland by boat the previous year.

It was originally called ‘The Hebrides’ but a couple of years after the first performance Mendelssohn added, or at least, accepted another title for the work… ‘Fingal’s Cave’ after a geological feature of the island. 

And this is Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra performing Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’.

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That was Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’.

In his remarkable career the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe frequently used specific locations as inspiration for his music and in some ways I think pioneered a musical language that feels distinctly Australian.

One of the ways he did this in his later compositions or reworkings of earlier ones was to collaborate with the digeridoo virtuoso William Barton.

I’m going to play you ‘From Ubirr’ from 2003. Here is a little of what Sculthorpe wrote about it:-

 Ubirr is a large rocky outcrop in Kakadu National Park, in northern Australia. It houses some of the best and most varied Aboriginal rock painting in the country. Many of the paintings have been proved to be the earliest-known graphic expressions of the human race. They demonstrate a caring relationship with the environment, and the Aboriginal belief that the land owns the people, not the people own the land.

So here is the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and digeridoo soloist William Barton conducted by Michael Christie with Peter Sculthorpe’s ‘From Ubirr’. It is about 12 minutes long and I hope you enjoy it

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That was the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and digeridoo soloist William Barton conducted by Michael Christie with Peter Sculthorpe’s ‘From Ubirr’.

Though I’d argue that William Barton’s largely improvised part contributes so much to the work that it could perhaps be more accurately credited as composed by ‘Sculthorpe / Barton’.

In this episode the theme that links some very different pieces together is that they have been in some way inspired by specific places. And for me it’s a good excuse to leap around musically and geographically.

And there is maybe not much of a bigger leap than going from Australia’s northern territory to New York’s Central Park.

The composer Charles Ives sold insurance during the day. At night he wrote extraordinary and extraordinarily challenging music. Music that was in some ways decades ahead of what the rest of the world was writing. And as a result he was almost totally ignored for most of his life.

In 1906 he wrote a 7 minute piece for small orchestra he called ‘Central Park In the Dark’ that he described as “the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night.”

So, in a sense the sound world Ives is creating is Central Park about a decade after the end of the Civil War. Most of the piece is very quiet as Ives wants there to be a sense that the sounds are off in the distance.

This is Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Charles Ive’s ‘Central Park in the Dark’.

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That was Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic in Charles Ive’s ‘Central Park in the Dark’.

I hope you are enjoying this episode of the Classical For Everyone podcast using the idea of landscape to connect a pretty diverse bunch of music for your and my listening pleasure.

We were in Scotland with Felix Mendelssohn at the beginning of the show and now we are heading back there. The British composer Peter Maxwell Davies lived most of his life in the Orkney Islands off the coast of northern Scotland. In the 1970’s someone came up with the brilliant idea that this remote and unspoilt place would be ideal for the mining of Uranium.

Maxwell Davies was one of the leading voices in the protests that eventually stopped this from happening. As part of the process he wrote a piece called ‘Farewell to Stromness’ which is the name of one of the main towns of the Orkneys.

Perhaps deliberately under the circumstances Davies, known for some challenging music, wrote a beautifully simple piece.

It exists in a few versions but here Is the composer playing it on the piano. Here is ‘Farewell to Stromness’ by Peter Maxwell Davies.

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That was ‘Farewell to Stromness’ by Peter Maxwell Davies performed by the composer.

In 1948 the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was approached to write the score for the film ‘Scott of the Antarctic’. Later he decided that there was enough good music in the score for it to be expanded into what was his 7^th symphony although it is known as ‘Sinfonia Antartica’. And it was premiered in 1953.

This is the third section of the symphony titled ‘Landscape’. Maybe because it started life as music to go with images, I think it really does summon up images of Antarctica.

It is performed here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.

And… it starts very quietly.

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That was…’Landscape’, the third section of Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘Sinfonia Antartica’. It was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to The ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. If you would like to listen to more episodes or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is everything in Italian?’. I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.  

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… the full track I played an excerpt from at the start of the show. David Porcelijn conducting the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and guitar soloist Timothy Kain playing Nigel Westlake’s ‘Penguin Ballet’ from his score for the documentary Antarctica.