Percussion. A loud episode.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of 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. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you. And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… Percussion.

A percussion instrument is pretty much anything that can be hit, tapped, scraped, scratched or banged. In an orchestra it is generally the responsibility of the individual or small group up the back… the ones who get to make the most noise and have to master the most instruments and who, in this episode, help give us armies fighting on an ice covered lake, a peasant girl dancing herself to death, big gates, small rocks and a visit to The Overlook Hotel with works from the composers Prokofiev, Sculthorpe, Bartok, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky. Music that features percussion is frequently on the loud side… but perhaps not surprisingly sometimes composers seem to get excited combining very quiet bits with very loud bits. So, if you have the opportunity, this episode is one where you might want to turn the volume up a bit.

But first… of course… a minute of Russian medieval history. In the year 1242 a battle took place as part of an ongoing struggle between… to massively simplify it… the Russian Orthodox Republic of Novgorod and the Roman Catholic Teutonic Knights of Livonia. The forces of Novgorod under the twenty-year old Prince Alexander Nevsky won the battle which took place beside the frozen Lake Chud on what is now the border between Estonia and Russia.

As the story was written down and revised over the centuries… ‘beside the frozen lake’ became ‘on the frozen lake’. And then in his 1938 feature film ‘Alexander Nevsky’ the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein added the visually powerful but extremely fictional plot device of the Teutonic Knights falling through breaking ice into the lake as they are slaughtered. It is amazing filmmaking and for most people this ‘version’ has become a factual representation of a formative event in the national sagas of Russia. And the power of the sequence in the film (which you can find on YouTube) is enormously helped by the music written for the film by Sergei Prokofiev. A year after the film was released to great acclaim, Prokofiev made a version of the score of ‘Alexander Nevsky’ for concert performance for singers, a choir and orchestra. And the music from ‘The Battle on the Ice’ sequence is one of the highlights… And… to at last get back to the theme of this episode… it is a field day for the percussion section. The score calls for…  timpani, 2 snare drums, bass drum, cymbals, 2 tambourines, wood block, rattle, triangle, xylophone, tubular bells, tamtam, and a  gong. Here is Claudio Abbado conducting the LSO with Prokofiev’s ‘The Battle on the Ice’ from ‘Alexander Nevsky;. It is about 12 minutes. The first couple of minutes are a bit quiet.

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That was Claudio Abbado conducting the LSO with Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘The Battle on the Ice’ from ‘Alexander Nevsky’. Alright, it’s hard to get further from a frozen lake between Estonia and Russia than Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory. The composer Peter Sculthorpe was in many of his works inspired by features of Australian geography. Here’s what he wrote about his 1990 work for organ, strings and percussionhe called ‘Little Nourlangie’…

This is a five minute gem and I think gives a great introduction to Perer Sculthorpe’s distinct musical language. If the music publisher Faber & Faber’s website is correct the last time it was performed was in 2001. Which is I think something of a shame. But at least we have this recording of David Drury playing the organ and Edo de Waart conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

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That was Peter Sculthorpe’s ‘Little Nourlangie’ from 1990 for organ, strings and percussion. David Drury played the organ and Edo de Waart conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Next up in this episode of ‘Classical for Everyone’ focused on percussion is the slow section from Bela Bartok’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’ from 1936.The celesta is a sort of smallish piano where the keys hit metal plates but this section is actually dominated by other percussion instruments… the xylophone and the timpani. This 8 minute section also falls into the category of compositions by Bartok that were given the name ‘Night Music’… and whilst he didn’t come up with the term, apparently Bartok didn’t mind it. It describes a style which he used mostly in the slow sections of multi-part compositions in his mature period. It is characterized by what the American academic David Schneider describes as "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies". And for horror movie fans that eeriness is what perhaps led the director Stanley Kubrick to use the piece as part of the score to his film ‘The Shining’. So, if the music reminds you of Jack Nicholson driving up to the Overlook Hotel… then that is perfectly appropriate. Here is the slow section from Bela Bartok’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’ with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

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That was Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the slow section of Bela Bartok’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’.  

In the musical depiction of imagined pagan rites of ancient Eurasia in his 1913 ballet ‘The Rite of Spring’… which includes a young maiden dancing herself to death… Igor Stravinsky threw in a lot of percussion and in fact he uses the whole orchestra in a kind of percussive way to emphasise the complex, unexpected and continually shifting rhythms of the work. Over a century later it is still considered a landmark in the development of western classical music. It is pretty fair to say that at the time there really had not been anything like it. Without getting into the complex and contradictory details of the night there was in fact something of an actual riot at the first performance as people wanting a traditional evening out with pretty boys and girls jetéeing across the stage clashed with young radicals who could not have been happier with Stravinsky’s grinding, clashing chords and revolutionary rhythmic choices.  In 1914 Stravinsky took the ballet music and made a concert stage version of it and here is just the beginning, about 12 minutes of it, from a pretty well thought-of recording from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati. Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite Of Spring’.

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That was the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati with the opening four sections of Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite Of Spring’.

Back to this Classical For Everyone episode with a bit of an emphasis on percussion. And with a slightly surprising skew to Russia. The Russian painter and architect Viktor Hartmann died suddenly in 1873. The following year an exhibition of his paintings, sketches and watercolours was mounted in St Petersburg. His close friend the composer Modest Mussorgsky was inspired to write a work for solo piano called ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ where each part in a sense describes a particular work of Hartmann’s from the show. The final section is called ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ based on a design by Hartmann that won a competition for a memorial gate in Kiev but which was ultimately not built. There is a real grandeur to the solo piano version but as the focus in this episode is percussion I’m going to play you the version arranged for orchestra by Maurice Ravel in 1922. Suffice to say the percussionists are kept busy. Here again is the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan with ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ from Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’.  It is about 6 minutes long.

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That was the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan with ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ from Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. Arranged for orchestra by Maurice Ravel.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. If you would like to listen to past episodes or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is 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 almost 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 have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… This is another little bit of music by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok I stumbled across when putting this episode together. It is his ‘Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion’ from 1937. Here’s a little Wikipedia blurb that explains a bit about the piece… The score requires four performers: two pianists and two percussionists, who play seven instruments between them: timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, snare drum, gong and xylophone. In the published score Bartok provides highly detailed instructions for the percussionists, stipulating, for example, which part of a suspended cymbal is to be struck with what type of stick.

Here is the final section. It is about 7 minutes long and is performed by… Argerich, Martha(pf)/Kovacevich, Stephen(pf)/Goudswaard, Willy(perc)/De Roo, Michael(perc)