This Sunday at the Musical Instrument Museum, Valley-based orchestra Musica Nova will perform a series of quirky compositions as part of a show they’re calling “Classical Music Goes Folk.”
Warren Cohen, conductor and music director at Musica Nova, says the show is an attempt to counter popular perceptions of classical music as stodgy and elitist.
Cohen wanted to feature compositions informed by musical styles that aren’t often heard in formal recital halls. He was particularly excited by the idea of pieces written by outsiders — artists who weren’t necessarily members of the cultures whose music they were inspired by. Cohen joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
WARREN COHEN: That tension between their own identity and the identity of the folk music, which is outside of their own tradition, I think creates some very interesting musical moments.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, to give listeners a bit of a sense of what that tension sounds like, I thought we could listen to a few moments of some of the compositions that you'll be performing. The first one is the opening of Germaine Tailleferre's piano concerto from 1924.
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COHEN: What's interesting about that is Tailleferre, of course, as a woman was very much outside of the sort of shall we say the elitist part of French music of the time? And the very opening of that piece is a kind of homage to a much earlier piece, which is the Bach Third Brandenburg concerto.
And what she did in this is that she does it and almost makes fun of it. So, in a sense, her outsider status as a French woman composer, taking a look at a, you know Saxon composer from, from much earlier is this kind of tongue in cheek reference to it.
DINGMAN: Oh, that's really fascinating. I mean, please forgive this classical music layperson question. But something that comes to mind for me in, in hearing that is that I listen to the opening moments of that concerto and I'm struck by how kind of jaunty and and playful it is.
COHEN: Yes, yes. Tailleferre being a woman whose identity was very much tied up with the fact that her father had told her that being a woman composer was no better than being a street walker.
DINGMAN: Wow. Wow.
COHEN: She had this kind of, yeah, this kind of attitude towards things of, “I am very much the outsider and I am going to make fun of all of these various pretensions of the classical music tradition.” And it's there in all of her music.
DINGMAN: So let's give folks another sample of this. You're also planning to perform Lou Harrison's Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra from 1951. Let's listen to a few seconds of that.
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DINGMAN: So that is from the third movement of the suite, that movement is called First Gamelan: Allegro. Tell us what Gamelan is and, and what's interesting to you about the, the fact that we're hearing those influences in this piece.
COHEN: Gamelan is an Indonesian orchestra. It's a bunch of percussion instruments with some additional instruments as well. There's sometimes some flutes and some other things like that. And these are instruments that have been produced locally and they have their own particular type of very distinctive sound.
And it's a, it's a musical style that I, that I think everybody should listen to. Absolutely remarkable. And a number of 20th century composers have been influenced by it. But Lou Harrison's understanding of it was probably deeper than almost anyone. He was an actual ethnomusicologist. He had studied Gamelan music profoundly and knew it extremely well. And as a matter of fact, had built for him for some of his compositions, actually had a Gamelan orchestra built for him.
Now, in this particular piece, he's not writing Gamelan music, he's writing Western music with a Gamelan influence, which is a very different type of thing. And because of his profound understanding, he presents it in a way which uses some of the idioms of Gamelan sound created by the use of attack piano, which is a piano like we sometimes call it a honky tonk piano. It's a piano that has nails put into the hammers so that it produces this clanging sound … So you have this kind of very, very kind of clattery sound, which is imitating the sound of a Gamelan but with Western idiom.
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DINGMAN: So the question of cultural appropriation is, is obviously something that's much more active today than it was when most of these composers were writing. Do you see this project as, as being in dialogue with that debate?
COHEN: Yes, I do. And, and it's an interesting question because of the fact that there, there's music that I consider cultural appropriation, inappropriate cultural appropriation. But of course, that's none of the music that I'm putting on this program. The most important thing is that there has to be a respect for the cultural traditions.
I mean, I can give you some pretty funny examples of really inappropriate what …
DINGMAN: You, you've anticipated my next question.
COHEN: Yes. My favorite is a piece called “Rush Hour in Hong Kong” by Abram Chastens. There was a famous moment when about six months after he wrote it and it sold like a half a million copies and sheet music. He was on the street. He runs into the great pianist Leopold Godowsky. And Godowsky says, so Jason, I hear “Rush Hour in Hong Kong is a big hit.” And Jason says, “yeah, it's, it's in its sixth printing already.” And Godowsky says, “my God, I knew it was bad. I had no idea it was that terrible.”
So which of course, is showing the idea that if the popularity of it was almost a reflection of the fact of how inappropriate it was because this was something that would appeal to people who knew nothing about real Chinese music.
DINGMAN: Well, so let me ask you, how much do you relate to this idea of bringing a maybe not outsider approach but an alternative point of view to this type of music?
COHEN: I mean, my own background is in many ways, traditionally classical. My parents were classical musicians, but my grandfather was a bandleader. The name of his band was Harold Khan and the Russian Cossacks. And on it, yeah, he made this up because I mean, his name was Harry Cohen and he called the band Harold Khan and the Russian Cossacks.
And in addition, he had in that band, he had a Hawaiian steel guitar and he did traditional 1930s, 1940s type band music like, you know, like, Tommy Dorsey type stuff, and also stuff that, that was from, the, the Caucuses from the, from the like like, like Caucasian sketches … So he mixed all of those things in this way. And so I come by this sort of mix of cultural things very, very honestly because of the fact that it was part of my background.
