Tag: classical

Ancestors: Lili Boulanger – “Les Sirènes” (1911)

rubikaimLeave a comment
Les Sirènes performed by Dawani Women’s Choir

Lili Boulanger was a French composer at the dawn of the 1900s. She is one of the most famous female composers of all time and was writing in a time where music was even more male dominated than it is today. Which is why it was a somewhat bold choice for her to choose the mythological sirens as the subject of one of her first public pieces. In translation, the piece begins with, “We are the beauty that charms the strongest men,” painting men as submissive to the wills of the powerful sirens.
The music begins with impressionist piano and then adds romantic influenced choir vocals. Much like the sirens, the beautiful music contains dark undertones with heavy use of dissonance and chromaticism. She uses a repeating pedal tone to convey the hypnotizing ability of the sirens.
Boulanger went on to be the first female recipient of the Prix de Rome, a prestigious scholarship that she and her sister Nadia had been trying to win for years. Trying to follow in their father’s footsteps after he had won the prize nearly a century earlier, Lili finally succeeded with her cantata Faust et Hélène. She broke new ground for women being accepted into classical composition, the effects of which are still felt today.

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)

Ancestors: Alice Coltrane – “Transcendence” (1977)

rubikaimLeave a comment

Unlike most artists that will be covered on this site, Alice Coltrane is someone who dedicated all of her discography to the topic of liberation, albeit mostly on the spiritual side rather than the political. Despite her single-pointed focus, her body of work has an incredible diversity to it. Her music ranges from aggressive chants to slow hymns, from avant-garde classical to her brand of spiritual jazz. The song “Transcendence” is a powerful combination of those last two genres. It begins with a modernist string section swelling in ascension as Coltrane’s harp slides up and down underneath. The harp then takes over for a solo, only to have the strings intrude with a loud glissando. The strings fluctuate between European and South Asian influences as she maintains these impressive runs on the harp. There’s some great use of extended techniques in the strings to bring a certain amount of grit to counterbalance the beauty of the harp.

The interplay between the harp and the other strings seems to create a sonic story, one of a persistent transcendent force (the harp) persisting through the violent shifts of rebirth and Samsara (the strings). Her Hindu belief system of Advaita Vedanta plays heavily into her music. She describes it as going “to your fullest and highest potential and not [being] limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.”

This liberation from dogma is important to the philosophy, so much so that it does not require a renunciation of any other faiths and instead seeks a goal of interfaith understanding. This religious freedom comes up later in the album as well, with a chant dedicated to Sri Nrsimha, who is an avatar of Vishnu who comes to Earth to destroy evil and end religious persecution. Alice Coltrane was a woman who dedicated her life’s work to spiritual liberation in a time where negativity was the most pervasive tone in musical culture. While both positivity and negativity have their place, I think people underestimate how radical it is to put forward a positive vision of the future. I hope that Alice’s music can inspire those positive visions and that we can materialize them here on Earth.

Ancestors: Krzysztof Penderecki – Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)

rubikaimLeave a comment

Krzysztof Penderecki died today. His voice will live on in pieces such as this one, which is dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima. As one of the worst moments of human history, the Hiroshima bombing has had far too little coverage in art in the West. In this bold, horrifying piece, Penderecki demands you to imagine the unimaginable. With this act of empathy, the pain within this music becomes a rallying cry to never let atrocities like this be repeated. The maddening cries of this music form a reminder and a mirror image of the peace that we’ve yet to achieve.