Dana Suesse, The “Girl Gershwin” (or was Gershwin the “Boy”

Nadine Dana Suesse (/ˈswiːs/; December 3, 1911 – October 16, 1987)

About a week ago, I looked in the local “Little Library” about a block from my house and found a disc called “Jazz Nocturne, The Collected Piano Music of Dana Suesse.” I think a music critic must live nearby, because virtually every time I peer in, someone has left CDs. Those aren’t uncommon finds, of course. What is out of the ordinary, however, is the type of discs my “secret Santa” leaves.

He or she leaves jewel boxes primarily containing classical music. Again, I’m sure that’s not so uncommon. What surprises me, though, is the provenance — a lot of the music are by composers I’ve never heard of. A lot of the discs are by eastern european modern or pre-modern composers. There’s a lot of opera, and while sometimes it’s by composers I know, it might be a piece I’ve never heard of, like Mozart’s “The Dream of Scipione.” There aren’t any present day discs, probably because CD sales have pretty much evaporated with the advent of online streaming services like AppleMusic or Spotify.

When I put on this album, the most extraordinary music popped out. It sounded like a mashup of Ravel, Debussy, Gershwin. These were all the influences of the time, of course, but it sounded so fresh and alive and new. Take the piece below, Scherzette (“whirligig”).

“Scherzette (“whirligig”)”

You can read Suesse’s Wikipedia entry and see that she was a child prodigy & a brilliant improviser, she studied with the same teacher as Gershwin, and she had a successful career writing popular songs like “The Cocktail Suite: I: Old-fashioned,” and “You Ought to Be in Pictures.”

“The Cocktail Suite: I: Old-fashioned”

I’m happy to find these discs because since there’s only one classical music radio station in my town. That station pretty much cleaves to the standard repertoire of known pieces that they play ad infinitum, which they know aren’t going to upset rush hours drivers on their way to the daily grind (think Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” Beethoven’s “Sixth Symphony,” Rachmaninov’s “Piano Concerto Number 3,” etc.)

If not for the “Little Library” mystery donor, I never would have heard of Dana Suesse. One thing that puzzles, and actually make me kind of angry, is why I had never heard of her before. After I found the disc, I told a friend of mine, and classically trained bass player who’s now also in her 60s like me. She had never hear of Suesse either.

Do any of you know why she never got the kind of recognition after World War II, that people like Gershwin got?

Check out this interview in which I discuss my pancreatic cancer journey

Check out my interview in which I discuss how I dealt with pancreatic cancer on the @projectpurple podcast! You can watch on Youtube or you can download from your favorite podcast platform: Youtube

After 29 years working at an international organization, I retired and was looking forward to travel and quality time with my wife, Laura, and adult daughters. Then I started having stomach problems and after a year of pestering my doctor about tests, he ordered a CT scan which reveals a mass in the tail of my pancreas.   A biopsy showed it was cancer.

Fortunately, I lived an hour away from Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which is a high-volume center, and I was scheduled for surgery to be followed by 6 months of chemo therapy.

Because of a life-long interest in health, fitness, eastern medicine, and homeopathy, I knew there were Eastern therapies that, though not scientifically studied in the US, are widely accepted and practiced, for example in Chinese medicine.  So I decided to approach the cancer with a strategy to:

• Get cancer treatment from western doctors
• Seek out and employ therapies that take more holistic or integrative care approach

It’s almost four years later and I’m still here. The last CT scan showed the cancer has not returned.  However, because of the 5 year average return rate of 90%, I still use many of the tools. 

Today, I’ve chosen an exquisitely beautiful choral piece by Thomas Tallis, Miserere Nostri.

According to sheet music I can find online, the text is “Miserere nostri, Domine” which translates as “Have mercy on us Lord.” Supposedly, this text comes from a Psalm 123: “3 Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us: for we are exceedingly filled with contempt. 4 Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.”

I’m not a fan of self-loathing, but verse 4 seems to be a plea for solace when in the midst of adversity. I think we could all use a little solace from time time to.

There’s a ton of recordings of this piece on Youtube, and I’m choosing one by The Tallis Scholars. I think it dates from around 2004. The soprano voice will pierce your soul.

Here’s AllMusic description of this piece.

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Maria Callas sings Alfredo Catalani

“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Catalani’s opera, “La Wally”

Does Maria Callas need any introduction? A Greek-American soprano born in 1923 in New York, she became arguably the greatest soprano ever. Her mother and father had a tempestuous marriage, and her mother returned to Greece with Maria and siblings in 1937. Recognized for her musical precociousness, her mother, a social climber, forced her to sing starting at age five, and upon returning to Greece, tried to enroll her in the Athens Conservatoire, but she was rejected because she hadn’t been trained in the fundamentals of singing. Her mother then offered to pay a voice teacher at the Greek National Conservatoire to tutor her. After realizing the natural talent, the teacher took Callas on, refusing to let her mother pay for the lessons. Marias studied with the teacher for two years and made her public debut at the age of 15 singing an aria from Tosca. Her mother then secured another audition with the Athens Conservatoire, and this time, she was accepted, though she put off enrolling for a year so she could finish her degree at the National Conservatoire. She had her first operatic debut in 1941 in a small role in Franz von Suppé’s Boccaccio. She became renowned in Greece and it was recommended that she move to Italy to firmly establish her career as an international performer. Instead in 1945 she chose to move back to America, where she quickly took her place beside the two other great Metropolitan Opera divas of the time–Renata Tebaldi and Zinka Milanov. In the 1950s, she had a feud with Tebaldi and had this to say about her rival at the time.

“My admiration of her is of the fullest, and I am happy for her success. If I hear her sing well, I am the first to cheer her. But I live in another world. She is a vocalist of a certain repertoire. I consider myself a soprano—one who does what they used to do once upon a time. My repertoire, by God’s will and nature’s blessing, is complete. I have contributed to the history of music. I have taken music that has long been dead and buried and have brought it back to life again. If the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi will sing, among others, Norma or Lucia or Anna Bolena one night, then La Traviata or Gioconda or Medea the next—then, and only then, will we be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing champagne with cognac. No—champagne with Coca-Cola.”

Yesterday, I was in New York City and paid a visit to Academy Records and CDs on 18th street. There I snagged this 1963 vinyl recording of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat, one of my favorite pieces of music.

On my way out the door, I noticed a bin of free records, I looked in and found a treasure trove of works by Ravel, Faure, Brahms, and various female composers. Among them was this gem–a old Angel Records compilations of famous arias, including today’s featured piece, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Catalani’s opera, “La Wally.”

Those of you who saw the 1981 movie Diva,a modern take on film noir thrillers, by Jean-Jacques Beineix will recognize this aria, whose performance of it by American soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez. It’s a great pot-boiler with romance, suspense, zen buddhism, and a menacing bald villain.

La Wally is the name of the protagonist in Catalani’s opera. In the last scene, she throws herself into an avalanche. Because this is so hard to depict in a theatre, the opera is rarely performed. Too bad. I’d love to see if Catalani had written any other such transportive arias.

Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893)

Easter Sunday is on May 2 this year in the Orthodox church. This work (the last of the three presented here), was composed in 1878 when Tchaikovsky was 38. It was immediately confiscated by church censors since there was a prohibition against Russian composers setting sacred text to “modern” music. They wanted to preserve tradition, but of course, what they thought was historically authentic had evolved over time and had many influences.

St. John Chrysostom lived the 5th century in Constantinople (the seat of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine) empire. There he rose to the position of Archbishop. John’s liturgy standardized the text and rite of the mass and that makes him one of the early church fathers. The Byzantine empire had Greek as its official language. Saints Cyril and Methodius (Byzantine Missionaries) converted the Slavs to Christianity and devised the Russian alphabet (Cyrillic), based on Greek, to transcribe Old Church Slavonic.

I spent some time this evening looking for examples of the earliest Byzantine and Russian church music and found that not so easy. Take this piece for example, sung by Sister Marie Keyrouz, a Lebanese Maronite Nun who studied musicology and anthropology at the Sorbonne, and collected ancient Greek, Syrian, and Arabic sacred music. It sounds wonderfully middle eastern, which makes sense since early Christianity started in Israel and Syria:

If you look up early Russian orthodox church music, you might find something like this:

Tchaikovsky was enthralled by such early music and while preserving the mystical or spiritually transporting feeling of these old songs, he definitely added his own Romantic flavor. However, you don’t hear much Romantic music sounding as spine-tinglingly powerful as this.

Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000): Prayer of St. Gregory

Notre Dame University sits just north of my home town of South Bend, Indiana. Though famous for the fighting Irish, for me its most important contribution was having the only classical music FM station in the berg. When I was in high school and started “discovering” classical music, the channel thereby lifted the cultural profile of the town for me from desert to oasis.

 

 

On Sunday afternoons, they took caller requests. A piece that almost always showed up was Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony Nº2 “Mysterious Mountain,” which he wrote in 1955, the year I was born. I found it entrancing, from the ethereal celeste to the lone horn to the driving and cascading strings.

 

Hovhaness’ father was a professor of chemistry at Tufts university. He was an Armenian born in Turkey, who moved to the US before the genocide, though many of his relatives were killed during that time. He first settled in Somerville, Massachusetts, but his family moved because of racism against Armenians in that town.

 

Alan started composing music at the age of 4, and his parents were concerned because he would stay up late at nights composing. Devoting himself to composition after studying piano, by the age of 14 he had written two operas and caught the attention of the composer Roger Sessions, who championed his work. College was at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he learned how to play the sitar and also explored eastern music from Armenia and Turkey. He wrote his Symphony No 1 “Exiles’ as a memorial to the Armenian genocide.

 

In 1942, he got a scholarship to Tanglewood. There he faced discrimination from no less luminaries than Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Here’s how wikipedia describes it:

 

“During a seminar in composition, while a recording of Hovhaness’ first symphony was being played, Aaron Copland talked loudly in Spanish to Latin-American composers in the room; and at the end of the recording Leonard Bernstein went to the piano, played a melodic minor scale and rebuked the work as ‘cheap ghetto music.”

 

It’s interesting to reflect that I first heard this son of an Armenian immigrant’s music on the radio station of an Irish (immigrant) university. My grandfathers were immigrants, Hungarian (paternal) and Belgian (maternal). South Bend was full of Eastern European immigrants who left what must have been intolerable conditions before the first world war, drawn by the industries which have turned the midwest into the rust belt. Worse, it’s alarming to contemplate the abject institutional and group racism which has become entrenched in the states since 1980. Our diversity which once made us strong and great has been used as a lightning rod to divide us into tribes fighting each other to keep our eyes off the true puppet masters who maintain the institutional racism.

 

I didn’t put a link to “Mysterious Mountain,” here for a reason. Recently I had the pleasure of hearing for the first time, Hovhaness’ “Prayer of Saint Gregory.” St. Gregory (the illuminator) is the patron saint of Armenia, having converted the King and his court to Christianity starting in 301 AD. The King had imprisoned him in a pit under a church for around 12 years because Gregory was the son of an enemy of the King. When the King went mad, Gregory was called forth and healed him, which is why he was treated favorably thereafter.

 

I cannot find any mention of the prayer of St. Gregory, though he must have prayed a lot in the pit. There is another St. Gregory (the great) whose prayer I did find. I find it fits well with the indigities Hovhaness had to endure.

 

 

Prayer of St Gregory (The Great)

 

Acclaim To The Suffering Christ

O Lord, You received affronts

without number from Your blasphemers,

yet each day You free captive souls

from the grip of the ancient enemy.

 

You did not avert Your face

from the spittle of perfidy,

yet You wash souls in saving waters.

 

You accepted Your scourging without murmur,

yet through your meditation

You deliver us from endless chastisements.

 

You endured ill-treatment of all kinds,

yet You want to give us a share

in the choirs of angels in glory everlasting.

 

You did not refuse to be crowned with thorns,

yet You save us from the wounds of sin.

 

In your thirst You accepted the bitterness of gall,

yet You prepare Yourself to fill us with eternal delights.

 

You kept silence under the derisive homage

rendered You by Your executioners,

yet You petition the Father for us

although You are his equal in Divinity.

 

You came to taste death,

yet You were the Life

and had come to bring it to the dead.

 

Amen.

 

 

https://youtu.be/SlbJhVQ6bws

Cai Yan: Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute

Here is Cai Yan’s entry on Wikipedia.  She appears as number 3 on Wikipedia’s list of female composers.  Cai Yan was born around 170 AD in China.  The daughter of a famous scholar, Cai Yang, she also studied calligraphy, poetry, and music, and was married off at the age of 15. Her first husband died, she returned home, and was subsequently captured by nomads during civil wars.  Cai Yan lived among them for twelve years and had two sons.  It seems there are three poems that she wrote detailing the sorrows of living among barbarians.  Eventually, she was ransomed by a chancellor in the name of her father.  He wanted her back because she was the last surviving member of her clan and he needed to appease the spirits.  I managed to track down three of her poems that were translated and published in 1983.  (Cai Yan and the Poems Attributed to Her, Hans H. Frankel Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews Vol. 5, No. 1/2 (Jul., 1983), pp. 133-156)).  A search on youtube for her works yielded two versions of Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute, which is today’s piece. If you scroll down below it you’ll find a translation of the “Eighteen Songs.” The article said the text was in Creative Commons. Here is the Youtube performance of “Eighteen Songs….”

July 11. Birthday of Liza Lehmann (11 July 1862 – 19 September 1918)

Liza Lehmann (11 July 1862 – 19 September 1918) was an English operatic soprano and composer, known for her vocal compositions.

Bird Songs

July 6, birthday of Nancy Dalberg (July 6, 1881 – September 28, 1949)

Nancy Dalberg studied with Carl Nielsen and was the first Danish woman to write a symphony.

Nancy Dalberg : Scherzo for string orchestra op. 6

July 3, birthday of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger is a surprise and delight. Originally a pianist, she began studying composing after moving to Chicago from Jacksonville, Florida. In the windy city, she came under the influence of Alexander Scriabin’s music and Theosophy. After marrying Charles Seeger (a musicologist and father of Pete), she moved with him to Washington, DC, where she worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Her later life saw her arranging folk songs. Her work is breathtakingly varied and is a real find.

Sonata for Violin and Piano

March 10, Birthday of Florence Aylward (1862-1950)

This is a rerun from March 2017

Since July 2016, I have been concentrating solely on female composers.  You can read about that in my post from July 19.  If I can’t find one born on the calendar day, I may not post.  On with today’s composer.

Florence Aylward started composing music for ballads at an early age and she started to become known at the ripe old age of 12.  Here’s the Wikipedia entry for her.

Beloved, It Is Morn	The Window
Aspiration	Couldn’t find anything else by her