Melodies from Mount Olympus

Today is the opening day of the London Olympics 2012. What will we Brits do with the opening ceremony? Tune in tonight and find out!

There will doubtless be a part for classical music in the event. Classical music has had quite an interesting history of association with the modern Olympics and from 1912 through until 1948, there was even a music competition complete with gold, silver and bronze medals for the best pieces. 

"Complete with..." isn't perhaps the right phrase. In 1912 only a gold medal was awarded to the Italian Riccardo Barthelemy for his Olympic Triumphal March. In 1920 it was gold for the Belgian Georges Monier for Olympique and silver for the Italian Oreste Riva for his Marcia trionfale but no bronze. In 1924 the jury  (which included Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel and d'Indy!) couldn't reach a decision, so no medals were given at all. In 1928 they did give out a medal but, bizarrely (and rather insultingly, I'd have thought) it was a mere bronze, awarded to the (suitably damned-with-faint-praise) Rudolph Simonsen of Denmark for his Symphony No.2, Hellas (a substantial piece, not remotely what you might be expecting - so please try it!). So far you will have noticed that none of these composers is a familiar name. The familiar names (as in 1924) sat on the juries. The Olympics used to take the idea of the Games being a competition for amateurs very seriously. The one exception to win an Olympic medal was the great Czech composer Josef Suk for his toe-tapping patriotic march Into a New Life (a delightful piece) in 1932. In another bemusing snub, Suk was merely given a silver medal. No gold was given that year! 

Things changed in 1936 when the Nazis took charge of the Olympics - more music competitions, more medals, more music. Guess what? Germany won 4 out of the 6 medals awarded by the largely German jury! Paul Höffer (who?) of Germany won gold for his Olympic Vow, Kurt Thomas (who?) of Germany won silver for his Olympic Cantata and Harald Genzmer (who?) of Germany won bronze for his The Runner. A slightly more familiar name, Werner Egk of...well, I'm sure you can guess where!...won gold in the Orchestral category for his Olympic Festive Music, while Lino Liviabella of fellow Axis power Italy won silver for The Victor and Jaroslav Křička of Czechoslovakia got the bronze with his Mountain Suite. The Berlin Olympics of 1936, incidentally, saw a very great composer enter the scene with Richard Strauss providing an Olympic Hymn for the opening ceremony. Strauss wasn't exactly enthusiastic about it, writing to his friend and librettist, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, "I am whiling away the dull days of advent by composing an Olympic Hymn for the proles - I of all people, who despise sports." I'd say the piece is pure hack-work, though the ending is not bad. 

The last London Olympics of 1948 opened with an ode, Non Nobis Domine, by Britain's very own Roger Quilter (plus a blast of the Hallelujah chorus) and saw the Pole Zbigniew Turski vault into the gold medal position in the competition for his Olympic Symphony, with a Canadian Jean Weinzweig and a Finn  Kalervo Tuukkanen winning silvers and the three bronzes going to two Italians and a Dane.

At that point the difficulty of deciding if an artist was an amateur or a professional got too much for the Olympic organisers and the competition was dropped. 

In 1958, the International Olympic Committee decided to adopt a piece originally written for the 1896 Games (the first modern Olympics) by the Greek opera composer Spyridon Samaras, the Olympic Hymn ("Immortal spirit of antiquity"), as its permanent anthem. It's a thoroughly grand operatic chorus.

In researching this post, I kept reading mentions of a Hymn to Apollo written for the 1894 Olympic Congress by one of my favourite composers, Gabriel Fauré. I never knew such a piece existed as it never appears in work lists for the composer. Was it lost? Apparently not, as the IMSLP site has a score of it. Having just played it through on the piano, it sounds like a real beauty - a modal piece in 5/4 time. The tune is not Fauré's own. It's a melody that was written in Ancient Athens:

Hopefully someone will record it one day and someone else will add it to his list of works.

In the 1960s American T.V. companies began using a piece called Bugler's Dream by the French-American Leo Arnauld in their coverage of the Olympic Games. John Williams co-opted this theme and used it in his own Olympic Fanfare and Theme, written for the 1984 Los Angeles games. He has written music for others Olympiads - Olympic Spirit for Seoul in 1988 and Summon the Heroes for Atlanta in 1996. John Williams is made for the Olympics! Other music that came out of L.A. includes Philip Glass's The Olympian and out of Atlanta sprang Michael Torke's bright-eyed Javelin. Glass must have caught the bug as he was back for Athens in 2004, with the ambitious, multi-movement Orion.

So will there be any music by a living British composer at tonight's opening ceremony in London? We'll see. Presumably it won't just be Elgar's Nimrod. We have to be more original than that!

Ubiquity

The dulcet tones of an (imaginary) BBC announcer: "Now on BBC2, are black holes really black? Exploring new revolutionary ideas that threaten to blow apart our traditional view of science, it's Horizon." As the BBC logo vanishes and a computer simulation of Space In All Its Infinite Majesty begins, a wavy melodic line starts up on strings, oscillating between just two notes, played in steady quavers above a long-held note. Before any change comes into the music, the (imaginary) narrator (probably Jack Fortune) starts speaking, building up suspense for the wonders of the universe to be brought before our awed attention. The music goes on underneath for a while, alternating minor and major harmonies, before being dumped in favour of the programme's 'theme tune', before anything so interesting as, say, a saxophone solo appears. 

Oh yes, we've been here so many times, whether for science programmes, arts programmes, even current affairs programmes, that wavy two-note melody, that low long-held note...

The music is Facades by Philip Glass, the fifth movement of a piece called Glassworks. Its simplicity, its enigmatic  tone, its neutral yet oddly haunting quality, all these, presumably, account for its mood-enhancing appeal to programme makers. I noticed the ubiquity of this piece as background music for BBC programmes a couple of years ago and others have began to notice too.  I must have been aware of it for even longer as for years whenever somebody spoke of 'minimalism' my brain would automatically press the 'Play' button of those opening notes of Facades. I have to say though, I never knew what came next under fairly recently, meaning that my 'minimalism' reflex quickly got stuck on the first few seconds of the piece and continued in my imagination, irritatingly, without evolving. This link will (should you chose to click on it) bring you the whole of Facades, complete with solo saxophone, which shows that the music does evolve after all. 

YouTube comments can really scrape the barrel (and beyond) but one on the link provided struck a sympathetic nerve with me:

I HATE HATE HATE THIS PIECE OF MUSIC ! Why? Because it has become ubiqitous. It is played on nearly every TV & radio documentary programme & now spoils their content. I TENSE UP every time I hear the damn piece. No, don't try to convice me. Blame UK TV and radio programme makers for overusing it. NASTY, NASTY MUSIC !

I must admit to feeling the same way whenever that music came on, but I think - having FORCED myself to listen to the whole damn thing! - that the saxophone playing of Jon Gibson and the occasional dissonances in this overwhelming consonant music helped allay my hatred. 

Overplaying a piece of music (surely?) cannot fail to do it harm. I once read a comment by the critic Michael Tanner who, if I remember correctly, said that Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata was a piece you could hear too often. For me even so beautiful, moving and noble a piece as Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings becomes infuriating if heard (at least) monthly for years on end, as seemed to be the case some years ago when a certain radio station kept playing it and playing it again and again. Similarly, though I love Copland and his ballet suite from Rodeo, if BBC Radio 3's Breakfast plays the Hoe-Down (once a favourite of mine) one more time I will not be held responsible for my actions! 

Lazy programming is not a friend of certain pieces. 

I could be wrong though. I suppose the assumption, perhaps drawn from pop music stations, is that there is no limit to the number of times you can broadcast a piece of music because the public will never tire of hearing it - most obviously all those Christmas hits from Slade, Wizzard, The Pretenders, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, etc, which the public indeed don't ever seem to tire of. Maybe, I'm a rare beast in tiring of the Barber Adagio and Copland's Hoe-Down and Michael Tanner is just as rare a beat in tiring of the Appassionata, and both myself and crimsonabsinthe from YouTube are unusual in finding the opening bars of Glass's Facades so annoying, though in this last instance I'd bet not because because this is a different type of repetition - the repetition of a short snatch of a piece rather than the piece itself, which, maybe, changes the issue. 

Still, I bet everyone has some pieces they are sick to death of hearing.

P.S. A factoid about Philip Glass, ubiquity and the BBC (courtesy of the Jewish Chronicle) is that until 2009, the BBC Proms had only broadcast 7 minutes-worth worth of music from one of the world's most influential composers. Just one piece! Can you guess which piece?