Film music began as a solution to a problem. Early film projectors were really loud, therefore something was needed to cover up all the noise. In addition, silent movies apparently seemed a bit awkward without any musical accompaniment. Enter, usually, a pianist, who would improvise musical accompaniments to the events on the screen. None other than Dmitri Shostakovich got his first job as a cinema pianist, honing his improvisatory skills, and sometimes receiving cat calls and boos for his fanta...
Dec 01, 2022•44 min•Season 9Ep. 175
Along with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, Leos Janacek is known as one of the three great Czech composers. He was born in Moravia, part of the Austrian Empire at the time, and became passionately interested in studying the folk music of his Moravian culture. After World War I, when the empire collapsed and Moravia became incorporated into the new country of Czechoslovakia, those nationalistic sentiments only increased, and Janacek was the perfect person to express those feelings through his...
Nov 25, 2022•50 min•Season 9Ep. 174
The center of Western Classical Music, ever since the time of Bach, has been modern-day Germany and Austria. You can trace a line from Bach, to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Schumann, Brahms, and Wagner, and finally to Mahler. But why does that line stop in 1911, the year of Mahler’s death? Part of the answer is the increasing influence of composers from outside the Austro-German canon, something that has enriched Western Classical music to this day. There was also World War I gett...
Nov 17, 2022•58 min•Season 9Ep. 173
David Krauss is the Principal Trumpet of the Met Opera orchestra, and in this conversation, we talked about his beginnings on the trumpet, the differences between playing in a symphonic orchestra vs. an opera orchestra, how to manage the vast distances between singers, the conductor, the orchestra, and the brass section, the specific skills an opera orchestra player has to have, and some funny/terrifying stories about on stage moments we both would rather forget! We also talked about David's pod...
Nov 03, 2022•46 min•Season 9Ep. 172
Note: This episode will be a lot more enjoyable if you listen to Part 1 first! As we turn towards the final three quartets of the set, we’ll see a lot of the same characteristics of the first 3; a perfect classical era proportionality, strong influences from Haydn and Mozart, and that perfect blend of vividly drawn but just very slightly restrained characters that marks Beethoven’s early period. But we also will see something else. We will see C Minor, Beethoven’s favorite key to depict drama an...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 9Ep. 171
In 1798, Beethoven, all of 28 years old, was about to begin a project that would take him to the last days of his life, a project that would result in some of the most far-reaching, most cosmic, most life-affirming, most dramatic, and simply put, some of the greatest music he, or anyone else, ever wrote. This project that Beethoven was beginning was his first set of string quartets. Beethoven wrote/published 16 string quartets during his life, and they are both a superhuman achievement and yet a...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 9Ep. 170
In almost every one of the past shows I’ve done about Shostakovich, the name Joseph Stalin is mentioned almost as much as the name Dmitri Shostakovich, and of course, there’s a good reason for that. Shostakovich’s life and music was inextricably linked to the Soviet dictator, and Shostakovich, like millions of Soviet citizens, lived in fear of the Stalin regime, which exiled, imprisoned, or murdered so many of Shostakovich’s friends and even some family members. Post his 1936 denunciation, Shost...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr•Season 9Ep. 169
Everyone knows Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Even if United Airlines hadn’t made the piece ubiquitous, it seems like the one piece of classical music almost everyone knows besides the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th symphony is Rhapsody in Blue. But did you know that Gershwin wrote a second rhapsody for piano and orchestra? We know Shostakovich’s later works for their intensity, drama, and depth, but did you know that Shostakovich was a completely different composer when he was a young man? That he ...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 9Ep. 168
In 1929, the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky contacted the American composer Charles Ives about performing one of his works. This was a bit of a surprise for Ives, since he had a checkered reputation among musicians and audience members, if they even were familiar with his name at all. In fact, he was much more famous during his lifetime as an extremely successful insurance executive! Ives mostly composed in his spare time, and his music was mostly ignored or ridiculed as that of a person suffering ...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr•Season 9Ep. 167
In the mid 19th century, the way to make yourself famous in France as a composer was to write operas. From Cherubini, to Meyerbeer, to Bizet, to Berlioz, to Gounod, to Massenet, to Offenbach, to Saint Saens, to foreign composers who wrote specifically for the Paris Opera like Rossini, Verdi and others, if you wanted to be somebody, especially as a French composer, you wrote operas, and you wrote a lot of them. But one composer in France bucked the trend, and her name was Louise Farrenc. Farrenc ...
Sep 22, 2022•58 min•Season 9Ep. 166
In 1922 a review appeared in the French newspaper Le Figaro: “We cannot describe the cries of admiring joy let loose by an enthusiastic public. In the immense oeuvre of Camille Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals is certainly one of his magnificent masterpieces. From the first note to the last it is an uninterrupted outpouring of a spirit of the highest and noblest comedy. In every bar, at every point, there are unexpected and irresistible finds. Themes, whimsical ideas, instrumentation com...
Sep 15, 2022•57 min•Season 9Ep. 165
Welcome to Season 9 of Sticky Notes! We're starting with a bang this season with Brahms' incomparable 4th symphony. This symphony takes the listener on a journey that unexpectedly ends in a legendarily dramatic and stormy way. What would compel a composer like Brahms to write an ending like this? Was it a requiem for his place in music? For Vienna? For Europe? Or was it the logical conclusion to a minor key bassline he stole from a Bach Cantata? This is the eternal question when it comes to Brah...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 9Ep. 164
"I think Mozart just really loved people." - Jan Swafford. For the Season 8 Finale, I had the great pleasure of welcoming back Jan Swafford, the great writer on music, who has written a spectacular new biography of Mozart. In this conversation, we talked about who Mozart really was as a person, some of the myths that defined him during his lifetime and into the present day, and of course, the incomparable music that Mozart was able to create, sometimes on a whim or in a single afternoon. This is...
Aug 04, 2022•1 hr•Season 8Ep. 163
George Gershwin’s story is like the story of so many American immigrants. His mother and father, Moishe and Rose Gershowitz, were Russian Jews who came to New York City in the 1890s looking for a better life and to escape persecution at home. Soon they became the Gershwines, and in 1898, Jacob Gershwine was born. Later on he changed his name to sound just a little bit more American, and the name George Gershwin was on its way to immortality. In just a few short years, the Gershowitz’s had become...
Jul 28, 2022•43 min•Season 8Ep. 162
If you want to understand how a symphony works, look no further than the works of the Father of the symphony, Joseph Haydn. In 1790, a concert promoter and impresario named Johann Peter Solomon showed up un-announced at the Vienna home of the great composer Joseph Haydn. He immediately told Haydn: “I am Solomon from London and I have come to fetch you.” What Salomon and Haydn were about to embark upon would be one of the greatest successes of both of their lives. Haydn would end up making 2 visi...
Jul 21, 2022•40 min•Season 8Ep. 161
Derrick Skye is one of the most creative, innovative, and brilliant composers of our time. His orchestral work, Prisms, Cycles, and Leaps is a musical thrill ride spanning influences from literally all over the world, from West African Music, Balkan Folk Music, Hindustani Classical Music, all the way to Appalachan Folk harmonies. I had the great pleasure of talking my way through this piece with Derrick, exploring the mind-bogglingly complex rhythmic patterns, the melodic lines that blend cultur...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr•Season 8Ep. 160
There is one composer who I’ve never devoted a full show to that fills me with the same devotion and ecstasy as the people who claim that Wagner almost immediately dissolves them into tears. His music is widely played, but it has never been totally embraced by the wider classical music audience. There are a variety of reasons for this, but his uniquely 20th century language of tonality mixed with atonality mixed with something completely different from anyone who has ever written music makes it ...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 8Ep. 159
Bucolic. Sunny. Cheerful. Joyous. Folksy. Ebullient. Thrilling. These are all words that I found while researching Dvorak’s 8th symphony. Dvorak’s gift for writing the most gorgeous of melodies is on full display in his 8th symphony, a piece that has been charming listeners ever since its very first performances. It is, on its surface, an uncomplicated piece, bursting at the seams with melody after melody after melody, almost mirroring one of Brahms’ greatest one-liners, where he referred to his...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr•Season 8Ep. 158
How does a composer capture the spirit of a country, especially if it's not his native land? Mendelssohn, in his Italian Symphony, gives us one of the best examples of someone doing just that, giving us a tightly integrated, yet highly independent set of 4 snapshots from his travels all over Italy. And yet, despite the piece being called the Italian Symphony and being indelibly associated with the country, the symphony remains a relatively traditional 4 movement German classical symphony. What w...
Jun 23, 2022•47 min•Season 8Ep. 157
Today I’m going to be talking about one piece, but in two different ways. I’m going to start today with an in-depth look at Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor, an early piece of his that reveals an incredible sense of drama, drive, and creativity. This is very different music than I’ve talked about before with Brahms as this is decidedly the work of a young composer, without all the burnished maturity of Brahms’ later music. This is also a great opportunity to revisit the bedrock of the Classical ...
Jun 16, 2022•58 min•Season 8Ep. 156
In 1964, the popular 20th century composer Luciano Berio was commissioned by Mills College in California to write a piece for voice and chamber orchestra. What Berio came up with is one of his most remarkably creative works, which is really saying something considering the innovative and constantly evolving way that he wrote music. Berio once said: “My links with folk music are often of an emotional character. When I work with that music I am always caught by the thrill of discovery… I return ag...
Jun 09, 2022•56 min•Season 8Ep. 155
It’s very easy to compare Sergei Prokofiev to Dmitri Shostakovich. They are the two most famous representatives of Soviet and Russian music of the 20th century, they lived around the same time, and their music even has some similarities, but at their core, you almost couldn’t find more different people than Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Shostakovich was neurotic, nervous, and timid. Prokofiev was confident and cool. Shostakovich was tortured by the Soviet government, and while Prokofiev certainly ...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 8Ep. 154
Imagine writing a concerto that prompted Beethoven to remark to a friend: “we’ll never be able to write anything like that. Or a piece that prompted Brahms to call it: “a masterpiece of art, full of inspiration and ideas.” Or had scholars and musicologists raving, saying things like: "not only the most sublime of the whole series but also one of the greatest pianoforte concertos ever composed" or "whatever value we put upon any single movement from the Mozart concertos, we shall find no work gre...
May 26, 2022•44 min•Season 8Ep. 153
Today I’ve got a pretty special show for you. It’s set up in two parts, with the first part featuring an interview, and the second part will be a more typical Sticky Notes analysis of a specific piece. Why did I set up the show this way this week? Well, I had the opportunity a few months ago to work with an extraordinary scholar and musician, Dr. Samantha Ege, who is the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, and is also one of the foremost scholars ...
May 19, 2022•51 min•Season 8Ep. 152
Mahler once said this to Bruno Walter, his protege and great advocate of Mahler’s works: "What one makes music from is still the whole—that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human being” You could almost just stop there with the last movement of Mahler 9. This is music so full of feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, but also of also acceptance and consolation, that words fail to describe its emotional impact. But as always with Mahler, this isn’t merely an emotional outpouring,...
May 12, 2022•47 min•Season 8Ep. 151
It's easy to forget that Mahler, for all of his ubiquitous success nowadays, was much better known as a conductor during his life than as a composer. He had basically one major success in his compositional career: a performance of his 8th symphony in Munich in 1910 that finally seemed to give him the approval he craved from the audience. But for much of his compositional life, Mahler was misunderstood. His symphonies were either too long, too dense, too confusing, too esoteric, too vulgar, too b...
May 05, 2022•36 min•Season 8Ep. 150
Remember where we ended in the first movement of Mahler's 9th symphony? After a 27 minute farewell which touched on the two poles of rage and acceptance, while filling in every conceivable emotion in between, we ended in total peace, calm, and acceptance . There is a lot about this symphony that is traditional - it has four movements, it's tonal(for the most part), it uses(mostly) traditional forms, but there is one thing about the symphony which is extremely unusual: the fact that it is bookend...
Apr 28, 2022•38 min•Season 8Ep. 149
Two events, occurring on the same day, drove Mahler to the brink. His daughter Maria died at the age of just 4, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that would prove to be fatal. He became consumed even more so than he ever was before with the idea of death, the afterlife, and all the philosophical trials and travails that came with these thoughts. These ideas of death did not come only from his own sense of loss and grief; they were about his place in history, and how he woul...
Apr 14, 2022•54 min•Season 8Ep. 148
Shostakovich is one of the easiest composers to do podcasts about because his life and his music is full of such incredible stories. But as easy as it is, it's also complicated. Shostakovich's music is sometimes heard as a musical history book, a testament, which it often is, but we should never lose sight of the fact that Shostakovich was a composer first, not a politician. So today we're going to be looking at the 4th quartet in two contexts, the historical and the musical, and then try to see...
Apr 07, 2022•46 min•Season 8Ep. 147
Barber’s Adagio seems to access a deep well of sadness, heartache, passion, and nostalgia in the listener that is very difficult to explain. As dozens of commentators have noted, there is nothing in particular in the piece which is particularly remarkable. There are no great harmonic innovations, no formal surprises, nothing NEW, at all. In fact, the music was completely anachronistic for its time. Despite all of that, or perhaps because of it, Barber’s Adagio has become perhaps the most well kn...
Mar 31, 2022•36 min•Season 8Ep. 146
