[00:00:00] Mahea: An aptly named number from a bombastic legend of the upright bass. A rage filled rallying cry echoing the emotions of the masses. And an orchestral tapestry filled with elaborate symbolism that was loathed by its creator. You're listening to Themes and Variation.
[00:00:24] Themes and Variation is Soundfly's podcast about music and perspectives. I'm your host, Mahea Lee.
[00:00:33] [track]: [music]
[00:00:34] Mahea: Hey there, we are back again with Themes and Variation. This week, Martin and I will be talking about fight songs with Ian Temple, Soundfly's founder and CEO and an amazing musician as well.
[00:00:45] As usual, the conversation is anchored by three songs that were selected in response to this episode's theme. This time around, we're drawing from the catalogs of Charles Mingus, Rage Against the Machine, and Tchaikovsky.
[00:00:57] We'll get into that in just a moment, but before we do, I have a quick favor to ask: If you like what you hear and want to let me and the rest of the team know it, please subscribe to the show and consider leaving a positive review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you go for podcasts.
[00:01:12] Okay, now that that's done, enjoy the episode, "Fight Songs."
[00:01:16] Welcome back to Themes and Variation. I am your (still pretty new) host, Mahea Lee, and today I am here with Martin Fowler. How are you, Marty?
[00:01:25] Martin: Hello. Hello. I'm good.
[00:01:28] Mahea: That's good. And we're joined today by our very special guest. Well, I guess just kind of a, it's a little bit of a strange word because you're kind of like... if it's Marty as second chair, then Jeremy, then I kind of feel like you're sitting next to Jeremy in the orchestral section.
[00:01:42] Ian: Are you making everyone hosts now? We're just all, yeah.
[00:01:46] Mahea: I can't handle the pressure. But yeah, so Ian Temple, anyway, I should say your name. So Ian, how are you doing today?
[00:01:52] Ian: I'm doing very well. Thank you very much.
[00:01:54] Mahea: It's nice to have you here on this, the second episode back.
[00:01:58] Ian: I'm so excited to be here. Yay. I can't believe we're doing this again. I love this podcast so much. It's been so much fun, these conversations. So, yeah.
[00:02:07] Mahea: Well, we're happy to have you. And today we'll be talking about "Fight Songs," which is sort of a bastardization of a different theme that you were proposing, Ian, that we just couldn't quite get the right wording on. Do you feel like it does that justice or do you feel like this was a totally different direction?
[00:02:23] Ian: Totally different direction for me. I have like a double hip surgery coming up in a month, so I was thinking about songs to like... You know, get through some difficult time, you know. Words that Mahea, you threw out were like "perseverance" or like "songs to like overcome difficulty" or something like that.
[00:02:41] Mahea: It was very self helpy.
[00:02:43] Ian: Yeah. It's a little self helpy. It's a little self helpy. Um, and instead, when the term "fight songs" came up, I immediately kind of went to a much more kind of... a slightly angrier place, you know, maybe defiant in a, you know, middle finger type way, you know, I don't know. Definitely a little bit less kind of inspirational overcoming of obstacles and a little bit more, uh, "I'm going to take you down, man!"
[00:03:08] Mahea: Well, I think one of the reasons we had trouble with it too is 'cause we sort of accidentally did a theme along the lines of what you're describing last season, which is like the whole entire past of the podcast... with Seth Haley, Com Truise. We did "Songs to Escape Into" and I think two of the three songs were chosen... like I chose Clair de Lune because it's what I listen to in headphones when I have to get a vaccination or a blood test, you know? So yeah, it was tricky to find wording, but I'm excited about "Fight Songs." I do want to point out you both picked songs in which the bass is very heavily featured, which puts further pressure on me to try to fill Carter's shoes in a way I wasn't fully prepared for this early, but that's fine. It's fine.
[00:03:49] Martin: Yeah, totally, totally did that on purpose.
[00:03:51] Mahea: Yeah. So spiteful.
[00:03:53] Ian: I was kind of like transcribing the bass parts to my song today and I was like, oh shoot, Marty's on the call. If I have anything wrong in my transcriptions, it's gonna be extra embarrassing. I went for it anyway.
[00:04:05] Mahea: Yeah. Marty was my saving grace on that too. And I was like, okay, well Carter's not here, but Marty is also an excellent bass player. So pressure's on Marty.
[00:04:12] And with that, why don't we go ahead and jump into your selection?
[00:04:16] [track]: [music]
[00:04:18] Mahea: What are we listening to?
[00:04:46] Martin: This is "Haitian Fight Song" by Charles Mingus.
[00:04:51] Mahea: How did you go about making this selection and did it involve googling the words "fight song?"
[00:04:57] Martin: Mahea? How dare you. How dare you!
[00:05:01] Mahea: But like did it? Did it?
[00:05:03] Martin: It did not. This is actually one of my favorite Mingus tunes of all time. It's a very well known Mingus tune, and being a bassist and having some experience and in the world of jazz, I am aware of Charles Mingus and might qualify him as maybe my favorite, certainly top five all-time upright bass players.
[00:05:22] Mahea: Wow.
[00:05:23] Martin: So "Haitian Fight Song," it's just... you know, I've spent some time with it. And so when the words "fight song" entered my brain, my internal computer returned "Haitian Fight Song."
[00:05:34] Mahea: Nice. Can I tell you something embarrassing?
[00:05:36] Martin: Always.
[00:05:37] Mahea: Good. So I was familiar with some jazz when I got to college, but I was definitely a classical kid at a jazz school kind of thing, so Mingus wasn't really on my radar until I got curious about the school's mascot. 'Cause Berklee has a mascot. Did you know that?
[00:05:51] Martin: I vaguely recall this.
[00:05:53] Mahea: Yeah. Berklee has a mascot technically, and his name is "Mingus the Jazz Cat." So that's what made me dig into his discography, and I'm pretty ashamed of that fact, which is why I just bragged about it on the podcast.
[00:06:05] Martin: That's hilarious.
[00:06:06] Mahea: Yeah. But let's get into the song. So tell us more about "Haitian Fight Song," please.
[00:06:10] Martin: "Haitian Fight Song," off of the 1957 album The Clown, is a very specific point in not only jazz history, but also American history. The word "Haitian" in this case, refers to the Haitian Revolution, which obviously was not in America, but was basically the only successful case of enslaved people rising up and overthrowing a government... although feel free to fact check my history, Ian. I know that's your realm.
[00:06:40] Feel free to expound as well. But that's sort of the reference, the Haitian Revolution of 1791. But in the liner notes of the album, he said, "'Haitian Fight Song,' to begin with, could just as well be called 'Afro American Fight Song.'" So really, the energy of the song was about Black empowerment and civil rights. 1957 was the year that the first Civil Rights Act was passed, which was deeply, deeply watered down by Southern segregationist Democrats, but indeed was a real pivotal year.
[00:07:13] So he channeled this energy into this sort of bombastic, unapologetic wall of sound from his band with just a whirlwind of tempo changes or feel changes and just a huge, huge, powerful, aggressive sound that channeled the energy of the fight.
[00:07:38] [track]: [music]
[00:07:41] Martin: My understanding is around this time Mingus was getting questioned for whether or not he could swing and this album essentially was him being like "I can swing."
[00:07:51] Mahea: That's really funny. I wonder who was leading that charge.
[00:07:54] Martin: I guess he wrote an open letter to Miles Davis. And this is all stuff I learned just like through the Googling process for a little more context. This is... I'm not super deep in this lore, but in an open letter to Miles Davis in Downbeat in 1954, he wrote his iconic quote that you'll find online, which is, "I write or play ME, the way I feel through jazz or whatever. Music is or was a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."
[00:08:35] Mahea: Woah. Yeah.
[00:08:37] Martin: Yeah.
[00:08:37] Ian: There's a lot of defiance and anger in that quote, isn't there?
[00:08:41] Martin: Yeah, he also said in the liner notes about the song, tying it back to the civil unrest and sort of social justice aspect... he said, "I can't play it right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution and how unfair it is. There's sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling, 'I told them, I hope somebody heard me.'"
[00:09:03] Mahea: That's intense.
[00:09:04] Martin: So that's "Haitian Fight Song." I guess I'll also just say it's G minor blues, pretty strong throughout, except for the sort of more free sections where he's doing his front man, free soloing.
[00:09:24] [track]: [music]
[00:09:28] Martin: Always a journey, always beautiful. And always makes you tilt your head a little to the side.
[00:09:34] Ian: Yeah, Mingus, he always feels slightly off kilter and left field. Which is interesting because, obviously Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane all went on to do, like, out there things, but there's something just really particular about Charles Mingus and the way he wrote. Like, he's one of the best writers for horns... these blaring horn parts in his arrangements...
[00:09:58] [track]: [music]
[00:10:01] Ian: The songs maybe have more, like, unusual, almost prog-y elements to them, where they change key signatures or change time signatures or have little, I don't know, moments of coming together amidst improvisation and stuff. You know, I mean... I'm curious, you know, what do you think of when you think of Mingus?
[00:10:19] Martin: Those are really good characterizations. I feel like he had no choice but to be fully outwardly himself, and I think the word "bombastic" is how he lived his whole life.
[00:10:31] If you ever get the chance to read his autobiography, by the way, that is a tall tale worth spending some time with. That is so fun, so wild. There's a lot of stories in there where I'm like, I don't think this happened like this, but I'm not sure. Feels like he's waxing poetic a little bit on some stuff that probably did happen to him, and he makes it just a little larger than life, and that's just... that's how I think of him.
[00:10:56] But then yeah, he's got sort of an angular quality to some of his writing and arranging that feels related to the way Monk approaches the piano in a lot of ways. That's how I think of him.
[00:11:19] [track]: [music]
[00:11:23] Mahea: I also think there's something to... like his contemporaries that we really think of as being like the forefathers of a certain era of jazz. A lot of them played with each other over and over and over again. I was gonna actually ask, who else is on this album?
[00:11:37] Martin: All right, so I'm gonna try and pronounce these names correctly, but I don't actually know these players very much, so...
[00:11:42] Mahea: And that's kind of what I'm getting at here, is I do feel like I'm not always as familiar with the people that he puts on his music. Like Miles Davis, at a certain point, it's a familiar cast of characters, even though he changed players regularly, you know? They all went on to become people we knew.
[00:11:56] Ian: Yeah, his two quintets, two famous quintets... yeah... Miles Davis that everyone became famous in their own right afterwards. I think Charles Mingus was too controlling for that. I mean, am I speaking... I might be kind of confusing...
[00:12:11] Martin: You might be right. You might be absolutely right. He certainly liked to do things his way. So I would say that makes sense.
[00:12:18] Ian: You kind of think of someone almost like Frank Zappa in a very different style of music, obviously, but like Zappa could never really collaborate that well because he was such a perfectionist in how he demanded his music was played and how it was made.
[00:12:34] People who know Charles Mingus better can please, absolutely come at me and I will be happy to be overruled. But these are just some things that I think I've heard over the years.
[00:12:43] Martin: I think that's an appropriate parallel of ethos, you know?
[00:12:47] Ian: Yeah.
[00:12:49] Mahea: I wouldn't say Miles Davis wasn't particular though. I don't know how much you should instruct Bill Evans, you know? Like there are certain people where it's like, if you were really controlling about who you put in the room, you don't have to be quite as fixated on the specific details because they might do something beyond what you were expecting... not to say these players didn't, and I do want to hear you attempt these names, Marty, if you don't mind.
[00:13:12] Martin: All right, I'll do my best.
[00:13:13] Mahea: Thank you.
[00:13:13] Martin: So we got Shafi Hadi on alto and tenor saxophone, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Wade Legge on piano, and Dannie Richmond on drums. None of whom I'm super familiar with, not that I'm like the biggest jazz head. I don't really know these players beyond their work on this record.
[00:13:32] Ian: I want to talk about the song a little bit more. It's really cool the way it builds. And those rhythmic elements, the horns...
[00:13:41] [track]: [music]
[00:13:56] Ian: You know, it's not in lockstep, it's like different horns are kind of coming and going and doing that. And then it's got this layering of intensity as the different horns and drums and other instruments come in on top of each other. And then some of the horns are doing these, like, bended notes. And the bass is doing some bended notes occasionally.
[00:14:20] [track]: [music]
[00:14:28] Ian: So the whole thing is like controlled chaos. And I know it's not, like the music is not, but in its sound, it's got this slight growing in intensity, kind of anarchy-ness to it that is absolutely an appropriate soundtrack for a fight.
[00:14:53] [track]: [music]
[00:14:58] Martin: If you want to study the minor blues, this is a great little number. It's got some quirks, but there's some incredible solos throughout from Mingus and everyone. Some really interesting, like, melodic tension choices. They feel tense in a way that supports the theme of the song. They feel like the tension within a fight.
[00:15:25] [track]: [music]
[00:15:28] Martin: The other thing that I just think is so cool musically is the way it just suddenly jumps into double time. No warning at all.
[00:15:36] [track]: [music]
[00:15:46] Martin: That's the kind of thing that can happen when you're really in sort of like a fight or flight situation. You got to keep up. You got to figure it out.
[00:15:55] [track]: [music]
[00:15:55] Mahea: Okay, wait. Hold on.
[00:15:56] Martin: Yeah!
[00:15:57] Mahea: Every time I hear that, I have a moment when I'm like "Boys of Summer." And then I'm like, okay, different mood. Anyway...
[00:16:19] [track]: [music]
[00:16:26] Mahea: Ian, what are we listening to?
[00:16:28] Ian: We are listening to Rage Against The Machine, their song called "Killing In The Name." This song has some terrible language in it, so if you're offended by expletives... we probably need to add that caveat here. But it is truly one of the great fight songs of all time, and one of the great amp you up songs of all time.
[00:16:46] So I had a really hard time with this prompt. I made a whole playlist for myself. I was really struggling to pick a song. Some of the other kind of songs I was considering, Tupac's "Hit 'Em Up"...
[00:17:03] [track]: [music]
[00:17:03] Ian: Like, it is a fight in a song. I still can't believe that song was ever put out just to like catch beef with everyone and put them on notice. Obviously didn't go too well for him.
[00:17:14] And I thought about Michael Jackson's "Bad," you know? Like the video where they're actually like doing the knife fight in the alley.
[00:17:25] [track]: [music]
[00:17:27] Ian: Public Enemy, "Fight the Power."
[00:17:32] [track]: [music]
[00:17:36] Ian: ...obviously a great example. Smashing Pumpkins, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is a good fight song.
[00:17:47] [track]: [music]
[00:17:50] Ian: But I think at the end of the day, there's one song that I can put on and no matter where I am, like what's going on in my life, I will jump up...
[00:18:01] Mahea: Fight someone.
[00:18:02] Ian: And start like beating something. I don't know. I mean, you know...
[00:18:05] Martin: You'll "rage," if you will?
[00:18:07] Ian: I will rage. I will just absolutely rage — usually, hopefully in a loving way, but you know, sometimes also in a defiant way in a kind of angry way.
[00:18:17] Mahea: This is useful information about you, so that's good to know.
[00:18:21] Ian: Yeah, if you ever need to like turn me into the Hulk, just put on this song.
[00:18:25] Mahea: PSA: If you hear this song, just leave Ian alone for a bit.
[00:18:30] Ian: I mean, okay. So it was released in 1992 on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album. It was written in the wake of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent LA riots in response to the police officers being acquitted for that. I mean the photo on the album cover is actually a Vietnamese monk, I believe, self emulating in protest of the killing of other Buddhists by the US-backed South Vietnamese regime in like the '60s.
[00:19:01] Talk about an act of defiance, right? Like a person literally lighting themselves on fire in defiance. And that's the message of this song in a nutshell. I mean, it is just defiance and rage personified in a song.
[00:19:18] So the lyrics... well, you can see it as religious or maybe even cultish, right? He's repeating the same lines a lot. You know, "now you do what they told you" is repeated like 16 times or something. And then at the end it changes to the, you know, "F*** you, I won't do what you told me" 16 times.
[00:19:44] [track]: [music]
[00:19:50] Ian: But like every lyric in this song is repeated many, many, many times. And that repetition is kind of, working oneself up into an almost like, frenzy.
[00:19:59] Mahea: Well it's that repetition with escalation thing that I think is like very human, but also a good device in poetry or in music. Things start to take on new meanings just because you've heard them three times in a row or whatever. And this has that effect.
[00:20:12] Ian: Absolutely. A hundred percent. The lyrics themselves are a critique of the police force and pretty direct to the point. I mean, "some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses," basically accusing certain police officers of being KKK members. And obviously there's a deep history in the US of that being the case, both after the Civil War when the KKK came into existence, there were active links with law enforcement for the next 100 years, but then even more recently, actually, there was a report by the Brennan Center for Justice that cited an FBI internal report warning its agents that it's not uncommon to encounter white supremacy groups and far right groups that have active links to police officers.
[00:20:55] That's a literal part of our history, this kind of connection. Obviously, not all police officers. And to be fair to Rage Against the Machine, they say that. SOME of those who work forces are the same that burn crosses.
[00:21:06] [track]: [music]
[00:21:07] Ian: It's so searing, right? Like it's so direct to just come out and accuse certain police officers of being connected with the KKK.
[00:21:21] The central message of the song in some ways is this idea of "killing in the name of." And it's really interesting that the lyrics are killing in the name of blank. I think what Zack is saying with that lyric is like killing in the name of anything, right? Like people have... all throughout history, people are killing in the name of something — of ideology, of religion, in the name of order. In this case, in the name of white supremacy, maybe. And, you know, you cannot justify your killing of people. There's no justification. Killing in the name of blank. And that's super powerful.
[00:22:01] [track]: [music]
[00:22:04] Ian: Musically, super interesting. It's a song that's kind of in D major, but also in D minor at the same time. The song is just a progression of different bass and guitar riffs, really. Some of them have the major third and some of them have the minor third. Some of them have more chromatic stuff. One of the opening bass riffs is this...
[00:22:29] [track]: [music]
[00:22:30] Ian: So what is that, a flat ninth?
[00:22:32] Martin: Yeah!
[00:22:33] Ian: But that's a pretty awesome interval and it's not in D minor or D major.
[00:22:37] Mahea: Yeah, I guess it depends on how you're looking at it.
[00:22:39] Ian: There's a lot of chromaticism in here. And then like the guitar comes in over the top of that.
[00:22:43] [track]: [music]
[00:22:52] Ian: So it's like C sharp to D, F sharp to G, but over the top of D and E flat. So really kind of weird. There's almost like a teasing of harmonic minor.
[00:23:05] Mahea: But I mean, it could be just like a chromatic approach kind of thing, right? Like harmonically, that's how I'm hearing it.
[00:23:10] Ian: What it is, is it's kind of the color brown, right? It's like super chromatic. At the end of that little guitar riff, he goes like F sharp, G, and then G sharp, and then back to G.
[00:23:21] [track]: [music]
[00:23:23] Ian: Basically, the music is all over the map. It's got these chromatic ideas, it's got these funky bluesy notes, it's got stuff that's more kind of classically blues minor.
[00:23:35] But I think the thing that makes it the best amp up song of all time is these three repeated sections. The first two times it's like a breakdown, and then the third time it's like a breakdown that becomes this epic climb.
[00:23:48] The first time through, at some point, the guitar starts doing kind of double time, like a quicker rhythmic riff over the top of it.
[00:23:56] [track]: [music]
[00:24:02] Ian: Once again, repetition is key to this. The bass note's not moving, there's no harmonic movement.
[00:24:08] Then the second time through, they make it a little bit more intense, and he adds like, "now you're under control. Now you do what they told you."
[00:24:18] [track]: [music]
[00:24:20] Ian: It's this like being oppressed, controlled by the establishment. But it's a boiling pot, right? As this breakdown goes on and the intensity keeps rising, you feel at some point it's going to explode. And the second time through, Tom starts doing some weird stuff on the guitar, where the pitch is like bending and rising almost in a shepherd tone-y way — a shepherd tone being a tone that seems to rise forever.
[00:24:50] [track]: [music]
[00:24:55] Ian: Once again, the guitar starts kind of going double time. The drums pick up.
[00:24:59] But then the third time is when the whole song breaks. The song just stops basically and it's arhythmic. The groove is totally lost and then the bass and the guitar start climbing up a D natural minor scale.
[00:25:19] [track]: [music]
[00:25:29] Ian: I just cannot listen to that without moving at the end. I mean it's that tension from that build, right? It's just like everyone's just going crazy. It's not a rhythmic, I guess, but it's certainly outside the groove of the song. It's just brrrrrr.
[00:25:41] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:25:41] Ian: And the guitar is just kind of sliding around on the strings and then it's got that tense scale walk up where every note is just like, uh, it's getting a little higher.
[00:25:51] Mahea: Well, I think that's what's keeping the pulse in place. I would think in that situation, I would just be playing as fast as I can, but making sure that you're hitting the accents in the moments when the chord changes or the note changes or whatever, and then you're still kind of stuck in the pulse because of that aspect.
[00:26:07] Ian: Totally.
[00:26:07] Mahea: So it is controlled chaos in that sense.
[00:26:09] Martin: It's a little hard to hear, but my understanding is that bassist Tim Comerford is playing basically triplets on that middle D while all the chaos is ensuing around. Which I always thought was really interesting. It's sort of like, functionally, the role of the bass player to hold everything together anyway. And then amidst this chaos, it kind of has this quality of being the sort of core central identity of the listener, holding on amidst the chaos.
[00:26:34] Mahea: But still resistant. Like the triplet figure is different from most of what we've heard.
[00:26:38] Martin: That's true. That's true.
[00:26:39] Ian: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Mahea: So it's resisting in its own way. Because there's different forms of protest.
[00:26:43] Ian: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[00:26:46] Mahea: It's triplet based protest.
[00:26:47] Martin: At the very end of the song, right before the very last riff, they all do the triplet figure together.
[00:26:52] Ian: Yeah, yeah totally.
[00:26:56] [track]: [music]
[00:26:59] Mahea: It feels like there's a lot of musical symbolism in this throughout. Like with the repetition stuff, you even have the experience as a listener, a little bit of like... like you get comfortable in the repetition, you get kind of irritated at it just a little bit for a second, you know? Like it feels very similar to the experience of being part of an organization that you start to lose faith in at a certain point. And then it's such a big relief when you break away from it.
[00:27:22] Ian: Yeah. I mean, the moment of release, when it all settles into the groove again at the top... my vision for this is definitely like... you could call it an angry mob or something like that, but an angry group of people. You know, whispers are going around the crowd, like, "we can't let this happen... our humanity's being crushed." You know, the beginnings of defiance, right? And Zack's voice starts off almost in the background like, "F*** you, I won't do what you tell me? F*** you, we won't... I won't do what you tell me."
[00:27:50] You know what I mean? It's like, it builds and then the whole thing locks in. You get this release because the rhythm locks in. You get this release because the scale stops climbing and lands on that like pentatonic riff. You get this vocal release because he starts screaming it on the rhythm and he's just like letting go, and that whisper has now turned into one unified energy, right? So like it's not multiple just individuals whispering. It's now a unified group of people charging down the street, or marching down the street to achieve an objective. And everyone's pounding the same drum, the same rhythm, the same kind of surging electrical energy. And I think that probably very much is the dynamic of being in a riot. The psychology of crowds, right?
[00:28:37] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:28:38] Ian: Little whispers are happening and suddenly somehow it all comes together and it just gets directed at one thing. And it's all unified. And that's a scary, dangerous thing.
[00:28:47] Mahea: Absolutely. 'Cause then you just have a different form of people being part of an organization...
[00:28:52] Ian: Oh yeah, totally.
[00:28:53] Mahea: ... without clarity. And that's just the nature of humans.
[00:28:56] Ian: It takes on a life of its own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This song actually hit number one in 2009 in the UK at Christmastime. It became the number one hit.
[00:29:07] Mahea: What happened?
[00:29:08] Ian: So basically a bunch of people in the UK got sick and tired of being force fed songs from the X Factor, from like Simon Cowell and his, you know, whole manufactured thing where every year there'd be an X Factor winner and that X Factor winner would do some schmaltzy, sugary song that would go to the top of the charts. Someone got sick of it and in 2009, started a petition and an online movement and it totally caught on ,and "Killing in the Name" became the top Christmas song.
[00:29:40] Mahea: That's awesome. So are you going to start listening to it with your family at Christmas?
[00:29:44] Ian: Yeah, I should put it on all my Christmas mixes.
[00:29:47] Martin: It's now the Die Hard of music.
[00:29:50] Mahea: Yeah, seriously. Well, are we ready to move on to our last song of the day?
[00:29:55] Ian: Definitely.
[00:29:55] Martin: Yeah.
[00:29:57] Mahea: Okay, we're gonna listen to all 15 minutes of it. Just kidding.
[00:30:24] [track]: [music]
[00:30:24] Mahea: Alright. I've listened to it. Non stop for two days, so I'm gonna go ahead and hit stop there. Uh... we are listening to Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," which I stand by is a fight song, but it turns out it's a fight song in more ways than I was aware of, so that's exciting.
[00:30:42] Obviously, you guys are familiar with the piece. What do you associate it with? Where do you think you've heard it in your life? In your travels as an adult human?
[00:30:51] Martin: I feel like I heard the Boston Pops play it for the Fourth of July or something.
[00:30:56] Mahea: Yeah. Ian, what do you associate the song with?
[00:30:59] Ian: Can you play me just the main theme again?
[00:31:01] Mahea: This one?
[00:31:07] [track]: [music]
[00:31:15] Mahea: So that's one of the themes.
[00:31:17] Ian: Yep.
[00:31:17] Martin: Nah, but do the big, big one. You know the one I mean.
[00:31:24] [track]: [music]
[00:31:29] Mahea: Is this the one you meant, Ian?
[00:31:31] Ian: Yeah, I think so. I feel like I think of Bugs Bunny or something like that.
[00:31:34] Mahea: Yeah. You know what that theme actually is?
[00:31:38] Ian: What's that one?
[00:31:39] Mahea: Well, let me start by just saying... okay, so "1812 Overture." What is your understanding of the word "overture?"
[00:31:45] Ian: Um, something at the start, I would have thought? Something... an opening to an opera or...
[00:31:52] Mahea: A musical or something like that.
[00:31:55] Martin: Exposition.
[00:31:56] Ian: Usually runs through a few different themes that will appear later in the performance, I would guess.
[00:32:03] Mahea: It feels like a preview-y kind of thing, right? I had never really realized that it wasn't a word that I had questioned at any point. So "overture" is, like you're saying, it could be a collection of themes, usually hinting at something coming ahead. It's sometimes used kind of interchangeably with the word "suite."
[00:32:19] But so... this piece is actually a collection of themes, but we associate most of those themes with this piece rather than their source material. The one that we link most closely to the "1812 Overture" is actually the French national anthem.
[00:32:36] [track]: [music]
[00:32:42] Ian: Oh totally.
[00:32:44] Martin: Oh damn!
[00:32:46] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:32:46] Martin: Wow. Okay.
[00:32:47] Mahea: Tchaikovsky hated this piece. It's possible that he came around eventually, but one of the things he had to say about it was, "I'm undecided as to whether my overture is good or bad, but it is probably the latter."
[00:32:59] He also said, "I wrote it without any warm and loving feelings, and so it will probably be lacking in artistic merit."
[00:33:06] So not a fan of the piece. He was basically commissioned to write something for an arts and industry exhibition that was going to be held in Moscow in 1882. One of the things that was supposed to happen at that exhibition is they were going to open the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, a giant building that was originally supposed to be created in celebration of Napoleon's retreat in 1812, but it was still unfinished at the time of writing. It was unfinished at the time of the premiere still.
[00:33:34] Martin: Glad to know it's not just me.
[00:33:36] Mahea: What do you mean?
[00:33:36] Martin: You know, doing things at the very last possible minute.
[00:33:39] Mahea: Oh yeah, no. A hundred percent. You and the nation of Russia.
[00:33:43] Martin: Hashtag relatable.
[00:33:45] Mahea: But so Tchaikovsky didn't like the building itself. He was not inspired by it.
[00:33:49] Ian: Neither did Stalin, I think. I think he knocked it down or something.
[00:33:52] Mahea: Yeah, he did.
[00:33:53] Um, but he went into it uninspired and what he did with it is actually pretty extraordinary because this is the piece that is probably most responsible for the wealth of his estate. But I think ultimately he just didn't like this commission.
[00:34:07] He ended up putting a lot of symbolism into the writing, but it is just a collection of different pieces of music that he has repurposed and arranged in an expert way. Some of the music is original because you need that to transition and make things work. But yeah, it's basically like a really elaborate puzzle.
[00:34:27] [track]: [music]
[00:34:35] Mahea: The first thing you hear at the very beginning is the melody from an Eastern Orthodox hymn called "O Lord, Save Thy People."
[00:34:47] [track]: [music]
[00:34:54] Mahea: Then we get the French national anthem, which interestingly wasn't actually the national anthem during Napoleon's time because he replaced it for a little while.
[00:35:03] Ian: Is that "La Marseillaise?"
[00:35:04] Mahea: Yes, it is.
[00:35:06] Ian: That was written during the French Revolution, so that would have been a great choice for this as well.
[00:35:11] Mahea: Totally.
[00:35:11] Ian: And after the French Revolution, all the nations of Europe attacked France, even before Napoleon. And "La Marseillaise" became an important rallying cry for the French at that point.
[00:35:22] Mahea: For some reason it wasn't good enough for Napoleon though.
[00:35:25] Ian: Yeah, Napoleon was all about Napoleon and not about the people, you know? So once again, he destroyed the Republican government that was the anthem for.
[00:35:34] Mahea: It's funny though, because here Tchaikovsky uses it to symbolize Napoleon.
[00:35:37] Ian: Oh, interesting.
[00:35:38] Mahea: So when it comes in, it's supposed to be the French entering. Then we get an overlap of the French National Anthem with some more Eastern folk music to represent the fact that there was this big clash.
[00:35:51] [track]: [music]
[00:36:01] Mahea: Then we get the first set of cannons. We get five of them.
[00:36:07] [track]: [music]
[00:36:15] Mahea: I guess that's supposed to represent the Battle of Borodino. And then we get that very, very, very long descending passage that just goes on forever and ever. Beautiful orchestration to make that sound happen. And that's supposed to represent the French army retreating.
[00:36:31] [track]: [music]
[00:36:39] Mahea: And then "O Lord, Save Thy People" comes back, but in a more glorious way. Like it's just... it sounds a little more confident, a little more bold. There's more instruments in at that point.
[00:36:51] [track]: [music]
[00:36:57] Mahea: And then the piece closes with 11 more canon shots and the melody from "God Save the Tsar!"
[00:37:09] [track]: [music]
[00:37:19] Mahea: So yeah, it is a collection of different pieces of music, really beautifully orchestrated essentially. I didn't know that.
[00:37:26] Ian: I don't think I knew that either. Yeah.
[00:37:28] Martin: No, I definitely didn't know that.
[00:37:29] Mahea: Right?
[00:37:30] Ian: It's this whole story. Yeah, it's like a film score. It's got all these different kind of motifs interacting.
[00:37:36] Mahea: It's interesting that he approached it that way too though. Like, I'm trying to picture writing a piece of music you don't want to write. And knowing it's going to be an overture. It's amazing that he still pulled so much symbolism in and made it work so beautifully.
[00:37:50] The cannons are an interesting choice.
[00:37:54] Ian: Love that. Yeah, Rage Against the Machine probably should have put some cannons in "Killing in the Name." Mingus should have had some cannons.
[00:38:01] Mahea: It's supposedly like... well, I mean, obviously really difficult to sync that up properly, so I'm not sure that Tchaikovsky ever really heard it as perfectly timed as the Boston Pops might do it today.
[00:38:16] Ian: Do you know what it's been like? Because obviously it was written for that moment of Russian history and the Russian tsar and Russian glory in that moment, but it's taken on many other lives, I assume, right? Are there any off the top of your head?
[00:38:31] Mahea: Most marching bands do the "1812 Overture" eventually, you know? Like even high school marching bands. Personally, I associate it with fireworks displays, and I think that's partly because it has that big finish.
[00:38:42] Ian: It gets played at july 4th a lot, I guess.
[00:38:44] Mahea: A lot.
[00:38:45] Ian: Yeah.
[00:38:45] Mahea: ...which is really weird knowing that it was a piece commissioned by the government of Russia.
[00:38:49] Ian: Right, a tsar, like an absolutist government.
[00:38:52] Mahea: Yeah, it just doesn't feel American at all.
[00:38:55] Ian: No.
[00:38:55] Mahea: I believe Tchaikovsky conducted it at the opening of Carnegie Hall. And I'm pretty sure he was the first Eastern European musician to conduct a major event in the US. And that would have been that concert. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the pieces of his that he did.
[00:39:13] I don't know. It's a little bit like Oasis and "Wonderwall" or something like that, where it's like... you can't really complain because it's sort of a huge part of your career. But at the same time, it would suck for this to be a big hit if you didn't like that you wrote it.
[00:39:26] Ian: I kind of never trust artists when they say that. I feel like a lot of these artists, a lot of these composers, are pretty ornery people anyway — never satisfied with a lot of their works, you know?
[00:39:36] Mahea: I believe that in this case though, because he had some complicated feelings towards the government. Well, I don't want to overly speculate, but basically some negative interactions with government officials may or may not have inspired a suicide rather than what his death was officially labeled. So I do believe that he probably didn't want to write what is essentially an ode to the government.
[00:39:57] That said, he was the most famous composer in Russia at the time. So if you're celebrating Russia, of course you get the most famous composer to do a piece of music.
[00:40:07] The other thing that blew my mind: This whole thing was done in six weeks. The scale of what this piece of music is, I cannot imagine... especially considering they didn't like have Finale, so the guy was just sitting there with a bunch of pieces of paper.
[00:40:20] Ian: That's what I was going to say. I mean, I'm curious about that. Do you have insight into how Tchaikovsky would have written it? Is he just hearing the parts in his head and writing down the notes? Like, is it that fluid?
[00:40:30] Mahea: I mean, I would assume so.
[00:40:32] Ian: Maybe tinking on a piano occasionally?
[00:40:34] Mahea: Yeah, exactly. Like I was going to say, that's how I arrange first, a lot of the time. It's rare that I go in and like demo parts immediately. Everything starts piano reduction. So I think a lot of this is: you work out the harmonies and the motifs and all that stuff on the keyboard, and then you divide those parts up. And I would assume that's how he wrote, because I don't know how else he would do it at that point.
[00:40:58] Martin: Yeah, I mean, with that kind of time crunch, you know, that's so many notes, you got to be pretty well steeped in the traditions of orchestration and understand how to put those notes in the right voices very quickly to make this volume of music in that short amount of time.
[00:41:12] Mahea: And if you listen to the way his pieces work, like whether it's this or the Nutcracker, Swan Lake or whatever, instruments do play kind of the same roles. Good roles. That's a real understanding of each family of instruments.
[00:41:24] Ian: Yeah, you probably would have to, because you can't, on a whim, be like, "I'm going to try something crazy." 'Cause you can't hear it, right? Like until you get it in front of your performers.
[00:41:35] You know, from our modern kind of vibe where it's so easy to, yes, write something on the piano, but then like, you can immediately translate into a DAW and hear it back and be like, "oh wait, that didn't work at all." You know? Or "that did work or that is exactly what I expected."
[00:41:51] Martin: Yeah. That really speaks to the depth of immersion in the space and the sphere with the instrumentalists, hearing pieces all the time. So you, you know, you write down an A in a certain range for the violin and you're like pretty sure you know what it's going to sound like because you heard that violinist who's probably going to play the piece play that A a hundred times last month. You know what I mean? It's just the immersion in the space.
[00:42:17] Mahea: Even with my limited experience working... because I wrote for orchestra back in school and stuff like that, you get these really quick lessons. The first time you write something that doesn't work... like I know specifically certain things I will never write for horns because I wrote a piece and everything else worked really well, and then we got to this one part and I had written something that it was just impossible for two different horn players to match intonation without like rehearsing forever. So I will never do that kind of thing again, you know? There's something about seeing someone's face when you've set them up for failure without realizing you did it that like permanently burns that lesson into your mind. It's almost like learning to play the orchestra like it's an instrument itself.
[00:43:02] [track]: [music]
[00:43:15] Mahea: Anything else you guys want to touch on on fight songs before we wrap this up?
[00:43:18] Martin: I'm just so pleased that neither of you picked Rachel Platten. Thank you for that.
[00:43:25] [track]: [music]
[00:43:27] Mahea: And with that, the "Fight Songs" episode of Themes and Variation is just about over. But before I let you go, I have a couple quick announcements to make.
[00:43:34] [track]: [music]
[00:43:35] Mahea: We'll be back here again in two weeks with a new episode and a new theme. If you'd like to join in on the conversation or keep up with podcast news, be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThemesVariation or drop us a line at [email protected].
[00:43:49] Speaking of soundfly.com, be sure to stop by the site where you can find resources for all your music learning needs.
[00:43:56] This turned out to be a really fun theme, and while we had a great time choosing the three songs featured in the episode, there were obviously lots of other possibilities. Here are some noteworthy fight songs selected by members of the Soundfly Discord community...
[00:44:10] Shout out to remmah for suggesting "Guile's Theme" from Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and highlighting the merits of video game music in general. I definitely toyed with the idea of bringing in something from the Mortal Kombat franchise, so we were sort of on the same page for a minute there.
[00:44:25] Jasmine suggested the song "Kung Fu Fighting," pointing out that it offers a musical mood that's uniquely non-threatening, yet it still clearly fits the theme.
[00:44:33] And Basho shared a piano medley of battle songs from the Final Fantasy franchise that I hadn't heard before, so thanks for bringing that to our attention.
[00:44:41] You can find some of these suggestions and others in the Themes and Variation Spotify playlist linked to in show notes. If you'd like to learn more about the community or Soundfly in general, visit soundfly.com. And if you decide to become a Soundfly subscriber, be sure to use the code PODCAST in all caps for 20% off at checkout.
[00:45:02] Thanks for listening, and I'll see you again in two weeks.