This week, we have a show for you that is absolutely ripe for the picking! We're creating a musical fruit salad, looking at fruit's appearance in music, in a show we're calling "Apples And Oranges."
Here's your positively peachy playlist. I'm sure you'll go bananas...
- Scott Joplin (1868–1917), Peacherine Rag – Scott Joplin was the undisputed "King of Ragtime." He grew up in northeast Texas, but in 1894, he settled temporarily in Sedalia, Missouri and often performed at the local Maple Leaf Club, for which his most famous piece of music is named. Joplin helped to make ragtime a popular genre, especially among music publishers, but also guided the style out of barrell houses and dance clubs into the parlor culture of early 20th century America. One of the ways he did this was by giving his ragtime tunes more elegant titles, such as The Chrysanthemum and The Antoinette.  We just listened to The Peacherine, named for a hybrid fruit a cross between the nectarine and the peach, that can be found in the Southern United States where Joplin grew up. The Peacherine was not the only fruit-themed rag that he composed. He also published The Pineapple Rag in 1908.
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- Johann Strauss II (1825–1899), Wo die Zitronen blühen ("Where The Lemons Blossom") Waltz, Op. 364 – After the successful premiere of his opera Die Fledermaus, composer Johann Strauss II, the waltz king of Vienna, went on a concert tour of Italy. As a gift to the Italian audiences, he wrote this lovely waltz originally titled Bella Italia ("Beautiful Italy"), and it premiered in Turin in 1874. When he returned to Austria, he decided to rename the work something that had a stronger connection to home. He called it "Wo die Zitronen blühen" or "Where The Lemons Blossom." Viennese audiences would recognize this phrase ("Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen") as a line from the famous Goethe novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, where the character Mignon longs for her lost home in Italy, the land where lemon trees grow. This section of Goethe's work has been especially popular among composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Hugo Wolf all set it to music.
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- George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), Acis and Galatea: O ruddier than the cherry – The myth of Acis and Galatea comes from Ovid's Metamorphosis, and tells the story of the love between the sea-nymph Galatea and the human shepherd Acis. The only problem is the cyclops Polyphemus-who also made an appearance as a troublemaker in Homer's Odyssey. Polyphemus also loves Galatea-in Handel's telling of the tale, Polyphemus declares his love for Galatea in this aria, comparing her complexion to the color a cherry. His cherry-colored love remains out of reach, and later in a jealous rage, Polyphemus murders the shepherd with a boulder. Galatea then transforms the blood of her murdered lover into the waters of the Acis River in Sicily. Romantic, right? The story was adapted into a libretto written by John Gay (who also wrote The Beggar's Opera) and then set to music by Handel, becoming Handel's first English language work.
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- Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), The Love For Three Oranges Suite, Op. 33 – Old-time radio fans may recognize this tune as the theme for the 1950s radio drama The FBI In Peace And War. But its source is actually from one of the strangest operas of the 20th century, Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. The opera is about an evil witch named Fata Morgana who curses a hypochondriac Prince to fall in love with and pursue, you guessed it, three oranges (yes, oranges). The oranges are being held captive by a chef, and each contain within them a very thirsty princess. When the prince rescues the oranges and breaks them open, two of the princesses die immediately of thirst. The third princess survives, and she and the prince end up living happily ever after-but not before she's briefly transformed into a rat. It's very strange, and as you may guess, the opera mostly confused people when it premiered.
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- Erik Satie (1866–1925), Three Pieces In The Form Of A Pear – Like the flower of the pear tree, Composer Erik Satie was a late bloomer. He did not receive a serious music education until he was in his late thirties. His mother died when he was young, and his father married a piano teacher who enrolled young Erik in the preparatory piano class of the Paris Conservatoire. Although a gifted pianist, he was described as as the "laziest student in the Conservatoire" To earn a living, he worked as an accompanist in the cafés and theaters of Montmartre. His Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear appeared in 1903. The work was a mixture of pieces written around 1890 and more recent cabaret songs. Shortly after completing this piece Satie realized that his compositional technique needed improvement. In 1905, at the age of 39, he enrolled in the Schola Cantorum, studying counterpoint, fugue, and orchestration with such teachers as Roussel and d'Indy.
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- Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000), The Flowering Peach – Alan Hovhaness gave evocative titles to many of his compositions, but the title of his work The Flowering Peach actually belongs to a play by American playwright Clifford Odets. Odets' The Flowering Peach was a 1954 modern retelling of the biblical Noah's Ark story for which Hovhaness composed the incidental music. Though its initial form was accompanimental, Hovhaness was able to transform his music for Odets play into a full scale concert suite of seven short movements. We just listened to the overture, and you might notice the unusual instrumentation: alto saxophone, clarinet, harp, and a variety of percussion instruments. Hovhaness thought that simplicity was key to musical expression, and his decision to use these instruments was guided by his belief that musical timbre was more interesting than complicated harmonies and ornamentation. He also brought his distinctive style to the mix, combining the idioms of Armenian folk music with Christian and Indian spirituality.
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- Mark O'Connor (b. 1961), Johnny Appleseed Suite – Multi-instrumentalist and composer Mark O'Connor has become one of the most trusted names when it comes to the performance and preservation of Americana music. In addition to being a virtuoso fiddler, and critically-acclaimed composer, O'Connor is a pedagogue, developing the "O'Connor Method" of string playing. Consider it like the American answer to the Suzuki method, with more emphasis on improvisation and a heavy dose of American folk music. The "Johnny Appleseed Suite," a tribute to the real-life pioneer nurseryman John Chapman, began its life as a work for children. It originally had narration, telling how Chapman wandered America helping homesteaders stake claims in the west by planting apple trees (one of the easiest ways to claim land in early America was to plant an orchard). The work has been transformed here into a concert piece, replacing the narration with O'Connor's own fiddling.
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- Conni Ellisor (b. 1957), Blackberry Winter – American composer Conni Ellisor is a Juilliard-trained violinist and a commercial music professional working in Nashville, so she's the perfect composer to blend classical music and Tennessee folk music traditions in a work like Blackberry Winter. This work, commissioned by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, features the mountain dulcimer in this movement and a Tennessee music box in an earlier movement. Both instruments come from the Tennessee folk tradition. They are lap string instruments, usually homemade, featuring drone strings, a string for the melody, and traditionally strummed with a turkey quill. The work's title was derived from a famous dulcimer tune called "Blackberry Blossom," quoted in the first movement. Ellisor settled on the Tennessee colloquialism Blackberry Winter for the title, referring to a late spring frost that usually results in a bountiful blackberry harvest.
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- Harry Belafonte, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" – Harry Belafonte's 1956 album Calypso not only made the career of the Caribbean-American singer, but also transformed American folk music by introducing it the calypso beat. It influenced practically every folk artist: I mean, just think for a second about the name of the folk group "The Kingston Trio." Calypso was also hugely successful-it spent a whopping 31 weeks atop the charts, and it was the first million-selling record by a single artist. Its breakthrough hit was the traditional song "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)," sung by others like Edric Connor and Shirley Bassey, but made famous by Belafonte. The song was a popular Jamaican folk song from around the late 19th century, sung as a call-and-response by the banana workers as they loaded bunches onto boats. The banana trade had taken Jamaica by storm, and the delicious fruit became the country's biggest export by the early 20th century.
