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Noon Edition

Musical Metropolis: New York

Start spreading the news, because the Ether Game Brain Trust is heading to the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps, "New York, New York," our final stop along our month-long musical metropolis tour, exploring the music of different cities. Below is our playlist of some great Manhattan melodies:

  • Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, "From The New World" – Near the end of his life, the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák moved to New York City, becoming the fist international music superstar to take up residence in the city. There he served as the director of the National Conservatory of Music. Dvořák began in 1892 at a starting salary of $15,000, an amount equivalent to nearly $400,000 today. The conservatory, which had been founded by the wealthy philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, was open to all students, including women and black students. Dvořák's original contract obligated him to work three hours a day, six days a week, with four months' vacation in the summer. During his stay, Dvorak avidly studied American folk music, and some have heard loose quotations of specific American melodies in his Ninth Symphony – which he completed during his tenure at the conservatory, a year after arriving in the Big Apple. He would only stay in New York for another two years, with the economic depression of 1893 forcing him to return to Europe in 1895.


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  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Festival Coronation March – There's that old joke: "How do get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice, Practice." It's a lesson in diligence: if you want to make it, don't take any shortcuts. Well, that's not what Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky did when he was the honored guest at Carnegie Hall's opening night in 1891. Originally called simply "Music Hall," it was funded by steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to be a marquee performance venue in New York. Tchaikovsky was asked to write a new piece for the occasion. He was one of the biggest composers in the world, but like many composers from that era, he didn't take what was happening in America very seriously. He brought along a piece with him called "March Solennelle," which was actually just his Festival Coronation March in disguise. The audiences at Carnegie Hall caught onto to Tchaikovsky's ruse, but they didn't really care. They were just excited to see the great composer performing in their city.


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  • Charles Gounod (1818–1893), Faust – Gounod's Faust is still performed frequently, but it will probably never be as popular as it was in the late nineteenth and early 20th century. From its premiere until the 1920s, Faust was never not being staged somewhere in a major European opera house. In 1883, it made its way across the pond to New York City as the inaugural opera of the Metropolitan Opera. The existing opera house in New York at the time, the Academy of Music, was full of old money aristocrats. And in the 1880s, New York City became the home of a number of wealthy, "new money" industrialists, wanting to make their way into high society. So they created the Met to compete with the Academy, and the Met has since become the largest classical music organization in America. Some of those first Met patrons included names like J.P. Morgan, Roosevelt, and Vanderbilt-industrialists that were excluded from the Academy of Music opera house.


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  • Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), West Side Story – West Side Story probably remains composer Leonard Bernstein's most famous work, but originally, director and choreographer Jerome Robbins had plans to make an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet called East Side Story. His idea was to center the plot around a Catholic boy falling in love with a Jewish girl on the Lower East Side of New York City, but when racially-motivated gang warfare began breaking out in cities around the U.S., Robbins and his collaborators Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents decided to make their musical a little more timely and relevant. The religious conflict became a racial one, the Lower East Side became the Upper West Side, and West Side Story was born. The 1957 musical, as well as the subsequent 1961 film and their Symphonic Dances orchestral suite were all huge artistic successes.


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  • Steve Reich (b. 1936), New York Counterpoint – Native New Yorker Steve Reich has spent most of his life in the city. In the 1960s, his minimalist style was part of a group of so-called "Downtown" music, comprising the music of New York City-based revolutionaries like La Monte Young and Yoko Ono. These so-called "Downtown" musicians drew influence from music outside of the traditions of modernist European classical music, separating themselves from the more stuffy "Uptown" composers at Juilliard and Columbia. Reich briefly attended Juilliard, but most of his influence derives from African drumming, Balinese gamelan, and Hebrew cantillation. Many of his works use rhythm as an organizing principle, and often incorporate the use of recorded tape. New York Counterpoint was written for clarinet and tape and commissioned by clarinetist Richard Stotzman in 1985. It's part of a series of sorts that includes the similar works Vermont Counterpoint and Electric Counterpoint.


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  • Aaron Copland (1900–1990), Quiet City – Although his most popular works are associated with the great wide open spaces of America, in real life Aaron Copland had almost nothing in common with this image. He was a Jewish socialist and a life-long dweller of New York City. Not all of his works are set in the country, however. "Quite City" was written in 1939 as incidental music to a play by fellow Brooklynite Irwin Shaw. Although the play folded after just two performances, Copland salvaged some of his music for this tone poem. Set in the big city after hours, "Quiet City" reflects the play's introspective characters and their nighttime musings on religion and their difficulty adapting to fast-paced modern life. The piece premiered in New York City in 1941, where it was performed by the Saidenberg Little Symphony at what is now one of the city's oldest community art centers, the 92nd Street Y.


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  • Charles Ives (1874–1978), Central Park In The Dark – Charles Ives' Central Park in the Dark was written in 1906 as a kind of companion piece to his work Unanswered Question (the latter was subtitled "A Contemplation of a Serious Matter" whereas this piece was subtitled "A Contemplation of Nothing Serious.") The work revolves around the sounds heard in Central Park in New York City around the turn of the century, before motorized vehicles and radio dominated the ether on those hot New York summer nights. In typical Ives fashion, this work juxtaposes many different sounds simultaneously. In addition to the ambient sounds of nature, tunes from a nearby saloon waft into our ears. Most notably, we can hear the song "Hello, Ma Baby," an 1899 Tin Pan Alley melody popular when Central Park In The Dark was written, and probably known today as the song sung by Michigan J. Frog in that Warner Brothers cartoon.


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  • Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, Empire State Of Mind – Written in 2009, "Empire State of Mind" has replaced Sinatra's "The Theme from New York, New York" as the most frequently heard song about the Big Apple, New York City. Although much of the credit goes to Brooklyn-native Jay-Z and Manhattan-native Alicia Keys for making this song famous, they weren't the ones who originally wrote it. Songwriters Angela Hunte and Jnay Sewell-Ulepic wrote most of the tune after experiencing a bit of homesickness on a trip to London. Both Hunte and Sewell-Ulepic are from Brooklyn, and grew up in the same Bed-Stuy housing project that Jay-Z grew up in. For the main sample, they use a sped-up loop from the song "Love On A Two-Way Street" by the 1960s R&B group The Moments. "Empire State Of Mind" became a modern day anthem for the city, selling millions of copies and earning Jay-Z a Grammy award.


Looking for some more Big Apple music? Check out our New York podcast!



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