Beat the Heat with a Water Playlist!

With summer 2024 off to a hot start here in Washington, can we be blamed for musing upon water? 

Countless classical music works about water come to mind, George Frideric Handel’s Water Music and Claude Debussy’s La Mer being two obvious examples. 

Here’s a summer playlist of water music from across the ages and around the world. 

Barbara Croall: “Nbiidaasamishkaamin/We Come Paddling Here” 

I had a conversation with John Banther in a season 4 episode of Classical Breakdown about Barbara Croall, an Odawa First Nation composer born in 1966 who lives in Canada. Nbiidaasamishkaamin is a musical depiction of life on the river, and it includes striking special effects that stunningly evoke the sounds of bird-calls. 

Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony: III. Scherzo. The Waves 

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the twentieth century. He studied with Maurice Ravel and was influenced early on by Germanic musical ideas, but through his penetrating and enthusiastic exploration of English folk music and English composers dating back to the Renaissance, he created a modern and distinctly British musical idiom.  

Vaughan Williams was 38 years old when he conducted the 1910 premiere of A Sea Symphony, a choral setting of poetry by Walt Whitman. The third movement, a scherzo, is a setting of Whitman’s “After the Sea-Ship” from Leaves of Grass. 

Gabriela Ortiz: Rio de las mariposas 

Gabriela Ortiz was born in Mexico City in 1964. Her parents were founding members of Las Folkloristas, and she has a doctorate in composition and electronic music from City University of London. Of her orchestral work Rio de las mariposas, she writes: 

The title of this work is an evocation of the legendary Papaloapan or “Rio de las Mariposas”, whose banks reach the river port of Tlacotalpan, Veracruz, where as a child and teenager I knew the regional songs... Images and memories of those trips are what nourish my desire to explore and play in a simple and personal way, with all these contrapuntal, rhythmic and melodic fabrics that occur naturally in a music so rich and full of tradition. On the other hand, I have also wanted to focus the harp not only within the context of Western European music, but as an instrument that has always been linked to our roots, and that its melodic and rhythmic possibilities can lead us to new articulations of language, but always within new contexts and reconstructing a path that, as indicated by the Venezuelan composer Paul Desenne, shows strata of an imaginary musical archeology that represents what we could call the history of musical miscegenation of our lands. 

Eric Whitacre: Water Night

American composer Eric Whitacre was born in Reno, Nevada in 1970. A Juilliard School alumnus, he is particularly noted for choral music, not only as a composer of choral works, but for the Virtual Choir experiences he has lead that use technology to bring together tens of thousands of vocalists worldwide.  

“Water Night” is a setting of a text by Mexican poet Octavio Paz. This recording will be broadcast on WETA VivaLaVoce on Monday, July 22 at 11:00am.   

Margaret Bonds: The Negro Speaks of Rivers 

The music of American composer Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) has been featured on Choral Showcase with Bill Bukowski, and John Banther and I have talked about her music on Classical Breakdown. A particularly fascinating aspect of her oeuvre is her many collaborations with Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. She set to music many of his poems, including one of his best known, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. 

Georg Philipp Telemann: Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth: X. Canarie: Die lustigen Boots Leute 

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) composed Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth (Hamburg Ebb and Flow) for a centennial celebration of that port city’s Admiralty in 1723; it is often referred to informally as his “Water Music”. An instrumental suite in ten movements, with titles evoking water myths from Greco-Roman mythology, its final movement is a canarie dance entitled “Die lustigen Boots Leute” (the merry boat people). 

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: Jūra (The Sea) 

Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) also wrote poetry in Polish, the native language of his family. It is possible that he had synesthesia — experiencing visual stimuli like colors while hearing music. 

He completed his symphonic poem Jūra (The Sea) in 1907. 

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Jennifer Higdon: City Scape: II. river sings a song to trees 

Brooklyn native and three-time Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) received the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for her Violin Concerto, composed for Hilary Hahn. Her 2002 orchestral suite City Scape was commissioned by the Alanta Symphony Orchestra — the city where Higdon lived for much of her childhood. 

Chen Peixun: Fantasia on Cantonese Folk Themes (for Gaohu and Orchestra): II. Calm Lake and Autumn Moon 

The music of Hong Kong native Chen Peixun 陳培勳 (1921-2007) is deeply imbued with Cantonese musical traditions and ideas. His orchestral work Fantasia on Cantonese Folk Themes is akin to a concerto for the gaohu, a modern instrument with steel strings modeled after the much older erhu (traditionally strung with twisted silk).  

Trevor Weston: Rivers of Living Water 

In his boyhood, Trevor Weston (b. 1967) sang in the choir of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City. His undergraduate degree is from Tufts University, and he has an M.A. and a PhD in composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches at the Juilliard School and at Drew University. 

Weston’s choral anthem “Rivers of Living Water” was featured on Choral Showcase a few years ago. Its text, from Psalm 105 and John 7, intertwines images of literal water with figurative evocations of vitality, renewal, and communion with the divine. 

Lūcija Garūta: Mermaid’s Song 

Latvian pianist and composer Lūcija Garūta was born in Riga in 1902, and she died in her native city in 1977. She studied piano and composition at the Latvian Conservatory as well as at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, where Paul Dukas was one of her instructors. Her own teaching career included positions at the Jāzeps Mediņas Rīga Music High School and the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music. Her best-known work is a 1943 cantata written to defy the Third Reich; banned by the Soviets after the war, it has frequently been performed since the fall of the Iron Curtain. She is remembered today as one of the most important Latvian composers and music teachers of the twentieth century.  

She also composed many delightful miniatures, such as this chamber work, “Mermaid’s Song”. 

Kaija Saariaho: Oltra Mar: III. Vagues [Waves] 

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) has been one of the most celebrated composers of our time. Of her orchestral work Oltra Mar, she wrote: 

Oltra Mar, which means “across the sea” in the ancient French language, is written for large orchestra and mixed choir. The work differs from my other large orchestral pieces (such as Du cristal, my violin concerto Graal Théâtre, or my orchestral song cycle Château de l’âme) in its sectional structure, being divided onto seven clearly separate parts. Parts 1, 3, 5, and 7 are about travelling and about the sea, the origin of life. In these parts the choir sings without words as a part of the orchestral texture. These sea sections take us from one time / place / musical texture to another. 

Hi Kyung Kim: At the Edge of the Ocean 

Hi Kyung Kim was born in South Korea in 1954. Her undergraduate degree is from Seoul National University, and she has a Master’s and a Doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Since the early 1990s she has been on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many of her works blend Euro-American and Korean concepts. 

Schubert: Auf dem Wasser zu singen 

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) composed over 600 German lieder in his all-too-short life. He set to music “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (“To be sung on the water”) a poem by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg, in 1823. A strophic song, its third and final verse reads: 

Ach, es entschwindet mit tauigem Flügel 
Mir auf den wiegenden Wellen die Zeit. 
Morgen entschwindet mit schimmerndem Flügel 
Wieder wie gestern und heute die Zeit, 
Bis ich auf höherem, strahlenden Flügel 
Selber entschwinde der wechselnden Zeit. 

Ah, time, with dewy wings, slips away 
from me on the swaying waves. 
Tomorrow, time will slip away with shimmering wings 
like it did yesterday and today, 
until I myself, upon higher, radiant wings 
slip away within time's changes.