Music on a world tour

Joaquin Rodrigo; Concierto de Aranjuez; New York Philharmonic; Jose Serebrier, conducting; Sharon Isbin, guitarist

During my high school years, Mr. D, our band director, had our jazz band play a variety of styles. I remember playing classics like “In The Mood”, “Satin Doll”, “Little Brown Jug” and “Blues In Hoss Flat”. At the other end of the spectrum, he also had us play a jazz band version of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. As I recall the arrangement was pretty good. And we also played a jazz band chart of Chick Corea’s “Spain”. I liked it a lot. Mostly, I think, because of the intro. It sounded exotic and I liked exotic.

The next time I heard “Spain” was on The Tonight Show some time in the 80’s. Maureen McGovern was singing as a guest with the Tonight Show band that evening. I had heard of Ms. McGovern before. She was the artist that recorded “Wherever Love Takes Me” from the British disaster film Gold, “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure and “We May Never Love Like This Again” from The Towering Inferno. The media referred to her as “the Disaster Theme Queen”.

The chart that she and the band performed on The Tonight Show was awesome. It was on that performance that I learned of the vocal range of Ms. McGovern. It’s huge. And she mopped the stage with the song. Mr. Carson invited her over to the couch afterward where she revealed that the traditional intro to the song, the exotic one that I had heard in jazz band a few years earlier, comes from the middle movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra.

Concierto de Aranjuez was composed in 1939 and was inspired by the gardens at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, a spring resort and residence of the King of Spain in the town of Aranjuez near Madrid. The gardens were built to relieve the royal residents from dust and drought using the waters of the adjacent Tagus and Jarama rivers. Mr. Rodrigo’s Concierto endeavors to take the listener through sounds of nature in and around the gardens during the period in which it was written, capturing the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains. The adagio, the aforementioned middle movement, is one of the most recognizable portions of music in the 20^th century classical repertoire. Mr. Rodrigo and his wife revealed late in life that the expression of sadness that permeates the movement was written as a response to the miscarriage of their first child.

Mr. Rodrigo’s guitar concerto is the composer’s most successful work. He contracted diphtheria at the age of three and almost completely lost his sight because of it. Subsequently, he wrote all of his compositions in Braille, which were later transcribed for publication. And though by virtue of the guitar concerto he elevated the Spanish guitar to international concert status, he never mastered the instrument himself, preferring to play the violin and the piano. Mr. Rodrigo died in 1999 at the age of ninety-seven.

It’s fun to think of music as a message in a bottle, or as a balloon with a note attached. “Write to this address and tell where you found me.” Just this morning, my friend Brent C. was telling of a group of street musicians that he heard playing in Salsburg, Austria, and then saw two years later on TV promoting their tour of the US. I heard Mr. Rodrigo’s Concierto in a band room more than forty years after it was written as the intro to a ferocious jazz tune. An artistic thought that escapes the borders of the mind and into the music atmosphere can belong to the ages. And there’s no knowing when or how it’s going to come back.

Credits: To Mr. D., for enduring all the hardships and frustrations of teaching music in the public school systems, yet reaching the learning masses by sharing his musical soul. Thank you.