"SONGS AMERICA LOVES TO SING"

Saturday, September 15, 2007 at 7:30 pm ~ Rogers Center for the Arts, North Andover 

John Musto has developed into one of today's most versatile and brilliant pianists, performing Bach and Mozart with as much intensity, eloquence, and panache as he plays Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.

He came to write music relatively late (in his twenties), and calls himself "a self-taught composer [but] not a self-taught musician." He once explained that he "really learned to write music by playing it ... The very act of learning to play a piece of music is to rethink it with the composer, retrace his footsteps (finger-steps) and then, in the best performances, recompose it onstage."

Musto's vocal writing has always been notable for its clarity, intelligence, wit, and sensitive text-set-tings. Prominent singers soon began performing his music, and he established a reputation as one of America's most sympathetic and compelling composers for the voice. He has enjoyed a close, ongoing association with the New York Festival of Song, his orchestral song cycle Dove Sta Amore was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, and he scored a major success at the Wolf Trap Opera in 2004 with the World Premiere of his opera Volpone.

But Musto's multi-faceted gifts extend far beyond the vocal repertoire. He has over the years composed award-winning instrumental scores for documentaries, important orchestral pieces and concerti, and highly imaginative and brilliantly effective piano music. Like so many composer-performers across the generations, his background as a richly-gifted, stage-savvy performer has given him a keen appreciation of both the needs and the aspirations of instrumentalists -- and audiences. His writing is challenging yet rewarding, balancing the learned with the theatrical, and his music combines the auto-didact's broad receptivity with the performer's focused discipline.

Musto's instrumental music inhabits a vibrant urban landscape animated by a brash energy, languid, nocturnal poetry, and stylish, sophisticated allure. In this edgy, eclectic universe, a wailing klezmer tune may easily evolve into a proper, well-ordered fugue, and a yearning, expressionist soliloquy may be turned inside out to reveal a sultry cabaret melody. The raucous sounds of the street co-exist naturally with the meticulous teachings of the conservatory. His instrumental compositions often seem like lively, literate conversations by a diverse cast of colorful, engaging characters.

The definition in the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians of divertimento perfectly describes the intent and nature of Musto's composition: "a work primarily designed for the entertainment of the listeners and the players [presupposing] a certain lightness of approach, though without excluding the possibility of high artistic achievement." Musto's Divertimento also revels in opposites -- the contrasts between short, energetic rhythmic figures against long-lined melodies: the differences between jazz and classical elements; and the opposition of light and dark in both the coloristic and characteristic senses. The work was commissioned by the Vail Valley Music Festival in 1999, and is, according to the composer, "informed by a variety of popular music styles." It begins with a sharp yet light fanfare-like figure that acts as a kind of motto, re-appearing throughout the entire opening movement. The piano introduces a long, leisurely tune, over the xylophones repeated notes. Before long, the music turns jazzy and motoric, with long sections gaining intensity through accumulating sonorities. The music suddenly breaks off, giving way to that most controlled and learned technique, a fugue, featuring the complex, contrapuntal interchange of many lines. This progressively gains momentum and climaxes in the re-ordered return of the opening material, but this time, instead of building, the music gradually fades away.

The generally more somber middle movement is based on a dark-hued. mysterious theme in the strings that is interrupted by ghostly, hymn-like phrases in the piano. Five interconnected variations make fleeting references to fractured waltzes, Ragtime, and Bartok-like night-music, ending in a florid piano rumination on the opening material. The finale again explores contrasts of rhythm, melody, and texture. The opening theme in the winds glides leisurely above a steady, active figure in the piano and percussion, before bursting into a boisterous, sharply-rhythmic, carnival-like atmosphere. These elements are extensively revisited, combined, and developed before the opening returns. But the music's momentum cannot be contained, and the syncopated rhythmic energy overtakes all, driving the work to its impetuous conclusion. 

Excerpted from the liner notes of Music from Copland House 
About John Musto By Michael Boriskin

Program notes by Michael Boriskin

Gershwin was a superb pianist with his own distinctive, assertive style, and he loved playing for hours at parties. He began his career demonstrating the popular songs of the day in the shops of music publishers on Tin Pan Alley, and created a series of small keyboard novelties of his own. Later on—in January 1925—he composed a set of six preludes for piano, but eventually chose to publish only three of them, arranged in a fast-slow-fast pattern. As his only serious solo piano music published in Gershwin’s lifetime, it quickly became a standard concert item by recitalists. And not just by pianists: with the composer’s permission, violinist Samuel Dushkin reworked two of the unused piano preludes for piano and violin, and that has motivated musicians since then to do the same with the three pieces that Gershwin published. Like the preludes of Bach, Chopin, and Debussy, Gershwin’s short works each focuses on a single musical idea. But in Gershwin’s case, his musical ideas grow out of the tradition of the blues and early jazz, with liberal use of syncopation and “blue” notes that mark them as distinctly American. The Preludes were transcribed for clarinet and piano by Eugene Asti.  Steven Ledbetter

"NOW AND THEN"

Saturday, November 10, 2007 at 7:30 pm ~ Pawtucket Congregational, Lowell
Sunday, November 11, 2007 at 4:00 pm ~ West Parish Church, Andover

Maurice Ravel composed his for piano in 1903-05, precisely the years in which the young man, already becoming established as a substantial composer, attempted for the last times, to win the Prix de Rome. As on all previous occasions, the conservative judges found his music far too “modern” and passed him over in favor of relative nonentities. (The scandal that followed Ravel’s final rejection led to the resignation of the conservatory’s director and his replacement with Gabriel Fauré, a far more open-minded administrator.)

The very title “Sonatine” indicates that Ravel is considering a return to the formal clarity and the elegance of the late eighteenth century. The opening movement, Modéré, adopts the sonata form expected at such a time (a form that Ravel rarely used elsewhere). The minuet of the second movement is embellished melodically and colored with harmonies that suggest earlier music, while the finale is basically a “perpetual motion” piece, with a brilliant conclusion.

The transcription for harp trio is the work of Carlos Salzedo (1885‑1961), a harpist and composer who was among this century’s most influential figures in the development of his instrument. Salzedo graduated from the Paris Conservatory in piano and harp in 1901 (Ravel was then auditing Fauré’s composition classes, having been barred from regular enrollment for his failure to win a prize). In 1909 Salzedo moved to the United States, as harpist for the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. Later he co‑founded, with Edgard Varčse, International Composers’ Guild, and in 1924 he inaugurated the harp department at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Salzedo once showed his transcription of the Sonatine to Ravel, who is reputed to have remarked, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Evidently he approved.

In the early years of this century, Joseph Jongen was among the best-known of Belgian composers. And if that reputation has largely fallen away, it does not at all diminish the elegant charm of his music, richly displayed in the “Concert ŕ 5,” one of his best-remembered works (the word “concert” normally means “concerto” in French, but here it really alludes to the interplay of the instruments in chamber style). His talent showed itself early.

Having begun studies at the Ličge Conservatory at the age of seven, he started composing in his early teens. By the time of his graduation he had earned marks of distinction in fugue, piano, and organ. At the age of twenty-one he won a competition offered by the Belgian Royal Academy with his String Quartet, Opus 3, and three years later received the Belgian Prix de Rome. Despite the name of the prize, he was not required (as were French winners) to live in Rome, and he spent the four years of the bursary studying in various places. In Berlin he discovered Brahms and the latest virtuosic orchestral achievements of Richard Strauss. In Munich he analyzed Wagner. Then, after some time in Italy, he went to Paris, where he met the latest French composers, including d'Indy and Fauré.

He returned to Belgium and lived there the rest of his long life (except for the years of World War I, which he spent in England), serving as professor of counterpoint and fugue in Brussels and, from 1925, as director of the conservatory in his native Ličge, where he had begun his own training.

On the whole, Jongen’s music is conservative, deriving from the late 19th-century French tradition (and particularly influenced by his great Belgian predecessor Franck), but he continued to listen to newer music and to enrich his harmonic structures with some of the ideas that he encountered. His single best-known piece, the Symphonie concertante for organ and orchestra (1926), contains passages that are discreetly atonal. Late in his life, however, he undertook a severely critical review of his own work and withdrew 104 compositions from his oeuvre, leaving a smaller, but still substantial body, of 137 pieces.

The Concert ŕ 5 for harp, flute, and string trio, dates from 1923. Here he clearly pays homage to Debussy and Ravel, the composers who had been the real moderns in Paris during the early years of his career. One can hardly hear the splashes of the harp at the opening of the first movement without thinking of Debussy's striking invention in the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune, and the rhythmic ostinatos over which flute or violin melodies unfold clearly reflect many passages in Ravel. Jongen’s music grows mostly out of a melodic-harmonic impulse, rather than from contrapuntal working, and it carries the listener happily along with it, through the sprightly opening movement with its balancing moments of lyrical repose. This first movement is almost as long as the other two combined. The middle movement’s tranquility is partly suggested by the modal character of the melody, and also by the quiet interweaving of the strings at the opening, which elegantly set up the flute’s bashful tune. The finale, with its plucked-string introduction, suggests the hints of Spanish guitars in the evocations of Iberia from the pens of Ravel and Debussy. As the main body of the movement gets underway, the air of a lively and sinuous dance emerges.

Jean Françaix was a unique figure in contemporary music, a composer who wrote serious music that was never heavy, that always had a lilt and humor to it. Before his death at age seventy-five he was, of all living French composers, the most frequently performed. Françaix grew up in a musical family that was naturally alert to the presence of talent among the offspring: his mother was a singing teacher at the conservatory in Le Mans, of which his father (a pianist and composer) was director. Following early studies with his father, he moved to Paris, where he studied piano with Isidor Philipp, taking first prize in 1932, and composition with Nadia Boulanger. His facility as a composer had begun to make itself known already in childhood when he composed a little piano piece Pour Jacqueline at the age of six. He achieved a surprising triumph in 1932 with his Piano Concertino, still essentially a student work, but one that revealed his innate sense of shape, his ability to write themes with real character, and his personal harmonic touch.

During his long and prolific career, Françaix composed a huge body of music—operas, ballets, film scores, orchestral works, chamber music, works for solo instrument, cantatas, and songs—that remains completely and utterly French. He shares with composers like Ravel and Poulenc a love of color and immediacy, as well as the ability to charm. Needless to say this predilection did not recommend him to those composers and critics of the mid-century period who sought the new at every cost. Françaix's style was born so fully formed, so highly developed, that it could simply be expressed in work after work, without straining for effect.

The Trio in C-major for violin, viola, and cello was composed in 1933—thus, when Françaix was just twenty-one. The work celebrates the neo-classical spirit with elegance and wit. All four of the movements are quite brief. During the witty opening movement, played with the instruments muted, the viola makes a specific bow to the past tradition with a theme that spells BACH backwards in musical pitches: B-natural, C, A, B-flat (Bach himself, of course, spelled his name musically many times—but in the normal direction). The scherzo, a funny leaden-footed waltz, conjures up images of less-than-graceful dancers galumphing about. The muted violin sings a lovely melody in the slow third movement, and the finale is as extrovert as it can be.

Earl Kim was a Californian by birth and training. He studied composition with two of the 20^th century’s greatest teachers, both of whom happened then to be in his home state: Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA (in 1940-41), and Roger Sessions at Berkeley (from 1947 to 1952). Of his teachers, Kim has commented:

It was not only their music but their attitude to music that had a profound effect on me, especially their utter dedication to the idea of music as an extraordinarily important human expression and the responsibility they inspired one to feel toward one’s materials.

Following his student years, Earl Kim taught at Princeton University from 1952 to 1967, in which year he moved to Harvard, where he taught until his retirement. In addition to being active as a conductor and ensemble pianist (especially with singers), he received numerous grants and awards for his work as a composer, including commissions from the Fromm, Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, and Naumberg foundations as well as the University of Chicago, the Hartford Symphony, and Boston University (for the Empire Brass Quintet). When Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony performed and recorded his Violin Concerto, with soloist Itzhak Perlman, the orchestra bestowed on Kim the Horblit Award, given from time to time to an American composer for lifetime achievement.

Many of Earl Kim’s works were music/theater pieces, often settings of texts by Samuel Beckett, to whom he was particularly drawn, and whose words he expressed in particularly evocative music. Beckett, along with Anton Chekhov and William Butler Yeats, supplied the texts for one of his smallest but most powerful compositions, Now and Then, for soprano, viola, flute, and harp.

Composed in August 1981, Now and Then was a long-delayed artistic response an experience that overwhelmed him in the Second World War. Serving as a combat intelligence officer with the U.S. Army Air Force, Kim was assigned to fly over Nagasaki on August 10, 1945—twenty-four hours after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city—to observe the damage. That experience had a powerful effect on him, one that shaped his reaction both to art and human beings for the rest of his life. As he later explained, it took him thirty-six years to be able to express in music what he saw that day.

The view was one of utter desolation. It was not simply that buildings had been knocked down and left in rubble. It was that there was nothing for a wide swath of what a few days before had been a thriving city.

The music of Now and Then is purposely spare, almost to the point of nothingness. Short repeated notes and figures in the instrumental parts suggest the halting attempt of an observer to find a coherent expression for this devastation. Breaks in the vocal line suggest the impossibility of coming completely to grips with the reality of this utter, monumental devastation. In a short work (about 8 minutes, in all) of hushed music that never rises above a soft dynamic, Earl Kim encapsulated the horror of one of the turning points of the 20th century and translated into music a visual image that few people saw as closely and with such immediacy as he.

From his earliest years, Saint-Saëns was an extraordinarily gifted musician as performer and composer. When, as a child prodigy of ten years, he gave a piano recital in Paris, he offered as an encore any Beethoven sonata the audience cared to request! By then he had already been composing his own little pieces for seven years and had studied composition formally for three. This energy, enthusiasm, and fluency lasted throughout his long life, so that he was still turning out a large number of pieces, some of them for unusual instrumental combinations, while in his seventies and eighties. He showed a special fondness for the sonorities of the harp, compared to those of the piano (his own instrument). In his last years he produced, in addition to the present fantasy, a fantasy for solo harp, Opus 95, and a concert piece for harp and orchestra, Opus 154.

The Fantaisie, Opus 124, was composed and published in 1907. Its inspiration was almost certainly the two young ladies to whom it was dedicated, Marianne and Clara Eissler, who must have been performers of considerable attainments. Like other such works, the piece is designed to show off the performers’ technique in a graceful and attractive way, with a series of tuneful sections that offer varying moods and tempos and circulate through different keys, largely minor in the beginning, more frequently major at the end. One striking feature of this fantasy is the extended passage in the middle in 5/4 time. The characteristic techniques and sonorities of both instruments are exploited to their fullest. 

Valentine Concert
"RED-HOT RHAPSODIES"

Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 7:30 pm ~ Longy School, Cambridge
Sunday, February 10, 2008 at 4:00 pm ~ Rogers Center for the Arts, North Andover

Dvorak had written a piano quintet in A major (which he called Opus 5) in the late summer of 1872. It was performed that November in Prague, but the composer himself was dissatisfied with it and destroyed his copy of the score. Fifteen years later he had second thoughts and asked the impresario of the concert to send him his own copy, which still survived, in order that he might attempt a revision. Though he made drastic changes, he still did not find the improvement great enough to induce him to offer the work to a publisher. Instead he decided to start over from scratch rather than waste further time on his juvenilia; a few months later he began his second piano quintet in A major, an incomparably greater work. It was composed during one of the happiest periods of his life, when he was living at home in Vysoká and writing in his best nationalistic vein. The composition took in all six weeks, from August 18 to October 3, 1887.

The most obvious nationalistic Czech element in the score is the second movement, labeled dumka, a term that Dvorak is responsible for introducing into musical terminology, although he could hardly define it precisely (or perhaps did not care to try). He used it a few years later as an overall title for the Dumky Trio, Opus 90; while that piece was still in manuscript, Dvorak played it through in New York with two of his colleagues from the National Conservatory of Music. The cellist on that occasion was Victor Herbert, who recalled later: “We liked the composition immensely and I asked him what ‘Dumbka’ [sic] meant in Bohemia—He thought for a while—shook his head and said to our surprise: ‘It means nothing—What does it mean?’” Grove’s Dictionary defines dumka (plural, dumky) as a Ukrainian word meaning “lament,” usually used in music for a slow expressive movement containing a number of short contrasting sections (not all of them lugubrious).

Actually the variety of moods in the quintet ranges as widely as anything in Dvorak’s output. Although the quintet as a whole is in the major mode, the first theme turns almost immediately from A major to A minor, and the second theme (first heard in the viola) is a pensive tune in C-sharp minor. The closing measures are assertive, but they do not entirely outweigh the grave character of much of the movement. We are thus prepared for the melancholy of the dumka, in F-sharp minor, that follows. A slow figure on the piano, decorated by tremolos to suggest folk improvisation, precedes and follows the main theme heard in the viola. This alternates with a contrasting lighter section in the major mode and later with a vivace contrast, but the main lamenting theme keeps recurring throughout.

The scherzo is called a furiant by Dvorak, but it lacks the characteristic rhythmic shift (two bars of 3/4 fusing to form one of 3/2) of the genuine furiant—rather it is a waltz tinged with Bohemian accents. The middle section is haunted by ghostly recollections of the main tune. The finale is more outgoing, with echoes of folk dances throughout and a vigorous, satisfying conclusion.

Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff received early encouragement from Antonín Dvorák and began piano studies at the Prague Conservatory by the age of ten. Further studies took place at most of the major European conservatories--Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne, not to mention work with Max Reger and Claude Debussy, as diverse a pair of teachers as one can imagine. During the mid to late ‘20s he worked in Germany, but returned to Prague in 1929, at the age of thirty-five, to take up a faculty position in composition. As this brief summary of his background might suggest, Schulhoff’s music drew from many sources, including Czech folk music and American jazz, as well as the prominent musical styles of his day. As a pianist he played the newest music, including the quarter-tone pieces of his compatriot Alois Hába. He absorbed all of these influences into his own personal style that showed remarkable versatility. There is no way of knowing what might have developed if he had not been imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and put to death in the Würzburg concentration camp while still in midlife.

His Concertino is a work of 1925. Its spare scoring, emphasizing the extremes of instrumental range (high flute and the low doublebass, with the viola as intermediary), reveals an attachment to the “objectivity” and avoidance of alluring sensuous sheen so characteristic of advanced composers of the period (Stravinsky and Hindemith were regarded as the leading figures of this kind of music), but its hint of folk dances, especially in the two faster movements, suggests familiarity with Janácek and Bartók. Emotional weight falls on the darkly lyrical opening Andante con moto moderato, which is by far the longest movement of the work. The second movement is a whirling Furiant that never tires. The Andante is warmly lyrical, and the closing Rondino a lively romp.

During World War I Bartók wrote in one of his letters, “I consider it my life’s goal to continue and finish the study of Romanian folk music at least in Transylvania...” Along with Zoltán Kodály, he had already spent years at the task of collecting the folk songs and dances of the Hungarian people in various parts of the country. The invention of the phonograph had made possible a whole new level of scholarship, since the researcher could go into the field and record actual performances; these could be listened to again and again while the music was being transcribed as a constant check for accuracy. The technology was exciting enough to justify the effort involved‑‑particularly in carting around and protecting the delicate wax cylinders on which early recordings were made. Think what Bartók would have given for a portable cassette recorder!

In addition to his large collection of Hungarian folk songs and dances, Bartók collected and wrote down 3,400 melodies, vocal and instrumental, of Rumanian folk pieces. He worked on these much of the rest of his life, though he never lived to see his edition published. When it was finally brought out in 1967, twenty‑two years after Bartók’s death, it was still a marvel of accurate and sympathetic scholarship.

Bartók’s ethnomusicological work also proved to be of fundamental significance in his own creative life. Many of his earliest pieces were constructed of actual folk melodies collected in the field, to which he applied more or less freedom in producing his arrangements. The music that he gathered thus became absorbed as part of his own melodic style, so that in his mature music he could be Hungarian to the core without ever actually quoting a pre‑existent melody.

The Romanian Dances appeared first of all as a work for piano solo in 1915; two years later he orchestrated the score. The work is made up of seven dance melodies representing six different dances from four regions of Transylvania, melodies he himself had collected in 1910 and 1912. The arrangement of dances is Bartók’s own, made for musical rather than scholarly reasons, since he seems determined to have a traditional fast-slow-fast organization. Throughout Bartók retains the original melodies as he had transcribed them.

The set begins with a “Stick” dance, which is supposed to be performed by a young man who, at the end, must kick the ceiling of the room. Bartók heard it performed by two gypsies, one playing a traditional violin, the other a three‑stringed instrument with a low bridge, which allowed for the performance of three‑note chords. Next comes the round dance Braul, which was performed all over the area. Bartók heard it played on a peasant flute, and he gives this melody to the clarinet.

The third dance is the first slow dance of the set, the title of which, “In one place,” indicates the choreography for one couple standing in place, the man with his hands on his hips, the woman with her hands on the man’s shoulders. The other slow dance melody, in a lilting 3/4, was collected by Bartók from a gypsy violinist.

The last series of dances returns to a fast tempo. The first of these, a Rumanian polka, alternates even and uneven beats. Bartók heard it played on the violin by a young village lad in Belenyes, the home of Janos Busitia, a Rumanian friend who was extremely helpful to Bartók in collecting this music. (The composer dedicated the Rumanian Folk Dances to him in gratitude.) The finale consists of two similar dances marked Allegro and Allegro vivace. Bartók described the dance as one performed by couples in groups, in which the men moved in a set of difficult solo steps while the women stood still, not even looking at their partners, as if annoyed by the men’s showing off.

Like his other arrangements of folk music, the Rumanian Folk Dances give us a taste of a rural society that was already on the verge of destruction in the First World War and has by now utterly disappeared. While they are certainly attractive for their own qualities, they are also especially significant for what they reveal to us in a purely musical way. For these folk melodies lie at the heart of Béla Bartók’s personality; they are the ever‑renewing wellspring that formed the source of his art.

Far too frequently the general public knows a gifted composer by a single work. The inevitable result is to underrate his achievement, particularly if the single work happens to fall into a relatively popular mold. George Enescu, who adopted the spelling Georges Enesco during his years in Paris, is a case in point. Certainly his first Romanian Rhapsody has been world famous almost from the moment of its first performance. Unfortunately it remains almost the only work by Enesco that most people know. Nor do they recall his work as a brilliant violinist and teacher (particularly of Yehudi Menuhin, whose autobiography speaks most warmly of him). His career as a composer was complicated by the conflicting demands made on him as a teacher and organizer.  Many of his larger compositions took years to finish, so difficult was it to find the time to work on them.

Enesco attained success early with the first Romanian Rhapsody, and it came to haunt him. He was only twenty when he wrote it and not quite twenty‑two when he led the first performance, yet audiences demanded it constantly for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, though the rhapsody is frankly based on the Hungarian rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, bringing together native songs and dances in a colorful potpourri, it is nonetheless effective, from the simplicity of the opening clarinet phrase to the fiery flash of the closing section. For a short time, at least, it makes us all Romanian.

"VOICES OF NATURE"

Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 7:30 pm ~ Longy School, Cambridge
Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 4:00 pm ~ Rogers Center for the Arts, North Andover

BIRD SONGS

Human beings are endlessly competitive. We long to do anything that we see or hear about. So from the earliest stirrings of human intellect, we have wanted to fly like the birds, and we have also wanted to sing like the birds.

For the last two centuries or so composers have written pieces about birds or ones that imitate the songs of birds, especially for sopranos, whose range most closely approximates that of our avian friends. In many cases the songs refer to the birds as singers of some particular kind—moaning with the pangs of love for instance, or celebrating the brightness of the dawn. Obviously these are human emotions that poets and composers have put into the souls of birds. In some cases, the songs are intended purely as showpieces for the singer, in which she attempts to outdo our avian friends in brilliance.

When composers are enjoying bird imitations, it goes without saying that they often turn to the flute as the instrument that suggests the notion “bird,” whether in vocal pieces or purely instrumental works. A word about the composers, not all of whom are every-day names in the concert world.

Julius Benedict (1804-1885) was a student of Carl Maria von Weber and later his biographer. He spent most of his career in England, where he was a leading conductor. He also toured the United States as the accompanist to the favorite singer of the age, Jenny Lind (for whom he may have written La Capinera).His most successful large work was the opera The Lily of Killarney (1862).

Albert Roussel (1869-1937) was an important French composer of ballets and symphonies (one of which, the Third, was written for the BSO’s 50^th anniversary). He was also a distinguished teacher. Following World War I, in which he was an ambulance driver, he spent his summers composing in his house on the Atlantic coast at Normandy.

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), the most famous Norwegian composer, married his cousin, Nina Hagerup, a fine soprano, and turned out a large number of beautiful songs, a genre that perfectly suited his melodic invention and his genius for creating miniatures. Though most of his songs are in Norwegian, Grieg spoke German (he had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and was a friend of Brahms). In Die veschwiegene Nachtigall (“The discreet nightingale”) he sets one of the most famous poems of the Medieval Minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide, a poem from the very dawn of lyric poetry in a modern European language, and Grieg captures all of its freshness with great delicacy.

Felix White (1884-1945) was a prolific composer whose name is now almost entirely forgotten (he is not included in the standard English music encyclopedia published in 2000, though there was an article about him in an earlier edition of 1955). He wrote some 250 songs and a good deal of chamber music. Like Grieg, his greatest strength seems to be in the miniature, such as his songs. He should not be confused with the Felix White who is the guitarist and vocalist of the British indie band The Maccabees.

Henry Bishop (1786-1855) is perhaps most famous of the composer of “Home, Sweet Home,” which appears in his opera Clari, the Maid of Milan (1823), but “Lo, here the gentle lark,” an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, is surely his second-best known song and one of the most popular of all “bird” songs.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Silent Woods. Opus 68, No. 5

In addition to his large works such as symphonies, concertos, and operas, Dvořák also composed many charming and melodious small compositions, both songs and instrumental pieces. Silent Woods was originally a work for piano solo, written as part of his 1884 collection From the Bohemian Woods. Later he made this version especially for his friend, the cellist Hanus Wihan, for whom he would later write his famous Cello Concerto.

MAURICE RAVEL Ondine,from Gaspard de la nuit

One of the most brilliant and original piano works from the first decade of the last century, Gaspard de la Nuit was inspired, at least to some degree, by a collection of bizarre poems written by one Aloysius Bertrand about 1830. These poems are filled with strange and exotic images, and Ravel combined them with a knowledge of some of the most brilliantly virtuosic music of the romantic era—such as Balakirev’s Islamey or Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes—in creating this amazing work. So many works of transcendent difficulty, by composers throughout the nineteenth century, seem to have been created purely for the sake of the virtuoso display, and not for any poetic or expressive quality that might thereby be projected.But Gaspard de la nuit (a set of three brilliant and varied works) is in another category altogether.

Ondine is music about water and a kind of water sprite (called an “undine” in English) that can acquire a soul by marrying a human being. The subject was a popular one in Romantic literature and opera. Ravel writes music of sweeping iridescence, depicting the spray of waters as well as the sweet sadness of the nymph.

GEORGE CRUMB Vox Balenae (Voice of the Whale)

It is still rare to find a composer whose style is immediately identifiable. George Crumb is such a composer, one who is thoroughly grounded in a traditional musical education but moved beyond it with his own self‑creation, inventing a kind of sound that marks him immediately as individual.

Crumb grew up in a musical family and learned from childhood to play the clarinet and piano. He took his undergraduate degree in composition at Mason College of Music and Fine Arts in his native Charleston, then went to the University of Illinois for his master’s degree and to the University of Michigan for his doctorate. There he studied with Ross Lee Finney, who, after his father, became the strongest musical influence on him. He has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania since 1965. In addition to numerous grants and awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Echoes of Time and the River.

Crumb’s early music grew out of short musical subjects in which timbre played as important a role as pitch and rhythm. His music has continually been marked by an extraordinarily refined ear for color and astonishing inventiveness in the creation of sounds, often using novel methods of tone production, occasionally with amplification to pick up the delicate overtones that might be lost otherwise. Much of his music has been programmatic, often drawing on a zodiacal cycle or number symbolism or such quasi‑dramatic elements as masked performers (as in Vox balenae), to serve the cause of musical illustration with vivid sounds, ranging from the sweet and delicate to the threshold of pain.

Many of his works derive their musical character through imagery from natural scenes or symbolic reflections of the cosmos, as from the zodiac, for example. Crumb has created an entire world of extraordinarily refined colors and textures as a musical analogue for these images, sometimes by using traditional instruments played in unusual ways, often by enlarging the ensemble with new and varied instruments, particularly in the realm of percussion.\

Crumb first heard recorded songs of whales in 1969 and was captivated by their eerie quality. Two years later he composed Vox balenae, and chose to ask the performers to make a gesture toward capturing that mysterious quality. 

...each of the three players should wear a black half-mask (vizor-mask) throughout the performance of the work. The masks, by effacing a sense of human projection, will symbolize the powerful impersonal forces of nature (nature dehumanized). Vox Balenae can be performed under a deep-blue stage lighting, if desired, in which case the theatrical effect would be further enhanced.

The opening movement is an extended vocalise (in which the flutist must both sing and play simultaneously), an incantation “for the beginning of time”. Suddenly the piano interrupts with the “Sea Theme,” which is subjected to five variations (Crumb named each of these after a geological era), evoking the wonderfully mysterious whale songs. The epilogue (titled, with a conscious reference to Messiaen's famous piece, “ ...for the end of time” recaptures the hushed, other-worldly timelessness of the opening.

Schubert composed Der Hirt auf dem Felsen in October 1828, just one month before his death at age thirty-one; it was conceived as a showpiece for the gifted soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann, whom he had hoped to persuade to sing in an opera that he intended to write.  (She had already performed his music successfully and had toured with Erlkönig.)  In the end the opera was never written, and this vocal chamber work was not given to the singer until after the composer's death. 

Schubert chose a text by Wilhelm Müller, the author of the poems for Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, but had some slight adjustments made in the middle portion of the poem by Wilhelmine von Chézy (she had earlier provided the libretto for Weber's Euryanthe and the play Rosamunde, for which Schubert had written incidental music).  The close expressive fit of music to words, the graceful vocal lines, and evocative echoes between the voice and clarinet (suggestive of the echo that the poet discerns arising from the distant valley) have made Der Hirt auf dem Felsen singularly popular as a pastoral expression of seasonal solitude and subsequent delight in the coming of spring.

Der Hirt auf dem Felsen

Wenn auf dem höchsten Fels ich steh',

Ins tiefe Tal herniederseh',

Und singe:

Fern aus dem tiefen dunkeln Tal

Schwingt sich empor der Widerhall

Der Klüfte.

Je weiter meine Stimme dringt,

Je heller sie mir widerklingt

Von unten.

Mein Liebchen wohnt so weit von mir,

Drum sehn ich mich so heiss nach ihr

Hinüber.

In tiefem Gram verzehr ich mich,

Mir ist die Freude hin,

Auf Erden mir die Hoffnung wich,

Ich hier so einsam bin.

So sehnend klang im Wald das Lied,

So sehnend klang es durch die Nacht,

Die Herzen es zum Himmel zieht

Mit wunderbarer Macht.

Der Frühling will kommen,

Der Frühling, meine Freud',

Nun mach ich mich fertig,

Zum Wandern bereit.

Je weiter meine Stimme dringt,

Je heller sie mir widerklingt

Von unten.

   -Wilhelm Müller and Wilhelmine von Chézy

The Shepherd on the Rock

When I stand on the highest crag,

look down deep into the valley below,

and sing,

From far away, out of the deep shadowy valley

rises the echo

of the chasms.

The farther my voice reaches

the brighter it comes back to me

from below.

My love lives so far away from me,

I yearn ardently for her

over there.

I waste away in deep sorrow,

my joy is gone;

hope has eluded me here on earth,

so lonely am I.

The song resounded so longingly in the wood,

it resounded so longingly through the night,

drawing hearts to heaven

with wondrous power.

Spring will come,

Spring my joy;

now I shall prepare myself

to go wandering.

The farther my voice reaches

the brighter it comes back to me

from below.

       -translation by SL

I wrote these four "Songs of Spring and Summer" sporadically over the last eight years, which is my entire life as a composer. "How sweet I roam'd," with text by William Blake, is one of the first pieces I ever wrote, while studying composition with Tom Benjamin at the Peabody Conservatory. After completing a first draft, I set it aside for years, always meaning to rework it. It finally received its first performance at the Longy School of Music, with the soprano Maria Jette, whose interest is directly responsible for the existence of the three other songs. After toying with the idea of setting a poem by Dorothy Parker ("August") and another by Edna St. Vincent Millay ("To April"), which would have entailed a vigorous tussle with copyright lawyers, I settled on these classic examples of British literature (keeping the title of the previously imagined song cycle).
 
The first piece, "The Soote Season," introduces the tone and character of the set. The vocal line dances through various keys (there is actually a hidden tone-row that defines the first twelve lines of the sonnet, although devotees of serialism will be disappointed by how little I do with it), while the cello describes the catalog of images in the text. The irony of the final couplet, a common theme through the cycle, is mitigated a little, I hope, by the innocence of the cello's reprise. The Blake song which follows takes on the theme of roaming, both in the meandering cello line and the constant changes of harmony and mood in the voice. It is followed by a mournful Lento ("Slow, slow, fresh fount"), in which I try to combine the timbres of voice and cello in an organ-like texture. The Donne poem functions as a scherzo/finale, and is quite virtuosic for both performers.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Folk Song Settings

For many centuries, we humans have sung our songs and danced our dances according to our own pleasure, and left it at that. But the beginning of the Romantic era saw a great interest in collecting and studying folk songs as records of an early stage of humanity. Many of the songs thus collected were not as old as was once believed, but the tunes often became part of the culture of the countries where they originated.

Like many of his German compatriots, Beethoven had an interest in folk song too, and he was therefore happy to accept a proposition from a Scottish collector and publisher, George Thomson, to arrange some traditional melodies that Thomson had collected in the British Isles with an accompaniment of piano, violin, and cello.

Beethoven and Thomson corresponded from 1803 until 1820. What Thomson sent to Beethoven were simply the unadorned tunes. He never included the texts (a fact that Beethoven complained about. In a letter of 1816 he begged Thomson for words of the songs “as they are very necessary if one is to give the proper expression.” Still, Beethoven did as he was asked (it was an easy way to make some money, and he was interested in the tunes in any case). As he described it, he added “symphonies” (instrumental introductions) or “ritornellos” (connecting musical passages) to a very substantial body of melodies—41 Scottish, 59 Irish, and 26 Welsh folk tunes. Thomson, who had commissioned this work in the first place, was not always pleased, finding Beethoven’s work too difficult. He asked the composer to make changes, but (not surprisingly) Beethoven refused, thereby leaving us these charming miniatures as an unusual spark from his heroic output.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)