TURNING POINTS 2021-22

Italian Modern
May 21, 2022
First Presbyterian/Santa Monica

Luigi Dallapiccolla - Tartiniana Seconda (1955-56)
Ferruccio Busoni – All’italia! (In Modo Napolitano) (1908)
Busoni – Élégie (1921)
Luciano Berio – O King (1968)
Busoni – Berceuse Élégiaque (1909)
Berio – Chamber Music (text by James Joyce) (1953)
Berio – Wasserklavier (1965); Erdenklavier (1969); Luftklavier (1985); Feuerklavier (1989)
Berio – Sequenza II (1963)
Igor Stravinsky – Suite Italienne (1933, arr. Stravinsky/Dushkin)

Festa by the Sea
May 22, 2022
First Presbyterian/Santa Monica

Franz Liszt – Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (1877)
Berio – Sequenza II
Nicolo Paganini – Caprice No. 24 (1807)
Berio – Folk Songs

Whether it is the flash of a sleek Ferrari sports car, the gaunt humanoid spindles of sculptor Giacometti, Ferragamo’s foot-fetishizing chic, those vivid fantasies Fellini splashed across the silver screen, or even the brutal geometry of Mussolini’s 45 arches penetrating the Palazzo della Civitá Italiana’s blank facade, the idea of Italian modernism conjures up potent images for most people. But the idea of Italian modern music – hardly resonates.

Why is this? And what is it about our understanding of classical music that has shortchanged Italian composers of the last century? More than a weekend could be devoted to these questions without reaching any definitive answers, but we will lay a groundwork with rare Italian pleasures and hopefully no small number of insights.

Groundwork
The investigation begins with Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni, perhaps the most historically important composer you likely know only in passing, if at all. At a time when Bach was hardly more fashionable in Italy than Beethoven’s pedantic student Carl Czerny, Busoni’s turn-of-the-century obsession with the keyboard works of J.S. Bach should be understood and appreciated as ground zero for what would become a major movement of the 20th century – Neoclassicism.  

For most of that century, until the Baroque authenticity movement first gained momentum in the 1950s, the piano transcription moniker Bach/Busoni Edition dominated performances of Bach’s music. Eventually 38 volumes were published between 1891 and 1920 including a lengthy treatise on the art of transcription. Busoni completely rethinks touch and the technical innovations necessary to perform Bach on the piano shorn of Romantic mannerisms. According to pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli, Busoni “envisaged his Bach transcriptions as an advanced school of pianoforte playing and gave an ascending order of difficulty: Ten Chorale Preludes, Prelude & Fugue in D major, Prelude & Fugue in E flat major, Chaconne, Two Toccatas.”

As determined by his father, a clarinetist supported by playing wind transcriptions of Italian opera and clarinet duets with his pianist wife, the entirety of Busoni’s musical childhood in Trieste was devoted exclusively to Bach. After enrolling at the Vienna Conservatory at age 9, the child prodigy’s first public performances two years later were praised by Vienna’s uber-powerful critic Eduard Hanslick. The young Busoni heard Liszt play in Vienna and met him a year later.

Eventually, a teaching position opened in Helsingfors, located in a part of Russia that is now Finland. Like Liszt, Busoni kept a relentless touring schedule as a recitalist and composer. In 1890, Busoni’s Konzertstück for piano and orchestra won a prize in the first Anton Rubenstein Competition in St. Petersburg, Russia. A year later at age 25, Busoni’s first  transcription of organ music for piano was published in Moscow. Little remarked on is how the young Busoni acquired the mantle of Franz Liszt – the intrepid transcriber of Bach organ preludes and fugues, which he first published in 1852, forty years before Busoni would begin volume one of his journey.

A new teaching position followed in Moscow. But the wide spread Russian nationalism made him, and his new Swedish wife feel ostracized. They jumped at an opportunity to relocate to Boston’s New England Conservatory where their first son was born. But again, the fit lasted only a year, so strong was Busoni’s will to perform and the staggering effect of his playing. Musicologist Percy Scholes, who compiled the first Oxford Companion to Music wrote, “Busoni, from his perfect command over every means of expression and his complete consideration of every phrase in a composition to every other phrase and to the whole, was the truest artist of all the pianists [I] had ever heard." Relentless American and European tours followed with Berlin becoming his home base.  

Turning Point
In 1893 Busoni attended the Berlin premiere of Falstaff, not long after its La Scala triumph. Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera, his only viable comedy, was also his collaborative masterpiece with librettist Arrigo Boito, who drew from Shakespeare’s plays Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV. For Busoni, Verdi’s Falstaff epitomized the height of Italian art that could be ranked on a par with any Germanic achievement. Verdi’s opera invited Busoni to boldly embrace scale and drama, while attending to the earthy humanity of folk dance roots. His massive five-movement Piano Concerto with male chorus, running over 70 minutes, composed from 1901 to 1905, was the improbable nurture/nature marriage of German structural rigor and Italian passion – grand, determined, eccentric, and volatile.

At first contact with a recording (Garrick Ohlsson/Dohnányi/Cleveland Orchestra on Telarc is recommended), the unforgettable opening movement might be mistaken for Chopin or Rachmaninoff parodied by Gustav Mahler with shocking chromatic dissonances, while the sprawling structure unfolds in ways unique to Busoni. Within a charged atmosphere of Wagnerian possibility while affirming the German master’s leitmotifs, Busoni introduces a set of themes and motives that recur as constantly surprising variations throughout the five movements – individually, in dialogue, and as figures in the harmonic texture.

The use of such narrative interweaving gives this knuckle-busting concerto a cohesion that – improbable as it may sound – can be likened to the profusion of themes unifying Olivier Messiaen’s 10-movement Turangalîla Symphony of 1949. Busoni’s busy “vivacemente” second movement hints at the motoric drive and sudden mood shifts of Bernard Herrmann’s future film scores for Citizen Kane and On Dangerous Ground decades later, all the while working out his Neapolitan folk song obsessions. After a slow movement that Mahler would have admired, lasting 25 wayward but absorbing minutes, a weirdly kaleidoscopic tarantella “all’ Italiana” becomes a tour de force in the grandest manner, tuneful but sideswiped with bristly brass, taut tympani interpolations, and fistfuls of dissonant notes in a Herculean piano part that inspires slack-jawed wonder.    

Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy for piano solo and orchestra provided the first precedent for Busoni’s final “Cantico” movement, as does Liszt’s closing male chorus in the Faust Symphony, but in Busoni’s’ hands the prolonged and fully integrated offstage male chorus opens a new vista, rather than bringing the work to dramatic finish, as did his forbears with a few minutes of vocal reinforcement and predictable cadences. Busoni wanted his massive concerto to be performed without an interval, making it my prime candidate for the neglected work most suited to the concert halls of our eclectic, grandiose, and Covid-troubled times.

Another turning point came with the 1907 publication of Busoni’s  Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. The decades of assimilating German music had finally shifted to allow his Italianate DNA full expression in a less exaggerated manner, seamlessly and with more economy. The 1908 solo piano work All' Italia! (In Modo napolitano) can be heard as the essence of Busoni’s Piano Concerto distilled into less than eight minutes. This recital piece from Seven Elegies, cleared the way for Busoni’s most hauntingly original orchestral work Berceuse Élégiaque ("The man's lullaby at his mother's coffin) also running about eight minutes. Nonpareil, yet capturing a searing and deeply nostalgic world view – apprehensive, prescient, vaporous and raw – experienced anew as though remembering a future painted with inscrutably dark Rothko-esque colors.

New World Vistas
Dedicated to Busoni’s late mother, Berceuse Élégiaque was first performed in 1911 by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of the terminally ill Mahler. Busoni was interested in the harmonium having obtained in America microtonal reeds and claiming that he, "had worked out the theory of a system of thirds of tones in two rows, each separated from each other by a semitone.” During the three years that Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances operated in Vienna (1918-21), the master transcribed several of Busoni’s piano pieces for chamber ensemble, while the reverse was achieved by Erwin Stein who arranged Berceuse Élégiaque for chamber ensemble relying on the harmonium to fill out the parts, as did many of the Society’s composer/arrangers. Persisting ever since was the notion that Schoenberg had made the chamber arrangement, perhaps to elevate its stature. A besotted John Adams made an ingenious intermediary-sized arrangement of Berceuse Élégiaque for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1989.  

Busoni composed the Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra based on a book of Native American music he was given while the pianist/composer toured the U.S. in 1910, by his student Natalie Curtis, a pioneering American ethnomusicologist and Indian rights activist who negotiated Mojave Apache land agreements directly with President Theodore Roosevelt and tribal leaders. Busoni gave the 1914 premiere of the Indian Fantasy in Berlin, then went on to compose the Indianisches Tagebuch (American Indian Diary) for solo piano, as well as Song of the Spirit Dance, a related study for chamber orchestra.

Busoni spent most of the First World War in Switzerland where he met young writers Stefan Zweig, whose 1922 novel Amok would be burned in piles by the Nazi’s, and James Joyce, whose three love poems entitled Chamber Music had already gained attention. After returning to Berlin, Busoni composed the Elegie for clarinet and piano 1919-21. One can hear through it to the symphonic music his student (1920-23) Kurt Weill was then composing. The Elegie’s haunting fluidity surely owes its effect to remembrances of his father and mother playing clarinet duets during Busoni’s childhood. The composer/pianist/publisher would be dead from heart failure in only three years – a most inopportune time for the fate of Italian music! At age 58, Busoni was poised for greater public recognition for his intended masterpiece opera Doktor Faustus completed posthumously by his student Philip Jarnach. Further scholarship resulted in a longer and more dramatic ending in 1984. Making matters worse, Busoni’s archive of 366 cataloged items were housed at his apartment, which was struck by a bomb in 1942. The surviving materials were divided between libraries in East and West Germany, only to be reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much remains unpublished.

Pulcinella
Perhaps the most well-recognized foundational work of neoclassicism is Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a one-act ballet with singers based on the characters of commedia dell’arte that premiered May 15, 1920, at the Paris Opera. Leonid Massine choreographed and created the title role for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, with sets and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso.

Initiated by the powerful impresario, Stravinsky believed he was responding to bits and pieces of music attributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-36), which Diaghilev had found in a Naples library. As the field of musicology matured and interest in Baroque music expanded greatly, scholars now attribute the ballet’s musical sources to Domenico Gallo, Carlo Ignazio Monza, Alessandro Parisotti, and Unico Wilhelm Count van Wassenaer. The latter was a Dutch nobleman who published his music anonymously including Concerto Amonico No. 5, which was interpolated into Stravinsky’s score. Gallo and Monza were obscure contemporary composer/performers whose music was fraudulently published as Pergolesi due to his fame and convenient early death. However, Parisotti (1853-1913), passed off his own music as Pergolesi to gain from the fashion for finding undiscovered Baroque manuscripts – in this case the aria “Se tu m’ami” set to a 1727 text by Paolo Rolli, publisher of the first complete Italian translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

The other prominent young Russian composer of the time, Sergei Prokofiev, completed his Classical Symphony modeled on Haydn & Mozart in 1917, yet Prokofiev is given slight credit for birthing neoclassicism largely because the symphony was a one-off surrounded by more daring and controversial works, while Stravinsky’s post-World War I about-face begat an omnivorous style evolving across decades before his adoption of serialism in 1950. “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past,” said Stravinsky, “the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too.”  

The sheer kinetic energy of these sparkling Italian melodies uncorked by Stravinsky’s rhythmic genius made for an intoxicating draught. An orchestral suite, reducing the ballet’s 21 dances to eight movements, appeared in 1922 with Pierre Monteux conducting the Boston Symphony. A 1925 violin and piano reduction of that suite was eclipsed in 1933 by Suite Italienne for cello and piano done by the composer with Gregor Piaigorsky, then Suite Italienne for violin and piano done with Samuel Dushkin, the composer’s collaborator on Violin Concerto and Duo Concertante, and a somewhat later version for violin and cello made by Piatigorsky and Jascha Heifetz using the same name and adding to the confusion.

Subversive Politics
Luigi Dallapiccola undertook Tartiniana Seconda at a time when neoclassicism was in decline and disrepute. The aesthetic purging force or the Second World War, and the postwar rise of Darmstadt, the American CIA-funded hotbed of international avant-gardism. had turned the page by 1956. Dallapiccola was born to Italian parents in the contested town of Pisino d’Istria, now considered in Croatia, at the same time Busoni was composing his Piano Concerto. Dallapiccola family was interred in Austria during the First World War due to his father’s subversive politics yet hearing Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman in Vienna convinced him to compose. From age sixteen he studied at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence. Upon hearing the music of Debussy at age seventeen, in 1921, he stopped composing for three years to fully absorb its transformative impact.   

When Benito Mussolini rose to power in 1922, Il Duce’s propaganda shaped young Dallapiccola’s world view until the years 1935-39 when Italy’s Ethiopian Invasion overlapped the Spanish Civil War. The use of banned mustard gas and massive civilian casualties constituted war crimes in Ethiopia and Abyssinia, while Spanish fascists represssed artists he admired. Dallapiccola’s Jewish wife soon become endangered by Mussolini’s cooperation with Hitler’s Final Solution as the various wars metastasized. Dallapiccola's works of the 1920s composed under fascist influence were withdrawn. They may never be performed as they are under controlled access for study only.

As powerful influences, the music of Alban Berg and Anton Webern succeeded Debussy, before Dallapiccola was the first Italian to warmly embraced serialism.

Disillusionment with Mussolini was powerfully expressed by his Canti di prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment) for chorus, two pianos, two harps and percussion composed 1938-41. Seven years later his opera Il prigionero elaborated on personal and ideological prisons. Mussolini’s introduction of race laws was given in a speech that lit the match to Dallapiccola’s creativity. “I should have liked to protest,” he wrote in a liner note, “but I was not so naive as to disregard the fact that, in a totalitarian regime, the individual is powerless. Only by means of music would I be able to express my indignation.” He swore off composing anything light or carefree. Busoni’s rigorous neo-classicism, however, softened Dallapiccola’s probing aesthetic allowing the two Tartinianas to emerge. Canti di liberazione (Songs of Liberation) for chorus and orchestra was completed in 1955, the same year as Tartiniana Seconda, in its own way an act of liberation.

Unbridled Virtuosity
The notoriety of Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) resides al-most entirely with his Violin Sonata in G minor “The Devil’s Trill,” and that he died of gangrene at age 77. Tartini was also the first known owner of a Stradivarius violin, now recognized as the 1715 Lipinski Strad. His 14-minute sonata was then the high-water mark in violin virtuosity, the sound of which had a hypnotic impact on its listeners. Sheer disbelief at his double stops and high dissonant trills inspired much speculation about Tartini’s diabolical communication with Satan. Several generations later Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) exponentially expanded the capacity of the instrument for effects and the urge to spread fictional rumors of devilry. Published in 1820 as Paganini’s Opus 1, the 24 etudes were composed 1802-17. Number 24, the pinnacle of a set generally escalating in difficulty is known for extremely fast scales and arpeggios, double and triple stops, left hand pizzicato, parallel octaves and tenths, rapid shifting, and string crossings.

Franz Liszt’s Grandes études de Paganini were begun in 1838 after experiencing a performance by the violinist which figuratively threw down the gauntlet of virtuosity. Liszt was determined to invent a whole new level and language of pianism by emulating the violin’s utterly different means of expression pushed to its extreme. Years later in 1877 he composed Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este (Fountains of the Villa d’Este) inspired by Villa d’Este, a Renaissance villa in Tivoli outside of Rome, and UNESCO world heritage site, where Liszt performed at the invitation of the presiding Cardinal. While the score bares a biblical inscription about water consistent with his life as an abbot, Liszt’s virtuosity moved from the dazzle factor of technique on display to an almost cinematic use of the piano’s seemingly infinite palette of colors to effortlessly render an impression – in this case elaborate cascades of water and sparking light in the radiant key of F-sharp major. Arpeggios of extended chords (ninths and elevenths) open the work, with tremolandos, mostly in the upper register, occurring throughout the piece. 

Future Tense
Luciano Berio’s poetically autobiographical Remembering the Future was published posthumously in 2006. The texts of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures 1993-94, “invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory.” For Italians the past is always profoundly present. Mussolini’s 1938 concept of romanitá encompassed the past, present, and future through architecture. The first known opera was Italian, the first great opera was Italian. Every subsequent generation since Claudio Monteverdi claimed an Italian opera genius until the First World War halted cultural production. Tattered national music traditions converged on the battlefield abetted by grinding industrialization. Genius opera composers languished.

Born a year after Busoni’s death, Berio came of age during the Second World War, where as an army conscript, he injured his hand and was hospitalized. After the war, his interest in piano studies, of necessity, shifted to composition in the Milan Conservatory. He coached singers on the side to support himself. An American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian was a fellow conservatory student, a love affair ensued. She received a 1950 Fulbright scholarship to continue in Milan. The couple was married the same year. In 1952 Berio traveled to Tanglewood in the U.S. to study with Dallapiccola as the Italian authority on serialism.

The couple shared a love of James Joyce, so it followed that Berio selected Chamber Music, Joyce’s three love poems from 1907, and set them for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, cello, and harp, dedicating the work to Dallapiccola in 1953, the year their daughter Cristina was born. Cinque variazione for piano, Duo pezzi for violin and piano were composed under Dallapiccola’s guidance, as well as two folk song arrangements that would eventually find their way into Berio’s most popular work Folk Songs completed in 1964 as a vehicle for Berberian’s remarkable facility for languages. In 1958, Berio recorded Berberian reading Joyce’s Ulysses and using tape collage and other rudimentary techniques created Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), among the most influential and remarkably fresh sounding classics of electronic music. For Sequenza II the challenge was to substantially raise the virtuoso stakes for the harp soloist and find an utterly new language devoid of the past. Years of working in the electronic music studio sharpened Berio’s ear for timbre and syntax.

Wasserklavier, the first of the four elements, water, earth, air and water – ultimately contained in a set of six piano encores – followed Folk Songs in 1965. Four years later it was paired with Erdenklavier, then, with exact 20-year intervals, Berio produced Luftklavier and Feuerklavier in 1985 and 1989 respectively. Moods vary from cool/pensive, to bold/ assertive, busy/insistent to flashy/volatile.

Along the way Berio, who had now taken a teaching position at Mills College, divorced, and remarried, was riveted by the shocking assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. His response was a ringing, keening elegy for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, hanging metaphorically in the clouds vocalizing disassembled syllables until they form the martyrs name in stunned defiance. Other global unrest surged onto the television in 1986 and propelled this 5-minute kernel to grow into a movement of Sinfonia, the composer’s most admired orchestral achievement with a vocal octet The Swingle Singers.

           PATRICK SCOTT © 2022

Chamber Music
poems by James Joyce

1. Strings in the earth and air
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.

There's music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.

All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument.

2. Monotone
All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going
Forth alone,
He hears the winds cry to the waters'
Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowin
Where I go
I hear the noise of many waters
Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing
To and fro.

3. Winds of May, that dance on the sea
Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring-around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my true love anywhere?

            Welladay! Welladay!
            For the winds of May!

Love is unhappy when love is away! 

Folk Songs traditional

1. Black is the color (USA)
Black is the color of my true love’s hair,
His lips are something rosy fair,
The sweetest smile, and the kindest hands;
I love the grass whereon he stands.
I love my love and well he knows,
I love the grass where on he goes;
If he no more on earth will be,
’Twill surely be the end of me.

2. I wonder as I wander (USA)
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus our Savior did come for to die
For poor orn’ry people like you and like I,
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.
When Mary birthed Jesus ’twas in a cow stall
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all,
But high from the Heavens a star’s light did fall
The promise of ages it then did recall.
If Jesus had wanted of any wee thing
A star in the sky or a bird on the wing
Or all of God’s angels in Heav’n for to sing
He surely could have had it ’cause he was the king.

3. Loosin yelav (The moon has risen) (Armenia)
The moon has risen over the hill,
over the top of the hill, its red rosy face
casting radiant light on the ground.
O dear moon with your dear light
and your dear, round, rosy face!
Before, the darkness lay spread upon the earth;
moonlight has now chased it into the dark clouds.
O dear moon, [etc].

4. Rossignolet du bois (Little nightingale) (France)
Little nightingale of the woods,
little wild nightingale,
teach me your secret language,
teach me how to speak like you,
show me the way to love aright.
The way to love aright
I can tell you straight away,
you must sing serenades two hours after midnight,
you must sing to her: ‘My pretty one.
This is for your delight.’
They told me, my pretty one,
that you have some apples,
some rennet apples, growing in your garden.
Allow me, my pretty one, to touch them.
No, I shall not allow you to touch my apples.
First, hold the moon and the sun in your hands,
then you may have the apples
that grow in my garden

5. A la femminisca (May the Lord send fine weather) (Sicily)
May the Lord send fine weather,
for my sweetheart is at sea;
his mast is of gold, his sails of silver.
May Our Lady give me her help,
so that they get back safely.
And if a letter arrives,
may there be two sweet words written,
telling me how it goes with you at sea.

6. La donna ideale (The ideal woman) (Italy)
When a man has a mind to take a wife,
there are four things he should check:
the first is her family, the second is her manners,
the third is her figure, the fourth is her dowry.
If she passes muster on these,
then, in God’s name, let him marry her!

7. Ballo (Dance) (Italy)
La la la la la …
Love makes even the wisest mad,
and he who loves most has least judgement.
The greater love is the greater fool.
La la la la la …
Love is careless of the harm he does.
His darts cause such a fever
that not even coldness can cool it.

8. Motettu de tristura (Song of sadness) (Sardinia)
Sorrowful nightingale how like me you are!
Sorrowful nightingale, console me if you can
as I weep for my lover.
Sorrowful nightingale, when I am buried,
sorrowful nightingale, sing this song
when I am buried

9. Malorous qu’o uno fenno (Wretched is he) (Auvergne, France)
Wretched is he who has a wife,
wretched is he who has not!
He who hasn’t got one wants one,
he who has not, doesn’t!
Tralala tralala, etc.
Happy the woman who has the man she wants!
Happier still is she who has no man at all!
Tralala tralala, etc.

10. Lo fiolaire (The spinner) (Auvergne)

When I was a little girl I tended the sheep.
Lirou lirou lirou …
Lirou la diri tou tou la lara.
I had a little staff and I called a shepherd to me.
Lirou lirou, etc.
For looking after my sheep he asked me for a kiss.
Lirou lirou, etc.
And I, not one to be mean, gave him two instead of one.
Lirou lirou, etc.

11. Azerbaijan love song (Azerbaijan)

[Transcription defies translation.]

April 16, 2022
First Presbyterian/Santa Monica

Lou Harrison – Suite for Violin and String Orchestra (1974-93)
Johann Sebastian Bach – Easter Oratorio, BWV 249 (1725-49, LA Premiere)

Lou Harrison was infatuated with George Frideric Handel and alluded to the Baroque master’s famous airs in his five-movement Suite for Violin & Strings. While the suite originated as an eclectic Baroque form, it was well-suited to the composer’s magpie proclivities. In Harrison’s hands its eloquent final chaconne, a form Johann Sebastian Bach had long before molded into an immortal masterpiece, echoes across centuries of wars and pestilence.

Unlikely Companions
These two compact works have much in common. Both use symmetry in their overall shapes to collect an odd assortment of contrasting moods. Both hypnotize and cajole in ways that seem unpretentious and timely. Yet, the suite and the oratorio have steadfastly remained obscure despite containing some of each composers’ finest music.

Bach’s stubbornly challenging but utterly rewarding Easter Oratorio receives its LA premiere tonight! One might expect such an occasion with some obscure piece recently come to light because of new Bach scholarship, but this lively 40-minute masterwork has been hiding in plain sight. Bach was so fond of the oratorio, he revised it four times while he was in service to St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Up until his death from a stroke after eye surgery that blinded him, Bach regularly adapted the original 1725 score and parts to the changing musical resources available first in 1738, then over a three-year period 1743-46, and lastly in 1749.  

Backwater
Leipzig was hardly a city where fashion was set, and Bach’s popularity had long been in decline. At age forty he was the city’s third choice to run both its main churches. The two preferred candidates refused the low salary. Bach’s second cousin and wife of 14 years Maria Barbara died suddenly in 1720, and Bach married Anna Magdalena the next year. He ultimately fathered 20 children, only half of which survived to become adults. Bach’s first child was born in 1708, and the last in 1742.

With Anna Magdalena, Bach would sire thirteen children, so he took the job in 1725 out of desperation. The church fathers were not musically sophisticated; their composer was more tolerated than appreciated. Bach’s ingenious counterpoint was falling out of style with the public. Carl Philipp Emanuel, his second surviving son and fifth child with his first wife would eclipse his father, known more as an organist than composer. The gifted CPE – as fans call him – was ten when his father’s oratorio first appeared as a 1725 birthday cantata composed for a friend. That same year CPE entered Leipzig’s St. Thomas School with great promise. His father at the same age was suddenly orphaned taken in by a relative.

The immensely successful Georg Philipp Teleman was CPE’s godfather, so he appeared destined for a composing career in an age of royal patronage. Yet, his father understood too well from experience that a university education would preclude his son from being regarded as a servant, so CPE also studied law. With great self-confidence, he would bring to music a new emotional dynamism that excited German tastemakers with his “sensitive style” (empfindsamer Stil).

Eclipsed
The issue of fashion and CPE’s trendsetting perhaps sheds some light on the oddities of the Easter Oratorio at a time when many other of works were also being revised by the senior Bach. Bright sonorities, sprung rhythms, emotional contrasts, turbulence, and theatricality were valued by the “sensitive style.” Most of these characteristics can be found in the oratorio. True to its origins as a cantata, elaborate choruses open and close the work following a scintillating instrumental sinfonia stylistically akin to the 1721 Brandenburg Concertos, alive with freedom and panache. Each of the vocal soloists is given sparely written texts of contrasting moods. The story of the empty tomb, the meeting on the highway, and the resurrection are like framed vignettes. The emotions are palpable and involving, but stylized. Flutes (recorders), oboes, and trumpets, instruments favored by the “sensitive style,” are given prominence and high degrees of difficulty. The singers must bring intelligence and life experience to effectively tap Bach’s elusive emotions in these scenes. 

Why is the Easter Oratorio so little performed and how for all these years could it have been completely disregarded in Los Angeles? Perhaps the virtuoso necessities of its vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, were too daunting or expensive for such a compact work to be undertaken in Los Angeles. In Bach’s time many hours of music were performed at Eastertide. The Saint Matthew Passion can take more than four hours with an embedded sermon. The Saint John Passion, roughly half as long, was composed during Bach’s transition to Leipzig from his previous post in Cöthen. The Easter Oratorio was first revised as a fast-paced companion to the arduous St. John Passion, which for some is tainted by the prevailing anti-Semitism. Unlike the Christmas Oratorio, the work never developed a performance tradition.

A contributing factor to this stunted tradition was that incomplete editions of the score published in 1874, revised in 1962, and again in 1977, weren’t authoritatively reconciled with Bach’s manuscripts until a full performing edition appeared in 2003, which has since been revised to include elements of the 1749 version. Maybe as attention spans and concert grow shorter, the  Easter Oratorio might eventually stand on its own.

Harrison’s Suite does prove worthy of companionship especially on the night between Good Friday and Easter. Harrison begins with a somber if not quite stricken threnody, a lament that immediately draws the listener into a heightened state of heartache and gloomy expectancy. His fifth movement closes with the same foreboding dark strings but soon gives the violin a warmer more hopeful, yearning, and ultimately radiant voice, haloed by the chiming of piano and celesta as though a miracle was about to happen.

Coexist
For Lou Silver Harrison the music of Korea, China and Indonesia coexisted with the rigorous and experimental Western traditions. He was schooled by Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles and leavened by the company of another Schoenberg pupil – his close friend John Cage. Unfamiliar with Harrison’s music, some might read such roots as a recipe for a witches' brew. Instead, Harrison composed a gracious body of music notable for its warmly communicative melodies and kaleidoscopic points of reference. Always living modestly and close to the earth, in 2003, Harrison left behind a magnificent straw bale house near Joshua Tree, where his archives are housed, as well as numerous invented instruments including gamelans made by William Colvig, Harrison's life partner for over 30 years.

The International Gamelan
Harrison first encountered a real Balinese gamelan in the Dutch Pavilion on a visit to the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition. As a teenager Harrison read articles by the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee, who studied Indonesian music in Bali from 1931 to 1938. Later his friend and mentor Henry Cowell, a trailblazing composer, publisher, and founder of the periodical New Music, played field recordings from Berlin where Cowell had engaged in hands-on study with Indonesian gamelan players in 1931 on a fellowship. Sadly, the life of Cowell as a creative dynamo and a source of inspiration suddenly changed when he was imprisoned in San Quentin for homosexual behavior in 1936. He served four of a fourteen-year sentence that was reduced due to the efforts of his faithful friends including Harrison.

Given this devastating incident, it seems very courageous that, when it came time in 1942, Harrison decided to be truthful about his sexuality with the Army's wartime recruiting doctor, resulting in the exclusionary classification of 4-F. Harrison saw it merely as being honest, which was also a convenient stance for a pacifist.

The sound of the gamelan had an almost incalculable impact on western music despite its obscurity for the average listener. The metaphor of concentric ripples in gamelan engulfed Claude Debussy at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1889, and again in 1900. He remarked in a letter to his poet friend Pierre Louÿs that the shadings of these scales made the Western tonic/dominant seem like child's play. The sonic ripples reached jazz with the help of Maurice Ravel and inspired Olivier Messiaen to seek out Indonesian recordings and live performances. Benjamin Britten was smitten by the gamelan as can be heard in his Prince of the Pagodas ballet from 1957. The first generation of minimalists, especially Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, studied and absorbed these centuries-old traditions during the following decade.

The gamelan is an ornately carved collection of variously tuned metallophones (gongs, sets of bronze bars, and graded bell-like forms struck from above with wooden beaters covered in cloth or leather) upon which to play the music of Java and Bali. The Javanese style is elegant and stately, emerging from ancient animist religious traditions filtered through Hindu-Buddhist culture, Chinese influences, and the mystic Sufism of Islam. Balinese style is clangorous, bright, often brisk, and quite emphatic. For Harrison, getting to the gamelan world was a long journey from the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg) in the 1930s and struggles with the Western stylistic expectations of composers, critics, and academics as a young man living in New York.

Breakdown to Breakthrough
Four flights up from the city's unbearably raucous streets, his creaky flat required its lonely inhabitant to lug heavy cans of kerosene up the stairs to heat water for bathing. Such was Harrison's ascetic life. He existed in poverty despite churning out hundreds of reviews for the New York Herald Tribune, where the composer Virgil Thompson, a restrained yet original composer held sway as the news-paper's insightful and unrestrained senior music critic from 1940 to 1954. Harrison might file as many as six reviews at a time and was the only writer prepared to comment on non-Western music. He filled his spare time

making performance editions from the dense scribblings of the great but largely ignored composer Charles Ives – even conducting the premiere after 43 years of Ives' Third Symphony, which Harrison rescued from obscurity and disarray just before his nervous breakdown in 1947. Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Accounts of Harrison's breakdown attribute it to intense stress, discomfort, and loneliness. More precisely, the cause of it and his eventual return to California cut much closer to Harrison's identity as an outlier. In New York, Harrison's unswerving stand for social justice had merged with a love affair that was abruptly ended when the church that employed his Black lover, Rev. Edward McGowan, moved the preacher to Maryland. For about four years the couple had flagrantly attended concerts together in halls, including 92nd Street Y, where African Americans were not welcome. Harrison was more "out" and so more vulnerable than a very large and highly visible contingent of closeted gay composers living in New York – yet he had the power of the press.

McGowan's hasty departure and swiftly arranged marriage to a presumed Lesbian, who may have also "needed cover," left Harrison devastated. Nonetheless, a nervous breakdown can prove to be a collapsing pyre from which a phoenix rises. As the calamity of the Atom Bomb unfolded, such was the case for Harrison, a Californian pacifist beaten down by the lonely, deadline-driven life of a writer and copyist in noisy, relentless, postwar Manhattan.  

To be sure, the years spent in the cultural capital of the Western World with his close friends Cage and Thompson had its pluses, but Harrison's unmet need for beauty, for the balmy waves of Pacific Rim culture, and total intimacy with another man, brought his dry neural tinder to sudden combustion.

A letter from Cage to Cowell described Harrison's emotional state as a "two-year-old progressed to a teenager." After episodes of insomnia, crying jags, panic attacks and the sensation of whirling, Harrison was hospitalized for nearly a year. Cage visited weekly and wrote to Ives describing Harrison's situation as desperate. Ives was moved to share the Pulitzer Prize money he received for the Third Symphony to cover Harrison's hospital bills.  

Soon after leaving the hospital, Harrison got the job scoring a brief psychological ballet The Perilous Chapel by New York dancer/choreographer Jean Erdman. The work helped Harrison to slowly recover from his mental illness. Central to Erdman's dance ritual, made with the counsel of her husband Joseph Campbell, the renowned expert on myth, is an intrusion symbolized by the lowering of a mobile sculpture through a huge crown of thorns. As the work's name (drawn from William Blake) suggests, the music is tinged with doubt and fear – perhaps a reflection of the religious source of Harrison's pain.

Pacific Meetings
While Harrison was still in New York, Virgil Thompson gave him a copy of fellow Californian maverick Harry Partch's new book Genesis of a Music in 1949. It was a life-changing encounter owing to the forceful argument against Western equal temperament and in favor of Partch's microtonal division of the octave into 43 parts. This congruence with Asian tuning resonated with Harrison's earlier life experiences of authentic Chinese and Korean music and provided a liberating alternative to the postwar vogue for serialism.

Harrison's work as an instrument builder became highly focused when in 1967, he met the electrician and amateur musician William Colvig, an ingenious craftsman and diligent inventor. They became a couple and built many unique gamelans including "Old Grand Dad," the original American Gamelan, and the Gamelan Si Betty dedicated to the late Los Angeles music patron Betty Freeman. The former was a gamelan reimagined with inexpensive and readily available materials – aluminum bars, oxygen tanks, tin cans and furniture tubing. Colvig tuned the instruments with an oscilloscope that he made. Major works ensued: in 1972 La Koro Sutro, a pacifist cantata with a text in Esperanto accompanied by the new gamelan, and two years later the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan.

In 1962 Harrison went to Taiwan to learn to play the cheng, a long zither-like stringed instrument smaller than the Japanese koto. He later trained the violinist Richard Dee, his San Jose State University World Music teaching assistant, to play the cheng and the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle. Together with Lily Chin, trained in Western opera but recently from Beijing, and Colvig his ever-willing partner, a Chinese music ensemble was formed. Harrison and Colvig eventually added flutes, mouth organ, and other instruments, while Chin sang. "We played about eight years at every imaginable school system," said Dee.

Since the early days of Double Music, a collaborative percussion work by Harrison and Cage, who each composed parts for two players of a quartet, Harrison enjoyed teamwork. Dee proved a well-suited collaborator to compose the fourth of six variously titled concertante works for violin and ensemble composed from 1951-1982. The highly idiomatic quality of the solo writing in the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan was helped by Dee's knowledge, and his familiarity with Asian tuning proved ideal for placing it in the bracing sonic world of Old Grand Dad. The San Francisco Chamber Music Society commissioned the work. 

Pragmatism
As with any prototype, and the passage of time, the materials of the American gamelan required maintenance. Its bulkiness and the need for special tuning deterred repeat performances. Furthermore, in 1975 when Harrison met Pak Chokro – the formidable Javanese music guru, who "retired" by joining the faculty of CalArts in 1971 – a profound influence now aligned Harrison with the century’s old traditions of Javanese gamelan. So, after nearly two decades and very few performances, Harrison authorized a more traditional arrangement by Kerry Lewis replacing the American Gamelan with strings, piano, celesta and two harps. Several versions exist, and the performance history is murky as far as the composer's ultimate wishes. Tonight, we are performing all five movements and all three Jhalas that make up the fourth movement. Harrison's intensely beguiling melodies alone justify this effort to bring the Suite to a wider audience, but his nods to Medieval and Baroque forms amidst the fascination with Pacific Rim culture is another aspect of the music enhanced by the orchestral arrangement.

World Music World History
Since at least his days as a critic, Harrison was knowledgeable about early music theory and performance practice in the Western traditions. Opening with ominous dark clouds, "Threnody" sings mournfully. Harrison neither dedicated it nor explained his choice of the Greek-derived word for a poignant memorial song. However, in 1973 with the Vietnam War approaching twenty years, such a devoted pacifist was mindful of the mounting losses. On this occasion, it can remind us of the dark storm of Good Friday.

The delightful "Estampie" recalls an energetic Medieval dance with strong stamping accents that was a precursor to flamenco. "Air" refers to an accompanied solo line notably in Baroque ensemble works such as George Frideric Handel's famous Air from Water Music. Harrison maintained an almost worshipful regard for Handel: "Surely no other composer had ... the feel for the register and placement of the individual tones of a chord as Handel." Harrison fairly describes his own "Air," the pivot point of the suite, as infused with the pure elegiac spirit of American nostalgia.

Ostensibly, Harrison's interest in Asian music is more focused in "Three Jhalas" the fourth movement. Jhala is a Hindustani (North Indian) term for a set of movements characterized by a dominant pulse, drone, or ostinato. Harrison's biographers Miller and Lieberman describe the Jhala form as "intermittent reiteration of a single tone between the notes of the main melody." A giddy dance Jhala ends abruptly to make way for an infectious whirling Jhala that ultimately collides into a mysterious processional Jhala.

Derived from the passacaglia, a stately Spanish dance La Chacona originated as a sexy swirling dance from South America that quickly spread from the New World to Europe, according to Alex Ross. Chaccone refers to a baroque vehicle for extended variations based on a reiterated harmonic pattern, or ground bass. In addition to chaconnes by Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schutz, notable examples include Henry Purcell's Chaconne in G Minor, and in Bach's Partita No. 2 for solo violin – the ultimate chaconne lasting nearly fifteen unforgettable minutes. As with the Bach, Harrison's "Chaconne" sets the violinist on a noble course steeped in world history of intense and exalted striving that bookends the bittersweet austerity of his opening "Threnody" and breathes the same pure ether as the "Air" midway, while the piano and celesta plash against the pacific sand.

Much of the spare and innovative character of the original work for American Gamelan is lost in the orchestral arrangement, but the softer contrast of soloist against a background of lush strings, harps and glimmering keyboards imparts a burnished unity and grand sweep to the whole journey without losing the bright percussive rhythms. This entirely successful gamelan tradeoff for strings resulted in a fresh and emotionally affecting work that should find its way into the standard repertoire of progressive orchestras.

           PATRICK SCOTT © 2022

March 19, 2022
First Presbyterian/Santa Monica

Olivier Messiaen – Petites esquisses d'oiseaux (excerpts) : Le rouge-gorge; Le merle noir; La grive musicienne (1985)
Gérard Grisey – Nout (1983)
Messiaen – Theme et variations (1932)
Jeffrey Holmes – Kaun (Kenaz) (2020, World Premiere)
François-Bernard Mâche – Vigiles (2021, US Premiere)
Thierry Pécou – Méditation sur la fin de l'espèce (Meditation on the End of Species) (2020, US Premiere)

The windows are well insulated, the doors are sealed. Spontaneous bird calls and songs warbling outside are long absent. The association of their music with balance, harmony, freedom, and well-being evolved to an abstraction. Attending a concert of live music is now a rare and embattled affair so instead we stay protected inside and call up a recording of Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux, the little bird sketches that Olivier Messiaen wrote so very long ago to immortalize the now vanished blackbird, song thrush, and the European robin, among others.

Across that outwardly empyrean 20th century, this French composer traveled the globe with his notepad, binoculars, and ears so attuned to the frequencies of birdsong that he could transcribe and transpose them into notes performed on a piano, with the infinitude of its 88 keys, requiring what was for the time an extraordinary new level of keyboard virtuosity. Messiaen freely visited tropical rainforests, windswept mountains, multicolored canyons, grassy meadows, and cloudy highlands long before the hazards of weather made such travel nearly impossible, let alone futile.

After the second of the world wars, Messiaen trained himself by transcribing 78rpm field recordings of American birdsong published as two volumes in 1942. Then in the chattering bird market of Paris he spent hours zealously notating the songs of caged birds from India, East Asia, and elsewhere. This unprecedented diligence produced Oiseaux Exotiques (Exotic Birds) his first ornithological masterpiece for piano, winds, and percussion, composed in 1952 and premiered four years later. With Reveil des Oiseaux (Birds Awakening) the whole orchestra was soon given over to reproducing vivid skeins of bird species sounding together to welcome the break of dawn. By 1958, seventy-seven different species of birds, each portrayed in their long-vanished natural settings, exist now on paper facsimile ready for real-time resuscitation from Messiaen’s solo piano Catalogue d’Oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds). By the end of his life and prodigious output of music, according to scholar Robert Fallon, Messiaen transcribed 357 individual bird species and incorporated 757 birdsongs in his music. Though Messiaen took the long view, he likely didn’t consider that he was creating a time capsule to survive the great collapse of species.

It is not incorrect to call this enormously influential Christian composer an ornithologist. His synesthetic experience of hearing color gave him enhanced memory tools, like pneumatic devices, and a keen association of the sound colors of birdsongs with instrumental timbre. This singular merger of science and art inspired generations of composers to engage directly with nature. Certainly François-Bernard Mâche and Thierry Pécou, French composers active during the late 20th and early-to-mid 21st centuries, were prominent among them – rising in authority along with the emerging consciousness of global warming that would tragically prove too little too late. With his 1983 book Music, Myth, and Nature, or the Dolphins of Arion translated into English in 1992, Mâche instigated the field of zoomusicology. A chapter in the book devoted to the study of zoosemiotics, the sound of animal-produced languages, was titled Zoomusicology – and behold, a scientific discipline was born!   

Messiaen’s Christianity was a paradox of naively authentic Catholic faith and highly advanced theoretical application of scientific observation – all grounded in primeval myth. By absorbing, as a precocious young man, all that could be known in the early 20th century about Ancient Greek meters in music and poetry, Messiaen understood that the doctrine of the Trinity was devised by Greek theologians specifically as a myth, unprovable and ineffable – like music or poetry – to make impossible thinking of the divine as a singular persona. Messiaen dwelled in the Trinity, celebrated Hindu rhythm structures, embraced myths of many ancient cultures, became steeped in Celtic legend, and found the divine in birdsong.

Perhaps Messiaen’s anti-rational fascination with myths of self-sacrificial love and death – Christ, Tristan, Isolde – and his identification with ancient Peruvian songs of love remained walled off from the public discourse for too long to effectively warn the planet of its fateful war between the quantifiable and the ineffable. Yet these conjoined obsessions with the observable and the invisible remain a seductive religion of nature and love experienced as music.

Both the American composer Jeffrey Holmes and his immediate generational predecessor, the short-lived Frenchman Gérard Grisey – who studied with Messiaen for two years – embraced the powerful role of myth in creativity. Grisey’s computer-assisted analysis of sound spectra and acoustics, first pioneered by post-WWII Messiaen student Iannis Xenakis, led to the coalescing of like-minded composers in Paris known as the Spectralists. Grisey was their leading light.

His sextet Vortex Temporum, a 40-minute magnum opus scored for piano, clarinets, flutes/piccolo, violin, viola, and cello was completed two years before Grisey’s death from a brain aneurism at age 52. But his most often performed work was Nout, the second half of a diptych for solo bass clarinet Anubis-Nout that came into being in 1983. That year saw a major spike in Cold War tensions.

In September near midnight, the Soviet Union’s early-warning radar registered an incoming attack by an intercontinental ballistic missile trailed by a quartet of missiles launched from the United States., Like his Cold War predecessor Vasili Arkhipov, submarine hero of the 1962 spike year when nuclear oblivion was barely averted in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanislav Petrov distrusted the radar’s false evidence. He was wary of the radar’s unreliable technology, so he waited for corroboration that was unforthcoming. The night sky and all that was enfolded by it remained dark and intact.

Stretching up, out, and down like a great tropospheric table, according to myth Nut the ancient Egyptian goddess of the night sky swallows the smoldering sun as darkness approaches and vomits forth its brightness at dawn. Under a starry mantle, the russet flesh of her rubbery legs, arms, and elongated torso protects all the orders of human hierarchy encompassed within. To capture Nut’s essence, Grisey transformed the inky sound of contrabass clarinet into an all-penetrating omni-flowing darkness with multiphonic breathing techniques.

A very early example of Messiaen’s ability to access the ineffable has hidden in plain sight by wearing the self-effacing title Theme and Variations like a brown paper envelope. What begins as sincere and charming chamber music quickly gains heft, momentum, and purposeful virtuosity until its soulful lyricism swells to an astonishing crescendo of ecstasy, teeters on the brink, then slowly withdraws with a profound sense of mortality. This duo for violin and piano anticipated by ten years the last movement of Messiaen’s famous WWII Quartet for the End of Time praising the immortality of Jesus from within a POW camp – and has been overshadowed by it.

Holmes and Pécou were kindred spirits given their respective interests in ancient Norse and Pre-Columbian cultures and rootedness in late 20th century French musical aesthetics. Historic record tells us that Holmes “composed post-spectral, teleological music incorporating elements of mysticism and lyrical expression. His creative inspiration was rooted in primitive myths, transcendent legends, and dramatic elemental landscapes in their primal and violent natural states. As a traditionalist, he composed music for acoustic orchestral instruments, using standard notational methods; as a formalist, he worked within a complex and unique non-octave diatonic, chromatic, and microtonal language; as a transcendentalist, he combined the inherent abstraction of sound with a greater meaning and possibility of interpretation using lyricism and overt expression.”

As the first of the great global pandemics paused in 2022, Holmes’s treatment of an apocalyptic Norse rune, commissioned by Pécou’s’ Ensemble Variances, was finally premiered in Santa Monica, near the composer’s US birthplace. Connecting Holmes to Pécou was the ensemble’s guitarist Pierre Bibault, a friend teaching at the Paris Conservatory.

This ritual quintet evokes the three primeval rune poems of Old Norwegian, Old Icelandic, and Old Anglo-Saxon runic alphabets that survived from the seventh century as the oldest forms of the English language before the larger Latin alphabet superseded a smattering of archaic letters. Such warrior poetry posits the letter “K” of Kaun as the corruption of disease, an ulcerated wound; the Anglo-Saxon letter “K” of Kenaz represents a torch. Together one could imagine the cauterizing of a wound, or trial by fire. The massive wildfires that would in time completely devastate the forests of California were raging in the mountains where Holmes lived during the composition of Kaun (Kenaz). The work was in three sections alternating passages of wistfulness featuring guitar and violin with cascades of combustion.

In the late 20th century, young composers gravitated toward microtonality after wrangling with the limitations of equal temperament. At the same time, they saw the post-World War II classical music establishment as increasingly as part of the old-world order. Like many of his generation, Holmes’s microtonality was ingrained by playing electric guitar in which bending the pitch was central. As such, his practical approach to microtonality and the production of overtones depended on the players achieving such effects through performance technique on traditional instruments. He used numerology as a fundamental compositional mapping device. The issues of tuning, the rhythmic investigation of Indian talas, and numeric relations, predisposed Holmes, and others of his generation to align with the environmental global consciousness of artists and intellectuals that would ultimately prove no match to the planet’s self-defeating oligarchs, petrochemical corporations, and dirty money.

Mâche was born into a family of musicians. His study with Messiaen led to an interest in ancient Greece and a diploma in Greek archeology. Whereas Messiaen abandoned electronic music after one experiment, Mâche joined the seminal Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris from 1958-63. He succeeded Iannis Xenakis as chair of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Arditti Quartet commissioned two works Eridan and Moires; Mâche has composed for orchestra and unusual small combinations such as harpsichord and organ. The integration of re-corded birdsong using a click track, such as in Vigiles became a hallmark. An extensive conversation with Bruno Serrou about his music and zoomusicology was published in 2007.

Among his final works, Vigiles stands out as an exceptionally crisp and vividly colored journey into a meta-con-versation for which there is no translation. Despite Mâche’s extremely advanced language of variation and transformation – multiplication, rotation, permutation such as transposition, inversion and retrograde, as well as augmentation and diminution – the leap of faith for listeners was as easy as it was rewarding.

Thierry Pécou invested a decade studying music and culture in Canada, Russia, Spain, and Latin America. He brings a global perspective to the existential question: “Can we sustain planet earth?”

Commissioned by Wigmore Hall and Radio France, Thierry Pécou’s Meditation on the End of Species was a brilliant flare sent up in the darkening night of 2021 signaling a danger as preposterous as it was easy to imagine – after  decades of apocalyptic entertainment, escalating data and anecdotal reports, and the proliferation of tipping-point models. The typewriter in the score reminds us of how rapidly a communication technology could become obsolete, and the speed of related transformation elsewhere, and all around us for good and for evil. Despite its fluid medium, the underwater world sounds geologic as the sound waves rebound from sea floors, tectonic walls, clefts, crevasses, and pinnacles. The songs and calls of whales mature as the waveforms gain purpose for communicating over longer distances with lower frequencies. Even with the indisputable fact of evolution, whales do not possess a communication technology suited to innovation and obsolescence.

The soul of Meditation on the End of Species was the cello soloist, our guide through a landscape of time, floating shards of memory, spells of lyricism and mounting tension that grew to a climax somewhat past midway. A dreamily suspenseful section followed from which the poignant sounds of calves seeking cooler and less salinized water made a heart-rending effect that left the listener deeply moved.

In the final edition of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, the academic and popular science author defined collapse as: "a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/ economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time." He reviewed the causes of historical and prehistorical instances of societal collapse, particularly from environmental change, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trading partners.

As I listen to the end of this program – a historical artifact from a time when every aspect that contributed to the degradation of the troposphere and the near total collapse of societies planet-wide was still verging on the possibility to reverse course, I close my eyes and dream of a different past.

                             PATRICK SCOTT © 2022

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Severe Clear
The meteorological state of a flawless blue sky, dawning bright and growing ever brighter across the entire continent that day, is known by weather and air traffic professionals as “severe clear.” Walking to the polls early that morning, primary voters in the election to replace New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani shielded their squinting eyes with voter pamphlets. The U.S. military couldn’t have had better conditions for operation Global Guardian, their annual full-scale training mission scheduled for that morning’s exercise in response to a potential Russian nuclear attack. Off the northeastern coast all bombers were loaded, and all submarines out to sea, with nearly 100% of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) ready. Adjusting for each successive orbit, NASA’s International Space Station, with its single American astronaut, synchronized its cameras to capture global images of severe clarity. The station’s lenses would soon track the outsized plume of chunky smoke spewing from the Twin Towers, as though from a volcanic hole at the tip of Manhattan – like a turbo-charged vent on the ocean floor.

The 25-year genesis of the World Trade Center ran exactly parallel to NASA’s space program with its origins in developing ICBMs, as the Cold War began, evolving to satellites and into the Moon mission. With rapt global attention, Apollo 11 landed on the moon’s powdery surface July of 1969. NASA’s successfully aborted Apollo 13 mission transfixed the world on television once more in April of 1970.

The World Trade Center’s origin story was linked to New York’s massive postwar urban renewal strategy that located the United Nations headquarters overlooking the East River. The UN opened in 1951. With tenants moving into the lower floors, the North and South Towers topped-out in December 1970 and September 1971, respectively. Dedication of the still-unfinished towers happened in 1973 with little fanfare. Like the space race, most New Yorkers were bored or angered by the World Trade Center.

Narrow Windows
Both world-changing projects came into focus in 1962 as precursors of globalization and the epitome of JFK’s “New Frontier” campaign promise. Minoru Yamasaki, the Seattle-born New York architect of the 1962 World’s Fair’s Pacific Science Pavilion, with its neo-gothic pointed arches and tracery vaults, was chosen to innovate major structural engineering solutions and to humanize the scale of these two monstrously imposing buildings.

The matching 110 stories of narrow windows not only gave the aluminum clad towers an infinitely reflective and almost translucent surface, but also calmed the architect’s own acrophobia. He hoped his 20-inch-wide windows would help manage potential clients’ fear of heights. But, succumbing to enormous pressure, for what would be the spectacularly successful 107th floor Windows on the World restaurant, the architect increased only the restaurant windows to 26 inches, a felicitous crowning detail. At its peak occupancy, 50,000 hungry workers and 80,000 hungry guests/tourists comprised the daily occupancy of the towers. Diners having breakfast in Windows on the World had a 60-mile view of the planet’s curvature on that “severe clear” day.

Heat-tempered glass became more common in skyscrapers around 1965. All 611,000 square feet of windows tempered to resist 150 mph winds were manufactured by one Ohio-based company in Toledo. The 200,000 tons of comparatively lightweight structural elements, however, were shipped and pieced together from many steel manufacturers across the entire nation. These two steel fretwork boxes supported acre-sized column-free concrete floors perforated only by pressurized stairways and three express elevators – instead of the conventional core elevator – that convened in the 44th floor lower “sky lobby,” where floor access transfers were made to meet more elevators.

Models of the design were tested in wind tunnels and were engineered to withstand impact from an aircraft like the military plane that collided with the fog-shrouded Empire State Building in 1945. The towers were not, however, designed for the impact of a Boeing 767 passenger plane with 10,000 gallons of unused jet fuel. That global product – an aircraft made by companies in the U.S., Italy, and Japan – didn’t go into service until 1982.

An astonished global citizenry watched on television screens as American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 flying up to 700 miles per hour rammed the North Tower, the one with the enormous transmitting needle on top, opening up a huge black hole from which a preposterously large fireball erupted. “It looked fake, to be honest,” said FDNY Captain Jay Jonas. “The sky was so blue, and the sun was glistening off the metal of the exterior of the World Trade Center. You saw an airplane-shaped hole in the North Tower with fire and smoke coming out of the building, under pressure. It was boiling out. I still can’t believe how bad it looked.”

Turning Point
Most of us remember precisely what was happening when this turning point in history crashed into our lives. For some, however, the story is more about what didn’t happen. Althea Waites, who is the ensemble pianist in tonight’s program, was at Eastman School in Rochester, NY performing in the Gateways Festival, an initiative since 1995 promoting African Americans in classical music. As the festival was ending, she had a strong hunch. Her subconscious mind was clear that she should return home to LA early, skip her planned Boston visit, and have her ticket on American Airlines Flight 11 re-written for Monday 9/10 – same departure time, same flight; get home early. The next day American’s Boeing 767 airliner left Logan International one minute before 8:00 am, was highjacked by terrorists fifteen minutes later, and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center with enormous force.

Uncommon Woman
Joan Tower has not shared a particular 9/11 memory because she was processing her grief over the loss of a close friend Margaret Shafer by working on her second string quartet. The intimacy of her feelings of loss with four string instrument parts knitting together a memorial tribute was suddenly and hugely magnified. “9/11 hit about a month later,” she said, “and the intensity of the piece got higher. It veers between pain and love and anger” As Greg Sandow writes, “The pain and anger get quite wild, but still each section of the piece grows naturally out of whatever came before. At the end, [In Memory] subsides into a single note, pulsing softly with a gentle breath of grief.” 

If anyone can, Tower exemplifies the legacy of American composer Aaron Copland. The most obvious tip-off is her orchestral piece Fanfare for the Uncommon Women (1987) scored similarly to Copland’s heroic paean to the rugged (male) individual – firmly in the foreground of patriotic rhetoric in 1942, when it was written. Copland would adapt his masculine Fanfare for the first movement of his popular Third Symphony, while Tower composed five more fanfares (most recently in 2016) with varied scoring that can be performed as a single 25-minute work: Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman. Performances of the set of six fanfares now number over 500.   

After visits to Cuba and Mexico, Copland expressed the musical influence of those countries. Tower lived in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru from age nine to age seventeen. Among her more than 25 orchestra works are ten concertos and no symphonies, preferring to compose evocatively titled tone poems often with a nod to the natural world. Among some of Tower’s 35 chamber music works, Très Lent (Hommage à Messiaen) for cello and piano helped kick off the OM Century, Jacaranda’s 2007-09 celebration of Olivier Messiaen’s centenary; String quartet No 1 “Night Fields” was performed by the Lyris Quartet in 2012 with David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, while Island Prelude for oboe and string quartet was heard in 2013 with large ensemble works of Tobias Picker and Steve Reich.

Sound Collage
Steve Reich lived in a Lower Manhattan apartment four blocks from the World Trade Center below Chambers Street with his wife Beryl Korot, his son, daughter-in-law, and their child. Reich and Korot were in Vermont that morning glued to the TV as the tempest of dust, smoke, debris, and human particles engulfed their neighborhood. The horror was muted only by the absence of har-rowing eye-witness accounts, which followed as people overcame the trauma enough to speak. The dispassionate Don DeLillo in his 9/11 novel Falling Man (2007) gives a vivid chronicle of the scene surrounding the disaster, “The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows, all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes.” The young Reich family was evacuated and able to return a month later. “Our phone connection stayed open for 6 hours,” said Reich, “and our next-door neighbors were finally able to drive north out of the city with their family and ours. For us, 9/11 was not a media event.”

Unlike the dark initial mood of Joan Tower’s second quartet, Reich began his second quartet in 2009 with a non-specific musical concept. He wanted to work again melding text with string quartet. His poignant Different Trains (1989) chronicled crossing America from New York to Los Angeles during WWII by train as a child of divorced parents, while at the same time, trains crossed Europe to deadly destinations. The scratchy analog recordings from various archives – holocaust survivors, a train conductor, etc. – were made into a sound collage and mixed live for the Kronos Quartet. In 2013, Lyris Quartet tackled this work for Jacaranda while giving the premiere of the digitally re-mastered audio track by sound engineer and live mixer Scott Fraser. Fraser’s achievement greatly improved audibility and comprehension of the text. He brought this earlier work to a higher standard after mastering the digital audio of WTC 9/11.

Since 1973, Reich was interested in elongating speech patterns allowing the instruments to extend the recorded phrases in real time creating “speech melody.” The technology would take 40 years to catch up. The 2009 commission from Kronos began to focus the concept of words connected harmonically with strings. In an NPR interview, Reich explains:

I had one idea only originally, and that was a totally abstract, structural, musical idea. Whoever was speaking – whatever they were speaking about – their last syllable would be prolonged.” So, he explains half-singing, "'They came from Bostonnnnnnn' – and the n would go on indefinitely – and that could be doubled by viola or by a fiddle or by a cello. Then the next person would speak: 'Goin' to LAaaaaa' – and the a could go on, and that could be doubled by another. And you start building up these textures of what the memories – or the vapor trails, if you like – of what people had said.

Public Domain
The timing of the commission destined the work to coincide with the tenth anniversary year of 9/11. “By January 2010, several months after Kronos asked me for the piece,” Reich said, “I realized the prerecorded voices would be from 9/11. Specifically, they would start from the Public Domain: NORAD, FDNY, and then from interviews with friends and neighbors who lived or worked in lower Manhattan.”

The North American Defense Command (NORAD) air traffic controllers first saw that the four airplanes were deviating from the courses while the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) sent fire crews into the chaos to bring people out. Instead, most of them perished with the building’s total collapse. On some floors only one survivor navigated the architecture of terror struggling past piles of discarded shoes, briefcases and wheelchairs on staircase landings as the lines of descending office workers swelled.

Reich pre-recorded the quartet playing different material twice for the equivalent of twelve voices, only four of them live. The first violin doubles the crying sound a tele-phone makes when left out of its cradle at the beginning and end of the first movement, which is built from NORAD’s panic over the path of Flight 11, and fire crew happenings. Reich’s personal interviews, including the first volunteer ambulance driver to arrive on the scene, make up the second movement which proceeds without pause. About the third movement Reich wrote:

After 9/11 the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the Medical Examiner's office on the East Side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition there is an obligation to guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira, consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages. The roots of the practice are, on one level, to protect the body from animals or insects, and one another, to keep the neshama (soul) company while it hovers over the body until burial. Because of the difficulties in DNA identification, this went on for seven months, 24/7. Two of the women who sat, and recited Psalms, are heard in the third movement. You will also hear a cellist (who has sat Shmira elsewhere) and a cantor from a major New York City synagogue sing parts of Psalms and the Torah.

WTC 9/11 is riddled by anxiety, rocked by confusion and roiling chaos. Pervading it is a sense of desperate searching, which enveloped the day, and the burdensome uncertainty that settled like a pall over the ensuing decade before the work’s premiere at Duke University March 19, 2011. The following May, President Obama ordered the execution of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, so the tenth anniversary was observed four months later with that primary mission accomplished, but a developing military quagmire in Afghanistan – and a homeland, whose obsession with Islamic terrorism allowed nativist domestic terrorism to rise unfettered.

Events Unfold
Restless Mourning was commissioned by the Carolina Chamber Chorale in Charleston, South Carolina for the Piccolo Spoleto Festival. The controversy surrounding the Confederate Flag in the state capital was proposed by the choral director as a starting point. The flag was raised over the capitol dome in 1962, where it remained until it was moved to the monument to South Carolina’s Confederate soldiers on the State House grounds in 2000. Unrest followed. Anthony Davis has never shied away from controversy, but an approach to the subject matter was not immediately forthcoming.

The composer and his collaborators, poet Quincy Troupe and playwright Allan Havis, were some eighty miles south while I was knotting my tie. Here is how that day and the composition of Restless Mourning unfolded:

Quincy, Allan, and I were all living in San Diego on that day September 11, 2001. We had in common strong ties to New York. and for us New York always was home. I spent the day at Quincy’s watching the events unfold and he began to work furiously on the epic poem that would become the text for movements 1 and 3. Allan also wrote a response, provocatively, telling the story from the pilot’s point of view, first the pilot for American Airlines and then the pilot for Allah who took over the plane. In presenting this work, I wanted to look at the events from varying vantage points, not necessarily the prescribed or official version. The music was conceived to take the listener on a journey from tonality to the octatonic, from resolution to noise and chaos.

I felt it was necessary to collaborate with my long-time partner in electronic music, Earl Howard who created the sound world around the composed music. The piece begins with the sound of the subway, a nostalgic sonic memory of New York. BLUE, the first movement, recalls the crystalline sky of that fateful day; one of those rare blazingly sunny days in New York. Quincy Troupe begins with this vision of Blue that becomes deeper as it represents Billie Holiday’s dress, the waters of the Caribbean, Miles Davis on Blue in Green, and Robert Johnson’s bluest blues.

This becomes blue as the sky over Pearl Harbor, a parallel atrocity. The movement captures the transformation of that sunny day into the dark chaos that followed. In the music the piece evolves from the sunny, Jazz inspired harmonies into something much more sinister and foreboding.

Movement two begins with a depiction of the typical day of the pilot, his concern for his family and his argument with his wife and his pride in his work. Again, all of this is upset as we realize that this is the story of the dead pilot remembering events on the plane. The pilot in the end becomes the pilot for Allah.

I was fascinated with how someone can embrace a belief that does not value human life, something beyond the human. Brecht has always advocated that music is a “narcotic” and in his collaborations with Weill and Eisler he tried to remove the seduction of music. In this piece the music propels us into the oblivion in an attempt to understand what compels a terrorist and what is seductive about that kind of faith. A sound texture follows that builds with stochastic textures and bell sounds that lead to a response from the instruments. The movement concludes with “I am the Pilot of our Innocence,” an innocence lost. The music now in D major as opposed to the D minor that begins the pilot’s music, features ascending and descending harmony in the choir, emphasizing the dissonance that defines a tonality.

Movement three is conceived from the perspective of the desperate people who leapt from the building. Quincy explores the action-hero fascination that still haunts us today. Where is Arnold, where is Bruce Willis, where is Superman when we really need them? The myth of a savior is an all too familiar narrative. Quincy also draws on the history of the World Trade Center site that was built on a slave burial site in New York. Many of the early slaves who came to America were Muslim and literate, and they were buried facing East. Quincy imagines the souls of the people who perished that day meeting the souls of the long-departed slaves.

Movement four concludes the piece with a setting of the 102nd Psalm of David, “They ate ashes for Bread.” The music here reveals my love of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington with the theme introduced by the bass before the choir begins. The antiphonal layers of the chorus that were used throughout the piece become the “riffs” of a Blues narrative with a final Gospel resolution.”

Common Ground
Hardly any time had elapsed when steelworkers and other skilled construction tradespeople brought their tools to the site. The dismantling of the wreckage began that day. Just as the gazillion steel units that made up the building came from nearly every state of the United States, concerned patriots drove to Manhattan from far away. After the astonishing decision was rescinded to ground ALL planes in the sky that day, people of all backgrounds hopped on planes to Manhattan to help nonstop for eight months around the clock – finishing the job one month early. Before 9/11 Americans who saw New York as a world unto itself saw it anew as the epitome of America.

Those were heady days of open expressions of love and solidarity, of boundary crossing – barrier dismantling human unity born of an overwhelmingly tragic event. All Republican and Democrat members of congress sang God Bless America together. Al Gore declared George W. Bush as his president.

Perhaps the most potent demonstration of such singular unity before 9/11 began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral train in 1945 that slowly wended its way north from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had established a center for polio victims. A decade would pass before the Salk vaccine proved effective against the 29,000 annual cases of polio in the U.S. and a universal vaccine mandate would begin.

The entire route of the Ferdinand Magellan train from Georgia to Washington DC was lined with tearful citizens devasted by the sudden unimaginable loss of a charismatic leader who brought them out of the Great Depression and on to victory in World War II.

At least 500,000 mourners silently watched in the hot April sun as a military caisson bore the casket from Union Station to the East Room, where the President would lie in state for five hours. The three-term President’s simple funeral service was then broadcast live on every radio across America. The commemorative music heard then by virtually all of America on April 14th was Samuel Barber’s Adagio.

The composer had arranged the central movement of his 1936 String Quartet Op. 11 for sting orchestra at the request of Arturo Toscanini who conducted. Thomas Larson, author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (2010) deemed it “America’s secular hymn for grieving the dead.”

 For our time, the emotional economy and perfect architecture of the Adagio in its original string quartet version speaks more directly and intimately than does the lush texture of the orchestral arrangement, which can invite overt sentimentalism. Naturally, Barber’s best-known work served frequently for 9/11 memorials.  

Sadly, for as much as 9/11 brought the United State of America together, the ensuing war in Afghanistan that just finally ended after twenty years quickly polarized the nation in an escalating way that some believe climaxed on January 6th with the Capitol Insurrection. It is safe to say, however, that growing public awareness that the trillion dollars, or so, spent on the war and occupation of Afghanistan could have been better spent on aging infrastructure, poverty, and climate change. Americans have the potential to unify to a critical degree seeking common ground around an agenda to pay our nations long-overdue bills.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2021

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REMEMBER THE FUTURE 2019-20

PROGRAM NOTES
Yale’s baseball coach was jealous of Charles Ives’s devotion to music. He wanted a star pitcher. America got its greatest composer instead. The popularity of baseball exploded after the disruption of the Civil War. The first national league formed in 1871. This juvenile delinquent of sports was just reaching adulthood when Ives was captain of the Hopkins School team in 1893. Baseball gave Ives a masculine identity at a time when music was considered the purview of women. Its balance of cerebral and physical gave him a stimulating paradigm for compositional strategies.

Baseball reached the peak of its popularity in 1939, when war again disrupted the world. It slowly declined as football steadily gained pride of place, eventually fueled by intersecting corporate interests and television’s ascendant power. It reached the peak of popularity at the height of the Iraq War in 2006. The slow decline of football as America’s dominant sports identity while basketball rises is interesting to chart against the fluctuating meaning of Pax Americana and with it the power dynamics of peace, prosperity, and exploitation. One might ask, where does the US leadership stand as the information age redefines autonomy and community in a rapidly changing world? What does the tattered idea of Pax Americana mean now? Can music help give any perspective?

Harkening back to ancient Pax Romana – 200 years of prosperous Roman hegemony – Pax Britannica covered 100 years of Imperial expansion from the Napoleonic Wars to WWI. Pax Americana was first used six years after the Civil War by Alexis de Tocqueville to underscore American exceptionalism – the first modern democracy built by immigrants. The term became associated with manifest destiny and prosperous isolationism when, by 1894, Pax Americana first appeared in print.

President Cleveland was praised for “maintaining the supremacy of law throughout the length and breadth of the land, in establishing the Pax Americana.” Of course, the ten-week Spanish American War in 1898 gained US dominion over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Pax Americana lasted in North America until the US was forced from its isolationism to join WWI as an ally and enter into a new global paradigm many now equate with endless war. The May 7, 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by German U-boat killing 1198 passengers and crew was the turning point.  

Ives was galvanized by the shocking news while waiting for a train in Manhattan. Those with him on the platform began singing “In the Sweet By and By” accompanied by a street musician on a barrel organ. The final movement of his Orchestra Set No. 2 is entitled “From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose.” From the orchestral texture, an offstage band, accordion, and sharp-elbowed piano, a small chorus echoes the hymn tune before and after the full orchestral statement of “In the Sweet By and By.”

Emerging from WWI into the Cold War, as ideologies polarized, the term was sometimes amended to Pax Americana et Sovietica, which is to say the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) doctrine was keeping the putative peace – while the Vietnam War raged on from 1955 to 1975, overlapped by the Cuban Missile Crisis! Pax Americana gained a decidedly negative meaning in a commencement address by President John Kennedy: “What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.” Those sentiments, however, did not prevail.

Critics of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, of U.S. imperialism and the Vietnam War considered NATO and its Supreme Allied Commander – always an American – the embodiment of Pax Americana. By then the term had become cognitively dissonant and absurdly oxymoronic.

Allen Ginsburg’s famous anti-war poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” addresses the degradation of language while asserting the power of poetry to galvanize anti-war action. In his book Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War, James Mersmann writes: “A chief virtue of [the poem] is that it makes the reader experience the proliferation and abuse of language. Its technique is to notice and reproduce the language that inundates the senses every day, and in doing so it makes one painfully aware that in every case language is used not to communicate truth but to manipulate the hearer.”

Nixon resigned after being impeached in 1974, and the Vietnam War ended with a mind-numbing thud a year before America would celebrate its bicentennial. Against the nation’s weary cynicism emerged the unlikely but heroic success of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson across Europe and at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976. Americans looking back fifteen years were unified only by pride in the Moon Landing and all the work leading up to it. Is it really so surprising then that a very long enigmatic spectacle featuring a violin-playing European scientist whose theories embodied the possibility of outer space, sung in a language made up almost entirely of syllables, numbers and non-sequiturs has an impact that still resounds.

The neoconservative movement of the late 1990s was led by a think tank embraced by the George W. Bush administration. The movement came to an apex with the Iraq War and rapidly lost energy as any notion of victory collapsed by 2006. Three times Pax Americana is cited in the think tank’s 90-page manifesto, Rebuilding American Defenses championed by William Kristol, John Bolton and Dick Cheney, among many prominent others. Yes, that was the year football began to decline. Subsequent advances in cranial imaging in the light of a persistent pattern of injuries, galvanizing incidents of racism, management scandals, and financial revelations about schools and teams tarnished football. The damage has been weathered, but not forgotten. High schools are reexamining their responsibilities and priorities. Younger Americans register significantly less interest in football, and the number of all Americans who have no favorite sport has increased form 8% in 2000 to 15% last year. Furthermore, as sexual harassment litigation seems headed to the world of sports, the national pastime, and the identity of the nation will undoubtedly change.

A Most Uncommon Pedigree
Charles Ives remains one of the most unfettered musicians who ever lived. His blazing originality is all the more astonishing when it is known that he was the father of the modern American insurance industry — earning by his death over $5 billion in today’s dollars. The many contradictions of his paradoxical personality have led some to underestimate Ives’s education, discipline and capacity for craftsmanship.

Ives’s love of extreme rhythmic complexity and daring harmonies was deeply ingrained by his father – a Civil War-era bandleader of genuine showmanship and taste for the outlandish, musically speaking. George Ives conducted choruses and orchestras, taught music theory and various instruments. He famously pitted large bands at either end of a field playing different tunes and harmonies to explore bitonality, multiple rhythms, and spatial effects. The family was socially prominent and active as anti-slavery abolitionists. George’s ever-curious son was also a diligent church musician, playing the organ from the age of fourteen and composing throughout his youth, while at Yale (1894-98), and in New York City when his business acumen was beginning to grow at the turn of the century.

At Yale, Ives was a go-getter and a student of Horatio Parker from Danbury, Connecticut, where Ives was born. Parker was especially esteemed in Europe for his oratorio Hora Novissima (The Last Hour), and considered America’s finest composer at the time. Ives wrote his First Symphony under Parker’s watchful eye. Such were the poles of the young composer’s experience and education.

Ives was twenty-five when the century turned. He was idealistic and deeply absorbed in the great romantic philosopher/writers known as the Transcendentalists – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. After Yale, he moved on from a year of actuarial work at Mutual Life to a six-year stint with a failing company before opening Ives & Co. in 1907. Although Ives cedes mastery to no one in his keenly observed and vividly imagined nature portraits, he possessed an efficient, albeit humanistic, business mind that thrived in his modern Manhattan office to which he would commute weekly by train, leaving his wife Harmony to manage their beloved home in Danbury.

Present Tense
Ives was obsessed with the past in his quest to write the music of the future. His compulsive revising and self-plagiarizing resulted in multiple versions and optional instrumentation from which musicians today must choose. Performances were so rare they never imposed on him the focus of external deadlines. While the raw quality of much of his music may pose genuine challenges to listeners even today, some of the most tender, serene and spiritual music ever written issued from the pen of Ives.

From his days as a baseball whiz, Ives knew he was a renegade rock-ribbed liberal, a New Englander to the core – social and political, balancing business and art. In his large-scale works, including the four finished symphonies, the famous set of tone poems: Three Places in New England, and the Second Piano Sonata “Concord,” one hears swatches and streams of Yankee tunes, marches, Protestant hymns, Negro spirituals, Stephen Foster, parlor songs, hoedowns and fiddle tunes, brothel honky-tonk, ragtime, and Beethoven – all coexisting with a rough freewheeling approach to rhythm and tonality within an always grand design.

Whether or not Ives was aware of Antonin Dvorak’s turn of the century admonition that American composers should listen to the music of “Negroes” and “Indians” for inspiration, Ives was the only composer with courage enough to incorporate ragtime into his complex piano music of the late 1890s – decades before Stravinsky and other Europeans were smitten. Ives greatly admired Native American drumming, but its influence is less identifiable. As his active period of composing waned, an African American woman Mary Evelyn Stiles “communicated” to him – in a dream or a trance perhaps – the pre-1850 spiritual, “In the Mornin’ Give Me Jesus.” The 1929 arrangement is among Ives’s Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations. It is considered his last compositional effort.

His Master’s Voice
The record producer Max Wilcox was tasked by RCA in 1967 with making the first Stereo LP of the First Piano Sonata by pianist William Masselos, the artist who gave the work its 1949 premiere. For this much-heralded release, the pianist described the work’s tortured genesis:

That a huge virtuoso piano sonata had been written by Ives before the more familiar ‘Concord’ Sonata was a fact known to many, but it existed only in a very rough manuscript. A few years after its completion, Ives deciphered his original sketches and put the work into a final form. This score was given to a friend, and it subsequently disappeared. Thus, one was faced with going back to the original, and Ives' delicate health did not allow him to undertake such a project. The composer Lou Harrison, a great friend and musical confidant of Ives, was one of the few who could decipher Ives’s musical shorthand, and it was he who, with the composer’s enthusiastic approval, realized the sketches. Much of the manuscript is completely clear, but some of it…is slightly less than tidy! It was in such passages that Harrison’s knowledge of Ives was invaluable.

Masselos then recounted a story that captures Ives’s protean compulsion in general and his particular dilemma:

After Ives’s completed score was lost – but before Harrison’s version – he began reworking a photostated copy of the manuscript. Characteristically he made a multitude of changes, with many passages appearing in three or four alternate versions. The margins of this score are peppered with Ives’s fist-shaking, handwritten outbursts against an imaginary gentleman named Rollo, who, according to Henry Cowell’s biography of Ives, signifies ‘one of those white-livered weaklings who cannot stand up and receive the full force of dissonance like a man.’

Musical Archeology
Tonight Adam Marks is using the Peermusic Edition based on the 1954 Harrison score with emendations by Masselos in 1979, with more corrections added in the 1990 reprint, but still leaving a good deal of latitude.

Pointing out landmarks must suffice when attempting any descriptive analysis of the First Piano Sonata. For example, a verse mocking the tune “How Dry I Am,” is answered by a chorus that is a deeply embedded treatment of “Oh, Susannah” the initial section of the second movement. In the second section titled “In the inn,” Ives recycled some of his Theater Orchestra Set, written 1904-11. A striking Afro-Cuban rhumba rhythm becomes evident despite its documented introduction to American music decades later. Masselos writes “This movement was based on Ives’s impressions of sounds heard while passing an inn ­– the driving improvisations near the beginning are unmistakably those of a jazz trumpeter. Jazz also inspires much of the fourth movement, with a raucously hilarious setting of ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ providing one of the great moments of the sonata.”

The dreamy third movement makes an affecting fantasy from the old-timey hymn tune “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Elsewhere the two raucous scherzo movements riff on ragtime, “Happy Days,” “I Hear Thy Welcome Voice” and that mind-boggling treatment of “Bringing in the Sheaves,” which owes its inspiration to gospel singing at its most unbridled.

Autumn – In the Barn – The Revival
During this same fertile period before WWI Ives embarked on a set of four violin sonatas that he hoped would appeal to the more daring musicians and find an audience. The brevity of the Second Sonata “Autumn,” with its titled movements, makes an ideal introduction to the set. The Episcopal hymn tune “Autumn” (“Mighty God While Angels Bless Thee”) dominates the thematic material of the first movement celebrating autumn harvest. The middle movement, “In the Barn” revels in fiddling tunes such as the Scottish reel “Money Musk,” and densely packed snippets from “Sailors Hornpipe,” “Oh Susannah,” the Revolutionary period fife and drum piece “The White Cockade,” and triumphantly insistent “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” That tune was so important the quotes it in 16 different works. The third movement “The Revival” is eventually infused with the18th century Appalachian folk tune “Nettleton” alternately known as “Come Thou fount of ev’ry blessing” whipped to a frenzy then ending enigmatically.

In a Darkened Theater
Growing up in the affluent and culturally diverse Baldwin Hills, Danny Elfman was imprinted in darkened movie palaces by the mastery of the fantastically versatile and well-educated golden age film composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann was among the early champions of Ives, eventually recording the Second Symphony. Herrmann championed George Gershwin, Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many British composers. Elfman was besotted with Herrmann’s indelible music for The Day the Earth Stood Still, Psycho, North by Northwest, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

In the late sixties Elfman attended University High School “Uni” in West LA where he joined a crowd that aroused his interest in jazz, Igor Stravinsky and contemporary composers with rock & roll cache. Soon he was in France with his older brother Richard’s avant-garde music theater group, then on to learning drumming while collecting instruments in Africa. Elfman studied informally with the great gamelan master Pak Chokro, guest faculty at CalArts.

Much has been written about Elfman’s charismatic rise from his brother’s Mystic Nights of the Oingo Boingo, where deep affection for Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, and Duke Ellington grounded the playful antics of a super-versatile ensemble of fifteen performers captivating audiences with a wild ride of fantasy. The group operated – however outrageously – in a professional milieu eventually documented by Richard’s 1982 film Forbidden Zone.

As lead singer, Elfman pared the group down to eight and the name simply to Oingo Boingo. The film Weird Science and television spin off gave him a hit with its title song. Relentless concertizing by 1995 seriously damaged his hearing and led to retirement as a singer. Meanwhile, his friends and fans Tim Burton and Paul Reubens asked Elfman to score their 1985 film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

So began an extraordinary partnership resulting in such iconic films as Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands, all before pulling the plug on his stage career. Elfman’s phenomenal work ethic resulted a staggering list of films, four Oscar nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, eleven Grammy nominations (one win for the Batman theme), and two nominations for AFI's 100 years of Film Scores.

The next frontier was to be concert music in classical settings. In 2004 the American Composers Orchestra commissioned a six-movement suite Serenada Schizophrana premiered in 2005 at Carnegie Hall. Three years later his 45-minute ballet for Twyla Tharp’s Rabbit and Rogue premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House with American Ballet Theater. The soloists and ensemble numbered 22 dancers. Elfman met the violinist Sandy Cameron when working on the score for Iris, the spectacular tribute to film history by Cirque du Soliel that opened in 2011 at the Dolby Theater. Several years later in Prague, a Gypsy cadenza Elfman wrote for Cameron featured in his “Music from the Films of Tim Burton,” captured the imagination of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. That interest led to a co-commission with the Scottish National Orchestra and Stanford University, Palo Alto. Sandy Cameron worked closely with Elfman on the Violin Concerto “Eleven Eleven,” which was premiered in 2017 in Smetana Hall in Prague, John Mauceri conducting. The score has exactly 1111 measures!

Berlin Philharmonic
The Piano Quintet, Elfman first foray into chamber music, was written almost simultaneously with the concerto. The idiomatic naturalness of the writing is expressive in ways we might expect from Elfman, but they are clothed comfortably in the manners of advanced classical music that offers a fresh take on a neglected form that has everywhere to grow. It is a genuine and quite welcome contribution that signals a stylistic maturity pulsing with promise. The composer provides a note on the genesis of the piece:

Last year, while traveling to Berlin to hear the Berlin Philharmonic perform, I met Knut Weber, one of their cellists. He was the one who suggested the possibility of writing a piano quartet. I was once again faced with something to explore that I knew absolutely nothing about, so of course I immediately agreed. Having only recently finished the violin concerto, I was much more relaxed with diving into what was, for me, more uncharted territory. The idea of writing a string quartet was intimidating, as I’m so infatuated by the string quartets of Shostakovich – but the presence of a piano gave me a bit more confidence, and I loved the freedom that the piano provides. The only thought I had going into it was the intriguing idea of thematic variations on the familiar children’s schoolyard taunt: ‘nya, nya, nya, nya nya …’ I wasn’t aware of anyone doing that before and thought it would be fun. It was. You can hear it in the second movement of the quartet, ‘Kinderspott.’ It was a great pleasure writing my first quartet for such wonderful musicians.

Initial Collaboration
In 1970, Glass was the resident composer for the avant-garde theater ensemble Mabou Mines, of which Joanne Akalaitis, his first wife was a strong presence as a director alongside Lee Brewer. Red Horse Animation, Mabou Mines’ initial collaborative piece, drew from visual and performance art, dance, and film. The music was produced live by the performers on a square wooden floor assembled from modules, each with a contact microphone attached underneath, and to a sound engineer.

Rhythms were tapped on the floor, nonsense syllables flowed easily in patterns that evoked quiet tribal songs. When the great wind rose on the Gobi Desert, company member David Warilow spun himself on his belly to make a howling modulated sound. This seamlessly integrated music was perhaps Philip Glass’s most self-effacing collaboration and one of his earliest.

Like his celebrated contemporaries Terry Riley and Steve Reich, Glass emerged outside of classical music’s mainstream. To hear their music performed live they had to rely on like-minded musicians, many of whom also spent their nights in the heady atmospheres of rock, jazz, and world music. Likewise, venues were more likely to be gallery spaces, lofts, clubs, or warehouses than concert halls. So it was completely natural that Glass would emerge in an environment shared with other art forms operating at the cutting edge.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his rigorous post-Juilliard study in Paris with the ultra-demanding Nadia Boulanger, mentor of very many important American composers, Glass had the self-confidence to pursue the most reductive experiments in compositions. Certainly the sculptors Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, as well as Judson school dancers had already claimed the convenient descriptor: minimalism.

Music in 12 Parts, composed in the span of 1971-74 and lasting nearly four hours, employs five musicians playing eleven instruments in such a way that continuous variation is almost imperceptible – so much so that when an audible change happens it is “as if one wall of a room has suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view,” wrote Andrew Porter in The New Yorker in 1978.

The purity of this experience reduced rhythm and melody to their barest essence and established a new kind of listening. Gone were the hierarchical landmarks of traditional form, even as it had evolved through postwar European experimentalism, through the chance operations of John Cage and the emergence of computer science as a compositional tool.

While it is easy to identify pulse and repetition as the features most fundamental to Glass’s music and their elegance as the source of his worldwide success, his capacity to collaborate with a multitude of artistic partners must also be factored into those qualities that led to his vast popularity today.

The most important of those collaborators, the one who would galvanize international attention in 1976 was the experimental theater director and visual artist Robert Wilson. Together, Glass and Wilson radically redefined opera in strictly American terms while touring Europe with Einstein on the Beach the same summer that the US celebrated its Bicentennial.

Pivot
As electrifying as this collaboration turned out to be, not much attention has been paid to how Glass got there from where he left off with Music in 12 parts from the austere culmination of a period that Glass accepts as “minimalist” to the harsh/sweet chromatic choruses and onslaught of amplified spoken text in Einstein on the Beach. The pivot was the four-part Another Look at Harmony.

The composer explains: “what I was looking for was a way of combining harmonic progression with the rhythmic structure I had been developing, to produce a new overall structure […] I’d taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put in – a process that would occupy me for several years …” Up to this point the harmony of Glass was a secondary result of note sequences driven by rhythmic design. Now harmonic motion and soaring cyclical melody would be supported by rhythm.

Parts I & II were absorbed directly into Einstein on the Beach, as its opening scenes. Part III became an independent work for the unlikely scoring of voice, clarinet & piano that still awaits a recording. Whether Part IV was composed before or during Einstein, it seems that this large work for chorus and organ was used to fulfill a 1977 commission by the Holland Festival – no doubt a welcome response to the barnstorming but economically tenuous European tour of Einstein and its eventual triumph at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Another Look at Harmony Part IV was first performed in the US at Carnegie hall in 1978, at a time when Glass was still making ends meet as a taxi driver, a furniture mover, and inexperienced plumber.

Lean and Dry Versus Ample and Wet
Presumably, the composer-supervised 1989 studio recording with the eight singers of Western Wind and the keyboardist/conductor Michael Riesman, simulates the scale and sonic character of the premiere, if not perhaps the tempos. The structure is made very lithe and transparent by nimble, seemingly inexhaustible voices isolated in a dry acoustic with the close miking and controlled reverberation typical of popular music production. Sung at a ferocious speed, the singers’ repeated micro-overlapping consonants can take on the character of maracas, while the neon-bright organ’s electric nasality maintains its ornate independence.

Questions must arise, however, about the viability of such a strenuous work in live performance – over 50 minutes of often very fast singing by only eight singers with no place to drop out for breath. After public performances in 2007, a traditional British amateur chorus, Choir of the 21st Century, undertook to record Another Look at Harmony Part IV with the internationally acclaimed pipe organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent and Howard Williams conducting. This shift toward traditional forces recognized the music’s roots in plainchant and its indebtedness to early choral traditions. Furthermore, the deeply-rooted role of organ music in the French tradition espoused by Boulanger also comes across strongly in Another Look. Regardless of the kind of organ used, some passages even suggest the toccata-like figurations of Charles-Marie Widor, the dominant organist in Paris at Saint-Sulpice from 1870-1933.

The inherent resonance of a church acoustic must be considered when setting tempos to allow the organ to speak and keep the sound of the chorus articulate. A well-prepared chorus can make hummingbird rests for the singers staggered in a such way as to leave the blend unaffected. Of course the organ, with all its registration options, is capable not only of many more colors and subtle gradations than an electric organ, but also it possesses an architectural physicality that is moving air in the room. Together the larger chorus and organ give the work corporate gravitas and nuanced light that is overwhelmingly beautiful.

Hydrogen Jukebox
While “Wichita Vortex Sutra” must correctly be credited as a Song #6 from the chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox, the whole enterprise began as a 1988 performance of the poem written and recited by Ginsburg to piano music composed and performed by Glass. The two encountered one another in the poetry section of a bookstore. Glass suggested they perform together, Ginsburg pulled a book of poetry from the shelf and opened it to “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” So the story goes.

The title of the chamber opera was taken from a line of his most famous poem, Howl: “...listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox...” Ginsberg explains, “it signifies a state of hypertrophic high-tech, a psychological state in which people are at the limit of their sensory input with civilization's military jukebox, a loud industrial roar, or a music that begins to shake the bones and penetrate the nervous system as a hydrogen bomb may do someday, reminder of apocalypse.” They discussed the pointless campaign of both presidential candidates George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis and set to work.

The 690-line poem was written February 14-15, 1966, in a VW van with his lover and travelling companion Peter Orlovsky. They met in 1954 and remained partnered until Ginsburg’s death at age 70 in 1997. The vortex is here a whirling, imploding axis of politically conservative white Christianity that denies sexuality and fosters hate. In Buddhism, a sutra (Sanskrit) is a sermon, a thread, connective cord, or rule. Ginsburg wanted to go to Wichita, Kansas, the literal center of the United States of America, to be inspired by its topography and residents, to stir up controversy, be angry, challenge authority, inspire love, bestow blessings, and protest the Vietnam War.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2020

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Johann Sebastian Bach
Bach’s Pastorale, in a new solo organ arrangement by James Walker, is used here to depict shepherds abiding by their flocks at night before any of the Christmas drama follows. This pastoral Sinfonia, originally scored for two flutes, two oboes d'amore, two oboes da caccia, strings, and continuo, opens Part II of the six-part oratorio than runs nearly three glorious hours, if performed complete. The Sinfonia’s scoring for winds is so well suited to an organ transcription that it is surprising none seemed to exist until this afternoon’s premiere. In the oratorio, Part II follows the birth of Jesus and depicts the adoration by humble denizens both human and animal in a world on the brink of a new era.

Hugo Distler
Hugo Distler died in WWII Berlin at age 34 in 1942, not because he was Jew or a soldier, but because he was a com-poser and organist constitutionally unable to live in Nazi Germany - so he committed suicide. Distler was a prolific composer of organ and choral music, as well as chamber works and a variety of concertos. His three early Op. 8 Organ Partitas (14 movements altogether) are not only neo-Baroque in style but also indebted to J.S. Bach. Op. 8 No.1 is a setting of “Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland” a medieval Lutheran hymn deeply associated with Bach’s frequent usage as thematic material. 

It is worth noting that the text was originally an Ambrosian chant in Latin from the Ninth Century. Ambrose was the patron saint of Milan. His Veni, redemptor gentium (Come, Savior of the Nations) was given a rather more stern German translation by Martin Luther as Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Come now, Saviour of the heathen). As Jacaranda’s Music Director, and First Presbyterian’s Organist and Director of Music explains:

A significant feature of the Reformation was congregational singing in the vernacular. What better way to bring people together in a frightening, violent time than to sing tunes they already knew, in their own language? To that end, Martin Luther translated the Latin verses of the chant into German, which were then set to a metrical version of the chant by a composer whose identity is uncertain. Throughout Bach’s career as a teacher, performer, and composer, he was a fervent admirer and student of Luther. Bach set the chant at least four times as an organ prelude, and turned Luther’s verses into a six movements cantata for chorus, soloists, and small orchestra.

Distler’s Partita starts with a stunning pedal solo that exuberantly blossoms into a tour de force for the entire organ.

Gary Bachlund
Gary Bachlund wrote Cantabile Semplice as a tribute to Marcia Hannah Farmer well after she died, but like James Walker, her passion lived on in his life. Walker illuminates her lasting impact on both men: 

Marcia was my mentor, in the fullest sense. I was eleven- years-old when she was appointed Choirmaster-Organist at [here]. She recognized my musical talents and helped me to cultivate them, first as a boy soprano and later as an organist. In 1969 and 1070, she hired a young singer (then-baritone) Gary Bachlund to play the part of King Melchior in Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, as she skillfully trained me to sing the title role. When my voice changed, I began studying organ with her. As her student for four years, she not only taught manual and pedal technique and the various elusive arts of organ-playing, but engendered a passionate love of the repertoire and of connection with the audience – whether in church or in concert. As her assistant, I learned every aspect of church music: the wide range of administrative tasks, service-playing, score preparation, conducting techniques, rehearsal planning, and – perhaps most importantly – building a community within the choirs. Over the years, as my career grew, I continued to seek her counsel and receive her wisdom, and I continue to live out of her mentorship to this day, with deep gratitude.

Charles Ives
Starting at age fourteen, Charles Ives was an enthusiastic organist. The instrument, with its multiple keyboards, pedals and stops to combine colors, lent itself to experimentation. At age twenty, Ives became a student at Yale in 1894, and organist at the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut. Ives spent four years (1898-1902) as organist and choirmaster in New Jersey and Manhattan churches. During these years he improvised on the organ and composed for it with some frequency. As biographer Jan Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life with Music; Norton, 1996) writes, Ives:

“…produced a number of relatively mild organ pieces most-ly at Central Presbyterian [of NY] for recitals and services – preludes, postludes, and the like – which formed a body of material he would draw upon for the rest of his creative life. Sometimes heavily recomposed, the organ pieces would become movements of symphonies, string quartets, and violin sonatas, become songs, or metamorphose into whatever genre Ives was pursuing…the lost 1901 organ work Memorial Slow March became the core of the Fourth Symphony’s mystical finale …” 

Sadly, just two solo organ pieces survive because a publisher to whom they were submitted rejected the scores but failed to return them, and the last church for which Ives worked apparently discarded volumes of original music and innovative arrangements of familiar tunes, such as this popular eighteenth-century carol. 

Adeste Fidelis in an Organ Prelude was composed in Ives’ junior year at Yale. The provenance of the carol is disputed, but consensus has been formed that John Francis Wade wrote it prior to the Jacobite uprising in 1745. A case has been made that he embedded secret meanings to have the carol double as a birth ode to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the soon-to-be exiled pretender to the throne of England. Both men retreated to France.

Ives takes the “Adeste Fidelis” melody, and inverts and harmonizes it with mildly dissonant chords creating an atmosphere in which the recognizable, but oddly slow and suspended tune hovers as though heard in winter light. With haunting pathos, this possibly secret call to the exiled faithful becomes increasingly familiar before mingling with Ives’ distant aurora borealis.

David Lang

On the occasion of its Noon to Midnight premiere October 1, 2016, the composer wrote this note:

The commissioners - the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Jacaranda - specifically asked me to write a piece that would include the spectacular and powerful organ in Walt Disney Hall. I am a little scared of concert organs - their sound can be overwhelming, and I started wondering if I could make the fear of being overwhelmed part of the piece. I thought if I had a very small and fragile voice singing along with the organ we would care about the power imbalance between the two. It might make us feel that the singer needed both support and protection from the organ, the way we all need support and protection from the world, and from life in general. Then I remembered the prayers that religious Jews say before going to bed. The prospective sleeper might say these prayers to calm himself or herself, to give thanks, and to ask for protection in the night, when the sleeper is most vulnerable and unguarded. For my text, I rewrote a portion of these prayers, trying to focus on just how fragile peacefulness really is, and on how much we need it. 

Bach
The Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) intertwines four identities – as a treatise on composition, as a collection of music for the church calendar, as a teaching tool for organ performance, and as a theological statement. In this collection of 45 choral preludes grouped by season Bach achieved the ideal of the form. In 1905 the organist pioneer and scientist Albert Schweitzer captured the work’s essence: “The method is the most simple imaginable and at the same time the most perfect. Simply by the precision and the characteristic quality of each line of the contrapuntal motive he expresses all that has to be said, and so makes clear the relation of the music to the text whose title it bears.” By contrast, Charles Gounod improvised the melody over Bach’s 1722 Prelude No. 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. The arrangement preserves a one measure spurious “correction” by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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Transcontinental Tones
Not long ago, Tanglewood and Piano Spheres offered rare performance of Three Quarter Tone Pieces for Two Pianos, a bewitching one-off composed by Charles Ives in mid-twenties America – just as the Moravian-born Alois Hába (1893-1973) was pioneering microtonality with a prolific vengeance in Europe. Within the quarter tone system, Hába wrote ten piano fantasies, five suites for piano, four string quartets, a solo cello fantasy, another for cello and piano, one for viola and piano, two unaccompanied choruses, and a quarter tone opera in ten scenes called Mother – all from 1920 to 1929!

First In Vienna then in Berlin, these accomplishments were fostered in a climate of avant-garde experimentalism with mentors Franz Schreker and Ferrucio Busoni – and in political circles that favored Communism. Hába began a lifelong friendship with fellow socialist Berthold Brecht’s collaborator Hans Eisler. Yet Nazism was on the rise and freethinkers were shadowed by distrust and threatening distain. Hába seized on a professorship in the Prague Conservatory offered when Josef Suk became its director in 1933. A former student, Suk was Antonin Dvorak’s son-in-law and artistic heir, as well as a former director of the conservatory.

Hába’s first important teacher at the conservatory was the neo-Romantic forerunner of Czech modernism Vítězslav (Victor) Novák (1870-1949), who encouraged the aspiring composer’s in-depth study of Debussy, Scriabin, Strauss, and Moravian folksong. In Vienna, Hába became a regular attendee at Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. He was deeply interested in the musical language of Erwartung, Schoenberg’s 1909 monodrama. He attended the 1924 premiere performance in Prague conducted by Alexander von Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s brother-in-law. With the publication of Hába’s New Harmony Textbook on microtonalism, and his inventions modifying the clarinet and trumpet, piano and harmonium, he established the Department of Quarter-tone and Sixth-tone Music at the Conservatory.

In 1934, Hába composed a second opera The New Earth in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. The daring libretto took on the subject of the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Soviet engineered “Terror-Famine” that starved three-to-ten million Ukrainians in 1932-33. According to many sources, Joseph Stalin instigated this still-controversial mass genocide to gain control of the region. The opera’s 1936 premiere was cancelled.

Moravian Prodigy
Gideon Klein was the youngest of four children born in the Moravian town of Přerov, where his father Heinrich brokered cattle. The family was steeped in traditional Jewish cultural practice but embraced a modern perspective. From age six, Gideon’s early musical interest and ability on the piano led to lessons locally and monthly in Prague, two-and-a-half hours away by rail, beginning at age eleven. By age fifteen he moved to Prague to live with his sister, seven years his senior, and study piano with the renowned Vilém Kurz. He also began composing. Among other much admired Czech piano virtuosi, Kurz would teach Pavel Štěpán, his grandson, who would become the authority on the piano music of Suk, and Rudolf Firkušný who would become the authority on the piano music of Leos Janáček. As it happens, Kurz also taught the Polish conductor Artur Rodziński, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1929 to 1933.

By age nineteen, Klein enrolled simultaneously in Kurz’s elite Master School of the Prague Conservatory, and to study philosophy at the distinguished Charles University in Prague founded in 1348. In his first semester he wrote an impressive treatise on voice leading in Mozart string quartets, and made sketches in quarter tones for Hába, who taught musicology for the university. He completed Kurz’s Master School course work in just one year.

Hába’s music was banned soon after the Nazi’s well-documented occupation of Prague March 15, 1939 and just as Klein began composing Divertimento, a wind octet. The first movement, a march, was finished June 25. The second movement, an allegretto, followed on July 15. As Klein’s prospects for the future darkened, he composed a third movement theme and variations based on the fleeting 14th song in Leos Janáček’s unique cycle, The Diary of One Who Vanished, for tenor and piano.

This so-called adagio was completed November 24, nine days after a demonstration arising from the burial of Jan Opletal, a student martyr, on November 17, 1939.That date is now celebrated as International Students Day, to mark the closing of Charles University, Prague Conservatory and all higher institutions in Czechoslovakia by the Nazis. As the one-year anniversary of the Nazi’s capture of Prague, Klein completed the Divertimento’s final movement March 8, 1940, in the relative safety of his home in Přerov.

Back In Prague, Klein became an active freelance pianist, quietly admired for his sophistication and dazzling technique. An ill-timed offer of a scholarship to study in Britain at London’s Royal Academy of Music was foreclosed by the Nuremburg race laws forbidding international travel, as well as public performances by Jews. Klein intrepidly adopted a Czech pseudonym – Karel Vránek – to make a sporadic living by playing piano in underground settings and homes.

The population of Prague was then over 850,000, of which some 50,000 were German-speaking Jews mostly living in the ancient central city “Old Town.” Prominent among them were Max Brod (1884-1968) and his late friend Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who met as law students at Charles University in 1902. Both wrote for the liberal-democrat German language newspaper Prager Tageblat (1876-1939). Brod was a minor composer, but a significant author, who became close to Janáček after 1916. Brod gave Janacek his first press, translated his past libretti into German, collaborated on his last several opera libretti, wrote a lengthy obituary that was widely reprinted, and finally authored the composer’s first biography. As literary executor of Kafka, Brod is singlehandedly responsible for countermanding Kafka’s wish for his writings to be destroyed after his early death from tuberculosis. When Brod fled Prague for Tel Aviv in 1939, he took with him a suitcase filled with Kafka’s unpublished writings.

These fellow travelers thrived in a city at the center of Europe with a turbulent history. For centuries, Prague was at the nexus of the old and new, abounding with gothic, baroque, art nouveau and modernist architecture, adorned with statuary, icons, saints and symbols, and laced together by its famous arching bridges across the Vltava (Moldau) River.

To operate as a freelance pianist in this charged milieu would have required an extensive repertoire. Perhaps Klein played opera transcriptions, and the usual light fare, but he is remembered for the more rigorously demanding classics by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and especially for contemporary music by Schoenberg and Janacek. Maybe he played Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Op.1, which can be heard as a decisive influence on his one and only sonata. The somewhat parallel story of the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman in Cracow, as dramatized in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist starring Adrian Brody, gives an accurately remembered feel for such fraught lives under comparable circumstances.

Gideon’s Suitcase
Klein and his sister Lisa (Eliška) entertained fellow artists in their apartment, a gathering place where he was arrested on December 4, 1941 in a massive sweep of Prague. Thousands were taken in trucks forty miles through the Small Fortress to the walled Large Fortress know collectively as Terezín. Lisa had been captured sometime after November 24th when deportations first began – exactly two years after Klein had completed the adagio third movement of his Divertimento. Although stories vary, it seems Lisa helped hide Gideon’s suitcase where many early scores including the Divertimento were packed. The locked suitcase would not be opened until 1990.

According to Milan Slavický's excellent biography: “One of Gideon Klein's friends found a suitcase that had remained unopened since the war—and in this suitcase were almost all Klein's compositions from the period preceding Terezín. Gideon Klein gave this suitcase to his friend shortly before joining the transport for Terezín.” This discovery brought the total of surviving works to twenty-five.

Theresienstadt
Ironically Terezín was built in 1780 to repel German invaders from the north during the Austria-Prussia rivalry that intermittently pitted Saxony against Bohemia. Emperor Franz Josef II dubbed the garrison town Theresienstadt in honor of his mother Maria Theresa. It was never used for that purpose, but in 1914 served as a prison holding Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year old Bosnian assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the act that catalyzed the First World War. Due to the crude prison conditions, Princip’s emaciated and gangrenous arm was amputated before he died of tuberculosis in 1918. The end of WWI saw the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of Czechoslovakia with Prague as its capital.

With the rise of the Third Reich, the Small Fortress was newly established as a Gestapo prison in 1940. At the order of Adolf Eichmann the walled Large Fortress was extensively modified as the ghetto and concentration camp by late 1941. The Eger (Ohře) River, which could be diverted to form a moat, separated the two fortresses. Lisa and Gideon were among the first waves of prisoners.

Initially, as it was in Prague, artistic and cultural expression was forbidden, dangerous and secretive, during most of 1941, but as it became apparent just how many extravagantly talented artists, academics and devoted amateurs made up the ghetto population, rules began to be somewhat relaxed as bored guards allowed limited expression. The camp’s Council of Jewish Elders was eventually engaged to give a semblance of governance and cohesion to the abundance of theater, drawing and graphic arts, and most significantly music. By 1942 officially sanctioned activities included, according to historian David Bloch:

musical events [that] quickly expanded into recitals, chamber, choral and orchestral concerts, operas and oratorios, performances of Jewish music, cabarets and light music played in the ghetto’s ‘coffee house’. As a courageous refusal to submit to the Nazi effort to utterly dehumanize Terezin’s populace – at its peak 60,000 souls crammed into a space intended for one-tenth that number – this spiritual resistance was also enhanced by the participation of dozens of well-known and a considerable number of critically-acclaimed composers. One of the youngest among them was the extraordinarily gifted and strikingly handsome Gideon Klein.

Klein was at the center of it all. He gave fifteen recitals, led rehearsals, composed and arranged songs and choral works, and was the pianist in the orchestra for the famous children’s opera Brundibar (Bumblebee) composed by Hans Krása and given many performances. His chamber music partners from Prague reassembled to play the Schubert Trio in Bb, Op.99, and piano quartets by Brahms and Dvořák. He helped prepare and accompanied Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride and multiple mountings of Verdi’s Requiem.

Victor Ullman, composer of the chamber opera Kaiser von Atlantis that has made it into the contemporary repertoire wrote of Klein, “[He] is without a doubt a very remarkable talent. His is the a cool mater of fact style of the new youth; one has to marvel at his strangely early stylistic maturity.” In addition to the Mozart Fantasy in C minor, and Janacek Sonata I.X.1905, he was known to play Schoenberg. It is perhaps more likely that he played the late Romanic and expressionistic Op. 11 Three Pieces, than the Op. 19 Six Pieces, but its nearly certain he studied these aphoristic and crystalline miniatures. Other works that appeared on his programs included Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110, Schumann’s Fantasy Op. 17, the Brahms Intermezzi, Suk’s Life and Dreams, and unspecified works by Scriabin. How much of this repertoire he played from memory is unknown, but it is likely to have been substantial.

Karel Ančerl, the greatest conductor to survive Terezin, let alone the holocaust, wrote a note for the first program devoted to Klein’s music: “Where there was a valuable cultural performance, there for sure Gideon Klein was the initiator. Towards the end, before the [final] transports to Auschwitz, Gideon started to conduct. He has all the gifts, including an accurate ear, for this art. It is difficult to say how and to what dimension Gideon Klein would have grown under normal circumstances. One can say with certainty that he could have been among the best, achieving the utmost perfection in the pianistic art, in composing and conducting.

Eventually, as worldwide attention and Red Cross scrutiny of the Nazi concentration camps forced the Third Reich’s upper echelon to devise a strategy for managing its image. Theresienstadt, with its 160-year history, a town square, church tower and picturesque ramparts, inhabited by a distilled cohort of intellectuals yielded a diabolical windfall – “Paradise Ghetto” a fraudulent propaganda performance stage managed by the Gestapo. Before the Red Cross delegation visited, the prisoners cleaned the stone paving of the streets with toothbrushes. Not enough costumes were brought so the “players” moved behind the scenes form location to location, swapping hats and aprons. The “players” sold goods to themselves with fake money that were their own confiscated possessions stored in a warehouse. Where the children’s barracks looked to crowded, bunks were pulled out and their occupants promptly shipped out to Auschwitz. Flowerpots were brought in and swiftly removed; fake garden were made, cultivated for the observers and destroyed in short order.

About twenty minutes has survived from a feature-length film documentary of this cynical charade intended to be shown publicly. The film showing these captured people in civil attire enjoying various normal activities instead of crowded together in striped pajamas was produced by the SS Office of the Regulation of the Jewish Question in Bavaria, not by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, as has been mistakenly reported. It was directed by the German Jewish actor Kurt Gerron and the Czech film-maker Karel Pečeny under tight SS supervision Finished on March 28, 1945, it was screened privately. The escalating end of the war rendered it useless, except for the most craven revisionist historians, and as clips in Nazi Newsreels. The film was shot mostly in the late summer and fall of 1944, likely just before Klein departed the camp. His sister and his girlfriend Irma Semtzka remained in Terezin until it was liberated May 8, 1945. They carried with them a portrait pained in oil by Charlotte Buresova, as well as all of Klein’s music manuscripts composed while there including the String Trio finished in late September.

Bitter Cold
October 1, 1944, Klein was shoved into a train headed to Auschwitz, but the camp was too full. The guards were not killing and disposing fast enough and refused the new shipment. The train was directed to the hastily modernized coal mine Fürstengrube, some twenty miles away. Slave labor including Soviet prisoners was intended to help increase coal production, but too many new arrivals were sick and untrained. The mine was failing to meet quotas by half. Michael Beckerman’s article on Klein for the Orel Foundations robust website shares a parting glimpse.

One of the last sightings of Klein is described in Milan Slavický's excellent biography of the composer. According to a prisoner named Hans Schimmeling, all new arrivals at Fürstengrube were subject to a doctor's examination. They were forced to wait naked in a room together, guarded by an SS officer. There happened to be a piano in the room, and the SS man asked if anyone played the piano. ‘The eyewitness was not a musician and did not recognize the piece, yet to this day he remembers Klein's playing and is convinced that had Klein played something to the guard's liking (a waltz, a ditty or something of that kind), he could have alleviated his fate and perhaps even saved his life.’ 

According to what has been pieced together of the last ten days of Klein’s life, Fürstengrube contained 1,283 inmates, mostly Jews as of January 17, 1945, despite the SS having burned the subcamp’s records before marching about 1,000 prisoners to Gleiwitz II on icy roads two days later. Anyone falling out in the freezing weather was killed. On the evening of January 20, these marchers joined prisoners from other subcamps in Gleiwitz. In the morning some 4,000 men were loaded into open railway cars. Again, Mauthausen, their nearby destination, was too full and the train was redirected to Dora seven days away. Five hundred fewer prisoners arrived at Dora. Back in Fürstengrube, January 27 in the late afternoon, a dozen SS officers killed most of those who remained, either by shooting them with automatic rifles or burning the sick in the barracks by throwing hand grenades inside. Such desperate measures were taken in the face of Soviet troops advancing on the camp.

Of the 140,000 individuals taken to Terezin between 1941 and 945, 118,000 died. More than 30,000 starved there and some 84,000 were murdered in Auschwitz, including more than 15,000 children of which an estimated 150 survived.

The Longview
These notes began with a detailed look at the personalities and cultural contexts that shaped Gideon Klein. As we observe his birthday 100 years ago today, it is important to honor his life as more than a footnote to a much larger history, or as just a ghettoized member of a generation of Jewish composers needlessly and viciously cut down before their prime. Klein was a huge repository of cultural memory, of artistic traditions entwined in a uniquely personal way with the power to see the future.

The Mozart Fantasy Klein championed was little known at that time. In it Mozart, who was especially beloved in Prague where he visited during his last year, peered into the void, sited an opera scene in miniature therein while surrounding it with daringly austere chromaticism. The Fantasy’s heft and profound sense of contemplating silence makes it unique in Mozart’s catalog. Klein’s recognized in Schoenberg the master’s vibrant relationship to centuries of tradition rooted in Bach. The pianist’s coolly analytical style would have suited Schoenberg’s aphoristic Six Little Pieces, transmitting the composer’s keen ability to distill psychological states through tiny tone pictures. Klein was known to have performed the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 from 1909 with their broodingly expressionistic late Romanticism at the brink of tonality.

Of course Klein’s national identity resonated deeply with Janáček his fellow countryman. The Moravian composer’s passionate drawing from his well of intuition, from his deep listening to the Czech language and the bursting sounds of nature around him, could not have suited Klein better. The timely political inspiration and outrage of justice imbedded in the date of Janáček’s Sonata I.X.1905 resonated deeply with Klein’s innate humanism and progressive political consciousness. It was a tribute to a young carpenter bayonetted during a demonstration supporting the university in Brno, Janacek’s hometown. It was finished in January 1906, but he was dissatisfied, burning a third movement funeral march, and throwing the remaining two movements into the Vltava after the premiere. With sudden remorse he watched as the Sonata "floated along on the water that day, like white swans.” In 1924, the pianist Ludmila Tučková found her copy of the long lost music and gave it a renewed premiere for Janacek’s seventieth birthday, with a new inscription "The white marble of the steps of the [university] in Brno. The ordinary laborer František Pavlík falls stained with blood. He came merely to champion higher learning and has been slain by cruel murderers.”

Klein’s only piano sonata was planned in four movements, but only four measures were sketched for the right hand. The not atypically abrupt scherzo ending was undoubtedly intended to be answered by a more thoughtful finale. On this program, the sudden ending leaves us in anticipation. The somber string quartet Fantasy and Fugue advances Klein’s use of chromaticism as well as his formal rigor. The first of two movements is in three sections that maintain relative objectivity, while the Largo is suffused with despair. The coda seems to evaporate in speechless unison harmonics.

The tone of Klein’s masterful final work – written after a year of robust artistic self-expression, and as the Red Cross delegation charade was playing out with prisoners pretending normal life for outsiders who might help – is all the more heartbreaking for its initial upbeat folk references. The middle movement is wary and weary, fearful, but not defeated. The busy final movement seems to imagine a better world.

Tonight’s program ends with what was left of a better world before Klein’s nightmare began. The stunningly brilliant Divertimento should now be heard and appreciated among a brace of wind ensemble works, each an established classic, that seemed magically to appear in a two-year window by Europe’s leading composers: Paul Hindemith’s quintet Kleine Kammermusic Op. 24 No.2 (1922), Igor Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet Op. 43 (1922), Stravinsky’s Octet (1923-24), and Arnold Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet Op. 26 (1923-24).

Klein would have known all of these works either through live performances by the notoriously accomplished wind players working in Prague, or by the published scores in the libraries to which he had access. As highly accomplished wind players, such as tonight’s Jacaranda Winds, take on Klein’s Divertimento and refine the score with markings that he was unable to include in his pencil manuscript – thereby creating a performance tradition – I am confident this work will be a worthy addendum to a cluster of 20th century wind music masterpieces.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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Warner Bros. produced the cautionary Wild Boys of the Road in 1933, but for an audience of kids, who only saw possibility for themselves, the film romanticized the risk. The Hobo Hero imagined returning to a boarding house from a life on the rails with a special sort of vagabond status. The 8-minute cartoon by Les Elton for Gag Films Inc. used crude racial and gender stereotypes to feature Piccolo Pete, the happy hobo. Pete played the railroad ties with his flute as though they were tone bars on a xylophone; he saved a puppy, milked a cow, and enchanted a sleepwalking blond with the music of his piccolo – leading her toward an uncertain destiny.

While such fantasies entertained audiences in darkened theaters, being a homeless vagrant was a crime punishable by hard labor or prison, as Partch would know all too well. Teenagers, who had the protection of older hobos known as “buzzards,” could escape detection and sleep in bush encampments, “jungles,” in exchange for scoring a cabbage for “mulligan stew,” or a can of coffee, by doing several hours of alley work in town, or in the rail yards. A hobo remembered being paid two tomatoes for a day’s hard work unloading coal from boxcars. “Maeves,” girls in the jungles, most likely became prostitutes working for fifty cents a trick. “Fruit tramps” from Oklahoma and Arkansas did the work we now grudgingly accept as organized migrant labor from Mexico. Moving through cycles from crop to crop to crop, including cutting hops for breweries and shaking nuts from trees, transients saved whatever they could to buy food for the winter. 

The dustbowl drought displaced four million Americans including many families driven by the promise of the west. By 1936, the daily influx of homeless migrants was so great the City of Los Angeles blockaded the California border for six weeks in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution. The scattering of younger and more resilient hobos served as a haphazard national grapevine. While cities filled up with desperate people intensely aware of income inequality, ready to riot or strike, hobos aimlessly crisscrossed the landscape. Between rare opportunities to share personal perspectives with isolated communities trying to compare their lot with other towns around the country, using any measure, the hobos experienced profound loneliness.

“Scrabble ass poor”  
How such a genius personality as Partch could spend some nine years hitchhiking and riding the rails is a circuitous story. In 1895, his parents fled the Boxer Rebellion in China as Presbyterian missionaries. They had spent two five-year stints in China before that virulent anti-foreign anti-Christian uprising landed them in Oakland California, where Partch was soon born. His mother was fluent in Mandarin and sang Chinese songs to the boy, who also learned songs from the Yaqui Indians near Tombstone, Arizona, where the family relocated. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration needed Mandarin speakers. His father was hired to enforce the government’s new Chinese Exclusion Act of 1902 dealing with an influx of Chinese laborers coming illegally from Mexico to work for the railroads. The boy also heard songs in Spanish while she taught him to read music. Partch’s rudimentary piano instruction advanced in Albuquerque, New Mexico where the family moved in 1913. Eventually Partch could play reed organ, cornet, violin and mandolin. Side jobs playing for silent movies soon followed. 

A turning point came in 1919 when Partch graduated from high school, his father died, and he got himself to Los Angeles to study piano. His mother soon followed, teaching at Westlake Military Academy, before she was killed in a 1920 trolley accident. Partch had enrolled in the USC School of Music with Death and the Desert, a lost composition from 1916, as evidence of his aptitude. After three months of study with predictably square faculty, a frustrated Partch left USC and likely hitchhiked to San Francisco where the libraries were deeper and more sophisticated. There he discovered a life-changing book in the 1877 translation about the physical properties of sound, Hermann von Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone, considered the foundational source of research on acoustics. The world of the equal temperament was now doomed in Partch’s eyes.

Idols and Models
As an usher for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in their original hall near Pershing Square, Partch’s first notable romance developed with Jose Ramón Gil Samaniego (1899-1968), a Mexican American actor, who would become Ramon Novarro. His fellow usher was made internationally famous starring in Ben-Hur, the top grossing 1925 MGM adaptation of the best-selling novel. With Samaniego’s first featured role, in Scaramouche (1923), the handsome actor adopted a screen persona and dropped Partch. That year, the composer would finally reject the standard 12-tone notation system and set out to substantially invent microtonality. After trial and error devising fingerings for the violin and viola, Partch created his first instrument with a luthier in New Orleans grafting the fingerboard of a cello to the body of a viola – the Adapted Viola was born in 1930. How Partch came to be in New Orleans – was it the French-styled nightclubs called “niteries,” or the Tango belt dives, and secret speakeasies, or its European nexus of port town sailors – is unknown, but one thing is clear: he was paid to proofread the Times Picayune newspaper. 

Drawing from his childhood affinity with Chinese poetry, Partch’s first surviving work, Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po (1933), employed a soprano intoning the text accompanied by his Adapted Viola. A San Francisco performance for Henry Cowell (1897-1965) and his New Music Society of California soon led to a privately sponsored trip to New York where he gained the attention of new-music trailblazers: Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and Walter Piston among others. With such advocates and references it is difficult to comprehend why Guggenheim declined his fellowship requests that year, and again in 1934. A $1500 grant-in-aid from the Carnegie Corporation proved a worthwhile investment, as Partch travelled to London, where he made crucial explorations that would set the wheels in motion for the rest of his life. He invented a chromatic pump organ with his unique 43-note scale based on the science of Helmholtz and the aesthetics of ancient Greek music. He travelled to Italy and Malta.

At the London home of Kathleen Schlesinger, a pioneering musicologist, Partch absorbed as much music research as possible in conversation.He made a detailed sketch of Schlesinger’sancient Greek Kithara, a replicashe created based on a vase painting in the vastly comprehensive British Museum. A trip to Dublin introduced Partch to William Butler Yeats at the dawn of his famously self-described second puberty. Concerned by his declining sexuality and general weakness, Yeats underwent an operation in the spring of 1934, one that Sigmund Freud had endured in 1923 – the year that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Yeats. The operation was intended to stimulate production of testosterone. Whether the effect was actual or placebo, in last five years Yates wrote and edited prolifically and conducted multiple affairs including a dalliance with the sexually aggressive novelist Ethyl Mannin. In a 1935 letter, he wrote:"I find my present weakness made worse by the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination. If I write poetry it will be unlike anything I have done.” 

Partch was enthralled by Yeats’s style of intoning text, especially hearing his translation of King Oedipus by Sophocles. Partch came armed with a sketch of how the play would become his libretto. This notion of setting Yates’s play to music persisted unfulfilled throughout Partch’s life (frustrated by lawyers, he would resort to using his own translations in 1952 and 1967). Yeats would succumb to angina In the dead of winter. Within days, the 1939 January edition of Atlantic Monthly published his last three poems including the line;“Now that my ladder's gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

The Wayward
The bitterness of this reconciliation of ambition, eros, and what conditions do allow within a lifetime, echoed the dashed emotional state of Partch’s psyche upon his return to the U.S., “scrabble ass poor,” at the height of the depression. For the first eight months as a hobo he wrote journals that later were collected as Bitter Music. This excerpt expresses the intensity of his thoughts: “I have thrown the petty respectable life with all is comforts behind me after the effort to broaden and beautify it has destituted me and drained my stamina. All right – let me throw it behind without guile, without hoping either for a return to it or for a constant absence. After all, it did not request my efforts. The normal live body hopes for the respect and love of others, and enough of the world to bestow largesse. He hopes and he abandons hope by turn. In the first there is fire to live, but in the second there is greater peace.” 

Barstow
The wonderfully accessible Barstow, which opens Partch’s narrative compendium, The Wayward, was polished and revised regularly from 1941 until the overarching work was finally put together as a five-movement musical narrative in 1968. Partch had a canny understanding of his unique vantage to capture ephemera from a world that would likely pass away. The players intone eight hitchhikers’ inscriptions found in Barstow, a hitchhiking cul-de-sac near the Mojave Desert, as Partch’s mordant alternative challenges the nationalist pieties issuing from the likes of Norman Rockwell and his musical equivalents.

San Francisco
In his review of Partch's April 22, 1944 New York Carnegie Chamber Hall concert, fellow Californian Lou Harrison singled out for praise: “San Francisco (setting of the cries of two newsboys) was the best and shortest piece. Around these cries Mr. Partch has woven a spell of about the foggiest and dampest music I have ever heard. I got homesick.” Partch remembers two enterprising youngsters in the pre-depression twenties hawking competing newspapers – the San Francisco Chronicleand William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner– well into the night.

The Letter
By reading from an actual letter received in October of 1935, the voice of The Waywardbecomes personal. This directness seemed to cause a good deal of ambivalence at a time when Partch still cared about the career implications of being transient and taboos around his sexuality. S. Andrew Granade (Harry Partch, Hobo Composer, 2014, University of Rochester Press) offers an informative and sensitive account of The Letter:

“Partch first met Pablo on June 14 of that year at the Federal Shelter in Stockton, CA, before both were shipped to Harrington Ranch. Partch was new to the federal camp system; Pablo was an old hand. They struck up a friendship, and Pablo indoctrinated the composer into transient life circa 1935. The two men shared many intimate discussions before Pablo left the camp on July 5 in advance of being kicked out for drunkenness. The October correspondence from Pablo is the only one Partch saved from this brief but passionate friendship, and while the news it recounts is fairly mundane, the feelings undulating beneath the words are not. It is significant that we have the original letter because Partch’s feelings toward Pablo are evident: he carefully recorded the details of their friendship in Bitter Music, where Pablo is one of just two men mentioned by name. As a result, The Letter serves as a musical portrait of a dear friend and the only piece of music Partch composed that sprang directly from the period chronicled in the journal.”

U.S. Highball
Running about 25 minutes, this chronicle of the rails and the roads is the most substantial work of the set, and one Partch was quite proud of. He describes the intoning voices as subjective (the thoughts of the protagonist, musings on place names, etc.), and objective voices, as a kind of chorus (fragments of conversation, signs, and boxcar graffiti without the ubiquitous obscenities). The nine instrumentalists also serve as the voices. 

In this context “highball” is not the familiar cocktail, although the mixed drink originated in railroad dining cars. Only when the boiler pressure gauge reached a consistent “highball” of stability could “highballing” attendants serve the heavy-bottomed tumblers of scotch and soda. In contrast, Hobos referred to the balls used to signal stopping, slowing, caution, and proceeding safely. If the ball on an arm was high, according to Partch, hobos would use it as a verb – “Let’er highball, engineer!” meaning “Let's get going.” In that regard, hobos always celebrated leaving a place, but never celebrated arriving, as all manner of pitfalls would yet be faced.

Partch also made this same trip from San Francisco to Chicago in one of his many moves. A year seemed to be his time limit in any one place, once he left the hobo life behind. Partch defined rugged individualism as being a maverick outsider, not the type to settle down, resistant to authority and rejecting conformity. Yet, for a while in Chicago his proofreading skills sustained him among the big newspapers, when he was not with grain threshers. 

This journey is in three parts that Partch whimsically called hobo allegro form – an overture and a “long and jerky passage by drags (slow freights) to Little America, Wyoming.” The middle adagio is taken up with dishwashing drudgery to earn some food. The third movement allegro’s “obstinately compulsive exhilaration of getting to Chicago” eventually deflates as the protagonist again faces the existential void – what next?

Ulysses at the Edge
While The Wayward existed for many years as four sections, Partch made further revisions in 1968 and added Ulysses at the Edge as something of an apotheosis. This setting recognizes Ulysses as the first and ultimate wayward wanderer. Uncharacteristically, the score calls for saxophone and trumpet, intended to be played by jazz greats Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, who never performed it. Oedipus had already used clarinets and a double bass among Partch’s ensemble of unique instruments. Given his deepening interest in setting Greek mythology, Ulysses at the Edge links the hobo-themed works to a universal narrative.

Dark Brother
The Flanders family of Chappaqua, New York, befriended Partch and offered him their attic in September of 1942. He needed a place to stay while awaiting his draft status. But not him alone! His Kithara and Chromatic Organ had to depart California, while the Chromelodeon was homeless in Chicago. Four months earlier, in the Windy City, he was classified an “ordinary seaman” by the government, qualified to handle coal. Status extensions and delays were done when a psychological examination disqualified Partch from service near the end of November. 

Donald Flanders was a close friend of Edward Aswell, the last editor to work with the novelist and playwright Thomas Wolfe, who had died in 1938 from complications of pneumonia at age 37. It follows that Partch would begin setting the final paragraphs of Wolfe’s undated essay God’s Lonely Man. Often quoted as the work’s essence, is this passage from the essay: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.” 

His productive time in the attic was spent writing a successful Guggenheim proposal in close proximity with his instruments, especially the Chromelodeon that was central to the conception of Dark Brother. According to Bob Gilmore (Harry Partch: A Biography, 1998, Yale University), “the music is a prolonged passage of what Partch termed “tonality flux:” a non-directional sequence of chords, each of which resolves onto the next by narrow, microtonal intervals.” The title implies the duality that recurs in an especially heightened way in Castor & Pollux”

Castor and Pollux
Perhaps Partch’s standalone masterpiece, certainly his most popular and immediately recognizable work, Castor and Pollux was composed as the first of three Plectra and Percussion Dances. The instrumental dance was taken on as a compositional relief from the draining tragedy of Oedipus. The story of Castor and Pollux, according to Partch, “replete with good luck…begins with one of the most delightful seductions in Greek Mythology, that of beautiful Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan…and ends with the birth of twins, presumably hatched from eggs. And the good luck continues – the twins ascend to the heavens to become the auguries of favorable voyages by ancient mariners.”

The work is in two continuous parts. Within each half (234 beats), three pairs of instruments introduce, one after another, three dithyrambic duos that then miraculously combine as sextets. While each of the six duos has a distinct character, the two combining sextets generate a euphoric design underpinned by a continuous quarter-note value that spawn a welter of sub-rhythms – clearly audible, yet deliciously confounding.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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Jehan Alain
Alain grew up in a family of organists. After marriage in 1935, he took two major positions – Church of Saint-Nicolas de Maisons-Lafitte, and thesynagogue at Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth. A fresh progressive sensibility was epitomized by his most famous pieceLitanies. Some hear a harbinger of minimalism in its fiendish but euphoric repetition. Notably, Philip Glass studied with Nadia Boulanger, who studied organ with Dupré. Significant other organ works by Alain include Les Jardin Suspendu (1934, Hanging Gardens) and Trois Danses(1937) among 120 works in Alain’s strikingly consistent catalog. Sadly, the dazzling promise of his artistic maturity would not arrive.

 Alain’s other identity was as a soldier. His 1934-35 enlistment ended with a severe case of pneumonia. In late 1939, his patriotism and fascination with gears, gadgets and motorcycles compelled him to enlist in the Eighth Motorized Armored Division as a mobile dispatcher. Near Saumur, the 10th century wine country town, Alain hazarded reconnaissance. Matthew Guerrieri describes in the Boston Globe what followed:

Alain chanced upon a detachment of German forces besieging the town. He killed 16 enemy soldiers before being killed himself. Alain’s death came three days after Marshal Philippe Pétain had called on French troops to stop fighting. Colonel Daniel Michon, head of Saumur’s French army’s cavalry academy, instead insisted that the school defend the town, as a matter of honor. Some 780 students and teachers, joined by another thousand or so soldiers in the area (many of them, like Alain, having made their way back after…Dunkirk), held off more than 10,000 German troops for three days before capitulating.

Maurice Duruflé
Vierne, nearly blind from congenital cataracts, appointed his 25-year old student Maurice Duruflé in 1927 to be his assistant at Notre-Dame. The younger man rose to the titular position at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, but the two remained so close that it was Duruflé who lifted Vierne’s slumped body from the keyboard when he died improvising the finale of his 1750th organ recital. Duruflé had a tireless capacity for score reading, pedagogy, technical explication of the instrument, composing, and improvisation. His two most notable achievements as performer and composer were the 1939 premiere of the Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings by Francis Poulenc, and his often-performed Requiem for chorus and orchestra of 1941. Duruflé suffered from perfectionism, which limited his output. At age 10, he was enrolled in the Rouen Cathedral boarding school for choristers.An article for the San Francisco Choral Society by Pilar Montero and Arthur Colman, explains why his adult personality was inward, uncertain and excessively self-critical: 

“Duruflé described his early schooling experience, which lasted into his adolescence, as one of imprisonment. He went from a warmly supportive home into the rigorous discipline of the choir school. The boys’ daily activities — lasting 14 to 18 hours — were prayer, meals in silence, supervised recreation, piano and solfège classes, choral rehearsals for services, singing at services, nonmusical classes, and more choral rehearsals.” 

These writers’ research further revealed that, “All the first-year students were allowed to do was stand at attention in perfect silence for hours at a time, turning the pages of the music scores for the older singing students.” Duruflé’s marriage to Marie-Madeleine brought some joy and balance to his latter life and career, especially after a debilitating car accident forced him to retire in a wheelchair – from which he continued to teach. 

Duruflé’s Prelude from Suite No. 5 is haunting and slightly macabre music with a gothic sensibility traceable to Duruflé’s deep immersion in Gregorian chant, about which he wrote extensively. This three-part suite suffered from his perfectionism when the composer disowned its tremendously fast and exciting Toccata because the “material was weak.”

Marcel Dupré
While Duruflé and Dupré share so many biographical elements it is easy to confuse them – DM initials, born to family of organists, child prodigies, students of Guilmant, writers of essays and treatises, improvisers par excellence, and both living to age 84 – Dupre was asoutgoing as Duruflé was withdrawn. Dupre gave in excess of 2000 solo concerts worldwide. Most astonishing among them were the complete works of Bach – performed from memory twice in two 10-concert sequences – 1920 and 1921. The Wannamaker Department Store sponsored Dupré’s extensive U.S. tour making him internationally famous. 

Dupré’s father was a close friend of Cavaillé-Coll and beneficiary of an organ built especially for his home when the boy was just fourteen. On the verge of WWI, he won the Prix de Rome with a cantata Psyché. His popular showpiece Cortege and Litanies was composed soon after the Bach marathons raised his profile. Its simple cortege gathers momentum with the litanies until the full weight of the instrument is brought to bear with magnificent blasts.

Leo Sowerby
The American Leo Sowerby composed Pageantin 1931. Like Dupré, Sowerby won the Prix de Rome in his late twenties. While in Rome Fernando Germani, a brilliant young organist at Basilica St. Peter’s of the Vatican, impressed the Michigander. Sowerby became organist-choirmaster at Chicago’sSt. James’s Episcopal Churchin 1927. Several years later the Vatican commissioned him to compose a pedal extravaganza for their fleet-footed organist. Unfazed after sight-reading the score, Germani commented, “Now write me something really difficult.” Sowerby was a more varied composer than his French contemporaries – with five orchestral symphonies and many concertos among his 500 works; yet like them Sowerby is remembered for his organ music.

Charles Ives
Perhaps the most memorable of 19th-century American organ music came from the youthful pen of Charles Ives. The New Englander held several posts in the organ loft since age eleven. His earliest music to survive a custodial sweep, after his departure from Central Presbyterian Church of New York, is his ambitious Variations on America (My County Tis of Thee), composed at age sixteen. William Schuman’s orchestration of the work is better known, but lacks Ives’s freshness, sincerity, wit, and plucky irreverence. 

Alan Hovhaness
Alan Hovhaness was born a New Englander like Ives. His list of works compares in size to Sowerby’s, but includes 78 symphonies! Hovhaness studied at the New England Conservatory, then travelled to Finland where he established a lifelong friendship with Jean Sibelius. The Prayer to Saint Gregorycomes from his so-called Armenian period beginning in 1940 when he was appointed organist at St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts. It is likely that the piece was written for church performance as a tribute to Gregory The Illustrator (257-331), the Patron Saint of Armenia. With the support from a New York Armenian church, Hovhaness composed his only surviving opera in 1946, Etchmiadzin –the name of the oldest standing Christian church in the world – based on the Saint’s life story. The Prayer to Saint Gregoryis credited as originating in the opera as an interlude for trumpet and string orchestra. But, the eloquent simplicity of the two instruments in communion is unforgettable. The Prayer’s spirit of faith strongly reasons for an origin story in the church.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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With his assistant in charge, Bach set out on foot to walk the whole distance. The scope of what Bach could learn from Buxtehude once in Lübeck’s lavish music scene rewarded the journey. Only after four months of devoted study, slavishly copying of Buxtehude, and performing solo and with orchestras, did Bach return to Arnstadt! He rudely dismissed the unhappy church authorities as parochial and accused them of stifling his development. Upon hearing the result of this experience, members of the local city council scolded the church saying, “If Bach continues to play in this way, the organ will be ruined in two years, or most of the congregation will be deaf!” Buxtehude died the following year, and Bach moved on to a new appointment.

In Forkel’s 1802 biography (Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work)– the first after a lengthy obituary – it was said the young Bach was prone “to run or leap up and down the instrument, to take both hands as full as all the five fingers will allow, and to proceed in this wild manner till they by chance find a resting place.”The work’s durability is due to its ever-modern and secular sensibility that cannot easily be explained.The oft-perceived lightning flashes and tempests of the opening toccata that quickly shift to feverish obsession in the fugue, have led to many unfortunate cultural appropriations in the 20th century. Silent film accompaniments and 3-D horror/science fiction fantasies ― and, of course, Disney’s Fantasiain an impossibly weighty orchestration by Stokowski ― this remarkable work has survived brutal treatment in its detachment from the churches of its origin. 

Messiaen - Apparition of the Eternal Church
Olivier Messiaen’s feelings toward Bach were likely more in line with Goethe’s famous response to hearing Bach play, “It is as though eternal harmony were converging with itself, as may have happened in God’s bosom before he created the world.” 

France declared war on Germany in September 1939 shortly after Messiaen donned the infantry uniform of a French Pioneer – however singularly unsuited he was for that role. His father, an esteemed translator of Shakespeare, and his recently deceased mother, a famous poet, had raised a musical prodigy. And as it happens, this rather humble 30-year old French Pioneer had already demonstrated he was poised to be a pioneer at the forefront of French music.

By the time the soldiers began their march north across the French countryside Messiaen had already enjoyed frequent public performances in Paris of his piano music, orchestral tone poems, song cycles and organ works. All declared a distinctly original voice. He was a genial and unconventional thinker of formidable intellect that betrayed a childlike fascination with color and unshakeable Christian faith. Especially significant was Apparition de Église Eternelle,a short organ work composed at age 26 coinciding with his appointment in 1932 as organist to Église de la Sainte-Trinité, where Messiaen would remain for over fifty years. Apparitiontakes the simplest imaginable form – an enormous implacable and luminously textured crescendo that summons generations upon generations of vibrating souls toward a blinding C-major white light and then solemnly recedes.

Before his capture by the Germans as a POW, Messiaen wrote a letter in the winter of 1940 describing life to readers of L’Orgue, a journal for organists and organ fanciers: 

After digging holes or sawing up trees, carrying heavy loads or pushing trucks, it’s hard to think about music... However, every night, during the hours that are meant to be for sleeping, I resolved to read a few pages of the pocket scores that are arranged with loving care at the bottom of my backpack. 

Whenever I have been able to find a light, I have kept my resolution, and I have read them closely, in a corner, analyzing forms, harmonies, and timbres in symphonies by Beethoven, MaMère L’Oye by Ravel, LesNoces by Stravinsky… Finally, I was allowed ― and even asked ― to play the organ on November 11th, on Christmas Day and on January 1st. The same privilege has been granted to me on some Sundays. 

Here, I have found abandoned instruments, riddled with ciphers. However, among all of them, two at least were very good. One, a Cavaillé-Coll, is equipped with lovely 8-foot foundation stops and powerful reeds. I played a few pieces on it by heart (the memory is a tenacious thing!): the sixth Trio Sonataby Bach, the Toccata and Fugue in D min-orby the same, two Noëlsby Daquin and Widor’s Toccata. While out on marches, trudging over bridges covered with sacks, or during the hours on watch when the only company is an enormous red moon and my feet feel as if they’re burning with cold in the deep snow, I often find myself singing certain melodies, certain favorite rhythms, and going over in my head the most important parts of my latest organ work, interrupted by the war… 

The other organ was modern, with lots of gentle mixtures. I treated myself to numerous improvisations, in an avant-garde style, with one solo for the 16-foot Bourdon and the Tierce on a harmonic scheme that would have frightened Schoenberg himself! Here’s a curious thing: unlike the pious Parisian ladies, the soldiers were not shocked by these surprising sonorities!

 The wartime setting of Messiaen’s impromptu performances sharpened all available to Bach’s sublime and apocalyptic architecture, as well as the spritely and glittering abstract style of Trio Sonata No. 6 that he played from memory. Much shorter but in a similar style is Bach’s G-major Trio Super Herr Jesus Christ, dich zu uns wendbased on a hymn tune of Bach that might have preoccupied Messiaen late at night.

A melody that certainly obsessed Messiaen his entire composing life was the Gregorian chant Alleluia of the Feast of the Dedication. While writers often observe Messiaen’s abiding interest in plainchant, only one chant occurs time and time again – tucked away in complex textures, sped up, inverted, harmonized or greatly elongated.

With Verset pour la Fete de las Dédicace, a competition piece composed in 1960, the composer modifies the chant to his third mode of limited transposition answered by repeatedcalls from the migratory song thrush that winters in France and southern Europe, as only Messiaen could transcribe from nature.

Ives – Processional: “Let There be Light”
Charles Ives spent four years (1898-1902) as organist and choirmaster in New Jersey and Manhattan churches. He brought to these jobs music composed in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, and from his years at Yale. As biographer Jan Swafford (Charles Ives: A Life with Music; Norton, 1996) describes, Ives:

“…produced a number of relatively mild organ pieces mostly at Central Presbyterian for recitals and services – preludes, postludes, and the like – which formed a body of material he would draw upon for the rest of his creative life. Sometimes heavily recomposed, the organ pieces would become movements of symphonies, string quartets, and violin sonatas, become songs, or metamorphose into whatever genre Ives was pursuing … the lost 1901 organ work Memorial Slow March became the core of the Fourth Symphony’s mystical finale …” 

While Swafford describes Ives’s organ music as “relatively mild,” relative must be the operative word as all but three of his organ works were “lost” by the church custodian – and the three survivors sound anything but turn-of-the century mild. Tonight’s program offers Processional: Let There Be Light(1901) Ives’s most elaborate work with chorus and strings joining the organ. (NOTE: Variations on America, and Adeste Fidelis in a Prelude, the other survivors, will be heard on the ORGANIC series 10/20 and 12/15 respectively.)

This rarely performed processional is philosophical work of extraordinary beauty in the Emersonian manner. For Ives the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson communicated the “Greater human message of destiny… the wider search for the unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of innate goodness …” Let there be Lightis free of Ives’ penchant for quoting hymns, shanties, rags, anthems and popular songs of the period, and is a shining examples of his writing in a restrained and rather pure manner. 

It is astonishing that Let There Be Light(1901), given its daring construction, was performed at all by the Choir of the Central Presbyterian Church, New York, to which it is dedicated. This very compact work is made in two parts. The second part uses the same musical material in the first part but performed exactly twice as fast. Multiple versions allow minimal to relatively lavish forces. In tonight’s version, the organ holds the lowest C available reinforced by six low strings. The chorus intones the simple text – “This is the day of Light. Let there be Light. Light, let there be Light. Today” – with a variety of ringing dissonances that inevitably resolve by firmly landing on C. Meanwhile the violins maintain four independent lines, sometimes in octaves, that also move to C. The effect of the three twining strands produces a euphoric sense of growing tension that resolves as a powerful affirmation. 

Pärt – Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
In a landmark 1989 demonstration against Soviet Cold War repression, Estonians formed a human chain of more than two million citizens joining hands across Lithuania and Latvia. Their “Singing Revolution” also included as many as 300,000 people gathered in Estonia’s capital Tallinn to sing national songs forbidden by the central government. When he joined this movement, Arvo Pärt had already gained unexpected fame through the German record company ECM in 1984. The renowned jazz label debuted its New Series with his music to unprecedented success. 

Spellbound, Manfred Eicher has stopped his car on the side of the road to listen to the 1977 air check recording of Tabula Rasamade in Vienna. His elegant new ECM recording revealed to the West an utterly new voice from behind the “Iron Curtain,” and began a prolific relationship with Pärt that continues today. The idea of the New Series took as its motto the Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence. On the album was the eponymous Tabula Rasa, as well as Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

Pärt was born September 11, 1935 in the small medieval town of Paide near the center of Estonia, north of Latvia, separated from Finland by the Gulf of Finland, and connected to Russia by the largest trans-boundary lake in Europe — over 300 miles long. Lake Peipus was the site of the famous April 5, 1242 “Battle on the Ice” depicted in the film Alexander Nevskyscored by Prokofiev. The battle music is the most memorable of the dramatic cantata that Prokofiev later fashioned from the score. Of course the Russians were victorious and centuries later forcibly annexed Estonia into the Soviet Union. The invasion and occupation began two years after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the year Francis Poulenc’s organ concerto was publicly premiered.

The Soviet Cloud
Pärt’s parents separated when he was three. His mother moved to Rakvere, midway between the capital Tallinn and St. Petersburg. She soon married her landlord’s brother who possessed a piano. When the middle register of the piano became damaged the boy began a life of experimenting with sounds at the extremes of the keyboard. Pärt’s teacher Heino Eller was as important to Estonia as Sibelius was to Finland. Eller was enamored with Palestrina and taught orchestration using Rimsky-Korsakov’s peerless book. After an education interrupted by service in the army, Pärtwas employed as an engineer in the Estonian Radio for a decade ending in 1968. During that time his compositions inspired both praise and condemnation. Pärtpioneered serialism in Estonia with a 1959 orchestra piece aggressively titled Nekrolog and dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust! The abstract purity of serialism attracted him, but the style’s rigorous purity gave way to chunks of Bach and Tchaikovsky dropping into its agitated texture. By a fluke the most ambitious work of this style, Credowas premiered to great effect and guaranteed official disapproval. 

Little Bells
The musicologist Paul Griffiths describes Pärt’s music as “bright pessimism,” others hear his reductive neo-medieval structures as “Holy” minimalism. Pärt describes his music as two constantly intertwining strands of sin and forgiveness. His compositional style underwent great changes — neoclassicism to serialism, and then collage technique — before arriving at what he calls “tintinnabulation” in 1976 with the composition of the piano miniature Für Alina. The piece was named for the daughter of close friends. Alina was separated by the Iron Curtain from her mother who had to remain in the Soviet Union while she stayed in England. Pärt explains: 

“Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers —in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises —and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this… The three notes of a triad are like bells.”

Relocation
Pärt, his Jewish wife, and two children secured exit visas under duress after the Soviet curtailment of his travel and activity as a composer. In effect they were deported in January 1980 with a cover story that would smear them as disloyal opportunists. Their passports revealed that they were part a large deportation to Israel. With only nine pieces of luggage, they arrived in the Vienna train station, where an unexpected woman singled them out. The publisher Universal Edition had created a ruse that landed them in a special house for musicians and jobs with Universal to justify expedited Austrian citizenship. After nearly two years the family moved to Berlin where his career would flourish following his partnership with ECM. Later, the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union allowed the composer and his four children access to Estonia. 

Memories
Pari Intervallo (1976) is hushed with a ravishing sense of memory. The work comes from Pärt’s most fertile period of discovery and innovation. Initially written as a wind quartet in memory of his stepfather, the 1980 organ version best suits the design of Pari Intervallo,as it benefits from the instrument’s almost infinite ability to make gradations of color “between intervals.” In a contemporary statement, Pärt, who was working on an elegiac orchestra piece, explains how it came to be titled Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten:

“In the past years, we have had many losses in the world of music to mourn.  Why did the date of Benjamin Britten’s death – 4 December 1976 – touch such a chord in me?  During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss.  Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in me.  I had just discovered Britten for myself.  Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music – I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut. And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.”

Poulenc – Concerto for Organ, Timpani & Strings
Francis Poulenc was an obsessive bridge player – social to the core. In his days as a young composer, sheaves of melodies – art songs filled with nuanced word play, and erotic double meanings sometimes ironic – materialized with polished craftsmanship to enchant a vibrant Parisian party scene. After some missteps, the eighteen-year-old aligned with the eccentric but visionary composer Eric Satie, who remained a model. Poulenc dedicated to Satie his first work performed in public, December 11, 1917.

Fashion Forward?
The teenager chose to ape prevailing the fashion for African arts in Paris, known today mostly for the inspiration ancient Iberian masks provided Picasso. In 1916, his notorious painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignonwas finally seen in public after nine years. 

The African masks were genuine, having been stolen from the Louvre! However, the often-specious fashion for the “primitive” manifested in Poulenc’s Rhapsodie Nègre, a chamber work for flute, clarinet, string quartet and piano, with an interlude sung by a baritone. It is ac-companied by piano until the singer’s return in the final. The text, which purported to be in the language of Liberia, is an embarrassing mélange of nonsense syllables and fragments of local Parisian slang passed off as Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou!By then Poulenc was conscripted into the French army. He described the first performance: “At the last minute the singer threw in the towel, saying it was too stupid and that he didn't want to be taken for a fool. Quite unexpectedly, masked by a big music stand, I had to sing that interlude myself. Since I was already in uniform, you can imagine the unusual effect produced by a soldier bawling out songs in pseudo-Malagasy!”

Lest this seemingly flippant work be deemed racist by our contemporary standards, it must be pointed out that the American poet Vachel Lindsey, an avowed anti-racist, published his onomatopoetic “singing poem” The Congo in 1914 to great if questionable success. Lindsey had extensive correspondence about declamation with the great Irish poet W.E. Yates, who in turn mentored the American Maverick composer Harry Partch in 1935 about reviving the oral tradition of poetry from ancient Greece. It is also worth pointing out that William Grant Still (1895-1978), the dean of African American classical music, is very likely to have heard Poulenc’s Rhapsodie Nègreby the time he composed his Ennangain 1958. The harp sextet’s wonderfully evocative opening movement far surpasses Poulenc’s Prelude, but an exotic French sensibility is detected.

After the war, a hastily put together concert of plucky young composers emerged in the press as Les Six. For a traumatized post-war populace hungry for surface sensation, Poulenc fashioned chamber music often featuring woodwinds. His anti-serious, anti-Wagnerian friends in the thrall of the multi-talented Jean Cocteau provided a strong group identity that would obscure Poulenc’s singularity well into the 1930s. For all that is made of Stravinsky’s path-breaking neoclassicism, Poulenc’s many sonatas and concerti should be appreciated as the movement’s epitome.

Turning Point?
So, how is that such a majestically serious organ concerto, so expressive of the gathering storm of war, and radiating an aura both religious and secular, came from the pen of Poulenc eighty years ago? Though the concerto was not the specific work that marked a turning point in Poulenc’s biography, deeply personal reasons brought on a profound reckoning with mortality and generated the only organ concerto in the standard symphonic repertoire. 

Lasting about 23 continuous minutes, the work has six sections each with a different tempo. Its drama, compact-ness, ravishing colors and textures, and a lively sense of purpose have made the concerto popular with orchestras graced with a hall and a viable organ. Regardless, the work is often misunderstood due to Poulenc’s standing as a composer of mostly effervescent neoclassical diversions. 

A myth has persisted that the spectacularly grotesque car accident in 1936 that beheaded Pierre-Octave Ferroud, thought to be Poulenc’s friend, perhaps one of many paramours. He was in fact a rival composer spurned by Poulenc’s wide social circle. Poulenc heard of the tragedy while on holiday near Rocamadour, the shrine where a statue of the Black Virgin is venerated – believed to have been carved by the fancifully imagined Saint Amadour. Poulenc’s biographer Benjamin Ivry (Phaidon Press, 1996) described the statue: “[it] depicts the Mary with thick lips, heavy eyebrows, a beaklike nose and high cheekbones [that] bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Raymonde Linossier.” 

This mannish woman was Poulenc’s closest friend from childhood. He was certain this protean intellectual would be his wife to live in perfect independence. She however was having an affair with a Japanese man and outwardly distained homosexuals. His proposal of marriage was uncharitably rebuffed, he was plunged into depression, and she suddenly died in 1930 after a two-year estrangement leaving their personal issues unresolved. “All my youth departs with her,” Poulenc wrote, “all that part of my life that belonged to her…I am now twenty years older.” 

Poulenc undertook Litanies à la Vierge Noir (Litanies to the Black Virgin), a chaste choral work with organ intended to be performed by girls and accompanied by an instrument of modest power. This Satie-esque expression of religious feeling shared Poulenc’s pen with an early version of the more robust Organ Concerto. Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), the formidable master teacher of generations of American composers, coached Poulenc’s writing for the organ.

Since his early twenties, Poulenc attended the salon of the benefactor Winaretta Singer (1865-1943), heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac. An amateur composer, her older homosexual husband was an impecunious Prince seeking a protected life of luxury, while she was a wealthy American lesbian seeking standing in Parisian society. Their “lavender marriage” 1893 marriage was loving and profoundly respectful. It was this successful model that Poulenc had hope to realize in his own life.

They established a salon populated by the intellectual and cultural who’s who of Paris – Marcel Proust, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Claude Monet, and Sergei Diaghilev, etc. She became a patron of Debussy, Faure, and Ravel. After her husband’s death in 1901, the Princess initially devoted her fortune to building hospitals, and with her friend Le Corbusier various accommodations for the homeless. She supported Madame Curie’s research and converted limousines to mobile medical vehicles during WWI. Her enormous influence as a music lover resulted in important commissions by Satie, Stravinsky, De Falla, and Weill among many others. Wanda Landowska, the great pioneering harpsichordist was a fixture. In 1928, she premiered Poulenc’s insouciant Concert Champêtre.

The composition of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, was delayed by artistic struggles and new directions, “Poulenc on his way to the cloister, very 15th-century, if you will,” he wrote a friend. Furthermore, Boulanger was away in America, and he had become dependent on her, as had the Princess. Then health problems began that would lead to Singer’s death in 1943 at the height of WWII.

The reigning organ builder of the 20th century Cavaillé-Collbuilt an instrument in Singer’s great salon seating some three hundred. On December 16, 1938 the long-awaited private premiere featured a young Maurice Duruflé on the organ with Boulanger conducting. She had returned from America expressing some disconcerting haughtiness toward Singer. Nonetheless, Boulanger’s own string orchestra arrangement of Purcell was followed by a Bach Trio Sonata for solo organ, some Poulenc songs, and the great concerto. The public premiere occurred six months later in 1939.

The Princess originally approached Poulenc in 1934 about writing an organ concerto simple enough for her to play. Its arduous and advanced birth pangs, her health issues and Boulanger’s snub, may have muted her response, however her biographer Sylvia Kahan (Music’s Modern Muse, University of Rochester Press, 2003) gives some perspective, “Winnaretta has left no detailed account of her own impressions of this strange and magnificent work, but its echoes of baroque masters, especially Buxtehude, as well as its complex and changing moods – austere, episodic, dark, exploratory – surely touched her.”

Poulenc’s other enduring masterpiece, the opera Dialogues des Carmélites about an order of nuns guillotined during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was revived by John Dexter at the Metropolitan Opera in May 2019 and broadcast live. Perhaps, the recent performances of his overshadowed rivals Farroud’s music, and more unfettered scholarship about the astonishingly important presence of gays and lesbians in music, Poulenc and his music may gain greater understanding and appreciation.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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DREAM IN COLOR 2018-19

VIVID REVERIES

May 25, 2019
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Five Dance Preludes for clarinet & piano (1954) - Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)
Piano Trio No. 3 (2007) - Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)
Four Pieces for clarinet & piano, Op. 5 (1913) - Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Piano Quintet in E-flat, K. 452 (1784) - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

In a program populated by well-known composers, tonight’s “mystery guest” is the Argentine German Mauricio Raul Kagel, whose final work is deeply connected to the Austrian tradition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Alban Berg, as well as Cagean chance operations eventually embraced by Witold Lutosławski, Kagel’s three companions. 

Kagel’s flamboyant playfulness and penchant for absurdist theatricality made him prominent among late-twentieth century composers; his prodigious output of rather uncategorizable works, including an attention-grabbing film with Beethoven as its subject also garnered considerable attention. Ironically, not quite eleven years after Kagel’s death, it may be the relatively conventional Piano Trio No. 3 that rescues him from relative obscurity — which is to say, his final masterpiece could ultimately enter the so-called standard repertory.

Grand Cafe
In musical terms a reverie, bringing to mind rêve, the French word for dream, is singularly associated with impressionism and Claude Debussy. But the more raucous revelry, even a state of drunkenness pertains too, as does a vivid imaginary idea, a vision born of dreaming while awake. How these four highly contrasting works gathered here can be collectively described as vivid reveries is a curator’s conceit.

Witold Lutosławski came to maturity in Warsaw during the subjugation of Poland by Germany and the manifold challenges to make a wartime living. He and fellow composer/pianist Andrzej Panufnik survived working in the Polish capital’s grand cafes playing popular music on two pianos. Entertaining chronically troubled citizens and German officers in uniform was made more worthwhile by adding original pieces, song transcriptions and some 200 arrangements. The most notable and durable of these was the astonishing Variations of a Theme of Paganini (closing Sunday’s benefit concert Varsovia by the Sea). It alone survived the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by the Polish underground that lasted 63 days and ultimately destroyed the city. In haste Lutosławski and his mother left the city with a few scores just days before the conflagration began.

Lutosławski’s First Symphony was begun upon completion of that keyboard confection in 1941. When finished six years later, the Stalinist regime now in power deemed the symphony unacceptable as anti-nationalist formalism. As Marek Zebrowski, pianist/composer and director of the Polish Music Center at USC writes, “Undaunted he forged ahead with a string of significant compositions, including Little Suite for Orchestra (1951), Concerto for Orchestra (1954) and the Five Dance Preludes for clarinet and piano.” 

The Boston Symphony premiered Bèla Bartok’s popular Concerto for Orchestra in 1944 while the composer battled leukemia in New York only to succumb ten months later. The first of its kind was widely hailed as a wartime miracle and the composer’s great swansong. For Lutosławski to respond in kind ten years later was a bold but savvy gesture. He further emulated Bartok that year with his five dances, which recall Bartok’s early folk arrangements and the convoluted intimacy of his 1938 three Contrasts for clarinet, violin and piano based on Hungarian and Romanian dances. While the contrasting moods of these northern Polish dances mostly hew to the spirited folk nationalism of meeting Soviet expectations, the interstitial slow movements have the character of bitter herbs, and pensive musings. Lutosławski arranged the work for clarinet, harp, piano and string orchestra the next year, giving it more cosmopolitan attire at a time when the post-Stalin climate of Soviet realism was thawing in 1958, after four years of introspection and deep technical probing. Dedicated to the memory of Bartok, Funeral Music declared Lutosławski’s stylistic breakthrough – a brilliant reconciliation of his melodic instincts with twelve-tone technique.

Leukemia also took the life of Kagel after a longer period of treatment and time to consider “How would composers of the past write if they were alive today? Viewing myself as part of a continual music tradition, I have never ceased to reflect on that question and on the consequences it entails.” A case can be made for his three trios functioning as a cycle with the first and third running about 30 minutes and the second 20 minutes. The first trio (1985) is in three movements, the second (2001) in one, and the third (2007) in two movements. In his 2013 essay “Surreal Romanticism of the Night,” Reiner Nonnenmann writes,

“Kagel features tonal harmony, familiar sounding melodies, dancelike gestures and exuberant rough-and-ready musicianship. But under the surface, tradition is going wild. Nothing fits together anymore. Chords collide, breaking all rules of major/minor functional harmony. The ‘themes,’ in turn, rather resemble vastly extended melodic vocal lines, their rhapsodic freedom has almost nothing in common with classical themes or their usual treatment. Meters and rhythms are particularly ambiguous: while still following standard structures or dance meters (Schubertian and South American in this case) constant interferences bring them out of step, as it the dances themselves had been made to dance. The resulting music sounds dubious to our ear. On the surface its Neo-Tonal postmodern pleasantness is skillfully obscuring a deep-down rejection of all traditional musical building blocks.”

Kagel’s Trio No. 1 opens in a reflective mood recalling – more in spirit than in manner – Liszt’s lugubrious gondolas before fitfully splintering into a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of Dante’s Inferno. Trio No. 2 struggles to free itself from the heaviness of mourning. At one point the score is marked “like a funeral procession” an inescapable allusion to Mahler. After a gently floating passage at the end of the score a dedicatory inscription appears. The date “11 September 2001” illuminates the mood.

Trio No. 3 deploys an abundance of variations pressing the edges of logic in search of unity. A teasing whimsicality twists delicate memories into harsh realities. Nonnenmann describes a “fairytale-like enchantment and savage appassionato fury.” The journey is a surreal “multi-layered game of hide-and-seek with well-known idioms, bordering on frightening” he says “…nocturnal Romanticism reminiscent of Schumann or Mahler.” One has only to cast the fishing pole of memory back to 2006-07, a time of energy scandals, Abu Graib, mortgage bubbles, the new iPhone and busy Space Shuttles — and the sweetness of capturing comet dust, observing geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and discovering “Hyperion,” a 38-story tree in California’s Redwood forest, the world’s tallest — to grasp the brave new world of a reflective 21st century composer facing his mortality.

Oddity, enigma, anomaly and one-off are words sometimes used to characterize the Four Pieces by Berg composed shortly after his orchestral song cycle Altenberg Lieder ignited audience fury in the Skandalkonzert March 31, 1913 in the in the great hall of the Vienna Musikverein. A riot of far more genuine hostility than the infamous and now suspect “riot” of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,that same year, greeted Berg’s music. It halted the concert conducted by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg before Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder could be heard! Their relationship was already strained by his recent marriage.

Berg’s fellow student Anton Webern seemed more attuned to the miniaturizing effect of expressionistic atonality being pioneered by their teacher. Both were focused on working with piano and strings and compressing sonata form. So, how was it that Berg chose the clarinet for these miniatures when he had no experience with the instrument, or a clarinetist eager for a new work, and the ability to collaborate? 

Berg’s biographer Karen Monson (Alban Berg, Houghton Mifflin, 1979) suggests his model was Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces (1909), and that by composing only four pieces he made them into a little sonata. She also notes that Berg’s interest in the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel was not yet shared with his master, thus adding to the tension in their relationship. What seems like an obvious biographical oversight is the fact of Debussy’s concurrent Premiere Rhapsodie for clarinet & piano composed as a highly virtuosic examination piece for the Paris Conservatory in 1910. 

Monson’s apparent surprise at Berg’s success writing so idiomatically, and her puzzlement over what may have caused this piece to exist at all is easily answered: Debussy. Monson writes, “Berg proved that he could write for the instrument as if he had mastered it through years of practice. The little Pieces burst with orders for a wide variety of articulations, wide leaps from one end of the range to the other, and surprising shifts in dynamics, exploiting the possibilities of the clarinet as only a virtuoso knows them.” Of course knowing of Berg’s fascination with Debussy and very likely knowledge of a new attention-getting work by him adds nuance to his dedication of the Four Pieces to Schoenberg. Was this his most “atonal” yet convincingly lyrical set of pieces Berg’s case to his teacher for Debussy, or the act of an otherwise obsequious student asserting his right to embrace models where he finds them?

Berg’s relative youth and compromised status made it impossible for him to find a publisher as he confessed in a letter to Erwin Schulhoff, one of many Jewish composers who would not survive WWII, “Once again at my own expense! A few antique pieces in my apartment had to pay for it.” Generations of clarinetists and composers have found Berg’s sacrifice a small matter for all the inspiration his Four Pieces still provide.

French playwright and spy Pierre Caron de Beaumarchaishad been running guns to the Americans when the U.S. Congress of the Confederation ratified the Treaty of Paris signifying the official end of the American Revolutionary War In 1784. That same year his revolutionary pro-American play The Marriage of Figaro was premiered, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was inducted into the Masonic Lodge of Vienna. Mozart’s opera librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who adapted the play, was a thirty-five-year old libertine recently banished from Venice, while Mozart, six years his junior, had recently wed Constanza Weber. 

The year 1784 is also significant for the composition of Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E-flat. Typical of the composer, the work was written quickly and performed two days later March 30, at the Imperial Court Theater.The applause was resounding. His career was at a tipping point. In Mozart’s next letter to his father Leopold he wrote, "I myself consider it to be the best thing I have written in my life." In the next two years he would write the String Quartet No. 19 “Dissonance,” the Piano Concerto No. 20 that anticipates Beethoven, the Symphony No. 38 “Prague” with its Bohemian complement of winds, and the history-making The Marriage of Figaro. Each work is a miracle, yet among chamber music, the Piano Quintet is on a level shared only with the transcendent String Quintet in G minor forom 1787.

Postscript: During the tawdry dysfunction of our recent current affairs, a marvelously clear photograph of a black hole was shared with the world. Just as I had settled on the next season’s name, Remember the Future – in part a nod to Luciano Berio’s book of essays – ruminations in Mozart’s life and times revealed that the existence of a black hole was first theorized in 1783. As Steven Hawking relates in A Brief History of Time, “John Mitchell, wrote a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star’s gravitational attraction before it could get very far.”  

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

VARSOVIA BY THE SEA– PROGRAM NOTES

This candy store of Polish music is offered as an hour of guilty pleasure sequenced to maximize the experience of the piano alone, with clarinet, violin and cello and doubled up – after a tart, fiery and exhilarating Polish Caprice for solo violin. 

The sweetness – whether brooding dark chocolate, shot with ginger, nuanced with edible flowers, or brandy-soak-ed cherries trapped in a chocolate shell, or creamy fondant glowing like contraband ivory – is all the more exciting because of the occasional thrill ride.

Grazyna Bacewiczwas a virtuoso violinist and neo-classic-al composer who first attended a private conservatory in Lodz then expanded her studies in Warsaw, before relocating in Paris for composition study with Nadia Boulanger. She made a striking virtuoso debut performing Karol Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto with Paul Kletzki in Paris in 1946. Three years later her Polish Capriccio began life as her best known work – a blistering virtuoso tour de force of fast passages and the ability to navigate high positions on the G-string and deft handling of chord-al sequences. Bacewicz was at her height as a pianist At age 44 when she premiered the Second Piano Sonata in 1953 in Warsaw. The work immediately excited audiences and artists including the highly acclaimed Polish virtuoso Kyrstian Zimerman, who has championed it.

Frederic Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano. On rare occasions he wrote for the cello. His PolonaiseOp.3 was written for the amateur cellist/composer Prince Antoni Radziwill, who hosted the composer at his hunting lodge in 1828. The work was endlessly revised to increase the level of virtuosity, a process mirrored by its enhanced name – Grande Polonaise Brilliante.

The Op. 17 Mazurkas were composed after Chopin settled in France as a refugee. The final Mazurka, No. 4, is both more characteristic of the dance and freer. The texture is quite homophonic, yet dynamic variation abounds. The Mazurka ends as it began with the same simple measures, no pedal, the left hand chords played portamento; the sound fades away in a perdendosi. Centuries later Henryk Górecki sampled these four measures in his Third Symphony “Sorrowful Songs.”

Polonaise-fantasie, Op 61 is a remarkable meditation on the national dance of Poland and a unique work among Chopin’s opus. Improvisatory in nature and harmonically bold, it explores lush pianistic textures and ruminates on Poland’s fate during then century of partitions – a historical moment far removed from the glorious past, when Polonaise was danced all across Europe and composed by such fans of the genre as Bach, Telemann, Mozart and Beethoven.

Szymanowski’s Mythes Op. 30 represent a pioneering breakthrough in 20th century music. Written during the spring of 1915, this suite was inspired by the composer’s great love of antiquity and mythology. Each of the movements is a brilliant, delicately sketched, and truly fantastic vision. The third movement Dryads de Pan, opens with a solo violin trill that depicts the summer wind. The Dryads’ ecstatic dance follows, soon to be interrupted by Pan’s flute (here the violin harmonics imitate the enchanted sound). Rapturous dancing ensues until collapsing in exhaustion as Pan’s theme returns to hover over the stillness. 

It was Szymanowski’s Third Symphony “Song of the Night” that compelled the eleven-year-old Witold Lutosławski to become a composer. Hearing Bacewicz’s recital not many years later inspired him to be a pianist. Where his education took him and prepared him to manage life in Wartime Warsaw is discussed in the Vivid Reveries notes, page 4.

PATRICK SCOTT & MAREK ZEBROWSKI © 2019

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April 13, 2019
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Three Pieces for Drum Quartet (1974-75) - James Tenney (1934-2006)
De Profundis (1994) - Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938)
Solo (1981) - Lukas Foss (1922-2009)
Stay On It (1973) - Julius Eastman (1940-1990)

Undeniably, minimalism started in California. Some make a case for La Monte Young as the movement’s true father (Variations for string quartet, 1955; The Four Dreams of China, 1962; The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, 1964), but a general and long-held consensus has it that Terry Riley birthed the movement in 1964 with a loose ensemble of players, including Steve Reich, performing his In C in the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a space housing KPFA and the Anna Halprin Dance Company. 

This Life of Sounds
Also born in 1964 in less countercultural surroundings, despite intentions to be the ”Berkeley of the East,” was the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York in Buffalo. As Renee Levine Packer observes in her definitive firsthand book about the Center, “This Life of Sounds” (Oxford University Press, 2010) – to whom these notes are deeply indebted: 

“Buffalo, New York, as it turns out, had a tradition of embracing challenge and innovation. There was pride in being first. The first elevator in the world was built in Buffalo in the 1840s. The first steam-powered grain elevator was developed there. In 1843, the railroad came to Buffalo. The town at theend of the Erie Canal became a city of increasing importance as a transportation center and the chief grain depot of America.”

Extensive vision planning and support from the Rockefeller Foundation helped create a new social dynamic for music that would bring eighteen performers and composers together without the necessity of teaching. Composers andperformers were called Creative Associates (CA) – a new model for collaboration. At the center of the Center, which lasted until 1980 (Morton Feldman directed the last six years, including a sabbatical), was the warm and charismatic personality of the pianist/composer Lukas Foss, a naturalized Jewish-American born in Berlin. 

Under his decade of visionary leadership nothing quite like the Center in Buffalo, with its Albright Knox concert hall existed elsewhere – before or since. Within four years, the Center would play a key role in the rapid advance of minimalism, as we know it, and soon contribute important strands to the movement’s history – even if these stories are only now gaining proper perspective.

Creative Associates
The Center deliberately avoided identification with any compositional method, style or ideology. Foss recruited the most progressive and accomplished young artists in America. The German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel, and the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, who was closely associated with Germany’s Darmstadt school and electronic music, felt liberated by the arrival of so many fellow travelers. They had accepted professorships at the University with the understanding that Buffalo would become the most exciting American city for new music.

The first cadre of CAs included percussionist/composer John Bergamo, who would later become a leading figure at CalArts, and fellow percussion innovator Jan Williams who would remain in various capacities as composer, conductor and director until 1980. The avant-garde jazz bassist Buell Neidlinger and the LA-born soprano Carol Plantamura, who was active in Rome with Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) joined to collaborate. Pianist Fred Myrow, who had strong links to rock music, would become a prolific film composer. The violinist Paul Zukovsky, a child prodigy and competition winner, would first gain acclaim as Einstein in Einstein on the Beach. The 35-year-old composer George Crumb would soon find his voice with the now classic anti-Vietnam ritual Black Angels for amplified string quartet in 1970. This 1964-66 cadre also included the non-English speaking Italian experimental composer Sylvano Bussotti, a flutist, clarinetist, and trumpeter/composer, another violinist, a violist, guitarist, and another soprano, as well as a baritone, and the conductor Richard Dufallo. 

The composer/pianist David Tudor, John Cage’s frequentcollaborator, followed in the second year, along with trombonist/composer and extended technique pioneer Vinko Globokar. With rock star looks, the formidable but elfin pianist Yuji Takahashi also stayed for two years. Cornelius Cardew, Britain’s notorious experimentalist and assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen followed in 1966-67. 

In the spring of 1966, Frederic Rzewski took a breakfrom MEV and Rome for a semester to explore the Buffalo scene. Meanwhile on the coasts the history of minimalism was being made, as we know it.

Steve Reich
After five years of study at Juilliard, and subsequently with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland, Reich’s first minimalist work, the tape piece Its Gonna Rain (1965), was made from live recordings of Brother Walter, a Black street preacher in downtown San Francisco. The next year, having returned to New York, Reich made the more famous tape piece Come Out from thevoice of Daniel Hamm, one of the “Harlem Six,” who would be imprisoned for nine years despite his innocence. Reich, like many composers of his generation, was deeply immersed in John Coltrane, and had an affinity for Black culture.

In 1966-67 Reich transitioned from process pieces for tape to instrumental phasing pieces — Reed Phase, Violin Phase and Piano Phase, followed by Four Organs in 1970. Phasing is a "continually adjusting" canon with mutable gaps between the voices that rely only on time intervals of imitation as, in these works, a given sonority is moved against itself through live performance with looped tape recordings, and then live only by careful calculation. The simplest and most popular of the works from this period was Clapping Music (1972). Drumming followed with structures capable of sustaining the music in large sections for well past an hour. The pivotal Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ increased Reich’s color palette and added melodic material that would open new vistas leading to his masterpiece Music for Eighteen in 1976.

Philip Glass
Strung Out (1967) for amplified violin was the first work of minimalism by Philip Glass, who had just returned from two years of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, where he also worked as a novice assistant to Ravi Shankar notating Indian music. Riley and Young also studied Indian music in California at the same time with Pandit Pran Nath, who taught North Indian singing at Mills. Glass’s exposure to non-Western music would flower exponentially in the decades ahead, but his dedication to Boulanger’s core interest in the richness of canonic structures, and a new fascination with the additive rhythms of Indian musicyielded a series of three large works in 1969 – Music in Contrary Motion for electric organ, Music in Fifths, Music in Similar Motion; and Music in Changing Parts in 1970 for the Philip Glass Ensemble. The culmination of this quest was the epic 4-hour Music in Twelve Parts(1971-74) for five players and ten instruments. A liberating new direction followed – including the vocal work Another Look at Harmony –that led to the New York premiere and six-city European tour of his masterpiece opera Einstein on the Beach in 1976.

Both composers of “downtown music,” as it was known, thrived in gallery, museum, and warehouse spaces attracting distinctly different audiences than those for traditional classical music. Mainstream recordings largely fueled the rapid reach into popular culture of so-called “minimalism” (renamed by a critic to align it with visual art and dance) and the extraordinarily parallel career paths of Reich and Glass as New Yorkers in the world. 

20/20 Vision
John McClure, Director of Columbia Masterworks (aka CBS Masterworks, aka Sony Classical) launched the “Music in our Time” series of LPs to reach the emerging college educated, pot-smoking, anti-Vietnam, anti-establishment, pro-civil rights audiences. As something of a trial balloon, Columbia’s budget label Odyssey released Come Out in 1967 alongside music by Richard Maxfield and Pauline Oliveros. “Music in our Time” launched in 1969 with the release of Terry Riley’s In C and Berio’s quite different but no less thrilling postmodern mashup Sinfonia with the New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers. 

David Behrman, whom McClure had released from Columbia in 1968 for a sabbatical as a CA, had the idea of recording In C with an ensemble of CAs. Riley, who was not yet a CA, would lead from the saxophone and Behrman was to be the recording’s producer. He observed about In C, “the best performances will be made by musicians gifted with special ability to improvise and listen to one another.” Trombonist Stuart Dempster would organize the project with McClure’s blessing in recording studio and converted church in midtown Manhattan’s Eastside. The overdubbed ensemble included trumpeter Jon Hassell and his wife Margaret, who played the relentless piano pulse wearing a glove. David Shostac, flute; Lawrence Singer, oboe; Jerry Kirkbride, clarinet; Edward Burnham,vibraphone; Jan Williams marimbaphone; and David Rosenboom, viola were all CAs. Darlene Reynard, a non-CA member of the Buffalo scene played bassoon. Riley’s one-page score was reproduced on the cover of the LP insuring its wide dissemination. The San Francisco composer joined as a CA in the spring of 1969. Julius Eastman became a Creative Artist the following fall. 

Julius Eastman
From an early age Julius was willful, obstinate and had an air about him that his father read as effeminate. His mother was protective and concerned only with the boy’s development claiming that before he was born she had a sense that he was special. At age ten he asked for a beginning piano book that seemed as easy to read on the piano as a textbook. He sang in St. John’s Episcopal Church choir, where he was a paid boy soprano, until his voice changed at age fourteen, darkening into an extremely resonant bass baritone. In 1968 four short piano pieces by the twenty-eight-year-old composer/pianist were performed in Buffalo’s Albright Knox Museum auditorium and in Carnegie Hall as a guest artist.

Eastman’s biographer Renee Levine Packer, the erstwhile administrator of the center and keen chronicler of its trajectory remembers, “Julius simply appeared in my office one day – a tall, slim, handsome black man dressed in a long Army-green trench coat and white sneakers carryingsome scores under his arm. ‘Lukas Foss said I should come over and talk to you,’ he said in a low, modulated voice. ‘I have a string quartet I’d like the Creative Associates to play.’ Foss hadn’t mentioned a thing to me, which meant that I hadn’t approached any of the musicians – some of whom could be quite surly about agreeing to do anything that might encroach on free time. I gave him the musicians’ phone numbers, suggesting that he could call them. ‘Good luck,’ I said skeptically.”

The university made him full faculty in 1971, and with extensive performing responsibilities, including touring with his newly composed Stay On It and Frederic Rzewski’s breakthrough vocal work Coming Together (1972). The three-week tour of Evenings for New Music concerts were givenin Paris, London, Scotland (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow), Lisbon, Barcelona, Rome, Perugia, Karlsruhe, and Berlin. The tour remains to be fully documented. Eastman stayed in Buffalo until 1975. His faculty bio at the time listed two ballets, songs, orchestral, and piano works.

Riley gained worldwide crossover appeal from this well-packaged recording. However, the Center’s role in fostering his rise, and that of minimalism, was largely eclipsed by his celebrity. Eastman’s fleeting moment of fame came from his matchless bass baritone performance of Eight Songs of a Mad King by Peter Maxwell Davies in 1970, soon recorded by Nonesuch and released in 1973. His live performances were rapturously received and the recording was nominated for a Grammy.

Stay On It
The octet with voice Stay On It (1973) was Eastman’s first important work to survive as his clear entry to the history of minimalism. That there was a black voice with a significant gay African-American perspective at this important turning point of Western music is a topic of considerable interest today, even more so as the cultural dimensions of disco with roots in Motown and Funk are contrasted with minimalism. 

Matthew Mendez, in his essay “That Piece Does Not Exist without Julius: Still Staying on Stay On It” from Gay Guerilla: Julius Eastman and His Music edited by Packer and Mary Jane Leach (University of Rochester Press, 2015), elaborates:

“It is noteworthy that Eastman should emphasize rhythmic continuity (“the beat”) at the exclusion of the other building blocks of early minimalism, such as process, repetition, consonance, slow harmonic rhythm, and machine-like impersonality. For no matter the direction Eastman’s later projects would take, the truth is that Stay On It stood askew from these minimalist standbys: too haphazard for “process music,” too wild and wooly for ‘another look at harmony,’ too expressive for assembly line industrial precision. We could not be farther away from midcentury modernism, where complexity and richness of signification were implicitly valorized as desirable (straight) ‘masculine’ traits. And this is to say nothing of the abstractions of early minimalism: with [CA Benjamin] Hudson’s Diana Ross snippet, from [“Stop in the Name of Love” interpolated in some performances] Stay On It cited disco as a social entity, highlighting the genre’s associations with gay and ethnic subcultures.”

 Packer, further observed the linkage of Eastman and Rzewski at this time when key works of Riley, Glass and Reichwere gaining ground in the public sphere:

“All in all, Eastman’s admiration for Rzewski’s workof this period makes considerable sense. If the modular structure of In C provided a manifestprecedent for questions regarding notation and ensemble coordination, Rzewski, for whom minimalism was merely a means to an end, offered an appealingly messy approach to pulsation andrepetition. In Rzewski’s hands, pulse-pattern minimalism was never rigidly non-referential. Unlike early Reich and Glass, the “outside world” of politics and the vernacular was readily embraced.” 

Packer quotes a frequent performer of Stay On It who contrasted Rzewski as being “aggressive and hard-nosed” and Eastman as “malleable and sensual.”  And summed up: “Eastman drew most of his musical conclusions by breathing the same air and feeling the same vibrations as his more commercially successful counterparts.” 

Frederic Rzewski
Rzewski spent the spring semester of 1974 in Buffalo. His Coming Together was given the first of many shattering performances by Eastman as narrator, March 31, 1974, at Albright Knox, ten days later in Carnegie Hall, and on tour. Eastman had already performed some five times as a pianist in Les Moutons de Panurge (1970), Rzewski’s ironic response to Riley’s In C. Coming Together, however, was reaction to the Attica Prison Riot, September 9–13, 1971. The maximum-security penitentiary was only 35 miles from Buffalo. 

Stage actor Steven Ben Israel, a member of New York's Living Theatre, premiered Coming Together in 1973. He may have better matched the racial identity of Sam Melville (born Samuel Joseph Grossman), convicted bomber, organizer, and Attica inmate, however Eastman embodied black empowerment that demanded humane conditions in a massive prison designed for a thousand fewer prisoners, than were actually housed in the brutal architecture. The inmates were 63% black or Puerto Rican. With uncanny stillness, Eastman’s reading Melville’s letter profoundly dwelled on how time is affected by place, and “a greater coming together.” Eastman took possession of the audience’s collective imagination in 1974 while Rzewski played a dizzying piano in an ensemble that numbered eight. The memory of what happened in Attica would not soon be alleviated. Twenty years later, De Profundis would return Rzewski to contemplate prison life.

Rzewski attended a concert by the Latin American folk music group Inti-Illimani from Chile in the Upper East Side’s Hunter College in 1974 with the pianist Ursula Oppens. Prodigiously talented with a formidable education, she had received numerous scholarships and awards including the 1969 gold medal of the Busoni International Piano competition, and had co-founded the new music series Speculum Musicae in 1971. Rzewski was a kindred spirit and an accomplished composer/performer of new piano music. He had returned from Italy in 1971 after studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, and co-founding MEV, the Rome-based collective in 1966 with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. MEV experimented with primitive synthesizers and performed daring, often riot-producing improvisations. That fateful Hunter College concert occurred just weeks after the resignation of President Nixon, August 8, 1974. Like the rest of the audience, Rzewski and Oppens left the hall singing The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a resolute earworm that lasted for days.

Rzewski’s epic hour-long protest classic of the same name that followed is often compared to J.S. Bach’s Aria and 30 Goldberg Variations. The composer Christian Wolff has written eloquently about this kaleidoscopic work. On its sources, Wolff observes, “It was about the time that Rzewski...began to associate himself with jazz musicians such as Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy, and developed an interest in popular political music, including songs of the Italian left...the songs of Hanns Eisler and the new Latin American music form Cuba and Chile, the Puerto Rican folk music in New York and the songs of Mike Glick.” 

After extoling the work’s resemblance to tonal Romantic piano music, its experimental harmony, and use of serial technique, as well as repeated notes and extravagant new sonorities, Wolff draws attention to, “the catching of harmonics after a chord attack, as well as the whistling by the pianist, crying out, slamming the piano lid, all techniques suggesting experimental music – and the free, informal kind of performing sometimes found in blues and jazz.” Considering all that came before and all that went into the work, it seems supremely poetic, and with no smallamount of irony, that Oppens gave the world premiere in1976 as part of the Bicentennial Piano Series at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Like Einstein on the Beach and Music for Eighteen, The People United emerged as Rzewski’s masterpiece in 1976.

James Tenney
It would be too neat to have James Tenney join this coincidental group of 1976 career achievements, yet he was associated with a bicentennial commission from the dean of anti-masterpiece composers John Cage. The US premiereof Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, at the Buffalo Center on the 76-77 season’s Evening for New Music featured Tenney among twelve speaking parts. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned the piece to observe the US Bicentennial. Cage scored it for “preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens” – perhaps anti-Vietnam conscientious objectors who had moved to Canada to avoid the U.S. draft? Tenney had been one of the original performers while on the York University faculty in Toronto. 

Prior to his years at York (1976-2000), he joined the new faculty before the 1970 opening of the Cal Arts campus,where he remained until 1975, the year he completed Three Pieces for Drum Quartet. A one-year stint at UC Santa Cruz led to locating across the U.S. border from Niagara Falls. His friend and admirer Morton Feldman, who many felt was not a natural leader or particularly comfortable with administrative duties, tapped Tenney, a rangy Westerner born in Silver Springs New Mexico, to fill in during the 1979 Spring Semester. Given York’s proximity to Buffalo, Tenney managed to become a CA in 1978.

Three Pieces for Drum Quartet
Three Pieces for Drum Quartet was begun in 1974. It is a triple homage while also being a superb example of the prevailing interest in additive processes and of reviving simple pre-classical forms in service to a new aesthetic. The centennial of Charles Ives was widely celebrated in 1974 with Leonard Bernstein as the most visible beater of the drum. Ives was Tenney’s hero, if he had one. The maverick composer embodied all that Tenney held dear as an American. The work opens as a wake for Ives performed on four evenly spaced tenor drums, sounding both somber for the composer’s passing twenty years earlier and suspenseful for some unknown future. The drummers then move to the four corners of the room where bass drums sound out a hocket for Henry Cowell, a California composer and Ives disciple, who spent time in jail for homosexuality. 

Hocket is defined as a “spasmodic or interrupted effect in medieval and contemporary music, produced by dividing a melody between two parts, notes in one part coinciding with rests in the other.” Tenney’s “Hocket for Henry Cowell” roils darkly like the Pacific Ocean 30-feet below San Quentin Prison, where the young composer served four years of a fifteen-year sentence. 

The final “Crystal Canon for Edgard Varèse” is performed in a loose configuration of snare drums. The flamboyant and strikingly handsome Varèse, a transplanted Frenchman,was in the public mind the father of the American musical avant-garde during the roaring twenties. He is credited with composing the first concert work for a percussion ensemble, Ionization, from which Tenney appropriated the snare drum part. Tenney, like his more prominent minimalist contemporaries, drills down on a particular canonic structure in this homage. He draws attention to the paradox of canons being the strictest types of imitation, which upon investigation opens up a surprisingly wide variety of possibilities. The crystal canon is governed by the same mathematical principles of crystal formation.

End of an Era
Throughout the seventies funding for the Center dwindled after Rockefeller ended support and the University responded as demands to establish culturally specific programs grew. When Feldman returned from sabbatical, only three CA of the original eighteen positions remained. The Center for the Creative and Performing Arts lasted until 1980.

Lukas Foss
Foss became music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1971, overlapping the last three years in Buffalo, and continuing until 1988 as among the world’s most daring programmers. His earliest works for solo piano dates from 1938. Short pieces followed fitfully until the Scherzo Ricercato in 1954. His pianistic chops were formidable enough for Columbia to team him with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Roger Sessions for the legendary 1958 recordingof Stravinsky’s Les Noces scored for four pianos, percussion and chorus. His masterpiece Time Cycle (1960) followed with Leonard Bernstein conducting soprano Adele Addisonwith the Columbia Symphony. 

Foss would return to the keyboard as a composer with a personal preoccupation – reconciling minimalism with its perceived polar opposite serialism. The work begins with a 12-tone row, but defies the rule of non-repetition. According to Daniel Felsenfeld’s linernote to Scott Dunn’s recording of the complete pianomusic of Foss on Naxos, the composer’s “favoring the motoric notions of Bach over the motoric notions of, say, Reich or Glass … Solo … is more than a stretched out fugato; it is a true piece of minimalism, which develops (or does not) in the same way, but yet does it with the Bartók-cum-Bach [that] Foss has always favored.“

De Profundis
In a memorial tribute to actor Luke Theodore of the Living theater, Rzewski composed De Profundis in 1991 for the pianist Anthony de Mare. Oscar Wilde’s letters from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas were excerpted for the pianist to speak wearing a microphone that can pick up other body music. The Wilde text is 150 pages in the 1981 Viking Penguin Edition. It was originally written longhand margin-to-margin as fast he could to fill the short period of time that writing materials were available in his cell. He was sentenced to two years hard labor and emerged in May 1897 from Reading Gaol suffering from bad health. Wilde would die in Paris at age 46 three years later. 

Music critic and writer Mark Swed deftly describes the work and the composer’s struggle:

“The eight text selections are chosen to follow Wilde’s Zen-like search for inner peace within the awfulness of prison, which means transcending both the psychological humiliation and the physical deprivation of incarceration. Each text setting is preceded by a piano prelude, but the astonishing opening, the pairing of piano gestures and the body, means, of course, that the piano becomes heard as an actual extension ofthe body. Rzewski, however, also uses the piano to represent the psyche. It ticks time. It travels through music history: At one point a Bach-like invention seems to take on stylistic accretions of Beethoven, then Liszt – perhaps as comment upon Wilde’s desperation to maintain his identity. The piano’s rhythms become the body’s, and the instrument mirrors the prisoner’s lapses into hysteria. But all the while the piano’s connection with the utterly physical nature of the body makes it all the more effective as an agent for the ultimate transcendence of the body into the spirit, that familiar realm of pure music, into which Rzewski follows Wilde at the end.”

Rzewski’s fascination with incarceration and resisting political oppression can also be seen as his central aesthetic challenge. While all great composers give themselves restrictions and knotty puzzles, Rzewski’s life work seems to be expressed in the conflict between freedom and constraint. Improvisation butts against strict composition. He said recently that his music “is about being as free as possible in an extremely confining situation.”

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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March 23, 2019
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Piano Sonata in E Minor (1932) - Florence Price (1887-1953)
Ennanga (1958) - William Grant Still (1895-1978)
“Single Petal of a Rose” (from The Queen’s Suite, 1958) - Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
Lyric (“Molto Adagio” from String Quartet No. 1, 1935/1948) - George Walker (1922-2018)
“In a Sentimental Mood” (arr. Art Tatum, 1935/1948) - Ellington
New World A-Comin’ (arr. Scott Dunn, 1943/2019 world premiere) - Ellington

Invited to play chamber music in a festival, Althea Waites was in Geneva, Switzerland, during the summer of 1985 when a package arrived from the U.S. Library of Congress. Wayne Shirley, its music librarian and a walking encyclopedia of American music known for his pioneering work in Negro spirituals, had already served two decades in the job as an active presence at conferences, and was the founding editor of the Society for American Music’s quarterly journal. Apparently, Shirley made it his business to know who was where, and when.

Out of Mothballs
The package contained a manuscript copy of a late Romantic Piano Sonata by Florence Price that had recently come into the Library’s possession. A note expressed, his eagerness for a public performance. Waites used the long flight home to memorize the score, as she would soon attend a symposium on Black American Music at the University of Michigan. The work received first prize in 1932 from the Wanamaker Foundation. Given the composer’s subsequent difficulty as an African American woman to be taken seriously, it may be safe to assume that Waites gave the Piano Sonata its first modern public performance in Ann Arbor.

Listening today with a more open-minded attitude about influences and a more widely shared interest to learn about African American music history, the inherent conservatism of the work gives way to hearing an authentic voice. Price’s debt to Grieg and Dvorak, not to mention the German models promoted at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied piano, organ and composition under the leadership of George Whitefield Chadwick, make a strong first impression. But, the attentive listener will soon detect a fine-grained language rooted in Black spirituals and other indigenous sources.

Chadwick was a self-taught organist when he entered the New England Conservatory (NEC) as a “special” student, which is to say he was gifted, but would have not been able to pass the rigorous entrance requirements. After extensive study in Europe, he would eventually return to NEC, where he transformed it according to European standards. Regardless, NEC became the first – and for a long time, only – conservatory where Blacks could aspire to a formal classical music education. Nonetheless, Price’s mother insisted she hide her race by using a false birthplace: Pueblo, Mexico. Chadwick would later teach Price’s contemporary and fellow Little Rock resident William Grant Still at Oberlin Conservatory.

Wanamaker
Price graduated in 1906. She is the first African-American woman composer to gain national stature.  According to Rae Linda Brown (1953-2017), who Waites met at the UM symposium, Price “was born into one of the most prominent black families in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father, Dr. James H. Smith, was a very successful dentist, an inventor, and a published author. Price’s mother, Florence Irene, was an elementary school teacher and an enterprising businesswoman.” The governor was believed to be her father’s secret patient. 

Brown had just completed her dissertation on Price’s Symphony in E Minor, the even more newsworthy Wanamaker prizewinner of 1932. Fredrick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony took notice and promptly programmed the work’s premiere at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. The bond that developed by the scholar and Waites resulted in program notes (edited by yours truly) for the 1993 CD release of the sonata paired with music by Still and Ed Bland. Brown gives a cogent analysis of the sonata’s structure and character:

The sonata-form first movement begins with a stately, chordal introduction in dotted rhythms. The first theme in E minor is a confident and uplifting spiritual-like theme. After a short transition, the three-fold statement of the lyrical second theme, in C major, follows. Both the first and second themes are aptly treated in the development section. The recapitulation leads to a whirlwind of harmonies before the movement is brought to an exuberant close. 

The second movement is in rondo form. The main theme is another lyrical spiritual-like theme, treated with characteristic syncopated rhythms and simple harmony. The two secondary themes are reminiscent of Chopin and Schumann, respectively. 

The third movement, a scherzo, provides a virtuosic and rhapsodic close to the sonata. Technically challenging, the movement is divided into two sections. In the first section, the main theme, a descending E minor scale, gives way to a lyrical cantabile theme, before it returns to a close the first half of the movement. The second section is based on a syncopated dance theme. A real tour de force, the dance theme and its complementary themes are taken through a series of meter and tempo changes to bring the movement to a triumphant close. 

Price never really received this kind of attention again until recently. She wrote three more symphonies, although the second was unfinished. If one Googles her name, at least four stories from major news publication appear. The most compelling is by Alex Ross, “New World” in The New Yorkerprint edition February 5, 2018:

“In 2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. The structure was in poor condition: vandals had ransacked it, and a fallen tree had torn a hole in the roof. In a part of the house that had remained dry, the Gatwoods made a curious discovery: piles of musical manuscripts, books, personal papers, and other documents. The name that kept appearing in the materials was that of Florence Price. The Gatwoods looked her up on the Internet, and found that she was a moderately well-known composer, based in Chicago, who had died in 1953. The dilapidated house had once been her summer home. The couple got in touch with librarians at the University of Arkansas, which already had some of Price’s papers. Archivists realized, with excitement, that the collection contained dozens of Price scores that had been thought lost. Two of these pieces, the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, have recently been recorded by the Albany label... 

The reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find. In a 1943 [the year Duke Ellington composed New World A-Comin’] letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced herself thus: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” She plainly saw these factors as obstacles to her career, because she then spoke of Koussevitzky “knowing the worst.” Indeed, she had a difficult time making headway in a culture that defined composers as white, male, and dead. One prominent conductor took up her cause—Frederick Stock, the German-born music director of the Chicago Symphony—but most others ignored her, Koussevitzky included. Only in the past couple of decades have Price’s major works begun to receive recordings and performances, and these are still infrequent.”

A year ago at First Congregational Church, the Southeast Symphony, under the baton of Anthony Parnther, gave the west coast premiere of The Oak, a tone poem that could be compared to Chadwick’s works in that genre, but for its fascinating moments of Wagnerian chromaticism. Otherwise Los Angeles awaits hearing in live performances Price’s three viable symphonies, two violin concertos, and her piano concerto.

The most encouraging development for her gaining wider appreciation is the recent acquisition by G. Schirmer of her catalog of more than 300 published and yet-to-be published works. Again, Ross puts into appropriate perspective what we can look forward to:

The anachronisms in Florence Price’s music are, in the end, no flaw. Listening to her, I have the uncanny sense of hearing the symphonies and operas that women and African-Americans were all but barred from writing during the Romantic heyday, when the busts on the piano were being carved. She seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals. Frederick Douglass, in his great speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” said, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” In music, too, we can use the past to build a less imperfect world.

Marquese Carter, a doctoral student at Indiana University, and heir apparent to Rae Linda Brown observed in a 2018 interview,“Florence Price is a representation in music of what it means to be a black artistliving within a white canon and trying to work within the classical realm.” He adds, “How do we, through that, create a sound that sounds our culture, sounds our experience, sounds our embodied lives?”

Childhood Friend
Florence Price was eight when William Grant Still was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. A partner in a grocery store, his bandleader father died before Still’s first birthday. His mother taught English for more than three decades, and his stepfather nurtured the boy’s musical interest with concerts, operettas, and RCA recordings. Spirituals sung by his maternal grandmother grounded him in Black culture on a weekly basis. By 1910, he was studying violin with a teacher, and soon after taught himself the viola, cello, and double bass. Soon he branched out to the winds learning oboe, clarinet and saxophone. To please his mother, Still enrolled in Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio to pursue a Science degree program. Nearby Oberlin Conservatory offered a scholarship to study with the likes of Chadwick and the leader of the avant-garde Edgard Varese, who exerted a liberating influence, but one Still would have to shake off to find his voice.

Just as it was ending, Still joined the navy to battle in WWI. For three years he worked for WC Handy, the father of the blues, as an arranger. The most significant fruit of his compositional labors was an orchestra suite Africa, not as he had experienced it but as he imagined it. The work was premiered October 24, 1930, in Rochester conducted by Howard Hanson, thus setting the stage, a year later, for his Afro-American Symphony, the first symphony written by a Black American and performed by a leading US orchestra – the Rochester Philharmonic.

As Still describes Africa, which was a sensation with the audience, “An American Negro has formed a concept of the land of his ancestors based largely on its folklore, and influenced by his contact with American civilization. He beholds in his mind’s eye not the Africa of reality but an Africa mirrored in fancy, and radiantly ideal.” He thought it would be his first work to endure, but a publishing foul-up lasted into the 1980s sadly reducing it to a curiosity. The revised edition was performed in 1935 – that nether region between his leaving New York with a Fulbright and gaining his first major Hollywood film arranger credit – Pennies form Heavena 1936 comedy with music starring Bing Crosby. That summer he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. The following winter the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski premiered his Symphony No. 2 in G minor “Song of a New Race,”December 10, 1937. It was a harbinger of a transformation of Black consciousness underway in Los Angeles.

Cutting Contests
Art Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio with cataracts that made him nearly blind. The year was 1890, just between the births of Still and Price. At age sixteen Tatum attended Columbus School for the Blind to learn more about music by using Braille. Classical training followed with a visually impaired pianist. By nineteen he had his own radio show “Arthur Tatum-Toledo’s Blind Pianist” on WSPD. Multiple surgeries improved his one partially sighted eye, but the gains were undone in 1930 by a physical assault.

His ascent to fame happened in a way that would seem extremely unlikely to white musicians, but for Black musicians, just one of the ways available. Since the Twenties, Black pianists competed in home concert showcases that doubled as rent parties. Like the competitive cutting that goes on with ballroom dancing, pianists would “cut” by taking over the piano bench to elaborate on the tune laid down by the displaced player. This was where stride piano first took hold. The cutting contests became larger and more formalized by 1933, when in New York City, making his debut at Morgan’s Bar, Tatum triumphed over the greatest players of the day: Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Willie “The Lion” Smith.

Tatum was totally relaxed and un-histrionic in his playing. His style was very fast, freeing the hands to have a life of their own. His face was calm, bemused, and slightly detached. Having cut these elite pianists decisively, his solo career was launched. 

Ellington followed Tatum’s progress since he first heard him in Toledo. In 1935, Ellington’s band introduced his signature tune In a Sentimental Mood. It is unclear when Tatum set to making his celebrated arrangement of the tune, but he first recorded it in 1948. Midway, with elegant irony, Tatum interpolates a quote from Stephen Foster’s Old Folks at Home (Way Down Upon the Swanee River) written for the Christy Minstrels — a wry critique of minstrelsy and Foster’s pervasive construction of Black life. 

Invasion
Several months after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, joined by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and other Black luminaries, appeared on a CBS broadcast from Columbia Square on Sunset Boulevard, March 30, 1941, called The Negro and National Defense.The show was produced by the National Urban League. 

Never before had an all-black cast appeared on television for a full hour. The Urban League advocated for wartime fairness in factory employment of Black Americans and for equity in the San Pedro and Long Beach shipyards, as well as on the battlefield. Patriotic messages were expressed along with interviews and live music. World heavyweight champion boxer Joe Louis mused on his experience as a factory worker. Elmer Carter, editor of Opportunity: A Journal for Negro Life, strongly decried inequality. The versatile singer and actress Ethel Waters, the first black woman to integrate Broadway's theater district entertained. Contralto Marion Anderson, who hadperformed on the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1939 after being denied a Constitution Hall recital by the Daughtersof the American Revolution, may have eloquently reprisedthe finish of her famous recital, Florence Price’s arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in De Lord.”

Dissonance
In an interview from the same time, Ellington challenged “offensive stereotypes instilled in the American mind by whole centuries of ridicule and degradation.” On behalf of Black society he rejected subservience as a tactic for survival. “Dissonance is our way of life in America.”

On Wilshire Boulevard, just a year earlier, February 29, 1940, the 12th Annual Academy Awards ceremony was held in the Cocoanut Grove ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel. Bob Hope made his debut as its host and Hattie McDaniel beat her co-star Olivia de Havilland as Best Supporting Actress. With her witty and nuanced performance as Mammy in Gone With The Wind, she became the first African-American to win an Academy Award. 

Unsurprisingly, a separate table was set for McDaniel and her escort – athwart the famous grove of arching palm trees at the back of the ballroom. 

Gone With the Wind dominated movie houses everywhere. In an open letter about depictions of Blacks in the film, Carlton Moss, an African-American screenwriter, actor and director of the 1953 documentary Frederick Douglass: The House on Cedar Hill,criticized its stereotypical black portrayals: the "shiftless and dull-witted Pork," the "indolent and thoroughly irresponsible Prissy," Big Sam's "radiant acceptance of slavery," and Mammy’s "constant haranguing and doting on every wish of Scarlett." 

Walter Francis White, the light-skinned leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,NAACP, piled on calling McDaniel an “Uncle Tom.” With Ellingtonian dissonance, she countered, “I would rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one." Opportunity congratulated her success at exposing prejudicial limits. Black audiences, sometimes organized as non-violent rallies, decried the film as insulting, and a “weapon of terror.”After its four year run, Gone With the Windsold close to sixty million tickets, or nearly half the U.S. population at the time, handily becoming the most profitable film. 

Against this background, Ellington devised a response to galvanize the Los Angeles Black community in at ground zero for the issue of segregation. With a grand entertainment at the Mayan Theater with his orchestra in the pit, he would address the powerful forces driving Black migration, and largely put an end to blackface. A song was cut in the first week that underscored the danger of pushing boundaries. “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia (and I’m Going to the U.S.A.)” riled the local KKK Chapter enough to threaten the show with force.

The Green Book listed 224 Black-friendly businesses in Los Angeles in 1941. They offered safety, and for many desperate migrants, a warm meal at the miraculous Clifton’s Cafeteria. Of course, when traveling professionally to Los Angeles, or for short and extended stays, Black entertainers, ballplayers, intellectuals and dignitaries could lodge in only one place – the striking Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. 

In brick and brownstone, an exasperated Black dentist built a Moorish art deco hotel with 115 rooms. Two years after it opened, the hotel changed owners and was renamed for the poet, novelist, and playwrightPaul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Although associated with Maya Angelou, it was Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” set to music by Price, that introduced the famous phrase that could well have describe Price herself: “But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings/I know why the caged bird sings,”

Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald stayed there. Some of them performed next door at Club Alabam and patronized the adjacent beauty parlor and liquor store. Paul Robeson, the actor and political firebrand, stayed there. W.E.B. DuBois, the great sociologist, civil rights activist, founder of the NAACP, and the first African American to receive a doctorate, stayed there. That year the Dunbar was the undisputed epicenter of Black cultural life and, not coincidentally, the Dunbar was Duke Ellington’s home base. He often composed his show in the bathtub after a breakfast of fresh peaches.

Jump for Joy was a turning point in Ellington’s merger of music and activism. The legendary review was not well documented – only a soundie of Ivie Anderson singing, “I’ve Got it Bad (and That’s Ain’t Good)” with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. No complete score survived as it was constantly in flux, no film was shot, despite 101 performances, and lines out the door. The few song recordings were affected by wartime restrictions, but worst of all for its legacy, the 60-member show didn’t make it to Broadway. Some powerfully worded songs do survive and a vein of oral history was opened up in the Black community and liberal white Hollywood that sustained Ellington’s message of radical pride.

 Jump for Joy closed at the end of September, just two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would cast the die for war with America. Ellington’s self-possession, elegance and rectitude provided a central focus for preparation

In Benjamin Cawthra’s extensively footnoted article “Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joyand the Fight For Equality in Wartime Los Angles” (Southern California Quarterly, Spring 2016, Volume 98, No 1; Historical Society of Southern California) to which these notes are indebted, Cawthra reveals that the true and lasting legacy of Jump for Joy, musically speaking, is the piano rhapsody New World A-Comin’:

 “In 1943, Ellington composed a long-form work that debuted at Carnegie Hall called New World A-Comin’, named for Roi Ottley’s book, a recent work of social criticism that had impressed the maestro. ‘I visualized this new world as a place in the distant future where there would be no war,’ Ellington later recalled, ‘no greed, no categorization, no nonbelievers, where love was unconditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God.’” 

Over the years, Ellington’s brilliant piano solo would take on various orchestral garbs, and navigate changing concertante balances. The great arranger Luther Henderson first took on orchestrating New World A-Comin’ for symphonic orchestra. Maurice Peress scaled his orchestration to the leaner American Composer’s Orchestra, with the hope that the work would enter the symphonic repertoire. That may yet happen, but arranger/conductor/pianist Scott Dunn, who had reconstructed the Vernon Duke Piano Concerto and played its premiere at Carnegie Hall, agreed with Jacaranda, that an arrangement for an ensemble of fourteen players might better meet the economic needs of progressive curators eager to program a major concert work by Ellington. 

“Ellington's ambitions to write music that spoke to Negro history and present-day political concerns were a significant element in the discussion surrounding his early 1940s period” writes Cawthra. “While Ellington had been put on the defensive in the Jazz press about whether his orchestra’s evolving music was truly ‘jazz’ – that is, whether it was true enough to the music’s ‘folk’ roots – discerning black listeners agreed with Ellington that it was a moot point.” Today, listeners of all sorts can agree, as the classical music framework has changed enough to embrace Ellington’s ambitions to defy categorization.

An Immigrant’s Son
Arriving from Jamaica, George Walker’s father pursued medicine at Temple University and became a practicing physician while his mother would nurture the musical talent – apparent at age 5 – of their boy, George Theophilus (sharing a middle name with Mozart) born in Washington DC in 1922. While still attending Dunbar High School, Walker studied at Howard University that hosted his first piano recital at age 14. Oberlin Conservatory immediately enrolled him in piano and organ studies. By age 17 he was organist for the Oberlin College Graduate School of theology. Curtis Institute of Music enrolled Walker, who had graduated highest in his class, to study piano with Rudolf Serkin, as well as the chamber music courses with William Primrose and Gregor Piatigorsky, and composition with Samuel Barber’s teacher. 

Walker’s 1945 New York recital debut at Town Hall was the first appearance of a Black instrumentalist in the prestigious venue. Two weeks later, he performed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy

The String Quartet No 1 followed the next year. Like Barber’s Adagio from his string quartet, Walker’s affecting second movement lent itself to an arrangement for string orchestra namedLyric. Also, like Barber’s Adagio for strings, the popularity of Lyric overshadowed the rest of Walker’s substantial body of work until fifty years later. In 1996, Lilacs for voice and orchestra received the first Pulitzer Prize bestowed upon a Black composer. Seiji Ozawa conducted soprano Faye Robinson singing poetry of Walt Whitman, accompanied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

George Walker died this summer in July at age 97. The original 1946 quartet version of Lyric is performed tonight in his memory.

Ennanga
Like his suite Africa twenty years earlier, William Grant Still was inspired more by the idea of an African harp, than what limited ethnomusicology could provide a composer to hear in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s. The ennanga is a Ugandan harp that strongly resembles ancient Egyptian harps, their bowed shapes strung across the void with up to eight strings. The strings have tiny noise-makers attached to color the sound – a rhythmic buzz intended to blend with the male singing voice. 

Had Still been given access to the recordings, videos, and photos available today, he might have been even more inspired by the sound of the 23-string African Kora harp, with its tall neck, gigantic resonator and tuneful bright metallic sound. Interestingly, Ennanga, the harp sextet (harp, piano and string quartet) he composed in 1956 sites his imagination closer to the kora sound’s alternating rhapsodic lushness and rhythmic liveliness in an evocative way that seems wholly singular. Certainly, the dominance of French chamber music for the harp could be renewed by the energy and drive of Ennanga.

Your Majesty
In the postwar years following Jump for Joy, Ellington toured most of Western Europe in 1950, with the orchestra playing 74 dates over 77 days. That year, Harlem, perhaps his most successful quasi-classical tone poem, was in the works. The clarity of the piano writing and exuberance of the orchestra interruptions in New World A-Comin,’ steeped in Southern California sensuality, was countered by a brash complexity that evolves from chaos to stride with emphatic confidence. Ellington was gaining fans in high places. He eventually presented President Harry Truman, a music lover, with the score to Harlem.

Postwar economics and changing tastes were making tours by jazz orchestras seem outmoded. Yet in 1952, the late André Previn said, "You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, Oh, yes, that's done like this. But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is!" This inherent mystery and elusive quality was part of what kept people coming back. That being said, sometimes a gem of such simple inspiration emerges from his inspired muddles. Such is the centerpiece of The Queen’s Suite – “Single Petal of a Rose.”

Because of commodious tour dates, Ellington was available for the 100 Jubilee of Leeds Hall and a reception for the occasion by Queen Elizabeth. There remain marvelous photos of his preening in the mirror beforehand, and the electric flirtation that seems to spark between them after much anticipation. Several years after he presented Her Royal Majesty with a single exclusive pressing of The Queens Suite, Ellington recounts the experience: 

"As a matter of fact I was the last person on line and she [Queen Elizabeth II] was sort of relaxed when she got to me, and we talked about her family, her father King George, her uncle Prince Edward and the Duke of Kent, whom I had an occasion to meet. The Duke of Kent and I used to play four-hands at the piano at night, and Prince Edward was at several parties where we played when we were there in 1933. Then one night, we had to hold the show for him in Liverpool. At another party he sat in on drums…. Then she told me about all the records of mine her father had. Then she asked me when was your first time in England? Oh I said, oh my first time in England was in 1933, way before you were born. She gave me a real American look; very cool man, which I thought was too much. I told her that she was so inspiring that something musical would come out of it. She said she would be listening, so I wrote an album for her."

It would seem that a new world had already come across the pond. Yet in America, the birth pangs of progress, however difficult, resulted first in the landmark unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down laws establishing segregation in public schools as unconstitutional; and then the foundational 1957 Civil Rights Act to ensure that all Americans could exercise their right to vote. When once we were admonished to keep our eyes on the prize, every once in a while granted the rarest of dreams, the flying dream, the prizes have now multiplied to such a degree that we must look for and work for a new world a-comin’.    

PATRICK SCOTT© 2019

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Sunday, February 3
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Premonition I

String Quartet No. 2 “From the Monkey Mountains” (1925) - Pavel Haas (1899-1944)
String Quartet No. 2 (1998) - Georg Friedrich Haas (b.1953)
String Quartet No. 3 “The Hunt” (2003) - Jörg Widmann (b. 1973)

Premonition II

Symphony No. 6 “Tragic” (Piano four hands arr. Zemlinsky) (1904/1906) - Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

From where we stand — nearly two decades into the twenty-first century — it is difficult to fathom the world view of a genius who started life in 1860 as the first of only six surviving children among fourteen. Harder yet is to comprehend the many ways his influence would proliferate across that expanse of time including three seemingly random and lesser-known composers: Pavel Haas, Georg Friderich Haas, and Jörg Widmann.

A Forested Park
Linguistically like most local residents, the Mahlers were German speakers within Slavic-speaking Bohemia. Religiously they were modestly observant Ashkenazi Jews in a Catholic stronghold known for the military and silver mines. With the expeditious use of his wife Maria’s dowry, Bernard Mahler pulled his family up out of street peddler poverty, first as a coachman, then as an ambitious innkeeper who would eventually build a distillery and a tavern in what is now called Jihlava in the Czech Republic. Bernard’s overbearing personality clashed with the sensitivity and sickliness of his perpetually pregnant wife. The boy often escaped the noisy, stifling, and argumentative atmosphere to a forested park nearby.

It has been said that child-sized coffins were as common-place in the Mahler household as any piece of furniture. Unique, however, was the piano — perhaps the only asset of any value his humble grandparents left behind. At age four, Mahler discovered the instrument stashed in the attic. Six years later, the same year that the German Empire was established — his first public performance was given in the town’s gothic-inspired Municipal Hall. Iglau, the German name for Jihlava, was founded in 1100 AD near a river separating Moravia and Bohemia — now a city of over 50,000. Iglau was the word for the hedgehog adorning the town’s medieval coat-of-arms.

Red Accessories
Musically, Iglau was also a border town. Gypsy music had deeper roots than the region’s famed 13th century St. Wenceslas Chorale, but their lack of a written cultural history doomed the Gypsies to persecution. They had been liberated from Romanian slavery in 1856, and so became a marginal and transient part of the regional culture at the time of Mahler’s birth. The ever present military bands with their trumpeting marches, the ethnic street ensembles with their home made instruments and roving folk singers, the fiddle quartets, a smattering of Jewish Klezmer music, rousing tavern songs, and peasant women dancing the polka and furiant with their elaborately ornamented headpieces and vivid red accessories made an enormous impression on Mahler.

Within this intensely musical milieu, Mahler’s public validation as a young artist grafted onto the model of his father’s ambition, drove the boy past a lackluster academicstint in Prague to enrollment in the Vienna Conservatory at age fifteen. He doubled down on piano studies and played percussion in the conservatory’s orchestras. There he met the would-be song composer Hugo Wolf, a passionate fellow admirer of Anton Bruckner, who embodied Wagnerism in a battle pitting Wagner against Brahms. 

Together, Wolf and Mahler attended the calamitous premiere of Bruckner’s Wagner-drenched Third Symphony, conducted by the hapless composer and church organist as a last minute substitute. To console their self-doubting professor — a most unlikely representative of the avant-garde – Mahler and Wolf presented Bruckner with their piano four hands arrangement of the 1877 symphony. 

Mahler left the Vienna Conservatory at age eighteen barely qualifying to enroll at the University of Vienna, where he lasted just a year. He read Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, among the German philosophers Wagner embraced, and like Wagner was interested in the emerging German Nationalism. 

Das Klagende Lied (The Song of Lamentation, 1880), employing a large chorus, massive orchestra, offstage band, and six soloists, was Mahler’s first important work. While stunningly original, the cantata drew from Liszt’s Faust and Dante symphonies, as well as the Bavarian composers Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana. The Brothers Grimm-derived fairy tale of fratricide resonated with the composer’s survivor guilt over the 1874 death of his talented younger brother Ernst. While operatic in a way possible only after hearing Wagner’s music dramas, this fast–moving story bore all the hallmarks of Mahler’s style, his voice, and the promise of worlds to come.

Wagner
Mahler’s early conducting ambitions were unrewarded as he failed to become Hans von Bülow’s assistant in 1884,a year after Wagner’s death. Von Bülow had married Liszt’s daughter Cosima before she left him for Wagner. The first important conducting assignment Mahler secured was a six-year contract with the Leipzig Opera, a post he shared with the highly competitive Artur Nikisch, five years his senior. A battle over conducting duties for the new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle was resolvedwhen the Hungarian maestro became ill. Mahler’s triumph was total except with his musicians. Long rehearsals and strictly enforced standards became a source of tension that dogged the rest of his career.

In Hungary, the First Symphony “Titan” would be unfavorably premiered in 1889. The title related to a four-volume novel (1800-03) of the same name by Jean Paul. The beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth can be heard in the first movement’s opening as though to signal Mahler’s sense of his own confident destiny. What would ultimately serveas the symphony’s third movement was inspired by a well-known childhood fable describing a funeral march for a hunter by all the animals upon which he preyed. 

The volcanic final movement firmly established Mahler’s originality, not that of newness per se but through ingenious recombination. His whirlwind of childhood sources would underpin Mahler’s mastery of the canon: Beethoven’s striving formal innovations, Schubert’s intimacy and lyricism, the weight and pathos of Brahms, the vivid tone painting and drama of Liszt, as well as Bruckner’s magisterial synthesis of Wagner. Furthermore, the Bohemian national spirit of Smetana and Dvorak was validated and absorbed by Mahler.

The 1889 landmark year of his first symphony was again clouded by tragedy. Between February and October both parents and his oldest sister died, leaving Mahler’s four younger brothers and sisters solely in his care. He erected gravestones in Iglau and never returned. Two years later, Mahler accepted the music directorship of the opera house in Hamburg, where von Bulow directed the symphony orchestra. The elder conductor’s reputation for bitterness softened as their friendship grew. He marveled at Mahler’s originality upon hearing him play on the piano Totenfeier (Funeral Rites), a symphonic poem that would eventually become the first movement of his next symphony. Confounded by the music, von Bulow was said to have compared Totenfeier to Tristan und Isoldeas the latter to a Haydn symphony! When the older man’s health failed Mahler was increasingly called upon to substitute at the Hamburg podium. Von Bulow’s death in 1894 was a devastating blow with a silver lining.

Pinnacle
The ultimate position — an appointment available only to a Christian — would loom large. The germinating Second Symphony provided a vehicle to express Mahler’s affinity for Catholic mysticism. After the opening Toten-feier movement, a leisurely Andante nostalgically looks back to happier times. The darkly ironic scherzo was based upon Mahler’s concurrent song setting of “Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes” before the penultimate movement, an alto solo setting of Urlicht (Primal Light). Mahler’s informal credo was drawn from The Youth’s Magic Horn, a collection of folk materials so widely admired that Goethe suggested it be a companion to The Holy Bible in every home. How to finish the work remained obscure.

Upon hearing Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Die Auferstehung (Resurrection), an ode recited at von Bulow’s funeral, Mahler wrote to a friend explaining the genesis of the final movement, “It struck me like lightning, this thing, and everything was revealed to me clear in my mind! It was the flash that all creative artists wait for – ‘conceiving by the holy ghost’.” Klopstock was primarily known for the epic poem The Messiah. Mahler set the poet’s first stanzas and added his own verses expressing thoughts about redemption and rebirth. 

The 1895 premiere of the “Resurrection“ Symphony brought Mahler fame and fortune, and helped him climb socially. However, a law forbade any Jew from holding that critically important position — Director of the Imperial Opera of Vienna. Conversion then to Catholicism was inescapable. In 1897 Brahms would die, the Second symphony would be published, his sister Justine and he would be baptized in Hamburg, and Mahler would achieve the pinnacle of his conducting career.

Using miraculously unbalanced movement structures,the Third and Fourth Symphonies continued Mahler’s Wunderhorn obsession while alternating Pantheistic nature worship with text settings of Nietzsche, and cataclysmic perorations with childlike visions of heaven. 

The Fifth Symphony shifted to a more cosmopolitan and program-free symphonic argument in four more traditionally balanced movements generally moving from dark to light.The Sixth symphony achieved an even greater thematic integration with powerful emotions deeply wedded to a case for the human condition as tragic — relieved fleetingly by transcendent love. 

Femme Fatale
The term femme fatale suited Alma Schindler like no other. Raised Roman Catholic, she was twenty-three, pregnant, and two decades younger than Mahler when they married in 1902. Her affair with the thirty-year-old composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (her composition teacher, 1871-1942) was two years in the past, as was a dalliance with the forty-eight-year-old theatre director Max Burckhard. 

Alma was raised among artists. She was thirteen when her father Emil Schindler, a renowned landscape, painter died. Her dubiously faithful mother promptly married her husband’s former student, the painter Carl Moll, a contemporary of Mahler. Alma receiving her first kiss from the painter Gustav Klimt, who was also Mahler’s age. Klimt, famous for the painting The Kiss, and the contested Woman in Gold, established the Vienna Secession movement with Moll, who would later become a Nazi sympathizer only to end his own life as the Third Reich collapsed. 

The marriage imposed a total curtailment of Alma’s compositional ambitions. But, limiting her self-expression exacted a price that Mahler would regret. She flirted with the composer Hans Pfitzner and spent occasional afternoons making music with her former lover Zemlinsky. 

Mahler’s unrelenting life on the podium was fraught with management disputes, musicians’ threats, attacks by the critics, vicious caricatures in the press, and grueling rehearsal schedules. Furthermore, Alma's need to be the center of attention and Mahler’s need for quiet and predictability to relax between performances, or compose during the summers, would erode the marriage further. 

None of that seemed to be so in the summer of 1903 when Mahler began work on the Sixth Symphony in a bucolic lakeside setting. He enjoyed prosperity, escalating career successes, and an apparently happy home life married to the most beautiful woman in Vienna with a second child on the way. During work on the symphony, Mahler completed his interrupted song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). 

Alma was confounded that he hadn’t set the cycle permanently aside when they married. She feared Mahler was tempting fate by setting more of Friedrich Ruckert’s (1788-1866) private poems written when he was 46 after the death of his two childrenfrom scarlet fever. These 428 poems were a process for coping with his fate and not intended for the public. Their outpouring of grief attempted to resuscitate his loved ones while consumed by anguish and the struggle for solace. Nonetheless, they were printed in 1871, five years after Ruckert’s death, and found a reader inextricably drawn to their pathos.

Tragic
Several important precursors cannot have been overlooked by Mahler when eventually choosing this subtitle “Tragic.” The anguished introduction of Schubert’s 1816 Fourth “Tragic” Symphony in C minor — which waited to 1849 for a premiere — offers some shocking harmonic modulations for its time. The propulsive rhythms that follow are always infused by worry and agitation. In capable hands, the darker colors  of the minor key can sustain a hovering mood of angst despite the otherwise jovial rhythms throughout. The Brahms Tragic Overture (1880) ups the dramatic ante and deepens the emotional affect.

Two penetrating D minor chords start a stormy sonata structure in a key associated with sadness. The often-jagged journey ends with glowering horns, biting trombones, emphatic tympani, and turbulent strings, yet Brahms retains the distance of an overture unattached to a drama.

In both cases the “tragic” appellation relates more to a set of feelings associated with material from which romantic age composers had to chose, and less from personal motivations or narrative intent. By 1904, Mahler was given the empyrean distance and had experienced tragedy so often and so intensely that his Sixth “Tragic” Symphony encompassed every historical, circumstantial and personal meaning of the word. 

In addition to teaching private composition students, Zemlinsky supported himself in the pit of Viennese Operetta houses as conductor, and at the new Schwarzwald School for mostly privileged Jewish girls. His affair with Alma began in 1900. She espoused a common and pervasive form of anti-Semitism, yet was drawn to the genius of Jewish intellectuals. Zemlinsky’s immediatefamily tree included Catholic, Jewish and Muslim branches that were braided together when Zemlinsky’s parents converted to Judaism, raising their son as Jewish. He did not pass muster with Alma’s social circle due to his unfortunate physical appearance, and more importantly his undistinguished standing, despite the championship of Brahms and his publisher for Zemlinsky’s early compositions. 

Alma broke it off and quickly married Mahler. In 1904 Schoenberg founded the Society of Creative Composers with Zemlinsky. Mahler underwrote it to promote contemporary music in Vienna. It follows that creating a piano four hands transcription of the newly composed Sixth Symphony would fall to Zemlinsky, a task he embraced in 1905 with enthusiasm and skill, as attested to Alban Berg, who praised its playability.

Mahler gave the work its premiere in 1906 with the scherzo as the second movement. An influential voice chided Mahler for the similarity of the materials and the mirror-like transition from the Allegro to the scherzo. In the next performance he reversed inner movements, thus beginning a controversy that lasts to this day. The relentlessly energetic opening march is barely relieved by rushes of passion that cannot be mistaken for anything but Mahler’s besotted love for Alma. The andante is dedicated to her and unfolds as one of his most beautiful creations. The scherzo acts as a sardonic laboratory where the materials for the opening march and other themes are developed and parodied on the xylophone — a nod to the skeletal effects in Danse Macabre (1874) by Camille Saint Saens,the first symphonic appearance of the instrument — and the only usage of the instrument in a Mahler score.

The symphony’s other signature controversy rises from Mahler’s ambivalence about how many blows of fate are to be rendered by the hammer, a large box contraption invented for the sole use of the Sixth Symphony. He specifies a very loud non-metallic whack he compared to a huge axe striking a piece of wood. Alma’s superstitions extended to a later interpretation of blows of fate that began soon after the symphony had its premiere.

Three Blows
After five months of relentless anti-Semitic harassment by the Viennese press and savage criticism of the Sixth Symphony’s Vienna premiere in January, Mahler was forced from his position as director of the Vienna Imperial Opera in May of 1907. After two months of treatment and an emergency tracheotomy, Maria Anna, nicknamed “Putzi,” the couple’s first child and Mahler’s favorite, died of diphtheria: a complication of Scarlet fever on July 12, 1907. Alma collapsed after the funeral. While seeking medical attention, the doctor also examined Mahler and found a faulty heart valve, a murmur to which Alma adopted a morbidly fatalistic attitude. Mahler’s termination was finalized on December 1, 1907. Amidst bushels of flowers, eight days later Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Anton Webern, and Klimt bid farewell to the Mahlers as they boarded the Orient Express for Paris.

Regardless of his religio-philosophical interests, and conversion to Catholicism, Mahler did not just “change coats” as he once casually remarked. The press made sure that his Jewish identity was very public, and although this cost him the directorship of the Vienna Imperial Opera, and likely shortened his life, Michael Haas, in his book Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale University Press, 2013) observes: 

“Mahler was the musical personality who would provide hundreds of twentieth-century Jewish composers — whether religious or not — with the means to do more than just assimilate into Austro-German musical life. He broke down the barriers that subsequently allowed younger Jewish composers to surge forward with their own ideas and agendas. They no longer had to accept the conditions tacitly demanded by the unwelcoming environment of the nineteenth century. Mahler…had not only broken with previous conventions, but had, with his highly individual approach to the Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition, placed himself in the pantheon of German Masters, uniting the ‘old’ and ‘new’ German schools.”

First Blow
One such Jewish composer was Pavel Haas. Growing up in Brno Moravia, Haas became the most distinguished student of Leos Janácek (1854-1928) at a time when Janacek was spectacularly productive near the end of his life. During those two years of Masterclasses by Janácek 1921-23, the 20th century Czech genius would compose two operas, Katya Kabanováand Cunning Little Vixen, as well as String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata.” In the remaining five years of Janácek’s life, a companion chamber music masterpiece Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters,” as well as the great operas The Makropoulos Affair and From the House of the dead, and the singular masterpieces Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass.

How Janacek found time to teach Haas, and how Haas was able to genuinely reflect his master’s style while striking out in a remarkable new direction that embraced the Jazz Age is an impressive synchronicity. Carl Jung’s concept of non-causal connectivity, first floated in the early 1920s, may be a stretch as applied to two composers nearly fifty years apart in age pioneering new string quartets, but its worth contemplating.

Haas’s Quartet No 2 “From the Monkey Mountains” was apparently also influenced by Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat (1917), a revolutionary chamber ensemble work written in neutral Switzerland, but influenced by the Harlem Hellfighters who toured Europe during World War I performing Jazz.  The subtitle refers to a tourist destination in the Moravian Highlands, now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Steeped in the special Czech synthesis of language, folk sources and distinctive pictorialism, the quartet’s first three movements Andante-Landscape; Andante-Coach, Coachman and Horse, and Largo-The Moon and I seem to bloom directly from Janácek’s world, however the Vivace Wild Night takes us to a daring new place with little or no precedent in chamber music. By allowing a drummer to provide percussion licks with the bare minimum of specified notation as part of a string quartet texture, the Brno audience was fairly appalled and utterly resistant. The composer was urged to recant and publish without the trap set part, and so he did. Fortunately the part was restored over six decades later and it is slowly emerging into the public sphere.

Of course Pavel Haas — taking chances in the Weimar Republic bubble of daring creativity and optimism — was among his namesake author’s paragons of the unassimilated Jewish composer. He was one among many who would be rounded up to serve out his meager if valiant creative life in Terezin before being executed in Auschwitz.

Blow Two
Georg Friedrich Haas, a non-Jewish Austrian composer, grew up in an Alpine ski resort area that attracts hikers, mountain bikers and the kind of winter sports enthusiasts one might long ago have associated with the Nazi ideal of Aryan culture. He has maintained a complex relationship with musical modernity and cultural politics. Dark Dreams was composed for the Berlin Philharmonic after moving to New York in 2013. It is, among other things, a meditation on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Perhaps the contract Mahler signed with The New York Philharmonic between his ouster form the Vienna Opera and the death of his child should be considered a lifeline in the layers of meaning that link Dark Dreams with Mahler’s last year sand his flirtation with the New World.

The Second Quartet (1998) of Haas is an exemplar of spectral music grounded in computer analysis of sound color produced by acoustic instruments performing micro-intervals of the overtone series. This work seems to have culminated a period of seeking purity of experience through live produced sound in traditional settings in Haas’ growing and prolific output. Does a work that is so closely analogous to perceptual art of the 1970’s have an emotional effect?

In contrast, the Third String Quartet (2001) must be performed in absolute darkness demanding equal if different challenges of both the players and the audience. With this quartet, Haas added perception to his compositional quiver. It has proven to generate persistent and lasting interest. Performances are always sold out.

The Concerto for Four Alphorns and Orchestra (2014) was heard not long ago at the LA Phil. It requires specialists on those Brobdingnagian instruments resting their bells many feet away from the players elevated on stair units. The effect is enchantingly different and mesmerizing to look at. A year later he responded to the choking death of Eric Garner, a poor cigarette vendor in New York with a trumpet solo called I Can’t Breathe. Neither the audiencenor the critics can hear it as just another solo chamberwork. Yet, he has moved on from politics in music.

In the last several years Haas came out as a person whose sexuality is rooted in BDSM (Bondage and Submission), previously the source of considerable shame. Mollena William-Haas, a very public Black American writer, actor and former Miss Leather, is his fourth wife and muse. Since 2015, shame is no longer hidden or real. Haas’ newfound freedom and approach to life and creativity has changed. Among his stated goals is "to articulate a human being's emotions and states of the soul in such a way that other human beings can embrace these emotions and states of the soul as their own." Like his contemporaries in German painting, Haas now exemplifies Mahler’s definition of originality — not that of newness, per se, but through standing in history as an act of ingenious recombination.

Blow Three
Jörg Widmann, the youngest of these various masters, is poised to make his mark in this arena of deep history. Despite mixed reviews of the opening performance and subsequent ECM 2-disc release, including 300 performers, Widmann was the talk of Berlin and Hamburg when his massive 2017 cantata Arche (Ark) was commissioned by Kent Nagano for the new Elbphilharmonie Hall in Hamburg.The former principal clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic thinks and works in large forms. His Hunting Quartet is the centerpiece in a cycle of five string quartets intended to be performed as an evening long work. The “Hunt”quartet is made of immediately accessible materials and its theatricality propels it to the rank of highly memorable works in the genre. That it has a predecessor in the Joseph Haydn String Quartet No. 17 “The Hunt” and joins a class of 18th century compositions themed with hunting (Haydn wrote Symphony No. 73 “La Chasse” as well) only adds to the curiosity factor and has made it individdually programmable and more popular than its mates.

Like Pavel Haas, Widmann has embraced the freedom to give string quartets an increased theatricality at odds with the purism associated with the core and dominant forms of chamber music in contraposition to how Georg Friedrich Haas has pushed purity to a new extreme.

If Mahler can be associated with fin de siècle conditions that led to WWI, as Pavel Haas reflects Weimar Republic “Entartete Musik”, the holocaust and WWII, Georg Friedrich Haas emerged across the last decades of the Cold War and the unmasking of Austrian diplomat and President Kurt Waldheim as, at least, a Nazi sympathizer, it falls to the timing of Widmann’s 2003 “Hunt quartet” to resonate with 9/11, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2019

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November 2, 2018
Wende Museum of the Cold War, Culver City

Piano Sonata No. 2 (1953) - Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)
Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 5, Op. 53 (1953) - Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996)
String Quartet No. 2 “Quasi una Fantasia” Op. 64 (1991) - Henryk Górecki (1933-2010)

After decades of globetrotting celebrity, concert pianist and composer Sergei Prokofiev’s (1891-1953) unquenchable needto be recognized as a bona fide Soviet artist eventually brought him back home, once and for all, to compete with punishing mediocrity, and accommodate the soul-killing machinations of the Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. Sadly, homesickness would prove fatal – but only after Prokofiev’s total degradation. 

On February 20, 1948, Stalin had the composer’s estranged Spanish-born wife Lina kidnapped. Betrayed by a friend, the former singer was abducted by car and taken to a prison where she was accused of spying, sentenced to twenty years in a forced labor camp, then summarily sent to Siberia never to see her husband again.Their sons Sviatoslav and Oleg witnessed the all-night ransacking of her apartment justified as a search for evidence. After it was over the young men walked eleven miles across black ice to their father’s home. Stalin soon publicly attacked him for “anti-democratic” formalism. A few years later, the composer of the ballet Romeo and Juliet and Fifth Symphony was branded an enemy of the people, his support constricted. Prokofiev’s life would end at age 61 with a cosmic cadence. 

On March 5, 1953, the celebrated artist died in an unheated apartment less than an hour before Stalin. They both suffered massive brain hemorrhages, but the extinguishing of Prokofiev’s lonely candle was utterly eclipsed by Soviet spectacle. Some 100 people were crushed to death in the surge to view Stalin’s body over three days.

Prokofiev’s funeral drew some forty close friends. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter placed a pine branch on his modest coffin – not a single flower could be found in Moscow. 

How then does this striking moment in history bear upon the three Polish composers featured tonight? 

To help inaugurate Music at the Wende Jacaranda selected Poland for its pivotal Cold War position, and for the historic importance of music in its cultural life and national identity. The 1945 Yalta Conference gave Poland to the Soviet Union. Poland’s position– west of the USSR, east of Germany, and ringed by the Satellite States – helped further the Cold War simply by existing where it did. Its borders were redrawn and its land mass reduced by twenty percent. 

Despite allied promises, Yalta foreclosed on democratic elections for more than four decades. The name Polish People's Republic was imposed by the 1952 Constitution, based on the 1936 Soviet model. Poland became a member of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Five of the most famous Nazi extermination camps were located in Poland, where about three million Polish Jews were killed.

The musical moods tonight range from agitated, defiant and brilliantly virtuosic to serenely mournful and intensely brooding, rapturous. The time frame of the concert is defined by the death of Stalin, and the final ceremonial dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, July 1, 1991, signifying the official end of the Cold War. While the three works on the program drew cultural breath from such epochal moments in Warsaw, Moscow and Katowice, they also resonate with a tenacious humanity that speaks to us today.

Song of Stones is a tribute to all artists challenged by conflict, constrained by bureaucracy, and confounded by absurdly jagged policy shifts from authoritarian whims. 

Weeks before Stalin’s death, the Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, age 34, was swept into the “Doctor’s Plot,” a trumped-up anti-Semitic purge emanating from Stalin’s paranoia. Weinberg’s uncle-by-marriage was Myron Vovsi, Stalin’s personal physician cast as a conspirator and fraudulently linked to the 1948 death of Andrei Zhdanov, the Minister of Culture. Furthermore, Weinberg’s father-in-law Solomon Mikhoels, the most famous Soviet Jewish actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, was murdered in 1948 on Stalin’s command as a "well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist.” 

On the day Stalin died, the Polish city of Katowice, a tragic pawn inthe struggle between Germany and the USSR – and future home of Henryk Górecki – was renamed Stalinogród. The Shostakovichs and Weinbergs soon celebrated the rapid unraveling of the sham “Doctors Plot” by burning the power of attorney papers previously drawn up to protect the children in the event they were killed in a camp, or in a faked car accident. How close to that fate Weinberg came is the subject of ongoing research.

The Nazis burned his entire family alive during the 1939 invasion of Warsaw. The close friendship with Shostakovich (1906-1975) began after Weinberg sent the score to his First Symphony to the great composer who was impressed enough to pull strings for him. Weinberg moved to Moscow in 1943 the year that Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony Op. 65 was composed at lightning speed in the summer and quickly premiered in the autumn – such was the anticipation after his Leningrad Symphony became an international propaganda sensation. The British conductor Mark Wigglesworth describes the official reaction: 

“By the end of the war, the work was effectively withdrawn from the repertoire and in 1948 it was officially censored for its ‘unrelieved gloom’, and singled out for attack by Andrei Zhdanov…He declared that it was ‘not a musical work at all…It is repulsive and ultra individualist. The music is like a piercing dentist’s drill, a musical gas chamber, thesort the Gestapo used.’ The scores were ordered to be recycled to save paper and all recordings of performances were destroyed.”

Wigglesworth admires the consistenttruth and meaning of Shostakovich’s intentions: “The piece is inflated, mundane and chaotic at times. But this was intentional. This was Shostakovich’s view of the world.” By 1943 his sorrow was complicated and exhausted.

Winston Churchill was invited to Missouri after he lost his position as British Prime Minister. President Truman was with him on the podium. The incendiary “Iron Curtain Speech” provoked Stalin and offered a predicate for the Cold War. It was March 5, 1946 – exactly seven years before to Stalin’s death. Soon the U.S. diplomatic policy of Eastern Bloc containment escalated tensions between the Soviet Union with its Satellite States, and the U.S. with its European allies making up the Western bloc. 

The resulting conflict, fought with proxy wars for forty-five years, was first established in a telegram from the Moscow Embassy responding to U.S. concerns that the Soviets were refusing to endorse the newly formed World Bank and International Monetary Fund. 

In his fateful telegram George Kennan, the U.S. Embassy Chargé d’Affaires, characterized the Soviets as "impervious to the logic of reason [and] highly sensitive to the logic of force.” He found them inherently weak but doggedly aggressive. A realpolitik attitude of friendly cooperation by the U.S. State Department to maintain a balance of power tempered Kennan’s cynicism. Using a pseudonym, Kennan’s long and detailed telegram was published by “Mr. X” in Foreign Affairs magazine in summer 1947. Given the complexity of his analysis, Kennan would later see fulfilled its potential for misinterpretation Nonetheless, he identified salient characteristics of the USSR that still hold true today for post-Cold War Russia – some strikingly relevant. 

Kennan’s key concepts included: that the USSR is perpetually at war with capitalism; that left-wing non-communist groups are more dangerous to the Soviet States than conventional laissez fairecapitalism; that Soviet aggression is rooted in Russian insecurity, nationalism and neurosis; that a culture of self-perpetuating unreality is fostered by the system of government itself; and, that the USSR’s intelligence capacity mustalways be attuned to “diseased tissue” wherever they found it the world for their ideology to succeed.

By 1953, Warsaw was largely rebuilt from almost total devastation that started with the 1939 invasion. The Germans escalated the damage after the infamous failed Jewish revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in spring of 1943. The even larger Warsaw Uprising of Operation Tempest caused massive loss of life and property destruction the following summer. Stalin withheld his allied support to allow the Germans to vanquish the Poles and raze what would amount to 85% of the city by January. Upwards to 200,000 civilians and some 16,000 resistance fighters were killed in mass executions. In 1945, as the bleakest possible landscape remained, the Allied Forces considered forsaking the city and building a new capital in Lodz about 75 miles south-west of Warsaw. Uniquely, Warsaw was painstakingly reconstructed instead – not rebuilt in the prevailing manner – in just seven years with private funds administered by the stateand work powered by hordes of volunteers. 

Grazyna Bacewicz, who organized and performed in underground concerts during the war survived to see Warsaw destroyed and rise again. Like her Romanian near-contemporary Georges Enesco (1881-1955) Bacewicz was a gifted child, becoming a highly esteemed concert violinist and pianist, composer and teacher. She was born in Lodz, Poland’s second largest city and a major textile producer, very densely populated and centrally located. Her musical father Wincenty and older brother (the more radical composer Vytautas Bacevičius (1905-1970)) identified as Lithuanian. He was her first piano and violin teacher. After brief study of philosophy, at age 19 she attended the Warsaw Conservatory to study violin and piano with distinguished teachers, and composition under Kazimierz Sikorski, known today for his arrangement of the Polishnational anthem. She graduated summa cum laude in 1932 and promptly moved to Paris where she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and later violin briefly with the renowned and peripatetic Hungarian virtuoso and pedagogue Carl Flesch in 1934. A scholarship from Ignaz Paderewski made her advancement possible.

That year another budding Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) attended her first composition recital. They remained colleagues and friends. In 1983, he wrote a forward to the first monograph on Bacewicz by Judith Rosen (Grazyna Bacewicz: Her Life and Works, Friends of Polish Music, USC, 1983)). His passion for her music was evident: 

 “When I think of Grażyna Bacewicz, I cannot limit myself to her music alone. I was fortunate to belong to that group of people who were bound with her by virtue of professsional friendship…She was bornwith an incredible wealth of musical talent, which she succeeded to bring to full flourish throughan almost fanatical zeal and unwavering faith in her mission. The intensity of her activities was so great that she managed, in a cruelly shortened life, to give birth to such treasures that any composer of her stature with a considerably longer life span could only envy.”

In 1935 Bacewicz competed in the famous first Wieniawski International Violin Competition receiving an honorable mention. The legendary Russian David Oistrakh took second place while the tragically short-lived Ginette Neveu, a French pupil of Flesch, seized the first prize. Bacewicz and Oistrakh became lifelong friends.Since childhood she composed with regularity, but under Boulanger’s tutelage she found the ideals of neoclassicism suited her strong interest in chamber music and concertante works. In an effort to make it competitive with the esteemed Warsaw Philharmonic, the conductor Grezgorz Fitelberg invited her to become concertmaster of the Polish Radio Orchestra in 1936.

That year she married a physician and amateur pianist Andrzej Biernacki. During her two-year stint with the busy orchestra, Bacewicz learned much about orchestration and was able to perform her own Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1938. Then opportunities arose in her beloved Paris. The École Normale de Musique invitedher to supervise an entire evening devoted to her compositions in the spring of 1939. She returned to Warsaw just months before the September invasion.

Bacewicz initially nursed her wounded sister and spent the ensuing six years performing in private homes and coffee houses to sustain Polish musical life in Warsaw, despite the most daunting conditions. Her family was placed in a transit camp after the large Jewish population of Pruszków was removed and eventually liquidated. Around 650,000 Poles from Warsaw and its suburbs were sorted according to religion class, profession, health, and age. The Nazis quickly “Germanized” Lublin, some hundred milesfrom Warsaw, by increasing its population of Catholics and exterminating its Jews,however the Soviets captured the city in July of 1944. During this period she composed a concert overture, her first symphony, second string quartet, and first violin sonata. Her home became a refuge for the hungry anda sanctuary for Polish culture.

While Warsaw was being cleaned of rubble the family returned. Bacewicz was even more driven to compose. The thrilling and restless Second Violin Concerto was premiered in Lodz October 18, 1946. Her neoclassicism was now more instinctual and improvisatory with a spectacularly muscular cadenza in the first movement, an eloquently lyrical middle movement, and a joyful cadence in D major to finish. That year she travelled again to France to perform her celebrated late countryman Karol Szymanowski’s (1882-1937) Violin Concerto No. 1 with the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoreux at Salle Pleyel in Paris, Paul Kletzki conducting. She was greatly influenced by Szymanowski and hadmet him at the Warsaw Conservatory, where he briefly held a prominent position but ultimately succumbed to tuberculosis.

Rosen has aptly addressed the style of Bacewicz’s music:“Though she personally objected to the categorizing of her music as ‘neoclassic,’ it is difficult to avoid the use of the term in describing her music. Perhaps one reason for her adherence to this basic style can be attributed to the social, cultural and even political climate in which she lived and worked.”

The ensuing period of Soviet governance was a decidedly mixed bag for music. Bacewicz joined the Polish Composers’ Union founded in 1945 to promote Polish music at home and abroad, foster competitions and, eventually to organize the “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music. The government established Polish Music Publishers to control what music could reach the public. Private publishing was outlawed in 1950. On the credit side music performance organizations proliferated beginning in 1948, and music scholarship for folklore emerged aggressively to promote nationalism. 

Soon the doctrine of social realism began to dominate and discriminate against artistic freedom. An early victim was Lutosławski’s First Symphony completed in 1947 but banned for many years. Not surprisingly, the folk-inspired music of Béla Bartók provided a model of how to be self-expressed using an advanced musical language. Again Rosen is eloquent about these conditions: “Since creativity was in part controlled and stifled by outside circumstances, the fact that she composed with any originality at all at this time becomes proof of her innate musical genius. The quantity of creative output reaffirms her unquestionable drive.”

In 1948 she was recognized for her folk-influenced Violin Concerto No. 3,the Olympic Cantata written for the London games, and the Concerto for String Orchestra, her most important work of rigorous neoclassicism. The latter was given the National Prize which included a critically acclaimed performance by the National Symphony in Washington D.C. At the end of 1949 she was awarded the “Warsaw Prize” for artistic achievement, as well as charitable and humanitarian work.These recognitions led to many moreinvitations to serve on international violin competition juries.

Among 57 entries to International Composers Competition in Liège, Belgium, her 1951 String Quartet No.4, received first prize and became a required by the 1953 International String Quartet Competition in Geneva. Along with her Fourth Violin Concertoand Fourth Violin Sonata, the Fourth String Quartet garnered another National Prize for Bacewicz. If the numerological coincidence want strong enough, the Fourth Symphony, her last, was written in 1953. At age 44 Bacewicz was at her height as a pianist when she premiered the Second Piano Sonata in 1953 in Warsaw.

The work immediately excited audiences and artists, but it would be two pianists who kept the flame alive. Nancy Fierro a long-time member of the piano faculty at Mount Saint Mary’s College in LA, like Judith Rosen, was dedicated to women composers. She read about the sonata but cold not find the score originally published by the Soviet government. Fierro reached out to Rosen in 1973. Rosen tells the story: 

“About ten years ago, an American pianist, Sister Nancy Fierro, wanted to add it to her growing performance list of works by wo-men composers. Not being able to obtain it directly from the Polish publisher, she contacted this author, who througha series of circuitous, but fortunate, events I eventually managed to obtain a copy of the score sent by a student who found it hidden in the storage compartment of a piano bench at the Warsaw Conservatory. In the ensuingyears through numerous concerts as well as a recording on the Avant label, Sister Nancy Fierro has helped to popularizethis piece in the United States.” 

The other hero was the controversial but highly acclaimed Polish virtuoso Kyrstian Zimerman hailed for his eloquent interpretation of Chopin (1810-1849). He tells a different story: “I was still a student when I first got to know Grazyna Bacewicz’s works in the 1970s. At the time my repertoire included the Second Piano Sonata. This is a work I continue to perform at my recitals, and I should add that wherever I play it, it always goes down very well with audiences.” For her centenary, on February 5 2009, Zimerman began a series of five concerts devoted exclusively to her music in Lodz – the birthplace of her and Artur Rubenstein! Poland’s largest cities hosted the series after Lodz, in Posnan, Cracow, Katowice, and Warsaw to triumphant responses.

Her prolific production and service to the field did not diminish after 1954 when a car accident broke her pelvis, ribs and injured her head and face. Her mother, sister daughter and husband suffered minor injuries, but Bacewicz remained in a darkened hospital room for a long drawn out recovery. While she had been limiting her performances on the violin and piano to premiering her own work, by 1955 she made a complete break from performing to compose exclusively. Bacewicz’s catalogue of works includes four symphonies, seven violin concertos, a concerto each for piano, and viola, three symphonic works for string orchestra, as well as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion, seven string quartets, two piano quintets, works for solo violin, solo piano, as well as variously scored chamber music.

Due to abiding confusion over his name– Moshe or Moisey Veynberg, Moishe Vainberg, and furthermore his children are known as Wajnberg – Weinberg is only now emerging as the leading Polish-Jewish voice of the Cold War Soviet Union. 

We left him in 1953 burning the power of attorney papers that granted Shostakovich protective custodyover his young daughter in the event of his death. His circle of friends included such leading Russian artists, as composer Nicolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950), the Borodin Quartet, pianist Emil Gilels, violinist Leonid Kogan, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and the conductor Kurt Sanderling. Very little is known about the composition of the Fifth Violin Sonata likely to the low profile he needed to assume at this dangerous time. The opening movement is steeped in Russian feeling reminiscent of Tchaikovsky but with darkness and introspection. The second movement is dramatic, angular and fast with the drive of Shostakovich. The third movement has a character that recalls Prokofiev while alternating playfulness with irony. The fourth movement is a Mahlerian fantasy fitfully spinning themesfrom the earlier movements in a darkly spirited dance.

Weinberg's immense body of instrumental music includes twenty-two symphonies, four chamber symphonies, seventeen string quartets, six violin sonatas, sonatas for piano, solo violin and cello, and many of other chamber works. Weinberg's opera, The Passenger (1968) was given a concert premiere in 2010 and staged the following year by the English National Opera. Although he considered it his most important work, six other operas include Lady Magnesia based upon George Bernard Shaw, The Portrait based upon Nicolai Gogol, and The Idiot based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Given the current state of scholarship on Weinberg it may take several more decades before an understanding of his music is possible.

Lech Wałęsa, an electrician, union leader and populist Solidarity party candidate, founded the movement in 1980 and won the presidency in 1990. Pope John Paul II played an active role in destabilizing Communism in Poland and its neighboring states.He was the first and only Pole and Slav to hold the papacy (1985-2005). The Solidarity movement heralded the eventual collapse of communist regimes and their political parties across Eastern Europe.

Henryk Górecki, a reclusive yet politically active Catholic, was utterly immune to the allures of success, yet the most well-known Polish composer of the 20th century was owing to the chart-topping 1992 Nonesuch recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. 

His masterful Second Quartet (1991) followed the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold War. Its subtitle refers to Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14, better known by its nickname “Moonlight.” His name recognition is now fading almost a decade after his death. Nevertheless he made an unheard of impact. The chart-busting sales of Górecki’s Third Symphony started in 1992 at Santa Monica’s non-profit radio station KCRW during pledge drive. Then station manager Ruth Seymour asked her listeners to sit down, or pull over, dim the lights with a glass of wine and candles, if possible. No member premium before, or since, has created such a sensation. The zeitgeist of the wall coming down, repressive regimes toppling, and serious voices offering consolation with deep knowledge of suffering spoke universally. Gregorian chant and Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) led the way for a new definition of crossover music.

Just as the war came to an end, the twelve-year-old Górecki fell and dislocated his hip. Misdiagnosis led to a serious infection and two years delayed treatment permanently damaged his pelvis. A Kafkaesque intervention resulted in twenty more months spent in a German hospital undergoing four operations and treatment for tuberculosis. By age sixteen a quarter of Górecki’s young live has been spent “speaking with death.” Despite chronic health issues, Górecki has a winning smile and a fierce determination to compose music.

By 1960, Górecki graduated with honors form the Polish National Academy, as a highly visible member of the so-called Polish Renaissance. Most prominent was Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), Lutoslawski, Woyciech Kilar (1933-2013), Kazimierz Serocki (1922-81) and Tadeusz Baird (1928-81). The latter two founded the Warsaw Autumn music festival in 1956. Górecki spent time in Paris absorbing Messiaen’s organ improvisations and the works of his students Xenakis, and Stockhausen. The American composer he idolized was Charles Ives. In 1967 Górecki declined a major commission for a work to commemorate the opening of the Auschwitz Museum. Górecki neither wanted the attention that the commission would undoubtedly spark, but the subject was too personally painful for him to consider under a deadline. Górecki’s sensitivity had much to do with the fact that the distances between Auchwitz (Oswiecim) and Czernica, where he was biorn, and Katoice where he lived his whole life formed an equilateral triangle.

Shortly before his fall at age twelve, Górecki went on a field trip to Auschwicz. In a BBC interview many years later Górecki remembered, “I had the feeling that the huts were still warm…the paths were made from human bones, thrown onto the path like shingles.”

Some of his relatives were victims of the Nazi camps. Górecki delved instead into an archaic 4-part song titled “Already it is Dusk.” Twenty years later he would return to it as an inspiration for his first string quartet – giving it the same name. By 1976 a prayer inscribed on the basement wall of cell no. 3 in Gestapo headquarters in Poland signed by Wanda Blazusiakowna: “18 years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944” crystalized Górecki’s need to address his Auschwitz experience. The elemental simplicity and naïve sincerity of the Third Symphony is either received, or it is not depending on the performance and the openness of the listener. In 1992 it shone more brightly contrasted by economic bad news, the aftermath of the Gulf War, and the optimism of the Reagan presidency had evaporated.

String Quartet No. 2 “Quasi una Fantasia” emerged from a decade of tension between the Catholic church and the Communist Party, and the ever-stronger Solidarity movement. “Almost a Fantasy” of course refers to Beethoven’s name for what is better known as the Moonlight Sonata, but, the full meaning is anyone’s guess. It is a fully mature and satisfying addition to the long history of string quartet literature. Hat shifts moods and formal preoccupations with as much mastery as he mastered in and of the forms Górecki embraced.

The determined slog of the opening movement’s cello buttresses the fragile state of the viola; the second movement captures the feeling of a dizzying folk dance in the composer’s beloved Tatra mountains. A Philosophical mood permeates the conversational thoughts of the third movement, while the breathless final dance picks up where the earlier revels left off. Delirious challenge dancing pits teams in a hormone and alcohol fueled rumpus. Suddenly, as though the spell is broken, the disembodied refrain of the Christmas carol Silent Night wafts through the air. The revelers trudge into the night as the melody hovers.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2018

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October 20, 2018
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field (2014) - Dylan Mattingly (b.1991)

Dylan Mattingly barreled southward on Interstate 5 –Berkeley and Highway 580 now long vanished from his rear view mirror. More than a year had passed since he delivered the commissioned score of Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field to pianist Kathleen Supové. Another ten months would elapse before she was ready to premiere the nearly two-hour work in New York’s Dimenna Center for Classical Music—Thursday, May 19, 2016. 

For a while the fluctuating temperament of the California aqueduct cut back and forth under the great north-south asphalt conveyor belt. 

Mattingly’s epic work gestated for nine months and was finally born as he finished his degree at Bard College. This coming-of-age far from home in New York State paralleled Achilles’ coming-of-age far away from Greece in what is now Turkey. Months spent attuned to the ancient plash and percussion of Aegean waves on Trojan sand seemed to fold up neatly as his tires sped toward Santa Monica. On a holiday weekend, this short trip was to visit the figurative painter Charles Garabedian arranged by visual art and music lover Raulee Marcus. LA Times art critic Christopher Knight observed what likely inspired her.

“His works draw on myriad precedents. Some are artistic—Matisse's brash color, Fra Angelico's Renaissance modesty, Picasso's stylized multiple viewpoints, Diebenkorn's fluid abstraction, the Mexican muralists' epic monumentality and more. Others are literary. There's Homer's Iliadand Odyssey, the Roman histories of Herodotus and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Garabedian doesn't illustrate these stories. Instead he reconfigures them, coaxing imaginative contemplation into view...manifestos extolling the irrepressible power of imagination” 

 In an interview conducted by Jennifer Samet for Hyper-allergic that was published weeks after Mattingly’s visit Garabedian said:

“Every time I walk into my studio and open the door, I am hoping I am a different person. I am hoping something different will happen. Of course it doesn’t, but I have that slight hope. The studio is magical,and it is not just a place where you work. You can lie downand sleep. It is a place where you create and where you are by yourself, you can be alone. Your studio can be a beautiful and nutty place, and it is.

I had read The Iliad when I started college at USC. I kind of liked it but I didn’t pay too much attention to it. But at one point, I became very interested in Homer. I just love the Greek tragedies. Those tragedies are something else. The writing itself is profound, butthere is simplicity to the imagery. In a complicated world, it is possible to reduce those stories to simple images. You can turn them into a compact understanding.”

For the last few months I have been painting Iphigenia. Iphigenia’s father sacrificed her, so that the fleet could sail off to Troy. She was bound and gagged so she couldn’t curse them as they sailed off. I think, if you have to have a subject, it might as well be tragic. You grow older and you see life in a simpler or different way, and it can be looked at tragically. Tragedy is not necessarily painful; it is just tragedy.”

On a balmy Friday afternoon, July 3, 2015, with his curious rouge-cheeked cockatiel Ajax perched on his hat, Santa Monica’s legendary artist – everyone called him Chas – navigated the classically white studio, tables strewn withart making tools and materials, to engage with paintings young and old. His lively banter intersected Mattingly’s stream of ideas. They both were infatuated with baseball and deeply in thrall to Homer’s retelling of The Iliad. The baseball paintings were from the sixties, but the Studies for the Iliad series spanned decades beyond. The huge gap in their ages entered the conversation. In just a few months, on December 29th, Chas would celebrate his 92nd birthday!

This self-aware 24-year old composer was comfortable living with history. His precocious ability to craft complex and communicative music may not be so surprising given his lineage. A cluster of significant musicians, a poet, and a painter, light up Mattingly’s family tree. Cellist Eleanor Aller was his second cousin, among many. She and her husband violinist/conductor Felix Slatkin co-founded the legendary Hollywood String Quartet (1947-61). Eleanor was the niece of Modest Altschuler, Mattingly’s great great uncle, an enterprising Russian Jewish conductor trained in the Moscow Conservatory who came to New York in 1893. Ten years later he founded the Russian Symphony Orchestra Society of New York City, which gave the U.S. premieres of works by Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Scriabin. After the First World War, he relocated to Hollywood where his cousin, D.W. Griffith’s film processor Joe Aller, helped him to score movies. Altschuler then founded the Glendale Symphony in 1924. Eleanor and Felix’s son, the multiple-Grammy-winning conductor Leonard Slatkin, revitalized the Saint Louis Symphony with recordings for EMI and RCA as well as Carnegie Hall concerts, and tours to Europe and the Far East– staying seventeen years before succeeding Mstislav Rostropovich at the helm of DC’s National Symphony Orchestra’s from 1996 to 2008.

Mattingly’s grandmother was the striking and accomplished painter Gladys Aller. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her "Portrait of Helen" in 1937. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) attended her wedding to orthodontist Eugene Farber. Active as Gladys Farber with the Chouinard Art Institute set in 1960s, she also championed causes including clean air, nuclear disarmament andopposition to the Vietnam War.

The composer’s father George Mattingly is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays, a photographer, publisher, and designer. He met Lucy Aller at the San Francisco State University Poetry Center, where she was an Antioch College work-study student. He had returned to the Bay Area from the esteemed Iowa Writers Workshop. Is it any wonder then that such a lineage would produce an ambitious composer ready to make his mark? Early on Mattingly’s talent attracted the attention of John Adams (b. 1947) when the prominent composer attended a concert of the boy’s teenage band “Formerly Known as Classical” – all teenagers playing music composed in their lifetimes. Afterhearing Mattingly’s piece, Adams said “we should hang out,” which led to regular visits in Berkeley.

Tonight’s Santa Monica performance of Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field—only the third, and also the LA premiere—caused Mattingly to remember his visit with Garabedian.

 “I was eager to speak to someone who had also been swept away in the tide of The Iliad when I met Chas in his studio, surrounded by paintings frozen in different moments of their lives — somethat had been just born, some were old and worn, lingering on the walls. It was a glorious shrine of imagination, not hallowed and clean like a cathedral, but littered with life in every direction. I arrived with a long list of questions to ask him about his work and his life, and I forgot them all when I walked through the door.

I was disarmed by his curiosity, and generous interest in life that made me feel like we were old friends, meeting for the first time. We talked about The Illiad and art, about aging, and the way that we chart a life through the things we create. That meeting, though brief, stands out to me in memory. Before I left, I traded Chas a copy of my score for a book of his work. Above an image of the sea, he signed his name and wrote an inscription — "it gets better as it goes along."

Chas died February 11, 2016. The following summer at the end of July, Mattinglymet the two founders of Jacaranda. As though navigating with a divining rod, the conversation found its way to Dylan’s Bakkhai Choruses,settings of Euripides in the original ancient Greek, for three sopranos and high baritone, two oboes, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, cello, double bass, percussionand microtonal keyboard completed in 2013. Owing to its originality and despite the difficulty of the music Jacaranda accepted the challenge of giving the work’s second performance – in Disney Hall for Noon to Midnight, November 18, 2017. Achilles… is Mattingly’s next major work. The composer provided an introduction: 

“For hundreds of years, bards would travel the Aegeanand sing from memory the 15,693 lines of The Iliad. Each time the story might change a little bit depending on the bard’s surroundings and memory. With thousands of years between us and then, uncountable waves on the shore, a speckling across the universe of momentary loves and victories and breakfasts and hands running through hair, I wonder what The Iliad, in which I find myself, might look like — evolved in some cases like fish on land and in others torn asunder like the endless reconfiguration of the continents, or perhaps transformed like the green Saharaonly 10,000 years ago. These are the days I grew up in — from the divine intervention in a walk-off home run to the river gods in the Hudson to the soft breathing of someone sleeping beneath the window.”

The form of the work loosely follows that of the 24 booksof The Iliad Homer transmitted for the ages. While Mattingly prefers the Lattimore translation for its fidelity to the cadences of the original Greek, we have opted here for the booktitles of the Fagels translation for their story telling eloquence and to give reference points where the composer aligns and where he departs. A summary of the action has been condensed from numerous sources (in italics) followed by a paraphrasing the composer’s verbal notes.

I.  Invocation                                       
Book 1 – The Rage of Achilles

Nine years into the Trojan War the Greeksare besieging Troy. A Trojan priest of Apollo offers the Greeks wealth for the return of his daughter, who is a captive of Agamemnon, king of Argos and commander of the Greek armies. Agamemnon refuses and Apollo inflicts a plague. After nine days,in a fury Achilles, leader of the Myrmidon Greeks,demands a meeting. Under pressure, Agamemnon agrees to return the girl to her father, but decides to take Achilles’s captive Briseis as compensation. Achilles declares that he and his men will go home. Odysseusreturns the priest’s daughter to Troy; Apollo ends the plague. 

Homer invokes the gods and the muses so that they may speak through him. The performer calls for strength to complete the massive undertaking. The movement’s theme is a musical translation of The Iliad’s first line of Ancient Greek using the twelve beat patterns of dactylic hexameter.

II.  Catalogue of Heroes                       
Book 2 – The Great Gathering of Armies

Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon urging him to attack Troy. Agamemnon heeds the dream but decides to test his army's morale first by telling them to go home. The plan backfires.The Greeks deploy upon the Trojan plain. Homer describes the origins of each Greek contingent. When news reaches Troy’s King Priam, the Trojans prepare for battle. Homer then describes the Trojans and their allies.

The “Catalog of Ships” in The Iliad is 500 lines of ship descriptions, with occasional regional shout-outs. Like the Biblical begats it is an endless stream of genealogical notes that are repeated several times, but feel non-recursive due to the pattern's length, which itself conceals the rhyming scheme.

III.  First Winter                                                
Book 3 – Helen Reviews the Champions

As the armies approach, Paris offers to end the war by fighting a duel with Menelaus, but loses heart and is ridiculed by his brother Hector, leader of the Trojan army. Both sides swear a truce and promise to abide by the outcome of the duel. Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, rescues Paristo join with Helen before Menelaus can kill him. 

First winter is about a California boy in upstate NY findinghis place in a world of distinct seasons. This visceral experience of the seasons takes up a big part of the whole work because a new conception of time passing was crucial to the experience of growing up.

IV.  Dance 1                                         
Book 4 – The Truce Erupts in War

Hera, wife of Zeus and queen of all the gods is inflamed by her hatred of Troy. Zeus causes the Trojan Pandaros to breakthe truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Agamemnon rouses the Greeks into battle.

The dances align with the books devoted to battles. The ancient tradition of dance was directly tied to preparing forbattle. Dancing was a military tradition teaching young men to move within the phalanx and move in step with other soldiers. In this conception, war is connected to beauty, movement, and how you align with everything around you in physical perfection.

V.  Gods and Insects                           
Book 5 – Diomedes Fights the Gods

Diomedes kills many Trojans after being endowed with godlike strength by Athena. He kills Pandaros, and defeats Aeneas. As Aphrodite rescues Aeneas, Diomedes, a jealous suitor of Helen, attacks and wounds the goddess. Apollo faces Diomedes and warns him against warring with the gods. Many heroes including Hector join in. Supporting both sides the gods try to influence the battle. Emboldened by Athena, Diomedes wounds Ares, the god of war.

The Olympian view of human mortality: small as ants.

VI.  First Spring                                               
Book 6 – Hector Returns to Troy

Hector rallies the Trojans and prevents a rout. Diomedes andthe Trojan Glaukos, by exchanging of gifts, find common ground. Hector enters the city, urges prayers and sacrifices, and incites Paris to battle. After bidding farewell to his wife and son in front of the city walls, Hector rejoins the fray.

Spring is when you begin to understand the transitionfrom dormant to fecund. The kernel of this book is the vignette of Hector saying goodbye to his wife and son ,His son is frightened by the sight of his dad in a Trojan helmet. For the first time he sees his parent in a worldly context and grasps that he is alone. 

VII.  First Funeral                                             
Book 7 – Ajax Duels with Hector

The duel lasts until nightfall. While the Trojans quarrel about returning Helen to bring the conflict to an end, the Greeks burn their dead. They build a wall and a trench to protect their ships and campsite. Paris offers to return stolen treasure and more to compensate for Helen. The offer is refused.

A pause from the fighting is taken to remember and burn the dead. The two funerals, this and the anti-funeral of Book XXII, are different from each other, but thematically related. Upon hearing the first themes together they slowly separate and move apart.

 VIII.  Dance 2, Second Fall                   
Book 8 – The Tide of Battle Turns

The next morning, the fighting begins anew. Zeus prohibits the Gods from interfering. The Trojans prevail and force theGreeks back to their wall. Night falls. The Trojans set up campin the field to attack at first light; their watch fires light the battle plain like stars.

The school year is conceived to first build momentum – to instill a feeling of hurtling towards something in mad preparation for winter. 

 IX.  Music                                                        
Book 9 – The Embassy to Achilles

The Greeks are desperate. Agamemnon declares the war a failure, but Nestor encourages reconciliation with Achilles.The king sends a delegation composed of Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix to where Achilles has comfortably encamped next to his ships. Achilles and his loving companion Patroclus receive the delegation, which offers generous gifts, including the return of Briseis, if Achilles will return to the fight. Achilles angrily refuses Agamemnon and declares he would return to battle only if the Trojans attack and threaten his ships with fire. The delegation returns empty-handed.

Achilles serenades the ocean with his famous lyre. A brief history of Western Music across the last couple thousand years ensues. A thematic kernel is taken through a short journey of transformation through time. A nod is made to Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), whose 20-movement piano symphony provided something of a model of unifying thematic devices and contrasts over two hours. Music is the subject. 

X.  Brutality                                          
Book 10 – Marauding through the Night

Later that night, Odysseus and Diomedes venture out to the Trojan lines. They wreak havoc in the camps of Troy’s Thracian allies, killing them in their sleep.

This book is theorized to be non-canonical. Some scholars believe it was tacked on later because of the indefensible actions of the main characters. Their brutality contradicts the ancient aesthetics of war. Mattingly accepts the contradiction as a necessary revelation of flaws.

 XI.  For Jackie Robinson                      
Book 11 – Agamemnon’s Day of Glory

The two sides fight a bloody battle in the morning; Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus are all wounded. Achilles sends Patroclus from his camp to inquire about Greek casualties. Patroclus is moved to pity by Nestor's speech.

One of the great battles in The Iliad is this last relatively innocent conflict – the last scene where the characters seem still to believe in the joy and glory of battle. Robinson’s battle to integrate baseball began a new era that allowed the struggle of American History into the world of baseball while in its the golden age. Baseball is celebratedas a part of our collective history.

XII.  Third Fall                                      
Book 12 – The Trojans Storm the Rampart

The Trojans attack the Greek wall on foot, as an eagle drops a writhing snake into the scrum of soldiers. Hector’s friend, seer and lieutenant, interprets this as an omen of impending Trojan defeat. Hector ignores the omen and leads the onslaught. Overwhelmed, the Greeks are routed; the wall's gate is broken.

The autumnal momentum here is a force is pulling things apart. This fall is a prelude to the unlucky thirteenth movement where all ideals are shattered, and innocence is lost with the experience of aging. The invocation theme comes back three times, each time at a lower pitch and carrying with it an existential dread.

XIII.  Lost                                                         
Book 13 – Battling for the Ships

Many collapse on both sides. The seer urges Hector to fall back and warns him about Achilles, but is again ignored.

Sounding initially like a funeral, many of the themes already heard coalesce quietly and slowly, like stars gradually moving into night. All the threads of heroism from the preceding movements are imbued with a sense of being lost. The context for identity is changing and old façades disappear. Inspired by long form episodic television [e.g. Battlestar Galactica (2004-09)], a deep feeling of suspense ends the movement prior to intermission. 

XIV.  Dance 3, Second Winter              
Book 14 – Hera Outflanks Zeus

Hera seduces Zeus luring him to sleep, allowing Poseidon to help the Greeks, who drive the Trojans back onto the plain.

While “Lost” dwelled on the human condition, this dance of the Gods is thematically related to the first dance. 

XV.  Divine Rage/Ocean                                    
Book 15 – The Achaean Armies at Bay

Zeus awakens enraged by Poseidon's intervention. Countering the growing discontent of the Greek-supporting gods, Zeus sends Apollo to help the Trojans, who once again breach the wall. The battle reaches the Greek ships.

Up to this point, the gods were just dabbling in human affairs, but here their power is tremendous and supernatural– the sound of something falling from the sky and crashing into the ocean. The invocation theme is destroyed by a massive wave. 

 XVI.  Love, Death, Paleoclimates          
Book 16 – Patroclus Fights and Dies

Patroclus cannot watch any longer. He begs Achilles to be allowed to defend the ships. Achilles relents and lends Patroclus his armor, but sends him off with a stern admonition not to pursue the Trojans. Patroclus leads the Myrmidons into battle and arrives as the Trojans set fire to the first ships. The Trojans are routed by the sudden onslaught. Patrocluskills a leading ally of the Trojans, the son of Zeus. Now in pursuit, Patroclus, ignoring Achilles' command reaches thegates of Troy, where Apollo stops him. Apollo and Euphorrbosset upon Patroclus, but Hector kills him.

This book, connected to the following one, is the center of The Iliad and the heart of the work. They are played attacca. Achilles is in love with Patroclus. He has done little in battle up to this point, but he joins the fighting with ferocity when Hector kills Patroclus. He becomes his true self, a terrifying majestic warrior. These movements link to the four that follow like a great chapter in six parts. Paleoclimates imagines the changing geography and weather surrounding the loves and deaths in the lives of every person, a recurring experience of emotion from ancient times to today. 

XVII.  Heart                                                     
Book 17 – Menelaus Finest Hour

Hector takes Achilles' armor from the fallen Patroclus as fighting develops around his body.

Despite the developing story, everything disappears but his love for Patroclus and heartbreak. 

 XVIII.  Rising                                        
Book 18 – The Shield of Achilles

Achilles grieves and swears vengeance on Hector. Thetis, mother of Achilles, grieves as well, knowing that Achilles is fated to die young should he kill Hector. Lacking armor, Achilles is urged to help retrieve the armored body of Patroclus. Bathed in radiance by Athena, Achilles stands at the Greek wall and roars with rage. The Trojans are dismayed. Hector’s seer again urges him to withdraw; again Hector refuses. The Trojans camp on the plain at nightfall. At his mother’s request, Hephaestus fashions a new armor for Achilles, with a magnificently wrought shield.

The ghost theme is introduced. Seeing the devastation of loss, Achilles is driven by anger to exert himself to the fullest, achieving his most fearsome self in movement XXI. 

 XIX.  Found                                         
Book 19 – The Champion Arms for Battle

In the morning, Agamemnon gives Achilles all promised gifts, including Briseis, but Achilles is indifferent. Achilles fasts while the Greeks take their meal, straps on his new armor, and heaves his great spear. His horse Xanthos, for whom Hera has granted speech, prophesies to Achilles his death. Achilles drives his chariot into battle.

Continuing with the dissolution of self, a terrifying process is driven by grief and rage. 

 XX.  Fourth Fall                                               
Book 20 – Olympian Gods in Arms

Zeus lifts his ban on godly meddling. They freely help both sides. Consumed by rage and grief, Achilles slays many.

Once again autumnal momentum produces resolve. An earlier theme is heard as a quiet iteration, resolute like a ringing bellthat propels into “Muddy River.” 

 XXI.  Muddy River (Aristea "...if I had wings")                
Book 21 – Achilles Fights the River

Driving the Trojans before him, Achilles forces half their number into the river Skamandros slaughtering them and filling the river with the dead. Angry at the killing, the river confronts Achilles but is subdued by a firestorm brought on by Hephaestus. The gods fight among themselves. The great gates of the city are opened to receive the fleeing Trojans, and Apollo lures Achilles away from the city through pretense.

Achilles’ aristeia, his finest hour, is where he attacks the river. You see everything that he can do in all his terrifying glory – his living essence. This movement quotes from Bob Dylan’s (b. 1941) version of Dink’s Song, first recorded by John Lomax in 1909, and sung by a woman named Dink. A muddy river is an image from the song. Suddenly time stops; the characters are in suspended animation. The quote distills to its essence, and then builds up to the sonic illusion of at least three hands playing. 

XXII.  Death of Hektor                          
Book 22 – The Death of Hector

When Apollo reveals himself to Achilles, the Trojans have retreated into the city, all except for Hector. Having repeatedly ignored the seer, he feels shame and resolves to face Achilles, despite the pleas of his parents Priam and Hecuba. When Achilles approaches, Hector's will falters. Achilles chases him throughout the city. Finally, Athena stops him with a trick. He turns to face his opponent. After a brief duel, Achilles stabs Hector through the neck. Before dying, Hector reminds Achilles that he too is fated to die in the war. Achilles dishonors Hector's body by dragging it behind his chariot.

More funeral music marred by dishonor – very desolate with a sense of departure.

XXIII.  Ebbets Field                                           
Book 23 – Funeral Games for Patroclus

The ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream, urging him to carry out burial rites and to arrange for their bones to be entombed together. The Greeks hold a day of funeral games. Achilles gives out prizes.

Ebbets Field is the old field of the Brooklyn Dodgers that was demolished and turned into a parking complex. Ebbets Field, home of heroes, is an analog for Troy with Achilles dreaming of a place now gone that lives on in the sidewalks,cracks, the stairwells. It stands in for memories of places that permeate our lives but are no longer there. 

XXIV.  Last Spring                                           
Book 24 – Achilles and Priam

Priam takes a wagon out of Troy, across the plains, and into the Greek camp unnoticed. He begs Achilles for his son's body. Achilles is moved to tears. The two lament their losses. After a meal, Priam carries Hector's body back to Troy. Hector is buried, and the city mourns.

This is the first great moment in literature of acceptance that loss and pain are not unique, or individual. To live in the world with other people requires acceptance of other people’s loss and pain. Everyone’s life is as real to them asyours is to you. The last half of the movement is something totally new. Rather than trying to wrap up everything, the best endings are beginnings – a time for reimagining theself – same notes, but a different person.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2018

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AWAKE 2017-18

REGIONAL ACCENTS

May 19, 2018
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Fantasia Baetica (1919) – Manuel De Falla (1876-1946)
String Quartet No. 2 (1962) – Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970)
Three Impromptus for Piano (1950) – Gerhard
Awake (2013) – Tomas Peire-Serrate (b. 1979)
 React (2011) – Peire-Serrate
Fantasia (1957) – Gerhard
Homenaje a Debussy & La Vida Breve/Danza No. 1 (1920) – De Falla
Toccata for Solo Piano (2016) – Peire-Serrate
Harpsichord Concerto (1926) – De Falla

How was it that the Spanish music composed by Russians and Frenchmen could so completely dominate 19th and early 20th century concert halls and theaters such that Spain’s own composers were left to wait in the wings? One might logically point to their respective music traditions and sheer numbers of citizens, consider politics, religion, diplomacy or fate, even speculate on the sway of far-ranging tours by pianist Franz Liszt playing his own spectacular Rhapsodie Espagnole — none would be untrue — but the real answer is Glinka.

With Wagnerian brass declamations to start, and castanets ablaze, Mikhail Glinka’s (1804-1857) stunning 1845 Spanish Overture No 1 Capriccio Brilliante on the Jota Aragonesa catalyzed Russian music while inventing the Spanish showpiece, or espagnolade. Ironically, the guitar playing of Felix Castilla in Madrid inspired such extravagance. A few years later, the impressive Overture No 2. Recollection of a Summer Night in Madrid would introduce a banquet of four Spanish themes that fed generations – including another jota, a punto moruño for the slow section, and two seguidillas learned from a shepherd boy or zagal. Glinka, the highly educated wellspring of Russian music, had already composed two historically Russian operas, one in the prevailing Italian style of Donizetti and Rossini, and one betraying strong Russian traits. With the blessing of Tsar Nicholas, A Life for the Tsar was quite successful in 1836, but six years later, Ruslan and Lyudmila was not at all.

The Russian Connection
An inveterate traveler, Glinka headed to France where he reconnected with Hector Berlioz. Born a year apart, they were kindred spirits with revolutionary ideas. Berlioz’s already serialized Treatise on Instrumentation was being prepared for publication while he was at work on The Damnation of Faust. Berlioz promoted concerts including Glinka’s Symphony on Two Russian Themes, Valse Fantasie, and two overtures. They were a dynamic duo. In May of 1844, Glinka moved to Spain where he wanted to compose picturesque fantasies, and indulge a keen interest in hearing national folk music. Glinka eventually met Don Pedro Fernandez Nelasco Sandino who would remain his secretary and traveling companion for nine years until he returned to St. Petersburg as war broke out between France and Russia, and the Tsar became fatally ill with a cold.

The intoxicating “Spanish Dance” in Tchaikovsky’s (1840-1893) ballet Swan Lake (1876), and the softer (and lesser) “Great Spanish Dance” in Glazunov’s (1865-1936) Raymonda (1898) owe their very existence to Glinka’s fragrant nights in Madrid. With five compact movements, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1887 Capriccio Espagnole maximized Glinka’s orchestral opulence with a bounty of glamorous solos, spiced with exotic tambourines and triangles, and charged by high- wattage fandango rhythms – and castanets.

Berlioz, the maven of orchestral know-how armed the French to raise the game. But it would be Georges Bizet’s first mature work Carmen (1875) that would define Spanishness so completely that many accepted it as utterly authentic. A child prodigy who struggled with facility and cynicism before embracing realism, Bizet died suddenly after the opera – a heart attack. Carmen was sealed in the public imagination. Likewise, Emmanuel Chabrier’s imperishable Espana (1883) was so spectacularly brilliant it obliterated the rest of his output. The bravura ballet suite from Massenet’s opera Le Cid (1885) so successfully competed in the concert hall for Spanish excitement and color that the epic four-act tragicomedy from which it was drawn is now all but forgotten. Embracing the new Verismo style, in 1894 Massenet recast the hot-blooded Spanish troublemaker as Anita, La Navarraise, willing to kill for money to win her man. La Navarraise is sister of Azucena, the earthy gypsy in Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

As the century turned, Maurice Ravel’s sensational Rhapsodie Espagnole (1907), his one act opera L’heure Espagnole (1911) – rife with jotas, habaneras and malaguenas, and the infamous ballet Bolero (1928), reveals how kaleidoscopic and nuanced the espagnolade had become in the hands of a Basque. Ravel was born in the seaside town of Ciboure near the Basque Spanish border. His free-thinking, but nearly illiterate Basque mother had come there from Madrid.

Claude Debussy was neck-and-neck competing with Ravel when he composed Iberia (1908), three sections were surrounded in the five-part Images. Not having Ravel’s birthright and breaking away from the Russian showpiece, Debussy’s aesthetic was more nuanced, moody, pastel, unpredictable and, like Picasso in his pre-cubist Spanish period, a harbinger of the modern. Debussy’s titles betray a less extrovert but no less trenchant perspective on the Spanish experience: 1.Through the streets and the paths; 2. The fragrance of the night; and, 3.The morning of a festival day.

A Band of Apaches
Alborada del Gracioso Ravel’s morning song of a jester (1905, orchestrated in 1910) is where our story lines begin to converge. Alborada del Gracioso was dedicated to Michel de Calvocoressi, a multi-lingual expert on Glinka and Liszt, who would soon publish their biographies. It was part four of his piano suite Miroirs. Each of the five pieces of Miroirs was dedicated to a member of Les Apaches, which had started in 1902. This band of avant-garde poets, composers, critics and artists, many of them gay, became galvanized by their passionate advocacy on behalf of Debussy’s controversial new opera Pelléas et Mélisande. They adopted the name “Les Apaches” upon hearing a newspaper boy shouting a headline about the American Indians. The word resonated so immediately because it is also French for hooligans. The loose membership eventually numbered sixteen, including Ravel, Calvocoressi and the imaginary Gomez de Riquet. Saturday meetings were mostly held in the studio of Paul Sordes, a painter and set designer. In addition to several critics, a conductor, and a publisher, the upstarts included the incomparable Catalonian pianist Ricardo Viñes, romantically partnered with Ravel it is believed, poet, painter, and art theorist Tristan Klingsor, and the emerging composers Igor Stravinsky at the time of Firebird, the orientalist song writer Maurice Delage, Rome Prize winner Florent Schmitt of the Loie Fuller ballet La tragédie de Salomé – and Manuel de Falla.

A New Voice
Born two years after Ravel in Cadiz of Valencian and Catalonian parents, Falla moved from Madrid in 1907 to study in Paris, where he joined the Apaches – remaining until their disbanding in 1914 with the outbreak of WWI. He arrived in Paris with a first prize in piano performance and deep study into Andalusian music – especially flamenco, particularly cante jondo – cultivated by Felip Pedrell (1841-1922), the hugely influential guitarist, composer, teacher, and musicologist.

Falla was of course deeply attuned to the piano music of the famous child prodigy pianist, conductor and composer Isaac Albeniz, whose decidedly Andalusian 90-minute piano suite masterpiece Iberia was begun in 1905. Each of the work’s four books was premiered in successive years from 1906 to 1909, with each premiere in a different French location. Falla responded to Iberia with his Cuatro piezas españolas begun in 1906. Ricardo Viñes gave the first performance in 1909 at the Salle Érard in Paris, a month after the final book of Iberia was first heard. While delightful, only “Montanesa” rose to the comparison.

Sadly, just three months later, at age 48, Albeniz died of kidney disease after nine-years of struggle. Now only Francisco Tárrega the father of classical guitar music, Enrique Granados Albeniz’s pianistic alter ego, and the still emerging Joaquín Turina could authentically carry the torch of Spanish music. Then in December 1909 Tárrega would succumb to a stroke and die.

Falla’s first major work, the hour long opera La Vida Breve, was composed in Madrid and won a prize there, but the promised production never materialized, so he brought the zarzuela-influenced opera to Paris. But, such hopes would take until 1913 to be fulfilled. La Vide Breve, the story of a jilted gypsy girl who confronts her beloved at his wedding and drops dead on the spot, was revised immediately at Debussy’s prodding to gain more continuity among its traditional numbers arias, its wealth of flamenco guitar, and orchestral interludes. Despite its flaws of youth, the opera’s two Danzas have been copiously arranged; especially effective for solo guitar is Danza No.1, the earliest work on this program.

Baetica Hispania
Falla’s most daring and ambitious work for solo piano, Fantasia Baetica, was commissioned by Arthur Rubinstein in 1919 and given its first performance a year later for Society of the Friends of Music in New York. With its austerity and percussive brilliance, the soulful flamenco sentiment is newly invented. It is likely from exposure to Stravinsky’s four hands arrangement of his 1913 Rite of Spring and Debussy’s twelve innovative Etudes of 1915.

As for any regional accent, Falla’s “sole intention was to pay homage to our Latin-Andalucian race.” Baetica is the ancient Roman name for the region known as the Iberian Peninsula that was under Moorish rule from the 8th to the15th centuries. The Fantasia hews to a primeval feeling when folk traditions were being forged from a confluence of culture.

Rubinstein dutifully premiered Fantasia Baetica, but it didn’t stick with him – a slight that harmed its adoption as an important piano work. Falla completed an equally innovative guitar piece Homenaje a Debussy that same year 1920. This highly nuanced work was among a set of compositions offered in a printed tribute to the late composer, who died painfully of cancer in March 1918, just months before France could exact its allied victory over the Germans, whom Debussy detested.

The inaugural edition of La Revue Musicale published 123 pages of scores from ten composers. Ravel contributed a duo that would become the first movement of his Sonata for Violin and cello. Stravinsky’s closing chorale soon was incorporated into Symphonies of Wind Instruments. One of Bartók’s Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs was included, as was La Plainte, au Loin du Faune, a piano elegy from Paul Dukas bewitched by Debussy’s Afternoon of the Faun. Also paying tribute was Eric Satie, Albert Roussel, Florent Schmitt, and Falla. Homenaje a Debussy is one of the ultimate challenges for a guitarist because it is like a cat's cradle - every line is in a delicate balance, somber but defiant, Spanish, but universal. The technical challenges are amplified by the internal affect necessary to project the whole. It must be noted that his mother, to whom he was extremely devoted, died suddenly in 1919.

Falla had relocated to Madrid during the war. Granados had been killed by a German submarine attack while crossing the English channel in 1916. Now the only major Spanish composer, he turned his attention to the modest precursor of El sombrero de tres picos (The Three Cornered Hat). The great Ballet Russe impresario Serge Diaghilev in the house for premiere of this chamber orchestra sketch. Soon the composer was at work on a two-act ballet with large orchestra, sets and costumes by the now famous Pablo Picasso. Léonide Massine adapted traditional Spanish dances to the story line while dispensing with the balletic vocabulary. The work was premiered in London at the appropriately named Alhambra Theater, a vast music hall in Moorish style reminiscent to the famous palace in Granada – that often hosted the circus! At long last the behemoth of Russian culture embraced a Spanish composer! Picasso wanted shouts of Ole! punctuating the battery of castanets while ushering in an all-too-fleeting soprano solo that telegraphs the authenticity of this enterprise. It would be Falla’s greatest triumph and largest completed work. The final dance with its vast and thrilling collage of ostinatos achieves the apotheosis of the espagnolade.

In many ways El sombrero de tres picos resonated with Stravinsky’s ultra Russian puppet drama Petrushka. But WWI had disabused Falla’s Russian friend of such richness and blatant nationalism. Instead irony and a fascination with jazz came through his Histoire du Soldat composed for a small ensemble in the seclusion of Switzerland. A reductive back-to-basics impulse prevailed in the twenties. A movement toward neoclassicism soon coalesced.  Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments had already stepped into that sensibility, while the Wind Octet of 1923 became a defining statement.

Falla was intimately aware of Stravinsky’s music, so it is not surprising that his Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments reveals a striking kinship with the music of his contemporary, while retaining an intensely Spanish identity ingrained by his education.

Falla’s teacher Pedrell was an ardent admirer of the Italian-born Domenico Scarlatti who served the Portuguese and Spanish royal families most of his life as court composer. Scarlatti bridged the baroque and classical style, which made him a distinctly interesting composer of harpsichord music during this reconsideration of the past.

Falla was drawn to the harpsichord and included it in the score of Master Peter’s Puppet Show premiered in 1923. The Polish doyenne of the harpsichord, no less than Wanda Landowska agreed to play the harpsichord part. This work was the first introduction of the instrument into the modern orchestra. Mutual gratitude led to the commissioning of a concerto, although it would take much longer to compose that Landowska had planned, to her annoyance.

The three-movement concerto uses a quotation from a Spanish Renaissance villancico by Joan Vasquez that was set by subsequent generations of composers. De Los Alamos Vengo, Madre (I come from the poplars, mother) returns in the third movement and lurks distantly in between. The poplar is a symbol of vulnerability due its pale bark, susceptibly to termites, and high rates of die-off. Falla was a weak child who suffered from tuberculosis and other ailments that led to exaggerated hypochondria. He formed a strong attachment to his mother and to his Moorish nanny. It would seem that he found an historical and personal signature tune that preceded even the musicology emerging about the Baroque and particularly J. S. Bach, with the help of Landowska and the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals.

Befitting a neoclassicist, Falla uses for the first movement a classic sonata allegro form, but roots it in his Renaissance theme, recalls the florid style of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, Furthermore, he introduces a melody strikingly similar to a tune in the Three-Cornered Hat, given to the violin, oboe and cello, to underscore his national identity. Landowska’s instrument included a modern 16’ stop to increase the bass, and borrowed heavily from piano construction in order to be heard in concert settings. This so-called revival harpsichord is the historically correct instrument for the many works commission by and for Landowska then and well into the 1960’s when the original instrument movement became dominant.

The austere hieratic quality of the middle movement evokes echoing chants and the laborious procession of Holy Week in Seville that Falla attended in 1922. Despite the composer’s deep religiosity, this music was considered highly avant-garde In Spain, cut off as it was from the general post enlightenment progress of the west. Audiences were puzzled and questioned the proficiency of the players owing to its cubist construction of displaced accents, ensemble irregularities, and sudden changes.

A sense of neoclassic balance is restored in the jaunty third movement reinforced by the return of De Los Alamos Vengo, Madre, and an infectious joie de vivre. Unfortunately, the Concerto was premiered paired with the lush and mysterious Nights of the Gardens of Spain, dances from the Three Cornered Hat, and excerpts from El Amor Brujo on the occasion of Falla’s 50th birthday. Next to such popular paragons of color, populism and tunefulness, this runt was hardly given a chance. Its chances of success were dealt another blow with the instrument’s fall from grace. When the great harpsichord works of this period are accorded the respect of historically informed performance practice, and the unique beauty of the instrument is appreciated, Falla’s singular achievement will be recognized as a masterpiece.

Roberto Gerhard’s music has faced many other obstacles to attaining the high regard it deserves. While he is regarded as a Spanish composer, born in Valls, near the ancient port city of Tarragona, his parents were not Spanish, and abutting wars caused life-long displacement from Spain at age 43. His strong Catalonian identity was always tempered by the necessary multilingualism of a child born of a German-Swiss father, and an Alsatian French mother. Yet his musical pedigree was Spanish.

Gerhard studied piano with Enrique Granados. Like Falla, he studied with Pedrell, an association so close he would write Symphony “Homenaje a Pedrell” (1941) twelve years before his actual Symphony No. 1. The passing of Pedrell in 1922 caused a crisis. Falla wasn’t taking students, and unlike his Spanish predecessors who migrated north, at that time Gerhard’s Parisian options looked insubstantial.

On the strength of his early works, Gerhard’s daring approach to Arnold Schoenberg was accepted. He became the great innovator’s only Spanish student working several years in Vienna and Berlin before retuning to Barcelona in 1929. His new sophistication was employed in music journalism. He connected with the prominent painter Joan Miró, navigated the increasingly polarized politics, and organized progressive concerts. Gerhard brought his teacher Schoenberg and fellow student Anton Webern to Barcelona. Gerhard organized the 1936 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), which was one of the last major cultural events of the Second Spanish Republic. The world premiere of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto was the highlight of the ISCM’s inaugural day April 19, just three months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Then Falla’s close friend Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated August 19, for his political activities and his homosexuality.

Gerhard’s affinities were clearly with the Republican cause and his ties to the Catalonia government were obvious. Both composers were on a watch list. Following Francisco Franco’s victory in 1939, Falla fled to Argentina where he would remain for seven years before his death, and Gerhard fled first to France before settling in Cambridge, England. Gerhard’s music was strictly prohibited until Franco’s death in 1975 – five years after the composer’s death.

Gerhard may have transplanted his life, but his music was steeped in well-received Spanish content. The Pedrell Symphony was composed in his modern tonal style. The full-length ballet Don Quixote also from 1941 was revised for a 1950 Sadler’s Wells production at Covent Garden featured Robert Helpmann as the Don and Margot Fonteyn as Dulcinea. The BBC orchestra championed the ballet’s suite of dances at the Proms in 1958. A Spanish translation of the Duenna, Richard Brinsley Sheridan satirical play set in Spain, served as the libretto for Gerhard’s triumphant first opera, a BBC Radio performance in 1949. After WWII his background in the twelve-tone technique and emerging serialism impelled Gerhard toward the prevailing international style emanating from Darmstadt, but tempered with an ineluctable connection to his roots.

The warmly Spanish sounding Three Impromptus for piano from 1950 show how gradually his language transformed, and the successive Fantasia (1957) for guitar, his only work for the instrument reflects how innately Spanish is the idiom despite its advances on compositional technique. A concurrent commission by Boyd Neel for a Harpsichord Concerto with string orchestra and percussion proved an opportunity to answer Falla’s work and advance his language.

The one movement Quartet No. 2 signaled a complete grasp of the international style -- remaining almost aphoristic like the piano Impromptus and guitar Fantasia in the brevity of its seven sections. The First Quartet while approachable and fascinating was more conscious of the great tradition to which it attained. Writing for Gramophone, Arnold Whittall observes:

The Second Quartet (1960-62) is more radical, more concentrated, showing that dialogues between active and reflective musics could be made fresher and more appealing in the absence of those history-laden Schoenbergian backgrounds. Though he aspired to employing all-embracing compositional systems, Gerhard was never their prisoner, and the skill with which he uses repetition for dramatic effect in this work shows that he was far from rejecting all aspects of traditional musical rhetoric.

While the composer points to a “magic sense of uneventfulness” which he describes as “time-lattices,” there are also moments that the writer Gary Higginson describes as “mad insectile activity – rhythmically fluid and crepuscular [using] a great many idiomatically unique effects for the strings like col legno pizzicato, glissandi with the fingernails and flageolet glissandi… its contrasts of dark and then brightly lit visions of a distant landscape continually hold the attention.” In short, the work is exciting and engaging in the hands of the most skilled performers. That the pace-setting Arditti Quartet championed both quartets bodes well for Gerhard and the many highly trained quartets today eager to champion deserving works of the last half century.

Tomas Peire-Serrate was born less than five years after the tenacious dictator Francisco Franco finally died in power. Spain has been in recovery ever since as the painful memories of the Spanish Civil War slowly subside. How such regional and cultural tensions continue to play out against the background of a creaky European Union remains a source of fascination if not puzzlement to the rest of the world.

All of the great Spanish composers since Isaac Albeniz studied and lived outside of Spain, with Pedrell as the pedagogical anchor in Barcelona and the keeper of pure Spanish traditions. So it is unremarkable on the one hand that Gerhard would flourish in London, while on the other opening the door to a more universalist conception of music less bound to the traditions of his place of birth, while being embraced in Spain with pride. His successors are now reaching maturity and a new chapter in the history of Spanish music is emerging. The three works by Peire-Serrate presented tonight cover a five-year period of recent composition in forms and instrumentation that invite an assessment, premature though it may be, of his possible place in the arc of Spanish music. 

Written for Jose Menor, the recent Toccata for piano is, as one might expect, a dazzling tour de force that resonates with tradition, while pushing the boundaries into the 21st century. React, a clarinet quintet with strings, is the earliest work on the program. The Zagros Ensemble premiered it at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Understandably, it shares a kind of rigor and intensity associated with the chamber music of Esa-Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg, graduates of the Finnish academy a generation ahead of Peire-Serrate. Awake is warmer, more delicate, and drenched in subtle colorations harkening to the French tradition of Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen and Boulez. The nuanced interactions among the five players are as wondrous to see as to hear.

Peire-Serrate was born in a suburb of Barcelona and obtained degrees in piano and music history before studying composition at Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona. From the Sibelius Academy, he moved to New York, where he received a master’s degree from NYU Steinhardt in composition for film and multimedia on full scholarship, earning the Elmer Bernstein Award upon graduation. Peire-Serrate is currently completing his PhD at UCLA while working in the film industry. He joins the legion of young composers drawn to the richness and opportunity of Los Angeles and the contemporary music community that makes it a great international center.

2018 © PATRICK SCOTT

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March 17, 2018
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Quatre études de rythme (1950) – Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)  
Psappha (1975) – Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)    
Piano Sonata (1952) – Jean Barraqué (1928-1973)

Even today, there is something profoundly unnerving about the whiplash change that happened to music in 1950 — in the wake of the war, and after the atom bomb — like evolution suddenly lurching forward to force life into light-speed mutation. This mid-century turning point is stranger still since it would equally cleave the life — born 42 years earlier in 1908, dying 42 years later in 1992 — of a key catalyzing figure.

Olivier Messiaen was hardly the only mortar in the pestle that brought total serialism into existence, but he taught its leading devotees, who touched the creative lives of nearly everyone then grappling with Anton Webern’s distillation of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. Analytical purity in music seemed destined to emerge while the rearranging whirlwind of war settled down, leaving in its wake the sentimentality, religion, certainty, and national identities associated with a shattered old world.

This man near the eye of the storm had already endured relentless criticism for his wide-ranging musical tastes, for his surreal hyper-romanticism, synesthesia, nature worship, and the sincere naiveté of his Catholic faith. He embraced Indian ragas, birdsong, Indonesian gamelan, Peruvian melodies, Wagnerian leitmotifs, Medieval chants and fragments of ancient Greek meters. Still, Messiaen would play a critical role in launching a level of pure abstraction and rigor previously unknown to music — as a creator teaching by example, and as a musical analyst par excellence. His bravest and most singular students were Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Romanian-born Greek Iannis Xenakis. His passionate friend and most cosmopolitan water bearer was Pierre Boulez; his most faithful surrogate was the American Betsy Jolas, and his most enigmatic disciple was Jean Barraqué.

Darmstadt provided the key locus for this epochal shift — a strangely poetic fact given its two-faced history: first among German cities to forcibly shutter Jewish shops at the twilight of Nazis power, a source of 3,000 Jews deported to concentration camps, but also home to prominently doomed leaders of the German resistance movement. The city would pay dearly as the allies bombed three quarters of its buildings. The historic core provided a trial run for the British firestorm technique that later decimated Dresden. Incendiary bombs circled the city before bull’s-eye blast bombs generated a caustic wind-powered fire that consumed everything within the perimeter. Upwards of 12,500 Darmstadt residents were incinerated, and some 70,000 were left homeless by war’s end in 1945.

Plain functional architecture was built over the ruins, often surrounding faithful replicas of historic structures representing the glory days of Jugendstil, Germany’s art nouveau. Home of the chemical giant Merck, which began as the Angel Pharmacy (Engel-Apotheke) in 1668, Darmstadt is now so identified with chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and the naming of newly-discovered elements that it has been branded the “City of Science.” However, like Lilies of the Valley that thrive in ashes protected there from cutworms, “purified” music emerged as an alternative identity. In 1946, the Darmstadt International New Music Summer School for contemporary classical music was founded with allied support from American Officers active in cultural exchanges and rebuilding initiatives. Darmstadt was in the American occupied zone where there were resources for music scholarships and the energy to find viable pianos. The New Music school proved uniquely attractive to a generation of well-educated and deeply curious pioneers. The Nazis had made musical innovation off limits for decades.

In addition to Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen, the Darmstadt Summer program attracted such avant-garde composers as Luigi Nono (married to Nuria Schoenberg), John Cage, Elliott Carter, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, and eventually Helmut Lachenmann. A 1954 lecture “American Experimental Music” by Wolfgang Rebner – a student of Paul Hindemith in Germany before leaving in 1939, who became a film composer/pianist in Hollywood and a regular performer at Peter Yates’s Evenings on the Roof – was likely the very first public assertion that an American tradition existed linking Charles Ives to Henry Cowell to Edgard Varese and to John Cage! It would take Yates another five years to take that ball and run with it.

In 1958, Nono coined the moniker “Darmstadt School” to embrace these prominent composers, as well as Earle Brown from the Merce Cunningham circle, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s teacher Franco Donatoni, the under-appreciated Belgian innovator Karel Goeyvaerts, and the electronic music pioneer Henri Pousseur. Barraqué and Xenakis were included in the Darmstadt School despite not having attended as students, as was Messiaen for his catalytic influence – regardless of a rapid retreat from serialism. Nono’s strong-willed nature and his controversial positions would effectively lead to the dissolution of the “Darmstadt School” by 1960.

During this ten-year period, Influential lectures were given about critical theory by Theodor W. Adorno, the controversial Marxist philosopher, sociologist, and composer. John Cage expounded upon chance operations; other cutting edge ideas were shared by the likes of Morton Feldman, Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek, Rene Leibowitz, David Tudor, György Ligeti, Edgard Varèse, and Xenakis. Ground-breaking performers who championed avant-garde music, such as Messiaen student and future wife Yvonne Loriod, were also accorded prominence. Loriod, however, was primarily Messiaen’s muse, and her capacity to realize his idiosyncratic birdsong, synesthetic effects, and unique structural methodologies proved a potent source of inspiration.

In a 1948 Paris newspaper profile, gay author and journalist Robert de St Jean (partnered with the more famous American novelist Julien Green), described Messiaen as having the expected long hair of a professor of harmony, but unexpectedly, his facial expression, “remains very fresh and very open, with glimmers of childlike gaiety, sometimes, in his eyes.” Serge Koussevitzky’s commission of a huge ten-movement symphony for the Boston Symphony – a year away from completion – had elevated Messiaen to international celebrity. Leonard Bernstein would conduct the premiere at Symphony Hall.

When asked by St Jean which “masters do you recognize as having left their mark on your work,” he replied to the nonplussed interviewer “the birds.” Most masterful of all he said was “the blackbird, of course! It can improvise continuously eleven or twelve different verses, in which identical musical phrases return. What freedom of melodic invention, what an artist!” Messiaen went on to disparage Western ignorance of rhythm as centuries away from full mastery. So it shouldn’t have been surprising that his gigantic symphony with piano and ondes Martenot soloists would soon be succeeded in his focus by the only vehicle for such necessary experimentation, the solo piano.

During 1949, at the Darmstadt summer course, Messiaen sketched the middle movements of Four Rhythmic Etudes, a work that signaled, especially in its third movement “Mode of Durations and Intensities,” a significant new direction that would galvanize all who saw the score, heard or performed it. Every note would exist within a numerical organization of pitch, duration, dynamics, and attack. Instead of utilizing a 12-note series, with the formal generating contours of a melody, Messiaen used modal scales composed of 36 pitches, 24 durations, 12 attacks, and 7 dynamics.

Messiaen’s handling of duration, e.g. tempo, comes out of the three – high, middle, low – registers of the piano expressed in superimposed eight note, sixteenth note and 32nd note. Messiaen explains: "The durations, intensities and attacks operate on the same plane as the pitches; the combination of modes reveals colors of durations and intensity; each pitch of the same name has a different duration, attack and intensity for each register in which it appears; the influence of register upon the quantitative, phonetic, and dynamic soundscape, and the division into three temporal regions imbues the passage with the spirit of the sounds that traverse them, creating the potential for new variations of colors."

“Neumes Rythmiques,” Messiaen’s first stab at so-called total serialism, draws from his fascination with medieval plainchant, and traces therein of ancient Greek poetic meters. A neume is described by Paul Griffiths, the great musicologist, librettist, and biographer of Barraqué, as a “sign representing a segment of melody. Such signs appeared in chant books in Western Europe in the 9th century and in the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century; there are also neumatic systems of similar age from Japan and Tibet.” A neume is literally and etymologically a breath. It is the precursor of the note before the five-line stave was invented to exert more control over pitches. Messiaen alternates longer strophes, roughly equivalent to stanzas, or opening statements in poetic odes, with shorter refrains, or choruses. Iambic rhythm establishes the first strophe, which is designated by the composer as neumes, with fixed resonances and intensities.

Messiaen explains further: "In an interplay of transposition, the neumatic symbol as an indication of a sinuous melodic entity is now applied to a rhythmic motive. Each rhythmic neume is assigned a fixed dynamic and resonances of shimmering colors, more or less bright or somber, always contrasting"

The rhythmic etudes open and close with impressions of volcanic Papua New Guinea, where tribal culture strongly inhabited a Pacific Rim landscape rich with particularly exotic birds and ritual dances around bursts of fire. The terse opening “Island of Fire” represents the summation of Messiaen’s pianistic models from Liszt, Debussy and Ravel, as well as characteristics of his massive keyboard works produced for Loriod in the decade just ended. The closing “Island of Fire” features pounding toccata-like rhythms ornamented with complex nature-evoking riffs that suddenly give way – twice – to a simple open-air passage of elegant birdsong as might have been written by Mozart or Chopin.

Iannis Xenakis was something of a refugee staring down last chances when he arrived in Paris In 1947. A death sentence for political terrorism was on his head; his face disfigured by shrapnel from a resistance-related skirmish in Greece. This scenario seems all the more unlikely when looking back to a childhood shaped by governesses, and music discovered on the radio. At ten, after his mother died, Xenakis attended an English style boarding school on an Aegean island, surrounded by temples and statues where his early interest in music led to piano studies and an affinity for science. Astronomy and archeology captured his imagination.

On the first day of Athens Polytechnic Institute’s school year in 1940, Mussolini’s troops invaded the Greek capital ending his 18-year-old dream of life in the ivory towers of mathematics and engineering. Xenakis’ politics became extreme overnight. He was repeatedly arrested and incarcerated while sporadically studying physics, music, archaeology and law alongside his focus on mathematics. Xenakis was at the front of any street demonstration, with the right-wingers at first, then with the communist National Popular Army becoming commander of the “Lord Byron Unit.” Later, after the Germans evacuated and the British established martial law in 1945, a shell fragment smashed his jaw and dislodged his left eye. Given up for dead, his father found the teenager in the rubble and was able to get him to an operating room.

After three months in a hospital, incredibly, Xenakis returned to study at the haphazardly functioning institute, while carrying on clandestine activism that provoked more jailings. Less than a year later he presented his thesis on “Reinforced Concrete,” only to be thrust into a camp for prisoners, escaping, and then hiding for six months in an Athens apartment.

His 1947 flight to Paris with false papers was a new beginning. Soon Europe’s most advanced architectural thinker Le Corbusier would offer him an engineering job. Xenakis worked closely with Le Corbusier for twelve years at the end of which mathematics, architecture and music actually merged with the landmark Philips commission for a pavilion celebrating electronics in a new age at the Brussels World Fair of 1958.

Despite a challenging relationship with Arthur Honegger, study with him at the École Normale was short-lived as the more methodical Darius Milhaud replaced the Swiss composer. Xenakis’ probing temperament didn’t sit well with Milhaud either. The young architect wanted harmony and counterpoint lessons with Nadia Boulanger, the famous teacher of so many Americans. But this unusually skilled and intuitive Greek was already 25 years old and still a musical beginner. Boulanger had no patience for that.

It was only after pushing open Messiaen’s door at the Paris Conservatory in the late afternoon of 1951 that Xenakis found a mentor who recognized the way in which he was advanced beyond his musical schooling. Years later Messiaen recalled, how this “bearer of a glorious scar, but radiant with an internal light…[and a] piercing gaze gave me to understand immediately that the man I was looking at was… not like the others. He told me he wanted to be a composer. When I found out that he was Greek, that he had studied mathematics and that he was working as an architect with Le Corbusier, I told him, ‘Keep going with all that…and out of it make music!”

Also in late 1951, Karlheinz Stockhausen began auditing Messiaen’s class at the urging of a young Belgian composition student Karel Goeyvaerts, who had also restlessly moved from Milhaud to Messiaen. The score to Messiaen’s “Modes Values and Intensities,” profoundly affected Stockhausen as it had affected Messiaen’s private student Pierre Boulez.

Xenakis married the French novelist and journalist Françoise Gargouïl in 1953. That year Le Corbusier hosted the International Congress of Modern Architecture in Marseilles for a rooftop event. Xenakis arranged a joint performance of the latest electronic music by Pierre Henry (another Messiaen student), a progressive jazz group, and alternating traditional musics from India and Japan ― each emanating from a different vantage point on the roof.

Soon the two architects collaborated on creating the famous modernist landmark monastery at La Tourette from 1953 to 1960. Meanwhile the composition of Metastasis, a nine-minute piece for orchestra and the first important work by Xenakis, responded to claims by electronic music composers of the inferiority and obsolescence of live performance. In 1955, sixty-one solo players, including a large mass of individual strings, premiered a graphically designed score made by using a ruled parabola. Xenakis endeavored to reconcile coexisting conceptions of time, Newton’s linear flow and Einstein’s recognition of matter and energy affecting time.

To propel forward motion, the score prescribed changes in the density of sound, its intensity and register.

This ultra precise parabolic design influenced Xenakis’ conception of the Philips Pavilion, “a free-form hollow structure” with 375 speakers imbedded in the undulating walls and the means to project lights and images for an audience of 500 at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The Pavilion was referred to by Le Corbusier as Poème Electronique, the name that would be exclusively applied to the eight minutes of electronic music by Varese to be played by the building as a condition of Le Corbusier’s participation. A synchronized eight-minute montage of images filled every angle of the space.

This World Fair was the first such international gathering since WWII ended, adopting as its optimistic symbol a giant structure resembling the form of an atom. The pair of architects settled on a floor plan for the Pavilion resembling a stomach from which giant tilting tent poles and wires supporting pre-cast concrete panels created a dynamic exterior. Xenakis also composed a brief electronic piece based on the sound of burning charcoal for the entrance.

The building was a sensation. After a battle for credit,  Xenakis shared the glory with Le Corbusier (who had little to do with it) and was made an international herald of the new. Xenakis then left architecture and completely embraced music for all its potential, once harnessed to advanced mathematic theory. Messiaen would describe the swarming string music of Xenakis, as it coexisted with the composer’s constant invention — such as the creation of the graphic computer interface — “not simply the ancillary side-effects of a thought; they are not radically new, but radically other.”

It is likely, however, the corpus of nine percussion works spanning two decades (1969-89), that may best encapsulate the mental energy of the “radically other,” an equipoise between total serialism and indeterminacy. Persephassa, a 30-minute percussion sextet led the way in 1969 – a rite of spring in honor of the goddess Persephone – with exhilarating cross rhythms, eddies, tremolos, tempestuous “clouds” of texture, the otherworldly whistling of simantras, and what percussion guru Steve Schick describes as “interlocking rhythms to create a unified rhythmic field.” Psappha, the next percussion work from 1975 distills – in half the duration – the drama of silence created by the sudden cessation of Persephassa’s forceful sextet. The silences of Psappha are more deliberate and intimate in the hands of a soloist, the air of the island landscape more present.

Sappho, the lyrical poet of Ancient Greece universally admired by composers, is the subject. Seemingly wayward drumbeats play among silent reveries before persistently accelerating toward a challenge often encountered by performers of Xenakis. What Messiaen called “the charm of impossibilities” is made very real when facing the demands of these scores. Schick describes the conundrum well, “the impossibilities are really there: they can be found at the end of Psappha with Xenakis’s indication that each of the many simultaneously sounding notes is to receive three strokes. The resulting music at its most dense would have a single percussionist playing as many as 25 strokes per second on a group of instruments dispersed widely in a space.”

Given the composer’s ancient/futuristic commitment to the human production of acoustic sound coexisting with a predisposition to science and computer technology, it is as though Xenakis throws down the gauntlet and demands that we evolve our capacity, what the paleontologist, geologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called super-hominization: “It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.” At minimum the performer can diminish the space between the instruments, the rest is technique and appealing to a higher power.

How Jean Barraqué produced as his Opus 1 – a Piano Sonata of formidable length and nearly insurmountable technical demands is something of a mystery. Until completing the work in 1952 Barraqué’s production of scores could hardly sustain his interest long enough to finish them, such was the pace of his auto-didacticism. Unsurprisingly, the material was mostly derivative and uninspired despite an inner compulsion to make the grandest artistic gestures, an unmistakable feeling that he was destined to further a great tradition.

Almost no clues exist as to how this came about. Messiaen’s non-religious childhood was defined by the years of WWI spent in the idyllic safety of Grenoble with his mother, brother and grandparents steeped in the greatest opera scores. A natural pianist and entertainer, he sang and put on shows in the living room. He was privately enchanted by bible stories. His father, a translator of Shakespeare to French, was a soldier at the front. His mother Cecile Sauvage, the well-regarded “poet of motherhood,” anticipated his birth in an epic poem. Fourteen years Messiaen’s junior, Xenakis initially shared similarly idyllic circumstances, but soon faced the harshest imaginable realities. Barraqué was six years younger still. He was conceived on Easter 1927, his mother noted, as his parents were religious and she envisioned her only child’s future in the church. His father was a butcher in a suburb of Paris, where they soon moved to improve his business prospects in occupied France. His biographer Paul Griffiths (The Sea on Fire, University of Rochester Press, 2003) describes his upbringing as “a wretched parody of family life.” Religious fervor was as real to the Notre Dame choirboy as was young Messiaen’s life-long faith. Until music wiped it out, utterly.

Recordings, first among them Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, then Beethoven and Bach obsessed the young Barraqué who populated his imagination with these great personages. Nothing else had much reality, certainly not school work. His life in the church may have led to study with the great blind organist/composer Jean Langlais in 1947. During that time Barraqué was suffering recurring bouts of mysterious nervous disorders now believed were related to his realization that he was homosexual.

The following year he became a non-enrolled student of Messiaen. Langlais may have made a recommendation based on the young man’s voracious curiosity. With an awareness of Messiaen’s classes, as Griffiths puts it, that “the past few years had been alive with revolutionary ideas about developing Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method of composition, reinvigorating rhythm, exploring new tone colors and leaning from the music of the world.” At the time fellow student Boulez was in an innovative heat of creative fire. Soon, unaccustomed to any higher education, Barraqué was thrust into Messiaen’s class in musical aesthetics and analysis at the Paris Conservatoire with three session per week each lasting four hours. That term Messiaen was focused on rhythm – Rite of Spring, ancient Indian ragas, Mozart, and plainsong. Barraqué’s writing at the time is nothing if not telling:

“For those who could use it, the time spent with Messiaen allowed that plunge…a great teacher conveys nothing: he’s there to disturb. What Messiaen will not do – and what some counted on him to do – is to set up a theoretical method of analysis. Only the works are there, magnificently radiant and devastating. Messiaen gave is his class the impresssion of a master who knows how to listen and be silent. One has to pass through some heavy experiences in order to preserve that respectful humility towards works – works no longer fixed in a splendid, distant past but alive forever with their on energy of life and death.”

Another year would pass in admiration of Bartòk while stepping in the direction of serialism. A catalyzing event was the 75th birthday of Schoenberg celebrated in Paris with an October 15, 1949 performance of the strictly serial, but deeply expressive Phantasy for violin and pianos, as well as the less strict and highly dramatic Ode to Napoleon for reciter and piano quintet, both recently composed. In the months before the concert he was immersed in earlier Schoenberg, and with fresh eyes for Debussy scores. Webern’s music had been recently published, was making the rounds, and proved hugely catalytic for the Messiaen circle. His influence is clear in Barraqué’s first serial work, tellingly title La porte ouverte (The Open Door), followed immediately by a solo violin sonata that also betrays the influence of Boulez, with whom he was intensely aware from a distance. Eventually they spent time together sharing scores.

Boulez remembers Barraqué at that time – with perhaps too much disapproval and hindsight from one who seemed to conceal his own sexuality – as a tense, overly complex alcoholic with bad work habits, one whose admiration of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche was unhealthy, in that he modeled himself as a classically cursed artist. Nonetheless, the Second Sonata of Boulez galvanized Barraqué to complete his own contribution to the canon of piano sonatas, which when finally revealed two years in gestation betrayed a work ethic that staggers the imagination. Much has been written about this work, and little of it helps explain its fascination or promotes understanding. Even Barraqué’s radio interview from 1969 most have left his listeners perplexed. He tackles the core subject of freedom versus rigor:

“In the free style the greatest role is played effectively by the dynamics and by the sort of rhythmic élan that sets up very striking contrasts. On the other hand, the rigorous style is written in a very contrapuntal manner, where cells of the basic structure are developed according to a principle of variation I call ‘in closed-open circuit’, that is, with all the variations on the rhythmic schemes, which are sometimes superimposed in two, three, four – up to four and even five parts – and which, above all, require the integration of silence, which progressively impregnates the work, so to say, and finally removes from it its contrapuntal and structural content to give way to silences – what I call ‘avoided’ music, silences that have an importance in the work.”

The handful of recordings began with Yvonne Loriod traipsing in and out of the studio to learn sections and perform them as her busy schedule allowed. It was finally edited together with a running time of 52 minutes in 1957. Whether she would have adopted similar tempi in live performance cannot be known. Subsequent recorded interpreters Roger Woodward and Herbert Henck have a consensus running time of 46-48 minutes. Considering the outright esoteric nature of this repertoire, CD buyer comments on Amazon are fulsome and extravagant. The adjective count may be off the charts, but the intelligence and thoroughness of these reviews is also absolutely stunning. The Loriod and Woodward recordings each have 2.5 million views among others on YouTube!

Eighteen years have passed since the Barraqué Piano Sonata was last performed in Los Angeles, yet the interest in this Mt. Everest of piano works seems undimmed. One can only hope that the rarity of live performances will diminish as the training and intelligence of pianists continues its magnificent trajectory, as access to recordings proliferates, and as the curiosity of performers and audiences demand the “charm of impossibilities.”

© PATRICK SCOTT 2018

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February 24, 2018
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Chant de Linos (1944) – Andre Jolivet (1905-1974)  
Sonata for Two Violins (1999) – Eric Tanguy (b. 1991) 
Oiseaux Exotiques (1956) – Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
La Mort du Nombre (1930) – Messiaen  
Quatour III (1973) – Betsy Jolas (b. 1926)
  Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894, arr. 1920) – Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

The famous symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé struggled for eleven years to get his masterpiece published, all the while considering theatrical options and stage directions. He was cool to the idea upon first hearing about it; after all, many now considered Mallarmé’s the greatest poem of French literature. A piano reduction helped soften his resistance months in advance. Confidently, the 32-year old Claude Debussy insisted that the 52-year old poet attend the first orchestral performance of his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. As it happened that very day, December 22, 1894, the precipitous judgment of treason landed in the Dreyfus Affair. The public, fanned by falsehoods in the press, was fixated on the trial with its trumped up charges and increasingly evident strains of anti-Semitism.

However, the cultural tastemakers were otherwise preoccupied with Mallarmé v. Debussy. Symbolism was an art movement that celebrated the dream state, transfiguration, sensuality, ambiguity, and the inner world of imagination. Debussy was drawn to the movement’s breakthrough poets and painters. Claude Monet had just purchased Giverny, the estate where his so-called impressionist paintings would change art history.

Harvey Lee Snyder, who has devoted an entire book to this work (Afternoon of a Faun: How Debussy Created a New Music for the Modern World, Amadeus Press 2015), captures the sense of ardent anticipation and doubt preceding the premiere, “…can any composer capture the mythic symbolism at the heart of the poem? Can music possibly simulate the opulent language, or evoke the languor, the torrid atmosphere of a sylvan afternoon, or portray the erotic ambitions of the faun.” Mallarmé would live only four more years.

The 20-something conductor was unknown; the hall was undistinguished. For Mallarmé, his verdict would come after an especially long and uneven concert – wayward Glazunov, vivacious Saint-Saens, pompous Franck, mixed with unremarkable songs and bonbons by lesser-known and now-forgotten French composers. Debussy’s Prelude arrived at the end of the evening as it does tonight. "I have just come out of the concert, deeply moved. The marvel! Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun, which presents a dissonance with my text only by going much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness. I press your hand admiringly, Debussy. Yours, Mallarmé."

The audience was equally thrilled and demanded an encore with such insistence that the prohibition of encores was swept aside. The intoxicated orchestra was all too willing to comply. Unwittingly, they witnessed together the dawn of modern music. Finally, music had thrown off Germanic formalist restraints and moved past Richard Wagner’s grandiose and intransigent chromaticism to celebrate the sensual and ephemeral underpinned by structures far subtler and intrinsically more progressive than Western music had ventured before.

Meanwhile the Dreyfus Affair polarized French politics for twelve years of degradation and reversals with long-lasting implications. By 1912, Paris audiences had polarized – on the one hand more conservative and reactionary, and on the other more daring and insatiable. The press however, continued to exploit these polarities for profit. For its third season the sensational Ballet Russe offered the public Vaslav Nijinsky, its impresario Serge Diaghilev’s new young star dancer performing his own radical choreography for Debussy’s score. The translation of an esteemed poem to music held in high regard would be further changed. Léon Bakst overpoweringly lush scenery and inspired costumes heightened Nijinsky’s stage action and riveting personification of the Faun. The movement was not only unfamiliar, but also onanistic and overtly erotic. Acting as dramaturge, Jean Cocteau helped Nijinsky with his poor grasp of French to navigate the elusive poem. The Louvre’s collection of Greek vases provided ample inspiration and clear models for Nijinsky’s satyr/faun.

The audience was stunned. The sculptor August Rodin stood and cheered, others booed; many were enchanted by the sublime merger of music and mime. The painter Odion Redon, Mallarmé’s close friend, rhapsodized on what he imagined would be the late poet’s reception. Rodin observed about Nijinsky, “Form and meaning are indissolubly wedded in his body, which is totally expressive of the mind within...” However, the dominant newspaper Le Figaro’s editor Gaston Calmette substituted for his critic’s insightful and positive review a front-page opinion attacking the ballet by means of a classic sex panic:  

“Anyone who mentions the words 'art' and 'imagination' in the same breath as this production must be laughing at us. This is neither a pretty pastoral nor a work of profound meaning. We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent. That is all. And the over explicit miming of this misshapen beast, loathsome when seen full on, but even more loathsome in profile, was greeted with the booing it deserved.”

A scandal ensued. Many more would follow in quick succession as the 20th century flexed its artistic muscles on the brink of a war’s gathering storm.

Before his famous interaction with Mallarmé, Debussy had begun work on his only opera, his magnum opus Pelléas et Mélisande based upon the 1892 play by the Belgian-born symbolist playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck. The initial composition was completed in 1895. Orchestration began in 1898 once a production commitment was in place. Yet another four years would pass before rehearsals began. The score was in every way unprecedented, so much so that it would take an unheard of fifteen weeks of rehearsals. Sixty-nine of them were conducted with Debussy present. Yet this vast innovative canvas in five acts was quite well received. In little more than a decade Pelléas et Mélisande had surpassed 100 performances at the Opéra-Comique by the time World War I cast a devastating pall. An ardent nationalist, Debussy was devastated by the German triumphs. Just six months before the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Debussy succumbed to rectal cancer, dying younger even than Mallarmé.

Interest in Pelléas et Mélisande faded with the rise of post-war anti-sentimentality, the profane Dada movement, and France’s growing love affair with Jazz. Even so, Debussy’s opera was of paramount importance to Olivier Messiaen’s artistic development. For his eleventh birthday December 10, 1919, the boy received the complete score of Pelléas et Mélisande. All the men of his family had enlisted for military service so he spent the wartime years with his younger brother, mother, grandmother and profoundly blind grandfather in mountainous Grenoble.

To pass the time he made miniature stage sets and held colored cellophane to the light shining down on them from the window. He taught himself to play the piano from Gluck’s Orpheé. After a few months he found he could hear the score in his head. The family was entertained at night by his singing and playing the parts in operas by Mozart, Berlioz and Wagner. While in this ideal childhood retreat he taught himself to play Debussy’s Estampes (1903) and Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1908). A voracious appetite developed for Shakespeare, of which his father was an accomplished translator. Poetry was also on his radar, as his mother was Cecile Sauvage, the French “poet of motherhood.” She introduced Messiaen to Keats and Tennyson, whose medieval ballad The Lady of Shallot inspired the boy’s first composition.

Just weeks before Messiaen’s birthday, in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances to present carefully prepared weekly concerts of “Mahler to the present” for serious music aficionados. Attendance at open rehearsals was encouraged. Complicated works with the most advanced language were repeated as many as six times to promote comprehension. Before the Society closed in 1921 due to Austrian hyperinflation reaching 14,250 percent, some 353 performances of 154 works in 117 concerts were produced.

The members-only organization barred critics and applause or booing of any sort. In Vienna during that time it was common for thrill seekers and provocateurs to disrupt performances of new music with whistles and catcalls. For the first two years Schoenberg excluded his own music to make way for his protégé’s Alban Berg and Anton Webern, as well as Stravinsky and Ravel, Busoni and Bartok, Ravel and Debussy, among many others.

Schoenberg established the model for a rotating Vortrags-meister (Performance Director). Among other prominent musicians Webern and Berg served in that role, as did his future brother in law violinist Rudolph Kolisch and founder of the Kolisch Quartet. Special arrangements for reduced forces of orchestral works were often made to keep the repertoire current and to foster analysis. One such Performance Director was Benno Sachs, about whom little is known except that he made tonight’s deliciously effective 1920 arrangement of Afternoon of the Faun, using the harmonium often favored by the society to help fill out the texture. Tonight we are using an exceptional pedaled harmonium owned by the composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003). Its earlier provenance has yet to be established.

Messiaen’s five-minute piano work The Lady of Shalott was posthumously published. A decade would pass before he would feel confidant as a composer. From 1928-29 the best-known and most frequently performed piano works are the Preludes, owing much to Debussy’s model, but establishing a strong and recognizable voice. Two works for organ and an orchestral work would precede La Mort du nombre. The twenty-two year old Messiaen wrote the quasi-symbolist poetic text with its enigmatic title. La Mort du nombre represents a dialogue between two souls experiencing separation.

However melodramatic or unconvincing to our 21st century sensibilities the text may seem on the page, Messiaen imbues it with synesthetic intensity that implies an orchestra and looks forward to the great masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time. The tenor expresses suffering with apocalyptic images that betray the influence of Edgar Allen Poe – “Bells of horror! Horrible mixture! Wall that crushes me! The earth opens up, the stars fall, the world is swallowed up!” Nowhere is the influence of Pelléas et Mélisande more evident, or the distance shorter to Debussy’s unfinished opera Fall of the House of Usher.

The contrasting soprano music is of such sweetness and luminosity contemporary critics complained of the music lacking stylistic unity. At least one writer heard the violin music as not very far from Jules Massenet (perhaps the popular “Meditation” from the opera Thäis?), and the abundance of pearly arpeggios beholden to Fountains of the Villa d’Este by Franz Liszt. The beauty and sincerity of the dominant melody, however, cannot be denied, as cannot the clear foreshadowing of the sublime movements that usher in the final moments of the Quartet for the End of Time written a decade later in captivity.

Few have ventured to explain the meaning of the work’s title, which may explain the infrequency of performances. The great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger – whose massive influence upon composers of the early part of the 20th century was only eclipsed by Messiaen’s towering and unabating influence on music of the last seventy-five years – helped organize the first performance in 1931, despite her lack of conviction about the composer’s talent. Importantly, he struggled with many obstacles up to the very last minute to secure the high level of artistry that would become a hallmark of virtually all of his successive premieres across six decades to come.

Debussy’s Greco-Roman interests were shared by one of Messiaen’s close friends Andre Jolivet. “My art” the composer said, “is dedicated to restoring music’s original sense, as the magical and incantatory expression of the spirituality of human communities.” After an immersion in the music of Debussy and Ravel, the young Jolivet was galvanized when he heard a concert of Schoenberg. Soon he sought out the avant-garde American transplant Edgard Varèse, who accepted him as his only European student. The ancient instruments of flute and percussion would figure prominently throughput his varied compositional output. His Cérémonial for six percussion instruments gave homage to Varese.

In 1935, Jolivet and Messiaen founded the Spiral Concerts to give themselves performance opportunities. In short order Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier joined them. A common set of musical values emerged. This quartet was opposed to the cynicism of Dada and the fashionable worldliness of Les Six. They were averse to neoclassical borrowings from the baroque, and dedicated to the primacy of melody, sincerity and humanism. “Young France” (Le Jeune France) was formed in 1936. However, as war approached and the four composers matured into their thirties, the group identity faded, while the friendships remained.

In 1944 Chant de Linos (The Song of Linus) began as a competition piece for flute and piano that helped launch the career of the great flutist Jean Pierre Rampal. Jolivet immediately expanded the virtuosic piano part for string trio and harp for premiere the following year by Rampal. Due to the intricate and riveting ensemble writing, and the showcase it provides the flutist, Chant de Linos would become Jolivet’s most popular work.

Linus (Linos in Greek) was the son of Apollo, god of music, poetry, art, medicine, sun, light and knowledge and son of Zeus, and Terpsichore, one of the nine muses and goddess of dance and choral performance. It was his duty to instruct Orpheus and Heracles in music. After chiding him for a series of errors, the hotheaded Heracles killed Linus with his own harp. Without the tragic ending, other mythological sources have as his mother Calliope the chief of the muses, and crediting Linus with the invention of melody and rhythm. She was revered for her ecstatic eloquence in reciting epic poetry. Jolivet’s score describes the work as a threnody, a funerary lamentation, an expression of grief interspersed with cries and dances. The quintet is extremely challenging due to the exposed unison writing that does not always lie idiomatically for the strings. This exciting journey features treacherous shifts, nearly impossible metronome markings, and an atmosphere that alternates lament with risk. For these reasons this highly effective quintet is infrequently programmed.

After Messiaen returned from a prisoner of war camp in Poland to a teaching position at the Paris Conservatory, where among his students was the incomparable pianist Yvonne Loriod, and the Second World War ended, four extravagant works were premiered in quick succession: Visions de l’Amen (1943) for two pianos; Three Little Liturgies of the Divine Presence (1944) for piano, ondes martenot, chorus of sopranos and medium orchestra; Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus (1945), a 20-movement piano symphony; and the 10-movement Turangalîla Symphonie (1945) for piano, ondes martenot, percussion solos and very large orchestra. Each premiere featured Loriod. The extravagantly orchestrated melodies soaring in ecstasy, juxtaposed with a gnarly counterpoint of complex rhythms and ample dissonance was polarizing in the extreme. A new direction followed forthwith at the century’s midpoint with Quatre Etudes de Rhythm for piano.

Like Jolivet before him, Messiaen was asked in 1952 to compose a competition piece for flute and piano. Le Merle Noir (The Blackbird) represented his most accurate transcription of an actual birdsong to date. The piece pointed the way to Messiaen’s advent as a new kind of ornithologist, one who could hear the high-speed complexity of birdsong with it inhuman dynamic range and unique timbres, remember it, transcribe it to western notation and set it in its natural habitat, some substitute, or an imaginary landscape – as music.

Messiaen’s synesthesia has been reported only as color hearing, but as brain research advances, and as actual synaesthetes share their experiences using more scientific rigor, it seems apparent that Messiaen’s sensorium was more multifaceted and intrinsic to his creative personality than previously understood. More than just color hearing, his experience might also have associated smell with sound, taste with color, and any combination of senses with memory. And thus Messiaen was aided in integrating this uniquely personal ornithology within a seemingly boundless creative output. Such polysynesthesia might also provide ways to better understand his unique approach to Catholicism.

The following year, Messiaen tackled the first of his five “bird” concertos for piano and varying sized orchestras, the amply scored Rèveil des Oiseaux (Birds Awakening) represents an avian dawn chorus. Oiseaux Exotiques, its more modest successor, was quickly composed across the end of 1956 and early 1957. The work has attained classic status owing to its compactness, highly distinctive cadenzas and an unforgettable coda. It is more straight-forward to conduct that the other concertos, though no less daunting for the virtuoso soloist. The massive Catalog d’oiseaux, made up of 13-pieces in seven books for piano solo followed in 1958. With nary a trace of religion, the postwar Messiaen offered abstraction dis-guised as birdcalls. Across the entire decade, his chaste love affair with Yvonne Loriod was extramarital. Only until his institutionalized wife died in 1959, was Messiaen able to marry the pianist – secretly in Japan after a respectful three years with his former student and close friend Pierre Boulez as witness.

Despite some harsh criticism of the two bird concertos in the press, there were those who felt Messiaen had finally broken free of the perceived sentimentality of his wartime music. In a 1961 article for Le Figaro, Claude Rostand disparaged the “earlier swoonings…dubious melodies…excesses of sound, with flashy, overloaded effects,” and turned around to praise Oiseaux Exotiques as “infinitely more spare…more sober and has a livelier edge, more clarity of line.”

A throng of important students joined Loriod, Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis including the Paris-born American Betsy Jolas. During WWII her family returned to the U.S. where she schooled first at New York’s French Lycée, and then Bennington College. She was active also as a keyboard accompanist and singer with the progressive Dessoff Choirs in NYC. Like Messiaen, Jolas was blessed with highly cultured parents, however her mother Maria McDonald was the translator, and her father Eugene Jolas was the poet. He founded the magazine transition in 1927 following his daughter’s birth. Until 1938, and the rumblings of war, transition featured the most exciting painters, composers and writers. Famously, he published in serial form the entire Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce as “work in progress.”

Jolas was a sympathetic student with extensive academic and performance experience of Medieval and Renaissance music, and an intense fascination for Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. In 1946 the Jolas family returned to Paris, where she continued her education with Darius Milhaud and Messiaen. A bond of trust eventually developed with Messiaen that made her the natural choice to cover for him at the Paris Conservatoire in 1971, when his international touring became especially demanding. She succeeded Messiaen with a permanent appointment in 1978.

String Quartet III was composed in 1973 with the subtitle “Nine Etudes” as a nod to Debussy’s innovative piano Etudes. The individual studies range in length from less than a minute to several minute-long explorations of aleatoric structures reflecting her interest in the kind of improvisation embraced by Boulez after digesting John Cage’s radical chance operations. She describes herself as a “fellow-traveler” with Boulez, but one who always took the side of beauty. This refusal to fully embrace serialism and break with the past was considered by some “feminine.” Her identification with such composers as Josquin des Prez (c. 1450-55  – 1521) and Stravinsky and may also have delayed appreciation of her significance, despite many distinguished awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation, Berlin Prize, Prix de la Ville de Paris, American Academy of Arts, and French Legion of Honor in 2011, to name only a few.

About “Nine Etudes” Jolas wrote:

“After Quatuor I for strings (1958) and Quatuor II for coloratura and string trio (1964), here again is a true quartet for strings. I have attempted in this work to present a contemporary view of some characteristic elements of string technique in the form of nine etudes, each of which, following Debussy’s example, deals with one particular aspect of this technique: pizzicato, harmonics, aleatory (No. 7 is in memory of Purcell’s Fancy on one note), vibrato, etc. Several movements are played without pause. Commissioned by the Kindler Foundation, Quatuor III was completed in September 1973. The first performance was given at the Textile Museum in Washington, January 7, 1974, by the Concord Quartet, to whom the work is dedicated.”

Tonight we celebrate the 50th birthday (January 27) of Eric Tanguy with his Sonata for Two Violins from 1999. Tanguy began serious music study at a young age with the enigmatic spectralist composer Horatiu Radulescu. Jolas and fellow Messiaen student Gerard Grisey deepened his education at the Paris Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1991. A resident of the Académie de France in Rome (1993-1994), Tanguy was a guest of the Tanglewood Music Center (1995) on special invitation from Henri Dutilleux. A close friendship developed with the older composer until his death in 2013. Affettuoso, in Memoriam Henri Dutilleux for large orchestra was commissioned by Orchestre de Paris and followed later in 2013. Esa-Pekka Salonen gave the U.S. premiere with the LA Phil in 2016.

His Nouvelle Etude was premiered by Jacaranda’s discovery Steven Vanhauwaert at Piano Spheres in 2015. To a standing ovation, the U.S. premiere of his Trio (2011) was given by Jacaranda with the Pantoum Trio, Tereza Stanislav, violin, Cécilia Tsan, cello, and Vanhauwaert. Tanguy has become one of the most widely performed and broadcast French composers today with over 100 works in nearly every genre published by Boosey & Hawkes/Salabert.

The 1999 Sonata for Two Violins is a marvel of assimilated influences across the waning 20th century. With superb and idiomatic craftsmanship (violin is his instrument), the 30-year old composer’s confidence is as striking as his music is accessible. The blistering speed of the outer movements contrasts the serenely French reverie within.

The composer writes:

"The Sonate pour deux violons by Eric Tanguy is also in three movements, each movement having his own specific harmonic characteristics. The first movement is based on the idea of interacting syncopations, crotchets and quavers. This composition technique aims at an expression of obsession, which is further increased by the mixture of lightning-fast cascades of triplets. The second movement develops from motifs and figurations between the two instruments, which flow into one another in a sensual way, balanced by two solo cadenzas. The third movement, particularly quick, develops the idea of escape, game of response, a kind of frenetic whirlwind."

The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich commissioned Tanguy’s Second Cello concerto and gave its premiere in 2001. For several years afterward he toured the work extensively before his sudden decline from cancer and death shortly after his 80th birthday in 2007. Such a brilliant and peripatetic spotlight thrust Tanguy into the forefront of composers today, making evident a heritage that traces its roots through him to Jolas, to Messiaen and to the “father of modem music” Debussy – the creator of a “new music for the modern world.”

PATRICK SCOTT © 2018

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January 20, 2018
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

The People United Will Never be Defeated! (1975) – Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938)
Gay Guerilla (1979) – Julius Eastman (1940-90)

For two decades composer/journalist/author/professor Kyle Gann wrote music criticism for The Village Voice. He writes with considerable authority. Around the turn of the previous century Gann identified Ben Johnston’s one-movement String Quartet No. 4 “Amazing Grace,” composed in 1973, as one of the essential works of the 20th century. “Had Ben never written another work, the Fourth Quartet would have been a sufficient blueprint for how music could expand its resources magnificently in the 21st and 22nd centuries.”

Gann’s clear-eyed focus as a composer was on the work’s concentrated theme and variations structure, and how each variation simultaneously exploits sophisticated microtonal and rhythmic innovations with such dense abandon that the score amounts to a nearly inexhaustible source book. More obvious to the listener, however, is the quartet’s deep humanism and almost magical thrall of the anti-slavery song that provides the work’s theme – and a means for accepting with pleasure about twelve minutes of what is fairly avant-garde material. “Amazing Grace” is both popular and influential, even though it still poses daunting challenges for quartet players.

El Pueblo Unido
Of comparable success is Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never be Defeated! – 36 Variations on a Chilean Song “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, an activist folk group. Rzewski wrote the hour-long piano work two years after the violent military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet September 11, 1973 that cut short the term of Chile’s first democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende – the same year “Amazing Grace” was written. Ortega’s protest song, a prime example of the nueva canción Chilena, was made widely popular by the Chilean music group Inti-Illimani formed in 1967 by politically disenfranchised university students.

Rzewski attended a concert by Inti-Illimani in the Upper East Side’s Hunter College in 1974 with the pianist Ursula Oppens (b. 1944). Prodigiously talented with a formidable education, she had received numerous scholarships and awards including the 1969 gold medal of the Busoni International Piano competition, and had co-founded the new music series Speculum Musicae in 1971. A kindred spirit and accomplished composer/performer of new piano music, Rzewski had returned from Italy in 1971 after studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, and after founding the Rome-based collective Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum in 1966. MEV experimented with primitive synthesizers and performed daring, often riot-producing improvisations. That fateful Hunter College concert occurred just weeks after the resignation of President Nixon, August 8, 1974. Like the rest of the audience, Rzewski and Oppens left the hall singing The People United, a resolute earworm that lasted for days.

Inti-Illimani and many similar groups fled Chile after Pinochet forced 5,000 civilians into a soccer stadium for questioning and torture. More than two-thirds were brutally executed, including the teacher, poet, theater director and famous singer of nueva canción Chilena Victor Jara, who was shot 44 times in the gut after his wrists were broken. His corpse was dumped into the street. But, instead of deterring dissent as was intended, a martyr was born for the now international cause. The hugely popular folk singer-activist Joan Baez immediately produced an album in tribute to Jara and his movement entitled No Nos Moveran (We Shall Not be Moved, 1974). The title track is a song of resilience and determination.

What was this all about?
Allende entered politics as an upper middle class physician with a liberal political outlook – following in his father’s footsteps. He publicly condemned Hitler after Kristallnacht in 1938, and worked for the victory of the Popular Front party becoming Minister of Health until 1941. In the decades that followed, he ran for the presidency three times. The wildly famous and twice exiled poet Pablo Neruda was nominated for the presidency in 1970, but threw his support to Allende, who finally won in a three-way run-off election.

The arts, culture and education flourished in Chile from 1970 to 1973. Progressive music festivals brought together classically trained musicians with folk artists, indigenous peoples and their instruments in genuine exchange. Record amounts of housing were built and thousands of scholarships offered; inflation dropped significantly and wages increased broadly after the establishment a minimum wage. Neruda received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 despite misgivings about his politics. However, Allende’s wholesale nationalization of key industries and the re-establishment of ties to communist Cuba created enormous friction and political backlash. Following the military coup and its aftermath, Chile was dealt another blow.

Ariel Dorfman, the acclaimed playwright (Death and the Maiden), novelist (Darwin’s Ghost) and essayist (newly published Homeland Security Ate My Speech), recently looked back in a recent New York Times opinion piece: “I can still remember my shock and sorrow the day I heard that Pablo Neruda, Chile’s greatest poet and one of the towering figures of 20th-century literature, had died. It was Sept. 23, 1973.” The Pinochet dictatorship announced that his death was from prostate cancer.

“Even if there were reasons to doubt every syllable that emanated from the junta as they tortured and murdered, persecuted and exiled Allende’s followers,” Dorfman continued, “it did not occur to me that they could have been stupid enough to assassinate Neruda himself.” Neruda’s widow, perhaps out of fear or denial, adamantly supported the government’s stated cause of death. “Nevertheless, decades later,” writes Dorfman,

“denunciations from Neruda’s former driver, Manuel Araya, mentioning a lethal injection [in the stomach] administered to the poet hours before his death led a Chilean judge to exhume the author’s body and seek help from foreign forensic organizations to determine the true cause of death. And now 16 experts have announced that Neruda died of a bacterial infection rather than of cancer cachexia, as fraudulently stated on his death certificate. Although they offered no evidence of foul play, their research has caused a certain amount of speculation. Contrasting with the inevitable circumspection of the forensic professionals, many Chileans — pundits, politicians, intellectuals, joined by one of Neruda’s nephews — take it as a given that an execution took place.”

The message of Ortega’s “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” strengthened as the days unfolded and the resolve of the Chilean people coalesced. That the nueva canción Chilena – soon transformed by Rzewski’s hands into what now must be considered high art – has generated renewed interest in 2017 – with proliferating performances – speaks to the mounting sense of resistance and universal longing for liberty. Dorfman continues:

“Whatever the truth about his death, its effect was stunning. Neruda’s funeral on Sept. 26, 1973, became the first act of public defiance against Chile’s new rulers. How could they fail to accompany on its final journey the body of the poet who had celebrated the human body in all its sensual desires and deepest despair?

That funeral was also a blueprint for how the resistance would eventually defeat Pinochet in the arduous years to come: by taking over every tiny and large space available, by pushing back the limits of what was permissible, by stating, in the face of bayonets and bullets, that silence would not prevail.”

A final report with further forensic analysis of the Neruda case is expected in 2018. We must be reminded that the truth can be found despite the worst possible odds, and arrogant destructive power does not have the last word, however long it takes to be quelled.

President Richard Nixon had been openly hostile to Allende after years of CIA propaganda against him and lavish financial support for his opponents. As Oppens and Rzewski walked into the autumnal breezes, perhaps the song they sang together resonated with the newly sworn president’s declaration just weeks before, “our long national nightmare is over.” For Chileans, however, Pinochet’s regime lasted until 1991. The courageous spirit of Chilean inclusiveness and diversity inspired Rzewski. The People United Will Never be Defeated! was dated September-October 1975 and dedicated to Oppens.

The Buffalo Generation
A remarkable new music scene developed in Buffalo at the State University of New York, which strived to be thought of as the ”Berkeley of the East.” Extensive vision planning helped to create a new social dynamic for music that would bring performers and composers closer together without the necessity of teaching duties. Financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation helped create a new paradigm for collaboration that opened in March 1964 – the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts. At the center of the center was the warm and charismatic personality of pianist/composer Lukas Foss (1922-2009), a naturalized Jewish-American born in Berlin. Under his leadership nothing quite like the scene in Buffalo existed elsewhere, before or since. Renee Levine Packer, who worked at the center as an administrator and authored the scene’s definitive chronicle This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (Oxford University Press, 2010), understood the historical models and like-minded programs it generated:

“Although these groups were comparable to the Buffalo center for their dedication to fostering the composition and performance of contemporary music, each was different in practice. Most used professional freelancers from their communities or faculty members and ad hoc performers. None had an ensemble brought together to live in a community for the sole purpose of the study and performance of new music. None presented as broad a cross-section of repertory with allegiance to no one school of thought, and, indeed, none incorporated as broad a representation of international composers and performers.”

Foss initially recruited 18 of the most progressive and accomplished young artists to be fellows. Percussionist/composer John Bergamo, who would later become a leading figure at CalArts, fellow percussion innovator Jan Williams, who would remain in various capacities as composer, conductor and director until 1980, and avant-garde jazz bassist Buell Neidlinger signed up. The LA-born soprano Carol Plantamura who was active in Rome with MEV joined the collaboration, as did the non-English speaking Italian experimental composer Sylvano Bussotti.

Pianist Fred Myrow, who had strong links to rock music, would become a prolific film composer. The late violinist Paul Zukovsky, a child prodigy and competition winner would gain notoriety as Einstein in the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach. The 35-year-old composer George Crumb would find his voice with the now classic anti-Vietnam classic Black Angels for amplified string quartet in 1970. This extraordinarily talented assemblage also included a flutist, clarinetist, and trumpeter/composer, another violinist, a violist, guitarist, and another soprano, as well as a baritone, and the conductor Richard Dufallo.

Already professors at the University of Buffalo when the center opened, the German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel, and the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, who was closely associated with the Darmstadt school and electronic music, felt liberated by the arrival of so many fellow travelers. The had accepted positions with the understanding that sleepy Buffalo would became the most exciting American city for new music.

John Cage’s frequent collaborator the composer/pianist David Tudor followed in the second year along with trombonist/composer and extended technique pioneer Vinko Globokar. In that spring, Rzewski took a break from MEV and Rome for a semester to join the Buffalo scene. Cornelius Cardew, the notorious English experimentalist and assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen followed in 1966-67. With rock star looks, the formidable but elfin pianist Yuji Takahashi stayed for two years.

After the center’s groundbreaking Columbia/CBS/Sony recording of Terry Riley’s In C, March 27-28, 1968 that overdubbed ten musicians including Jan Williams on marimbaphone, the San Francisco composer overlapped Takahashi’s stint in the spring of 1969. Julius Eastman became a Creative Artist the following fall. The university made him full faculty the following year, and with extensive performing responsibilities, including touring Europe, he stayed until 1975. David Del Tredici, who had already begun his Neo-Romantic devotion to Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland, completed Vintage Alice during his 1972-73 stay – many years before he became an outspoken champion of gay identity.

Rzewski spent the spring semester of 1974 in Buffalo. His breakthrough work Coming Together (1972), was given the first of many shattering performances by Eastman as narrator, March 31, 1974, at Buffalo’s Albright Knox Gallery, and ten days later in Carnegie Hall. Eastman had already performed some five times as a pianist in Les Moutons de Panurge (1970), Rzewski’s ironic response to Riley’s minimalist landmark In C.

In Coming Together, however, Eastman’s uncanny stillness reading the letter of Sam Melville (born Samuel Joseph Grossman), convicted bomber, organizer, and inmate of Attica Prison, profoundly dwelled on how time is affected by place, and “a greater coming together.” The maximum-security prison was only 35 miles from Buffalo. The memory of what happened there would not soon be alleviated.

Stage actor Steven Ben Israel, who was a member of New York's Living Theatre in 1973, may have better matched the racial identity of this particular leader of this most notorious prison rebellion, however Eastman embodied the black empowerment that demanded humane conditions in a massive prison designed for a thousand fewer prisoners, 63% of which were black or Puerto Rican, than were actually housed in the brutal architecture. Eastman took possession of the audience’s collective imagination while Rzewski played a dizzying piano in an undetermined ensemble that numbered eight for this occasion. Eighteen months later The People United Will Never be Defeated score was given to Oppens.

Considering all that came before and all that went into the work, it seems supremely poetic, and with no small amount of irony, that she gave the world premiere in 1976 as part of the Bicentennial Piano Series at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.

The epic hour-long protest classic is often compared to J.S. Bach’s Aria and 30 Goldberg Variations. The composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) has written eloquently about this kaleidoscopic work, its sources and structure. On the former, Wolff observes, “It was about the time that Rzewski...began to associate himself with jazz musicians such as Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy, and developed an interest in popular political music, including songs of the Italian left...the songs of Hanns Eisler and the new Latin American music form Cuba and Chile, the Puerto Rican folk music in New York and the songs of Mike Glick.”

After extolling the work’s resemblance to tonal Romantic piano music, its experimental harmony, and use of serial technique, as well as repeated notes and extravagant new sonorities, Wolff draws attention to, “the catching of harmonics after a chord attack, as well as the whistling by the pianist, crying out, slamming the piano lid, all techniques suggesting experimental music – and the free, informal kind of performing sometimes found in blues and jazz.”

Also, like the wondrously clear structure of Johnston’s “Amazing Grace,” despite its complexity, the prospect of following the extensive formal logic of The People United is not difficult. Again, Wolff explains:

"The opening song is set in thirty-six bars, which are followed by thirty-six variations and then an expanded repetition of the song setting. Throughout the variations there is a continuous cross-referencing of motifs, harmonic procedures, rhythms, and dynamic sequences. These in turn are contained within the organization of the variations. The variations are grouped in six sets of six. The sixth variation of a set, itself in six parts, consists of a summing up of the previous five variations of the set, with the final sixth part of new or transitional material. (It has been suggested that the first five variations of a set are the fingers of a hand, and the sixth unites them to make a fist.)”

Roots & Minimalism
The octet with voice Stay On It (1973) was Eastman’s first important work to survive as his clear entry to the history of so-called minimalism. That there was a black voice with a significant African-American perspective at this important turning point of Western music is a topic of considerable interest today – as Eastman is discovered and re-discovered more than twenty-five years since the tragic dismemberment of his body of work. At the end of his life, conditions of addiction, poverty, homelessness, flawed decision making, homophobia, and it must be said, the cruelty of institutional racism undermined the safekeeping of his oeuvre. What remains today is unpublished although in the safe keeping of his younger brother, former bassist with the Count Basie Orchestra Gerry Eastman, who manages distribution of manuscript copies. Eastman’s biographer Renee Levine Packer, the erstwhile administrator of the center and keen chronicler of its trajectory, observed the linkage of Eastman and Rzewski at this time when key works of Riley, Glass and Reich were gaining ground in the public sphere

“All in all, Eastman’s admiration for Rzewski’s work of this period makes considerable sense. If the modular structure of In C provided a manifest precedent for questions regarding notation and ensemble coordination, Rzewski, for whom minimalism was merely a means to an end, offered an appealingly messy approach to pulsation and repetition. In Rzewski’s hands, pulse-pattern minimalism was never rigidly non-referential. Unlike early Reich and Glass, the “outside world” of politics and the vernacular was readily embraced.”

After quoting a participant in many performances of Stay On It contrasting their common ground with Rzewski being “aggressive and hard-nosed” and Eastman as “malleable and sensual” she observed, “Eastman drew most of his musical conclusions by breathing the same air and feeling the same vibrations as his more commercially successful counterparts.”

That being said Eastman’s so-called “Nigger series” – Evil Nigger (1979), Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerilla (both c. 1980) each for four pianos certainly demonstrates Eastman’s later and total integration of these two sides, so well contrasted in Stay On It. Evil Nigger has an energetic grandiosity that recalls Rachmaninov before its growing dissonance and structural reduction. The esprit de corps is heightened by the cuing calls at key moments of “1, 2, 3, 4!” that heightens audience involvement!

At 55-minutes, Crazy Nigger is more than double the length of its predecessor. Eastman’s “organic form” is in full display described by Kyle Gann in his trenchant program notes to the three-disc treasure trove of historic recordings. “Every phrase contains the information of the phrase before it,” he explains “with new material gradually added in and old material gradually removed: minimalism’s additive process expanded to the level of phrase structure.”

The form of Crazy Nigger is so elaborately drawn out that some extraordinary textures emerge slowly with rivulets of melody and an engulfing darkness of bass notes that require sixteen more hands belong to eight pianists in the audience in a coup de theatre! Luciano Chessa, in the anthology portion of Packer’s book edited by Mary Jane Leach considers Gay Guerrilla “Eastman’s most powerful tribute to the modern fight for gay rights and one of his most compositionally memorable – and moving – works...if all of Eastman’s music but this one were to disappear, Gay Guerrilla would still be enough to guarantee him a firm place in the history of twentieth-century music.”

Eastman’s father, Julius Sr. was named after Julius Caesar. He trained to be a civil engineer and got work managing water systems. His wife Frances was devoted to piano study. Their middle class life in Ithaca included a grand piano, but did not include religion. Eventually their eldest boy’s talent and autonomy gained expression singing for St. John’s Episcopal Church choir, where he was a paid boy soprano. He learned that his talent had worth. From an early age Julius was willful, obstinate and had an air about him that his father read as effeminate. Frances was protective and concerned only with the boy’s development claiming that before he was born she had a sense that he was special. At age ten he asked for a beginning piano book that seemed as easy to read on the piano as a textbook. His voice changed at age fourteen darkening into an extremely resonant bass baritone.

Renee Levine & Julius Eastman center with Morton Feldman and other Creative Associates at the Albright Knox Gallery. Suddenly this slight and spindly boy had an identity as a singer that could rivet an audience with a commandingly large voice. Racism was hardly evident in Ithaca, where the black population was small and educated. Julius participated in science club and his high intellect was accepted. As the boy matured, however, his options seemed to narrow in the eyes of his school counselor despite good grades and prizes for singing. Perhaps ironically and with a hint of sexual rebelliousness, Julius chose to sing Stormy Weather at his class graduation. Nevertheless his talent was being nurtured by observant others who had connections to Juilliard School and Curtis Institute of Music, where he enrolled in 1959 as one of two black male students and three Latinas among one hundred plus students.

Eastman lived at the YMCA, and his homosexuality was now apparent enough that friendships were limited. Weighing only 125 pounds, it must be considered that he suffered from malnutrition. He wore glasses. His shyness and technical sophistication as a pianist compared less well to the many Anglo students who entered with more privilege. So the young Cuban, Mexican and Brazilian women students became his close companions. Composition would soon supplant his interest in being a pianist and his grades improved markedly.

With a final recital in 1963 made up exclusively of his own compositions earned him a diploma from Curtis. Before entering the Buffalo Center, the intervening five years showed his enterprising nature and opportunities that his talent and mentors helped manifest. He was selected by the conductor Eugene Ormandy for a minor part in a production of Der Rosenkavalier and assigned a German coach with decided success. Of even greater impact was his casting as Tiresias in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and the great Lili Chookasian as Jocasta. He was then asked to tour the U.S. and Europe as a member of the sensational Gregg Smith Singers in 1968. After a stint as a dance accompanist, he joined Foss’s many-splendored enterprise in 1969.

Gay Guerrilla
For the audience new to Eastman’s music the most distinguishing feature of Gay Guerrilla is his surprising interpolation of an unlikely but highly recognizable theme – the reformation’s battle hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott) written in 1528 by none other than Martin Luther, the namesake of Dr. Martin Luther King. Of course J.S. Bach famously incorporated the hymn in a 1723 cantata of the same name featuring four soloists, chorus and chamber orchestra. Lukas Foss was a noted Bach conductor and may have employed Eastman as the bass soloist.

On this 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, the puzzle of this choice deepens as one considers the Protestant stance against Catholicism’s doctrine of earning grace, rather than it being an intrinsic spiritual state. Martin Luther’s pronounced anti-Semitism only muddies the waters. Kyle Gann opts for a perverse use of the quotation, “being quite subversively transformed, given the intention implied by Eastman’s title, as a gay manifesto.” In the context of such a manifesto coming ten years after the 1969 Stonewall Inn origin of gay liberation, another interpretation may be that by appropriating this famous music – especially after reading the four versus that Luther wrote to his own melody – Eastman triumphantly ennobles what had been long rejected as unspeakable.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2018

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November 18, 2017
Noon to Midnight, Walt Disney Concert Hall 

Fantasmagoriana (World Premiere, Co-Commission) – Mark Grey (b. 1967)
I. The Revenant
II. The Grey Chamber
III. The Fated Hour

Three Choruses from Bakkhai (2013) – Dylan Mattingly (b. 1991)
Chorus I, Chorus III, Chorus VII

Mount Tambora was the largest volcano to erupt since Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD. An ancient Roman painting survives depicting Bacchus framed by the dizzying pre-volcanic form of Mount Vesuvius, and giving us a sense today of what was lost in the heart of ancient Rome. Only two hundred years ago, however, the Indonesian island of Sumbawa – home to the Tambora stratovolcano – would model lasting climate consequences for the modern world now contemplating nuclear winter. With the greatest force yet recorded, Mount Tambora’s first eruption in April of 1815 propelled a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil upward followed by ten billion tons of pulverized rocky material and ash. Three shafts of fire eventually merged into one column nearly 150,000 feet that dwarfed the 14,000-foot high mountain as it was reduced by a third – all the while gushing molten lava.

Year Without a Summer
Lesser eruptions followed building upon a much smaller but highly polluting 1814 volcanic eruption in the Philippines. Global temperatures dropped over one degree with a related death toll of 90,000. A massive epidemic of typhus was unleashed by the cold. Crops failed globally; monsoons magnified the flooding and torrential rains in Asia. In America, summer temperatures ranged within hours between 95 degrees to near freezing. A retired President Thomas Jefferson was nearly bankrupted by his crop failures. The worst famine of the 19th century brought about riots, burning and looting many European cities, as the coldest decade in recorded history prevailed. Eighteen hundred people froze to death. Many months after the eruption, the climate change effect was so pronounced that 1816 was dubbed the Year Without a Summer. The English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner captured the vivid yellow sunrises and sunsets caused by Mount Tambora’s pollution in paintings such as The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. The cataclysmic events also inspired him to imagine the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as a spectacular 1817 watercolor using scraped encaustic. While the eruption may have had a lasting effect on Turner’s unprecedented use of color, several writers responded to the prolonged gloom by giving birth to the Gothic Horror genre – and what is now being dubbed by movie studios: the dark universe.

Dark Universe
The promiscuously bisexual Lord Byron was granted an acrimonious divorce in March of 1816 after little more than a year of marriage. Charges of incest with his half-sister, mounting debts, and nagging scandals that generated the epithet “mad, bad and dangerous to know” forced his exit from England in April. Byron’s epic narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (two cantos in1812, and two more in 1818), which gave him overnight fame, inspired the symphonic poem Harold in Italy by Hector Berlioz. Like his disaffected hero, Byron wended his way through Belgium and Germany before settling at Lake Geneva from May to November.

Due to a congenitally deformed foot Byron traveled with his own personal physician, John William Polidori, a young specialist in sleepwalking who happened also to be a writer. The two strikingly handsome travelers met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his soon-to-be wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Geneva. She introduced herself as “Mrs. Shelley.” The young literary couple had been traveling with Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, a thwarted singer, actress and would-be writer, who had dallied that spring with Byron immediately after his divorce. The volatile Clairmont was instrumental in bringing the “Shelleys” together, and also had a hand in the travel plans that reunited her briefly with Byron. The following year she would give birth to his daughter Allegra; Percy and Mary would actually marry.

Lord Byron
Polidori augmented this medical employment with a publisher’s fee to maintain a diary including celebrity gossip of which there proved to be a rich trove during June of the Year Without Summer. Byron and his doctor companion took up residence at the Villa Diodati, a mansion in the village of Cologny, while the “Shelleys” and Clairmont took the smaller lakeside Maison Chapuis.

Cold rain fell incessantly in Geneva that summer. Nearby, in western Switzerland a conical ice dam began to form at the tongue of a glacier. After two years of relentless growth and fitful human efforts opposing nature, the mass of ice would collapse in a catastrophic flood. Such an atmosphere of mounting dread and unremitting gloom left this house- bound quintet near a log-burning fire reading in French from Fantasmagoriana, a recently translated collection of German ghost stories. Byron proposed, in moment of restless invention after hours of talking, often past midnight – and drafts of laudanum – that they “each write a ghost story.”

Monsters Among Us
Mary was unable to conceive an idea for several days. Polidori was inspired by a fragment written by Byron that would become The Vampyre, the short story published in 1819, and the first tale of the undead re-animated by the harvesting of hot fresh blood. They discussed Galvanism, the recent discovery of animating a recently dead frog, for example, when its nerves were touched to an electric current. On June 16, several hours past midnight came to Mary the terrifying idea of harnessing natures power to revoke the finality of death:

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

What began first as a short story became a vastly influential novel published anonymously in 1818. Multiple editions sustained speculation about which of the Shelleys wrote what. The latest iteration of the story will be the opera Frankenstein by Mark Grey to premiere in Brussels at the newly renovated Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in 2018-19. Grey has already extracted a Frankenstein symphony that was premiered by the Atlanta Symphony In 2016 marking the anniversary.

The composer’s research into the anthology of German ghost stories gave inspiration to a three-movement chamber symphony Fantasmagoriana co-commissioned by Jacaranda and the LA Phil for the new music marathon Noon to Midnight. Scored for string quintet, wind, quintet, trombone and percussion, its three movements have suggestive titles: I. The Revenant; II. The Grey Chamber; and III. The Fated Hour.

Euripides 404BC
Bakkhai is a revolutionary tragedy by the most remarkable of ancient Greek playwrights at the end of his life. The work was given a prize-winning posthumous premiere in 405BC. Euripides makes civilization’s first argument for the opposing natures of control (Pentheus) and freedom (Dionysos). As such, Euripides pits the rational and analytic against the instinctive, and sensual, yet the latter – aligned as it is to the animal world – gives potential access to the force of spirituality.

Nonetheless, interpretations of this complex story of the charismatic god Dionysos, conceived by Zeus with Semele, a human, disguised as a human to undermine the rule of Pentheus, and ultimately inspire his Bacchantes, a cult of women outsiders, to a killing frenzy in which they tear Pentheus limb from limb, have changed over the centuries as the nature of the conflict and the understanding of power gets reexamined.

Dylan Mattingly has set the entire text of the play in its original ancient Greek as a cantata with the more accurate transliteration of the tile Bakkhai. All of the play has been incorporated. The work was completed in 2013. All seven choruses were premiered in Brooklyn by Contemporaneous directed by David Bloom. The instrumentation is 3 sopranos, high baritone, 2 oboes, cello, bass, re-tuned piano, and 2 percussionists. Mattingly has done extensive scholarly work into microtonality, as well as ancient Greek music and drama.

The following are two excerpts from a lengthy essay:

“There are numerous barriers between us and an understanding of the choral poetry and music of Greek drama from the fifth century B.C. But perhaps the strongest limiting factor in our ability to recreate a sonic world from 2500 years ago is the dependence of our own concept of music upon the irrepressible tropes and traditions of the modern world. We define music by the soundscape that surrounds us. For us to imagine a different music, we must unlearn some of our own experiential knowledge of what music is. Because of this critical problem, it is unsurprising that a good deal of the attempts to recreate the music of ancient Greek tragedy is based in anachronistic projection.

The modern Western predilection for the twelve equally spaced notes in each octave on the piano, known as equal temperament, hinders our vision of a tuning system based entirely by the natural mathematical relationships between the notes. Likewise, the dominance of steady time signatures in all types of current music impedes our ability to imagine a music with a fundamentally unsteady beat. Although it is a Sisyphean task to approach ancient music from a clean musical slate, I will do what I can to bring about an understanding of the music of the Bakkhai, in as much of the ecstatic glory that Euripides poured into it.

The following material is divided into four parts. The first is a background of ancient Greek music and the Bakkhai in particular, and an attempt to clarify the aspects of the art form that may have been obscured by a scholarship steeped in the language of Western classical music. The second part is a complete scansion of the meter of the choruses of the Bakkhai. Third, I have written a guide through my own music for these choruses, written not as an attempt to precisely recreate the sound of ancient Greek music, but rather to use a comprehension of Euripides’ words, rhythms, and notes to build something that presents an emotional conception of the Bakkhai but is in itself entirely new. The fourth part is the music itself.”

And, specific to the music at hand this evening:

“The first and most important thing to clarify is that this music is not a reconstruction. It is not an attempt to recreate the potential sound of the music from 404 B.C. when the play was premiered. Although it is impossible for us to know exactly what that music would have sounded like, I feel fairly certain that it did not sound like this.

The music that I have written is very much my own, inspired musically by my own life as well as my own experience of and interpretation of the choruses of the Bakkhai. That said, the music attempts to use the premises that have been discussed…in order to create something that is true to the emotional content of the Euripides tragedy. This music is not what Euripides’ own music would have sounded like, but perhaps it sheds some light upon what his music would have felt like…

The instruments and singers in the ensemble are required throughout the work to tune to the just-intoned piano [synthesizer], although because these instruments (and singers) can achieve a great variety of microtones, they are also able to explore just-intoned harmonic zones beyond that of the fixed piano tuning. The instrumentation serves to juxtapose the ecstatic high voices and reeds with a very bass heavy rhythm section consisting of the cello, bass, bass drums, and often the piano.

The chorus in the Bakkhai are importantly foreigners, a group of women who have “left the hills of Tmolus to adore Bromios,” the music must be universal in its penetrating allure, but simultaneously strange and alien—unlike anything heard before in Thebes. Often I attempt to evoke a sort of imaginary folk music, complete with its own roots in the combination of its imaginary religious and imaginary popular strands of music. There are various elements throughout the music that come from each of those zones, the most easily ascertainable one being tonality.”

Mattingly has a very original voice. Despite the strenuous demands of performing this music the integration of all seven choruses into the whole is an extravagant dream that should not be unrealized for much longer. Hopefully, both Grey’s opera Frankenstein and Mattingly’s music theater work Bakkhai will both soon be heard in their entirety all the better to hear and understand the legacy of John Adams their enthusiastic mentor.

© PATRICK SCOTT 2017

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October 21, 2017
First Presbyterian / Santa Monica

Varied Quintet (1987) – Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
String Quartet No. 9 (1988) – Ben Johnston (b. 1926)
Jardin des Herbes (1989) – Karen Tanaka (b. 1961)
Two Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1982) – Steven Stucky (1949-2016)
Symphony No. 3 (1995) – Philip Glass (b. 1937)

The growing presence of exotic tunings in classical music helps, by contrast, to unconceal the power of equal temperament, its inherent limitations, and diminishing dominance. This transformation – however incremental, subtle and under-appreciated – is among many accelerating changes in global climate, human migration, power dynamics, gender identity, and data access altering worldviews today.

Among the planet’s sixty-three generally recognized scales and modes, equal temperament dominates with only five. While equal temperament was a consolidating force during the Age of Enlightenment, its global impact can be traced to a business concession made when the industrial revolution overtook the production of pianos from artisans in the 19th century. Just intonation, Its functional opposite, is based on the physics of sound occurring as an overtone series, be it a vibrating string, or a column of air – the human windpipe, or a flute, for example. The intervals between notes are naturally uneven and tuned by ear. With equal temperament, however, all twelve notes are multiples of the same basic interval. This simplified system is a schematic standard that allows for enormous complexity, due to the ease of shifting from scale to scale.

Volcanoes & Tigers
A twentieth century American movement to compose music using just intonation emerged in the northeast quarter of the Pacific Rim’s ring of volcanoes. Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, the movement’s west coast tigers, were harbingers of micro tonality. After a privileged childhood in multicultural Portland Oregon, study in Los Angeles with Arnold Schoenberg, and conducting the world premiere of Symphony No. 3 by Charles Ives at Carnegie Hall, Harrison adopted scales and tunings derived from various Asian musics, some rooted in ancient China, and indigenous music – such as the Indonesian gamelan in later years. Partch invented wholly reimagined instruments to expand just intonation and accommodate his original 43-tone scale. However, it is his invaluable supporting research that drives the growing impact of Partch’s conceptual work.

The older Partch was key to Harrison’s ultimate rejection of international modernism. The hobo scholar’s exhaustive Carnegie-supported research into the mathematic theories of sound from ancient Greece – attributed to Pythagoras, his school, and Ptolemy (AD 100-170) the Greco Roman scientist living in Alexandria, Egypt. Ptolemy’s persuasive book, Harmonics, the theory and mathematics of music, gave Partch a touch-stone for much further musical archeology in Britain. Even more consequentially, he discovered a reprint of the 1877 English translation of Sensations of Tone (1863), the first scientific study of sound and human perception. Its author, the pioneering German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz invented a resonator to, among other things, chart sonic waveforms. Partch sought to reconcile ancient theories with what was considered modern science.

Genesis of a Music
Partch’s 1947 manifesto Genesis of a Music devotes three whole chapters to his theories of scales, tuning, just intonation and the mathematic principles necessary for building fantastical instruments to perform within a microtonal system. Genesis of a Music summarized over 200 years of Western music in a examination Alex Ross calls "the most startling forty-five-page history of music ever written".

The book totally expanded the consciousness of the twenty-three year-old Johnston when it was published in 1949. Years earlier In Macon, Georgia – at age twelve, accompanied by his grandmother – Johnston first learned about Helmholtz from a lecture on Debussy and acoustic theory. By August 1950 he and his new wife Betty Hill moved to coastal Gualala, California – due west of Sacramento in Redwood country. As an apprentice, Johnston mostly helped Partch build and tune his unique instruments, but it was not his calling. With Partch’s blessing, the following year Johnston began study of polytonality at Mills College in Oakland with Darius Milhaud, who was at his teaching peak. During that year he composed a setting of John Donne’s poem A Nocturnall Upon Saint Lucie’s Day for baritone and piano. Shortly before he graduated from Mills a teaching position with duties to play for dance classes opened up at the University of Illinois, Champagne Urbana. Johnston remained there for thirty years extending Partch’s theories to their ultimate fruition using traditional instruments. Given the adaptability of string players, its is not surprising the core manifestation of Johnston’s theoretical work was composed for the ensemble at the core of Western chamber music – his utterly distinctive set of ten string quartets.

Was it coincidence or destiny that Partch’s treatise was published in 1949, the year when serialism first emerged as the ultimate codification of the twelve-tone system. Father figure of the entire Germanic tradition culminating with Schoenberg’s protégé Anton Webern, J. S. Bach (1685-1750) was strongly blamed by Partch for his sanctioning embrace of equal temperament. However, as Bach scholarship has matured around his 250th birthday, which fittingly coincided with the millennium, this idea has been thoroughly discredited. Recent scholarship reveals Bach’s frustration with the idea of even temperament. Partch seems to have conflated well tempered (The Well-Tempered Clavier) with equal tempered. The California maverick’s bias may have derived from Bach’s singular orientation to the keyboard. However, the so-called father of Western music actually advocated for a more flexible territory between just and even temperament.

Anti-Establishment
Partch did pioneering work in ancient music, while musicology was just emerging as a serious discipline, so his need for a scapegoat can be forgiven. The free-thinking Partch railed against the intrinsic hegemony of “equal-tempered tuning, which meant that composers could not absorb the scales of other world traditions; and the urge to make music ever more instrumental and abstract." By contrast, as he put it, the traditional vocal declamation with string accompaniment of China, Greece, India, and the Arab world are corporeal – more about being physically (in the Walt Whitman sense) than doing, striving and arriving. He saw equal temperament as the music of colonization and subjugation. Not unlike the English language, equal temperament is quite viral.

Partch’s hitchhiking, sexually self-expressed distain for the constraints of capitalist conformity resonated with Harrison. The atom bomb changed the world utterly for him. Working for world peace required a transformational set of tools. Among them, just intonation has certainly more currency in the world than Esperanto, the synthetic language Harrison championed. His bicoastal visibility and close friendship with bicoastal John Cage, his sunny personality and a more favorable orientation to the musical mainstream than Partch, helped him gain early attention. Harrison’s sphere of influence eventually expanded with his emergence in the sixties as openly gay – and partnered for life with the instrument builder William Colvig.

Decades before Johnston arrived in Oakland to go to Mills College, Harrison had explored the rich Bay Area dance scene centered at the girl’s school as a dancer, musician and composer in his twenties. Lester Horton (1906-53), the most influential California choreographer to follow Ruth St. Denis in Los Angeles, was invited in 1938 to bring his dance company and teach during the Mills summer session giving Harrison many opportunities for self-expression. Many years later in 1980, Harrison was invited to return to Mills to inaugurate the newly created Darius Milhaud Chair in music composition for a fixed term. He taught “Intonation in World Music” aside the resident Kronos Quartet and shared music making with Terry Riley.

Varied Quintet vs the Varied Trio
The renowned percussionist Willie Winant helped Harrison establish the Mills College gamelan. In gratitude the composer wrote a quintet featuring percussion for Winant, with Harrison playing harp, violinist David Abel, Julie Steinberg on harpsichord, and Colvig playing a tubular bell he made to which the ensemble tuned in just intonation. Winant struck and caressed a vibraphone, tambourine, drums, bakers pans and a set of tuned porcelain bowls played with chopsticks from India known as a jaltarang.

UC Berkeley celebrated Harrison’s 70th birthday two months early with a concert including the Suite for Violin and Gamelan and the premiere of the Varied Quintet in 1987. Since the harpist and bell player were a busy and committed couple, and the cartage for the fragile harpsichord and bulky harp added hassle and expense, a version that the Abelz-Steinberg-Winant Trio could tour became an obvious and immediate undertaking. To clinch its portability and popularity, the quintet was recast in equal temperament with the help of pianist Steinberg. Formed in 1984, the trio specializes in music of the Pacific Rim, North, Central and South America. Mills hosted the actual May 1987 birthday concert including premieres of three extraordinary pieces: Varied Trio, Ariadne danced by Eva Soltes – who dedicated many years to the production of a brilliant full length bio-documentary on the composer – and  the Concerto for Piano and Gamelan. The A-S-W Trio then went on to celebrate Harrison’s birthday in several cities.

The extraordinary popularity of the trio version with its distinctive scales makes a strong case for the trio version with equal temperament, but the subtle colors, textural delicacy, and bright bell in just intonation make the quintet cherishable, more so for the fourth movement’s far more idiomatic neo-baroque French rondeau – Harrison’s tribute to the lavish sensuality of the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Quartet No. 9
During Harrison’s birthday year Johnston was finishing work on his Quartet No. 9 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina where he located after early retirement. The Palo Alto-based Stanford String Quartet premiered the work in 1988. Bob Gilmore, who edited Johnston’s collection of writings Maximum Clarity (2006, University of Illinois) writes in the book’s chronology that the ninth quartet “consciously evoke[s] earlier classical idioms as part of a new emphasis that becomes increasingly apparent in Johnston’s music of these years, and which he discusses in “Position Paper” published in Perspectives of New Music: that of exploring how European music might have developed had it been freed of the constraints of equal temperament. This form of musical revisionism, distinct in technique and intent from the neoclassicism of his earlier work.” This important book follows in the footsteps of Partch with four large chapters: On Music Theory; On Musical Aesthetics and Culture; Some Compositions; and On Other Composers.

Gilmore observes in his notes to the 2006 Kepler Quartet New World Records CD, that this revisionism is:

“Especially clear in the third movement, a lyrical and fully Classical slow movement that invokes Haydn, but with melodic embellishments that are not possible in the language of the great Austrian Composer. The scherzo-like second movement perhaps suggests shades of Mendelsohn, but opens up his idiom to new harmonic adventures made possible by just intonation. The energetic finale…[is] classical in impulse (with perhaps a hint of a jazz walking bass). But the most extraordinary movement is surely the first, where Johnston achieves a real compositional tour de force in creating a six-minute movement, the pitch world of which remains entirely between middle C and the C an octave above and yet retains our interest throughout. Here the richness of just intonation with its luminous pure intervals and their microtonal variants, lets us hear as never before one of Western music’s most familiar clichés: the C major scale.”

Gilmore trusts that this Janus-like quartet will help listeners discover “new sounds and untried harmonies.” As writer, critic and composer Kyle Gann observed in 1995, String Quartet No. 9 uses intervals of the harmonic series as high as the 31st partial with “potentially hundreds of pitches per octave,” in a way that is "radical without being avant-garde," and not for making "as-yet-unheard dissonances," but to, "return...to a kind of musical beauty," that he feels has been eroded in Western music by equal temperament.

A Pervasive and Persistent Legacy
Several generations of composers now have moved beyond equal temperament in their embrace of noise via John Cage, electronic music, and the computer-assisted scientific analysis of sound underpinning the spectralist movement. So-called World Music has gained purchase in concert halls previously devoted only to Western music. The issue has become less contentious as is evident in Karen Tanaka’s Jardin des Herbes. The harpsichord with its origins in a world less defined by theoretical tuning is easily and often re-tuned for specific periods of music. The work succeeds in virtually any tuning, but thrives in the micro climate of just intonation. Her love of nature and concern for the environment has influenced many of her works, including Questions of Nature, Frozen Horizon, Water and Stone, Dreamscape, Ocean, Silent Ocean, Tales of Trees, Water Dance, Crystalline series, and Children of Light.

Tanaka was born in Tokyo, Japan where she began piano and composition lessons as a child. She moved to Paris in 1986 helped by a French Government Scholarship to study with Tristan Murail and to work at IRCAM as an intern. In 1987, she was awarded the Gaudeamus International Composers Award at the International Music Week in Amsterdam. She studied with Luciano Berio in Florence in 1990–91 supported by the Nadia Boulanger Foundation and a Japanese Government Scholarship. In 1996, she honored with a fellowship at Tanglewood. In 1998 she succeeded Toru Takemitsu as co-artistic director of the Yatsugatake Kogen Music Festival. In 2005 she was awarded the Bekku Prize.

After her 2012, selection as a Sundance Institute’s Composers Lab fellow for feature film, Tanaka served as an orchestrator for the BBC's TV series, Planet Earth II in 2016. Her works have been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, LA Phil, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Brodsky Quartet, and the BIT20 Ensemble. The prestigious Nederlands Dans Theater is among numerous dance companies that have featured her music.

Tanaka has received commissions from Radio France, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arts Council of England, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Michael Vyner Trust for the NHK Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, for cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano, and the National Endowment for the Arts for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Chester Music, London, Schott Music, New York, and Editions Bim in Switzerland publish her music. Tanaka lives in Los Angeles and teaches composition at Cal Arts.

Poetics of Steven Stucky
Following the tragic loss of Steven Stucky in January of 2016, Jacaranda and pianist Gloria Cheng wanted to remember the composer in this fifteenth season. Cheng had performed his Album Leaves on the inaugural season in 2004. Together we wanted to remember an extraordinary composer and dear friend. Cheng will devote her next CD entirely to the music of Stucky, so it was decided that a public performance of these valedictory songs would give the artists a public hearing of a lesser known work prior to its world premiere recording.

John Donne (1572 -1631) wrote the lion’s share of his Holy Sonnets over two years 1609-11. The form of his sonnet is based on a Petrarchan model ending with a rhyming couplet. The first eight lines follow the normal ABBA ABBA rhyming pattern, but the remaining six lines rhyme with an atypical CDCE EE. The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter – five groups of unstressed syllables followed by one that is stressed. He was the leading representative of the metaphysical poetic movement that reacted against the conventional surfaces of Elizabethan poetry, and has proven to be a favorite source over the centuries for composers attracted to the invention of his metaphors, sensuality, and vibrant language.

This pairing from Donne’s most famous sonnets was given this beautiful setting before a clear trajectory was evident that Stucky would contribute greatly to making Los Angeles the center of contemporary music it is today. His relationship with the LA Phil was the longest such association between an American orchestra and a composer. He was appointed Composer-in-Residence by André Previn in 1988, and was Consulting Composer for New Music working closely with then Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen to expand contemporary programming, award commissions, and develop educational programs. The latter included mentoring pre-college composers under the groundbreaking Composer Fellows Program. Stucky hosted talks in the Green Umbrella series most memorably with Marc-André Dalbavie and Leif Ove Andsnes. Notable LA world premieres included Stucky’s Symphony (2012) by the LA Phil, and Piano Sonata performed by Cheng in the Piano Spheres series at Zipper Hall.

As conductor, Stucky frequently led the LA Phil New Music Group. Soloist Michala Petri joined the group for the US premiere of his recorder concerto, Etudes (2002). He conducted world and regional premieres of his contemporaries and mentors, such as Donald Crockett, Jacob Druckman, William Kraft, Witold Lutoslawski, Christopher Rouse, and Judith Weir.

While Two Holy Sonnets of John Donne is not about issues of tuning in particular, the work reveals a probing mind and a sophisticate ear that seem to transcend any perceived limitations of equal temperament

Undermining ET: Glass at 80
Arguably the most famous and financially successful composer on the planet, Philip Glass has indefatigably applied his pliant minimalism to every classical music form, repeatedly and with and such determined energy that his the art gallery beginnings seem like ancient history. Looking to the rigor of his relentless teacher Nadia Boulanger reveal more about how he developed the capacity to write an unending stream of operas, ten symphonies, and concertos for every imaginable soloist or group.

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies led the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987) that was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for Paul Zukofsky and dedicated to the composer’s late father. Glass's remembered that "his favorite form was the violin concerto, and so I grew up listening to the Mendelssohn, the Paganini, the Brahms concertos. So when I decided to write a violin concerto, I wanted to write one that my father would have liked." The Concerto was so persuasively performed and recorded in 1992 by Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, that the die was cast for more orchestral concert music.

Davies told Glass at the time of his success: "I'm not going to let you…be one of those opera composers who never write a symphony". Glass promptly responded with two three-movement symphonies "Low" (1992), and Symphony No. 2 (1994). The first combined themes from tracks on the 1977 David Bowie/Brian Eno album Low, a crossover gambit perhaps. Moving more directly toward symphonic tradition, Symphony No. 2 is described as a study in polytonality making reference to the seemingly unlikely French tradition of Milhaud, the Swiss Arthur Honegger, and Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos, who emerged with the help of Milhaud.

Davies commissioned Symphony No. 3 (1995), for his Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra using nineteen string players. Having perhaps worked through a return to his Boulanger past in Paris, the result was authentic, more transparently polished, and intimate. Finally Glass found a symphonic style upon which to generate seven more. The symphony’s third movement reuses the baroque chaconne as a formal stratagem and, as such, betokens the composer’s growing interest in Bach. The result is structurally taut and cohesive. Glass describes the shape and what gives the work its unity:

“The opening movement, a quiet, moderately paced piece, functions as prelude to movements two and three, which are the main body of the Symphony. The second movement mode of fast-moving compound meters explores the textures from unison to multiharmonic writing for the whole ensemble. It ends when it moves without transition to a new closing theme, mixing a melody and pizzicato writing. The third movement is in the form of a chaconne, a repeated harmony sequence. It begins with three celli and four violas, and with each repetition new voices are added until, in the final [variation], all 19 players have been woven into the music. The fourth movement, a short finale, returns to the closing theme of the second movement, which quickly reintegrates the compound meters from earlier in that movement. A new closing theme is introduced to bring the Symphony to its conclusion.

That being said, the overtones of nineteen solo strings can create a haze that is not helped by rooms with less than ideal acoustics. As the composers works have moved into the classical music arena like, perhaps, and invasive species, it was logical and welcome when Michael Riesman, Glass’s erstwhile music director arranged the work for string quartet plus viola and cello. This vastly successful reduction has been named String Sextet, however its origins should not be mistaken or disguised. Interestingly, the String Quartet No. 5 was written around the same time. It was eventually recognized as the finest work in the form by Glass. Hearing the two works side by side shows a fundamental kinship, so it was natural to have the Lyris Quartet, which made its Jacaranda debut playing the Glass fifth return to this sensibility for Jacaranda’s fifteenth season.

PATRICK SCOTT © 2017

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