Program Notes: Greater Bridgeport Symphony (March 16, 2024)

Debussy: l’Après Midi d’un Faune 
Jessie Montgomery: Coincident Dances
Paul Schoenfeld: Klezmer Rondos
Schubert: Symphony #5

Our program this evening opens with a piece written in 1894 that transformed music history forever: Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (L. 86). This ten-minute Impressionist masterpiece is viewed as a turning point in music history; Pierre Boulez memorably stated that “the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music.”  Debussy was inspired by the poem of the same name by the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolist poets resisted naturalism and realism, and sought to write about spirituality, the subconscious, imagination, and dreams. Charles Burkhardt tells us that:

 “ [This prelude] was [Debussy's] musical response to the poem of Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898), in which a faun playing his pan-pipes alone in the woods becomes aroused by passing nymphs and naiads, pursues them unsuccessfully, then wearily abandons himself to a sleep filled with visions. Though called a "prelude," the work is nevertheless complete – an evocation of the feelings of the poem as a whole.”

 You will be struck by the dreamlike, hazy nature of the Prelude. The piece begins with a languid flute solo, centered on the tritone: the powerful and unstable interval that was viewed as “the devil in music” in the Renaissance, but that forms the powerful gravitational pull of the dominant seventh chord, and has given us the opening notes of Leonard Bernstein’s immortal “Maria.”  The rhythm and the tonality of the piece are fluid, and ever shifting. The tonal ambiguity leads to the whole tone scale, a major characteristic of Impressionism. This whole tone scale floats freely, lacking the gravitational pull of the major or minor scale.

 "It is interesting to note the careful compositional structure that Debussy used to create the dreamworld of the Prelude; I’ll unpack this with you in the pre-concert lecture. Debussy uses compact musical ideas, called “cells” (motives) and builds the piece systematically from them. It’s fascinating to note that the piece is 110 measures long, and, while the piece of music is not a linear narrative, Mallarmé’s poem is also 110 lines long.

 Both of our next two pieces juxtapose multiple musical styles to evoke a place or occasion, in ways similar to George Gershwin’s work in Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris.

 Composer Jesse Montgomery has this to share regarding her Coincident Dances, which I’m looking forward to experiencing with you for the first time this evening. The GBS is one of the first fifteen orchestras in the world to perform this new work. Says Montgomery: “Coincident Dances is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood. The work is a fusion of several different sound-worlds: English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, and techno.” My reason for choosing these styles sometimes stemmed from an actual experience of accidentally hearing a pair simultaneously, which happens most days of the week walking down the streets of New York, or one time when I heard a parked car playing Latin jazz while I had rhythm and blues in my headphones. Some of the pairings are merely experiments. Working in this mode, the orchestra takes on the role of a DJ of a multicultural dance track.

 Klezmer Rondos evokes typical Eastern European klezmer band sounds within a typical concert work, characteristic of Schoenfeld’s amalgamation of differing styles. Somewhat uniquely in the orchestral repertoire, this piece includes saxophones and coronet (the trumpet-like instrument played by Louis Armstrong.) While we tend to think of the clarinet as the characteristic solo instrument in klezmer, the flute, violin or trumpet took on this role as well. Tonight, our own principal flutist, Keith Bonner, takes the lead on flute and piccolo. I’m indebted to Neil Levin for this context:

 “Klezmer Rondos quotes directly the opening section of a song of the Lubavitcher Hassidim, Kol dodi (Voice of My Beloved), from Song of Songs, attributed to the first Lubavitcher—or ḥabad—rebbe, Rabbi Shneier Zalman of Liady. A variation is often attributed to rebbes of different dynasties who were Rabbi Zalman’s contemporaries. There is also the quotation of a well-known Lubavitcher niggun rikkud (dance tune), as well as other typical idiomatic Hassidic phrases and inflections throughout…An original Yiddish song in folk style, to the poem Mirele by Michl Virt, concludes the first of the two movements.”

 Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 uses the smallest orchestra of his symphonies; Schubert seems to have been particularly enamored with Mozart when writing this symphony, and the instrumentation matches the first version of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. The first movement is Schubert’s first to not begin slowly, but begins with a very simple rising arpeggio (do-mi-sol) that comprises the first theme. Unusually, the recapitulation begins in Eb (IV), not Bb—a device Schubert had used before.  The second, slow movement ranges far afield harmonically, in a way characteristic of Schubert but not heard in Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven. The third movement, a minuet, is extremely Mozartean in character and harmony. The symphony concludes with a finale that is the shortest of the four movements.

 

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In this book, emerging as well as established scholars mobilize the links between applied sociology, music, education, and music education in ways that intersect the scholarly and the personal. These interdisciplinary vantage points fulfil the book's overarching aim to move beyond mere descriptions of what is, by analyzing how social inequalities and inequities, conflict and control, and power can be understood in and through music teaching and learning at both individual and collective levels. The result is not only encountering new ideas regarding the social construction of music education practices in specific places, but also seeing and hearing familiar ones in fresh ways. Digital assets enable readers to meet the authors and the points of their inquiry via various audiovisual media, including videos, a documentary music film, and multi-lingual video précis for each chapter in English as well as in each author's language of origin.

Program Notes for the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, Oct. 16, 2021

 “Sprit of 76”

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #1 in F# minor, Op. 1

Gershwin An American in Paris

Dvorak Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 9 B178, “From the New World”

 We begin our 76th season performing three beloved masterworks with strong connections to a particular country, from both insider and outsider viewpoints. As we slowly emerge from this period of pandemic-induced time at home, and begin to venture further afield, this music provides an interesting lens to consider how composers manage to evoke familiar places, or the new and unfamiliar. Since the Gershwin and Dvorak are explicitly “American” pieces, it is interesting to ponder what is American about them, how composers signify the “American” in music, and also to think about the borrowing and melding that is inherent in American music.

            Rachmaninoff, best known for his piano prelude in C-sharp minor, his second and third piano concerto, and his setting of Russian Orthodox vespers, devoted inconsistent attention to composition throughout his life, given his busy piano and conducting career. Piano was the primary focus of his musical education, and, after he and his family left Russia in 1917, he realized he could better support them as a concert pianist. However, during his main period of compositional activity, Rachmaninoff left us many beautifully crafted works notable for their lyrical melodies and their skilled use of the piano, which serve as the cumulation of the Russian Romantic tradition begun by the more European-oriented Tchaikovsky and the more Russian nationalist composers known as “The Mighty Handful” or “The Five” (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin).

            Though it lacks the popularity of his second and third piano concertos, Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto is underappreciated and well worth your acquaintance. Rachmaninoff composed the first movement in 1891, when he was 17, and the latter two movements when he was 18. This student work may have been modelled on the Grieg piano concerto (the fanfare in brass that begins the piece recalls Grieg). Rachmaninoff seems to have performed the concerto as piano soloist only once, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he was a student. Twenty-six years later (1917), he revised it significantly, creating the version we hear tonight, which had its American premiere in 1919 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Spirited outer movements (the first in minor, the final in major) surround a very short nocturne as the middle movement. Though the melodies are not as lush as Rachmaninov’s later, better-known, pieces, one can hear the youthful exuberance of a young Rachmaninov, combined with the economy of a more mature composer. Said Rachmaninoff: "I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now. All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention. When I tell them in America that I will play the First Concerto, they do not protest, but I can see by their faces that they would prefer the Second or Third." We find a similar youthful freshness in Gershwin’s An American in Paris.  

George Gershwin was a regular traveler, and his decision to compose the tone poem An American In Paris originated in the third of his four trips there, in 1926. When he left, his thank you card to his hosts, the Schirmers (of music publishing fame), included a four-measure melody labeled “An American in Paris.” In 1928, Gershwin began the piece using that four-measure melody and trying to evoke the honking of Parisian taxi horns. He tried to incorporate a popular dance melody he had heard in Paris. Interestingly, the piece ultimately became more about the American than the city he was visiting: “As I was not a Frenchmen, I knew that I had gotten about as far as I could get with it.”

Gershwin found his imagination and his compositional technique limiting his ability to evoke Paris. Instead, the piece came to focus on how much he missed his home of New York: “I live up on 103rd Street near Riverside Drive, and from the windows of my room I can get a pretty good view of the Hudson. I was walking up and down wondering how to develop this theme into a piece when I glanced out and saw the river. I love that river, and I thought how often I had been homesick for the sight of it, and then the idea struck me – an American in Paris, homesickness, the blues.”  In this tone poem, the blues serve as a symbol of the United States in sound, and as a contrast to the playful opening theme. Gershwin wrote this piece over a few years, working mostly in New York but also on return trips to Paris. The piece was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1928, receiving very positive reviews. A narrative to accompany the piece, written by Deems Taylor, was distributed at the premiere, but this has not remained part of the performance tradition. Critics complemented the freshness and vitality of the work, as well as the growth in Gershwin’s ability to write longer instrumental music.

As a songwriter, Gershwin’s training in writing longer instrumental works was a mixture of self-teaching and seeking out advice from experienced composers of concert music. From the many Europeans he interacted with, he found an appreciation for his gifts, saying “it was quite a paradox to me to find out that, although I went abroad largely to benefit my technic…much more attention is paid there to the originality of musical material than to the excellence of its technical development.”

Of course, Gershwin’s “originality of musical material” is indebted not only to his own gifts, but from his borrowing and adaption of what has been called “the greater aquifer” of American music – the African-American idiom of the blues. While sometimes fraught with complication, even exploitation, such borrowing and adaptation forms an inevitable aspect of music made in the American melting pot or mosaic, and is perhaps the central feature that makes American music “American.”

 Like Gershwin, Antonin Dvorak was profoundly impacted by his time in a new country, in this case, the United States. Dvorak came to New York to lead the National Conservatory of Music of America, which flourished from its founding in 1885 through the early 1920s. During this period, he wrote his two most famous pieces, the ninth symphony and the cello concerto. The Ninth Symphony is so familiar that it is easy to not think about how it was created. Many composers in the Romantic era became very interested in folk music, particularly of their own culture, and of others that seemed “exotic.” Dvorak, however, seemed to be coming from a place of deep respect for American folk cultures. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, he wrote a series of essays urging American composers to root American concert music in Native American and African American musics—a striking departure from what the majority of the American academic and concert music establishment was recommending or doing in that period. When Dvorak’s 9th Symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, he carried out his own recommendation.

            Dvorak’s student, the African-American composer Harry Burleigh, had introduced Dvorak to the rich treasury of African-American spirituals, and Dvorak sought to emulate and pay homage to these exquisite melodies in this piece. In the well-known theme of the second movement, Dvorak was so successful in doing so that many believe he quotes a spiritual, and someone even later penned words for it – “Goin’ Home.” The Dvorak scholar Joseph Horowitz tells us that “The principal subject of the slow movement—a tune so resembling a spiritual that it later, as `Goin’ Home,’ became one—was entrusted to the English horn, whose reedy timbre, it has been suggested, resembled Burleigh’s voice.” There is also evidence that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha may have influenced Dvorak as he wrote this piece, but exactly how remains a mystery. While Dvorak obviously didn’t abandon his own style while writing this piece (the third movement sounds very much like one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances), it does stand distinct from his other work. As we listen to this very familiar piece, pay close attention to the transition from the first movement (E minor) to the beginning of the second (Db major). What Dvorak accomplishes in just a few chords is sheer genius. Such melding of diverse influences, above all, is what makes music “American.”

 

—   Frank Martignetti, Ph.D.

Sacred Heart University 

 

        

Program Notes for the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, April 17, 2021

Spring Into Life

George Walker             Lyric for Strings

Antonio Vivaldi           The Seasons

Arvo Pärt                     Fratres

Igor Stravinsky             Dumbarton Oaks

In this remarkably varied performance, bringing together varied music of 18th-century Italy, 20th-century Estonia, and 20th-century North America, we affirm life and the power of music, as the GBS presents the largest array of performers assembled since the pandemic began. All of this music is striking for its impact on the listener, particularly given the short length of most of the pieces.

 The composer and pianist George Walker (1922-2018), a professor at Rutgers University from 1969-1992, was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (1996).  Walker’s compositional output is notable for its eclecticism. Describing his generation of African-American composers, Walker wrote in 1991:

“Their common denominator is not a use of black idioms but a fascination with sound and color, with intensities and the fabric of construction. Pretentiousness and bombast are conspicuously absent.”

 Walker adapted the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1 to create the Lyric for Strings (1947, rev. 1990). The 24-year-old Walker titled this movement “Lament” and dedicated it to his grandmother, a former slave who had seen her husband sold, and she herself escape from slavery.  This piece is notable for its impassioned lyricism, with rich harmonies juxtaposed with impassioned unison and two part lines. It is impossible to hear this piece and not be reminded of Samuel Barber’s famed Adagio for Strings (1936); both men wrote these pieces when they were students at Philadelphia’s famed Curtis Institute of Music, some eleven years apart.

 We then turn to one of the most familiar pieces in the Baroque repertory (since its 20th century revival), Antonio Vivaldi’s (1678-1741) programmatic series of four violin concertos The Seasons (ca. 1716-7). Each piece illustrates a season of the year: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each concerto includes a 3-stanza sonnet. Such programmatic works were highly unusual in the Baroque era; the pieces include vivid musical depictions of sounds appropriate to rural life in that season. Though the incredibly prolific Vivaldi wrote some 500 concertos (in addition to being a teacher, performer, and Catholic priest), his work is notable for its imagination, variety, and skill. Each concerto is a three-movement work with quick outer movements surrounding a slow inner movement. The poems are reprinted here, as the best possible listening enhancement.

The Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) writes almost entirely using a technique he invented, called tintinnabuli (from the Latin word for bell), inspired by Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. In tintinnabuli, one voice arpeggiates chords, and one voice moves in stepwise, or scalar motion. The harmonic vocabulary is simple and diatonic—drawn from the major or minor scale.   Frates (1977, rev. 1992), Latin for “brothers,” exists in many versions, all created by the composer. Here, we hear the version for violin soloist, strings, and percussion. This piece is typical of the majority of Pärt’s output, being variations on a six measure theme. The theme juxtaposes a sense of rushed busyness with a sense of quiet contemplation. Frates is organized as nine sequences of chords, separated by a recurring motif in the percussion (the “refuge”). Much of the texture is three-part with drones (long, sustained, pitches repeated). The outer voices play only pitches from the D harmonic minor scale, while the middle voice plays only the pitches of an A minor chord. The clash of C# in the outer voices and C natural in the inner voices creates tension and ambiguity for the listener. While this may sound abstract and complex, Frates affects the listener in a strong, visceral way, and has been used in the soundtrack of many films, including There Will Be Blood (2007).  

            Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) found his way from Russia to living and working in France, and came on tour to the United States in 1935. He became a U.S. resident when World War II broke out, remaining here for the rest of his life. His 1937-8 Concerto in E-flat (almost always referred to as “Dumbarton Oaks”) was commissioned by Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss, whose Washington, DC estate bore that name. This estate later became a research institute of Harvard, and hosted the 1944 conference that led, ultimately, to the founding of the United Nations. The concerto is scored for chamber orchestra (flute, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, three violins, three violas, two cellos, and two basses), and is an example of Stravinsky’s neoclassical style—a conscious attempt to harken back to the order, balance, symmetry and elegance found in the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. The twelve-minute piece is composed in three movements, performed without interruption. It was the last piece Stravinsky composed in Europe. Nadia Boulanger, who had helped arrange the commission, conducted the premiere—a private event at Dumbarton Oaks. Each instrument functions as a soloist amid a largely polyphonic texture, and the opening theme and choice of strings used harken back to Bach’s Bradenburg Concertos. Dumbarton Oaks says a lot in a short time, using a relatively small number of performers.