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TORGULMANIA!

Monday Dec. 10 2007 7:30 pm     Tuesday Dec. 30 2007 7:30 pm

Program Notes

AARON COPLAND's name is, for many, synonymous with American music. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900. At age 17 he studied harmony, counterpoint, and sonata form with Rubin Goldmark. In 1920 he went to Paris, where he began his association with his teacher and mentor Nadia Boulanger; developed a growing interest in popular idioms; and came to the realization that there was as yet no American counterpart to the national styles being created by composers from France, Russia, and Spain. He became determined to create, in his words, “a naturally American strain of so-called serious music.”

Upon his return to America in 1924, his career was launched when Serge Koussevitzky, whom he had met in Paris, agreed to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Copland’s Organ Symphony, with Boulanger as soloist. When performed in New York, the dissonant, angular music created a sensation, but Copland saw a broader role for himself than mere iconoclast. He sought to further the cause of new music as a vital cultural force. He accomplished this not only by composing, but also by lecturing and writing on new music, and by organizing the groundbreaking Copland-Sessions concerts. Copland never ceased to be an emissary and advocate of new music. For 25 years he taught young musicians as a leading member of the faculty at Tanglewood, and, throughout his career, he nurtured the careers of others.

As America entered first a Depression, and then a war, Copland began to share many of his fellow artists’ commitment to capturing a wider audience and speaking to the concerns of the average citizen in those times of trouble. His decision to “say it in the simplest possible terms” alienated some of his peers, who saw in it a repudiation of musical progress— theirs and his own. But many who had been drawn to Copland’s music through his use of familiar melodies were in turn perplexed by his use, beginning in the mid-1950’s, of an individualized 12-tone compositional technique.

Aaron Copland was one of the most honored cultural figures in the history of the United States. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Kennedy Center Award, an Academy Award, and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany were only a few of the honors and awards he received. In addition, he was president of the American Arts and Letters, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Society of Arts in England, helped found the American Composers Alliance, and was an early and prominent member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano was composed in 1943, in Hollywood, while Copland was working on the score of the film North Star. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Copland’s friend, Lt. Harry Dunham; Copland received the news of Dunham’s death in action in the South Pacific during World War II just after finishing the work. The work is reminiscent of Copland’s major ballets, with echoes of Appalachian Spring in the first movement and Rodeo in the last. The Andante first movement is spare, beginning with open chords and a simple violin line that keeps lengthening and changing. This quiet, introspective mood is broken twice during the movement with a quicker dance-like theme, creating a small arch-form (ABCBA). The lyrical second movement is in three parts (ABA), free and open in the outer sections, more measured in the waltz-like middle part. The third movement favors brittle piano octaves and lots of open space in a playful Allegro, which alternates with a more lyrical, though still robust, theme. The end of the piece winds down and finishes with a hint of the opening of the whole sonata rounding things off.

DAVID HEUSER was raised in the cultural wastelands of suburban New Jersey in the 1970’s, but, for reasons unknown, felt compelled to begin writing music shortly after beginning piano lessons around the age of 7. He has been writing music ever since. Eventually this led to degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music and Indiana University, where he received his doctoral degree in 1995. Heuser’s music has been performed by various groups and individuals and in festivals and conferences throughout the U.S. and abroad, and he has won a variety of awards, the most recent of which was the inaugural Fauxharmonic Orchestra composition contest in 2006. The winning work was his orchestra piece A Screaming Comes Across the Sky, which Charles Ward of the Houston Chronicle called “all-American music at its most dynamic and visceral.” Heuser currently resides in San Antonio, where he is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His music is published by Non Sequitur Music, and works of his can be found on recordings on the Albany, Capstone, and Equilibrium labels. Heuser is a founding member of the Composers Alliance of San Antonio (CASA), and his work O The White Towns can be found on that group's first CD “Works by San Antonio Composers Performed by San Antonio Performers.”

Thin Green Traces was written for SOLI Chamber Ensemble members violinist Ertan Torgul and pianist Carolyn True. The title comes from the a line that occurred to me out of the blue, like a quote without a source: Our lives are like thin green traces across the sky. The piece is in five movements, with brief even numbered movements alternating with the more substantial odd numbered movements. The movements are:

I. Arcs and Arches: At the beginning, our lives stretch out in front of us seemingly without end, without limits, when all is potential.

II. Apex: It comes not with a bang, but with a whimper.

III. Funeral March: Funerals are not for the dead, but for the living to morn and rage.

IV. Flying Apart: With time, contrails dissipate, as do we as much as we fight to hold ourselves together.

V. Air: Fading Away: All things end.
JOHN CORIGLIANO’s Violin Sonata, from 1963, when the composer was in his 20’s, was composed for his father, violinist John Corigliano, Sr. The elder Corigliano was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic at the time, several years away from being wooed to San Antonio to become the concertmaster of the San Antonio Symphony by conductor Victor Alessandro, who recruited talent near retirement to become models for the younger players in the orchestra.

John the younger has gone on to win most major honors a composer can, including Grammy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer, and an Academy Award. His music often takes shape from visual imagery, which he then translates into sound, and he is a masterful orchestrator who utilizes special effects to help recreate those images. For all of his feints at experimentation or the avant garde, he is really part of tradition of American music which includes Copland and Barber. "You must understand the importance of the past," says Corigliano, "but if you don't realize the importance of the present and the future, [if] you don't nourish that — and our art form does not — then it's like a tree that grows no new shoots. Without new shoots the tree dies." Corigilano is currently on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music and at Lehman College, City University of New York.

The Violin Sonata was premiered at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy where it won the Chamber Music Competition, and the success of that performance resulted in a number of important commissions, and his career was off and running. Corigliano’s father premiered the piece in New York City soon after, with The New York Times calling the piece “an engaging, extroverted work with plenty of technical skill (which is not rare in today’s music) and personality (which is) behind it.” Corigliano himself writes about the piece: “The Sonata is an optimistic, ultra-rhythmic, tonal-and-then-some duo for two masterful players. I built the themes and harmonics of its four movements – Allegro, Andantino, Lento, and Allegro – all from a second and its inversion, a seventh. The movements center, respectively, on C, D, G minor, and D, but I freely included non-tonal and polytonal sections when needed. I think its eclecticism, its rhythmic energy, and its bright character give the Sonata a very American quality, though that wasn’t the goal of writing it.

“I didn’t so much develop the lively theme in the opening Allegro as herald it with a brief opening fanfare and then imbed it in a detailed backdrop, like a stone on a mosaic. Then, from those backdrop details, I built the first theme of the next movement, a gentle Andantino in a modified sonata form. Three themes seem to intertwine in this movement, which peaks and peaks again before quieting, but a closer look should reveal that both the second and third themes are but variations of the first. The third movement caps a tense, emotional violin soliloquy with hushed echoes of the sonata’s signal interval (the second), the fourth movement, a rondo with a difference, takes a vivid polytriadic theme, and augmented variation on it, and accompanimental fugues from previous movements, and spins them all into a breathless and exuberant polymetric finale.”

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