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MANY WORLDS. ONE VOICE. . .MUSIC.

Monday May 12 2008 7:30 pm     Tuesday May 13 2008 7:30 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot of composers and age recently, and not just because I’m a composer who turned 40 in the last few years. No, this has actually been a topic of (online) discussion recently between members of composers’ organization I belong to, and some interesting issues about our myths about composers and age have come up. For many, there are two basic models: the first is the composer whose genius is revealed early in life and who burns brightly but quickly through their talent, often because they die young (see Schubert), but sometimes because they’re one or two hit wonders (see George Antheil); and the second type is the composer whose genius is also revealed early in life but who has a long career, filled with innovation and great artistry, preferably with three, easy to demarcate, periods (see Stravinsky). What is missing from these two myths is the composer whose abilities gradually develop, who might not hit their full-stride (or even find their own voice) until mid-career. We’re so intent on every composer being either a Mozart (type 1) or a Beethoven (type 2), we’ve forgotten that there are far more Haydns out there.

With that in mind, let’s see how this plays out with tonight’s works.

John Adams, whose Road Movies begins the concert, has become the closest thing we have to an Aaron Copland in our time. When the New York Philharmonic wanted to commission a work commemorating the tragedy of September 11, 2001, they turned to Adams to write On the Transmigration of Souls. But despite beginning to compose as a boy in New Hampshire, and studying at Harvard in his 20’s, it took Adams until he was 30 (and a relocation to northern California, where he still lives) to write Phrygian Gates. This is his real Op. 1, and is the piece that established his voice, but it should be noted that his music has continued to evolve and change. Adams’ status was not achieved through a smash, break-out hit, but gradually through both his orchestral music in the first half of the 1980s, and his historic operas Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). He has maintained that status with more recent compositions such as Dr. Atomic (2004), an opera about Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atom bomb.

Adams’ list of chamber works is not a long one, and Road Movies is his only work for violin and piano. The piece has been compared to a road trip, perhaps somewhere near Adams’ home –  maybe around the Sierra Mountains, or on the Pacific Coastal Highway. Like most of Adams’ music, Road Movies is pulse music (he is often labeled a second-generation minimalist). Pianist Andrew Russo hears references to the foothills in the ups and downs of the music in the first movement, with the spiky chords evoking craggy rock formations. The second movement is slower and more spacious, suggestive of the wide open spaces of the West.The final movement, with its tongue-in-cheek, overly-precise instruction to play with 40% swing, drives with a lead foot, freely mixing in elements of fiddlin’ technique.

If Adams became Adams around the age of 30, West Virginia native George Crumb didn’t become himself until about 1964, when he was 35. At about the same time he came back East from teaching at the University of Colorado, to settle in Media, Pennsylvania, and to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1997. The pieces he is best known for, including Ancient Voices of Children and the string quartet Black Angels, date from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of this music is chamber music, often with soprano, nearly always setting the poetry of Lorca. These works are highly concerned with timbre, using a wide variety of exotic percussion instruments and unusual performance techniques, and often contain theatrical and ritualistic elements. Crumb’s scores are also beautiful to behold. He works on large sheets of paper, marked only with blue guidelines (which do not appear when reproduced), and therefore has to draw in all of the staff lines by hand. Many works include music which is molded into symbolic shapes, with staff lines curved or circular or going in different directions. Form is also affected by his visual sense; most of his movements or sections fill just one or two of these large pages.

The Cello Sonata, however, is a student work, written when he was studying in Berlin with Boris Blacher (in between graduate degrees at the Universities of Illinois and Michigan). Not much of the mature Crumb is present in this piece, but there are tantalizing hints, especially in the first movement which toys with the kind of timbral play Crumb would become known for. There is also a hint of middle-European folk music (Hungarian, perhaps) here and there. The theme and variations movement is straightforward, composed of the theme,  three variations, and a coda. The final movement is a fast Toccata and is perhaps the least like Crumb’s mature style of the three.

Elliott Carter studied at Harvard, but was also a pupil of Charles Ives’ as a teenager, and later studied with Nadia Boulanger in France, as so many American composers did at the time. Despite all of this good instruction, it took him until he was 40 to write his Cello Sonata, the first work which begins to reveal the style he has come to be known for. After writing it, he famously isolated himself in the Arizona desert and came back in 1951 with his first string quartet, a work in which he fully established his musical language as well as his mastery of the string quartet. (Carter later won the Pulitzer Prize in music twice, for his Second and Third String Quartets. For the sake of completeness, I should mention that both John Adams and George Crumb have a Pulitzer gather dust somewhere as well.)

Carter’s music is particularly American as it is concerned with the voice of the individual in the context of a group. In the string quartets this means the four parts usually have a great deal of rhythmic independence from each other, which allows their voices, if you will, to be heard, even while working together as a group. In his concertos, the story is often of the soloist maintaining their identity against the tide of the ensemble. In Two Diversions, written for the Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book (a series of short piano works written by a variety of composers), Carter creates two lines which he clearly separates by tempo, dynamics, articulation and the like. He writes: “The first Diversion presents a line of paired notes that maintain a single speed throughout, while the other very changeable material uses many different speeds and characters. The second Diversion contrasts two musical lines one of which, on the whole, grows slower and slower while the other grows faster and faster.”

As we are talking about age, it should be noted that not only did Carter write his first opera (What’s Next) when he was 90, the same year he wrote Two Diversions, but I have been told that he has written more music since he turned 70 than he wrote in the first 70 years of his life. Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday later this year, and he continues to write works of extraordinary power and imagination.

Paul Hindemith was 27 when he wrote Kammermusik No. 1 in 1922, the piece that began his move toward neo-classicalism and away from the expressionism of his early music. He was 43 when he wrote the Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, around the time he left Germany for Switzerland (as his music had fallen out of favor with the Nazi regime). In fact, he began working on the piece while on a ship headed for America in April 1938, and completed the work on his return to Switzerland in June of that year. By this time his style was pretty much set; earlier in the decade he had written his Craft of Musical Composition which laid out the theoretical underpinning of his music. He would later find his way to the United States (in 1940) and back to Switzerland (in 1953), but despite the continent hopping, little changed in his musical language the rest of his life.

The first movement of the Quartet is a sonata form with three themes, one which begins the work, a second, more lyrical idea heard first in the cello, and a more agitated idea from the piano. The second movement is in a three-part form (ABA); the outer sections feature the clarinet on an expressive melody, while the middle part is louder and features the clarinet and cello playing in octaves, which creates a rather striking timbre. Note also the new rhythmic accompaniment when the opening clarinet melody returns at the end of the movement. The final movement is also in three sections. The middle section here is faster and more contrapuntal than the outer parts. The piano brings in the coda with a rousing toccata-like passage and the piece finishes with a flourish.

- Notes by David Heuser

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