Michael Colgrass
Born in Chicago on April 22, 1932
Currently lives in Toronto
As Quiet As...
Having passed his 75th birthday last April, Michael Colgrass now ranks as one of Canada’s senior composers. He also holds a unique distinction among prominent classical composers in North America in that he is the only one whose music is well known equally on both sides of the Canadian-American border. His life has divided neatly into two nearly equal halves, first in the United States, then in Canada, where he has lived since 1974.
Colgrass’s musical education was undertaken with such prominent figures as Darius Milhaud, Lucas Foss, Ben Weber and Wallingford Riegger. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1956, he went to New York City where he free-lanced as a percussion player in a wide range of “gigs” ranging from the New York Philharmonic to Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz band to the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway. Over the years, Colgrass turned more to composing, and now enjoys a career based solely on commissions, which have come from the Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony and many others. His list of prizes includes a Pulitzer (for Déja vu, 1978), two Guggenheims, a Rockefeller Grant, and the 1988 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music. Recent works include Raag Mala for wind ensemble (2006) and Side by Side, a work for harpsichord, altered piano and orchestra premiered in 2007.
As Quiet As is one of Colgrass’s oldest orchestral compositions, dating back to 1966. It is also one of his most imaginative in conception. Most of us are impressed with towering waves of sound and huge climaxes. As Quiet As goes to the other extreme. Here’s how the composer explains it: “As Quiet As was inspired by the answers of fourth-grade children asked by their teacher to complete the sentence beginning “Let’s be as quiet as …” From the 21 answers compiled by Constance Fauci and printed in The New York Times in December, 1961, I chose seven that seemed to make a nature study as might be perceived by a child. My purpose was to depict the very nature of each metaphor, as if I were demonstrating to a blind person the essence of a leaf as it changes color, of a creek abandoned even by birds, and of an ant – or many ants – skittering about.
“‘Children Sleeping’ and ‘Time Passing’ are like dream sequence. Following light breathing and heartbeats, a sonatina written by Beethoven as a child appears through a montage of ‘sleeping sounds,’ and then reappears fragmentarily in musical styles from 1800 to the present – Haydn, Sibelius, Ravel, Stravinsky, Count Basie – as if one were taking a fleeting glance at music history moving through time. the jazz is interrupted by a distant sound (1945!), which ends the dream, and the last setting (Webern) is in post-war style.
“‘A Soft Rainfall’ and ‘The First Star Coming Out’ are the spring and summer counterparts of the autumnal leaf and creek, and are related musically as well. The creek is not a rainfall, and the leaf a soft blanket of night across which stars flicker like a million raindrops turned to crystal.” he Berkshire Music Center Orchestra under Gunther Schuller gave the first performance of As Quiet As on August 18, 1966 at Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony). The work is dedicated “to children, with love and with hope.”
Jean Sibelius
Born December 8, 1865, in Hämeenlinna, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, Op. 47
A true national hero at the time of resistance to Russian occupation with his symphonic poem Finlandia (whose central section has always resounded as the unofficial Finnish anthem), Jean Sibelius represents the pole star and is the first of the great composers of a Scandinavian nation who belongs essentially to the 20th century.
A strange fate for a solitary artist, jostling established forms, who would live nearly a century without profiting from that exceptional longevity to produce the masterpieces of maturity. In 1929, at 64, a venerable age when so many composers sit enthroned at the pinnacle of their art, and three years after producing Tapiola, his final symphonic poem, Sibelius burnt three sketches for an Eighth Symphony and put a brutal end to his career as a composer, feeling outmoded by the twelve-tone technique initiated by the Second Viennese School. Slowly but surely ravaged by alcohol, he would nonetheless take three more decades to die, without ever again taking pen to music paper.
A centrepiece of the genre, and one of the most performed of the 20th century, the Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 came into being in 1903, immediately after the composer settled for good in the woodsy setting of Järvenpää, north of Helsinki, and it underwent a few revisions in 1905 before being premiered that same year in Berlin under Richard Strauss. In conventional three-movement external form, its internal structures are never straitjacketed and showcase a rhapsodic inspiration. Its essential appeal lies in a clearly established preference for keeping any purely pyrotechnic virtuosity for its own sake at bay, favouring rather a discourse that is unfailingly expressive and cantabile – not that the solo part is without its share of technical difficulties.
The Allegro moderato, broadly developed, straightaway depicts a climate of the most beautiful mineral purity, with the gentle vibration in the strings greeting the solo violin, whose high notes are deployed with an intense lyricism mixed with the tension of an augmented-fourth interval. The colours of the more relaxed, almost languorous Adagio evoke on the other hand the softness of the light between seasons in Italy, which the composer had just visited for the first time. The Finale, an orchestral tour de force shot through with rhythmic pugnacity at every turn, with its long-short-short ostinato and its almost Gypsy theme attacked with full bow, remains the most widely famous movement, and finishes with a brilliant D major, although one accompanied by chromatic glissades from the orchestra as they finish lending the coda a tempestuous character and as though still in the thrall of the minor mode.
Antonín Dvorák
Born in Mühlhausen, Bohemia (today Nelahozeves, Czech Republic), September 8, 1841
Died in Prague, May 1, 1904
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 (From the New World)
Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9, the “New World Symphony” to most listeners, received its world premiere in New York's Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Although the “New World” Symphony was written in the New World, it is not specifically about the New World. True, there are themes that could be construed as being “authentic” songs of the American Indians or African-Americans, but in fact, as in Dvorák’s Slavonic works, he did not actually quote directly from folksong but rather composed his own based on study of the source material.
One “New World” aspect of this symphony is the role played by Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which Dvorák had read in Czech translation some thirty years earlier. He re-read the poem in America and claimed that the scene of Minnehaha’s funeral in the forest inspired the Largo movement of his symphony, while the Indians’ Dance was responsible for the Scherzo. Dvorák actually visited Hiawatha’s land (Iowa and southern Minnesota), but the symphony was essentially complete by this time, so whatever influence Hiawatha had on him was purely literary, not geographical.
From the New World alone of Dvorák’s nine symphonies opens with a slow introduction. Within the space of just 23 measures, the composer incorporates moods of melancholic dreaming and tense foreboding, startling eruptions and a surging melodic line. The main Allegro section is launched by horns in an arpeggiated fanfare motif in E minor, a motif that will reappear in all remaining movements as well. Several additional themes follow.
The Largo contains one of the most famous themes in all classical music. Many listeners know it as the song “Goin’ home,” but Dvorák did not borrow the theme from a spiritual; it is his own, and the words were superimposed after the symphony was written by one of his students, William Arms Fisher. Although Dvorák himself claimed the movement was inspired by a passage from Longfellow’s poem, Otakar Šourek (himself a Czech), believes the listener is equally entitled to imagine instead Dvorák longing for his homeland: “the melancholy, wide expanses of the South Bohemian countryside, of his garden at Vysoka, of the deep solemn sighing of the pine forests, and the broad, fragrant fields.”
The Scherzo is one of the most energetic and exhilarating movements Dvorák ever wrote, and borders on the virtuosic as well for the dazzling orchestral display it entails. The contrasting Trio section is a charming rustic dance introduced by the woodwind choir and set to the lilting long-short-long rhythm of which Schubert was so fond.
The finale too contains its share of melodic fecundity and inventiveness. The development section develops not only material from this movement but from the three previous ones as well, especially the main theme of the Largo, which is fragmented and tossed about with almost reckless abandon. The grand climax of the long coda brings back the chordal sequence that opened the Largo, but now painted in broad, majestic strokes in the full brass and woodwind sections. The final chord is a surprise - not a predictably stentorian chord played fortissimo by the full orchestra, but a lovely, warm sonority of winds alone, a sound that lingers gently on the ears of New World audiences.
Robert Markow |
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