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About the Music October 7 & 9, 2012 MASON BATES Mothership Mason Bates was born in Philadelphia in 1977. He composed this work in 2011, and it was first performed by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House the same year. The work is scored for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bass clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, harp, piano, laptop computer for electronic sounds, and strings. Mason Bates grew up in Virginia, where he studied piano with Hope Armstrong Erb and composition with Dika Newlin. He earned degrees in composition and English literature in the Columbia-Julliard program, where he studied with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler. He is currently working on his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, studying with Edmund Campion, David Wessel, and Jorge Liderman. He has been the recipient of an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, and a fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center. Bates composes music for electronica, acoustic instruments, and very often an eclectic combination of the two; his works have been performed by orchestras and ensembles across America and all over the world. Mason Bates writes the following about Mothership: “This energetic opener imagines the orchestra as a mothership that is ‘docked’ by several visiting soloists, who offer brief but virtuosic riffs on the work’s thematic material over action-packed electro-acoustic orchestral figuration. “The piece follows the form of a scherzo with double trio (as found in, for example, the Schumann Symphony No. 2). Historically, symphonic scherzos play with dance rhythms in a high-energy and appealing manner, with the trio sections temporarily exploring new rhythmic areas. Mothership shares a formal connection with the symphonic scherzo but is brought to life by thrilling sounds of the 21st century—the rhythms of modern-day techno in place of waltz rhythms, for example.” PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia, in 1840 and died in St. Petersburg in 1893. He completed this concerto in 1875 and the work was first performed by Hans von Bülow, piano, and conductor B. J. Lang with a freelance orchestra in Boston the same year. The concerto is scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings. When Tchaikovsky completed his First Piano Concerto in December of 1874, he wanted to play it for a piano virtuoso—which he was not—to see if any parts of it “might be ineffective, impracticable, and ungrateful” in the piano writing. “I needed a severe but at the same time friendly critic to point out just these external blemishes.” The natural choice for such advice was Nicolai Rubinstein, the director of the Moscow Conservatory (where Tchaikovsky taught composition) and a renowned pianist, conductor, and teacher. He had conducted the premieres of several of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works, and his brother Anton had been Tchaikovsky’s teacher. He was also the work’s intended soloist and dedicatee. So it was that on Christmas eve Tchaikovsky played the work for Rubinstein on the piano in one of the Conservatory’s classrooms. Tchaikovsky later wrote: “I played the first movement. Not a single word, not a single comment! If you knew how stupid and intolerable the situation of a man is who cooks and sets a meal before a friend, a meal the friend then proceeds to eat—in silence! Oh for one word, for friendly abuse even, but for God’s sake, one word of sympathy, even if it is not praise! But Rubinstein was preparing his thunderbolt. I summoned all my patience and played through to the end. Still silence. I stood up and asked, ‘Well?’ “Then a torrent poured from Nicolai Gregorievich’s mouth, gentle to begin with, but growing more and more into the sound and fury of Jupiter. My concerto, it turned out, was worthless and unplayable—passages so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written as to be beyond rescue— the music itself was bad, vulgar—here and there I had stolen from other composers—only two or three pages were worth preserving—the rest must be thrown out or completely rewritten. An independent witness in the room might have concluded that I was a maniac, an untalented, senseless hack who had come to submit his rubbish to an eminent musician. “I was not just astounded but outraged by the whole scene. I left the room without a word and went upstairs: in my agitation and rage I could not have said a thing. Presently Rubinstein joined me and, seeing how upset I was, asked me into one of the other rooms. There he repeated that my concerto was impossible and said that if I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honor of playing this thing of mine at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I replied, ‘I shall publish the work exactly as it stands!’ And this I did.” As it turned out, both Nicolai Gregorievich and Piotr Ilyich were wrong. Whether or not the concerto is vulgar is best left to others; it certainly is not “worthless and unplayable.” Within a short time, Rubinstein changed his mind about the concerto, and eventually became one of its best advocates. As for Tchaikovsky, he didn’t change a single note: he changed lots of them, through several revisions, mostly intended to make the piano part more “grateful.” Since this fantastic story occurred, the piece has become, as everyone knows, the most popular piano concerto ever written. The introduction to the first movement has become one of the single most widely-recognized passages of classical music, right behind the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. And not just because it leads off most of those late-night television commercials for the “100 Greatest Classical Melodies.” This opening is sheer genius. The stentorian horn calls are punctuated by massive orchestral chords. The piano enters with thunderous, eightoctave-wide arpeggios. We soon realize that, for now, the piano is playing an accompaniment to a rich, opulent melody in the strings’ lower registers. The piano picks up this tune and plays with it in a way that seems so right. The irony of it all is that this remarkable device, this unforgettable tune, is part of the first movement’s introduction, and is never heard from again! This bothers some people, but it is easy to let it pass when what follows is so incredibly inventive, so endlessly melodic. Listen for the “real” main theme of the first movement, which Tchaikovsky took from a common beggar’s tune. Listen for how Tchaikovsky incorporates a “scherzo” into the second movement. And enjoy the bumptious Ukrainian folk song that forms the basis of the last movement. We may “eat in silence,” as Tchaikovsky said, but there’s plenty of time for praise at the end. AARON COPLAND Symphony No. 3 Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 and died in Peekskill, New York in 1990. He composed this work between 1944 and 1946 on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation using themes he had collected over a period of years. It was first performed in 1946 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky. The score calls for 4 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, celeste, piano, and strings. In the twentieth century the stately evolution of musical styles accelerated into a full-fledged revolution. Stravinsky, the century’s greatest master, coursed from expressionism to neoclassicism to serialism without waiting for his audience to catch up, and it was a dizzying ride. Aaron Copland, dean of American composers, went through stylistic changes of equal magnitude. As a young man he wrote brash, dissonant, jazz-tinged works. But he came to believe that the relentlessly increasing complexity of music was alienating listeners, so he performed a musical about-face: “I felt that it was worth it to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest terms possible.” From the mid-1930s to the mid1940s he composed his most famous pieces in this simpler vein, culminating with Appalachian Spring in 1944. It was at the end of this period that the Koussevitzky Foundation commissioned Copland to compose his Third Symphony, and he took the opportunity to look ahead again. For a decade he had been composing music for the theater, the ballet, and film scores: music that told a story. Now he was to compose in an abstract form, and it was time to move beyond the Americana that had made him so popular. Copland had composed his Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942 as part of a wartime project. Its premiere had caused barely a ripple of interest (its immense popularity would come years later) but it contained several motivic elements that Copland wanted to explore further in his Third Symphony. He quotes the Fanfare note-fornote at the beginning of the symphony’s fourth movement, but close examination reveals that its melodic and rhythmic motives can be found in the first three movements, too. In a way, the symphony is a theme-and-variations where the theme is not heard until late in the piece. The dramatic first movement is in three parts: two broad, hymn-like sections using the same material surround a more animated and brassy section. The second movement is a rather traditional scherzo with a pastoral Trio. The scherzo sections are restless and spiky, while the Trio recalls the cowboy music of Copland’s recent past. The third movement is in the form of a long arch, ABCBA, but it sounds more like a freeform work because each section seems to evolve organically from the last. The Finale begins with a soft anticipation of the Fanfare For the Common Man, followed by the Fanfare itself in its original scoring for brass and percussion. This serves as an introduction to a sonata form of terrific invention and buoyant rhythms. In the coda the newer themes are met with a massive statement of the theme that began the symphony. Copland said that the work had no story or program: “I suppose if I forced myself I could invent an ideological basis for the Third Symphony. But if I did, I’d be bluffing—or at any rate, adding something ex post facto, something that might or might not be true but that played no role at the moment of creation.” He did admit that since it was completed just as World War II was won, it might “reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time.” No doubt Copland’s new compositional turn left behind some listeners who expected another Lincoln Portrait or Rodeo. Such is always the case when a composer feels he has “played out” a given style. One thing clearly did not change, however: the spirit of affirmation Copland brought to every work. —Mark Rohr is the bass trombonist for the PSO. Questions or comments? [email protected] Visit Online Insights at PortlandSymphony.org to learn more about this concert.