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notes January 28/29 CATHEDRALS OF SOUND By Dr. Richard E. Rodda 30 SECOND NOTES: The symphonies of Anton Bruckner have often been called “cathedrals in sound” for their grand scale and visionary content, qualities that are abundantly demonstrated by the “Romantic” Symphony that closes this Des Moines Symphony concert. They strive for the infinite, for the transcendent spiritual experience; and that takes time – about 65 minutes! Two very different musical types precede Bruckner’s magnificent work on this program — Johannes Brahms’s rousing compendium of German university drinking songs in his Academic Festival Overture, and William Bolcom’s Concerto Grosso for Saxophone Quartet & Orchestra, whose influences range from Robert Schumann and the waltzing Strauss family to the Beatles. JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897 in Vienna. ACADEMIC FESTIVAL OVERTURE, OP. 80 (1881) • First performed on January 4, 1881 in Breslau, conducted by the composer. • First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on May 6, 1956 with Frank Noyes conducting. Subsequently performed five more times, most recently on April 13 & 14, 2013 with Joseph Giunta conducting. (Duration: ca. 10 minutes) Artis musicae severioris in Germania nunc princeps — “Now the leader in Germany of music of the more severe order” — read the lofty inscription of the honorary degree, honoris causa, conferred upon Johannes Brahms by the University of Breslau on March 11, 1879. Brahms, not fond of pomp and public adulation, accepted the degree (he had declined one from Cambridge University three years earlier — he refused to journey across salt water) but acknowledged it with only a simple postcard to Bernhard Scholz, whom he asked to convey his thanks to the faculty. After receiving this skimpy missive, Scholz, conductor of the local orchestra and nominator of Brahms for the degree, wrote back that protocol required the recipient to provide something more substantial, a “DoktorSymphonie,” perhaps, or “at least a solemn song.” Brahms promised to compose an appropriate piece and bring it to Breslau the following year, when he would join the academicians in “doctoral beer and skittles.” In 1880, Brahms repaired to Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut, east of Salzburg, for the first of many summers in that lovely region. There he worked on the piece for Breslau: “a very jolly potpourri of students’ songs,” he called the new Academic Festival Overture. (The somber Tragic Overture was composed at the same time, Brahms stated, to serve as an emotional balance to the exuberant Academic Festival.) When Scholz discovered that Brahms was preparing to serve up a medley of student drinking songs to the learned faculty at an august university ceremony, he asked the composer if this could be true. Never one to deny his innate curmudgeonly nature, Brahms shot back, “Yes, indeed!” On January 4, 1881, almost two years after the awarding of his degree, Doctor (!) Brahms displayed for the first time his sparkling Academic Festival Overture to the Rector, Senate and members of the Philosophical Faculty of Breslau University. Brahms, who was not a university man, first became acquainted with the traditional student songs when he visited his friend the violinist Joseph Joachim in Göttingen in 1853. The four melodies that he chose for the Academic Festival were known to all German students; Gaudeamus Igitur (“Let us rejoice while we’re young” ), basis of the Overture’s majestic coda, is the most famous. Even with the use of these unsophisticated campus ditties, however, the work is still solidly structured and emotionally rich, a fine example of Brahms’s masterful techniques of orchestration, counterpoint and thematic manipulation. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum and the usual strings consisting of first violins, second violins, violas, violoncellos and double basses. WILLIAM BOLCOM Born May 26, 1938 in Seattle, Washington. CONCERTO GROSSO FOR SAXOPHONE QUARTET & ORCHESTRA (2000) • First performed on October 20, 2000 in Detroit, conducted by Jahja Ling with the PRISM Quartet as soloists. • First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on October 13 & 14, 2001, conducted by Joseph Giunta with the PRISM Quartet as soloists. (Duration: ca. 21 minutes) William Bolcom, in many ways, exemplifies the American composer at the start of the new millennium. Bolcom has taken his proper share of native and European training with distinguished (mostly French) teachers, including Milhaud, Messiaen and Boulez. His work has been recognized with commissions from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and many noted performers and ensembles, as well as by a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his Twelve New Etudes for Piano, recognition as the 2007 “Composer of the Year” by Musical America, multiple Grammy Awards for his settings of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, National Medal of Arts, Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, and induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. He has taught at leading conservatories (he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1973 until his retirement in spring 2008, the last fifteen years as Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Composition), and has served as a critic, composer-in-residence and adjudicator. He is known as an excellent pianist. It is his background outside these factual entries, however, that makes him such an intriguing representative of the modern American composer. Bolcom’s earliest memorable musical experience came not from his grandfather, a lumber tycoon who raised money for the Seattle Philharmonic so that he could annually conduct a program of marches — though he could not read a note of music. Nor did it come from his mother, who continuously played classical selections on the phonograph while she was pregnant with William in the hope that he would become musical by pre-natal osmosis. Rather, Bolcom admits that his first musical memory came when he was eight, during a visit to a music shop where he heard a recording of The Rite of Spring. So intrigued was he by the music that he pleaded to take the album home. It was duly purchased, and he spent hours in front of the phonograph imbibing Stravinsky’s epochal masterpiece. It is significant, and typical of many of today’s composers, that it was a recording — that dynamic marriage of music and technology — that opened the world of music to William Bolcom. After Stravinsky, Bolcom added the pioneering American iconoclast Charles Ives to his musical pantheon. Other items were soon deposited in his increasingly eclectic musical grab-bag — Berg, Weill, serialism, microtones, as well as a thorough grounding in the great European classics. To all of these, Bolcom, like Ives, added a wide range of American popular music: jazz, folk, blues, rock, pop, ragtime. He gathered what he wished from this torrent of musical streams, and hammered it with a real flamboyance into his own characteristic style. In 1965, for example, he received second prize in composition at the Paris Conservatory for his String Quartet No. 8 — he was denied first prize because the theme of the finale was in the style of rock-’n’-roll. His Session IV (1967) contains quotations from Beethoven and Schubert cheek-by-jowl with some snippets from Scott Joplin’s rags. His first two operas (Dynamite Tonite and Greatshot) are rooted in the popular idioms of the satiric cabaret; McTeague, premiered by Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, is set in 19th-century San Francisco; A View from the Bridge, commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago for its 1999 season, is based on Arthur Miller’s novel; his most recent commission for Lyric Opera, premiered in December 2004, took Robert Altman’s movie A Wedding as its subject. Bolcom’s most recent work is the Trombone Concerto, premiered on June 10, 2016 by the New York Philharmonic and that ensemble’s Principal Trombonist, Joseph Alessi, under the direction of Alan Gilbert. The composer wrote, “The Concerto Grosso, composed for the PRISM Quartet (which includes two of my former students), is intended purely as a piece to be enjoyed by performers and listeners. In 1993, PRISM expressed an interest in having me compose a concerto grosso for their group. (To remind readers, a concerto grosso is a Baroque-era form involving a ‘concerto,’ i.e., a soloist or small group of players, in this case our quartet, in dialogue with the ‘ripieno,’ the large orchestra.) Although each member of PRISM is an excellent soloist, I took their request to mean that I should emphasize their group identity, their ‘four-ness.’ This immediately called up two precedents in my mind: the Schumann Concerto for Horn Quartet and (of all things) the early Beatles in their mode of dress and style of movement. “The first movement, Lively, in simple sonata form, evokes blues harmonies in both of its themes. Song Without Words, which follows, is a lyrical larghetto. The third movement, Valse, begins with a long solo stretch for the saxophone quartet; the development of this theme alternates with a pianissimo scherzetto section. The final Badinerie, a title borrowed from Bach, evokes bebop and rhythm-and-blues.” The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, wood block, China cymbal, triangle, slapstick, crotales, tambourine, chimes, snare drum, tom-toms, hi-hat, ride cymbal, bass drum, tam-tam, drum set (consisting of: snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbals, hi-hat, ride cymbal) and the usual strings. ANTON BRUCKNER Born September 4, 1824 in Ansfelden, Upper Austria; died October 11, 1896 in Vienna. SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, “ROMANTIC” (1874; Revised in 1878-1880) Edited by Leopold Nowak • First performed on February 20, 1881 in Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter. • First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on March 21 & 22, 1992 with Joseph Giunta conducting. (Duration: ca. 65 minutes) The music of Bruckner is unique in the history of the art. He has been called the “Wagner of the Symphony,” after the mortal whom he revered above all others, but this appellation implies that his work is more derivative than can be substantiated by the musical scores or by his life. Bruckner, scion of generations of Catholic peasants, passed most of his life in a sort of ceaseless religious ecstasy and fervent humility that held him aloof from the exigencies of everyday life. Even Wagner, as mean and self-serving as any musician who ever lived, could not resist the guileless simplicity and utter sincerity of this extraordinary man. Bruckner’s early works were mostly service music, plainly intended to praise God. When he turned to orchestral music later in life — his First Symphony did not appear until he was 42 — the intent and philosophy of his sacred compositions were transferred into his newly adopted genre. The music created by such a visionary as Bruckner needs special care from the listener. His symphonies have been called “cathedrals in sound,” and the phrase is appropriate both for the mood that they convey and for their implication of grandeur. Such works by their very nature must be large in sonority and temporal duration if their vision is to be realized — a twenty-minute Bruckner symphony would be as ludicrous as the massive baldachino of St. Peter’s dropped onto the altar of the neighborhood parish church. It is this very striving toward the infinite, toward the transcendent, that raises Bruckner’s best works to a plane achieved by few others in the history of music. Those willing to meet Bruckner on his own terms, to partake of the special hour that he grants the listener in each of his symphonies, find an experience as fulfilling and deeply satisfying as any that the art has to offer. Wrote Lawrence Gilman, “He was and is a seer and prophet. Sometimes, rapt and transfigured, he saw visions and dreamed dreams as colossal, as grandiose, as aweful in lonely splendor, as those of William Blake.” The Fourth Symphony, one of Bruckner’s finest achievements of spirit and craftsmanship, could be (and has been) the subject of extensive analysis. (Robert Simpson’s consideration runs to 22 pages.) Suffice it to say for the technically minded that the first movement is in leisurely sonata form, the Andante is built from three themes which recur in sequence, the galvanic Scherzo is provided with a sharply contrasting trio reminiscent of an Austrian Ländler, and the Finale draws together themes from all the preceding movements for a cyclical summation of the entire Symphony. The most fruitful approach for those who prefer to listen without labels, however, is to be swept along by the glorious tide of sound, at some times small and intimate and reverential, at others, mighty and heaven-storming. It is from the building of long, controlled climaxes to move from the tiny to the great that the Symphony derives much of its power, as though these rising lines of musical tension were the machines slowly, inexorably opening the cathedral vault to the visionary sky above. Deryck Cooke wrote, “The essence of Bruckner’s symphonies is that they express the most fundamental human impulses, unalloyed by civilized conditioning, with extraordinary purity and grandeur of expression; and that they are on a monumental scale which, despite many internal subtleties and complexities, has a shattering simplicity of outline.” Perhaps Bruckner was right — perhaps his talent did, indeed, come directly from God. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals and the usual strings.