Download About the Music - Portland Symphony Orchestra

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.