Echoes and Resonances Works by Janaček, Brahms, and Kareem Roustom
Ker stin Schüssler-Bach
A Natural Philosophy of Sound: Janáček’s Concertino What an odd beginning: all by itself, the piano plays a scale-like motif in pounding quarters, and yet it does not sound simple because of the addition of chromatic steps. A quarter-note loop, then a descending fifth. The whole structure is stubbornly repeated three times, only interrupted by the horn, which takes up the quarter-note loop like a distant call. This persistent beginning continues until the motifs finally dissolve into a field of lyricism. Leoš Janáček, that great individualist from Moravia, chose a highly idiosyncratic color for his Concertino of 1925. The piano is the central force, but it is flanked by a different combination of instruments in each movement. One typical element of Janáček’s music are the short motifs that seem like linguistic transcriptions. In fact, his lifelong efforts to render the Czech language a ccurately in rhythm and melody culminated in his operas. On his walks, Janáček was also in the habit of notating birdsong, the sound of waves, and the rushing of the wind: to him, this was the “music of life”, and it appears in his works as the voice of nature. Only one year before the Concertino, his opera The Cunning Little Vixen had its premiere—a pantheist celebration of the divine spark in all living creatures. Janáček continued these essays in natural philosophy in his Concertino, and although his remarks should not be mistaken for a hint at program music, their illustrative nature is certainly helpful to the listener following the piece (which was originally conceived as a piano concerto with the title “Spring”). 13
