FESTIVAL FINALE: American Masterworks

Poetry Prelude

Daniela Naomi Molnar

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ANTONÍN DVORÁK (1841-1904)

CHRIS ROGERSON (b. 1988)

CHARLES IVES (1874-1954)

String Quartet No. 12, Op. 96 “American” • (25’)

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Lento

III. Molto vivace

IV. Vivace ma non troppo

Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt • (15-20’)

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Intermission

Selections from 114 Songs (1922) • (14’)

66. The Light That is Felt

56. The Circus Band

51. Tom Sails Away

49. In Flanders Field

101. My Native Land

45. At the River

AMY BEACH (1867-1944)

Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 67 • (27’)

I. Adagio: Allegro moderato

II. Adagio espressivo

III. Allegro agitato: Presto

Viano Quartet

Lucy Wang, violin

Hao Zhou, violin

Aiden Kane, viola

Tate Zawadiuk, cello

Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano

Viano Quartet

Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano

Anton Nel , piano

Anton Nel, piano

Viano Quartet

Chris Rogerson’s Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt was made possible through the generous support of the CMNW Commissioning Fund.

All fans of Dvořák ’s “American” music owe a debt of gratitude to Josef Kovařík. If Dvořák had not met and befriended the young Czech-American violinist, he would not have written the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, or the String Quintet, Op. 97 (both nicknamed “American”), nor would the summer of 1893, when Dvořák and his family spent the summer in a small town in northeastern Iowa, prove to be one of the most significant periods in the composer’s life.

Kovařík grew up in Spillville, Iowa, a small farming community settled by Czech and German immigrants, and he served as Dvořák’s personal assistant from 1892-95, while Dvořák headed the National Conservatory in New York City. Understanding Dvořák’s dislike of city life and his need for the slower pace and quiet of the countryside, Kovařík invited the composer and his family to leave behind the hustle and bustle of New York City and live in Spillville during the summer of 1893.

Spillville clearly agreed with Dvořák; within three days of his arrival, he began work on Op. 96. Dvořák wrote quickly, as was his wont, and finished the quartet two weeks later. Eager to hear his new work, Dvořák performed the first violin part, with members of the Kovařík family playing the other instruments, in the first performance in the music room of the Spillville school.

Dvořák crafted many of the melodies from pentatonic scales, with basic, understated harmonic accompaniments. The unadorned melodies and ready accessibility of Op. 96 appealed to audiences, and are part of the reason Op. 96 remains one of Dvořák’s most popular chamber works.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

I am right-handed in nearly everything I do except for baseball, a sport my father taught me as a left-hander himself. I grew up playing wiffle ball in my backyard, my own “rough diamond,” begging my dad to play game after game.

Of course I wanted to crush the ball out of the park, but my father taught me to focus on the little things, like how to track down a fly ball in center field. I idolized ruthless competitors like Barry Bonds; my father taught me a game of quietude.

So when my former teacher Martin Bresnick introduced me to the poem “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt" by David Bottoms, I was drawn to it and hoped to set it one day. I rediscovered it recently when Bottoms passed away. To me, this beautiful poem embodies the unique relationship between many fathers and their children. Have I ever learned “what you were laying down” (a clever reference to the bunt itself)? In particular, I find it moving that the poem itself is a personal sign to the poet's father: “Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap / Let this be the sign / I'm getting a grip on the sacrifice.”

In Sign for My Father, I try to capture an elegiac feeling of childhood, as well as the uniquely American nostalgia for the pastime of baseball. This work is dedicated to my father.

—© Chris Rogerson

In the mid-1940s, Aaron Copland wrote of Charles Ives, “It will be a long time before we take the full measure of Charles Ives.” A man who spent his days selling life insurance, and who composed in virtual obscurity, isolated from almost all the prevailing musical influences of his time, Ives wrote iconoclastic music. He was a mixture of paradoxes; his oldfashioned values hardly seem like the likely impetus for his forward-looking music, and the privacy he craved in his personal life hampered his need for a public audience.

Ives wrote songs throughout his career; their subjects include idyllic New England evocations of Americana, nature, children, hymns, and WWI. The calm beauty of The Light That is Felt, based on Whittier’s poem, expresses Ives’s recurring desire to recreate a child’s sense of security. Ives’s words and boisterous musical “noise” capture a boy’s excitement at seeing and hearing The Circus Band. Ives’s text to Tom Sails Away relives childhood memories of Tom and his family; the music reflects Ives’s attitude to the war and its devastating impact. In Flanders Field sets John McCrae’s famous poem; the bitter music includes mordant quotes from well- known nationalistic tunes. My Native Land, an English translation of a Heine poem, brims with nostalgia. Ives gives the well-known hymn At the River an off-kilter setting; the melody falls away, returns to its original setting, and ends on an ambiguous question.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

Amy Beach , who published under her married name, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, was the most famous and well-regarded American woman composer of her time. Beach grew up in a wealthy Boston family, and her musical ability declared itself early. “She played the piano at four years, memorizing everything that she heard correctly,” wrote Beach’s mother, herself a gifted pianist and singer. “Her gift for composition showed itself in babyhood before two years of age. Beach’s prodigal piano skills led to her debut with the Boston Symphony at 16. Two years later, after her marriage to 43-year-old Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, Beach largely withdrew from public performance, at his insistence. Dr. Beach allowed his wife to continue composing, but did not want her learning composition from a teacher. Other than one year of formal compositional lessons when she was 14, Beach was a composing autodidact; she studied scores and read everything she could find pertaining to harmony, theory, counterpoint, fugue, and instrumentation. Beach wrote in many genres, and a number of her works, like the Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 67, have entered the standard repertoire.

Beach displayed both her composing and performing skills when she premiered Opus 67 with the Hoffman Quartet in Boston’s Potter Hall on February 27, 1908. Critics took note of the Brahmsian influences in Beach’s writing, which were not accidental. Beach had performed Brahms’s Opus 34 in 1900; when she began writing her own piano quintet in 1907, she transformed a theme from Opus 34’s final movement into the primary melodic material for all three movements of her Opus 67. Beach’s style combines the lush Romanticism of Brahms with contemporary harmonies and a vibrant, distinctly American energy.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz