comments by matthew guerrieri
richard einhorn
Born January 1, 1952; Newark, New Jersey
Maxwell’s Demon #4 (2011)
To illustrate the second law of thermodynamics—the one that says that entropy increases, and the universe tends toward disordered equilibrium—the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell tried to break it. He imagined a superhuman demon, with a two-chambered box, able to track the path and speed of every molecule by working a trapdoor to keep slower molecules on one side of the box and faster molecules on the other, creating permanent zones of hot and cold. The counterintuitive result reveals the principle; we expect hot things to cool down and cold things to warm up. But where exactly Maxwell’s Demon violated the law turned out to be a more subtle problem. It was only with the rise of information theory in the second half of the twentieth century that the Demon’s trickery became clear. The path and speed of a molecule is information, after all, and, as it turns out, while storing information is thermodynamically free, erasing it comes at a thermodynamic cost. As long as
Pañca (2018; 2023)
Einhorn’s music often is concerned with process and practice, both musically—with its layering and juxtaposition of repeated motives and harmonies—and programmatically. His most-performed work, Voices of Light, a choral companion to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film
The Passion of Joan of Arc, can be heard as an expression of religious practice, while his 2012 oratorio The Origin explores scientific practice through the work of Charles Darwin. Pañca, premiered in 2018, considers practice on a more intimate scale. (Originally written for violin and piano, Einhorn has also adapted Pañca for violin
Maxwell’s Demon still has memory, he can keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold, but once he runs out of storage space, the thermodynamic bill comes due.
Richard Einhorn’s Maxwell’s Demon #4, first performed in 1990, the last in a series of electric violin solos inspired by Maxwell’s creature, wears vernacular influences proudly: a sharp, amplified sound world, double-stops as power chords, repetitive riffs, and rhythmic drive. The works in the series are often also performed on acoustic violin, as is this case with this evening’s performance, to similar effect. (Einhorn has mentioned as personal touchstones everything from John Coltrane to Philip Glass to Captain Beefheart.) But in its relentless nature, the piece also captures something of the implications of the Demon’s work, the burden of remembering and forgetting ever-increasing amounts of information. Bombarded by data, we fight a losing battle against encroaching chaos.
and guitar and, as it is being heard today, flute and harp.) A slow, ascending five-note loop is overlaid with melodies and harmonies, sometimes serene, sometimes busy, sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting. The title is the Sanskrit word for “five,” the work’s rhythmic underpinning, but also a reference to prapañca, the Buddhist term for the “manyness” with which one perceives the world and the proliferation of distraction that such perception can trigger. It hints at Pañca’s evocation of meditative practice: a buzz of thoughts surrounding an anchoring mantra.
4 TWENTY-FIFTH
SEASON
jessie montgomery
Born December 8, 1981; New York City
Play (1999; 2023)
Jessie Montgomery’s Play, from 1999, is like a quick-fire improv game. Given a couple of prompts—a little gallop up and down the scale, with some major-minor turns thrown in, and a tritone-plus-a-fourth tumble down the steps— how many situations can the four instruments come up with in two minutes? The prompts change and merge, losing and gaining in
julia perry
Born March 25, 1924; Lexington, Kentucky
Died April 24, 1979; Akron, Ohio
Pastoral (1959)
By the end of the 1940s, Julia Perry was on her way to a career typical of Black composers of her time, with an affinity for vocal music and a style admitting influences of spirituals and the blues. By the end of the 1950s, Perry had achieved something else entirely: a compelling synthesis of modernist serialism, European neoclassicism, and American clarity, of which her Pastoral is an ideal example.
Born in Kentucky, Perry already started to attract attention as a teenaged singer in Akron, Ohio, before attending Westminster Choir College, where she studied composition, voice, piano, violin, and conducting, was a soloist in the choir, and concertmistress of the orchestra. Having spent the summer of 1949 at Tanglewood studying voice, she returned in 1951 as a composition student with Luigi Dallapiccola, an Italian composer of lithe, lyrical twelve-tone music. Perry spent the next two years in Europe continuing her studies with Dallapiccola, while also taking classes with Nadia Boulanger, the French high priestess of neoclassicism and counterpoint, a formidable and legendary pedagogue. Later in the decade Perry would return to Europe for another long stint, studying, composing, and
translation. Some players get stuck in a rut; some players get stuck on a note. When a promising new twist appears, the players take a collective breath and see where it goes, but the initial prompts steal back in. Finally, the last player breaks the rules: a pair of fourths, no tritone. The game is over.
lecturing and conducting concerts on behalf of the U. S. Information Agency.
Perry wrote Pastoral in 1959, just after returning to the United States for good. In a way, the work sums up her European experience, with outer sections constructed on serialist lines surrounding an intricate neoclassical fugue. Instead of a twelve-tone row, Perry uses the pitches of an A minor harmonic scale while constantly blurring the line between the keys of A minor and C major. The opening chord, for example, contains all seven notes of the scale; the flute’s line, however, conspicuously lacks the A. Perry gives particular prominence to the scale’s two tritones—G-sharp and D, B, and F—one harmonically leaning toward the minor key, the other toward the major. The central fugue assembles salient intervals from the first section into a twisty theme, reaching an unexpected climax in which the lowest strings hold onto the subject while the others proclaim the countersubject in four-part parallel harmony, almost like a bigband shout chorus. The opening theme returns, wending its way to an ambiguous close.
The technique of Pastoral, the elegance and rigor with which Perry maintains and explores
CSO.ORG 5 COMMENTS
its contradictory harmonic thesis, is impressive. Sadly, it would be a high point in her career. Over the following years, Perry would pursue a more experimental, repetitive style that left her at odds with the American classical-music mainstream. Dogged by illness, in 1970, Perry
leonard bernstein
Born August 25, 1918; Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died October 14, 1990; New York City
suffered the first of a series of strokes that would leave her increasingly incapacitated, though she never stopped composing. After her death in 1979, many of her scores were lost. Those that survived are testament to a fierce, restless musical intelligence.
Dance Suite for Brass Quintet (1989)
Leonard Bernstein’s breakthrough as a composer came via the American Ballet Theater—with 1944’s Fancy Free, choreographed by Jerome Robbins—so it was natural that he contribute music for the group’s fiftieth-anniversary gala in 1990. But while the twenty-six-year-old Bernstein had approached his assignment with surprisingly symphonic ambition and scope, the seventy-two-year-old Bernstein only had the energy for Dance Suite, five miniatures for brass quintet. Indeed, the pieces were performed at the gala, but not danced to, the music coming and going too fast for choreographic treatment. It would be the last work Bernstein completed before his death.
Bernstein’s biographer Humphrey Burton called Dance Suite “sketches from the bottom drawer,” but the sketches are quintessential Bernstein. For one thing, every movement is derived from music originally written for more private or informal purposes, examples of Bernstein’s typical thrift regarding a good tune. Some started as gifts: Bi-Tango a birthday
present for violinist Paul Woodiel, Dancisca a piano piece for Bernstein’s granddaughter Francisca, Two-Step commemorating the birth of Bernstein’s grandson Evan. Two-Step originally had lyrics as well, as did the Waltz (a wry protest song in defense of the National Endowment for the Arts, then under siege by conservative lawmakers), and MTV (setting some hard-boiled dialogue inspired by an episode of Miami Vice). And the Suite encapsulates much of Bernstein’s musical style: the loping, off-balance syncopations that always sure-footedly land; the melodic alternation between simple, almost childlike scales and oblique leaps; the penchant for suddenly sharp punctuation, whether jocular or stinging (or both). Even the stylized jazz of MTV, its rock-and-roll/Crockett-and-Tubbs provenance notwithstanding, would not feel out of place in Fancy Free. The Dance Suite might have lacked choreography, but Bernstein still gave some of his favorite compositional tricks one last twirl in the spotlight.
Major support for CSO MusicNOW is generously provided by the Zell Family Foundation, the Sargent Family Foundation, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
6 TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON
COMMENTS
walter piston
Born January 20, 1894; Rockland, Maine
Died November 2, 1976; Belmont, Massachusetts
Fanfare for the Fighting French (1944)
In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, British conductor Eugene Goossens, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, put out a call to American composers for fanfares to open each program of the orchestra’s 1942–43 season. “It is my idea,” Goossens wrote,” to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.” Among those who responded was Walter Piston with his Fanfare for the Fighting French. A lifelong New Englander and a Harvard professor, Piston nevertheless had strong connections to France. As a young violinist, he had performed in orchestras led by Georges Longy, the emigré who left an enduring French stamp on Boston’s musical culture, and, after graduating from Harvard, Piston had traveled to France to study, like so many American musicians before and after him, with Nadia Boulanger.
Out of the eighteen fanfares Goossens premiered, exactly one entered the repertoire: Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Later in his life, Copland explained his choice
angel alday
Age 16
New Work for Wind Quintet
Angel Alday is a participant in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Young Composers Initiative, led by CSO Mead Composer-inResidence Jessie Montgomery (see page 8). His new work for wind quintet was specially selected to be included in tonight’s performance. Alday’s first exposure to formal music training was in the sixth grade, when he joined the band at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. He was later accepted to ChiArts, Chicago’s first public arts high school, where he now majors in both composition and performance. In addition, he is
of title by way of a swipe at Piston’s effort: “It seemed to me that if the fighting French got a fanfare, so should the common man, since, after all, it was he who was doing the dirty work in the war.” Still, Copland had also studied with Boulanger, and while Piston may have made his French accent explicit by incorporating the dotted rhythms of the Marseillaise, the two fanfares share more than a little DNA. Both use a bit of bitonal flavor to add some bite to their tonal harmonies; both make use of a brief, surprising stepwise modulation for brightness. And Copland’s melody—with its rising triads and falling fourths—echoes the bass trombone/tuba lines in Fanfare for the Fighting French. But where Copland gives full rein to his talent for the oracular, Piston channels the more traditional virtues of the fanfare: ruffles and flourishes.
a student at the Merit School of Music, studying trombone and euphonium. In 2022 he attended the Interlochen Arts Camp. This summer he will attend the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute to study composition.
Angel Alday on New Work for Wind Quintet
My new work for wind quintet has two primary emotions: an uplifting and positive one and a darker and harsher one. This piece is meant to symbolize my time
CSO.ORG 7 COMMENTS
Matthew Guerrieri is a composer, pianist, and critic, and the author of books about Beethoven and Doctor Who. He lives in Evanston.
throughout high school, from the COVID-19 era to the present. The work starts darkly, as if the members of the ensemble were singing that there is no hope. As the ensemble begins to move forward through this struggle, a brighter melody begins to emerge; the ensemble regains hope and passion within the music. This gives the music momentum, and symbolizes the desire
jessie montgomery
Musings for Two Violins (2023)
Jessie Montgomery on Musings for Two Violins
Musings for Two Violins is designed as a series of short movements inspired by the Forty-Four Violin Duets by Béla Bartók—a piece we violinists tend to revisit throughout life because of its nimble nature and
Young Composers Initiative
With leadership from CSO Mead Composerin-Residence Jessie Montgomery, the Young Composers Initiative engages youth from across the Chicago region and empowers them to create new pieces of chamber music. Following a competitive application process, five student composers were selected to work with Jessie throughout the 2022–23 season. Angel Alday’s new work was selected to be part of this evening’s program and compositions by
to continue to push throughout the devastating period that was COVID-19. The ensemble then returns to a stalemate representing my internal fear after I contracted COVID-19. Nevertheless, by taking care of myself, I was able to push through this difficult time and return to living in a more ideal society. This piece is a representation of my hopes, struggles, and desires.
programmatic effect. I also wanted to pay homage to some of my favorite composers of string music so that each movement is inspired by a different composer—J.S. Bach, Paul Hindemith, Antonio Vivaldi, and Darius Milhaud—in addition to references to my own Duo for Violin and Cello throughout. Each movement is like a passing whim, though distinct in character.
the four other young composers received their premieres in Grainger Ballroom preceding tonight’s concert.
Angel Alday 16, Chicago High School for the Arts
Lincoln Gibbs 17, Lakes Community High School
Brandon Harper 17, Lincoln Park High School
Malik Muhammad 14, Muhammad University of Islam
Sofia Ruiz Cordero 18, Naperville North High School
The Young Composers Initiative is generously supported by Margo and Mike Oberman.
A statement from the artist Donovan Foote
When we watch musicians perform, we are seeing and hearing the culmination of time, energy, study, and practice. We become familiar with the front-facing appearance of the instrument and the audience-facing appearance of the musician, but we may not consider the context. I’ve always considered postmodern visual art to be a breaking down of tradition. With this artwork, I wanted to show the back of the instrument—the part that may rest against a musician’s body or is set on a chair during a break in practice. Along with this element is the story of the luthier who crafted the instrument using an entirely different set of skills and tools. For this postmodern American suite of music, this image tries to tell the story of how we arrived here from different perspectives.
Artwork available at symphonystore.com/musicnow
8 TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON COMMENTS
Baird Dodge Violin
A New York City native, Baird Dodge joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a violist in 1996. He later moved to the second violin section that same year. In 2002, he was appointed principal second violin by Daniel Barenboim. After studying violin and viola from an early age, Dodge attended the precollege division of the Juilliard School. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Swarthmore College in 1990 and a master’s degree in music from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1994. His teachers have included Helen Kwalwasser, Gregory Fulkerson, and Joyce Robbins.
An avid chamber musician, Dodge has collaborated with such artists as Daniel Barenboim, Isidore Cohen, and Ida Kavafian. He also has appeared as a guest artist with the Chicago and Colorado string quartets. He has performed at the Bravo! Colorado Festival, Taos Chamber Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, and on Music from Marlboro tours.
Baird Dodge has a special interest in contemporary music. He often has performed works by his father Charles Dodge, including the premiere of his Violin Etudes at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in 1994. He recorded his father’s Viola Elegy for New Albion Records in 1992. In 2006, he premiered and recorded Carillon Sky, a chamber concerto written for him by Augusta Read Thomas, on the CSO’s MusicNOW series with Oliver Knussen conducting. He also has championed the works of composer James Matheson and premiered several of his pieces, including the Violin Concerto, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the CSO in 2011.
Jessie Montgomery Composer, Violin
Jessie Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator whose music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of twenty-first century American sound and experience. In July 2021, she began a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works, as well as collaborations with distinguished choreographers. Recent premieres include Hymn for Everyone (2021), her first commission for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Five Freedom Songs (2021), a song cycle for Soprano Julia Bullock; a set of concertos—DIVIDED (2022), Rounds (2021), and L.E.S. Characters (2020); and a site-specific collaboration for Bard SummerScape and Pam Tanowitz Dance (2021).
Highlights of her 2022–23 season include the world premieres of orchestral works for violinist Joshua Bell; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; a consortium led by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for New Music USA Amplifying Voices; the violin duo Musings for CSO MusicNOW and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; and new settings of various works by choreographer Donald Byrd for Nashville Ballet.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation. Her Soul Force is featured on the 2022 Grammy Award-winning recording by the New York Youth Symphony. She is currently visiting faculty at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, Bard College, and the New School, and has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization since 1999.
CSO.ORG 9 profiles
PHOTOS: TODD ROSENBERG
Montgomery holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University.
Rachel Barton Pine Violin
Heralded as a leading interpreter of the great classical masterworks, violinist Rachel Barton Pine thrills audiences with her dazzling technique, lustrous tone, and emotional honesty. With an infectious joy in music-making and a passion for connecting historical research to performance, Pine transforms audiences’ experiences of classical music. Pine performs with the world’s leading orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, and the Chicago, Vienna, and Detroit symphony orchestras. She has worked with renowned conductors, including Teddy Abrams, Marin Alsop, Semyon Bychkov, Neeme Järvi, Erich Leinsdorf, Nicholas McGegan, Zubin Mehta, Tito Muñoz, and John Nelson.
She has recorded forty acclaimed albums, many of which have hit the top of the charts. In September 2022 Cedille Records released her Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries: 25th Anniversary Edition, which features a new recording of Florence Price’s Violin Concerto no. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Jonathon Heyward. She frequently performs music by contemporary composers, including major works written for her by Billy Childs, Mohammed Fairouz, Marcus Goddard, Earl Maneein, Shawn Okpebholo, Daniel Bernard Roumain, José Serebrier, and Augusta Read Thomas.
Her RBP Foundation assists young artists through its Instrument Loan Program and Grants for Education and Career, and since 2001, has run the groundbreaking Music by Black Composers project.
She performs on the “ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat” Joseph Guarnerius “del Gesù” (Cremona 1742), on lifetime loan from her anonymous patron.
Michael Mulcahy Conductor
Chicago Symphony Orchestra trombonist
Michael Mulcahy appears worldwide as a soloist, conductor, and teacher. He was appointed to the CSO by Sir Georg Solti in 1989, having been principal trombonist of the Tasmanian and Melbourne symphony orchestras and solo trombonist of the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Mulcahy made his solo debut with the Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim in 2000 and subsequently performed as soloist under Pierre Boulez. In October 2016, he gave the world premiere of Carl Vine’s Five Hallucinations for Trombone and Orchestra, and in February 2018, he performed in the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto.
He has been principal trombonist of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque and the Grand Teton Music Festival since 1992. Mulcahy is also principal trombonist of the Australian World Orchestra, having performed under conductors Alexander Briger, Zubin Mehta, Sir Simon Rattle, and Riccardo Muti. He was a founding member of the National Brass Ensemble in 2014.
An invitation to direct the West German Radio Orchestra sparked Michael Mulcahy’s interest in conducting. He serves as director of the CSO Brass, conducts annually for the Grand Teton Musical Festival, and makes guest appearances with the Sydney Symphony, Tasmanian Symphony, New World Symphony, and the Royal Danish Orchestra.
Currently, Mulcahy leads the trombone studio at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music and is a visiting artist at the Australian National Academy of Music.
10 TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON PROFILES
PHOTOS: NO CREDIT AVAILABLE, TODD ROSENBERG
forterestaurant.com @ChicagoForte NOW OPEN! MAKE A RESERVATION Symphony Center’s new restaurant, Forte, offers a contemporary take on Mediterranean cuisine. Make a reservation, view menus and learn more at forterestaurant.com
CSO.ORG/SUBSCRIBE | 312-294-3000 OFFICIAL AIRLINE OF THE CSO 2023/24 SUBSCRIPTIONS NOW ON SALE! Explore the season at cso.org/subscribe Highlights include: BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 | HANDEL Messiah | STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring HOLST The Planets | RAVEL Boléro | MAHLER Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection)
YO-YO MA
the pull of an orchestra that plays as one. Experience a dynamic list of musical guests. Celebrate what’s possible when talents unite.
JOSHUA BELL
Feel
SHEKU KANNEH-MASON
EVGENY KISSIN
HILARY HAHN
SUBSCRIBE
YUJA WANG
RICCARDO MUTI SCAN TO
DANIIL TRIFONOV
