Program Notes

DAVID B. LEVY

Florence Price

Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934)

African-American composer, organist, pianist, and educator Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9, 1887, and died in Chicago, Illinois, on June 3, 1953. Active as a composer and performer in the worlds of symphonic and commercial music, Price is also renowned for her choral and solo vocal compositions. Her settings of spirituals were performed by some of the 20th century’s greatest singers, including Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price. She was also the first African-American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra when Frederick Stock led the premiere of her Symphony No. 1 in e minor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June 1933. Much of Price’s music remained unpublished until after her death, but since 1918 G. Schirmer acquired the rights to her works, and more recent scholarship has led to ever-more frequent performances of her music. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement dates from 1932-34 and was given its first performance by the composer as soloist in Chicago in 1934. Its original orchestration, recently restored and published, calls for flute, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings.

Antonín Dvořák, while in the United States in the early 20th century, admonished American composers to look for their essence in the roots of Native and African-American music. This advice began to bear fruit in the 1930s as two prominent Black composers, William Grant Still and Florence Price, began to rise to prominence. The fact that the latter was a woman made her achievements, and challenges, all the more impressive. Born in the American South, Price sought to escape racism by moving from Little

Rock and Atlanta to the friendlier climes of Chicago. Her extraordinary contribution to the classical repertory reflects, in her own soulful manner, the powerful late-romantic style of Dvořák’s music, as exhibited in the Czech master’s popular Symphony in e minor (“From the New World”) mixed with the authentic voice of African-American culture—a beautiful example of cross-pollination.

Price’s only piano concerto (she also composed two violin concertos) is in three connected sections that are performed without interruption. The first movement’s gently probing opening theme breathes the world of the spiritual before blossoming into a lush romantic idiom reminiscent of the grand piano concertos of Chopin and Liszt. Price’s gift for melody is everywhere present, combined with brilliant virtuosity. The second section is the concerto’s slow “movement” and is filled with many poignant melodies. The finale, as is the case with her Symphony No. 1, is in the style of a juba—a lively African-American dance idiom commonly the property of enslaved workers on Southern plantations. The juba is also known as the hambone, and in its original usage included clapping of hands and slapping of body parts. In the case of Price’s Concerto, it makes for a joyous ending to a remarkable composition deserving of a more prominent place in the concerto repertory. ●

George Gershwin

Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, and died in Hollywood, California, on July 11, 1937. While his career began as a song plugger in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley, he went on to great success on Broadway in the concert hall. His most important stage work was the opera Porgy and Bess, which remains in the repertory of opera companies and which enjoys occasional revivals on Broadway. Rhapsody in Blue was composed in 1924, the same year in which he wrote his Concerto in F to fulfill a commission by the band leader Paul Whiteman. The original orchestra version (“theater orchestra”) was made by Ferde Grofé. The full orchestra version appeared in print in 1942. The “original” version had its premiere on February 12, 1924, in New York City’s Aeolian Hall, with Whiteman leading his band and the composer serving as soloist. The full orchestral version is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 alto saxophones, tenor saxophone, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, banjo, and strings.

A trill on a low F in the clarinet is followed by a 17-note rising scale in the key of B-flat major. Ross Gorman, the clarinetist in Paul Whiteman’s band, however, either by accident or on purpose, turned the upper part of the scale into a slow and sexy glissando, thus creating one of the most famous openings in the entire history of music. Accident or no, the composer loved it, and it has remained indelibly stamped on the imagination as the signal of Americana in the “Roaring ’20s.” Popular culture took over almost immediately, and who among us can now separate Rhapsody in Blue from one of America’s largest airlines?

George Gershwin was already a rising star in the musical world when Paul Whiteman, encouraged by an earlier attempt to bring together classical music and jazz on the same program, approached the young composer to produce a concerto-like piece. Whiteman had been impressed by Gershwin when the two collaborated on Scandals of 1922. After first refusing the commission, Gershwin relented and agreed to contribute to Whiteman’s “experimental concert.” The composer gives us a glimpse of what was on his mind in an explanation given in 1931 to his biographer, Isaac Goldberg:

It was on the train [to Boston], with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise … And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

Gershwin’s original title for the work was American Rhapsody but was changed at the suggestion of his brother, Ira. While chastised by “serious” newspaper critics as lacking in form, the work became popular with audiences almost immediately. The premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on February 12, 1924, in New York’s Aeolian Hall was an event that attracted attention from Tin Pan Alley to Carnegie Hall. Representatives of the latter venue who attended the concert were violinists Fritz Kreisler, Mischa Elman, and Jascha Heifetz. Sergei Rachmaninoff was there, as were conductors Wilem Mengelberg, Leopold Stokowski, and Walter Damrosch. The latter figure was so taken with the work that he offered Gershwin a commission for a concerto for piano and orchestra. ●

LORI NEWMAN

Sergei Prokofiev

Born 1891, Sontsovka, Yekaterinoslav district, Ukraine Died 1953, Moscow, Soviet Union

Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64 (1935–1936)

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been the inspiration for numerous works in several genres, including art, music, opera, ballet, musical theatre, and film. The most successful ballet is by Sergei Prokofiev, although Prokofiev’s version was nearly destined for failure due to several missteps—some within Prokofiev’s control and some not.

Prokofiev began formal education at the age of 11 with the composer Reinhold Glière. While Prokofiev appreciated Glière’s tutelage, he would later write that he felt his teacher was too conservative in his lessons, and taught him “square” phrasing and traditional modulatory patterns. At the urging of the composer Alexander Glazunov, Prokofiev enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 12. His early style of composition was considered radical, atonal, and avantgarde, experimenting with polytonality, dissonance, high chromaticism, and irregular time signatures. He graduated from the Conservatory with relatively average marks, mainly because he treated his time there as wasteful and boring. Despite this, Prokofiev had made a name for himself as a composer of the future before he was 20 years old.

His first big break came when the music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson signed a contract with the young composer in 1911. The contract allowed him to tour internationally and in 1913, he traveled to Paris and London where he was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev and the famed Ballets Russes. He wrote several short ballets for Diaghilev, with varying degrees of success, but the experience of working with the balletic master would have a profound impact years later when he would begin Romeo and Juliet.

In 1918, Prokofiev left Russia, partially due to his fear of the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War and their implications, and partially because he felt his music was too experimental to have lasting success in an increasingly stifling political climate. Prokofiev arrived in New York in early September 1918.

Life in America was not all Prokofiev had hoped for. He found brief initial success, possibly due to people’s curiosity more than anything else, but he seemed to constantly be compared with, and in the shadow of, other Russian exiles, most notably Sergei Rachmaninoff. His one big success in the States was the commission of his opera The Love for Three Oranges. The premiere was delayed and the opera took so much time to compose that Prokofiev found it difficult to take on other endeavors and to financially support himself. Prokofiev decided living in America full time was not for him, and he began a period of going back and forth between Europe and America until 1922 when he moved back to Europe.

Prokofiev spent the years 1922–1936 composing and living throughout Europe. All the while he was composing and succeeding in Western Europe, he continued to maintain ties to the Soviet Union. He toured there and began weighing his options for a possible return. He had decided to pursue a simpler

musical scheme that was less harsh and experimental and wondered if the style he envisioned for himself could fit in with the Soviet Union’s political ideals. Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 and remained there for the rest of his life.

In 1934 while Prokofiev was still splitting his time between Moscow and Paris, he received a commission for a full-length ballet from the Kirov Theater in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The composer decided he would choose a lyrical subject matter, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For reasons unknown, the Kirov backed out of its contract; it is suggested this was due to political pressure to purge composers considered avant-garde from their repertoire. In 1935, the Bolshoi Ballet picked up the contract but later backed out, claiming the music was impossible to dance to. It is also believed that the Bolshoi vehemently disagreed with Prokofiev’s ending of the work—he originally had written a happy ending to one of the most tragic and famous works in history. He explains in his autobiography:

There was quite a fuss at the time about our attempts to give Romeo and Juliet a happy ending—in the last act Romeo arrives a minute earlier, finds Juliet alive and everything ends well. The reasons for this bit of barbarism were purely choreographic: living people can dance, the dying cannot … But what really caused me to change my mind about the whole thing was a remark someone made to me about the ballet: “Strictly speaking, your music does not express any real joy at the end.” That was quite true. After several conferences with the choreographers, it was found that the tragic ending could be expressed in the dance and in due time the music for that ending was written.

He changed the ending for the premiere in 1938, which finally, and quietly, premiered in Brno, Czechoslovakia. With the future of his Romeo and Juliet uncertain, Prokofiev created two orchestral suites and ten piano works from the score. (A third orchestral suite was later extracted.)

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet saw its Russian premiere at the Kirov Theater on January 11, 1940. The production was fraught with difficulty. Prokofiev and the choreographer, Leonid Lavrosky, were at constant odds with each other, and the dancers complained that they didn’t understand how to dance to Prokofiev’s music. Lavrosky, without Prokofiev’s permission or knowledge, added music to the ballet and reorchestrated some sections so that the dancers could more easily hear their cues. Despite these issues, the performance was both a commercial and critical success. The Bolshoi programmed the work in 1946, and it has remained one of the most popular ballets in the repertoire and one of Prokofiev’s most enduring successes. ●

DAVID B. LEVY

Anton Bruckner

Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, “Romantic,” WAB 104 (1874)

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden, near Linz, on September 4, 1824, and died in Vienna on October 11, 1896. A near contemporary of Johannes Brahms, Bruckner emerged as one of the most important Austro- German composers and teachers during the second half of the 19th century. A skilled organist whose repertory he enriched, his most important compositions were in the realms of symphonies and sacred music. He is considered a late- Romantic extension of the legacy of Beethoven and Schubert. The influence of

Richard Wagner may be discerned in his orchestrations and harmonic vocabulary. As a teacher at the Conservatory of Music in Vienna, Bruckner was an inspiration to many young composers, including the young Gustav Mahler. His Symphony No. 4 was first conceived in 1874 and was revised by the composer between January 1878 and June 1880. This version was first performed by the Vienna Philharmonic on February 20, 1881. Despite further revisions by Bruckner and others, the 1878/80 version is the one most frequently used. The composer dedicated the symphony to Constantin Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a figure who played an important role in the development of Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse. Johann Strauss Jr. dedicated his popular waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods to this nobleman. The work is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

Nearly all of Anton Bruckner’s music is suffused with, and reflective of, his deep immersion in the Catholic faith. The seriousness of purpose stems in part from his upbringing, of course, but also his work as organist, teacher, and choirmaster for the boys’ choir at St. Florian in Upper Austria from 1845 to 1855 and his permanent to the most important musical post in the ecclesiastical world of Linz, a position he held until 1868. His move to Vienna in that same year was sparked by his appointment as Professor of Counterpoint and Harmony at the Music Conservatory of the Austrian capital city. It was during this last phase of his career that the composer of sacred choral and organ music turned his attention more fully

to the composition of symphonies. His country manners never fit in comfortably with the sophisticated world of the Vienna of his day, but, as the famous conductor Wilhelm Fürtwängler said to a meeting of the German Bruckner Society in 1939, “Bruckner did not work for the present; in his art he thought only of eternity, and he created for eternity. In this way, he became the most misunderstood of the great musicians.”

Bruckner was supremely unconfident as a composer of symphonies, as witnessed by his numerous revisions. The shadows under which he worked were those of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (first performed in the same year as Bruckner’s birth) and the overpowering music of Richard Wagner. The fact that some of his pupils, most prominent among them being Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf, became avid champions of Bruckner the symphonist, helped buoy his reputation as symphonist, but, excepting a few works, his symphonies have never enjoyed the popularity of those by Brahms and Mahler. The Fourth Symphony has proven to be Bruckner’s most frequently performed work. Its sound world is unique. Throughout his career, Bruckner excelled as an organist, and it should come as no surprise that his approach to orchestration reflects this. Each section of his orchestra is treated as if he were unleashing a rank of pipes—one for winds, a different set of pipes for brass, and yet another for strings. As such, his music often takes on the character of a carefully chiseled sculpture, now of granite, now of softer stuff. Bruckner’s sense of religious piety and mysticism was ever mindful that he was born in the same year that witnessed the completion and first performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Like the barely perceptible quiet rustling that begins the first movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, Bruckner’s first movement follows suit. Beethoven’s opening also begins with broken fragments of an idea that soon explodes into a mighty first theme. Bruckner also draws the ear’s attention to a noble thematic idea in the solo horn, which is soon picked up by the winds. This is followed by yet another arresting idea— one of the composer’s signature traits—a rhythmic figure comprising two notes followed by a triplet. All of these ideas combine to build toward a magnificent climax, before the first movement moves on to new thematic ideas.

There have been some hints of a vague “program” for the entire symphony and each of its movements based upon communications from Bruckner himself. None of them, however, shed much light on the music and its “meaning.”

The second movement begins as a funereal march in c minor. Its opening section gives ample room for the cello and viola sections of the orchestra to spin out Schubertian-inspired melodies, as well as a “chorale” theme reflecting Bruckner’s deep religiosity. Cast loosely in sonata form, the recapitulation leads to a majestic climax before receding to its hushed ending. The third movement is a fine example of a Brucknerian scherzo, the kind of movement in which he excelled as a symphonist. This one, with its wonderful horn calls, clearly evokes the world of the hunt—a signature idiom in Romantic German culture and economy. Notice once again Bruckner’s favorite duple-followedby-triplet rhythmic figure. The middle section (Trio) is a lovely and graceful Ländler, a folk dance popular among Austrians (think of Maria and Captain von Trapp dancing in one of the scenes in The Sound of Music). The symphony’s finale, a movement with which the composer struggled mightily, presents the listener with a bit of a conundrum when trying to understand its sonic architecture. Rather than following logical patterns, the music presents a succession of events, now mysterious, now powerful, now gently lyrical. What does become clear is that Bruckner is drawing upon motivic ideas presented in all three of the movements that precede it. As to be expected, the symphony ends in a blaze of glory. ●

COLIN MARTIN

Colin Martin

Songs from By Heart (2018)

Scored for soprano solo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, timpani, percussion (playing whip, suspended cymbal, tubular bells, vibraphone, glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, and rain stick), celesta, and strings.

Poet Karen McKinnon’s connections to the New Mexico arts community run deep. An alumna of UNM, she produced several collections of poetry, and in 2016 endowed the UNM Creative Writing department to administer a Creative Writing Poetry competition for UNM undergraduates. The texts from Songs from By Heart come from her most recent anthology of poetry, By Heart, which was published in 2018. By Heart is described as “a collection of poems that transform ordinary moments into something greater, and follow family history into mystery and

wisdom. Through the passing of seasons and the blossoming and fading of flowers, there is always the consolation of nature and memory.”

The two texts used in this piece, “To Each Her Own” and “Moving My Mother,” both explore McKinnon’s relationship with her mother. “To Each Her Own” is a nostalgic look at a woman in her prime, full of intelligence, life, and skill, focusing in particular on her aptitude for gardening. “Moving My Mother” is a much darker poem, as the voice shifts from the past into the present, and the speaker discusses the fallout from her mother’s battle with the “demon of dementia.” In setting these two poems, I used the contrast of tonality and atonality to present this conflict between nostalgia and present tragedy. The piece is set in one continuous movement, with no pause between the poems. “To Each Her Own” is tonal and features nearly no dissonance at all. There are frequent modulations between keys in order to evoke the different colors and moods the poem brings out—joy, reverence, and the colors of flowers, all against the backdrop of nostalgia. After this, a brief, purely orchestral interlude brings a slow dissolution of tonality. Things become murkier, less grounded, and unstable. This is a depiction of her mother’s declining mental state, and her loss of a sense of reality. The music suddenly explodes into a frenzy, leading us into “Moving My Mother,” which begins frantically as the speaker attempts to make order of her mother’s house. The major reveal of her condition, and her battle with dementia, then comes through the most dissonant, dramatic music in the piece. Calm is somewhat restored but always with a sense of tension and being ungrounded. The piece ends in a dreamscape, scored with the solo voice over a background of celesta and violins, then bass and marimba, before ultimately giving way to a rain stick, evoking the scattering of seeds at the end of the poem that brilliantly ties the two poems together.

I would like to thank the New Mexico Philharmonic for offering me this commission, and to Karen for allowing me to set her lovely words. ●

CHARLES GREENWELL

Carf Orff

Born on July 10, 1895, in Munich, Germany, Died March 29, 1982, in Munich, Germany

Carmina Burana

Scored for STB soloists, two adult choirs, one boys’ choir, 3 flutes, 2 piccolos, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, Eb clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 pianos, celesta, percussion, and strings.

The German composer and educator Carl Orff came to international prominence in 1937 with the first performances of his scenic cantata Carmina Burana; so much so, in fact, that the work has tended to overshadow virtually everything else that he wrote. With this work, he established a new kind of “total theater” in which words, music, dance, scenery, and costumes were integrated to produce an overwhelming effect. In doing so, he called upon aspects of two earlier forms of theatrical expression, namely classical Greek tragedy and Italian Baroque opera. At the time, Orff had more in common with conservative trends in German culture than with the progressive thinking of the Weimar years. Instead of following the trend to avant-garde musical revolution, he studied earlier musical forms and styles, mainly late Renaissance and Baroque composers, and used them to create his own unique musical language. He was also influenced by his contemporary Bertolt Brecht, with whom he shared a passion for percussion. (Brecht, a controversial and influential poet, in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, created another famous and popular German stage work of the 1930s, namely The Threepenny Opera.)

Returning to the past was quite common in conservative circles at the time, and Germans often made pilgrimages to sites of past cultural and political greatness. It was in this context that Orff came across the inspiration for his most famous and most frequently performed work.

In 1934, Orff first saw a book of medieval poetry that had originally been published in 1847 and that was based on a manuscript collection discovered in 1803 in the Bavarian Abbey of Benediktbeuern. It is from that 1847 edition that the title Carmina Burana comes, which simply means Songs of Beuern. The manuscript contained more than 200 songs and poems written in medieval Latin and Middle High German and a combination of the two, dating mostly from the 11th and 12th centuries, with some from the 13th century, covering a wide range of subject matter from religion to criticism of the decline in moral standards of the clergy and people in authority to very ribald and sensuous expressions of eating, drinking, and lovemaking. In short, these remarkable poems, which are still very fresh and appealing, cover just about every aspect of human existence: church, state, society, and the individual, and cover humanity in all of its moods. Scholars believe the poems came from England, France, Spain, Italy, and Central Europe, and the fact that so many of them were in Latin gave them wide currency at the time. (It must be explained that the Carmina Burana were written by people for whom Latin was an acquired language: as a result, there is frequently a kind of vague wordiness and sometimes even misuse of the words that must have been difficult for even contemporary people to understand.) Some of the poems have authors listed, among them Philippe Abelard who was Chancellor of the University of Paris, but the majority of them are anonymous, having most likely been written by a peripatetic group called the Goliards, consisting of students, teachers, unfrocked priests, runaway monks, clerics, wandering scholars, and intellectuals. An interesting feature of European life in the late Middle Ages was the ease with which these scholars and students and assorted hangers-on went from one university town to another, and there seems to have been a large group of such people in temporary residence in such towns in both their native countries and elsewhere. These vagrants traveled through France, Germany, and England, earning their way with satirical, critical, and often ribald songs in lilting but frequently unidiomatic Latin. Orff was so taken by what he read that he instantly began to set some of the words to music, and in a matter of a few weeks’ time the entire work was basically composed.

In setting the texts, Orff created what he called a scenic cantata consisting of a succession of tableaux showing how fortune governs the affairs of man. Following the first performances of the work in June of 1937 in Frankfurt, Orff told his publisher in effect to discard everything he had written up to that time, and as he put it, “My collected works now begin with Carmina Burana.” Although the first performances were stage works involving dance, choreography, visual designs, and other stage action, the cantata is now presented more often than not in concert form. The composer’s subtitle for the work is “Secular songs for soloists and chorus, accompanied by instruments and magic images.” For the record, this ultimately became the first of a trilogy of such pieces collectively entitled Trionfi, or Triumphs. The other two are Catulli Carmina (Songs of Catullus) and Trionfo di Afrodite (The Triumph of Aphrodite). In these works, particularly the first two, Orff was influenced by late Renaissance and early Baroque composers, including Claudio Monteverdi and William Byrd, and the primary musical element is rhythm.

Overall, the music gives the impression of being rhythmically straightforward and simple, but often the meter changes freely from one measure to the next.

The first performance was given in Frankfurt in June of 1937, followed by several other productions elsewhere in Germany. The Nazi regime was initially nervous about the blatantly erotic tone of some of the poems, but because of the cantata’s immense popularity, the authorities eventually embraced the work, and it became the most famous piece of music composed in Germany at the time. The popularity of the cantata continued to grow after the war, and by the 1960s Carmina Burana was firmly established as part of the international classical repertoire. That initial production had as a centerpiece a large wheel, symbolic of the wheel of fortune constantly turning, bringing good and bad luck to mankind indiscriminately, and the cantata as a whole may be looked upon as a parable of human life exposed to the whims of fate and at the mercy of the eternal laws of change. The work begins and ends with the famous chorus Fortuna imperatrix mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World), the two statements of which frame the three main sections of the piece that deal with Man’s encounter with Nature (particularly Nature reawakening in spring); Man’s encounter with the gifts of Nature (among them the joys of wine); and Man’s encounter with Love in all forms. Man is pictured here in a hard, unsentimental light, a point of view which is very much in keeping with the anti-Romantic stance of the work. There are 24 numbers in the cantata, and the musical forms underlying the words are quite simple and basic and almost always repetitive. The harmonies utilized are also very traditional and tonal, and much of the time the music is propelled by powerful, driving rhythms. The orchestra, which includes a large percussion section and two pianos, replaces the normal Romantic tone coloration with big blocks of brilliant sound, very often resembling a gigantic pipe organ. The second section of the work, entitled In taberna (In the Tavern), is where the truly original theatrical material begins, and the orchestration here is striking. Carmina Burana continues to be a favorite with audiences everywhere, appealing as it does to the most fundamental musical instincts. ●