PROGRAM NOTES

by James Randall

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962): Fanfare Ritmico (2000)

With a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several Grammys under her belt, Jennifer Higdon is also among the most frequently programmed living composers. Her professional journey is all the more remarkable as she got a bit of a late start in music. She taught herself to play flute at age 15, and she only wrote her first compositions in her early 20s. Incredibly prolific since, her compositions include orchestral music, an opera, chamber works, and music for symphonic wind ensemble. Ensuring that her works are accessible to a general listening audience is a particular priority. She writes “I always tell people that my music should speak to them… and that they shouldn’t feel obligated to say why or how. All reactions are valid; the important thing is to have the experience.”

Fanfare Ritmico was commissioned in 1999 by the Women’s Philharmonic, a San Franciscobased orchestra made up entirely of women and dedicated to performing works solely by women. As she composed the work, Higdon found herself “reflecting on how all things have quickened as time has progressed. Our lives now move at speeds much greater than what I believe anyone would have ever imagined in years past… This fanfare celebrates the rhythmic motion, of man and machine, and the energy which permeates every moment of our being in the new century.” And, as it turns out, our lives haven’t gotten any slower in the nearly quarter century since the work’s premiere. In this virtuosic piece, listen particularly for the spatial distribution of musical sounds across the orchestra. Higdon scored it in such a way that the music often moves across the stage from one side to the other, similar to the effect you might get listening to a stereo recording on headphones.

Pascal Le Boeuf (b. 1986): Triple Concerto for Violin, Percussion Duo, and Orchestra (2022)

Pascal Le Boeuf is a genre-bending young composer, pianist, and producer whose works fuse influences from jazz, classical, and electronic music. His work “Alkaline” earned a 2017 Grammy nomination for “Best Instrumental Composition.” Other accolades include first place in the 2008 International Songwriting Competition, the ASCAP Foundation Johnny Mandel Prize, and several New Jazz Works Commissions from Chamber Music America.

In the preface to his score, Le Boeuf writes that his Triple Concerto is “about new beginnings, adapting to change, and creating stability in a chaotic environment…” In the midst of the pandemic, Le Boeuf and his partner, also a composer, welcomed a new baby, Baxter, into their family. Both parents were determined to find time to continue to compose, and, at that point, art truly began to imitate life. On the form of the piece, the composer confesses that “the structure is based on childcare.” In the notebook he used to draft musical ideas, Le Boeuf had scribbled the couple’s hectic daily plan to ensure care for Baxter and time for them both to write music. According to the composer, the back-and-forth relay “provided a perfect structure for the form of the concerto—or was it the other way around? I don’t think I’ve ever restarted a piece so many times, generated so many ideas, or been sidetracked so consistently.” Ultimately these diversions and false starts found their way into the heart of the concerto “in the form of themes traded between the soloists and the orchestra that are consistently interrupted or redirected to other areas.” For all the parents in the audience who remember similar scenarios, this piece is for you!

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 1 in D Major, “Titan” (1887-1888)

Listening to Mahler is an immersive experience. He once shared with the composer Jean Sibelius that “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” His music is famous for both its gargantuan proportions and for its complex allusions to the physical and the metaphysical. In his first symphony we hear passages that evoke the natural beauty of the Austrian countryside—the break of dawn, birdcalls, folk songs—but also passages whose emotional communication seems much more subjective and psychologically complex. How are we to react, for instance, when Mahler, in the third movement, reimagines a children’s song as a funeral march, and then interrupts this odd procession with a sentimental pop song and a klezmer band? What’s it all mean? For me, it helps to understand something of the world Mahler lived in.

During his lifetime, Mahler was better known as a conductor than a composer. He would compose during summers in a small cabin in the Austrian alps and conduct during the fall and winter concert season in Vienna. He thrived in the seasonal rhythm alternating between the natural beauty of the mountains and the intellectual and artistic bustle of the city. In addition to being a hub for music, Vienna was also the wellspring for the new science of psychology, and the theories of consciousness proposed by another of Vienna’s most famous residents, Sigmund Freud. In fact, Mahler eventually spent at least one session on Freud’s famous couch exploring the new field of psychoanalysis. Similar to Freud’s interest in recurrent dreams as a window into the subconscious mind, Mahler’s music returns again and again to melodies and themes he has explored in prior works. He once remarked that “composing is like playing with building blocks, where new buildings are created again and again, using the same blocks. Indeed, these blocks have been there, ready to be used, since childhood, the only time that is designed for gathering.” If this sounds a bit Freudian, that’s exactly where we’re headed. Rather than the more linear path that we hear in works by Beethoven or Brahms, where musical motives and themes usually follow a logical progression, we are instead dropped into a more episodic dreamlike narrative. Themes and musical styles are often juxtaposed in strange and surprising ways. To borrow from a recent film title, it can be “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Mahler’s life experience was filled with the kinds of crises of modern identity that psychoanalysis sought to ameliorate. He famously described himself as “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world— always an intruder, never welcomed.” Ever the outsider, he had tried his best to assimilate. His musical language was that of the German symphonic tradition. He revered Wagner, a virulent anti-Semite, and championed his operas. He also converted to Christianity and wrote music inspired by overtly Christian themes and texts. But these actions were never sufficient. His critics were often direct and vicious. Rudolph Louis, a German musical critic and popular author of several composer biographies and harmony textbooks wrote:

If Mahler’s music would speak Yiddish, it would be perhaps unintelligible to me. But it is repulsive to me because it acts Jewish. This is to say that it speaks musical German, but with an accent, with an inflection, and above all, with the gestures of an Eastern, all too Eastern Jew. So, even to those whom it does not offend directly, it cannot possibly communicate anything. One does not have to be repelled by Mahler’s artistic personality in order to realize the complete emptiness and vacuity of an art in which the spasm of an impotent mock-Titanism reduces itself to a frank gratification of common seamstress-like sentimentality.

The stinging phrase “impotent mock-Titanism” was a direct shot at Mahler’s first symphony. As originally conceived, it was a 5-movement tone poem called “Titan,” inspired by a Romantic novel by Jean Paul of the same name. The work’s mix of musical styles “high” and “low” and of music of varied origin didn’t fit his critics’ ideas for a unified work of art. It was, however, true to Mahler’s credo that a symphony should attempt to “embrace the entire world.” This was his world and his experience, which included, of course, music that might sound at any given moment Jewish, Christian, German, Austrian, or Bohemian. We hear all of these in the Symphony no. 1 in D Major.

Movement I: Spring and No End

The work opens with a quiet, gorgeous curtain of strings. In one program for the piece, Mahler related that the beginning signifies the “awakening of nature from a winter’s sleep.” We hear distant awakening fanfares and the calls of a cuckoo. As a principal melodic theme, Mahler uses a melody from a previous work, a song which carries the text, “Isn’t it becoming a fine world? Chirp, Chirp! Fair and sharp! How the world delights me!”

Movement II: Under Full Sail

The music here takes the form of a Ländler, a spirited Austrian folk dance in triple time, which bookends a slower waltz section.

Movement III: The Hunter’s Funeral Procession

Mahler wrote to a friend suggesting a possible program for the famous third movement: On the surface one might imagine this scenario: A funeral procession passes by our hero, and the misery, the whole distress of the world, with its cutting contrasts and horrible irony, grasps him. The funeral march of “Bruder Martin” [Frère Jacques] one has to imagine as being played in a dull manner by a band of very bad musicians, as they usually follow such funeral processions. The roughness, gaiety, and banality of this world then appears in the sounds of some interfering Bohemian musicians, heard at the same time as the terribly painful lamentation of the hero.

Later, he recalled the movement in more personal terms, as “heart-rending, tragic irony, and is to be understood as exposition and preparation for the sudden outburst in the final movement of despair of a deeply wounded and broken heart.” As in the first movement, Mahler references a melody from a previous composition, a song entitled “Die zwei blauen Augen”: “The two blue eyes of my darling/they have sent me into the wide world. I had to take my leave of this well-beloved place! O blue eyes, why did you gaze on me? Now I will have eternal sorrow and grief.”

Movement IV: From Hell to Paradise

Mahler sets his initial musical hellscape in the key of F minor, a far distance tonally from the work’s heavenly ending in D major. For melodic material, he draws from a number of sources with Christian symbolism, including “inferno” and “cross” motives from Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony, and a “Grail” motive from Wagner’s opera Parsifal. He shared hints to a narrative for the movement with his close friend, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, an Austrian violist: “The last movement, which follows the preceding one without a break, begins with a horrible outcry. Our hero is completely abandoned, engaged in a most dreadful battle with all the sorrow of this world. Time and again he and the victorious motif with him is dealt a blow by fate whenever he rises above it and seems to get hold of it, and only in death, when he has become victorious over himself, does he gain victory. Then the wonderful allusion to his youth rings out once again with the theme of the first movement. (Glorious Victory Chorale!)”