Translation: Esa-Pekka Salonen's Five Images from Sappho

Program notes for the LOOP concert on April 10, 2008, featuring the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). Texts for songs 1-4 from Sappho – A translation by Mary Barnard (Univ. of California Press, 1958) Copyright © 1958 by the Regenta of University of California, Copyright renewed by Mary Barnard. Used by arrangement with G. Schirmer, Inc. as agent for Chester Music Ltd. Texts for song 5 from The Love Songs of Sappho. Essay copyright © 1998 by Paul Roche. Introduction copyright © 1998 by Page duBois. Published 2001 by special arrangement with Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, USA. Used by arrangement with G. Schirmer, Inc. as agent for Chester Music Ltd.

1. Tell Everyone

Now, today, I shall sing beautifully for my friends’ pleasure

2. Without Warning

As a whirlwind, swoops an oak Love shakes my heart

3. It’s No Use

Mother dear, I can’t finish my weaving You may blame Aphrodite soft as she is she has almost killed with love for that boy

4. The Evening Star

Is the most beautiful of all stars

5. Wedding

Raise up the rafters high, Hurrah for the wedding! Carpenters: higher and higher, Hurrah for the wedding! The bridegroom is equal to Ares, Hurrah for the wedding! Much taller than any tall man is, Hurrah for the wedding! As tall as the singer of Lesbos, Hurrah for the wedding! Towers over all singers of elsewhere, Hurrah for the wedding! I think I shall be a maiden forever Listen my dear, By the Goddess herself I swear That I (like you) Had only one Virginity to spare Yet did not fear To go over the bridal line When Hera bade me And cast it from me; So I cheer you on and loudly declare: “My own night was none Too bad And you my girl Have nothing to fear Nothing at all.” Raise up the rafters high, Hurrah for the wedding! Carpenters: higher and higher, Hurrah for the wedding! The bridegroom is equal to Ares, Hurrah for the wedding! Much taller than any tall man is, Hurrah for the wedding! As tall as the singer of Lesbos, Hurrah for the wedding! Towers over all singers of elsewhere, Hurrah for the wedding! [Bridesmaid’s carol I] Come, bride Brimming with roses Of love, bride, Gem of the lovely Goddess of Paphos: Go, bride, Go to the bed where sweetly and gently You’ll play with your bridegroom: So, bride, Hesperus lead you Star of the evening Happily onwards Where you shall wonder Where Hera on silver Sits Lady of Marriage. Raise up the rafters high, Hurrah for the wedding! Carpenters: higher and higher, Hurrah for the wedding! The bridegroom is equal to Ares, Hurrah for the wedding! Much taller than any tall man is, Hurrah for the wedding! As tall as the singer of Lesbos, Hurrah for the wedding! Towers over all singers of elsewhere, Hurrah for the wedding! They were exhausted and The black trance of night flooded into their eyes.

Program Notes: Esa-Pekka Salonen's Five Images from Sappho

Program notes for the LOOP concert on April 10, 2008, featuring the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). If we imagine the history of art as some kind of Darwinian survival game, Sappho stands out as a genetic miracle. No (almost no) whole organism (poem) has survived; instead we have a couple of dozen pages’ worth of fragments. Some of them are almost complete little poems; most of them are isolated groups of words or single words far apart. Almost every generation of poets has tried to translate these scattered messages from a woman of whom we know very little. As always, interpretation tells more about the interpreter, and his time and culture, than the work itself. Our modern view of Sappho is similar to that of other art forms, more scholarly than romantic. It is important to remember that the best Sappho translation today (or the best Beethoven interpretation) will be seen as interesting, but slightly ridiculous, by future generations. We are prisoners of our own time and generation. It is the fragmentary nature of the material, and therefore an almost open form, that makes Sappho so fascinating to set to music. (After having typed this sentence I realized that I am still trying to give an intellectual, formal explanation wildly off the mark in the good old serialist tradition. That is exactly what I mean by being a prisoner of one’s own generation.) It is the tremendous energy of suffocated sexuality and the vibrant eroticism in Sappho that got my imagination going. Sappho reveals to us secrets of the female soul like nobody else. There is no subject more interesting. Between these small islands of words one can hear music. I set out to compose a cycle in which I would describe a woman’s life from childhood to old age and death. Timing was not right: my son Oliver was born in the middle of the composition period, and it became totally impossible for me to imagine death and loneliness. I decided to concentrate on the first part of life instead. A short description of the structure of Five Images from Sappho:

1. Tell everyone. The singer explains that she is going to tell a story. Music is fanfare-like, except for the word ‘beautifully’.

2. Without Warning. The first awakening of love. Descending figures in the beginning are metaphors of a gentle whirlwind.

3. It’s no use. A young girl is unable to concentrate on household chores. She is trying to explain to her mother why, but gets so excited that she can only stutter. Finally, she manages to get the words 'that boy’.

4. The evening star. I imagine: a girl is lying in the grass in the evening, gazing at the stars. For the first time she understands that even she will be old one day. The strings and the celesta describe the flicker of the stars.

5. Wedding. I combined several poems here to create a larger form. The singer has different roles in this song. In the refrain the crowd greets the bridegroom. It returns twice in different guises. After the interlude the bride has a brief moment of despair, but is comforted by an older woman ('listen, my dear’), who has a very balanced point of view, in my opinion.

After the second refrain girls gather outside the nuptial chamber and sing teasingly a song ('Come bride’). After the third refrain and an orchestral culmination, a voice describes the couple sleeping peacefully in each other’s arms.

Program Notes: Ryan Francis' Piano Concerto

Program notes for the LOOP concert on April 10, 2008, featuring the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). This concerto feels like an arrival point for me artistically that has been in the works for the past four years. I’ve been exploring a lot of seemingly (to me, at least) disparate musical concepts, but this concerto is the crucible in which I’m forging them all together.  On the one hand, I’ve written a good deal of music that deals more with textural as opposed to ‘metric’ rhythms, and I also have a parallel string of pieces that are concerned with electronic influence on acoustic music, which are much more metrically complex, while retaining more harmonic clarity. My interest in electronics has influence the concerto on both an aural level and a process level. While the concerto’s orchestration is often designed to create 'electronic’ timbres, I also decided to forego my traditional paper-and-pencil-exclusively method of composing, in favor of working with MIDI maps. This new method of working allowed me to explore and develop textures that I probably would have never discovered were I simply working with my hands on a keyboard, and this influenced the soloist’s part in particular. I would write with grids, unconcerned with playability, and would then transcribe them into mensural notation and revise and revise until they were completely idiomatic. The result has been that the piano writing is often utterly different than my previous work, which was my goal. Each of the movements were developed out of piano etudes that I have been writing for the past year, and the form of each movement reflects the same sort of obsessive quality of an etude, although I allowed myself to be a little more expansive as well; this is a concerto, after all!

• The first movement could almost be a chorale, were it not for the sharp syncopated disjunctive melodic contours that cut through the texture.

• The second movement is a sort of musical Jacob’s Ladder, constantly rising musical gestures that are also continuously falling.

• The third movement is more about color than the others, and less rhythmically driving as well, although there is a gentle repeated note pulse that runs through much of the movement.

• The final movement is comprised of two basic layers: a light, distant textural one, and a foreground built on constantly evolving loops of material.

Translation: Maurice Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

Program notes for the LOOP concert on April 10, 2008, featuring the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). Translation by Ned Rorem.

I. Sigh / Soupir

My soul rises toward your brow where, O peaceful sister, Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme sœur, a dappled autumn dreams, un automne jonché de taches de rousseur, and toward the roving sky of your angelic eye, et vers le ciel errant de ton œil angélique as in a melancholy garden, faithful, monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique, a white plume of water sights toward heaven’s blue! fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’azur! Toward the compassionate blue of pale and pure October Vers l’azur attendri d’octobre pâle et pur that onto vast pools mirrors infinite indolence qui mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinie and, over a swampwhere the dark death of leaves et laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agonie floats in the wind and digs a cold furrow des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon, letting the yellow sun draw out a long ray. se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.

II. Futile petition / Placet futile

Princess! envious of the youthful Hebe Princesse! à jalouser le destin d’une Hébé rising up on this cup at the touch of your lips, qui poind sur cette tasse au baiser de vos lèvres, I spend my ardor, but have only the low rank of abbot j’use mes feux mais n’ai rang discret que d’abbé and shall never appear even naked on the Sèvres. et ne figurerai même nu sur le Sèvres. Since I’m not your whiskered lap-dog, Comme je ne suis pas ton bichon embarbé, nor candy, nor rouge, nor sentimental pose, ni la pastille, ni du rouge, ni jeux mièvres and since I know your glance on me is blind, et que sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé, O blonde, whose divine hairdessers are goldsmiths! blonde dont les coiffeurs divins sont des orfèvres! Appoint us – you in whose laughter so many berries Nommez-nous… toi de qui tant de ris framboisés join a flock of tame lambs se joignent en troupeaux d’agneaux apprivoisés nibbling every vow and bleating with joy, chez tous broutant les vœux et bêlant aux délires, appoint us – so that Eros winged with a fan will paint me upon it, nommez-nous… pour qu’Amour ailé d’un éventail a flute in my fingers to lull those sheep, m’y peigne flûte aux doigts endormant ce bercail, Princess, appoint us shepherd of your smiles. Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.

III. Rise from Haunch and Spurt / Surgi de la croupe et du bond

Risen from haunch and spurt Surgi de la croupe et du bond of ephemeral glassware d'une verrerie éphémère without causing the bitter eve to bloom, sans fleurir la veillée amère the ignored neck is stopped. le col ignoré s’interrompt. I, sylph of this cold ceiling, Je crois bien que deux bouches n’ont do not believe that two mouths – bu, ni son amant ni ma mère, neither my mother’s nor her lover’s – jamais à la même chimère ever drank from the same mad fancy. moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond! The pure vase empty of fluid Le pur vase d’aucun breuvage which tireless widowhood que l’inexhaustible veuvage slowly kills but does not consent to, agonise mais ne consent, innocent but funereal kiss! naïf baiser des plus funèbres! To expire to nought announcing A rien expirer annonçant a rose in the darkness. une rose dans les ténèbres.

Program Notes: Maurice Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé

Program notes for the LOOP concert on April 10, 2008, featuring the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce).

The allure of Mallarmé’s cryptic inscrutable symbolist verses inspired many composers to use them as texts – or pretexts – for composition.  Nevertheless, when Mallarmé was informed by Debussy that he intended to musicalize his famous poem, L’apres-midi d’un faune, the poet replied, “I thought I had already done that.”

Debussy and Ravel had each, unbeknownst to one another, seized upon two of the three poems that comprise Ravel’s cycle for as texts for songs, a coincidence that Debussy found “a phenomenon of autosuggestion worthy of communication to the Academy of Medicine.”  Ravel found his specific inspiration when Igor Stravinsky showed him the score for his Poèmes de la lyrique japonaise which employed an unusual chamber ensemble derived from one that Schoenberg used for Pierrot Lunaire.  Impressed by the coloristic possibilities of such an ensemble, Ravel decided to devise his Mallarmé settings for the same combination of instruments and soprano for a prospective performance of all three works that never took place.

What Ravel achieved in these songs is less an interpretation of the texts – for, indeed, how could one interpret poems of such scrupulous, suave ambiguity? – than a supreme act of poetic transposition into music.  The first song, Soupir, for example, both naively and sophisticatedly true to its title, has the arched structure of a sigh: the voice rising exquisitely to a subtle climax; and then the long sad languor of release.  The string glissandi that thrum, fountain-like, behind the entire first half of the song find their etiolated echo at the end, bracketing, as if in a sad mirror, the very impossibility of the “azure.” 

In Placet Futile, the vain supplication is offered to a Watteau-painted princess, as remote as a figure enameled on a china plate.  But whoever this princess might be, the proud deportment of the petitioner shines clearly through angular melodic lines and intricate chromatic harmonies, maintaining inflections perfectly natural to speech.  The mood is undeniably restrained, a quiet pain tightening the throat.  But listen to the magical entreaty at “nommez-nous…” where the flute unfurls like a silver tongue and slowly settles to the ground like a ribbon of silver, not to seduce, for seduction requires an agency wholly absent from Mallarmé’s delicate sonnet, but to present the singer’s eternal submission on a platter of china for the perfect princess’s cool contemplation. 

With Surgi de la croupe et du bond, Mallarmé pushes his text even further into the realm of music.  The poem exhales a studied elusiveness that cancels form, eloquence, rhetoric.  Ravel responds with music of extreme harmonic vagueness, music that even flirts, at times, with bitonality.  The spare musical texture is punctured by bell-like octaves on the piano which have been heard at crucial points in the previous songs: now the knell dominates.  Even the most striking effects, such as the glassy shimmer that surrounds the climax on the word “agonise,” are kept on this side of expressivity, never quite breaking through the mood of spectral silence.

Ravel, so often acclaimed for his supreme musical taste, makes these songs literally tasteful: like the taste of lime sherbet or raspberry laughs.  His music does not interpret but particularizes Mallarmé’s intentional ambiguities, fixes them to a specific and eradicable flavor.  It is the taste of infinite dissolution, of longing, of boredom, of chic black lacquered Nothingness.

Program Notes: Avner Dorman's Piccolo Concerto

Program notes for the On Record concert on October 11, 2007, featuring the complete chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman.

Originally, Lior Eitan commissioned me to write a piece for piccolo and harp. While I was composing the first movement, I felt that the music was more fitting to be a concerto. When Lior came over and read the first movement, we both agreed this was the case. As in traditional concertos, Piccolo Concerto has three movements — fast, slow, fast. The musical material is drawn from diverse musical genres and styles: Baroque and Classical music, Ethnic music, Jazz, and Popular music.

Baroque and Classical — The first movement is based on the classical sonata form. Throughout the piece, there are several fugues and canons. I also use many sequential patterns and other clichés of 18th century music in this piece.

Ethnic — to my ears, the Piccolo’s bottom octave sounds very similar to Middle Eastern shepherd’s flutes. In the second movement, especially, I emphasize this similarity by using characteristic modes of Middle-Eastern music, as well as common styles of ornamentation from the region. Another reference to my home region is the imitation of the sounds of desert winds and of the Mediterranean Sea in the second part of the movement.

Jazz and Popular music — From the very first notes of the concerto, the juxtaposition of a steady beat in the bass with syncopations in the upper parts serves as a key compositional technique in this piece. Frequently, the classical and ethnic motives are accompanied by short repetitive patterns. In vast sections of the piece, the soloist’s part is supposed to sound as if it is an improvisation. In certain sections of the piece, these repetitive rhythms together with the Basso-Continuo lines emulate modern drum-machines.

Program Notes: Avner Dorman's Mandolin Concerto

Program notes for the On Record concert on October 11, 2007, featuring the complete chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman. One of my favorite things as a composer is to discover and explore new instruments. When Avi Avital approached me to write a concerto for him, my acquaintance with the mandolin was fairly limited. I had used it in chamber pieces only twice before, and did not know most of the repertoire for the instrument. As I got to know the instrument better, I discovered its diverse sonic and expressive possibilities. The concerto’s main conflicts are between sound and silence and between motion and stasis. One of the things that inspired me to deal with these opposites is the Mandolin’s most basic technique – the tremolo, which is the rapid repetition of notes. The tremolo embodies both motion and stasis. The rapid movement provides momentum, while the pitches stay the same. The concerto can be divided into three main sections that are played attacca:

1. A slow meditative movement with occasional dynamic outbursts. The tremolo and silences accumulate energy which is released in fast kinetic outbursts. The main motives of the piece are introduced, all of which are based on the minor and major second.

2. A fast dance like movement that accumulates energy leading to a culmination at its end. The tremolo is slowed down becoming a relentless repetition in the bass - like a heartbeat. The fast movement is constructed much like a Baroque Concerto and a Concerto Grosso. The solo and tutti alternate frequently and in many instances instruments from the orchestra join the Mandolin as additional soloists.

3. Recapitulation of the opening movement. After the energy is depleted, all that is left for the ending is to delve deeper into the meditation of the opening movement and concentrate on a pure melody and an underlying heartbeat.

I would like to thank Avi Avital for his dedication and commitment throughout the process of creating this piece; for many hours of experimenting with unusual techniques; for introducing me to the Mandolin’s vast repertoire, including Baroque Mandolin, Russian folk music, Bluegrass, Indian music, Brazilian Jazz and Avant-Garde; and for performing the piece with depth and virtuosity.

Program Notes: Avner Dorman's Concerto Grosso

Program notes for the On Record concert on October 11, 2007, featuring the complete chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman.

I have always loved baroque music. Even as a young child, when I did not care for classical or romantic music, I found baroque very exciting and closer to the music of our day. In retrospect I guess it was the clear rhythms, the strong reliance on the bass, and the extreme contrasts that made this music appeal to me.

In 2002 Israeli conductor Aviv Ron approached me to write a concerto for his orchestra for a series dedicated to Baroque concertos. He wanted a piece based on the music of Handel and Vivaldi, and I gladly accepted the challenge.

I chose to use the opening theme of Handel’s Concerto Grosso opus 6 no.4 as my main motif, and Vivaldi’s signature virtuosic patterns as the rhythmic driving force of the piece. The piece can be described as a “minimalist” take on baroque music, influenced by Górecki, Pärt, and Glass, and taking their techniques to new extremes.

The soloists are comprised of a String Quartet and a Harpsichord. As in a traditional concerto grosso, they serve as both soloists and as leaders for the large ensemble. Structurally, the piece has three large sections — (i) slow, (ii) fast, and (iii) slow. The opening slow section is interrupted twice by outbursts of energy, and the middle fast section gives way to a static exploration of sound toward its culmination.

Concerto Grosso was premiered in February of 2003; its revised version was premiered in November of the same year.

Program Notes: Avner Dorman's Concerto in A

Program notes for the On Record concert on October 11, 2007, featuring the complete chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman. Avner Dorman composed his Concerto in A at the age of 19, while he was serving in the Israeli Army. The piece was first performed by Dmitry Shteinberg and the IDF chamber orchestra conducted by Menachem Nevenhoiz in 1995. In this early piece it is possible to identify some of the compositional trends of Dorman’s later works, mainly the combination of Neo-Classicism with Rock elements; Middle-Eastern rhythms in the fast movements and transparent lyricism in the slow one; Humor and Joie de Vivre, on the one hand, and tormented moments on the other.

“My initial inspiration for the concerto came when I heard a recording of Bach’s keyboard concerto in A major on the radio (performed by piano and strings). I found the bright sound of the Violins doubling the Piano’s top line very exciting, and then and there I improvised the opening tutti of my Concerto in A. This was the first time I wrote a Neo-Classical piece. I found the challenge of doing something new while keeping the transparency and directness of the classical style very appealing. I got even more ecstatic about the piece when I realized that using the traditional harmonic vocabulary enables me to effortlessly integrate Jazz, Pop, and Rock elements into the piece. Even though the piece is dedicated to Vivaldi, one can also find in it allusions to Nina Simone, The Police, The Cure, Stravinsky, and of course, to Bach. Throughout the piece the soloist borrows patterns that are idiomatic to the string instruments of the orchestra.”

The piece is in three movements: fast-slow-fast. The first and third movements use the tutti-solo convention of the Baroque era. The second is a song without words. Movements of the Concerto: I. Allegro II. Andante III. Presto

Program Notes: Dmitri Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony op. 110a

Program notes for the There and Back Again concert on May 24, 2007, featuring the works of Avner Dorman, Béla Bartók, Osvaldo Golijov, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Rudolf Barshai arranged Chamber Symphony for Strings, Opus 110a from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8. Shostakovich composed the Quartet in a three-day period in 1960. At the time, the “official” story behind the Quartet was that Shostakovich had been so shocked and distressed upon witnessing the destruction in Dresden that he composed the piece to express his horror of Fascism. The quartet’s subtitle, “To the Memory of the Victims of Facism,” no doubt helped to fuel this myth. But in fact, the “victim” to which Shostakovich was referring is himself: he composed Quartet No. 8 as a musical and autobiographical suicide note. However deep his despair, Shostakovich did not commit suicide – he died fifteen years later of natural causes.

With the composer’s permission, the violist and conductor Rudolf Barshay transcribed Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 (1960) for chamber orchestra, which, in accordance with Shostakovich’s wishes, was given the title of “Chamber Symphony.” Subtitled immediately after a visit to Dresden, Germany. He was overwhelmed with emotion after learning of the complete devastation of the city, a result of Allied bombing raids in February 1945, in which 140,000 people died. Consisting of a sequence of five uninterrupted movements, the emotions range from quiet poignancy to violent, faster sections, including one depicting the actual bombings. Often described as autobiographical since the dominant theme consists of Shostakovich’s musical signature D-S-C-H (D-Eb-C-B), it is at the very least an extremely personal outcry against war. He also includes quotes from many earlier works, including his Symphonies Nos. 1, 5, 8 and 10, his Piano Trio No. 2 and the revolutionary Russian song Languishing in Prison. Most telling is Shostakovich’s inclusion of a quote from the line “Tortured by merciless enslavement” from his opera Lady Macbeth.

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony expands his Eighth String Quartet for full string orchestra. Composed in 1960, this music encapsulates his life’s work, both spiritually and literally. Its numerous themes come from previous compositions, forming a musical autobiography that connects his First and Tenth Symphonies, First ’Cello Concerto, Piano Trio, and opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsinsk. The first theme is his own motto – D.S.C.H. (D – E-flat – C – B in Cyrillic script), heard previously in his Tenth Symphony (1954). The Quartet originated in a commission for the film Five Days, Five Nights, about the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Shostakovich visited the city in the summer of 1960: profoundly moved by the destruction, he composed the music in three of the most intensely creative days of his life. However, the Dresden context gives only the most obvious layer of meaning. According to Izvestia, the music was ‘dedicated to the victims of fascism and war’; it is also possible to hear in the work a lament for the tragedy of the Russian people’s suffering under Communism.

The solemn, lamenting character of the first movement, dominated by the DSCH motif and a second, a tightly chromatic melody introduced by solo violin, and a more serene idea, is shattered rudely by the second movement’s unceasing evocation of a musical hell. Fast and furious, DSCH is now screamed out by in the high register of the violins, before it exhausts itself, leading directly to the third movement, a skeletal ‘danse macabre’. A contrasting middle section introduces a theme from the First ’Cello Concerto, reappearing as a connection to the fourth movement. Now we hear a Jewish melody and a folk song, ‘Languishing in Prison’, whose significance needs no explanation. The final movement echoes the first, now slowly fading into cold silence.

Program Notes: Osvaldo Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

Program notes for the There and Back Again concert on May 24, 2007, featuring the works of Avner Dorman, Béla Bartók, Osvaldo Golijov, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Eight centuries ago Isaac The Blind, the great kabbalist rabbi of Provence, dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet’s letters:

“Their root is in a name, for the letters are like branches, which appear in the manner of flickering flames, mobile, and nevertheless linked to the coal.”

His conviction still resonates today: don’t we have scientists who believe that the clue to our life and fate is hidden in other codes? Isaac’s lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and klezmer musicians. In their search for something that arises from tangible elements but transcends them, they are all reaching a state of communion. Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, says that:

“Isaac and his disciples do not speak of ecstasy, of a unique act of stepping outside oneself in which human consciousnes abolishes itself. Debhequth (communion) is a constant state, nurtured and renewed through meditation.”

If communion is not the reason, how else would one explain the strange life that Isaac led, or the decades during which groups of four souls dissolve their individuality into single, higher organisms, called string quartets? How would one explain the chain of klezmer generations that, while blessing births, weddings, and burials, were trying to discover the melody that could be set free from itself and become only air, spirit, ruakh? The movements of this work sound to me as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout our history. This somehow reflects the composition’s epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Arameic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew. The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different ways: The quartet plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays, “We will observe the mighty holiness of this day…”, while the clarinet dreams the motifs from “Our Father, Our King.” The second movement is based on ‘The Old Klezmer Band’, a traditional dance tune, which is surrounded here by contrasting manifestations of its own halo. The third movement was written before all the others. It is an instrumental version of K'Vakarat, a work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. The meaning of the word klezmer: instrument of song, becomes clear when one hears David Krakauer’s interpretation of the cantor’s line. This movement, together with the postlude, bring to conclusion the prayer left open in the first movement:

’…Thou pass and record, count and visit, every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature’s life and decreeing its destiny’.

But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had always the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity in a performance, musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, “blind.” That is why, I think, all legendary bards in cultures around the world, starting with Homer, are said to be blind. “Blindness” is probably the secret of great string quartets, those who don’t need their eyes to communicate among them, with the music, or the audience. My hommage to all of them and Isaac of Provence is this work for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness, then, reminded me of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: An art that springs from and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of sound in our memories.

Program Notes: Béla Bartók's Rumanian Folk Dances

Program notes for the There and Back Again concert on May 24, 2007, featuring the works of Avner Dorman, Béla Bartók, Osvaldo Golijov, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music.

Bartók is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, the study and ethnography of folk music.As a young man, composer Béla Bartók wrote his mother of his life’s ambition: to contribute to “the good of Hungary and of the Hungarian nation.” Although he made his living primarily as a pianist and teacher, he is now recognized primarily for his compositions and his ethnological work. During his lifetime Bartók collected and classified more than 14,000 folks melodies of Hungarian, Slovak, Rumanian, Croatian, Turkish, Bulgarian, and North African origin.

Much of his original work, done with his friend and colleague Zoltán Kodály, took place in the years preceding World War I. After the war, the changing political map of Eastern Europe made it increasingly difficult to travel to the various ethnic regions that they found so rich in folk heritage. Bartók and Kodály had long believed that music of the “Hungarian” style often found in Western European music was more of a stylized urban gypsy music rather than real indigenous peasant music. In their collection process, they first jotted down melodies by hand, but later began to use Edison cylinders to record songs and dances.

Bartók was particularly drawn to the Rumanian folk traditions because he felt that the Rumanian groups had been more isolated from outside influences and were therefore more authentic. He also attracted the variety and colors of instruments used in the Rumanian music– violins, peasant flutes (panpipes), guitar, bagpipes.

The outbreak of war restricted collecting, but it was during this time that Bartók formalized various settings of folk songs and dances for the piano. Román nepi táncok, a set of six Rumanian dances, was written in 1915, arranged for violin and piano the next year, and for salon orchestra in 1917. The material had been collected in 1910 and 1912 among the Rumanians living in areas of what was then Hungary.

The use of the piano by necessity required that timbres of the original instruments be given up, however, the composer chose a register and keyboard touch aspiring to represent the flavor of the original. He simplified the intricacies of melody and rhythm, but compensated for this by enriching the harmonic structure in the left hand. The subsequent orchestral transcription allowed for reintroduction of a richer palate of instrumental timbres through strings and winds. Bartók’s folk dance arrangements typically do not follow the original temps, he makes the fasts faster, and the slow ones slower.

Program Notes: There And Back Again

Program notes for the There and Back Again concert on May 24, 2007, featuring the works of Avner Dorman, Béla Bartók, Osvaldo Golijov, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Music, self-sustaining dream of the imagination, which weaves itself out of phantom and fugitive tones, often gasps after the real.  Whatever is audible in the universe has at some point, by some enterprising composer, been dissolved into music: birdsong, car horns, the chimes of clocks, railroad trains, the wordless melodies of speech, even musical representations of the sounds of musical instruments.  Still, these representations, to use an eel-slippery word, can be deemed to fail. Which may be part of the reason that composers have always incorporated folk music into their works, whether secular or sacred.  Folk music, a part of historical and cultural reality, is what it is (except when it isn’t, about which more later).  To complain against it is fruitless: can one rebuke the sun?  It is already music, therefore it nestles into the musical texture in a way that birdsong, or an attempt at birdsong, might not.  And what is folk music after all but the spontaneous birdsong of the human animal, which has a thousand different voices.  Folk music is authenticity itself, diametrically opposed to all art and artifice. In quest of this unquenchable authenticity Béla Bartók and his colleague Kodály tramped the fields of Hungary noting the native songs of tiny villages while, in near perfect synchronicity, Ralph Vaughn-Williams betook himself to the fens and hamlets of rural England to jot down folk ballads.  When, in the fourth movement of his Eighth Quartet (transcribed for string orchestra as the Chamber Symphony we hear on tonight’s program), Shostakovich quotes a Jewish folk melody, amid a welter of reminiscences from his own and other music, it serves not only to evoke the catastrophe of the Holocaust, but also to be precisely itself, irreproachable, real.  The melody is there for those who can hear it.  Shostakovich can be neither praised nor blamed except for the use to which it is put: the tune is a part of living history. That said, caveat auditor.  Plenty of composers have filched folk tunes and adapted them for their own use, often changing them radically.  Or they have written music in a “folk style,” deriving from no extant folk music.  Or the “folk” music they use may have been completely ersatz from the get-go.  Exacting definitions of folk music are hard to come by. Nevertheless, all four pieces on tonight’s program find intriguingly different uses for what can fairly enough be described as folk music, whatever its provenance.  In the case of Bartók’s Rumanian Dances, folk dances that he transcribed during his researches are entirely the matter of the piece.  But Bartók subtly alters a chord here, varies a voice in the accompaniment there, appropriating the folk material and making its completely his own.  Even the form of the piece – all six scrupulously scripted minutes (Bartók provided timings down to the second) – a series of dances in which no measure is repeated verbatim, speaks more to modernist concision à la Webern than to all night revels in the Hungarian countryside.  Folk music is entirely taken up into the realms of art. As noted above, Dmitri Shostakovich quotes a Jewish melody in his Chamber Symphony.  The work was written in the course of three days, after Shostakovich’s visit to Dresden in 1960, when he learned of the aftermath of the Allied firebombing of that city which claimed 140,000 lives.  Icily mournful in its outer movements, often frenziedly violent in its inner, the Chamber Symphony may be, despite appearing to be a record of the destruction of war, Shostakovich’s most biographical work.  Not only does it quote from many of his other works, including a very telling inclusion from Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District of the aria “Tortured by merciless enslavement,” but his personal musical “motto” D-S-C-H (represented by the notes D, E-flat, C, B) dominates the musical material and is repeated dozens of times in all registers throughout the work.  The Eighth Quartet, from which the Chamber Symphony was derived, was dedicated by Shostakovich to “the victims of fascism and war,” but can also be heard as a lament for those imprisoned by Communism and for Shostakovich himself, who had just been disbarred from the Party and feared not only for his musical career, but even for his life. Avner Dorman’s approach to folk-like material in his Mandolin Concerto is more whimsical, which is not to say that the piece itself is.  The mandolin is primarily a folk instrument.  Though it has been used by composers such as Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, it has typically been employed in a folk-like vein.  Mr. Dorman’s concerto opens with the mandolin’s defining tremolo – quickly repeated notes on the instrument’s paired strings – and broadens into slow arcs of music in which the mandolin plucks out half-melodies that suggest folk or popular origin before launching into a virtuosic Middle Eastern-inflected furiant with echoes of the tango.  Of his concerto, Mr. Dorman writes: The concerto’s main conflicts are between sound and silence and between motion and stasis. One of the things that inspired me to deal with these opposites is the Mandolin’s most basic technique – the tremolo, which is the rapid repetition of notes. The tremolo embodies both motion and stasis. The rapid movement provides momentum, while the pitches stay the same. The concerto can be divided into three main sections that are played one right after another:

1. A slow meditative movement with occasional dynamic outbursts. The tremolo and silences accumulate energy, which is released in fast kinetic outbursts. The main motives of the piece are introduced, all of which are based on the minor and major second.

2. A fast dance like movement that accumulates energy leading to a culmination at its end. The tremolo is slowed down becoming a relentless repetition in the bass - like a heartbeat. The fast movement is constructed much like a Baroque Concerto Grosso.  The solo and tutti alternate frequently and in many instances instruments from the orchestra join the mandolin as additional soloists.

3. Recapitulation of the opening movement. After the energy is depleted, all that is left for the ending is to delve deeper into the meditation of the opening movement and concentrate on a pure melody and an underlying heartbeat.

Isaac the Blind, a 12th Century kabbalist from Provence, dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all the things in the universe are products of combinations of the Hebrew letters. Osvaldo Golijov’s Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, is a mystical and yet extraordinarily human mediation on fate as read through the history of the Jews.  Golijov sees this work as mediating the worlds circumscribed by the three root languages of the Jewish people: Yiddish, Hebrew – a language both ancient and modern, sacred and secular – and Aramaic, the most ancient of all. The prayerful prelude slowly evolves like a heart that knows it is going to break.  Ululations on the clarinet evoke the shofar, the ram’s horn that calls Jews to prayer, and then, more explicitly, in mutual conjunction and opposition to the string quartet, muses on liturgical melodies employed during the High Holy Day services.  The second movement takes a traditional klezmer dance tune and displays it in a funhouse mirror, the clarinet wailing and gurgling in wild laughter.  The clarinet takes on a cantorial role in the lush, plaintive, almost cinematic, third movement, which passes into the fluttering harmonics and reminiscences of the haunting, ultimately unresolved, postlude. The music, by turns enthralled and abject, despairing and wise, sometimes seems to come to a complete halt, only to be pushed forward by the tiniest of sonic pulses, never quite extinguished.  Anyone familiar with the folk melodies used in this composition is likely to be stunned by the thrill of recognition, which is part of the point of using them, much as Ives and Copland made use of American folk song.  These religious songs and popular dances of another era are a vehicle to access a time and place eternally outside the composition itself.  Like the Parthenon, ever unchangingly itself, even after hundreds and hundreds of years, no matter how much it and the world and we have in fact changed, Golijov’s music takes us there, into the past, and back again.