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2019/2020 concerts Other Arion seasons
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Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 8 pm Christ and St. Stephen's Church, 120 West 69th Street, NYC Tickets are $30 (open seating). Students under 25 with ID: $15 at the door.
Quartet 131, a new ensemble, formed since three of its four members appeared together on last season’s Arion series, will perform Dvorák's Quartet No. 5 in F minor, Florence Price's Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint, Bernard Herrmann's Echoes, For String Quartet (1965), and Charles Griffes' Chippewa Farewell Song (1919)
Notes on the Program Echoes, for String Quartet (1965) Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) Bernard Herrmann is permanently associated in popular culture with the films of Alfred Hitchcock -- most particularly, with Psycho. Its familiar ‘screech’ (which was a part of Herrmann’s musical score, not a studio ‘sound effect’) is its single most instantly identifiable impression, a kind of nonverbal shorthand for the film, impossible to confuse with anything else. In this respect it somewhat resembles the opening measures of John Williams' score for Jaws. Over the course of a decade from the mid-1950s to mid-’60s, Herrmann wrote the scores for seven Hitchcock films, amongst which -- along with Psycho -- the most accomplished and significant are generally considered to be those for Vertigo and North by Northwest. They are universally acknowledged, not only as classics of film scoring, but as integral to the pacing and the building of suspense in these movies, while powerfully underlining the varieties of obsession at their center. The extraordinarily fruitful Hitchcock/Herrmann relationship ended abruptly and acrimoniously over the score for an eighth film, Torn Curtain, which Hitchcock rejected because Herrmann had failed to satisfy several conditions insisted on by Universal Studios (which regarded Herrmann’s work as old-fashioned and too grounded in ‘serious’ music, and wanted a more ‘popular’ score with a potential ‘hit’ song at its center that could be part of marketing). It is less well remembered that Herrmann, in a career spanning more than 30 years, wrote scores for iconic movies by other filmmakers, including Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, and Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver -- the last of which he finished recording the day before he died. (Among the future projects he had been hired for at the time of his death, on Christmas Eve of 1975, was the film score for Carrie.) Still less well-known is Herrmann’s early career in concert music as a composer and conductor. By the age of 20 he had completed studies at New York University and the Juilliard School and started his own chamber orchestra, gaining the experience that allowed him, at age 23, to become a staff conductor for the Columbia Broadcasting System. There, amongst other things, he conducted the live music for Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. By the early 1940s he was principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra, where he became an early champion of the music of Charles Ives, giving American premieres of works of Ives and an enormous number of other composers. During the same period, he wrote some of his most notable concert music, including his Symphony, the opera Wuthering Heights, and a cantata based on Moby Dick (dedicated to Ives). These works and others were performed by such conductors as Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Sir John Barbirolli. Echoes, a single-movement string quartet, dates from a low point, professionally and personally, much later in Herrmann’s life. A reputation for being ‘difficult’ had begun early with The Magnificent Ambersons (when virtually half the music he had written for the film was removed in the course of editing, Herrmann had refused to allow the film to be released until his name was removed from the credits) and culminated in the mid-1960s’ rift with Hitchcock. This, along with the developing feeling in Hollywood that his scores were backward-looking and esoteric, meant a period of unemployment . The resulting frustrations and stresses, added to his always volatile personality, created strains in his second marriage, and his wife of 17 years left him. Around the time of its premiere in 1966, Herrmann had this to say about the title of the quartet: “The term ‘Echoes’ is meant to imply a series of nostalgic emotional remembrances.” It seems at least possible that it may have had very specific associations for him, in memories (or indeed, echoes) of ways in which he had used the word when writing to his first wife, nearly twenty years earlier, at the time of their separation: “More and more I feel that perhaps I am not possessed of any real great talent. It is perhaps an echo of a talent -- that is why I can conduct and do all kinds of musical activities -- they are all echoes -- never the real voice.” Whether or not, there is something undeniably ‘Hitchcockian’ about this recurrence, as about the murky, restless self-doubt -- all of which seems to find its way into the piece, which consists of eight sections of varying character (each a ‘nostalgic, emotional remembrance’) framed by a prelude which introduces a theme that recurs throughout, serving as a linking device between each section, and making its final appearance in a concluding epilogue. Attentive listeners who are familiar with Herrmann’s film scores will detect at least two specific ‘echoes’ along the way, from Psycho and Vertigo. Five Folksongs in Counterpoint (1951) Florence Price (1887-1953) Writing in 1943 to conductor Serge Koussevitzky to submit scores of her music for his consideration, Florence Price introduced herself in this way: “My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps -- those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” Born Florence B. Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, American composer and pianist Florence Price began musical studies with her mother. She gave her first public performance on the piano at the age of four and had her first composition published, locally, at age eleven. Completing high school (as valedictorian) at the age of fourteen, she went on to attend the New England Conservatory in Boston where, on her mother’s advice, she initially identified herself as of Mexican nationality in order to circumvent the prejudice she feared to encounter there. Graduating in 1906 with an Artist Diploma in organ performance and a teacher’s certificate on piano, she served briefly as head of the music department at what is now Clark Atlanta University, before marrying Thomas J. Price and returning with him to Little Rock in 1912. In 1927 a series of violent, racially charged incidents in that city culminated in a gruesome lynching that made national headlines. The Washington Post reported how, after being hanged by an angry mob, the body of John Carter was dragged behind a car “through the main street of the city and then saturated with gasoline and burned ... while thousands of persons looked on.” Joining the Great Migration, the Prices moved to Chicago later the same year. There, Florence Price renewed her musical studies (taking courses variously at The American Conservatory, The University of Chicago, and Chicago Musical College) and her commitment to composition. By 1932 she had completed a symphony which was awarded First Prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Competition. A piano sonata she submitted in the same competition was also recognized with a lesser prize. This symphony was subsequently included in a series of concerts performed by The Chicago Symphony as part of the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition, earning Price the distinction of being the first African American woman to have a piece performed by a major American symphony orchestra. Other notable orchestras that gave performances of her work during her lifetime include the Pittsburgh Symphony and the U.K.’s Hallé Orchestra (for which Sir John Barbirolli commissioned a premiere). Her art songs, including a setting of Langston Hughes Songs to a Dark Virgin, were performed regularly by Marian Anderson and, later, by Leontyne Price. In 2009, a trove of manuscripts of pieces by Florence Price, previously believed lost, were found found in a house in a small town south of Chicago where she had spent summers. These were submitted to the University of Arkansas, where some of Price’s papers were already housed. Five Folksongs in Counterpoint existed in manuscript parts only when members of the Apollo Chamber Players came across it in the University of Arkansas library. A score and edited parts were created and made publicly available by the ACP. A date of 1951 appears on their score, but at least one Price scholar and biographer thinks they may date from as early as 1927. There is some thought that Price was revising them toward the end of her life with the aim of finding a publisher for them. Very broadly, each of the five contrapuntal settings proceeds in a similar manner. The ‘tune’ is presented simply, with standard harmonization in an uncluttered texture; imitative (often canonic) counterpoint predominates in the earlier stages; later, features of the writing that had been purely subsidiary are highlighted and begin to predominate in passages of free counterpoint where rhythmic interest prevails over melodic, while harmonies grow more chromatic and ‘modern’. In most cases, the ‘tune’ then reasserts itself, often in an ecstatic way, followed by a brief coda or epilogue. This basic shape is adapted in some significant ways. In ‘Calvary’, only the first half of the familiar melody is heard at the beginning; the full eight-measure phrase is not played until almost halfway through the piece. In ‘Drink to Me’ some version of the melody remains present virtually throughout whereas, in ‘Shortnin’ Bread’, fragmentation and featuring of secondary elements begins early and continues until these have more or less overwhelmed and subsumed the theme. ‘In Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, the initial statement is entirely unaccompanied and unharmonized. Price uses the term ‘folksongs’ to encompass songs of divergent origins. The first (‘Calvary’ and fifth (‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’) are spirituals, the fourth (‘Shortnin’ Bread’) a plantation song. The second (‘Oh My Darlin’ Clementine’) is a western folk ballad whose tune seems to have its origins in a Spanish song popularized while large portions of the southwestern U.S. were still part of colonial Spain (or, later, Mexico). The third (‘Drink to Me with Thine Own Eyes’ -- more usually known as ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’) is a popular English song of the 18th century, a setting of Ben Jonson’s Song to Celia. All were well known in Price’s day and will be familiar to most listeners now. Chippewa Farewell Song (1919) Charles Griffes (1884-1920) Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born in Elmira, New York, where he had his first piano lessons with an older sister. At age fifteen, he continued studies with his sister’s teacher, an Englishwoman born in New Zealand who was Professor of Piano at Elmira College. On her advice (and with the benefit of her financial support) Griffes went to Germany in 1903 to study piano and composition at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, where his initial experience was similar to that of many conservatory students: “It is rather discouraging at first,” he wrote to his mother, “to find so many pupils ... who can play just as well and lots better than you can”. But by the end of his first year he was invited to perform at the school’s concert in the Beethoven-Saal of the Berlin Philharmonic, considered to be an unusual honor for a first-year student (and a foreigner). Although he had come to Berlin primarily with the goal of making a career as a pianist, his interest in composition began to develop almost as soon as he arrived. By the end of his second year he had grown frustrated by the musical conservatism of his composition teacher and left the Conservatory to seek private lessons with ‘somebody more modern’. After fewer than a dozen lessons with Engelbert Humperdinck, he spent the remainder of his time in Germany working and studying on his own, returning permanently to America in 1907. He found a position as Director of Music at the recently founded Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Though he found the work unrewarding, it provided the financial stability that allowed him to devote free hours (and summers) to composition; the school’s proximity to New York City meant that he was never far from concert halls and theaters. Griffes’ first published works (1909) show the influence of his years of study in Germany. In the decade of life that remained to him, he made the journey from German Romanticism through French Impressionism (and French-inflected ‘Orientalism’) to free dissonance and near-atonality. His early Symphonische Phantasie (as its German title implies) is an example from the first category; two of his best-known compositions --The White Peacock (1915) and The Pleasure Dome of Kubla-Khan (begun in 1912 and finished in 1916) typify the second -- and what has come to be regarded as perhaps his most accomplished work, the Piano Sonata (1918), is of the third and last. Premiered by Griffes in New York in February of 1918, it failed to please some listeners and puzzled others. One critic, writing in Musical America, said: “The sonata, after ten minutes of wandering ... ends without any disclosure of beauty or tangible invention.” Another wrote that it “breaks completely away from convention and belongs frankly to a field of endeavor that must be called experimental.” By the time of his death at age 35 in 1920 (from lingering complications of influenza contracted in the worldwide 1918-20 epidemic), Griffes had begun to enjoy genuine success as a composer. In his last year, theatrical works were performed in New York, Philadelphia and Washington; Pierre Monteux conducted The White Peacock with the Boston Symphony and at Carnegie Hall in New York. Only a few weeks later, Leopold Stokowski presented four of Griffes’s compositions with the Philadelphia Orchestra at The Academy of Music. The Chippewa Farewell Song dates from this period. It is one of two Sketches for String Quartet based on Native American themes that were premiered in 1919 by the Flonzaley Quartet (the finest string quartet in America in its time) and subsequently revised at the suggestion of the quartet’s first violinist, Adolfo Betti. They did not see publication until 1922. Among the letters of sympathy preserved by Griffes’ mother was a card that read: “In the recent death of Charles T. Griffes, one of the most gifted of contemporary American composers, the music of America suffers a great loss. We who keenly feel this loss wish to express our sorrow while offering to the memory of the man and the composer this tribute of admiration and respect.” The many signatures included those of Harold Bauer, Georges Barrere, Pierre Monteux, Leopold Stokowski and Sergei Prokofiev. In addition to his significance as an early 20th century American composer, Griffes has become a figure of importance to LGBTQ historians. He kept detailed diaries throughout much of his short life (many of them written in German) which included frank accounts of his frequent sexual encounters with men. Most of these diaries, along with letters and other papers, were destroyed by a younger sister after his death; those that survived have helped to reconstruct a picture of gay life in New York City in the 1910s. String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 9 (1873) Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) A glance at this evening’s program may cause audience members to think there has been some mistake: surely, given the thoroughly American first half, the concluding work ought to be Dvorak’s F Major (‘American’) quartet? Dvorak certainly belongs on the program, as two of tonight’s works -- the Price and the Griffes -- exemplify exactly the ‘way forward’ that he envisioned for American music. Toward the end of his three-year stay in the U.S., writing in Harper’s magazine (in 1895), he remarked: ”Inspiration for truly national music might be derived from Negro melodies or Indian chants. I was led to take this view partly by the fact that the so-called plantation songs are indeed the most striking and appealing melodies that have yet been found on this side of the water, but largely by the observation that this seems to be recognized, though often unconsciously, by most Americans. ... The most potent as well as most beautiful among them, according to my estimation, are certain of the ... plantation melodies and slave songs, all of which are distinguished by unusual and subtle harmonies, the like of which I have found in no other songs but those of old Scotland and Ireland.” There are unmistakable resemblances -- melodic, rhythmic, modal; even the use of the same key (D minor) -- between the opening measures of Griffes’ Chippewa Farewell Song and the theme of the Lento movement in Dvorak’s ‘American’. Musicologists have picked over the latter work and declared it to be free of authentic, discernibly American elements of any kind (so that’s that, eh?). And in any case, what we now call Dvorak’s ‘American quartet’ was, for a long time, actually widely known as his ‘Negro quartet’ (implying African American rather than Native American borrowings). So it may be that the two pieces share nothing more in this respect than a generic, pentatonic exoticism -- or that Griffes, consciously or unconsciously, based his theme on Dvorak’s -- or that both incorporated some widely familiar notion of ‘what a Native American song sounds like’ current on either side of the previous turn of the century. Whatever the reason, the similarities remain striking. The question of what could constitute ‘authentic’ American music lay two decades into the future at the time Dvorak was writing his early F minor string quartet. The more general notion of what he called ‘truly national music’ did not. Nationalism in music was, of course, part of the larger European cultural and political landscape of the 19th century. For musicians (specifically, non-German ones), it was also partly a matter of finding and asserting a distinct voice. By the time Dvorak was beginning to compose, European art music was German. The only partial exception to this -- opera -- seemed well on its way to being co-opted by Wagner. In our time, Wagner has become emblematic of all that is least attractive about the German national character, and is for some indelibly associated with the worst chapters of its history. In Dvorak’s own time (especially prior to the completion of the Ring cycle), Wagner was still perceived much more as he himself wished to be: as a political and musical revolutionary. So Dvorak’s Czech nationalistic sentiments and his early, extravagant admiration for Wagner’s music do not sit so uncomfortably together as they might, at first, seem to do. In any case, by 1873 -- the year in which the F minor quartet was written -- Dvorak was losing some of his admiration for Wagner and rethinking his whole approach to composition. This was certainly the result, in part, of the fact that his opera, The King and the Charcoal Burner (which has been described as ‘going to extremes in attempting to follow the example of Wagner’) had recently been rejected for performance by Prague’s Bohemian Provisional Theater, where Bedrich Smetana, reluctantly, declared it ‘unperformable’. Still, Wagner’s influence is palpable throughout the F minor Quartet, especially in the use of chromaticism and bringing together of distant key areas and the dramatic, somewhat ‘operatic’ feel of the outer movements. Dvorak’s loose structure in these movements may partly be a matter of an inexperienced composer learning the ways of larger forms, but it can also feel as if he were striving for a synthesis of established compositional templates with the much freer notions of structure -- including greater reliance on recurrence and restatement -- pioneered by Berlioz, adopted by Liszt, and adapted for his purposes by Wagner. The first movement’s basic ‘sonata’ form, for instance, survives, and there is no shortage of Beethovenian development; there is, however, an unconventional second period of development incorporated into the recapitulation. At the same time, folk elements drawn from traditional music of Dvorak’s homeland abound: dissonance and chromaticism of a quality distinct from the Wagnerian; modally-based melodies and harmonic progressions; uneven, asymmetric phrase lengths, and the influence of dance rhythms (in particular, the 2+3 of the furiant). The piece was accepted for performance by the Bennewitz Quartet and was announced as part of their season in Prague, but the ensemble ultimately declined to present it. The reason given was its “lack of quartet style”. It is difficult to be certain precisely what was meant by that, but the work’s formal anomalies probably had something to do with it. Deeply offended, Dvorak removed the title page from the score (which presumably carried a dedication) and effectively disowned the piece (the second movement was reworked and later became the Romance in F minor, Op. 11, for violin and orchestra). It was rediscovered and published in 1929. Program Notes © 2020 Robert La Rue |
