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Performance Archives This page, taken from the inaugural
program of the Annas
Bay Music Festival in Summer 2006, includes the complete program
notes and related information for the September 2006 concert, "Requiem Æternam".
commemorating the fifth
anniversary
Annas Bay Chamber Choir * members of the South Shore Chamber Orchestra For the past five years, the eleventh day of September has been treated with an unparalleled sense of mingled terror and awe. The terror comes from vivid memories of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania—who in America cannot recount tales of “where I was” upon hearing the news and seeing the pictures? The awe stems from the tales which are greater than our own: the tales of survivors, yes, but even more often the tales of the victims. Without doubt, September 11, 2001, is the most tragic single day in American history since Pearl Harbor, and, it could be argued, a source of even greater infamy. It is the most humbling of honors for us to attempt our own commemoration to the terror, the awe, and the tales. This memorial concert begins with the most frequently performed piece of American choral music, the Alleluia composed by a New York native, Randall Thompson (1899–1984). Thompson is quite possibly American history’s pre-eminent composer of choral music, but that is a rather simplistic picture of this major composer, whose works also include three symphonies and two string quartets, and who was both director of Philadelphia’s famous Curtis Institute and a professor at Harvard for many years. Not bad for a former undergraduate who failed in his first audition to join the Harvard Glee Club—he later quipped, “My life has been an attempt to strike back.” His many choral compositions form the core of the American repertory—two of his sacred works are also on our “American Psalms, Motets and Spirituals” program—and range from the idyllic The Peaceable Kingdom, through the delightful and urbane Frostiana, to the boisterously patriotic The Testament of Freedom. The story of the Alleluia is a particularly unusual one. There are several theories as to why he began composing the piece barely a week before its scheduled first performance: the official story is that he was “preoccupied with another commission”, though the popular lore is that he quite simply forgot about it! Alleluia was intended to be sung by the entire student body of the first institute at Tanglewood, on July 8, 1940. Thompson wrote the work in just four days, and delivered it to the conductor, G. Wallace Woodworth, barely forty-five minutes before the first performance. Woodworth’s first impression: “Well, text at least is one thing we won’t have to worry about.” The work retains a freshness and spontaneity, and is one of those few works which one never seems tired of hearing, or performing, and is still performed at the opening concert of Tanglewood’s annual summer events. While the story is one of whimsy, the composition is rather sober throughout. While not detracting from the events of September 2001, let us also recall the events of May and June 1940: on May 10, Nazi Germany invaded France and the Low Countries; the Dutch army surrendered on May 15; Brussels fell two days later; on May 26, the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk began, not to be completed until June 4; Norway surrendered to Germany on June 10; Paris itself—a symbol of European culture since the eleventh century—fell to the Germans on June 13. And on July 1, Randall Thompson turned his attentions to the Alleluia. It is perhaps no wonder that Thompson related it to the Book of Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The secular equivalent to that quote from Job might be the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s sixty-fourth sonnet: “This thought is as a death, which cannot choose / But weep to have that which it fears to lose.” These words are artfully set by Dominick Argento (born 1927) in Sonnet LXIV, subtitled “In memoriam 9/11/01”. Perhaps America’s leading composer for the voice—his opera A Water Bird Talk and various choral works feature in Annas Bay’s programs—it was natural that he be commissioned for a new work to be premiered at the Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music, held in August 2002 in Minneapolis, where he had lived for fifty years. He had yet to select a text for the commission, when a friend e-mailed him the current Shakespeare sonnet in late 2001. Argento writes: “Shakespeare’s poem so perfectly accorded with my own response to the events of 9/11 that this brief elegy virtually wrote itself.” The text seems particularly apt with its overt reference to “sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d.” Argento’s setting is through-composed, meaning that its structure is rather loose, and simply moves from one line to the next. All of the Argento hallmarks are present: a predominantly tonal musical language, but not bereft of dissonant clashes; rich choral writing with full, expansive chords; a steady rhythmic pulse, moving progressively forward; fluid tempo, which changes often, but subtly; and, above all, careful attention to the text. Particularly striking is his choice to set the most crucial line in unison: “Time will come and take my love away.” When I have seen
by Time’s fell hand defac’d
Samuel Barber (1910–1981) is one of the central figures of American music. After studying at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the American Academy of Rome, he composed his only string quartet in 1936. The following year, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini suggested that Barber orchestrate the quartet’s slow movement, and this new version, re-titled Adagio for Strings, propelled the composer to fame. Barber’s passionate, neo-Romantic style remained popular as more “progressive” music gained ground with music critics. This clash of opinions came to a head at the premiere of his opera Antony and Cleopatra, composed for the 1966 opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which was well received by audiences but panned by reviewers. Barber then retreated into privacy and composed considerably less. The Adagio for Strings remained popular, however. It has been used in the soundtracks of no fewer than eleven films, most famously Platoon in 1986. And the popularity continues today: as of last March, a performance of the Adagio for Strings was the best-selling classical download on iTunes. Most obsessive perhaps is the compact disc consisting entirely of arrangements of this music: the original version for string quartet, the next for string orchestra, and additional renditions for clarinet choir, flute and synthesizer, solo organ, or brass ensemble, plus the composer’s own 1967 transcription for choir, setting the Latin text Agnus Dei from the Catholic Mass. The opening melody—consisting of a rising line which proceeds entirely stepwise, then a falling line in the same manner—when given a choral guise sounds suddenly as simple and chant-like as anything known to Pope Gregory in the sixth century. Agnus Dei, qui
tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Dona nobis pacem.
The daughter of a mining engineer, the compositions of Joan Tower (born 1938) often have titles that echo her father’s profession: Platinum Spirals, Silver Ladders, Black Topaz. On account of her father’s job, she mostly grew up in South America; after returning to the States in 1955, she enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied with Henry Brant. Most of her professional life was spent in New York, getting advanced degrees at Columbia University, composing, and also playing the piano. Her greatest achievement as a performer was her decades of work with the Da Capo Players, the new music ensemble she founded. In 1972, she took a job teaching at Bard College. Her most well-known compositions are large orchestral works, many of which she wrote while Composer-in-Residence at the St. Louis Symphony: Sequoia and her Concerto for Orchestra. Her music is evocative, angular, and sometimes whimsical, as in Petroushkates, her take-off of Stravinsky’s ballet. She has also drawn attention to the achievements of women composers, and of women in general, as in her series of Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman. However, when asked if she’d ever personally felt discriminated against as a woman, she replied: “I don't think so. There's too much discrimination against composers in general.” Joan Tower has written that her “second string quartet, In Memory (2001), is dedicated with admiration to the Tokyo String Quartet who commissioned the work and have performed it all over the world. The fifteen-minute, one-movement piece is about death and loss, and was written in memory of one of the composer’s old friends, Margaret Shafer, who had passed away the summer the piece was begun. About two months later, the September 11th event occurred and this increased the loss to include the many people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center tragedy. This ‘amplified’ feeling of so much pain in the world played a major role in increasing the intensity of the music. The writing contains high, sustained, celestial material, some of which descends very slowly. This is paired with more forceful and driving repetitive musical ideas that try to express the anger and pain that results from the loss of people in one’s life.”
The next three choral works have been assembled to form a central triptych to our memorial commemoration. They were chosen and arranged in an attempt to recall the day itself, September 11th, 2001, and the collective experience which the country underwent: of silent disbelief, of dissonant emotional outpouring, and of uncertainty as to how to move forward.
John Cage (1912–1992) was a native of California, and worked as a dance accompanist at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle for several years. He eventually settled in New York, where he was to expand on his already innovative compositional methods. Cage’s contributions to musical development are many—including one of the first pieces written for a record player; popularizing the “prepared piano” in which various objects, such as pencils, erasers, nuts and bolts, or even plastic forks, were placed between the strings of the piano; and pioneering the use of electronic music, which consists entirely of spliced or computer-engineered sounds. But perhaps Cage’s most influential contribution was the elaboration of chance music. This compositional technique requires the performers themselves to make certain decisions about the music to be heard; for example, the composer might indicate the notes to be played, but each performer should make up his or her own rhythm, tempo, and other elements. John Cage described one of his last compositions, One11, as being “controlled by random operations”. His ground-breaking work of chance music is 4’33”. The title is the duration of the piece, and though Cage encouraged performers to alter the time at will, we will honor the duration of the 1952 premiere. In this composition, Cage takes his own exploration of chance music to its most logical extreme. Two experiences led Cage to compose 4’33”. The first was visiting an anechoic chamber, a sound-proofed room in which the walls are constructed so as to absorb sounds, rather than reflect it as a normal room would. Expecting to hear complete silence, Cage instead “heard two sounds, one high and one low,” which were simply sounds created by his own body, probably a mild tinnitus and the circulation of his blood. This experience convinced Cage that sound—and, by extension, music—always exists, and is always around us. The second experience to inspire 4’33” was seeing the completely white paintings of his friend Robert Rauschenberg; the perceived images on a blank surface changed based on the room’s lighting and the viewers’ shadows. One might described such paintings as chance art. Hence 4’33”: a study in chance music and the omnipresence of music.
Charles Wuorinen (born 1938) still lives in the city of his birth, New York. He was the youngest person ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize, in 1970 for his thirty-minute electronic work Time’s Encomium, and he remains a vital force in American music. Wuorinen writes mostly twelve-tone music, a technique pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg in which each of the twelve chromatic pitches within an octave are treated as perfect equals: no pitch is stated more often, or with greater emphasis, than any other. This creates a rather dissonant harmony, and Wuorinen compounds this harshness by using very dense textures, meaning that at any given moment there is a great deal happening in his music. The brief choral piece A solis ortu (1989) is very representative of this density: none of the four choral parts ever rest. In fact, the piece is really only half as long as it sounds: mid-way through, the tenors and basses trade parts with the sopranos and altos. The work was inspired by a photograph of a sunrise at Yosemite National Park, and is based on the Gregorian chant traditionally associated with the text.
A solis ortu usque ad occasum: laudabile nomen Domini.
Like so many composers on this concert, Peter Winkler (born 1943) has close connections with New York: for several years he has lived on Long Island. Winkler studied composition at Princeton and Harvard in the 1960s, but found particular passion for Motown and the Beatles, a zeal which would eventually lead him to become a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Indeed, he teaches popular music—together with composition and theory—at Stony Brook University. His compositions often incorporate pop elements, including works for musical theater, but he also composes more traditional classical music, such as the choral Requiem æternam, begun on September 12, 2001. Winkler has written the following: “My first response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, was the desire to pray for the souls of the victims. The prayer came to me in musical form: the sound of a cappella voices singing words from the beginning of the Latin Requiem Mass.The prayer is at first low and tentative, then increasingly impassioned. Silences are very important to the idea of the music. As the piece goes on, the role of the silences shift from punctuation to interruption, as though the impulse to pray were being choked off.”
Calvin Simmons was the first African-American to lead a major symphony orchestra. After serving as Zubin Mehta’s assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Symphony, he was appointed conductor of the Oakland Symphony. However, his career was cut short when, at the age of thirty-two, he drowned in a canoe accident. Elegy, to the Memory of Calvin Simmons (1982), by California composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003), is in gamelan style, and features a mournful, poignant solo for the oboe. The soft dynamic allows the audience to engage in their own meditations, and the repetitions of the melody remind us that life also consists of ever-repeating cycles.
The concert—and indeed, the entire Festival—ends with a plea for peace by Kirke Mechem, born in Kansas in 1925, and later a student of Randall Thompson at Harvard. His extensive repertoire of over 250 published works emphasizes vocal music, including several operas (including Tartuffe, based on the comic Molière play, and John Brown, based on the radical nineteenth-century abolitionist) and vast amounts of choral music. However, the most remarkable aspect of Mechem’s choral music is not its quantity, but its consistently fine quality. Island in Space (1990) takes as its text three sources: the Latin Requiem Mass prayer, “Dona nobis pacem”; an interview of Russell Schweickart, the first astronaut to conduct an unattached spacewalk; and the poetry of Archibald MacLeish. The work is roughly in four parts, delineated by the texts. The “Dona nobis pacem” introduction has two sub-sections—one chordal, the other rhythmically oscillating—both of which return later in the piece. The first of two main sections centers around the Schweickart text, given mostly to the men’s voices in unison. One of several noteworthy moments in this section occurs at the key phrase “The earth is a whole”, given to the whole choir. Note also the return of the oscillating figure from the introduction, and the interruptions at “a silence the depth of which you’ve never known.” Mechem then gives a flowing, lyrical treatment of MacLeish’s poem, leading to an epilogue which recapitulates the strong, chordal statement from the beginning: “Dona nobis pacem”—“Grant us peace.”
— Program note by Gary D. Cannon
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