Program Notes

Five Songs in Counterpoint

Florence Price

While it may seem that the Avalon String Quartet and the Amadè Chamber Camerata are jumping on the Florence Price bandwagon, it should be noted that Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint were on the Avalon programs for the 2017-2018 season well before Ms. Price was featured both in the Sunday New York Times and New Yorker Magazine in 2018.

Why is Price heralded 65 years after her death in Chicago in 1953? She was the first African-American female composer to have a symphony performed by a “Big Five” American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Music Director Frederick Stock played the world premiere of her Symphony No. 1 in E minor on June 15, 1933, on one of four concerts presented at the Auditorium Theatre during Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition. But the glory of that achievement had long faded. She had died in relative obscurity. (And more recently, The Florence B. Price Elementary School in Chicago had been shut down by the CPS board in 2011.)

What has brought Price to everyone’s attention is the recent discovery of several previously unpublished, major works of hers that been lying in a dilapidated house in St. Anne, Illinois where Price had spent her summers. The new owners found numerous musical manuscripts and forwarded these to the University of Arkansas which had already had a few of her works in manuscript. The newly discovered works included two violin concertos that have been recently been released on recordings—hence Price’s “discovery.”

Speaking of the University of Arkansas and our piece for tonight, Matthew J. Detrick, Artistic Director, Apollo Chamber Players writes:

While researching works by African-American composers to include in a program of Henry Thacker Burleigh, Dvorak, and a new commission by Libby Larsen, we came upon this previously unearthed string quartet [Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint] collecting dust in the University of Arkansas Public Library. It came with no score and in manuscript form, and it required editing. Over the course of 30+ hours, I used Finale notation software to create a score and parts…We fell in love with this piece, each of the movements reflecting the hardship and celebration of African Americans. Beautiful, touching music.

Dr. Rae Linda Brown conjectures that Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint may have been written as early as 1927. If so, this places them in the midst of jazz-infused or -inflected “classical” pieces such as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Copland’s Piano Concerto (1926). Yet, Price’s efforts with Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint are quite different–more joyous etudes in compositional technique using the folk songs to orient the listener. This is much like the “popular” Copland who continued the complexity of his difficult, neoclassical technique while using American fold material to focus the listener. As Dvořák had realized in 1893, Americans had an emotional attachment to this music.

The first song is thespiritual “Calvary” which Price treats, as advertised, contrapuntally with a density and tonal freedom that yields a volatile disorientation which the composer always grounds back to the opening phrase of the melody. As befits this most serious of subjects, this is the most intense of the settings though it surprisingly ends in major. “Clementine” starts out lighthearted but also intensifies in passage of rhythmic complexity before trembling strings bring back the “Oh my darling” phrase to the conclusion. “Drink to me only with thine eyes” begins almost as a chorale with more blocked harmonies. But soon follow quasi variations that have the light touch of French Impressionism. “Shortnin’ Bread,” as expected, is the most up-tempo and syncopated—showing a direct line to the disruptions that will lead to ragtime. While “Shortnin’ Bread” may have been too uncomfortably close to mitigating plantation life, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” has a lyric that is commonly thought to be in “code” such that the true meaning is deliverance from slavery. The melody is stated by the cello and passes through each instrument. It is given a detailed treatment with a few jazzlike touches before ending in a classic coda.

Molto Adagio “Lyric for Strings” from String Quartet No. 1

George Walker

George Walker’s recent death this past August, through the many obituaries including one in the New York Times, reiterated his stature as an award-winning composer and pianist. (To this writer, the most interesting line in that obituary quotes Walker as saying, “Being black had hindered my career as a pianist, but here it actually helped me as a composer.”) Chicago audiences were able to hear Walker’s most famous composition, “Lyric for Strings” when Ricardo Muti performed the arrangement for string orchestra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this past spring. There is a notable video on YouTube of Muti conducting the piece decades earlier as part of a Martin Luther King memorial concert in Philadelphia and bringing Walker out on the stage for a bow.

However, “Lyric for Strings” was originally composed as the middle movement of Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 written when he was 24. As noted in the NYT obituary, “The Lyric was written in memory of his grandmother… It has an immediacy and melodic sweep, but also an intimacy that draws the listener in.” The staff at classical WQXR noted:

‘Walker’s Lyric for Strings was written the decade following Barber’s Adagio.‘ Like the Adagio, it was originally part of a string quartet… then orchestrated for a larger body of strings.‘ Like Barber, Walker uses tonal harmonies under a lamenting melodic line…’ The short work moves at a stately pace from an opening downward interval and makes its effect through steady growth of texture and intensity before reaching a serene close.

After several measures of introduction, the melody proper begins in the first violin with a downward line ending with a prominent “turn” which at the slow tempo becomes an important melodic motif rather than an ornament. As Walker put it, “The linear nature of the material alternates with static moments of harmony.” These latter consist of a three-chord augmentation of the last three notes of the turn. The music builds to a first climax followed by a reprise of the static chords. Then follows a climbing excursion into major mode with the turn at the upper end of the line, a climax, and the three chords return to bring the piece to a quiet close. The Lyric for Strings is being performed in memory of Charles A. Amenta Jr. DDS who died this past January.

Different Trains

Steve Reich

Just as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert are the giants of the Classical era, Terry Riley (born 1935), Phillip Glass (born 1937), Steve Reich (born 1936), and later (for a while) John Adams (born 1947) are the great proponents of the “Minimalist” musical aesthetic. This is an American style that is in reaction to the highly intellectualized, highly organized/formula driven, anti-expressive (or hyper expressionist) Modernist style of the post-WWII era. As Reich put it:

“Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie…”

So rather than look to Europe, these composers may have been the first to embrace world music in the sense of discovering elements of Asian and African music—the hypnotic repetitions of melodic cells of the former and the rhythmic vitality of the latter to carry their music. If there was a European connection, it was to the medieval musical drones and slow-moving lines that existed in chant forms prior to Western harmonic, triadic sophistication.

In Reich, there was an element of audio technology with his use of self-made recordings of found sounds and speech in the environment that could be repeated and played in displaced tracks against each other like techno fugues, that particularly colored his music. But sparseness and simplicity are the basic expressive elements. Reich even speaks of early pieces where “the notes, don’t change, the instruments don’t change—only the rhythm changes. It was like writing with both hands tied behind my back.” But from those restrictions came a certain freedom from the prescribed Modernism of his time.

The minimalist tradition is not “academic” (though Riley somehow had an academic position teaching Hindu music and composition) but more from the “hip” art world and the “art rock” and progressive jazz world. Mention of rock stars like Brian Eno or David Bowie and jazz greats like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and especially John Coltrane occur frequently in Reich’s discussion of either musicians he admired/modeled, regarding the latter, or, regarding the former, maybe found something to draw from in his music.

Reich was just reconnecting with his Jewish heritage in the 1980s when he composed “Different Trains” (1988). It is one of those masterpieces where everything seems to “work,” where subject matter and compositional technique align to make aesthetic magic. It has been described as one of the greatest pieces written in the 20th century. Most notably it was stated in the New York Times by musical historian and intellectual, Richard Taruskin that, “{Reich] has composed the only adequate musical response — one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium — to the Holocaust.”

As Reich put it:

Different Trains, for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape, begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments.

The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was a year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew, I would have had to ride in very different trains. With this in mind, I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation. In order to prepare the tape, I did the following:

1. Record my governess Virginia, then in her 70s, reminiscing about our train trips together.

2. Record a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, then in his 80s, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life.

3. Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul and Rachel — all about my age and then living in America — speaking of their experiences.

4. Collect recorded American and European train sounds of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them as accurately as possible in musical notation.

The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape and the final live quartet part is added in performance.

Different Trains is in three movements (played without pause), although that term is stretched here since tempos change frequently in each movement. The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theater in the not too distant future

The effect Reich achieves is direct and indirect at the same time. What could be more direct than people speaking about their experiences. Yet, the words, as treated, have a simple poetry, that despite the composer’s use of the term “documentary,” elevate this experience far above that. There is no overdramatization or trivialization. The musical techniques are simple but profound. Sometimes the “speech melodies” anticipate the speaker–mostly when dealing with Reich’s own train trips. But often instruments (especially the live viola and cello) echo the Holocaust survivors like an evanescent musical halo. The train propulsion never lags but the tempos change, and the textures of the combined forces vary in ways that are highly expressive seemingly despite themselves—which is a great compliment to the artist. The Aristotelian dramatic irony is obviously not lost on him—nor us. We know why the phrases “different trains” and “but today, they’re all gone” were chosen.

String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96

Antonin Dvořák

Haydn was famously “fetched” by Johann Peter Salomon from Vienna in 1790 to compose music for a series of concerts in London. Haydn had two prolonged stays in London 1791-1792 and 1794-1795 and composed some of his most famous works for concerts there including his 12 final symphonies, known as the “London,” as well as other works like the Sinfonia Concertante and the “Gypsy” piano trio. But his duties were fairly straight forward—compose music and give concerts.

As ambitious as Salomon’s gambit was, the idea of Jeanette Meyer Thurber was far more audacious. Almost exactly 100 years after Haydn, Thurber, a wealthy patron of the arts who organized and funded the National Conservatory in New York in 1885, fetched Antonin Dvořák to America. But this was not solely to put on concerts of his music. Nor was this to merely teach at the Conservatory. Mrs. Thurber wanted Dvořák to help America develop its own school of musical composition in contrast to the many American composers who studied in Europe and returned to compose music that wasn’t, to her mind, distinctly American.

Thurber had high ideals and goals. Her Conservatory admitted women, blacks, and the disabled and gave scholarships for needy students. Incredibly, Dvořák was enthusiastic about this task of guiding America to an original school of composition. He explored the music of Negro Spirituals, Stephen Foster-type American songs and the Native American music he heard through “Wild West” shows but also in the plains of Iowa via visiting performers.

The New York Herald in May of 1893 published Dvořák’s thoughts on the future of an American school of composition:

“In the Negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathétic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source. The American musician understands these tunes and they move sentiment in him.”

That view was astonishingly open-minded and prescient. And there is plenty of evidence that it wasn’t well accepted in traditional classical music enclaves like Boston. Perhaps the title of Maurice Peress’s 2008 book, Dvorak to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots, can convey Dvořák’s true contribution to our American musical identity.

Dvořák was in Spillville, Iowa in an enclave of Czech immigrants in the summer of 1893 for his three-month sabbatical. He had already composed his Symphony “From the New World” and planned to complete a string quartet and a string quintet during the summer months.

Dvořák worked with impressive rapidity composing the String Quartet in F major op. 96 in about two weeks. Then almost immediately following the Quartet, he composed the Quintet in E flat op 97 for two violins, two violas and cello in five weeks. Both, more because of their use of American-like themes rather than the mere fact of their site of composition, are called “American” as in Dvořák’s “American Quartet and “American” Quintet. (Some earlier publicity for this concert relied on our earlier plans to perform the Quintet, but we pivoted to program the Quartet while hoping to include the Quintet in a future concert.)

The private Spillville premiere of the Quartet was by Dvořák as first violinist (yet Dvořák spent his early performing life as a violist), his children on viola and cello, and his American secretary Joseph J. Kovarik as second violin. (Kovarik, 1870-1951, a native of Spillville, had convinced Dvořák to vacation there rather than back home in Bohemia. Kovarik headed the viola section of the New York Philharmonic from 1895-1936.)

The opening movement “Allegro” (fast) starts with a hazy atmospheric, scene-setting before the viola bursts in with the rugged, main theme. It is largely pentatonic (a five-note scale common to many folk musics including American, Bohemian, Asian, and Scottish) and includes a short-long rhythm in its second phrase. This rhythm is sometimes known as a “Scottish-snap” and is also heard in many American songs—for example the word “swaN-E-E” in the Stephen Foster song—as well as the opening theme of the “New World” Symphony. The second theme is played by the first violin and, also, has a noticeable “snap” to its melody. The movement is in sonata form with the development starting with a distinctly minor-mode cast (pentatonic mode is neither minor nor major) featuring much exploration of the short-long rhythm and a fugue-like passage initiated by the second violin. The brief coda climaxes strongly.

The second movement “lento” (very slow) has been interpreted as a hymn of the plains of America or an expression of Dvořák’s homesickness for Bohemia. The first violin does most of the singing though sometimes in duet with the cello playing high in its range and later with the second violin. The solo cello has the final lyric though the viola, which has accompanied throughout, has its figure die out dramatically. The third movement “molto vivace” (lively–very, very fast) is a scherzo in feeling though not in structure. Dvořák said that he derived some of the melody from the song of the scarlet tanager, a brilliantly colored bird he experienced in Spillville. The finale “Vivace” (lively–very fast) with its syncopations and chugging accompaniment seems an exciting combination of ragtime and cowboys riding in a Marlboro commercial (i.e. “Magnificent Seven”) though several authors have described this latter as depicting trains traveling across the plains. Dvořák was obsessed with trains—remember the first half of this concert–as well as ships, and birds. The form of the finale is a Rondo with the returning theme in the first violin skipping along cheerily. The coda is about as exciting as string quartet music gets.