This concert focuses on telling stories; musical descriptions of place, reflections on birds and nature, stories from the New York City downtown scene, and a composer’s life story.
We start with a work commissioned by the Craftsbury Chamber Players in celebration of its 25th season in 1990: Gwyneth Walker’s Craftsbury Trio. The following description is from the composer.
Craftsbury, Vermont is a place of open and stark landscape with a gentle pace of life. In writing Craftsbury Trio, I have attempted to express these impressions through a direct and uncluttered musical language. In the tradition of composers over the centuries, I have taken the initial of the subject and translated it to its name key: C—the most basic of all tonalities. To me, it relates to the requirements of simplicity and clarity in writing a musical portrait of this place.
The first movement, “Up-Country Toccata”, carries a tempo marking of “lively,” and serves to introduce the players to the audience. In its function of initiating the C tonality of the work (C Minor here, C Dorian and C Major in later movements), the music establishes the tonality without modulation. I sought to combine the energy of a keyboard toccata with the primarily percussive gestures in the strings. The cadenza passage near the end allows the pianist to roam freely over the keyboard before sliding into a final refrain.
A rubato passage leads into “The Lark in the Morning,” loosely based on the folksong with lyrics “the lark in the morning, she sings as she flies.” Although the melody originally lies in the major mode, it soon moves to the natural minor mode to emphasize what I hear as a mournful quality in the song. Thus, the character of the music is intended to become plaintive and to grow in intensity as the lines overlap in increasingly tight stretto. At the end, the lines ascend (the lark flies away), with final taping sounds suggestive of fluttering wings.
“You Can Buy It at the General Store” is a playful homage to those country stores where one can buy anything — from fly paper and fishing tackle to imported gourmet foods. One can find a little of everything at the general store . . . or in this movement!
In the center of the town of Craftsbury, on a small plateau opening into broad views of the surrounding mountains, is the village green, Craftsbury Common. This plot of land is enclosed by a white, split-rail fence. There is a purity to this scene. The common, and its few neighboring wooden buildings, appears unchanged over the centuries. And time stands still here. “Craftsbury Common” is an elegy to this quiet, haunting beauty. Through this music I have endeavored to capture the qualities of openness (5ths), timelessness (static chords, repeating patterns, slow tempo), reverence (cello theme), starkness (economy of notes), yearning (surging lines), and purity (C Major).
Susan Bottii used seven of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems from Stray Birds as the texts for her Bird Songs, composed for Lucy Shelton in 2016. Lucy tells that story:
When I called my friend and colleague Susan Botti to ask for a new composition … I requested that it include percussion. She immediately played some sounds for me from the exotic instruments perched in her home studio and suggested favorite poems from Tagore’s “Stray Birds”. I was ecstatic with these sources of inspiration! Botti had collected four Prayer Bowls while in Taipei in 2010 and now they would become central to “Bird Songs” (her settings of seven short poems featuring birds and nature). “Listen, my heart…” is the centerpiece. The haunting sound world is a mix of the complex tuning of the bowls, contrasted with other small percussion instruments (tuned and untuned) and the jangle of two wind-chimes made by the composer from keys and various small metal objects. Botti asks the voice to play with the ambiguous tunings, singing into and around the given pitches. It was a wonderful challenge to inhabit this unique sound world, with its complete range from whispered speech to full-throated song, as well as opportunities for improvisation. In “Bird Songs” I play all the percussion instruments—with the two sets of chimes behind me and a table in front of me with the smaller instruments and the four Prayer Bowls. I sing from within a special nest of evocative sounds.
That “nest” of percussion instruments required to perform the piece is a collection of instruments the composer has either made or gathered on her journeys. Susan Botti has loaned the original collection to Mary Bonhag for this performance. The titles of each song are the complete text of each poem.
Pianist and Composer William Bolcom is a native of Seattle, Washington. His first original pieces were composed when he was 11 years old and already studying with faculty from the University of Washington. In his college years he studied with Darious Milhaud, Leland Smith, and Olivier Messaien. By the 1960’s he was immersed in complex serial composition technique but gradually beginning to embrace a wider variety of musical styles. One of his stated career goals has been to erase boundaries between popular and art music.
Bolcom became steeped in the world of cabaret music by accompanying his wife, singer Joan Morris. Starting in the late 1970’s, he began a 20-year collaboration with poet Arnold Weinstein resulting in the creation of four volumes of Cabaret Songs. Tonight’s selections are a sampling of this broad collection. The songs are wonderfully unpredictable, flipping between deep emotion and jarring humor.
Bedřich Smetana was born at Leitomischl, Bohemia (now Litomysl, Czech Republic) on March 2, 1824. His father was a brewer and amateur violinist, his mother a dancer. Bedrich studied the piano and violin as a child, performing in public for the first time at age six. In 1835 the family moved to Čechtice, a small market town in the center of the country, which, to this day, has no railway or large roads connecting it to the outside world. With only limited local educational options, Bedrich was sent off to boarding school. In 1838 he convinced his father to let him go to Prague to study at the Academic Grammar School.
Things did not go well. Smetana was ridiculed by fellow students because of his country manners and started skipping classes. Instead, he went to concerts, attended operas, and joined a string quartet. When his father found out, he made his truant son come home. In 1840 an older cousin stepped in, agreeing to supervise Bedrich’s remaining primary schooling at the Premonstratensian School in Plzen where he was a faculty member.
This was the year the sixteen-year-old Smetana first heard Franz Liszt play, and it changed the course of his life. Smetana was now determined to become a musician, and in 1943, with his father’s rather tepid blessing, he moved to Prague to study with Josef Proksch, the head of the Prague Music Institute. Proksch introduced Smetana to both Liszt and Berlioz. The young composer fell under the spell of these towering figures and their dynamic programmatic music. From then on Smetana’s compositional style was focused on nationalism, realism and romanticism. Smetana’s many large instrumental works have clear programmatic content. Vltava (The Moldau), from his set of six symphonic tone poems Má Vlast (My Fatherland), is a prime example
In 1870, after many years of professional ups and downs, Smetana achieved a long-standing ambition: the appointment as principal conductor of the Provisional Theatre in Prague. By the summer of 1874 Smetana was forced to give up the post as his health began deteriorating rapidly due to advancing syphilis. By the end of October, he was completely deaf. Supported only by a small pension, which often arrived late, he was forced to move to the country to live with his married daughter.
This was the state of his life when he wrote his String Quartet op. 116, in 1876. We are fortunate to have Smetana’s own words as a guide to the drama of this chamber music story from a letter to his close friend Josef Srb-Debrnov written in 1878:
As regards my Quartet I gladly leave others to judge its style, and I shall not be in the least angry if this style does not find favor or is considered contrary to what was hitherto regarded as “quartet style.” I did not set out to write a quartet according to recipe or custom in the usual forms. I have already worked through particulars of the necessary forms as a young student of music theory so that for me they are completely familiar, and I understand them well enough. For me the form of every composition is dictated by the subject itself and thus the Quartet, too, shaped its own form. My intention was to paint a tone picture of my life.
The first movement depicts my youthful leanings toward art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune . . . The long insistent note in the finale owes its origin to this. It is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which in 1874 announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke, because it was so disastrous to me.
The second movement, a quasi-polka, brings to mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing.
The third movement . . . reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my first wife.
The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat national elements in music and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future, the tiny rays of hope of recovery, but remembering all the promise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret.
That is about the content of this composition, which, so to speak, is of a private character and therefore is deliberately written for four instruments. These [four] are to talk to each other in a narrow circle of friends of what has so momentously affected me. No more.”