Program Notes

Composers, like everyone else, live in the world. It's sometimes hard to keep this in mind (or convenient to ignore it) and composers, more so than purveyors of the other arts, are frequently regarded as esoteric, their works hermetic. We as an audience have, perhaps, a prejudice toward some pure acceptance of (supposedly) abstract musical terms, a prejudice which has been encouraged explicitly or covertly time and again by composers themselves--think of the coyness with which Mahler released or suppressed programmatic outlines of his work. Listening to music, can we know too much? Can we know too little? Does thinking about the hostile presence of Napoleon's army in Vienna during the premiere of Fidelio confuse and obscure our reaction to the music, or does this knowledge illuminate and clarify? What of the origins of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments as an homage to Debussy? If we don't know this stuff, are we left out in the cold?

The presence of Louis Andriessen's works on these two programs triggers a cascade of these reflections on music's--that is, an individual's music's--relationships outside itself, how a composer's cultural connections become manifest in his work. And vice versa: it's a feedback system. Composers' life experience is somehow reflected in the music they produce, even if the general predilection or specific incident be unapprehendable to the listener or even to the composer him/herself. Any information has the potential to enrich our next experience (not only in this context, but in any context). None of the composers here can be described as an ivory-tower artist: a generous receptiveness to outside stimulation is a big part of each of these major voices in contemporary concert music.

Louis Andriessen's Bells for Haarlem is an eight-minute occasional piece, written to inaugurate a new concert hall in Haarlem (The Netherlands). The piece, for glockenspiel and vibraphone, celesta, piano, and synthesizer (patched to a "horrible bells" sound), is based on the evening bells of Haarlem's Great Church (Saint Bavo), which ring to celebrate a victory of Haarlem's Knights in the Fifth Crusade. Two of the church bells are said to have been looted from the Egyptian city of Damietta. If this little history suggests regret for religious war and imperialism held up against the majesty and architectural accomplishment of both the church and the new concert hall, such a conflict would not be unheard of in Andriessen's work. Bells for Haarlem was premiered on November 13, 2002 by the Electra Ensemble.

Gunther Schuller is represented by the two sides of his compositional life in the Webern-like Concerto da camera and the Third Stream classic Densities. A propos the Third Stream, Schuller once wrote, "I am not interested in improving jazz...replacing jazz...[or] 'bring jazz into classical music...' I am simply exercising my prerogative as a creative artist to draw upon those experiences in my life as a musician that have a vital meaning for me." This sentiment is, of course, our larger premise, with Schuller, like Andriessen, absorbing the vibrancy of progressive jazz that was developing far outside the conservatory (at least until Schuller himself invited it in as president of the New England Conservatory in the 1960s and '70s).

Schuller's polymath accomplishments are the stuff of legend--an autodidact who was soloist in his own Horn Concerto as principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony by age nineteen, a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra player by age twenty, whose other gigs included playing with Miles Davis and Gil Evans. His stylistic range was rare indeed in the 1940s, but it is due in great part to his influence that one can't swing a cat in a major American city these days without hitting a player comfortable in both the jazz and classical worlds. He invented the phrase "Third Stream" (as a marriage of two mainstreams, progressive classical and progressive jazz) and worked with the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Lewis, and others in developing this new style and in encouraging musicians to learn to play it. Among Schuller's many valuable contributions as an educator (primarily at NEC and Tanglewood), one of the most lasting has been to bring jazz--the whole range of jazz--into the conservatory to the mutual benefit of both jazz and classical musicians. He also revitalized ragtime music almost single-handedly.

Along with these pursuits (and putting aside his several books, two music publishing companies, and record label), Schuller has amassed a catalog of nearly 200 works, writing for any conceivable medium from small jazz combo to the world's great orchestras. (His new work for orchestra, Where the Word Ends, was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its 125th anniversary; James Levine leads the BSO in the premiere performances later this month.)

Schuller wrote his Concerto da camera for a chamber orchestra of seventeen players (including two percussion, piano, celesta, and harp). It was commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Eastman School of Music. The piece is in a single movement of just over eight minutes' length in two sections, demarcated by a loud cadence at just about the midpoint. The first section is somewhat suspended in time ("with a floating quality") and the second, though related in material, more forward-moving. Flurries of color wash over more sustained music, and Schuller injects a degree of performance freedom into the surface structure with semi-improvised, cadenza-like passages. The composer's concern for tone color is a continuation of explorations first heard in his orchestral work Spectra (1958).

Schuller's Densities is from his Third Stream compositions of the early 1960s, for a quartet of clarinet, vibes, harp, and bass. While the basic pitch material derives from the twelve-tone chromatic, improvisation potentially allows players to intertwine limited-interval pitch sets, such as modal or tonal scales. After a brief introduction there are two sections to the piece, each with its own swing--a jump tempo followed by a blues.

Andriessen's two vocal works Passeggiata in tram in America e ritorno (1998) for voice, amplified violin, and ten instruments, and the much bigger, half-hour La Passione (2002) for voice, amplified violin, and large ensemble, are closely related. They were both written for the Italian avant-garde singer Cristina Zavalloni and violinist Monica Germino, who reprise their performances in these concerts. Andriessen had first heard Zavalloni in performances of Sylvano Bussotti's La Passion selon Sade. Both of these works set the poetry of Dino Campana, and both feature the strong vocal melodic component that has been an increasingly important feature of Andriessen's work in the past two decades. Passeggiata also has an optional film component by Marjike van Warmerdam. The ensemble part was written for De Volharding, the group Andriessen formed in the early 1970s to perform his piece of the same name ("Perseverance" in English). This scoring of Passeggiata was premiered in concert in Brisbane, Australia, in July 2001.

Andriessen composed La Passione as a further exploration of Dino Campana's poetic world. (Incidentally, the distinctive sound of the hammer dulcimer here can also be heard in a more forward role in Lee Hyla's Amnesia Variance on the first of these concerts.) The piece was commissioned and premiered by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen, who were joined in the first performance on October 6, 2002 by the soloists Zavalloni and Germino. The composer writes: "It was the Italian singer Cristina Zavalloni who first introduced me to the impressive Canti Orfici (Orphic Songs) by the poet Dino Campana (1885-1932)...[who] published his Canti Orfici in 1914. Throughout his life, his existence was dominated by a troubled spiritual condition. After a 5-week stay in a psychiatric hospital in Imola, his father sent him to recuperate in Argentina. However, on his wartime journey back to Italy, the poet was arrested at the Belgian-French border and taken to a psychiatric hospital in Tournai, Flanders. The text to the last song of La Passione, 'il Russo,' is set in the landscape of Flanders. Nine years later, in 1918, Campana was officially declared mentally ill and he spent the last fourteen years of his life in a clinic in Castel Pulci, near Florence. Most of the Canti Orfici are poems in prose. The images are fantastic, sometimes gruesome, unpredictable collages of perhaps futuristic dreams. For La Passione I chose six fragments from different texts, except song No. 2 'La sera di fiera' for which I used the complete poem. The work flows as a one-movement 26-minute piece, but formally it is structured as an introduction followed by a series of six songs. Campana's Passion, as it is reflected in his surrealist poetry, was the main inspiration for the musical language of the composition."

An introductory brass fanfare explicitly recalls Stravinsky's Agon, and the same textures are heard throughout the piece's six songs, expanded into pattern or standing alone as gesture. There is a fundamental dichotomy between the folk-naïve quality of the vocal and violin music--the pair are minstrels at a fair, perhaps--and the different complexity and sonic subtlety of the ensemble writing, although their coexistence results not in dissonance but, as in all of Andriessen's large-scale works, an expansion of the basic assumptions of "classical" concert music.

-- Robert Kirzinger