November 9, 2005
Accounts of the cost of human conflict, and the hope for lasting peace.
Programme Notes
Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey
John Adams (arr. Richard Mascall): The Wound-Dresser, text by Walt Whitman
Samuel Barber: Dover Beach, text by Matthew Arnold
Gloria Coates: Voices of Women in Wartime, text by various women on both sides of World War II
Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy: Maura, text by a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto
Osvaldo Golijov: Tenebrae, text from the Hebrew alphabet
Stephanie Moore: In Flanders Fields, text by John McCrae
While all wars are begun by human beings (and presumably for explicable human reasons), once a conflict is underway, it seems to take on an impersonal force and momentum; and stopping it sometimes appears to require efforts out of all proportion to the initial causes. Against the impersonal energy of war, however, the writers and composers on this programme set smaller forces – the memory of past joys and past sufferings, truthfulness, compassion, duty, conscience, honesty, and the faithful love of one human heart for another. The power of these “rumours of peace” comes from their clarity and sharpness of focus: Adams’ scrupulous setting of Whitman’s gruesome hospital diary, Barber’s interpretation of Arnold’s melancholy but determined plea for human faithfulness, Coates’ deeply expressive juxtaposition of small moments in the lives of women in wartime, Fairlie-Kennedy’s haunting evocation of a refugee’s fragile past, Golijov’s reflections on the transformative value of the tiny details of culture, and Moore’s defiantly hopeful presentation of the role of the dead in warning the living. Perhaps, if we can learn to arrange them in an impenetrable formation, these small forces may indeed provide a barricade against the advances of war.
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John Adams (1947 - ): The Wound-Dresser (1989), arranged for baritone, oboe, trumpet, string quartet, percussion, and piano by Richard Mascall.
American composer John Adams is known primarily for large orchestral works and for music dramas such as Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). He is usually described as a minimalist composer, but transcends the usual restrictions of the category, making use of late-romantic harmonies and orchestral colours, and incorporating witty references to both serious and popular music of the 20th century. His acclaimed setting of a fragment from Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” dates from the same period as his two operas, and explores great emotional range with characteristic restraint – an effect emphasized in Richard Mascall’s arrangement for chamber ensemble.
Whitman’s poem is taken from the collection Drum-Taps, the only work he allowed himself to publish during the American Civil War; his principal activity during the war years was visiting and nursing wounded and dying soldiers in the military hospitals around Washington, DC. The poem is an intense soliloquy on Whitman’s hospital experiences, reflecting on the preciousness of the human lives lost, the horrific consequences of human aggression, the ruin of bodies, and the compulsion to comfort and to tend, even when no healing is possible. There has been speculation that Adams set the text in response to the AIDS crisis; at the time of composition, his mother was also tending his dying father.
Almost all of the first half of the work features syncopation somewhere in the accompanying instrumental texture, creating an ambivalent counterpoint to the jagged but somberly matter-of-fact vocal recitative. The uncompromising descriptions gather musical momentum, until the piccolo trumpet bursts out with shrill and confused bugle calls at the passage which begins “I dress a wound in the side…”, the most intensely expressed section of the text. The wound-dresser and the composer together overcome their revulsion, and return to the more stoic tone of the opening, and the exhausted closing section allows a brief glimpse of the light of human contact and affection.
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Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Dover Beach, op. 3 (1931), for baritone and string quartet
Barber studied both composition and singing at the Curtis Institute (from 1924 to 1932), and wrote Dover Beach, his first masterpiece, for himself to sing with string quartet, although the first public performance was given by the mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton in 1933. Sidney Homer, Barber’s uncle and mentor, encouraged him to be true to his inner creative voice, while developing his compositional craft to a level of apparent effortlessness, and his music of the 1930s demonstrates how well he heeded this advice. In many ways, Dover Beach is a precocious work, in which the 21-year-old composer embraced Arnold’s bitter and alienated text with a conviction which anticipated the emotional and psychological preoccupations of his later compositions.
The association of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with war arises from the final three lines:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In fact, the poem was probably written during Arnold’s honeymoon visit to Dover in 1851, and has more to do with his reflections on human nature than with any actual conflict. An agnostic, Arnold saw the “natural” state of human beings, the outmoded protection of faith being withdrawn, as one of ignorance and strife: it is only in loving commitment to one another that we are able to overcome our innate predisposition to misery. For generations since the poem’s publication, however, this assessment has seemed to be borne out by world events, and Arnold’s call for love as a remedy for war and other human calamities has resonated strongly with many readers.
From the lapping waves of Barber’s opening to the return of the same motive at the close, the string quartet behaves almost as a single organism, with the voice closely integrated but individual. The textures of the work are romantic, without succumbing to any temptation to expressionism. The climax of the piece comes, as might be expected, on the line “Ah, Love, let us be true to one another!”, but the clash of armies fades into the ageless sound of the waves.
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Gloria Coates (1938- ): Voices of Women in Wartime (1973), for soprano, viola, cello, piano, and percussion
Gloria Coates studied in Louisiana, Chicago, and New York, and her teachers included Alexander Tcherepnin and Otto Luening. Since 1969 she has lived in Europe. She devotes her time primarily to composition, but has also lectured, written musicological articles, and worked for German radio. She is known as the composer of 14 symphonies, numerous vocal and choral works, solo and chamber pieces, electronic music, and music for the theatre, and as a tireless advocate for contemporary American music on the European stage. The critic Kyle Gann has called her an “atonal-expressionist post-minimalist”, and compared her style to that of Krzysztof Penderecki.
The cantata Voices of Women in Wartime dates from a period when Coates was working as a tour-guide for the American army. Her tours often included the concentration camp at Dachau, and the work responds to the emotions which the camp evoked in her, as well as to the final stages of the conflict in Vietnam. She chose texts by German, English, and American women, speaking of the human losses and ironic futility of war.
Coates rejected serialism as a compositional technique, but evolved an atonal language of her own, in which semitones and glissandi are important expressive features. Both are already in evidence in this early work: she uses the semitone extensively to set texts of loss and emotional compression, as in “Junge Witwe”; and glissandi are used throughout the work, in both the vocal and instrumental parts, to echo the cry of the wounded human spirit. Only in the final section of the last movement, which expresses the hope that some hard-won wisdom might be wrung from all the sufferings of war, does the musical language expand into more straightforward tonal patterns, closing with almost startling optimism in C major.
Voices of Women in Wartime was later incorporated into a larger work, The Force of Peace in War, but the Talisker Players present the piece in its original form.
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Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy (1925- ): Maura (1992), for soprano, piano, violin, and cello
Margaret Fairlie-Kennedy is based in Ithaca, NY, and has enjoyed a long association with Cornell University, including a post as composer-in-residence. Her most recent chamber music pieces have included Undertow (1997) for violin and piano, Summer Solstice (1998), and Desert Echoes (1999), which won the performance award in the Maxfield Parrish competition held by the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. Maura was commissioned by the Pro-Mozart Society in Atlanta, and premiered by members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1993.
Maura is dedicated to the memory of Jerzy, a young Polish refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, from whose diary the text is taken. He had managed to escape with his wife, but was unable to save his younger sister. Fairlie-Kennedy says, “This work is about parting, and all its implications” – the violence of abrupt separation, the inexorability of memory, the guilt of a survivor.
The piece combines sung and spoken text, and includes sections of continuous rhythmic movement as well as looser sections in which the performers respond to one another, converging on key points in the text. Much of the work’s direction comes from rhythmic figurations in the piano part, and the ways in which they are transformed and disrupted, while the violin and cello often interact more lyrically with the voice. Throughout the piece, the swirling and dancing recollections of the past which Jerzy shared with his sister are contrasted with abrupt intrusions of loss and regret.
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Osvaldo Golijov (1960- ): Tenebrae (2000), for soprano, clarinet, and string quartet
Osvaldo Golijov grew up in Argentina and moved to Israel in 1983, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy. In 1986 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, and studied with George Crumb and Oliver Knussen. He has enjoyed a long collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, and has been composer-in-residence at the Spoleto USA Festival, Marlboro Music, Ravinia, and several other festivals. He has been Associate Professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA since 1991, and is also on the faculties of the Boston Conservatory and the Tanglewood Music Center.
The title Tenebrae comes from the evening services of Holy Week, in which the readings are taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah for the fallen city of Jerusalem; each section begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The composer explains the background of the work:
I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin's Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.
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Stephanie Moore (1979- ): In Flanders Fields (2005), for soprano, baritone, English horn, string trio, and piano
Stephanie Moore is a recent composition graduate of the University of Toronto. She has written a number of works for voice and chamber ensembles, including settings of poems by Toronto poets Anne Michaels and Ken Babstock, and an opera scene based on a libretto adapted from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Her teachers have included John Hawkins, Gary Kulesha, Chan Ka Nin, and Christos Hatzis.
Moore remarks that In Flanders Fields is one of the few poems she has memorized, having known it for more than ten years, long before she began setting it to music. Its predictable iambic (weak-strong) metre, broken only by punctuation, certainly facilitates memorization, but setting this poem to music afforded her the opportunity to free the text from the lock-step iambic pattern, and to isolate and repeat phrases and insert musical interludes. She wanted to avoid having the words pulled along indiscriminately by the metre without encouraging the listener to consider their meaning.
As Moore began taking the poem apart into sections and small phrases, she became impressed with the idea of restless spirits and the perspective of the poem: narrated by one who has died, on behalf of many others. She was also struck by its warning, somewhat veiled by the metre, to the society which sent these soldiers to war: “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep”. Musically, she imagines the baritone as a lone soldier/ghost addressing us, and the solo English horn as representing his spirit. The soprano, who has a somewhat lesser role in the piece, is conceived of as a spirit representing the spirits of all the other soldiers who have died, and the solo violin is connected with this idea. The imagery of the first five lines of the poem contrasts the ideal and the beautiful (“The larks, still bravely singing, fly”) with the reality of war and human suffering (“Scarce heard amid the guns below”), and Moore has underlined this contrast by juxtaposing low piano and cello with high violin and viola. The steady rhythm of the opening is intended to conjure up the image of the soldier walking through the fields of Flanders, while his spirit, in the person of the English horn, sings.
This performance is a world premiere.
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