Tuesday May 7 & Wednesday May 8, 2013 • 8pm.
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Trinity St. Paul's Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Programme notes by Andrea Budgey

Birds – and other winged creatures – have played an important role in mythology, art, and other expressions of the human imagination throughout recorded history. Their ability to escape the power of gravity, and to see the world from a vantage point inaccessible to humans, has led people to attribute to them supernatural powers of not only of movement, but of knowledge and insight.

The complexity of birdsong has had a particular fascination for musicians. Some very interesting advances in rhythmic notation – as, for example, during the French Ars nova of the late 14th century, or in the works of Olivier Messiaen – have inspired repertoire in which the imitation of birdsong was a common feature. Contemporary recording techniques and modern ornithology have rendered the songs and lives of birds less mysterious, but they remain powerful cultural symbols.

As descendants of the dinosaurs, birds in one sense seem to exemplify the adaptability of species to changing circumstance. At the same time, their vulnerability to environmental threat reminds us of the fragility and interdependence of all life.

Arvo Pärt: Es sang vor langen Jahren, poetry by Clemens von Brentano
Lee Hoiby: The Life of the Bee, poetry by Jeffrey Beam
Miriam Gideon: Creature to Creature (excerpts), poetry by Nancy Cardozo
John Plant: Sandpiper, poetry by Elizabeth Bishop
Aaron Copland: As It Fell Upon a Day, poetry by Richard Barnefield
Georg Philipp Telemann: Trauer-Musik eines kunsterfahrenen Canarien-Vogels, text anonymous
Lukas Foss: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, poetry by Wallace Stevens

Arvo Pärt (1935- ): Es sang vor langen Jahren for voice, violin, and viola (1984)

Since the 1970s, Arvo Pärt's work has been characterised by a style which critics have designated "mystic minimalism", influenced by the melodic shapes of Eastern Orthodox chant and the tonal structures of medieval and Renaissance polyphony. The composer himself refers to the slowly-changing transparent sonorities – heard most strikingly in his choral works – as "tintinnabuli", the sonorous ringing of bells.

Es sang vor langen Jahren casts the nightingale as the embodiment of nature's constancy, in contrast with the variability of human relationships. In it, Pärt employs many of his "tintinnabuli" techniques on an intimate, even miniature scale. The violin and viola support the vocal line intermittently with delicate sustained chords, with silence playing a role of almost equal importance in the texture. The vocal line itself is both modal and angular, like a folk tune which has been stretched to draw attention to the deeper resonances of Brentano's superficially simple text. The interlude and coda (for strings alone) feature greater rhythmic movement, but preserve an overall impression of suspension and stillness, while the long absence of the voice from the texture seems to underline the lover's absence from the scene.

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Lee Hoiby (1926- ): The Life of the Bee for voice, cello, and piano (2001)

Lee Hoiby, born in Wisconsin, originally planned a career as a concert pianist, but changed his mind when he was invited to study composition with Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute. His dramatic works have been presented by the Spoleto Festival, the New York City Opera, the Des Moines Metro Opera, the Dallas Opera, and Pacific Opera Victoria in British Columbia, as well as on and off Broadway.

Hoiby’s song cycle The Life of the Bee was premiered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 6, 2002. This cycle consists of five songs with texts by Jeffrey Beam, drawn from a larger work-in-progress of the same name; the poems characterize the various residents and activities of a bee hive.

The first movement, "Millennium Approaches", is brief elegy to the spent blossoms which the bees have used to maintain themselves and their world: the gently undulating descending lines in the cello and piano frame the spare and allusive text. "The Spirit of the Hive", with its darting and buzzing figures in the instrumental parts, speaks of the irresistible call of wildflowers to the bees of the hive, and "The Queen" portrays the fierce self-identification of an ancient queen bee with her expanding kingdom. The sharp, march-like rhythms of "The Sting" underline the defiant challenge of the worker bees provide to anyone who would threaten the hive. "The Swarm" evokes the exultant power of a bee swarm as it bursts forth to seek for blossoms and fruit, propelled by racing sextuplets in the accompaniment.

The final phrase "This a thing, some will say, men will not do" epitomises the singularity of the species, and Hoiby sets it lightly, quoting the instrumental figures which opened the cycle. His setting throughout the piece demonstrates the craft of using music to enhance a text without overwhelming or distorting it, and provides an apt vehicle for Beam’s short, precise phrases and arresting natural images.

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Miriam Gideon (1906-1996): Creature to Creature for voice, flute, and harp (1985)

Miriam Gideon was born in Colorado, grew up in Boston, and spent most of her adult life in New York City. She studied piano and musicology, and took composition lessons privately with Lazare Saminsky and Roger Sessions; the latter was an important influence on her style, which can for the most part be described as rigorously atonal. Gideon taught composition at Brooklyn College, City College of the City University of New York, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and her output includes music in a variety of vocal genres, including a large body of Jewish liturgical music.

At the première of Creature to Creature by the Jubal Trio, the cycle was greeted as "limpid, lilting and good-humoured" and "deftly wrought". The three compact movements performed on this programme are those depicting insects, and Gideon's astringent, angular settings are the perfect foil for Cardozo's self-consciously clever and witty texts. The vocal and instrumental parts are tightly integrated, and their restless forward progress evokes the patterns of insect movement, which can seem so much more irregular than that of birds, at least to human eyes.

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John Plant (1945- ): Sandpiper for voice, clarinet, string quartet, and piano (2011)

American-born composer John Plant moved to Canada in his early twenties to study with Bruce Mather and Charles Palmer at McGill University. Most of his career was spent in Montreal, where he taught at Concordia University from 1993 to 2008. He has also been deeply involved in the study of classics, language, and comparative literature, and these interests have been extremely important in shaping his works for the human voice. In 2008 he retired to Nova Scotia to concentrate on composition.

The poet Elizabeth Bishop (American poet laureate in 1949-1950, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956), spent much of her childhood in Great Village, Nova Scotia. The first version of Plant's setting of her poem Sandpiper dates from 2009; the expanded version (heard on this evening's programme) was premiered at the Scotia Festival in Halifax in 2011, the year of Bishop's centenary celebrations. The string quartet (the main addition) combines with the piano to depict the ever-shifting world of water, sand, and wind through which the sandpiper moves, while the melodic and rhythmic material of the vocal and clarinet lines evokes, with astonishing precision, not so much the sound of the bird (although that is echoed, too), but rather the quickness, restlessness, and variety of its movements.

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Aaron Copland (1900-1990): As it Fell upon a Day for voice, flute, and clarinet (1923)

This is often considered Copland's first piece of serious music, written in response to an assignment from Nadia Boulanger when he was studying with her in Paris in the early 1920s. He had happened upon Barnefield's poem "Address to the Nightingale," of which he later explained, "The poem had the simplicity and tenderness that moved me to attempt to evoke that poignant expression musically."

The melancholy and restraint of the resulting setting were to become very characteristic of Copland's later style: the vocal part is given a neo-Elizabethan flavour, like a lute-song refracted through the prism of the intervening centuries, while the flute and clarinet between them create a compact but carefully-crafted frame for the miniature. Copland makes full use of their ranges and dynamic possibilities, and the counterpoint between them is both disciplined and dissonant. The turning figure with which the vocal part begins is very much a unifying motive, hinting at the nightingale's song in a way later made explicit on the words "Fie, fie" and "Tereu, tereu". It returns as the wordless closing section winds its way to the spare texture of two balanced open fifths.

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Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767): Trauer-Musik eines kunsterfahrenen Canarien-Vogels, for voice, oboe, violin, viola, and continuo, TWV 20:37

Telemann, that astonishingly prolific and popular composer of the German Baroque, produced this secular cantata in Hamburg in about 1737. The author of the text is unknown, as are the circumstances of composition – it may have been commissioned, or perhaps written as a favour; the subtitle "Trauer-Music eines kunsterfahrenen Canarienvogels, als derselbe zum grössten Leidwesen seines Herrn Possessoris verstorben", is usually translated "Funeral music for an artistically-trained canary-bird whose demise brought the greatest sorrow to his master."

The text as a whole could be treated ironically, mock-seriously, but no part of it is actually comic, and Telemann's treatment is delicate, even tactful: the themes of natural beauty, the comfort of companionship, the shock of violent death, and the grief of bereavement are, after all, persistent and significant ones. The relationship between the human and animal worlds, interesting in the eighteenth century, has been brought into even sharper focus in our own time, when the killing of a single songbird by a cat can represent far larger tragedies of environmental instability and loss.

The cantata is sometimes performed with only strings and continuo; the addition of an oboe, as in this performance, expands the tonal palette. While one might choose to see occasional obscure allusions to the canary's call in some of the instrumental figuration, Telemann avoids obvious references to bird-song. The final aria and recitative are particularly poignant, but the work then ends forcefully, the narrator's rage at his loss expressed, on the one hand, in a musical style reminiscent of operatic revenge-arias, and on the other in a sudden switch to Low-German dialect, a juxtaposition of painful incongruity which somehow makes the loss more immediate.

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Lukas Foss (1922- ): Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for voice, flute, piano and percussion (1978)

The German-born American composer Lukas Foss studied piano, flute, theory, composition, orchestration, and conducting from an early age. By the time he was 20, his teachers had included Louis Moyse, Fritz Reiner, Isabelle Vengerova, Paul Hindemith, and Serge Koussevitzky. His compositions include works for stage, orchestra, chamber, chorus, voice, and piano, and his distinguished career has included conducting appointments with the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and teaching appointments at UCLA, Tanglewood, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, Yale University, and Boston University. A two-week festival of his music was held in Buffalo in 2003.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, written in 1978, is in many ways highly characteristic of Foss’ compositional style. The solo voice presents Wallace Stevens’ poetry, in thirteen brief, almost fragmentary movements, combining soaring phrases with hushed whispering, and a tape delay echoes the effects of the voice three seconds later. The flute conveys the many moods of the poems and the many manifestations of the blackbird, using a variety of extended techniques. The piano also uses extended techniques, and combines with the percussion to produce an extraordinary range of mysterious and atmospheric effects, using such devices as triangle beaters, cowbells, and Japanese bowls directly on the piano strings. They create an ideal framework for the allusive, even gnomic text.

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