Music Monday: Brouwer: Remembrances

By now, even if you've only read half of these posts, you're probably familiar with the trope of the composer who starts writing music at a very early age and never looks back. It's true that many composers do follow this trajectory, but by no means is it the one and only life path, and today we feature a work by Margaret Brouwer (b. 1940), a composer who took a rather more roundabout route to the composing life.

Roundabout, but not entirely out of left field. Instead of diving into life with the intent to write music, Brouwer initially set out to be a professional violinist. (In an interview over at New Music Box, she says that one reason she was slow to come to composition was that she simply didn't know women could be composers, given the overwhelming maleness of the average concert program.) She majored in violin performance at the Oberlin Conservatory, and ultimately wound up living and working down in Dallas. She had quite a successful career, too, working as a freelancer for numerous recording gigs and also landing positions with both the Fort Worth Opera and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. For many musicians, this is the dream life, and she was living it.

Over the years, tho, she had started writing music, at first for children at summer camps or for her friends to play, and she gradually began to ramp up her compositional activities. There was no big epiphany moment, but she ultimately decided that she wanted to switch over to writing instead of playing primarily. Since she was supporting two children as a single mother, she didn't want to strike out as a freelancing composer (a proposition even more financially risky than being a freelance performer), and went to Indiana University to earn a DMA in composition instead. As soon as she graduated, she managed to land a job teaching composition, and would go on to serve as the chair of the composition department at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where she is currently a professor emerita) from 1996 to 2008. Despite having little to show for her nascent compositional efforts prior to 1980, she's had a dazzlingly successful career, with commissions coming from major orchestras all around the country and a plethora of prestigious awards, up to and including the Guggenheim Award in 2004.

Unlike many composers who came of age in mid-century America, Brouwer resists being pigeonholed into one specific compositional style. She's quite happy to deploy the techniques of Minimalism and Serialism in the same work, despite the radically opposed foundations of these schools. (Indeed, in many ways Minimalism was founded in direct and strident opposition to Serialism.) This freewheeling stylistic eclecticism is more often a characteristic of the current generation of up-and-coming composers, but Margaret Brouwer beat us to the punch. (She is, of course, not entirely alone in this — there have always been elements of stylistic blending in American composition — but she does it exceptionally well.) As such, her pieces live in a wide variety of sound worlds, to the point that if you didn't know better, you might think they weren't all written by the same person.

With that in mind, today we're featuring a rather Neo-Romantic work, but it would be a mistake to flag Brouwer exclusively as a Neo-Romantic composer. Remembrances (1996) was written for the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra in memory of Robert Stewart, a close friend of Brouwer's. It begins with a dull pounding in the timpani followed by searching, aimless strings, conveying the ache and emptiness of loss. The brass and woodwind instruments enter gradually, building to a climax that launches a faster, murmuring section, seeming to conjure up fleeting memories of happier times. (Stewart was a sailor, among other things, and this music certainly seems to capture the rush of ploughing thru the waves.) After a stirring, expansive climax, the music ebbs to a darker, stiller place, echoing the opening sorrow.

Echoes of the faster music ensue, now scored more delicately, as tho only glimpsed faintly, from afar. This sets the stage for several intimate, lyrical woodwind solos, seeming to emerge like personal speakers at a wake, haloed gently with warm and resonant strings. These individualized memories dissolve into another collective tutti, one that, perhaps unintentionally, hints at "America the Beautiful". This memory sours, collapsing back into the rushing music from before, which builds to a reprise of the earlier climax, this time not ebbing away so much as disintegrating under the strain of the emotional intensity. An extensive coda ensues, projecting a final mood of hard-won acceptance, and maybe even hope.

Music Monday: Barber: Summer Music

Because we're having a bit of a heat wave here in Los Angeles, I'm skipping ahead to something that I'd normally save for rather later in the year. Despite the fact that there's almost nothing about him on my blog, I consider Samuel Barber (1910 - 81) to be one of my deepest compositional influences, tho he can be a hard composer to get a handle on. Born into a decidedly upper-middle class family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Barber had no shortage of musical influences early in life: His mother was a pianist, his uncle a composer, and his aunt a contralto with the Metropolitan Opera. Little wonder, then, that Barber expressed certainty that he'd be a composer when he was only nine years old.

At the age of 14, he entered the Curtis Institute, triple majoring in piano, composition, and voice. He was basically absurdly talented at all three of them, and quickly became the darling of the school's founder, Marie Louise Curtis Bok, who would subsequently introduce Barber to his future publishers in the Schirmer family. While at Curtis, he met Gian Carlo Menotti, who would go on to become his life-long romantic (and sometimes artistic) partner. (Menotti was a composer in his own right, tho he has generally not been as widely recognized an appreciated as Barber has. I personally find Menotti's works to be rather bland and uninspiring, so don't expect to see Amahl and the Night Visitors featured here any time soon.) Unlike many composers who struggle to gain recognition in their lifetimes, Barber was pretty much an instant success, and many of his works entered the standard repertoire as soon as they were premièred. His few flops — most famously the Antony and Cleopatra opera that he wrote for the opening of the current Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966, which was savaged in the press and not exactly beloved by the audience — are far eclipsed by his other works — you have definitely heard his Adagio for Strings, even if it wasn't identified as such. Said works are somewhat scattered between ensembles and genres — he didn't write a whole cycle of symphonies or slew of concerti; his largest compositional category is probably voice and piano — but they are each and every one of them gems.

Rather unusually, the commission for Summer Music was paid for not by an organization or consortium, but by subscribers to a chamber music series in Detroit. The idea was to defray the cost of the new work so that the individual audience members of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit would only have to chip in a few dollars, much like a pre-internet in Kickstarter-style crowdfunding. (This model of commissioning didn't catch on in 1954, but it seems considerably more viable today.) Originally, Barber was supposed to produce a septet for three winds, three strings, and piano, but after spending a summer with the New York Wind Quintet, he altered the instrumentation to fit that ensemble. Despite working very closely with the NYWQ in the compositional process (one of the members reportedly drew up a chart of chords that are particularly difficult for a wind quintet to play well, and Barber gleefully included all of them), Barber honored the initial arrangement and let the Detroit players give the world première. (As soon as they could, the NYWQ began playing the piece, and with gusto, playing it more than fifteen times in the first year alone.)

Bassoon and horn set the piece on its way, singing out languid, indolent lines quickly interspersed with colorful interjections from the flute and clarinet. What follows is less programmatic than suggestive — there are interludes that suggest idle lounging in a shady hammock and others that suggest the astringent chirping of insects, but no narrative arc links these together, and many passages seem to have no direct counterpart in the external world, instead conjuring a mood or emotion that one might feel on a lazy August afternoon. Each section is distinct and clearly defined, but they flow into each other easily and without high-stakes drama. A reprise of the opening material about halfway thru re-starts the piece with a greater sense of forward motion. There is an interruption in the form of a rapid ascent followed by yet a third re-launch, this time leading to a brilliant, swirling apotheosis before the dregs of the piece swirl quickly by and wink out of existence, like a memory of distant youth.

JS Bach: Cello Suite No. 3: V. Bourée I and II

Hey all! The fifth movement of my project to record JS Bach's third cello suite is now online! (You can find the earlier movements here in case you missed them or want to listen again.)

Music Monday: Baker: Cello Concerto

Back to the land of the living! David Baker was born in Indianapolis in 1931, and spent the bulk of his early life in that state, attending the University of Indiana for both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Somewhat unusually, both of these degrees were in music education instead of composition or performance, and indeed, education seems to be an ongoing passion of Baker's, especially when it comes to the world of Jazz. He was an early codifier of many of Jazz's unwritten traditions, and published several seminal treatises on Jazz improvisation in the 70s and 80s. Down Beat magazine made him the third ever inductee into their Jazz Education Hall of Fame, and many other organizations have recognized him for his accomplishments in this regard. He currently teaches at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University.

As a composer, Baker has been astonishingly prolific, penning upwards of 2000 compositions to date, ranging from standard Jazz charts to thru-composed symphonic works and everything in between. (Since he studied with Gunther Schuller, the term "Third Stream" — Schuller's label for works that fuse classical and Jazz idioms — is never far off from the works in the middle. I'm not particularly interested in diving into the various cans of worms associated with that term today, but it seems important to note the connection.) Today's featured work, his cello concerto from 1975, falls decidedly more towards the classical side, at least until the final movement.

Keeping in line with traditional concerto protocol, the orchestra presents a brief introduction before the soloist's entrance.  It's a swirling mass of turbulent sounds, and the cello does little to change the mood, tumbling in with angular, disjointed motives and mutterings. There are hints of lyricism and almost-tonal harmony sprinkled about the movement, but they never quite cohere, feeling instead like fragments of inert past languages dissolved in an acidic stew of contemporary disorientation. Eventually, this phantasmagoric wandering works its way to exhaustion, and the movement ends with a ghostly whisper from the cello's upper register.

Every theme in the expansive second movement is derived, in some way, from the solo cadenza that begins it, tho these derivations are not always immediately obvious. The harmonic language is still far from familiar, but there does seem to be more genuine lyricism here; for all the unusual twists and turns, things gel around long lines, singing despite their sinuousness. There are various orchestral punctuations, but they feel less like accompaniment in their own right and more like interpolations in the solo part. Despite occasional flowerings of consonance and warmth, the movement ends much as it began, in a distant, etherial world.

Right from the start, it's clear that the finale is going to have some Jazz in it, but it's a far cry from a bland injection of a tune with swing into a piece that otherwise lives in the realm of high modernism — it's a real blending of what has come before. It's a dissected, exploded Jazz tune, one that's been put thru a blender and then carefully pinned down like some massive exotic butterfly in a surrealist taxidermy shop. Even harmonically it's a mixture of worlds, with the chord changes from "Back Home Again in Indiana" alternating with a twelve-tone row. It's a wild ride, and it ends with a fittingly irreverent tumble into silence.

Music Monday: Bonds: Songs

Before diving into the music for today's post, I want to draw attention to a quote by the poet whose texts are set in it. When faced with the question of why black authors were less prolific than their white counterparts, Langston Hughes pointed out [Google Book, p 528] that, due to racism, black authors were not afforded the same lucrative opportunities to write for mass media as white authors, and thus "[are] not in touch with the peripheral sources of literary income that enable others more fortunate to take a year off and write". He was talking specifically about writers of words, but the same considerations apply to writers of music as well. Conductors and performers have never made commissioning decisions based solely on musical quality (if that can even be determined objectively); they've always tried to work with people they like. Given the entrenchment of structural racism in our society and the oblivious self-positioning of concert music as the music of the cultural élite, it is wholly unsurprising that African-American concert composers would find many fewer opportunities to ply their craft, and that the works they produced for what opportunities they did get would languish in relative obscurity.

(Obviously, things were somewhat better financially in the world of Jazz, a rich and vibrant genre created and shaped at every turn by African-American musicians. White mainstream culture's treatment of Jazz was (and frequently still is) baldly racist, and many white composers are guilty of pilfering from it in highly questionable ways, but at least black musicians could have successful careers in it. My focus on concert composers for African-American History month is emphatically not meant to claim that concert music is in any way superior to or more legitimate than Jazz — these posts are not trying to replace the old canon with a new, equally exclusive one — I am merely focussing on the genres of music I know best. While my knowledge of concert music is far from complete, I know enough about Jazz only to be aware of the vast, yawning chasms of my ignorance.)

Now for the music! Margaret Allison Bonds was born in Chicago in 1913, and she spent the first two decades of her life there. Her mother was a practiced musician and gave Bonds her earliest training on piano, an instrument that Bonds continued playing thruout her life. While studying music at Northwestern University, she became, at the age of twenty, the first African-American soloist to play with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and had earned her Master's in Music by the age of 21. She continued her studies at Juilliard, but returned to Chicago to open her own music school (where she taught, among others, a young Ned Rorem), and was also active as a performer, composer, and impresario. In 1968, she moved out to Los Angeles, where she lived until her death in 1972.

Dark, brooding chords introduce her setting of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" from 1942, a setting of the poem by Langston Hughes. (Bonds had a long and enduring friendship with Hughes, and they collaborated on several projects including a cantata and at least one musical.) As with the opening words, these chords return at various points to anchor the song, sometimes in the original, but sometimes transformed from melancholy to grandeur and even joy. The music slips easily, almost dreamily, between styles, but never loses its powerful cohesion. (According to Wikipedia, Bonds submitted this piece as part of an application to study with the great French teacher Nadia Boulanger, but when Boulanger saw the song, she declared that Bonds needed no further lessons and declined to teach her. Listening, it's not hard to hear why, even if the story is apocryphal.)

Several years later, Bonds set three more poems by Hughes, resulting in the "Three Dream Portraits" (published 1953), a cycle that shows up in pretty much every biographical sketch of the composer that I've found. The first is "Minstrel Man", set to a rolling accompaniment that seems to hover right on the cusp between comfort and tragedy — fittingly, for a text that has to do with missing a black man's deep suffering because of his (forcedly) happy surface. The mood lifts in the "Dream Variations", with a whirling, expansive fantasy land that blossoms almost to the point of ecstasy before catching on a moment of poignancy and ending on a reserved note. It's back down to earth for the concluding "I too Sing America", which is at turns  sarcastic, falsely cheerful, and boldly swaggering. The swagger wears off by the end, however, and the cycle draws to a close in a somewhat gloomy mood despite the assurances of the text. Looking at the subsequent and continuing history of racism in this country, it seems a sadly prescient choice.

JS Bach: Cello Suite No. 3: IV. Sarabande

Hey all! The fourth movement of my project to record JS Bach's third cello suite is now online! (You can find the first three movements here in case you missed them or want to listen again.)

For an explanation of why I feel justified in being as free with the score as I'm being, I devoted last week's post to talking about the question of textual fidelity, so check it out!