Contemporary Classics February 12, 2019 - Music Described in Richard Power's "Orfeo"

Tonight’s Contemporary Classics is featuring some of the music mentioned and described in Richard Powers book “Orfeo”.  This book published in 2014 is the story of 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els, whose home experiments in biohacking musical patterns into a bacterial human pathogen have attracted the worried hazmat-suit-level attention of Homeland Security.  It is a long story but for those who love contemporary music it is well worth reading as there are some wonderful descriptions of music from the 20^th century.  Tonight we will be exploring three of those works: Messiaen’s  “Quartet for the End of Time”, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D, Op. 47 and Partch’s “Barstow: 8 Hitchhikers' Inscriptions”.

Quartet for the End of Time is a piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen for clarinet (in B-flat), violin, cello, and piano. Messiaen was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz.  With some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard (Carl-Albert Brüll) he wrote the piece for fellow prisioners clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier. The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on 15 January 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards.  Messiaen later recalled: "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension." Messiaen wrote in the Preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation.  It is in eight movements:

I.               "Crystal liturgy", for the full quartet

II.             "Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time", for the full quartet.

III.           "Abyss of birds", for solo clarinet.

IV.           "Interlude", for violin, cello, and clarinet.

V.             "Praise to the eternity of Jesus", for cello and piano.

VI.           "Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets", for the full quartet.

VII.         "Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time", for the full quartet.

VIII.       "Praise to the immortality of Jesus", for violin and piano.

We are going to close this hour of music mentioned and described in Richard Powers book “Orfeo” with the first 6 movements of Harry Partch’s “Barstow: 8 Hitchhikers' Inscriptions”. Composer, theorist, instrument builder, and performer, Harry Partch stands with Henry Cowell and John Cage among the great experimenters in American Music. Constrained by conventional scales and tuning, Partch devised his own instruments to capture the sounds he imagined. Barstow, composed in 1941 and revised many times afterward through 1968, ranks among Partch's best-known and most accessible works. A setting for voices and instruments of eight hitchhiker's inscriptions along a guard rail near Barstow, California, the work immortalizes the dying world of the American hobo. Its intimate, honest view of Depression-era America provides a foil to the nostalgic Americana of the period. 

We are going to close tonight’s Contemporary Classics program dedicated to some of the music mentioned and described in Richard Powers book “Orfeo” with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D, Op. 47. 

This work represented a come back for Shostakovich who was heavily criticized by Pravda which attacked his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  This work was originally well received but then apparently Stalin decided he hated it so Shostakovich faced censure.  The 5^th symphony was seen by many as a subtle attack on the suppression of artists – and fortunately this was so subtle that it slipped by the thugs that ran the Soviet Union.  At the premiere in Leningrad, there was a vociferous ovation lasting over a half hour and the conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Yevgeny Mravinsky raised the score above his head in triumph and defiance.   And members of the audience cried during the third movement, largo.  There was some official resistance to the piece but it was overwhelmed by public adulation.  The work is in 4 movements: Moderato-Allegro non troppo, Allegretto, Largo and Allegro non-troppo.