Contemporary Classics August 6, 2019 - Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music

Tonight on Contemporary Classics we are featuring some of the music being presented at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music that runs from August 8-12^th of this year.  The festival is under the direction of British composer Thomas Ades and features a wide range of contemporary music.

First lets consider Oliver Knussen’s “Whitman Settings”.  British composer Oliver Knussen was an instrumental figure in the beginnings of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.  Born in 1952, he suddenly and unexpectantly died right before last year’s Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival.  Much of last years festival as dedicated to his memory.  This year as part of the final concert on August 12^th they are doing  Oliver Knussen’s “Whitman Settings”.  Composed in 1991, Oliver Knussen wrote about this work: “Although these versions of characteristically powerful but unusually short poems by Walt Whitman constitute my eighth concert work for a soprano voice, they are my first in many years for voice and piano. I was very conscious, while composing, of trying to re-imagine a very familiar genre with fresh ears – specifically of setting the voice in different contexts within the all-encompassing range of the piano. All four poems muse on things in space or the sky, and all four songs grow from the short idea heard at the outset.”  In 1992 he wrote the version for soprano and orchestra which you will listening to tonight. Knussen calls his Whitman Settings “the most intricate and kaleidoscopic orchestral score [he’s] ever done.”

Sudip Bose wrote in the American Scholar about the first song “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” “It begins with a frenetic orchestral introduction, the voice entering with a bell-like sonority amid the vivid colors of the orchestra—brassy, bright, glittering. Whitman’s speaker describes his bewilderment at the learned astronomer he has gone to hear, a scholar who thrills the gathered crowd but who reduces the wonders of the celestial night to a series of figures and equations”

Sudip Bose wrote in the American Scholar about the second song  “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”  “Knussen’s exotic score beautifully captures the spaciousness of this particular text (as well as its loneliness and feeling of isolation), despite the concise nature of the utterance. There’s so much movement here, as well: the soprano voice flickering like a firefly, leaping gymnastically to great heights, then plunging into the depths as she traverses the line “Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”   Knussen is reported to have described this song as “probably the most complex thing of anything I’ve done at all, the way it’s put together. But however complex the workings of what I do, or however manic the working out of detail, I do tend to approach things from the point of view of the effect”

Of the third song “The Dalliance of Eagles,”  Bose writes “Whitman’s birds of prey come together, then part, their “talons loosing,” their erotic dance coming to a sudden, puzzling halt only at the end, as the music drops off mid-phrase.

Bose describes the final song “The Voice of the Rain,” “as having  rich and opulent harmonies."  

György Kurtág Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, Op. 42.   The 24 minutes long work consists of a enormous Fantasia in three parts I. Senza Tempo - Sostenuto, Parlando, Pulsato II. Vivo, Agitato – Recitativo & III. Choral – Ricapitulazione  and ending with a coda containing two parts (recitativo & epilogo). The range of tone colour in the composition is undoubtedly the key element in its effectiveness, Kurtág luxuriates in the possibilities offered by the two solo instruments and the huge orchestra. His instrumentation is magical, the exceptionally big percussion section is enriched with the incomparable sound of a new instrument, the steel drum. The ”concertante”was premiered in 2003 in Copenhagen by Hiromi Kikuchi, Ken Hakii and the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schonwand. In 2006, this work won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.   The award chair Marc Satterwhite wrote “The orchestra is used to full advantage but without overshadowing the role of the soloists.   After ranging through many changes of mood, tempo and texture, from intimate to violent, the final section is mysterious and ambiguous.”

The American Premiere of this work will also be part of the final concert of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music on August 12^th.

Joseph Stevenson of All Music wrote “Ruth Crawford Seeger was among the most daring and accomplished American avant garde composers. She wrote music in which a lot happens all at once, on every possible level. She exercised strict control over all aspects of the music, rhythm, and tone color, as well as the individual notes of the melodic lines, creating music of extraordinary dramatic tension. This quartet is often considered her masterpiece.

The String Quartet, a 12-minute work is fully as concentrated and advanced work. The texture throughout favors lines that are highly independent from each other. The first movement, Rubato assai, has the kind of wide, arching intervals that are a part of the Webern-Schoenberg style, perhaps not surprising since Crawford wrote the quartet in Berlin during her Guggenheim Fellowship year of 1930-1931. The way the movement increases in energy by piling up on itself, so to speak, is typical of Crawford's music and sets the work apart from its European models.

The second movement, Leggiero (lightly), is canonic, with imitative entrances cast in distinct registers; the lines of the music are often linked from one instrument to the next like a chain. The third movement is a remarkable study in what Crawford called "dissonant dynamics." Each of the four instruments has its own independent rise and fall in loudness on different held notes. The assertion of one particular note transfers the listener's attention to it, so the melody emerges note by note from an ever-shifting cloud of dissonance. Later, Crawford would attempt to make this effect even clearer to the audience by arranging this movement as an Andante for string orchestra, trusting that the conductor would control these emerging melodies even better than individual string players could.

The Allegro finale features hard-edged playing at the frog of the bow by the first violin, juxtaposed with fast unison or doubled answers by the other strings, posing a tricky problem in dynamic balance for the performers. As the movement progresses, the three lower strings adopt the material and manner of the violin, and vice versa, by stages, then return via the same path to the texture of the beginning. It's a bold concept, brilliantly executed.

This quartet represented both the high point of Crawford's career as an avant-garde composer and a premature end to it. After she became a Communist her music veered more toward the "proletarian music movement” and subsequent pioneering work in American folk song. She did not return to the path indicated by this great quartet again until 1952, by which time she was already fatally stricken with cancer.

Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931 was performed as part of the 3^rd concert on August 10^th of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

Lets open this second hour of this Contemporary Classics broadcast, which is celebrating the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music with Poul Ruders’ Symphony No. 5 which is also part of the final concert of the Festival on August 12^th.  As previously mentioned the Festival runs from August 8^th to 12^th at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox MA. Poul Ruders’ Symphony No. 5  was completed in 2013. The symphony, composed in three movements,  at first would seem quite conventional with an explosive, quick-paced first movement followed by an hypnotically inward-looking slow movement, followed by a bristling dance finale. However Ruders occupies a sound world all its own. The first movement's opening brass fanfare is followed immediately by startling police whistles and pounding drums- music of volcanic power and intensity. The slow movement employs a huge registral span with dissonant pulsations reminiscent of Morton Feldman.  The third movement's funky dance rhythms collide with dense harmonic underpinnings.  A review in The Guardian called it a “bracing, satisfying experience” while a review in Fanfare called it “mercurial, playful and surprisingly tonal”.

We are going to close tonight’s presentation of music from the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music with Israeli-American composer Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal.  This work was performed as part of the third concert of the Festival on August 10^th.  

Anea Crystal was written in 2008.  The preface to the score explains that “anea” is “an invented name for a music crystal made similarly to an ionic crystal.”  The two main portions of this work Seed I and Seed II can be compared to the seed crystals chemists use to precipitate the growth of crystals in solution. Trevor Bača in his essay “Nature, Song, Transfiguration: The Instrumental Music of Chaya Czernowin”  “Seed I and Seed II are musical “seeds” that function as fragments by themselves and that, when taken together, precipitate the growth of a larger complex. This sort of compositional thinking provides the composer with a sort of laboratory in which new details of musical structure can be invented and explored, metaphorizing the motion of music according to an understanding of chemical process.”    Seed I and Seed II are for string quartet and Anea is for string octet, being built of both Seeds together played simultaneously with some changes. Chaya Czernowin writes “The five pieces on this series are each a concise and concentrated focus on a singular physical gesture. Close examination of the gesture reveals the strange physical laws of the world in which the gesture exists, and the body performing it. One could conceive of Anea Crystal as an ionic crystal of gestures.”

The pieces belong to the series “Shifting Gravity” together with the pieces Sheva (Seven) and Sahaf (Drift).