Four Centuries of Great Music January 22, 2023 Chamber Music Works That Need Be Programmed Episode 3

This is the 3rd episode of Four Centuries of Great Music entitled "Chamber Music Works That Need to Be Programmed".

Born in 1867 in New Hampshire, Amy soon shown herself to be a prodigy on the piano including improvisation.   After her family moved to Boston area, she continued her development as a pianist and began composition and theory lessons.  At 16 she gave her concert debut, but ended concertizing at 18 following marriage.  Because her new husband did not want her performing.  She was limited to two concerts a year and both had to be for charity.  However her husband did not restrict her composition, but did not allow her to continue composition lessons, so most of her further development as a composer was the result of her own self-study.  Although she enjoyed composing, she considered herself first and foremost a pianist.  She returned to piano performance at the death of her husband.

Her Piano Trio, Op. 150 was composed during her late period in 1938 while Beach was at the MacDowell Colony, a colony for composers and artists, in Peterborough, New Hampshire.   This piano trio was first performed at the MacDowell Club in January 1939 with Beach at the piano, and it was published by The Composers, Inc. that same year.

This piece would turn out to be the last chamber work that Beach would compose in her lifetime.  Due to heart disease, she retired from composing in 1940 and died in 1944.  The trio was composed during a time where Beach was exploring dissonance in her works, which she had started to use after going to Europe for the first time in 1915.  However, the late-Romantic style in which Beach composed, as seen in the virtuosic piano part, was considered to be old-fashioned by the time the trio had been composed. Like her earlier Piano Quintet, the trio has three movements, and a slow movement with a scherzo.  The movements are marked Allegro, Lento Expressivo, and Allegro con Brio.   The trio also features equal writing, and importance, for each instrument.   Similar to the Themes and Variation featuring a theme from a past song, the trio has fragments from her song, “Allien” and the piano piece “The Returning Hunter.”


Next is Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1, "Calvary"

Perkinson was born in Manhattan in 1932, and names for the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and New York University. He later transferred to the Manhattan School of Music and received several composition prizes during those studies.

“When I sat down to write this string quartet, I was not trying to write something Black, I was just writing out of my experience,” said Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson.  That is something that Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson always did.  He came to the American music scene in the 1950s in the middle of the modernest battle between the music of Babbitt and other modernist and the neo-romantics of Barber and Copland.  Perkinson like the “dean of Afro-American music”, William Grant Still wrote from their hearts.

Perkinson composed his Quartet No. 1 in 1956 and it was premiered at Carnegie Hall  the same year.  Its use of dissonance and counterpoint is often similar to other works composed at the same time. The quartet, however, marks one of the first times Perkinson clearly based a work on  a black spiritual, based on ‘Calvary’. Perkinson was familiar with the spiritual from church services.  The work is in three movements marked I. Allegro; II. Quarter Note = 54; III. Rondo, Allegro Vivace The spiritual provided the basis for the melody of the first movement, although it is transformed to the syncopated and angular style characteristic of Perkinson’s compositions from this period. The movement is generated through the development and transformation of the Calvary melody, providing a rich source of motives and intervals for Perkinson’s counterpoint. If the spiritual tune is present in the second and third movements, it is heavily disguised. The second is slow and expressive while the third (a rondo) is more agitated.  Both feature striking alternations of homophonic passages with precise counterpoint and voice transfers.


Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are continuing the series of Chamber Music Works that Need to be Programmed with an emphasis on Chamber music by female composers, composers of color, under-recognized composers, American composers and composers who are living and breathing (not having died often over 200 years ago).

Next is Germaine Tailleferre’s Sonata for Harp.

Born Germaine Taillefesse in 1892, she changed her name to “Tailleferre” to spite her father who refused to support her music studies. He considered music an unworthy pursuit, and a “woman studying music” he once remarked, “was no better than her becoming a streetwalker.” She never forgave him for his inflexible attitude towards her artistic gifts. Embittered, she is said to have regarded his demise in 1916 as something of a relief.   Studying at the Paris Conservatoire she immediately won various prizes and caught the eyes of her fellow students Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. When she published her first string quartet in 1918, she was welcomed as a major talent and as the only woman into the private musical club that eventually blossomed into the composer collaborative known as “Les Six.”

Her harp sonata however was written much later in her career in 1953 for the Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta. The sonata was later revised in 1957 after the premiere. The sonata is praised for its influences of jazz, Spanish Habanera and expressionism and is in 3 movements I. Allegretto; II. Lento and III. Perpetuum Mobile

The opening movement begins like a lullaby, with a sweet melody played by the soloist. After this is established Tailleferre plays with the Habanera rhythms, which are nuanced within the music. The harp sparkles through into its upper range as the dynamics also begin to creep up. The wave of different textures and timbres Tailleferre creates during just this movement is a real feast for the ears as the soloist moves up and down the instrument. The opening lullaby theme returns at the end of the movement before trailing off quietly.
 
The slow middle movement opens with a new theme which takes some time to properly unravel. Opposing rhythms between the harpists hands are at the centre of this theme as many different voices crossover one another. The dynamics are quiet, giving a mysterious atmosphere to the movement. The theme is explored in some depth in this movement, before the music concludes quietly.
 
The perpetuum mobile begins at a quick pace from the beginning. The agile harpist creates swells of notes that are accented by peaks and troughs of the melody. The sweet sound of the harp and the lightness of the string plucks plays well into the perpetuum mobile theme. Certainly the most virtuosic and challenging of the three movements, the finale comes to its climax, where the harp plays a bold syncopated figure before a big glissando finishes the sonata.
 

Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor
Lets open this second hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great music with the music of Teresa Carreño.  Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1853 but really began her concertizing career at 8 after her family emigrated to New York City in 1862.  And she performed for President Abraham Lincoln in the White House in the Fall of 1863.  As a pianist she displayed such force and passion that she was known as the “lioness of the piano.” However, Carreño was also an accomplished composer, and not only wrote works for piano but also composed several pieces for chamber ensembles, of which her String Quartet in B minor, composed in 1896 reveals a style that closely follows many of the common practices of her day. For example, the chromatic and arpeggiated subject of the quasi-fugal section that brings the fourth movement to an end seems to anticipate the fugal subject of the “Von der Wissenschaft” section of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra composed later that year.

Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - I. Allegro
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - II. Andante
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - III. Scherzo
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor - IV. Allegro risoluto

Charles Martin Loeffler: Music for 4 Stringed Instruments

Charles Martin Loeffler was born in Schöneberg bei Berlin, Germany. By age 13, Loeffler knew that he wanted to be a professional violinist, and was accepted as a student of Joseph Joachim, a friend of Brahms and a major champion of his music. Loeffler studied with Joachim from 1874-1877, and when Loeffler moved to the U.S. at age 20, he brought along a letter of recommendation from Joachim. Loeffler first moved to New York, then eventually made Boston his permanent home, serving as the assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 20 years; he resigned the post in 1903 to focus on teaching and writing music until his death in 1935.

Despite his German nationality, Loeffler gravitated more toward the French tradition sometimes with unmistakable echoes of Debussy.  So much did he identify with the French sound and to avoid the “German” stereotype during the First World War, he even claimed Alsatian heritage despite being born and raised near Berlin from clearly German heritage.

He has sometimes been called a post-Impressionist composer, though Impressionism was not nearly the only influence in his musical development. Sounds as diverse as medieval music, Russian folk music, and American jazz entered his compositions. His style was difficult to pin down. He often created decadent pastiches of music that were light in structure and heavy in a mixture of rich romanticism and modernism.

His Music for four Stringed Instruments was written in 1917 as an elegy to the first US aviator to die in the First World War.  It has the open lyricism of the Dvořák quartets, but is very rigorously crafted.  It contains a devilishly difficult cello part, in which the cellist is required to retune her instrument several times while playing.


He was a meticulous composer and a frequent reviser.

Charles Martin Loeffler: Music for 4 Stringed Instruments: I. Poco adagio
Charles Martin Loeffler: Music for 4 Stringed Instruments: II. Le saint jour de Pâques (The Holy Day of Easter)
Charles Martin Loeffler: Music for 4 Stringed Instruments: III. Moderato

We will close today’s Four Centuries of Great Music with Mary Watkins’ Summer Days written in 2020.  Mary Watkins fits all of the categories as a Black, American, living the breathing woman whom you have probably not heard of by chamber music audiences. 

Mary D. Watkins studied composition and classical music at Howard University. She has composed three operas and has written for symphony orchestras, chamber and jazz ensembles, film, theatre, dance, and choral groups.