Meet the Composers

Program Notes

Eric Nathan Just a Moment (2021)

"Just a Moment (2021) is a meditation on distance and intimacy. One oboe is placed on stage and the other off-stage at a distance within the performance space. They call out to each other, note-by-note, phrase-by-phrase, creating an unfolding melody, catching each other’s notes, embracing these tones and the space that divides them, with subtle unisons and half-step dissonances mingling in echoes. There is a magical, trance-like sense of contemplation to the work, but also a sense of dancing joy. The audience hears the oboe on stage, and the echoes of the distant oboe from above, embracing and surrounding all in a sonic choreography that meets in the space between. What the experience of the struggles of the past year has taught me most is to appreciate fleeting moments of beauty and connection, and how these can sustain us." (Eric Nathan, September 2022)

Errolyn Wallen Dervish (2001)

In dervish dances, contrary to popular myth, there is absolutely no hedonistic wildness; the swirling skirts move from rapt and still devotion. The Sufi dance is solely for worship. I wanted to capture this atmosphere (Dervish proceeds from an intense, trance-like state) and also to set it beside the passion that is in speed. (Errollyn Wallen, 2001)

Arvo Pärt Spiegel im Spiegel (1978)

Shortly before he emigrated from Soviet Estonia to Berlin in 1978, Arvo Pärt received a commission from Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov.  The result was Spiegel im spiegel, or “mirror(s) in the mirror,” a piece that upends the conventions of instrumental virtuosity.  Rather than flashy violinistic figurations, the piece requires an almost superhuman calm that can be translated to almost any instrument; the arrangement for oboe and piano on this program is one of many possible incarnations of a work that has also made dozens of appearances in movies, television, and popular culture.  

Exemplifying his own particular brand of “minimal” music, Spiegel im spiegel operates under the guiding metaphor alluded to by the title: an “infinity mirror,” in which two mirrors are set up to reflect one another in parallel planes.  The composer compared the piano part to a “guardian angel,” grounding and encircling the solo instrument with a near-ostinato of water-droplet arpeggiation in the middle register and occasional bell sounds (a trademark of the composer) ringing out above and below.  Emerging from this tinkling clockwork, the melodic line unfolds as a series of paired reflections, each centering on the pitch A.  Slowly ascending phrases, each one note longer than the last, are answered by gently descending phrases.  The pattern could continue forever, extending into the infinite, yet the cyclical return to the focal pitch A also gives a sense of ebb and flow that the composer likened to “returning home after being away.”

Even in Pärt’s famously contemplative oeuvre, this duo holds a special place for its intense tranquility–or tranquil intensity.  “Everything redundant must be left aside,” the composer notes, “Just like the composer has to reduce his ego when writing the music, the musician too must put his ego aside when performing the piece.”  Accordingly, the players themselves seem to recede in the face of the music; they are gradually effaced by the reflected light of the score until they reach a vanishing point.  In this way, the music manages to be at once profoundly individual and, in a sense, impersonal–like the eternally receding cascade of reflections in a mirror in a mirror in a mirror.... (Beth Levy, 2022)

Olivier Messiaen Poèmes pour Mi, Book II (1936-1937)

V. L’épouse (The wife)

VI. Ta voix (Your voice)

VII. Les deux guerriers (The two warriors)

VIII. Le collier (The necklace)

IX. Prière exaucée (Prayer answered)

In 1986, Olivier Messiaen looked back to identify four of his main preoccupations, framing them with his characteristic combination of religious and natural imagery: “There have been four conflicts in my life as a composer,” he wrote: “The first is that, as a composer-believer, I speak of faith to atheists.  How do you expect them to understand me?  My second conflict is that I’m an ornithologist and speak of birds to people who live in cities, who have never wakened at four o’clock in the morning to hear the call of birds in the countryside.... Now here’s my third conflict: when hearing sounds, I see colors in my mind’s eye.... No matter how much I put in my music–harmonies, sound complexes, and orchestration–listeners hear, but they see nothing.  As for my fourth conflict... most people think that rhythm and the steady beat of a military march are one and the same, whereas [to me] rhythm is in fact an unequal element given to fluctuations, like the waves in the sea, the sound of the wind, or the shape of tree branches.”

Messiaen’s Catholic fervor and musical aptitude announced themselves early.  He entered the Paris Conservatoire at age eleven and received prizes in all his chosen fields–organ, improvisation, and composition.  Deeply moved by the Catholic Revival which flourished in France between the wars, he was resident organist at the church La Trinité in Paris for more than forty years, interrupted only by his service in WWII, during which time he composed his landmark Quartet for the End of Time (1941).  His embrace of spiritual themes and Biblical imagery is reflected at every stage of his long career, including such titles as L’Ascension (1933), Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus  (1949), and Saint François d’Assise (1975-1983).

In Poemes pour Mi, we find Messiaen’s characteristic conflation of spiritual and earthly (in this case, conjugal) love.  “Mi” was a nickname for the composer’s first wife, Claire Delbos, a violinist and composer in her own right.  Messiaen also had another woman in mind when writing: Marcelle Bunlet, a prominent Wagner soprano, who gave the premiere with Messiaen at the piano.  The nine songs of the cycle as a whole trace the mystic journey of a married couple, with the midpoint (the first of the songs on this program) devoted to “L’epouse,” referring both to Delbos and to the Church as the “bride of Christ,” and the seventh song describing the fervent struggle of the warrior-lovers on their path toward the divine.  For the text, Messiaen created his own surreal incantations on images taken from the New Testament, interleaved with those of his own devising.  Particularly noteworthy are the “awakening bird of spring” who makes an impressionistic appearance in “Ta voix” and the lovely circular figures in “Le Collier” that suggest at once a bejeweled necklace, a lover’s arms, the cycles of nature, and an image of eternity.  Though parts of the cycle display Messiaen’s love of Hindu rhythmic formulae and rhythmic palindromes, in the final song, Messiaen pays homage most overtly to the recitational quality of Gregorian Chant, with static vocal lines that blossom into rapture at important words in the text: âme (soul) and joie (joy). (Beth Levy, 2022)

Maurice Ravel Two Melodies Hebraiques (1914)

I. Kaddisch

II. L’Enigme eternelle

The aura of the exotic that hovers around Maurice Ravel was partly imposed upon him and partly of his own making.  Raised in Paris as the son of a Basque mother and Swiss father, he seems to have embraced the eclectic freedom of an outsider, while also standing shoulder to shoulder with Claude Debussy, whom he outlived by nearly twenty years, as the most important French composer of the early twentieth century.  Ravel’s many Spanish-themed scores come to mind: Rapsodie espagnole, L’Heure espagnole, and above all the ubiquitous Bolero.  In addition to these works, which are often linked (rightly or wrongly) to his Basque heritage, there are many other forays into folk cultures that do not come with a ready-made biographical explanation: songs that evoke Greek and Japanese sources, his later jazz-inflected pieces, the orientalist Shéhérazade songs and Chansons madécasses, and the Chants populaires, which comprises songs from the Spanish, French, Italian, and Hebrew, with later installments adding Scottish, Flemish, and Russian to the mix.  Rather than claiming some kind of personal affinity with all these traditions, Ravel embraced the creative distance of the craftsman.  He quipped to friend and music critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, “Doesn’t it ever occur to those people that I can be ‘artificial’ by nature?”

Ravel cultivated a reputation as a dandy and an atheist, which makes the compelling spirituality of his Deux mélodies hébraïques, or Two Hebrew Songs, especially surprising. The work was commissioned by soprano Alvina Alvi of the St. Petersburg Opera in 1914, and some who heard it came away with the false impression that the composer was in fact a Jew. Despite the title, the two song texts actually feature a mixture of tongues: Hebrew and Aramaic in the first song, “Kaddisch,” and Yiddish interspersed with more generic “tra la la-ing” in the second, “L’Enigme eternelle.” What is “Hebrew” about these songs has more to do with their melodies, which Ravel composed with an ear attuned to folk sources. The prayer that Ravel sets in the first song is not the full text recited by Jews at times of mourning but an excerpt, sometimes called the “half-Kaddish” that may be compared to the Christian doxology–an interjection of thanks and praise. Ravel places a melody replete with modal inflections and ornamental flourishes against the backdrop of a piano accompaniment–which the composer himself played at the premiere–at first crystalline and bell-like, then gently rippling, like the strumming of a guitar. Turning from the prayerful to the playful, Ravel gives his own answer to the world’s “eternal enigma” in the form of a stylized folk song, with impressionistic harmonies giving the feeling of an ecstatic but disembodied dance. (Beth Levy, 2022)

T.J. Anderson Shouts

Thomas Jefferson Anderson (b. 1928) is an influential composer who is often commended for his artful incorporation of various stylistic influences. Anderson’s training in Western classical music developed along with deep roots in the jazz tradition, and Anderson has referred to himself as a “musical anthropologist.” In conferring Anderson with an honorary doctorate, Barry A. G. Greenfield lauded the composer as a “deft synthesizer of traditions, and an advocate for pluralism in the classical music canon.” 

This characteristically skillful integration of varied musical experiences is abundantly present in Shouts (1997). The title likely refers to the “ring shout,” a sacred ritual of ecstatic worship involving song, dance, and experiences of euphoria as the Holy Spirit enters the participants. According to historian Bernard E. Powers, Jr., “As enslaved people adopted Christianity in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, the foregoing rituals [circular worship dances from West and Central Africa] became a profound aspect of the Africanized Christianity they practiced. …Aside from its strictly religious function, during the slave era as Africans from various ethnic groups joined together in the ring shout, it became an important mechanism through which a new common African American identity was formed.” 

Tellingly, Anderson instructs the musicians to sit in a circular configuration, as far apart as possible. The oboe starts the piece alone, reminiscent of how a single voice begins a ring shout, setting its tempo. A songlike quality continues throughout much of the piece, but dance is in the mix, as well. Percussive col legno techniques (in which the players strike the instrument’s strings with the bow) are reminiscent of a specific ring shout gesture: one of the celebrants would sometimes rhythmically strike the ground with a broomstick. These and other jaunty, repetitive rhythmic gestures recur like a sort of calling card, interrupting but then eventually generating elements of call-and-response.

While exuberant rhythmic figures and quasi-vocal displays have an obvious ecstatic quality, a mysterious, quiet sense of peace abounds in the piece as well. Perhaps each musician in Shouts meant to embody a direct, personal communion with the divine, in addition to a communal, ritualized experience.

In recent discussion with his daughter, Dr. Anderson said, “I wish for each of my compositions to be interpreted by the freedom of the performer as well as the listening audience.” In matters both musical and spiritual, Shouts is a shining example of this principle at work.

-Emily Joy Sullivan (2022)