Series Concert II
Invention, Homage, and Expansion
Monday, September 9
Program notes by Timothy Summers unless otherwise noted
Monday, September 9
Program notes by Timothy Summers unless otherwise noted
Luigi Boccherini — Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid
Luigi Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, in 1743. He shares little with J.S. Bach beyond the first syllable of his last name and an exceptional ability to write music for cello. Boccherini was one of the first great virtuosi of the instrument. He wrote hundreds of fluent and brilliant works for string ensembles, of which more than a hundred were quintets with two cellos. Of these, the Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid is among the most famous.
Boccherini was unambiguous about how and where the Musica notturna should be presented:
The piece is absolutely useless, even ridiculous, outside Spain, because the audience cannot hope to understand its significance, nor the performers to play it as it should be played.
Explicit and authentic though these instructions may be, we will ignore them completely, and play the piece here in Charlottesville, well outside of the Iberian Peninsula.
György Kurtág — Hommage à J.S.B.
György Kurtág writes music of quiet intensity. Perhaps most well-known are the Signs, Games and Messages, a growing collection of miniatures for individual or small groups of instruments. His Hommage à J.S.B. finds small systems and lets them float. It is a tip of the hat, given with all seriousness, in a brief moment of music: relations of notes, seeming to resolve.
Valentin Silvestrov — Hommage à J.S.B.
Music should be so transparent that one can see the bottom and that poetry shimmers through this transparency, —Valentin Silvestrov
There is a kind of simplicity of surface with Silvestrov. His works sometimes break into song, and sometimes break apart. He uses fragments and memories to build what he called ‘meta-music.’
With this homage, the composer bows to J.S. Bach by repackaging seemingly familiar things and listening sensitively after melody fragments and harmonies. The violin part, mostly supported by the piano in unison (like a simultaneous echo), ‘shades’ itself in the middle section with tiny echoes composed in detail. Thanks to Gidon Kremer, this three-part composition (also entitled ‘Dedication’ or ‘Tribute to J.S.B.’) has travelled half the world since 2010. (M.P. Belaieff, Mainz)
Colin Jacobsen — BTT
From Colin Jacobsen:
BTT started off in my mind as an investigation into and celebration of the incredible creative ferment and experimentation of the 1970’s/80’s downtown New York scene as embodied by the likes of Glenn Branca, Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, John Zorn, the Velvet Underground, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, the New York Dolls, Laurie Anderson, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, the Lounge Lizards, to name a few. However, I also found myself thinking about John Cage and Johann Sebastian Bach. This happened in part because a colleague of mine suggested that Cage was really the spiritual father of that whole scene. I then realized that Cage was tapping into the same elemental “stuff” as Bach, even if perhaps from an opposite point of view and an obviously different era. While Cage is known as a proponent of chaos, he most often set up a system of rules, welcoming whatever unfolded within that system. When we think of Bach and the cosmic order in his fugues, there’s also a setting up of parameters with an almost pre-determined quality which then unravel in a natural and larger than human way.
I also felt that even within the incredible eclecticism that defined the downtown NY scene and continues to influence so many diverse musical worlds, I found it interesting to juxtapose two other opposing musical streams in this piece; the “minimalism” of Glass and Reich (music that unfolds over spacious time) and the “maximalism” of somebody like Zorn (music that constantly seeks to smash and subvert itself even as it’s happening).
All this to say that most of the musical material in BTT emanates from a spelling of B-A-C-H and C-A-G-E (D), which in and of itself sets up an interesting juxtaposition of tonalities. The BACH motif is chromatic and curls in on itself while the CAGE motif has an open and pentatonic feel. Over the course of the piece, the two motifs interact in a variety of ways, sometimes contradicting each other and sometimes in harmony. The resulting mix of sections may or may not relate to some of the above-mentioned musicians.
J.S. Bach/ Dan Tepfer — Inventions/Reinventions
Here is an excerpt from Dan Tepfer:
Completed three centuries ago, in 1723, the Inventions are study pieces, intended, as Bach explains on the title page, to teach the student to “play two voices clearly” and “at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well”, as a “foretaste of composition”. Bach’s use of the word “invention” to name these pieces is interesting in and of itself. He meant it not in our modern understanding of the word, but as it is understood in rhetoric, where, coming from the Latin inventio, it refers to the subject matter of an argument, the idea that we wish to put forward. As Bach points out, finding an idea is only the first stage; the second, elaboratio, is knowing how to carry it out. And indeed, the Inventions show, exquisitely, how to elaborate simple ideas into complete compositions. But, to me, the analogy to rhetoric only goes so far. In each of the Inventions, we are first introduced to a musical idea, often a short melody, in a known place of comfort: the home key. We get to know it well enough, through repeated exposure, that we identify it as a central character: a protagonist. Then, suddenly, our theme is thrust into a new key, often the dominant or relative major, and I’m convinced that in that moment, we unconsciously ask ourselves whether it will ever make it back home. Like any good storyteller, Bach makes us wait for the answer, taking his theme on an arresting adventure to foreign lands as represented by a series of disparate but related keys, full of dramatic tension and release, before finally returning home. Each of the Inventions, I realized, is a brilliant miniature demonstration of classical narrative form in music, carried out in under two minutes. (The Invention in C minor, with its long canonic subject, is an outlier, but still fits the bill).
For a complete set of liner notes to Inventions/Reinventions, click here.
Luigi Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, in 1743. He shares little with J.S. Bach beyond the first syllable of his last name and an exceptional ability to write music for cello. Boccherini was one of the first great virtuosi of the instrument. He wrote hundreds of fluent and brilliant works for string ensembles, of which more than a hundred were quintets with two cellos. Of these, the Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid is among the most famous.
Boccherini was unambiguous about how and where the Musica notturna should be presented:
The piece is absolutely useless, even ridiculous, outside Spain, because the audience cannot hope to understand its significance, nor the performers to play it as it should be played.
Explicit and authentic though these instructions may be, we will ignore them completely, and play the piece here in Charlottesville, well outside of the Iberian Peninsula.
György Kurtág — Hommage à J.S.B.
György Kurtág writes music of quiet intensity. Perhaps most well-known are the Signs, Games and Messages, a growing collection of miniatures for individual or small groups of instruments. His Hommage à J.S.B. finds small systems and lets them float. It is a tip of the hat, given with all seriousness, in a brief moment of music: relations of notes, seeming to resolve.
Valentin Silvestrov — Hommage à J.S.B.
Music should be so transparent that one can see the bottom and that poetry shimmers through this transparency, —Valentin Silvestrov
There is a kind of simplicity of surface with Silvestrov. His works sometimes break into song, and sometimes break apart. He uses fragments and memories to build what he called ‘meta-music.’
With this homage, the composer bows to J.S. Bach by repackaging seemingly familiar things and listening sensitively after melody fragments and harmonies. The violin part, mostly supported by the piano in unison (like a simultaneous echo), ‘shades’ itself in the middle section with tiny echoes composed in detail. Thanks to Gidon Kremer, this three-part composition (also entitled ‘Dedication’ or ‘Tribute to J.S.B.’) has travelled half the world since 2010. (M.P. Belaieff, Mainz)
Colin Jacobsen — BTT
From Colin Jacobsen:
BTT started off in my mind as an investigation into and celebration of the incredible creative ferment and experimentation of the 1970’s/80’s downtown New York scene as embodied by the likes of Glenn Branca, Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, John Zorn, the Velvet Underground, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, the New York Dolls, Laurie Anderson, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, the Lounge Lizards, to name a few. However, I also found myself thinking about John Cage and Johann Sebastian Bach. This happened in part because a colleague of mine suggested that Cage was really the spiritual father of that whole scene. I then realized that Cage was tapping into the same elemental “stuff” as Bach, even if perhaps from an opposite point of view and an obviously different era. While Cage is known as a proponent of chaos, he most often set up a system of rules, welcoming whatever unfolded within that system. When we think of Bach and the cosmic order in his fugues, there’s also a setting up of parameters with an almost pre-determined quality which then unravel in a natural and larger than human way.
I also felt that even within the incredible eclecticism that defined the downtown NY scene and continues to influence so many diverse musical worlds, I found it interesting to juxtapose two other opposing musical streams in this piece; the “minimalism” of Glass and Reich (music that unfolds over spacious time) and the “maximalism” of somebody like Zorn (music that constantly seeks to smash and subvert itself even as it’s happening).
All this to say that most of the musical material in BTT emanates from a spelling of B-A-C-H and C-A-G-E (D), which in and of itself sets up an interesting juxtaposition of tonalities. The BACH motif is chromatic and curls in on itself while the CAGE motif has an open and pentatonic feel. Over the course of the piece, the two motifs interact in a variety of ways, sometimes contradicting each other and sometimes in harmony. The resulting mix of sections may or may not relate to some of the above-mentioned musicians.
J.S. Bach/ Dan Tepfer — Inventions/Reinventions
Here is an excerpt from Dan Tepfer:
Completed three centuries ago, in 1723, the Inventions are study pieces, intended, as Bach explains on the title page, to teach the student to “play two voices clearly” and “at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well”, as a “foretaste of composition”. Bach’s use of the word “invention” to name these pieces is interesting in and of itself. He meant it not in our modern understanding of the word, but as it is understood in rhetoric, where, coming from the Latin inventio, it refers to the subject matter of an argument, the idea that we wish to put forward. As Bach points out, finding an idea is only the first stage; the second, elaboratio, is knowing how to carry it out. And indeed, the Inventions show, exquisitely, how to elaborate simple ideas into complete compositions. But, to me, the analogy to rhetoric only goes so far. In each of the Inventions, we are first introduced to a musical idea, often a short melody, in a known place of comfort: the home key. We get to know it well enough, through repeated exposure, that we identify it as a central character: a protagonist. Then, suddenly, our theme is thrust into a new key, often the dominant or relative major, and I’m convinced that in that moment, we unconsciously ask ourselves whether it will ever make it back home. Like any good storyteller, Bach makes us wait for the answer, taking his theme on an arresting adventure to foreign lands as represented by a series of disparate but related keys, full of dramatic tension and release, before finally returning home. Each of the Inventions, I realized, is a brilliant miniature demonstration of classical narrative form in music, carried out in under two minutes. (The Invention in C minor, with its long canonic subject, is an outlier, but still fits the bill).
For a complete set of liner notes to Inventions/Reinventions, click here.