Week One: Soul
Saturday, July 7th - White Recital Hall
Sunday, July 8th - St. Mary's Episcopal Church
Nico Muhly: Gibbons Suite
Jane Carl, Tony DeMarco, Kristin Velicer, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Dan Velicer
J.S. Bach: Ich habe genug
Gwen Detwiler, Mike Gordon, Tony DeMarco, Kristin Velicer, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Charles Metz
Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintet No. 1
Kristin Velicer, Tony DeMarco, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Dan Velicer
Saturday, July 7th - White Recital Hall
Sunday, July 8th - St. Mary's Episcopal Church
Nico Muhly: Gibbons Suite
Jane Carl, Tony DeMarco, Kristin Velicer, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Dan Velicer
J.S. Bach: Ich habe genug
Gwen Detwiler, Mike Gordon, Tony DeMarco, Kristin Velicer, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Charles Metz
Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintet No. 1
Kristin Velicer, Tony DeMarco, Jessica Nance, Maria Crosby, Dan Velicer
Program Notes:
Program Notes by Andrew Granade
Nico Muhly: Gibbons Suite
Nico Muhly is one of the most prolific and visible young composers working today, and he famously doesn’t confine himself to one style or genre in his music. As a student, he worked with Philip Glass, whose music informed Muhly’s earliest compositions, but he also collaborated with popular musicians from Björk to Usher, writing arrangements for their songs and learning the trappings of indie rock, R&B, and hip-hop. As a result, Muhly’s music swings widely and wildly among styles, even over the course of one piece.
Muhly is also famously contradictory, particularly in regards to his music. In an interview with Rebecca Mead for the New Yorker, he disparaged composers who write lengthy program notes for their works as leaning on “This stupid conceptual stuff where it’s, like, ‘I was really inspired by, like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis.’” However, when writing about his Gibbons Suite, he engaged in that same type of hyperbolic language: “Orlando Gibbons! I love him so much. His cadences always drive me crazy with pleasure; when the Britten Sinfonia asked me to arrange a few anthems for small ensemble, I immediately said yes, on the condition that I could start with ‘This is the Record of John,’ which is a chatty narrative piece featuring call-and-response interaction between soloists and the choir, with a fantastic accompanying meshwork of imitative phrases. Here, the viola is the star countertenor, slightly hungover but fiercely earnest.”
These contradictions, these swings of style, are what animate Muhly’s music and the Gibbons Suite in particular. Muhly went on to note, “Orlando Gibbons’s verse anthem ‘See, see, the Word is Incarnate’ is one of my favorite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: ‘Let us welcome such a guest!’, ‘Goodwill towards men!’ Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like ‘See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the pricks of thorns, the print of nails’?) and miss my entrance. My piece, ‘Motion,’ tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as on an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello crisscross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody ‘in the sight of multitudes a glorious Ascension.’ The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: ‘the blind have sight and cripples have their motion’ – the word ‘motion,’ in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.”
J.S. Bach: Ich habe genug
Following Muhly’s work, we move from a reimaging of an earlier sacred work to the real thing, and from an obscure Renaissance composer to one of the most influential and performed composers of all time. J.S. Bach is foundational in Western music, and his solo vocal cantata “Ich habe genug” is one of his most popular works – performed, recorded, and studied more than almost any other. It is truly the soul of concert music.
Bach wrote “Ich habe genug” for the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and based it on the story of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple forty days after his birth (which is why the cantata was first performed in early February 1727). He cast the work as three arias connected by two short sections of dry recitative, but in many ways treated the voice as another thread in an instrumental texture instead of crafting the melody and filling in the accompaniment with the instruments. You can hear this approach by listening to the opening ritornello for each of the arias. In them, Bach introduces the vocalist’s melodies and establishes the aria’s expressive core. Then, when the singer enters, she does so as an equal partner to the instruments, not as a diva holding court. This parity of singer and instruments is one reason “Ich habe genug” has become such a staple of chamber music concerts; it demonstrates the richness achieved when musicians work in collaboration.
“Ich habe genug” consists of five movements alternating an aria providing an emotional response to the story with a recitative that outlines the story. The first aria, “Ich habe genug” features a beautifully delicate interplay between the voice and flute or oboe. Many scholars have pointed to the similarity of this aria with “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but instead of that aria’s striving, Bach here presents a picture of perfect rest and contentment in the Lord. Following a recitative on the same text, Bach moves into the center point of the five movements, and indeed the emotional highlight of the cantata: the second aria “Schlummert ein.” One of the textual themes that holds “Ich habe genug” together is the longing for death, particularly in light of the resurrection of the Christ. This slumber aria most clearly connects to that theme with the text describing death as sweet sleep and the music pausing regularly with long fermatas as if entering into peaceful repose. Bach’s wife Anna Magdalena so loved this aria that she transcribed it into the notebook she used in teaching her children and it remains enormously affecting today. A short, very dry, recitative connects us to the final aria, “Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod,” which contrasts musically with the rest of the cantata as it is a lively dance full of elaborate scales for the voice. But it continues the theme of the anticipation of death with the singer literally moving in joy toward the promise of resurrection and the end of all suffering.
Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintet No. 1
Ernest Bloch’s impact on the music you are hearing at this concert goes well beyond this one composition. Though Bloch was born in Switzerland and studied violin and composition in Belgium, he spent most of his life and career in his adopted homeland of America, where he transformed music education. Over the course of the 1920s, he created the composition department at the Mannes School of Music, served as the first Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, and helped establish the San Francisco Conservatory of Music by working as its first Director. Because of this pivotal pedagogical work at three towering institutions, he really is at the soul of American musical training.
Bloch composed his Piano Quintet No. 1 in 1923 while he was working at the Cleveland Institute. Composition in the United States at the time was split between two competing ideologies – those who believed American music should be nothing more than a transplant of European ideals and those who favored an expansive and experimental approach to composition. Bloch would have none of these false divisions. Writing about this quintet he noted, “‘I write without any regard to please either the so-called “ultra-moderns” or the so-called “old-fashioned”.’” He felt free to borrow from any style he needed in order to communicate his intent. As a result, this quintet features his favorite cyclical form, borrowed from Beethoven as well as many composers surfing along in the great German’s wake. But it also includes the use of quarter-tones, the notes that lay, literally, between the notes of an equally-tempered piano. These “ultra-modern” sounds mix with an “old-fashioned” form to create a work of surprises and great expressive power.
Bloch cast the work in three movements that naturally flow into one another despite their disparate tempi because of their similarities of musical technique. Each movement features motives built from small groupings of notes, contrapuntal textures contrasted with long sustained lines and drones, and a variety of special timbral effects, from harmonics to double and triple stops to unique bow placements like sul ponticello (where the strings play near the instrument’s bridge), sul tastiera (where they play over the fingerboard), and col legno (where they play with the back of the bow). An “Agitato” opens the work and introduces the musical material that serves as the basis for the entire Quintet. This material includes the opening rolling motive in the strings and a striking melodic figure than spans over an octave and will reappear in the second movement. This first movement ends with the famous quarter-tones that make the ending’s intensity almost unbearable. The “Andante mistico” transforms the anxious energy of the first movement into a calming, more gentle exploration of the same musical material. However, in this movement Bloch employs those special timbral string effects to create a truly mystical atmosphere where the strings seem to float over the piano’s anchor. The final movement, “Allegro energico,” combines the “Agitato’s” propulsion with the “Andante mistico’s” mystery. Bloch even instructs the pianist to play one figure as if trying to sound like an exotic bird. After all this tempest, Bloch ends the work with an extended section of tonal flux where you don’t know where you are going harmonically until he finally resolves the piece on a peaceful C major, a move that led Ernest Newman to write that “There is no more welcome, more impressive, more clinching, more conclusive, more authoritative C major chord in all music.” After experiencing this potent work, we think you’ll agree.
Nico Muhly: Gibbons Suite
Nico Muhly is one of the most prolific and visible young composers working today, and he famously doesn’t confine himself to one style or genre in his music. As a student, he worked with Philip Glass, whose music informed Muhly’s earliest compositions, but he also collaborated with popular musicians from Björk to Usher, writing arrangements for their songs and learning the trappings of indie rock, R&B, and hip-hop. As a result, Muhly’s music swings widely and wildly among styles, even over the course of one piece.
Muhly is also famously contradictory, particularly in regards to his music. In an interview with Rebecca Mead for the New Yorker, he disparaged composers who write lengthy program notes for their works as leaning on “This stupid conceptual stuff where it’s, like, ‘I was really inspired by, like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis.’” However, when writing about his Gibbons Suite, he engaged in that same type of hyperbolic language: “Orlando Gibbons! I love him so much. His cadences always drive me crazy with pleasure; when the Britten Sinfonia asked me to arrange a few anthems for small ensemble, I immediately said yes, on the condition that I could start with ‘This is the Record of John,’ which is a chatty narrative piece featuring call-and-response interaction between soloists and the choir, with a fantastic accompanying meshwork of imitative phrases. Here, the viola is the star countertenor, slightly hungover but fiercely earnest.”
These contradictions, these swings of style, are what animate Muhly’s music and the Gibbons Suite in particular. Muhly went on to note, “Orlando Gibbons’s verse anthem ‘See, see, the Word is Incarnate’ is one of my favorite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: ‘Let us welcome such a guest!’, ‘Goodwill towards men!’ Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like ‘See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the pricks of thorns, the print of nails’?) and miss my entrance. My piece, ‘Motion,’ tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as on an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello crisscross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody ‘in the sight of multitudes a glorious Ascension.’ The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: ‘the blind have sight and cripples have their motion’ – the word ‘motion,’ in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.”
J.S. Bach: Ich habe genug
Following Muhly’s work, we move from a reimaging of an earlier sacred work to the real thing, and from an obscure Renaissance composer to one of the most influential and performed composers of all time. J.S. Bach is foundational in Western music, and his solo vocal cantata “Ich habe genug” is one of his most popular works – performed, recorded, and studied more than almost any other. It is truly the soul of concert music.
Bach wrote “Ich habe genug” for the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and based it on the story of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple forty days after his birth (which is why the cantata was first performed in early February 1727). He cast the work as three arias connected by two short sections of dry recitative, but in many ways treated the voice as another thread in an instrumental texture instead of crafting the melody and filling in the accompaniment with the instruments. You can hear this approach by listening to the opening ritornello for each of the arias. In them, Bach introduces the vocalist’s melodies and establishes the aria’s expressive core. Then, when the singer enters, she does so as an equal partner to the instruments, not as a diva holding court. This parity of singer and instruments is one reason “Ich habe genug” has become such a staple of chamber music concerts; it demonstrates the richness achieved when musicians work in collaboration.
“Ich habe genug” consists of five movements alternating an aria providing an emotional response to the story with a recitative that outlines the story. The first aria, “Ich habe genug” features a beautifully delicate interplay between the voice and flute or oboe. Many scholars have pointed to the similarity of this aria with “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but instead of that aria’s striving, Bach here presents a picture of perfect rest and contentment in the Lord. Following a recitative on the same text, Bach moves into the center point of the five movements, and indeed the emotional highlight of the cantata: the second aria “Schlummert ein.” One of the textual themes that holds “Ich habe genug” together is the longing for death, particularly in light of the resurrection of the Christ. This slumber aria most clearly connects to that theme with the text describing death as sweet sleep and the music pausing regularly with long fermatas as if entering into peaceful repose. Bach’s wife Anna Magdalena so loved this aria that she transcribed it into the notebook she used in teaching her children and it remains enormously affecting today. A short, very dry, recitative connects us to the final aria, “Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod,” which contrasts musically with the rest of the cantata as it is a lively dance full of elaborate scales for the voice. But it continues the theme of the anticipation of death with the singer literally moving in joy toward the promise of resurrection and the end of all suffering.
Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintet No. 1
Ernest Bloch’s impact on the music you are hearing at this concert goes well beyond this one composition. Though Bloch was born in Switzerland and studied violin and composition in Belgium, he spent most of his life and career in his adopted homeland of America, where he transformed music education. Over the course of the 1920s, he created the composition department at the Mannes School of Music, served as the first Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, and helped establish the San Francisco Conservatory of Music by working as its first Director. Because of this pivotal pedagogical work at three towering institutions, he really is at the soul of American musical training.
Bloch composed his Piano Quintet No. 1 in 1923 while he was working at the Cleveland Institute. Composition in the United States at the time was split between two competing ideologies – those who believed American music should be nothing more than a transplant of European ideals and those who favored an expansive and experimental approach to composition. Bloch would have none of these false divisions. Writing about this quintet he noted, “‘I write without any regard to please either the so-called “ultra-moderns” or the so-called “old-fashioned”.’” He felt free to borrow from any style he needed in order to communicate his intent. As a result, this quintet features his favorite cyclical form, borrowed from Beethoven as well as many composers surfing along in the great German’s wake. But it also includes the use of quarter-tones, the notes that lay, literally, between the notes of an equally-tempered piano. These “ultra-modern” sounds mix with an “old-fashioned” form to create a work of surprises and great expressive power.
Bloch cast the work in three movements that naturally flow into one another despite their disparate tempi because of their similarities of musical technique. Each movement features motives built from small groupings of notes, contrapuntal textures contrasted with long sustained lines and drones, and a variety of special timbral effects, from harmonics to double and triple stops to unique bow placements like sul ponticello (where the strings play near the instrument’s bridge), sul tastiera (where they play over the fingerboard), and col legno (where they play with the back of the bow). An “Agitato” opens the work and introduces the musical material that serves as the basis for the entire Quintet. This material includes the opening rolling motive in the strings and a striking melodic figure than spans over an octave and will reappear in the second movement. This first movement ends with the famous quarter-tones that make the ending’s intensity almost unbearable. The “Andante mistico” transforms the anxious energy of the first movement into a calming, more gentle exploration of the same musical material. However, in this movement Bloch employs those special timbral string effects to create a truly mystical atmosphere where the strings seem to float over the piano’s anchor. The final movement, “Allegro energico,” combines the “Agitato’s” propulsion with the “Andante mistico’s” mystery. Bloch even instructs the pianist to play one figure as if trying to sound like an exotic bird. After all this tempest, Bloch ends the work with an extended section of tonal flux where you don’t know where you are going harmonically until he finally resolves the piece on a peaceful C major, a move that led Ernest Newman to write that “There is no more welcome, more impressive, more clinching, more conclusive, more authoritative C major chord in all music.” After experiencing this potent work, we think you’ll agree.