Week Three: Art
Saturday, July 21st - White Recital Hall
Sunday, July 22nd - St. Mary's Episcopal Church
Libby Larsen: Blackbirds Red Hills
Jane Carl, Jessica Nance, Melissa Rose
Albert Roussel: Serenade for Flute, String Trio and harp, op. 30
Shannon Finney, Anne-Marie Brown, Jessica Nance, Alex East, Tabitha Reist Steiner
Alyssa Morris: Brushstrokes
Shannon Finney, Melissa Peña, Joshua Hood
Gabriel Faure: Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 120
Anne-Marie Brown, Alex East, Melissa Rose
Saturday, July 21st - White Recital Hall
Sunday, July 22nd - St. Mary's Episcopal Church
Libby Larsen: Blackbirds Red Hills
Jane Carl, Jessica Nance, Melissa Rose
Albert Roussel: Serenade for Flute, String Trio and harp, op. 30
Shannon Finney, Anne-Marie Brown, Jessica Nance, Alex East, Tabitha Reist Steiner
Alyssa Morris: Brushstrokes
Shannon Finney, Melissa Peña, Joshua Hood
Gabriel Faure: Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 120
Anne-Marie Brown, Alex East, Melissa Rose
Program Notes:
Program Notes by Andrew Granade
Libby Larsen: Black Birds, Red Hills
This third week of Summerfest we are turning our attention to the art of chamber music, but more specifically to the connections between art and chamber music. Visual art and music have long been entwined, with painters like Wassily Kandinsky attempting to capture music in paint and composers like Morton Feldman adopting painters’ brushstrokes as musical gestures. Libby Larson begins our concert with a piece of music in four movements inspired by six paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Larson is a familiar name to chamber music audiences as she is one of the most prolific and performed contemporary American composers. She is also unique among American composers in that she is not associated with a university but has instead spent her career with musical institutions (she helped found the Minnesota Composers Forum which has since become the influential American Composers Forum) and developing relationships with performers. The genesis of Black Birds, Red Hills comes out of both of those trends in her career as pianist Thea Engelson and clarinetist Scott Bridges commissioned the work from Larson in coordination with the National Museum of Women’s Art for the 1987 centennial of Georgia O’Keeffe’s birth.
In starting the work, Larsen devoured information about O’Keeffe and was drawn to two colors in O’Keeffe’s paintings: the color red that came out of the earthy color of the foothills of New Mexico and the color black from the stones that litter the landscape. Larsen felt a resonance with those colors and picked paintings featuring those colors to paint musically. As Larson wrote about the work, “Georgia O'Keeffe found the flow of time and color in music inspiring to her work as a painter. Black Birds, Red Hills is inspired by six paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. Each painting explores the flow of time and color on her beloved red hills of New Mexico. In each painting O'Keeffe reveals perspective, beauty and meaning through the magnification of objects, specifically the horizon line, the black rock and the black bird. Movement one three and four reflect the ‘V shape’ of the hills just outside O’Keeffe’s window. She describes this shape as the arms of two great hills, which reach out to the sky and hold it, suggesting to me an abstract cradle. In movement II, I liken the music to O’Keeffe’s image of the black rocks. O'Keeffe found these rocks on her walks to the Glen Canyon dam. She became fascinated with the effect of time on the rocks, noting that time has turned them into objects which are precious to look at and hold. Finally, to paint the black birds which lived in the hills near her, O'Keeffe covered the red hills with snow and focused on the bird as a metaphor for time, always there and always moving away.”
Before the concert, feel free to take out your phone and look at the specific paintings that inspired Larson to create Black Birds, Red Hills:
Movement I
#1 Pedernal and Red Hills, 1936
Movement II
#2 Black Rock with Blue Sky and White Clouds, 1972
Movement III
#3 Red and Orange Hills, 1938
#4 Red hills and Sky, 1945
Movement IV
#5 A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red Hills, 1946
#6 Black Bird Series (In the Patio IX), 1950
Albert Roussel: Serenade for Flute, String Trio, and Harp, op. 30
We’ve spoken several times over these three weeks of Summerfest about composers who took different routes to arrive at composition. Most of those composers were musicians who added composing to their musical profile; they didn’t travel too far career-wise to become composers. Albert Roussel had the farthest to go in finding his way to composition, and that path informed the style of composition he favored once he began.
Roussel’s childhood was a lonely one, as in his first ten years his parents and both sets of grandparents died, leaving him in the care of his aunt and uncle. By the time he was 15, his aunt and uncle had decided to send him to Paris for school, and by the age of 18, Roussel had decided to join the French navy, ultimately rising to the rank of lieutenant. But throughout these years, Roussel took lessons in organ and piano and entertained himself and his fellow crewmen on their long voyages to the Near East by composing small works for a violin-playing shipmate. Finally, in 1894 when he was 25, Roussel left the Navy to study composition, landing at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent D’Indy. D’Indy impressed a reverence for traditional musical forms on Roussel, but the sounds of Debussy’s Impressionism also exerted a strong influence, especially in his harmonic language. Roussel probably would have continued on as an imitation of his older colleagues if World War I hadn’t stopped his compositional life while he served as an artillery lieutenant. After WWI, Roussel found himself in a new world and responded to it by reimagining his musical language, keeping the traditional forms of his schooling, but combining them with a simplicity and tranquility that spread his fame beyond France.
The Sérénade for Flute, String Trio, and Harp is a prime example of this new style Roussel developed in his later life. While the Sérénade features an unusual collection of instruments, it is traditional in its form as it is nothing more than a tiny symphony for five players, with a first movement in sonata form, a lyrical and slow second movement, and a whirling dance of a final movement. Yet that standard formal box contains fascinating material. The opening movement is full of charm and wit and allows the flute to carry most of the main themes. The flute’s prominence isn’t surprising since Roussel wrote the work for flautist René le Roy, but how those themes float along a steady rhythmic stream that abruptly shifts direction and speed throughout does surprise. The flute continues breathing out the long lines of melody in the second movement, but instead of resting on the rhythmic shifts from the first movement, Roussel supports it with kaleidoscopic harmonies that slowly rotate and throw color around the room. This central movement is the longest and most emotionally expressive of the three and provides just enough space for the final movement to cap the work with a delicate dance. Listen closely for the intricate plucking notes that run across the string instruments, leading to a slow interlude before all the instruments return for a swirling conclusion that ends with an unexpected conclusion that, upon reflection, seems perfectly suited to this mischievous and delightful work.
Alyssa Morris: Brush Strokes
Continuing the trend from last week’s presentation of Eric Sammut’s Zapping Trio, we introduce Alyssa Morris to you this week, a performer/composer with a similar path to Sammut’s percussionist/composer trajectory. Morris earned degrees in oboe performance from Brigham Young University and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music before joining the faculty of nearby Kansas State University. However, along the way she also discovered a love of composition and began writing chamber music, compiling an impressive list of commissions and recordings.
When she was commissioned by the Athenia Chamber Ensemble of Ohio University, Morris decided to focus her work on Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist painters, but did not approach the project as Larson did with Black Birds, Red Hills. Instead of being inspired by the paintings of these men, she focused on their technique, how they used their tools, and how those techniques might be interpreted by a flute, oboe, and bassoon. Morris describes the four movements of Brush Strokes in this way:
“The first movement, Monet, depicts the constant movement of water that is present in many of Claude Monet’s paintings. Water lilies are the subject for approximately 250 of Monet’s paintings. I also chose to rely on the water lily theme because there are many different images of water to portray. In one part of a stream the water may be calm, while further down the water may rage. Running water is ever changing, much like the swift brush strokes of Claude Monet. Monet was an impressionistic painter. His paintings reflected his immediate impression of a particular subject or scene. He strived to capture the subject in a particular light, before the light changed. When the light changed, Monet started painting on a new canvas. I wanted to depict Monet’s swift painting and the constant changing of light with frequently shifting chord progressions.”
“The second movement, Seurat, is a musical representation of the pointillist works by Georges Seurat. This movement is primarily inspired by Seurat’s paintings A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and The Circus. Seurat’s brush stroke technique is very formulaic. If inspected closely, one can see that Seurat’s paintings are comprised of tiny strokes or “points” of pure color on the canvas. When the painting is viewed from a distance, the colors appear to blend and shimmer. This color blend effect is called “optical mixing.” The music in the movement Seurat aims to depict the pointillist aspects of this artwork by frequently shifting the instrumentation and bouncing the melody from one player to another, and also by the pointed and light attack of every note.”
“The third movement is Van Gogh. This movement depicts one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most well-known paintings, Starry Night. Van Gogh lived a life of loneliness and sorrow. Despite his beautiful talent as a painter, he was mentally disturbed. In 1889, Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Remy. It was here that he was inspired to paint Starry Night. Though at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he had not lost his belief in an afterlife. He expressed that he felt a strong need for religion, so he looked to the stars. Starry Night is filled with curves and rhythm, and the cypress tree in the front exudes a dark loneliness. The movement Van Gogh moves with a slow, rhythmic pulse and a curving melodic contour. The overall darkness of the movement depicts the loneliness of the cypress tree, and of Van Gogh.”
“Pollock is the final movement and is a musical representation of the works of Jackson Pollock that used the “drip” technique. Paintings such as One were created by pouring or dripping paint onto a canvas with hardened brushes, sticks, or syringes. Pollock laid his canvas flat on the floor to paint. His process was called action painting. The movement Pollock is fast and full of energy, with chromatic and scalar flourishes depicting the paint being dripped, poured, and flung onto the canvas.”
Gabriel Faure: Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 120
It might surprise anyone who knows of Gabriel Fauré’s extensive use of the piano in his songs and chamber music to discover that the composer was not terribly enamored with the instrument. Here is a composer who used the piano in all of his chamber music except his very last work, the String Quartet op. 121, which he wrote when he was 79. Here is a composer who transformed French art song with the harmonic shifts in his piano accompaniments. But the fact remains that he did not care for the piano. Perhaps he simply preferred the organ (many of his piano pieces include the finger substitutions common on the organ), or felt about the piano the way he felt about the orchestra (that too many composers substituted flash for true musical ideas). Whatever the reason, we can be glad that Fauré still used the instrument for with it, he transformed the landscape of modern chamber music.
Fauré’s Piano Trio comes from the end of his life, two years after he retired from his prominent position as head of the Paris Conservatoire and the same year the president of the French Republic honored him with a national celebration of his music. But Fauré could not enjoy his retirement and this great honor fully. His hearing was slowly degenerating and by 1920 when he retired, he could not distinguish high and low sounds, hearing only the middle portion of the sonic spectrum. He also found himself perpetually exhausted, famously telling his wife, “The trouble is that I can’t work for long at a time. My worst tribulation is a perpetual fatigue.” The isolation brought on by his deafness and frailty seems to have caused a season of introspection, an inward turn in his music that resulted in the Piano Trio.
That introspection seems to have inspired his choice of instrumentation as well. The spark for the trio came from Fauré’s publisher Jacques Durand, who suggested a work for piano, violin, and cello, but Fauré had different ideas – if he was going to use the piano, he wanted the rich sounds of the clarinet with it instead of the violin. He fiddled with the piece during the fall of 1922, worrying to his wife, “I'm doing absolutely nothing and haven't thought of two notes worth writing down since I've been here. Have I come to the end of my resources?” By late winter of 1923, he had evidently rediscovered those resources and completed the trio, abandoning the clarinet along the way in favor of the violin, though the piece is frequently performed with a clarinet essaying the violin part today.
The Piano Trio shows the impact of Fauré’s ambivalence toward the piano and the deafness that was approaching from either end of the instrument’s ranges. The piano sits throughout its twenty-minute length in its middle range, a feat of compression that demands a different kind of listening from the audience. Tension is not going to come through soaring melodies or rumbling harmonies; instead you must listen to the subtle interplay of the instruments and the ways in which they intertwine one with another. The first movement follows the traditions Roussel upheld as well with its two themes that contrast in their meter (the first is in a dance-like triple feel while the second fools your ear into hearing it in two beats per measure) but share a long-lined almost sung melodic shape. The second movement is the work’s highlight; like Roussel, Fauré pours most of his emotional communication in this movement and it is the longest. The cello often plays in the same register as the violin and you can hear them delicately passing the melody between them as the piano spins out harmonies that, as in his vocal music, continually lead you into unexpected regions with their surprising turns. The final movement, a lively rondo, seems to refute Fauré’s contention that he was suffering from “perpetual fatigue.” All the striving of the first two movements is cast aside as the instruments dance together in the daylight, showing that even though Fauré might not have loved the piano, he certainly knew how to make it sing.
Libby Larsen: Black Birds, Red Hills
This third week of Summerfest we are turning our attention to the art of chamber music, but more specifically to the connections between art and chamber music. Visual art and music have long been entwined, with painters like Wassily Kandinsky attempting to capture music in paint and composers like Morton Feldman adopting painters’ brushstrokes as musical gestures. Libby Larson begins our concert with a piece of music in four movements inspired by six paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Larson is a familiar name to chamber music audiences as she is one of the most prolific and performed contemporary American composers. She is also unique among American composers in that she is not associated with a university but has instead spent her career with musical institutions (she helped found the Minnesota Composers Forum which has since become the influential American Composers Forum) and developing relationships with performers. The genesis of Black Birds, Red Hills comes out of both of those trends in her career as pianist Thea Engelson and clarinetist Scott Bridges commissioned the work from Larson in coordination with the National Museum of Women’s Art for the 1987 centennial of Georgia O’Keeffe’s birth.
In starting the work, Larsen devoured information about O’Keeffe and was drawn to two colors in O’Keeffe’s paintings: the color red that came out of the earthy color of the foothills of New Mexico and the color black from the stones that litter the landscape. Larsen felt a resonance with those colors and picked paintings featuring those colors to paint musically. As Larson wrote about the work, “Georgia O'Keeffe found the flow of time and color in music inspiring to her work as a painter. Black Birds, Red Hills is inspired by six paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. Each painting explores the flow of time and color on her beloved red hills of New Mexico. In each painting O'Keeffe reveals perspective, beauty and meaning through the magnification of objects, specifically the horizon line, the black rock and the black bird. Movement one three and four reflect the ‘V shape’ of the hills just outside O’Keeffe’s window. She describes this shape as the arms of two great hills, which reach out to the sky and hold it, suggesting to me an abstract cradle. In movement II, I liken the music to O’Keeffe’s image of the black rocks. O'Keeffe found these rocks on her walks to the Glen Canyon dam. She became fascinated with the effect of time on the rocks, noting that time has turned them into objects which are precious to look at and hold. Finally, to paint the black birds which lived in the hills near her, O'Keeffe covered the red hills with snow and focused on the bird as a metaphor for time, always there and always moving away.”
Before the concert, feel free to take out your phone and look at the specific paintings that inspired Larson to create Black Birds, Red Hills:
Movement I
#1 Pedernal and Red Hills, 1936
Movement II
#2 Black Rock with Blue Sky and White Clouds, 1972
Movement III
#3 Red and Orange Hills, 1938
#4 Red hills and Sky, 1945
Movement IV
#5 A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red Hills, 1946
#6 Black Bird Series (In the Patio IX), 1950
Albert Roussel: Serenade for Flute, String Trio, and Harp, op. 30
We’ve spoken several times over these three weeks of Summerfest about composers who took different routes to arrive at composition. Most of those composers were musicians who added composing to their musical profile; they didn’t travel too far career-wise to become composers. Albert Roussel had the farthest to go in finding his way to composition, and that path informed the style of composition he favored once he began.
Roussel’s childhood was a lonely one, as in his first ten years his parents and both sets of grandparents died, leaving him in the care of his aunt and uncle. By the time he was 15, his aunt and uncle had decided to send him to Paris for school, and by the age of 18, Roussel had decided to join the French navy, ultimately rising to the rank of lieutenant. But throughout these years, Roussel took lessons in organ and piano and entertained himself and his fellow crewmen on their long voyages to the Near East by composing small works for a violin-playing shipmate. Finally, in 1894 when he was 25, Roussel left the Navy to study composition, landing at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent D’Indy. D’Indy impressed a reverence for traditional musical forms on Roussel, but the sounds of Debussy’s Impressionism also exerted a strong influence, especially in his harmonic language. Roussel probably would have continued on as an imitation of his older colleagues if World War I hadn’t stopped his compositional life while he served as an artillery lieutenant. After WWI, Roussel found himself in a new world and responded to it by reimagining his musical language, keeping the traditional forms of his schooling, but combining them with a simplicity and tranquility that spread his fame beyond France.
The Sérénade for Flute, String Trio, and Harp is a prime example of this new style Roussel developed in his later life. While the Sérénade features an unusual collection of instruments, it is traditional in its form as it is nothing more than a tiny symphony for five players, with a first movement in sonata form, a lyrical and slow second movement, and a whirling dance of a final movement. Yet that standard formal box contains fascinating material. The opening movement is full of charm and wit and allows the flute to carry most of the main themes. The flute’s prominence isn’t surprising since Roussel wrote the work for flautist René le Roy, but how those themes float along a steady rhythmic stream that abruptly shifts direction and speed throughout does surprise. The flute continues breathing out the long lines of melody in the second movement, but instead of resting on the rhythmic shifts from the first movement, Roussel supports it with kaleidoscopic harmonies that slowly rotate and throw color around the room. This central movement is the longest and most emotionally expressive of the three and provides just enough space for the final movement to cap the work with a delicate dance. Listen closely for the intricate plucking notes that run across the string instruments, leading to a slow interlude before all the instruments return for a swirling conclusion that ends with an unexpected conclusion that, upon reflection, seems perfectly suited to this mischievous and delightful work.
Alyssa Morris: Brush Strokes
Continuing the trend from last week’s presentation of Eric Sammut’s Zapping Trio, we introduce Alyssa Morris to you this week, a performer/composer with a similar path to Sammut’s percussionist/composer trajectory. Morris earned degrees in oboe performance from Brigham Young University and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music before joining the faculty of nearby Kansas State University. However, along the way she also discovered a love of composition and began writing chamber music, compiling an impressive list of commissions and recordings.
When she was commissioned by the Athenia Chamber Ensemble of Ohio University, Morris decided to focus her work on Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist painters, but did not approach the project as Larson did with Black Birds, Red Hills. Instead of being inspired by the paintings of these men, she focused on their technique, how they used their tools, and how those techniques might be interpreted by a flute, oboe, and bassoon. Morris describes the four movements of Brush Strokes in this way:
“The first movement, Monet, depicts the constant movement of water that is present in many of Claude Monet’s paintings. Water lilies are the subject for approximately 250 of Monet’s paintings. I also chose to rely on the water lily theme because there are many different images of water to portray. In one part of a stream the water may be calm, while further down the water may rage. Running water is ever changing, much like the swift brush strokes of Claude Monet. Monet was an impressionistic painter. His paintings reflected his immediate impression of a particular subject or scene. He strived to capture the subject in a particular light, before the light changed. When the light changed, Monet started painting on a new canvas. I wanted to depict Monet’s swift painting and the constant changing of light with frequently shifting chord progressions.”
“The second movement, Seurat, is a musical representation of the pointillist works by Georges Seurat. This movement is primarily inspired by Seurat’s paintings A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and The Circus. Seurat’s brush stroke technique is very formulaic. If inspected closely, one can see that Seurat’s paintings are comprised of tiny strokes or “points” of pure color on the canvas. When the painting is viewed from a distance, the colors appear to blend and shimmer. This color blend effect is called “optical mixing.” The music in the movement Seurat aims to depict the pointillist aspects of this artwork by frequently shifting the instrumentation and bouncing the melody from one player to another, and also by the pointed and light attack of every note.”
“The third movement is Van Gogh. This movement depicts one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most well-known paintings, Starry Night. Van Gogh lived a life of loneliness and sorrow. Despite his beautiful talent as a painter, he was mentally disturbed. In 1889, Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Remy. It was here that he was inspired to paint Starry Night. Though at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he had not lost his belief in an afterlife. He expressed that he felt a strong need for religion, so he looked to the stars. Starry Night is filled with curves and rhythm, and the cypress tree in the front exudes a dark loneliness. The movement Van Gogh moves with a slow, rhythmic pulse and a curving melodic contour. The overall darkness of the movement depicts the loneliness of the cypress tree, and of Van Gogh.”
“Pollock is the final movement and is a musical representation of the works of Jackson Pollock that used the “drip” technique. Paintings such as One were created by pouring or dripping paint onto a canvas with hardened brushes, sticks, or syringes. Pollock laid his canvas flat on the floor to paint. His process was called action painting. The movement Pollock is fast and full of energy, with chromatic and scalar flourishes depicting the paint being dripped, poured, and flung onto the canvas.”
Gabriel Faure: Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 120
It might surprise anyone who knows of Gabriel Fauré’s extensive use of the piano in his songs and chamber music to discover that the composer was not terribly enamored with the instrument. Here is a composer who used the piano in all of his chamber music except his very last work, the String Quartet op. 121, which he wrote when he was 79. Here is a composer who transformed French art song with the harmonic shifts in his piano accompaniments. But the fact remains that he did not care for the piano. Perhaps he simply preferred the organ (many of his piano pieces include the finger substitutions common on the organ), or felt about the piano the way he felt about the orchestra (that too many composers substituted flash for true musical ideas). Whatever the reason, we can be glad that Fauré still used the instrument for with it, he transformed the landscape of modern chamber music.
Fauré’s Piano Trio comes from the end of his life, two years after he retired from his prominent position as head of the Paris Conservatoire and the same year the president of the French Republic honored him with a national celebration of his music. But Fauré could not enjoy his retirement and this great honor fully. His hearing was slowly degenerating and by 1920 when he retired, he could not distinguish high and low sounds, hearing only the middle portion of the sonic spectrum. He also found himself perpetually exhausted, famously telling his wife, “The trouble is that I can’t work for long at a time. My worst tribulation is a perpetual fatigue.” The isolation brought on by his deafness and frailty seems to have caused a season of introspection, an inward turn in his music that resulted in the Piano Trio.
That introspection seems to have inspired his choice of instrumentation as well. The spark for the trio came from Fauré’s publisher Jacques Durand, who suggested a work for piano, violin, and cello, but Fauré had different ideas – if he was going to use the piano, he wanted the rich sounds of the clarinet with it instead of the violin. He fiddled with the piece during the fall of 1922, worrying to his wife, “I'm doing absolutely nothing and haven't thought of two notes worth writing down since I've been here. Have I come to the end of my resources?” By late winter of 1923, he had evidently rediscovered those resources and completed the trio, abandoning the clarinet along the way in favor of the violin, though the piece is frequently performed with a clarinet essaying the violin part today.
The Piano Trio shows the impact of Fauré’s ambivalence toward the piano and the deafness that was approaching from either end of the instrument’s ranges. The piano sits throughout its twenty-minute length in its middle range, a feat of compression that demands a different kind of listening from the audience. Tension is not going to come through soaring melodies or rumbling harmonies; instead you must listen to the subtle interplay of the instruments and the ways in which they intertwine one with another. The first movement follows the traditions Roussel upheld as well with its two themes that contrast in their meter (the first is in a dance-like triple feel while the second fools your ear into hearing it in two beats per measure) but share a long-lined almost sung melodic shape. The second movement is the work’s highlight; like Roussel, Fauré pours most of his emotional communication in this movement and it is the longest. The cello often plays in the same register as the violin and you can hear them delicately passing the melody between them as the piano spins out harmonies that, as in his vocal music, continually lead you into unexpected regions with their surprising turns. The final movement, a lively rondo, seems to refute Fauré’s contention that he was suffering from “perpetual fatigue.” All the striving of the first two movements is cast aside as the instruments dance together in the daylight, showing that even though Fauré might not have loved the piano, he certainly knew how to make it sing.