Aaron Diehl, piano
Michael Schachter, composer
David Danzmayr, conductor
William Grant Still (1895-1978): Darker America
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes (plus English horn), clarinets and bassoons, horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, percussion, and strings
Composed: 1924
Duration: 13 minutes
William Grant Still might rightly be considered one of the most “American” composers contemporary audiences have never heard of. This fact has nothing to do with Still’s ability, likeability, or output, for his music is accessible and honest and there is a lot of it—operas, symphonies, tone poems, songs, chamber music, and the like. The reason you may not have heard of Still is because he was Black and until rather recently, women and people of color faced tremendous difficulties attempting to break through the world of the dead white composer, or even the living white composer. Fortunately, that is now changing and audiences— ProMusica audiences among them—are experiencing the music of an unprecedented swath of composers that few of us knew existed just a few decades ago.
Still grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, the son of a store owner who died when he was but three months old. His mother was a schoolteacher, and it was Still’s stepfather who nurtured the young man’s love of music. Though Still initially pursued a Bachelor of Science degree (his mother had designs on his becoming a doctor), he eventually followed his love of music to the Oberlin Conservatory, where he pursued composition, all the while assisting the janitor and doing other small jobs to cobble enough tuition money together.
Following a stint in the navy, Still moved to Harlem, where he embraced the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, worked with blues musician W.C. Handy, and played in dance bands (including those of Artie Shaw and Paul Whiteman), while continuing to compose and arrange. His first real break came with his “Afro-American” Symphony No. 1; when it was debuted by the Rochester Philharmonic, it was the first time the work of a Black composer had been performed by a major American orchestra. Still went on to compose prodigiously, imbuing his scores with the African American experience, blues, jazz, and the classical techniques he had absorbed through the study of composition largely by way of white composers, among them Edgard Varèse, among the most progressive composers of his day. And yet, despite operatic successes, performances with the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and soundtrack arrangements for major studio films (Pennies from Heaven, Stormy Weather), Still remained under the radar.
Still’s 13-minute single-movement Darker America is typical of his unique compositional approach; thus, it seems only fitting that we draw on his words for the music’s description:
“Darker America, as its title suggests, is representative of the American Negro. His serious side is presented and is intended to suggest the triumph of a people over their sorrows through fervent prayer. At the beginning, the theme of the American Negro is announced by the strings in unison. Following a short development of this, the English horn announces the sorrow theme which is followed immediately by the theme of hope, given to muted brass accompanied by strings and woodwind. The sorrow theme returns treated differently, indicative of more intense sorrow as contrasted to passive sorrow indicated at the initial appearance of the theme. Again hope appears and the people seem about to rise above their troubles. But sorrow triumphs. Then the prayer is heard (given to oboe); the prayer of numbed rather than anguished souls. Strongly contrasted moods follow, leading up to the triumph of the people near the end, at which point the three principal themes are combined.”
FROM THE COMPOSER:
Michael Schachter (b. 1987): Being and Becoming: Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets (the second doubling on bass clarinet), bassoons, alto saxophone, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings
Composed: 2024
Duration: 20 minutes
Here —
Now —
A century after the premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin’s sensational “experiment in modern music” anchors United Airlines safety videos and orchestral pops concerts.
Yet, despite its senescence—as well as the discomfiting questions of appropriation rightly raised by contemporary critics—Gershwin’s Rhapsody stubbornly remains an object of my unconditional love and fascination. Its vigor, its earnestness, its clarity of expression, its imperviousness to cuts or rearrangements. But also—as an evocation of place and time. 1920’s New York? Not so much as central Massachusetts in the mid-aughts: sitting at the piano in my teacher’s studio, then dancing like fools to old Bernstein recordings with her son, who became my best friend. There, some creative pilot light was lit inside me, the flames of which led (however windingly) to this piece, in this place, in this time.
For Gershwin—a first-generation Jewish immigrant, a high-school dropout hawking sheet music on the street, desperate to break into a snobbish cultural aristocracy all too eager to shut him out—the hapsody was the thrum of the burgeoning metropolis, the Yiddishkeit of his family life meeting the virtuosic flourishes of Liszt and the song forms of Tin Pan Alley.
In my own rhapsody, I set out not to create a pastiche of Gershwin’s sound world, but rather to take the context of his rhapsodic project as impetus to reckon with the here and now. In my conversations with Aaron Diehl throughout this piece’s development, we alighted on several points of cultural fascination that wove themselves into the fabric of its creation:
Through these priorities and more, my piece came to life as a proper, old-school rhapsody, an extension of a through-line from Liszt, Bartok, and Gershwin to the Beatles, Queen, and Radiohead: a single-movement work, tuneful and vernacular, moving more by the hot thrill of impulse than the cool logic of austere design.
The title, Being and Becoming, refers not only to the sprawling, kaleidoscopic form of the rhapsody, but more broadly to the inescapable interplay between presence and transience. In a sense, each of us is a collective—a partnership of particles and spirit, held together in that dynamic combination of consistency and change that we call the self, experiencing an impulsive, episodic assortment of infinite present moments, until we eventually dissipate and return to the source.
We know little. But we do know that we are here, together, now. Being, and becoming.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings
Composed: 1883
Duration: 33 minutes
Summers for Johannes Brahms often meant time away from Vienna, the city he had adopted as his home after visiting for the first time in 1862 (he was born and came of age in Hamburg, where his father was a professional double-bassist). The summer of 1883 was spent in the German town of Wiesbaden, a picturesque spa town on the Rhine River. Brahms’s lodgings that summer included an airy studio with a view to the river, which he described as luxurious “as if I were trying to imitate Wagner.” (In truth, given his penchant for luxury, Wagner would probably have preferred Wiesbaden’s Biebrich Palace, the ducal palace situated on the bank of the Rhine). The view Brahms enjoyed during much of that summer, as it turned out, played a significant role in the music he was crafting, his Symphony in F major.
The year 1883 was marked by several important births of which Brahms would have been ignorant: those of author Franz Kafka and composers Anton Webern and Edgar Varese, all three of whom would significantly reshape the world Brahms would leave behind toward the century’s close. Of one death, in February of that year, he was particularly aware: that of Richard Wagner. Brahms had had a long and complicated history with Wagner going back decades. But although Brahms’ musical principles were decidedly opposite to those of Wagner—Brahms held fast to Classical forms and structures while Wagner believed that by creating new schemes, he was personally forging the music of the future—Brahms recognized Wagner’s genius. He was personally involved with preparations for Wagner performances in Vienna and later was the proud possessor of the manuscript of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Wagner, for his part, had less than flattering things to say about Brahms and later demanded to have his manuscript back! Regardless, upon hearing of Wagner’s death, Brahms, who was in the middle of leading singers in rehearsal, laid down his baton and announced, “Today we sing no more. A master has died.”
That same year Brahms had become smitten by a twenty-six-year-old contralto named Hermine Spies whom he had met that January in the town of Krefeld, where he had gone to perform some of his music. By this time, Brahms was a fifty-year-old, rotund cigar-smoking and alcohol-imbibing musician whose recent compositions had made him famous. He was in great health and had never been married. Just how romantically he regarded Spies, “my songstress,” is impossible to know but certainly one of the reasons he opted for the town of Wiesbaden in the summer of 1883 was because his “Rhine-maiden” would be there too.
As is evident in the opening bars of the Third Symphony, Hermine was hardly the sole inspiration for Brahms’ latest opus. Following two majestic wind chords, the violins passionately decry a theme evoking Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, an earlier work also composed on the banks of the Rhine. Brahms’ relationship to Schumann dated to the 1850’s, when Schumann had championed the younger composer, publicly regarding him as heir to Beethoven’s legacy. Schumann and his wife Clara would serve as mentors to Brahms. In return, Brahms would fall deeply in love with Clara.
All of which is to say, Brahms’ Op.90 is rich in cyphers. Indeed, the first three bassline pitches—F-A-flat-F, which ascends up a third and then to the octave—are believed to be musical shorthand for Brahms’ musical motto: Frei aber froh, Free but happy. In truth, Brahms suffered romantically, though judging from the exalted character of his F major Symphony, he appears to have been in high spirits that summer. These three pitches, meanwhile, will come to dominate not simply the opening Allegro con brio but the other three movements also.
It had now been six years since his previous symphony. In the meantime, Brahms had composed his monumental Violin Concerto, a pair of orchestral overtures, and his Second Piano Concerto and the composer was at the height of his powers. While his First Symphony had caused him tremendous struggle, he had since learned to compose with “fluency and ease,” evident not simply in Third Symphony’s inspired, organic handling of material but by the fact that it was all but complete come October. Indeed, Brahms played through parts of the symphony on the piano that month for Dvořák, who believed it surpassed Brahms’ earlier symphonies, if not in grandeur, then in beauty.
As the musical world had come to expect, Brahms looked to a time-tested, classically minded framework. Structurally, three of the four movements—I, II, and IV—rely on sonata form, while the C minor Poco allegretto is cast as an easily identifiable ternary—A-B-A— form. The work as a whole breathes a lyrical freshness and is rarely freighted with typical Brahmsian weightiness. Examples are to be found in the light-hearted clarinet theme of the second movement, which Brahms marks espressivo semplice (expressive, simple) before passing it effortlessly along to other members of the orchestra, the waltz-like theme of the Poco allegretto and the fluid, easy theme of the finale, which again may well mirror the flow of the Rhine river, but a few steps away from Brahms’ Wiesbaden doorway.
Admittedly, the fourth movement contains some of the most powerful orchestral writing Brahms would ever create, yet the overall effect remains seemingly effortless. Whether or not we regard the atmospheric writing towards the end as Brahms tipping his hat to Wagner, his late rival, there is no mistaking the Schumann-esque reprise of the opening. Brahms then allows his noble score to simply fade away. This was a daring end for a symphonic work, but it left no doubt about the symphonic confidence Brahms was experiencing during the halcyon summer of ‘83.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor, WoO.1
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings
Composed: 1868
Duration: 4 minutes
Nineteenth-century Vienna was a true melting pot, the capital of a monarchy that stretched nearly 240,000 square miles, making it the second-largest geographical country on the continent (after the Russian Empire). On any given day, one might hear Czech, Croatian, Polish, Ruthenian, Romanian, Bosnian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Italian, or Romani, not to mention Yiddish, spoken in Vienna’s streets. Among those speaking Hungarian was violinist Eduard Hoffmann, who came to the capital in 1842 to study music, though he was subsequently banished from the country for participating in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Having adopted the Hungarian name Ede Reményi, the violinist left for Germany, where he met a fifteen-year-old pianist and would-be composer named Johannes Brahms. Before the pair could work together, Reményi, who was being pursued by German authorities, fled to the United States. He returned to Europe several years later, toured with Brahms, and ultimately led a highly successful concert career.
During their time together, Reményi introduced Brahms to the Csárdás, a traditional Hungarian folk dance in 2/4 or 4/4 meter that typically began slowly and gradually accelerated. The exotic warmth and buoyant spirit of these dances captivated the otherwise serious Brahms, so much so that he later composed twenty-one Hungarian Dances of his own, scored for piano four hands. Though some of the melodies Brahms created anew, most of his dances drew on actual Csárdás themes, such as the G minor dance heard tonight. The music’s golden glow and simmering Hungarian passion blossomed with Brahms’ arrangement for orchestra, though he must have been more than satisfied with his original piano versions of the dances (published in 1869 and 1880 respectively), for they proved among the most popular and financially rewarding works Brahms would ever compose. An aside: on YouTube, you can hear Brahms’s own (high-pitched!) voice in an Edison recording the composer made, along with a piano performance of this very Hungarian Dance, though it will come as no surprise that the recording quality in 1889 left much to be desired. Play on, Herr Doktor Brahms!
© Marc Moskovitz
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