Season Schedule

About the Music

FROM THE COMPOSER:
Paul Rissmann (b. 1971): FLOW: Variations Over Time
Instrumentation: Scored for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings
Composed: 2025
Duration: 22 minutes

It started with sushi.

David Danzmayr and Janet Chen pitched an idea over lunch in Downtown Columbus. Their brief was clear, they wanted “something that illustrates compositional techniques that were developed throughout the 20th century.”

I really liked their concept (lunch was great too) so it wasn’t until the next day that panic set in.

Three things troubled me:

• many years ago, as a music student, I had vehemently rejected most of these techniques because they felt ugly or limiting, or both.
• how could I preserve any sense of self if my job was essentially to dress up in other composers’ clothes?
• surely the best way to showcase these innovations would be to play music by the composer who actually pioneered them!

Time passed, anxiety increased, and it took a lot more sushi before the idea of FLOW: Variations Over Time was fully formed.

My imposter syndrome was finally tamed by imagining a simple melody that changes style and mood as I embrace a series of new orchestral colours. Of course, none of those colours are new, many are over 100 years old, but they would be new to my palette. The challenge was to paint them into my score, but still feel like the music was mine.

FLOW presents a series of variations that take the audience from 1900 to the present day in around 22 minutes. In such a short work, it was impossible to honour all the musical innovations that were developed in that time; however I knew I wanted to start by exploring impressionism and end with something bold and cinematic, which I dubbed ‘Zimmerism’ – as in Hans!

However, the problem with that journey is, it doesn’t truly deliver us into the present, not when we now live in a world dominated by A.I.

Like many artists, the thought of humanity happily inviting a computer to make creative decisions on their behalf fills me with horror. Even if the technology surpasses anything the most gifted creatives could imagine, does that mean that people should stop dreaming, stop feeling, stop making art?

It was with a huge amount of trepidation that I uploaded the FLOW theme to A.I. One of its compositions is included as part of this concert suite, not out of laziness, but as a representation of the present. While the rest of this work took many months to compose, A.I. made hundreds of variations on my theme in a matter of minutes. It doesn’t even need an orchestra to play it.

George Gershwin (1898-1937): Rhapsody in Blue (arr. Fleck)
Instrumentation: Scored for solo banjo, two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons, three saxophones, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings
Composed: 1924
Duration: 17 minutes

Banjo player extraordinaire, arranger, composer, and musical maverick Béla Fleck probably didn’t need the 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue to inspire his reinterpretations of that classical-jazz masterpiece, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Fleck first heard the iconic work as a seven-year-old when his uncle introduced him to the movie of the same name, which tells the story of George Gershwin. It left an indelible impression on the youngster. Perhaps Fleck saw something of Gershwin in himself, another New York Jew also destined to do great musical things. But above all, there was Gershwin’s brilliant, well-loved score, which so effortlessly imbues a black jazz musical idiom with thrilling, classically inspired piano virtuosity. Decades later, Fleck remains overtly aware of the danger such an undertaking would find today, that is, a white man lifting the music of black culture for his own means. As a banjo player, “everything I do moves within the problematic nature of the harm done along race lines throughout American history.”

A century ago, when Gershwin dashed off the score, which he did within weeks, there was no “woke” culture, no understood laws of musical property. As a composer, Gershwin, the son of Jewish immigrants, had deeply immersed himself in the rich musical mélange of New York from a young age, studying classical piano, working as a song “plugger” for Tin Pan Alley music publishers, and then gradually arranging and composing his songs for vaudeville and Broadway. In 1919, Gershwin scored his first hit with “Swanee,” a song Al Jolson heard him play and went on to sing himself. Gershwin was, by this time, so enmeshed in the sounds of vaudeville and jazz that when bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned a piano work from the young composer, a mash-up of these various styles must have seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Gershwin himself described the Rhapsody’s compositional process as a reimagination of the American melting pot
in music:

“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer…
I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”

The kaleidoscopic nature can also be noted in the work’s segmented architecture. Rather than adhering to classical form or structure, Gershwin’s music unfolds naturally—hence the term Rhapsody, or rhapsodic—as if it’s a large improvisatory piece in the making (Gershwin had yet to write out the entire piano part for the premiere and so improvised the cadenzas). No less than Leonard Bernstein has commented on the work’s fragmented character or lack of musical “inevitability,” precisely that component that makes Beethoven, Beethoven. “You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone; it can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact, all these things are being done to it every day. It’s still the Rhapsody in Blue.”

Regardless of the cultural dangers of history, Rhapsody in Blue, alongside Gershwin’s “folk” opera Porgy and Bess, which has likewise been criticized for its representation and appropriation, remains quintessentially great American art. The music has been embraced universally, Béla Fleck being but one in a long line of interpreters. In 2024, in celebration of Rhapsody’s centennial, Fleck reimagined Gershwin’s music several times over, both as a vehicle for bluegrass band and, in a more traditional version, by substituting the banjo for piano within the framework of the well-known orchestral score heard tonight, as arranged by composer Ferde Grofé. The cultural twists and turns, however, are never far from Fleck’s mind. As he has written,

“America’s music is innovative and full of endless possibilities BECAUSE of the way we are moved by the diversity of thought and culture that we are submerged in. We must face harms done, reclaim histories with truer narratives, and adapt our humanity in this moment to create space, opportunity and justice for voices pushed away from the stages, curricula and fame. We can do this by elevating composers like Duke Ellington in our curricula, teach African and Latin diasporic pulses in the training of classical music. But we still can enjoy Rhapsody as one piece of an illustrious puzzle showing the dawn of a powerful coming together of culture in music.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
Instrumentation: Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani, and strings
Composed: 1795
Duration: 26 minutes

In 1787, Ludwig van Beethoven passed through the gates of Vienna in search of musical guidance. He hoped to study with Mozart, but shortly arriving in the musical capital, he learned that his mother was dying, and so quickly returned to his native city of Bonn, Germany. Five years later, Beethoven returned to the Austro-Hungarian capital, but as Mozart, too, had since died, the young Beethoven set his sights on learning from the elder Classical statesman, Franz Joseph Haydn. Although not the only figure Beethoven would study with in the years that followed, Haydn was certainly the most famous, especially following the latter’s triumphant return from concerts in London in 1790. Beethoven would butt heads with all his teachers—along with the heads of many other Viennese over the years—and with Haydn things were no different. Years later, Beethoven claimed to have learned nothing from “Papa” Haydn, but we know better. Haydn had recognized the younger man’s talent and did much to foster it. Such influences are peppered throughout Beethoven’s inaugural symphony, drafted between the years 1795-6.

Haydn’s musical spirit can be sensed from the first movement’s slow, stately introduction, in the rushing “scherzo” quality of the third, and again in the witty sonata-rondo finale. Indeed, when the First Symphony was premiered, in Vienna in 1800 under Beethoven’s direction, one reviewer found it a “caricature of Haydn pushed to absurdity.” It is not known how Beethoven reacted to such criticism, but as someone bent on distancing himself from Haydn while moving the Viennese symphonic tradition forward, we might safely assume Beethoven was not amused.

The First Symphony may not exhibit the revolutionary traits of the “Eroica” or the Fifth, but it nevertheless contains radical ideas of its own, as evident in the work’s opening chord. Beethoven not only commences with a dissonance, a rare opening move in 1800, but also opens in a key other than his declared tonality of C major. Is he making a joke at his listeners’—or perhaps his players’—expense, another trait inherited from the humorous Haydn? To be sure, the music soon rights itself, swinging toward F major and foreshadowing the “home” key of C.

Another mark of the renegade composer was his approach to orchestration, for rather than simply handing much of the material to the upper strings, as was tradition, Beethoven relied heavily on their colleagues in the woodwind section. He would be taken to task by the critics for his heavy-handed wind writing throughout the First Symphony, but at this stage, Beethoven was intent on exploring new orchestral colors, in addition to exaggerated dynamics and heightened motivic development. Following this unexpected opening gambit, Beethoven begins the inexorable drive toward the Allegro proper, with its greatly anticipated C major resolution. If what unfolds from this point on is arguably more routine—a first theme cut from classical cloth, the strongly contrasting subordinate theme, and a development constructed almost entirely from primary material—the underlying power and accompanying drive reveal precisely those qualities that Beethoven would continuously explore and exploit in each symphony that followed.

The courtly atmosphere that opens the second movement may seem reminiscent of the slow movements of Haydn or Mozart, yet Beethoven also offers up clues that he intends to bring increased depth to what was formerly a light-hearted movement. By casting his Andante in a sophisticated sonata form and offering expanded development of his ideas with contrapuntal passagework, a weightiness is achieved in a movement that earlier composers simply looked to as relief from the far more serious strains that preceded it. Similarly, while the third movement harbors a conventional Menuetto label, in reality, it is anything but. As suggested by its Allegro molto e vivace tempo indication (“very fast and lively”), this is hardly the aristocratic 3/4-time minuet of Mozart’s day, but rather a movement that rushes relentlessly toward the finale.

Despite the tremendous forward momentum previously established, Beethoven is not yet ready to deliver on his promise. Instead, he opens his finale with an Adagio, and an absurd one at that, built on nothing more than the most basic scale that adds a note with each repetition. Only when the pitch F is reached, demanding immediate resolution, is the music thrust into the Allegro proper, heralded by a flurry of ascending sixteenths that spill into the good-natured opening theme. What follows is a Haydn-esque creation, combining sophisticated wit and a reliance on a hybrid sonata-rondo form, of which Haydn was the undisputed master (even the theme hints at Haydn’s own Symphony No. 88 finale). Haydn’s miraculous powers of invention, however, were simply not to be outdone by the young upstart, at least not yet. We must remember that Beethoven was testing symphonic waters for the first time—the titanic musical waves were still to come. For now, Beethoven played by the master’s rules. Soon enough, the young Beethoven would put the 18th century behind him, shattering old molds and casting new ones with every symphony that followed.

© Marc Moskovitz
marcmoskovitz.org