by Bill Scanlan Murphy
DAVID DZUBAY (born 1964)
SHADOW DANCE
Composed: 2002
Premiered: Dallas, Texas, 2003
David Dzubay, winner, with Shadow Dance, of the 2005 Columbia Orchestra’s American Composer Competition, was born in Minneapolis, and is now Professor of Music at Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington. His works have been performed all over the world, and winning our competition is merely the latest in a long line of awards and prizes.
Like Christopher Theofanidis’ Rainbow Body, based on a Hildegard of Bingen sequence and performed by the Columbia Orchestra last year, Shadow Dance stands on the shoulders of a much earlier masterpiece—the Viderunt Omnes of the twelfth-century composer known to us only as Perotin (which means, oddly, “Pete”). Perotin was choirmaster at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris until his death about 1220, and wrote some of the earliest known four-part music, in a style known as “organum.”
The vast four-part organum Viderunt Omnes (“All the ends of the earth shall see”) was written for the Feast of St. Stephen in 1199, and can reasonably be called the musical equivalent of the mighty Notre Dame Cathedral itself. In the organum, the Gregorian Chant for the day is sung in almost unbelievably long notes (some minutes long – pity the poor monks who sang them!) while three other voices dance above the drone in relentless but strangely cheerful celebration.
Viderunt Omnes is one of the cornerstones of Western music; the Notre Dame School, over which Perotin presided, has often been called, with reason, the heart of the “12th Century Renaissance.” David Dzubay’s Shadow Dance takes Perotin’s piece and, as they would say in the Middle Ages, “tropes” it, adding new parts and whole swathes of entirely new music as the organum itself gradually recedes into the past, leaving a vision of our own time that has emerged—like ourselves—from history. The “dance” of our own time lacks Perotin’s profound musical and cosmological certainties. As the composer himself says:
“Like the age in which we live, the character of this dance is unstable: by turns ominous, peaceful, celebratory, reflective, frantic, joyful, raucous, anxious, hopeful.”
FRANK NUYTS (born 1957)
WOODNOTES – CONCERTO FOR MARIMBA AND ORCHESTRA
Composed: 1986
Premiered: Ghent, Belgium, 1987
The composer and percussionist Frank Nuyts was born in Ostend, Belgium, and studied at the Royal Conservatory in Ghent, where he now teaches. Very much a child of the late twentieth-century avant-garde, Nuyts became much associated in the late 1970s with various political causes (he was personally involved in resettling Chilean refugees in Belgium after the military coup of 1973), combining sternly leftist politics with a very un-populist style of music derived from Webern and other hardline serialists. Typical is Sonivers II, a work from his “Chile” period, which combines electronic tape with music based on the numbers 1, 9, 7 and 3, spelling out the date of the coup. However, in recent years he has “:mellowed” considerably—musically, at any rate—to the extent of basing one work, Rastapasta, on a track by The Police, and declaring himself a fan and disciple of Frank Zappa.
Woodnotes belongs very much to this area of Nuyts’ work. In fact, Rastapasta and Woodnotes were written specifically to showcase Nuyts’ new “postmodernism” at a special concert in Ghent, which received a mixed welcome from his more hardline colleagues; as far as the audience were concerned, however, they marked a move to “approachability.” The two pieces became the basis of Nuyts’ new broad-based popularity, which has grown steadily ever since, along with the success of his percussion group Hardscore, which has a European following of near-rock band proportions. Nuyts also performs widely with his wife, pianist Iris de Blaere; their performances of Frank Zappa’s Uncle Meat and Rdnzl caused near-uproar in Turnhout in 1995.
The Frank Zappa connection is a useful handhold for the American audience when scaling the heights of Nuyts’ music for the first time. Like Zappa’s music, Nuyts’ percussive style owes as much to bebop and the more demented end of Big Band as it does to Schoenberg, and in fact acts as a bridge between these two apparently unreconcilable styles of music. Zappa, for all his antics, was a deeply serious musician with deep roots in the profoundest Western traditions, often at his most serious when he seemed to be joking (and even more so when he was joking); exactly the same is true of Frank Nuyts. This music is celebratory, ferocious, frightening, and fun, all at once. It is also, as the “concerto” of the subtitle suggests, fearsomely difficult to play.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)
SYMPHONY No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68
Composed: 1876
Premiered: Karlsruhe, Germany, 1876
When Brahms completed his First Symphony in 1876, he was already as old as Beethoven had been when he finished his eighth. It took Beethoven an average of six months to write a symphony; it had taken Brahms twenty years.
Brahms had originally wanted to write a symphony in D minor (the key of Beethoven’s Ninth); the result, after much mind-changing and vacillation, was the critically disastrous First Piano Concerto. So Brahms tried C minor, the key of Beethoven’s Fifth, resulting in the present work. After years compositional anguish and morbid self-doubt, it was finally, in October 1876, ready to play to Brahms’ closest musical friend and (alas) sternest critic, Clara Schumann. Clara’s husband, the great Robert, had once not entirely helpfully declared Brahms to be the true heir to Beethoven. Frau Schumann glumly declared it to be lacking in melody. Brahms himself declared the symphony to be “long and not particularly amiable.”
After some ruthless trimming of the inner two movements, the first performance took place in the comparative backwater of Karlsruhe under Felix Otto Dessoff; the Vienna premiere, under Brahms himself, took place in 1877. The great critic and theorist Hanslick praised the work to the skies, only to appall poor Brahms by pointing out that the mighty melody of the fourth movement was an obvious cousin to the main theme of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. Brahms roared, “Any fool can see that!” The conductor Hans von Bülow chimed in by declaring the new symphony to be Beethoven’s Tenth. More positively, Hanslick ended his review by saying that “the new symphony of Brahms is…an inexhaustible fountain of sincere pleasure and fruitful study.”
Nowadays, we tend to agree with Hanslick’s closing words, and leave Brahms’ status vis-à-vis Beethoven to the musicologists. There are similarities to Beethoven, not least to the highly unified structure of Beethoven’s Fifth: the first subject of the first movement is also the basis for much of the material for the next two movements. However, the second movement duet between horn and violin and the same movement’s solo violin owe far more to the Romantics than to Beethoven; there is also what might be called a Romantic sense of economics in having the trombones sit silent on the platform for three whole movements before making their majestic entrance with the fourth movement’s famous melody. Neither would Beethoven have introduced the melodic highlight of the work, as Brahms does, with an Alphorn melody he’d picked up on vacation.
The dichotomy is simple enough: Brahms’ structures are Classical, but his heart is Romantic. Where Wagner is superhuman, Brahms is, quite simply, humane.
(To top of page)
