by Bill Scanlan Murphy
SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981)
ADAGIO FOR STRINGS
Composed: 1935
Premiered: Rome, 1935 (String Quartet); New York, 1938 (orchestral version)
At the first test screening of the movie Alien in 1979, something happened that tells us much about the vast reputation of this exquisite work. The film’s director had rejected Jerry Goldsmith’s closing title music, and had insisted on replacing it with the Barber Adagio. As the titles rolled, many members of the audience looked around, asking urgently “When did he die? What happened?”
They thought that President Jimmy Carter had met a sudden untimely end. The Barber Adagio has been played on the radio and public media every time a US president has died since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. The British director of Alien was unaware of this, and had inadvertently added an entirely unintended layer of meaning to Sigourney Weaver’s gory adventures. Incredibly, exactly the same thing happened at the first American showing of The Elephant Man the following year.
The Adagio was not even originally intended as an orchestral work, but was the slow movement of Barber’s String Quartet. The first performance of the Quartet took place in Rome; in the audience was Arturo Toscanini, who suggested—fiercely—to Barber that it would make a fine piece for string orchestra. Barber obliged (three years later!), and the Adagio was on its way. It is now one of that tiny number of classical works (and even tinier number of modern classical works) that nearly everyone knows, even if they can’t put a name to it.
The piece, like so much great music, is based on the simplest of musical ideas—a stepwise pattern of notes that winds slowly up, then down again. The great drama of the middle section is built around its inversion. It’s that simple. And the greatest, most dramatic moment consists of nothing at all—that huge, aching silence at the climax of the strings’ climb to their highest registers and loudest sounds. Even those who acknowledge the presence of the outraged ghost of Mahler waving the slow movement of his Fifth Symphony will admit that this piece has earned its place in American musical history honestly.
DAVID HEUSER (born 1966)
A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY
Composed: 2005
Premiered: Houston, 2005
Program note by the composer:
A Screaming Comes Across the Sky is the first sentence from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity's Rainbow. The book’s title refers to the parabola made by a rocket or bomb in flight; specifically, Pynchon is referring to the V2 rocket, which the Germans were lobbing at London during World War II, as the thing screaming across the sky. Gravity’s Rainbow, the parabola, is the central metaphor of the book, signifying many things, including the trajectory of life itself, from birth to death. Unlike the earlier sub-sonic rockets, the V2 is super-sonic, meaning that those on the ground no longer hear death coming. Simply put, if you hear the V2 approaching, the rocket has already landed and you were spared.
By no means does this short work attempt to capture the richness and complexity of Pynchon’s dense 700+ page novel. Instead, I focused on the mood struck by the first sentence and the shape described by Pynchon’s title. In many ways the piece is very much about altitude, with register playing a central role in the form and movement in the piece. I also took, from the aggressive, active nature of Pynchon’s first sentence, a sense of relentless kinetic motion, and throughout the piece there is a rhythmic pulse, always played by someone, even in the quietest section where it is performed by the percussion section playing the sides of their drums with their fingers. The only point where this incessant pulse is not heard is when the horns burst out with the main melody of the piece, a melody that has always been, up to this point, only hinted at, buried or unfinished, struggling to gain altitude until finally, at this climatic moment towards which the whole piece leads, everything else is stripped away.
A Screaming Comes Across the Sky was commissioned by the Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival for its “New Texas Overtures” program. It was awarded the 2006 Fauxharmonic Orchestra Composition Prize, and was the winner of the Columbia Orchestra’s 2007 American Composer Competition.
WILLIAM BOLCOM (born 1938)
VIOLIN CONCERTO in D
I: Allegro
II: Adagio
III: Rondo—Finale
Composed: 1983-1984
Premiered: Saarbrücken, Germany, 1984.
Yes, in D! It’s tonal! More or less. There are even things in the music that might be accused of being—horreur!—unes. William Bolcom is possibly the only living American composer who can dare to write such things and still not be run out of the contemporary music world on a rail; equally well known for his forays into popular music with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, as for his astonishingly wide-ranging compositions, Bolcom is in a league, and musical world, of his own.
The Violin Concerto was written for Bolcom’s friend, the Romanian violinist Sergiu Luca. Luca shared Bolcom’s enthusiasm for jazz, and in particular for the music of Joe Venuti, whose trio backed Bolcom and his wife to devastating effect one night in the early eighties. Venuti’s musical world certainly makes itself felt in the Violin Concerto, primarily in the finale, but we shall have had occasional glimpses of it before then.
The first movement of the Concerto is described by the composer as a Fantasia juxtaposing several musical styles, setting up a multi-layered musical conversation (and conversations can and do include jokes) that will explain itself fully in the Finale.
The slow movement is dedicated to the memory of the composer’s friend, the pianist Paul Jacobs, who died in 1982. The “conversation” is now deadly serious, culminating in an exchange between the soloist and an off-stage trumpet. Not the usual orchestral trumpet, however; this is a trumpet in D, which brings with it a whole world of associations from the Baroque era.
The Finale is a Rondo that borrows this uniquely Classical form to drop in entire musical worlds between the appearances of the rondo theme; Joe Venuti, rhythm and blues, and ragtime all make appearances before the soloist leads us out of this maelstrom in a closing passage of terrifying difficulty. The very solidity of the form makes this an immediately graspable, exciting musical experience. And wasn’t this, after all, the original purpose of the fixed Classical forms—to make us understand differing themes in terms of each other and the tonalities they moved through?
ANTONIN DVORÁK (1841–1904)
SYMPHONY No. 9 IN E MINOR, FROM THE NEW WORLD
Adagio—Allegro molto
Largo
Scherzo: Molto Vivace—Poco sostenuto
Allegro con fuoco
Composed: 1893
Premiered: New York, 1983
First performed as the composer’s Symphony No. 5, then published as No. 8 before reaching its final numerical berth in Dvorák’s catalog, the New World symphony was written in New York, during Dvorák’s tenure as Director of the National Conservatory of Music.
Everybody knows how Dvorák used American Indian and Negro spiritual themes in the symphony, and everybody is, alas, wrong. Dvorák first came into contact with Native American music in Spillville, Iowa, whose population was almost entirely Czech at the time. Far from going there to absorb local color, however, he was invited there by his friend Joseph Kovarik in the hope of getting him away from New York City to something more like his Bohemian home. The town was visited several times a week by Native Americans selling medicines; while there, they would camp outside town and sing and dance in the evenings. Dvorák took great interest in all of this, and bought several instruments to take back to New York. Not a note of the New World symphony has anything to do with this, however; he completed the symphony before going to Iowa.
Despite this, Dvorák said on the day of the premiere:
"I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral color."
There is, in fact, nothing at all in the music even faintly resembling Native American music. Dvorák once called the Negro Spiritual the “folk songs of America,” but used none of them in his New World Symphony. The famous Goin’ Home words were added later by a poet who thought the tune resembled Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Which it doesn’t—any more than other melodies in the piece resemble Yankee Doodle, Deep River or any of the numerous American melodies that have been cited over the decades as the inspiration for the piece.
So, why the title? Dvorák actually intended the title to carry the suggestion of a greeting “from the New World” to his much-missed countrymen back home—which is why he used a Bohemian melody in the slow movement.
What happened is simple enough. Dvorák, that most European of composers, fell victim to that most American of creatures, the promo man. Arthur Mees had written the program note for the premiere without consulting Dvorák, and it’s all there—the “Negro Spiritual slow movement,” Native American pow-wows in the scherzo and a sobbing Hiawatha just about everywhere. Poor Dvorák denied it all later, but the story has stuck.
The reality is a Czech masterpiece. That America could inspire such music from the Bohemian master is cause enough for national pride without raiding the music itself for local borrowings. The Symphony is bigger than all of us.
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