• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

WORLD OF THE I VHHin ISUUID BY DONALD MARTINO THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FINAL WORK COMMISSIONED BY THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA FOR ITS CENTENNIAL //] that whiter island, where Things are evermore sincere Candor here, and lustre there BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Carl St. Clair and Pascal Verrot, Assistayit Conductors One Hundred and Sixth Season, 1986-87 Wednesday, 8 April at 8 JOHN OLIVER conducting THE TANGLEWOOD FESTIVAL CHORUS and MEMBERS OF THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA MARTINO The White Island, for mixed chorus and chamber orchestra (world premiere; commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its centennial and supported in part by a generous grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities) The Bell-man Upon Time His Letanie, to the Holy Spirit The goodnesse of his God The white Island TANGLEWOOD FESTIVAL CHORUS, JOHN OLIVER, conductor INTERMISSION BRUCKNER Mass No. 3 in F minor for soloists, chorus, and orchestra Kyrie Gloria Credo Sanctus—Hosanna Benedietus—Hosanna Agnus Dei ROBERTA ALEXANDER, soprano KATHERINE CIESINSKI, mezzo-soprano JOHN ALER, tenor JOHN CHEEK, bass-baritone TANGLEWOOD FESTIVAL CHORUS, JOHN OLIVER, conductor Baldwin piano The American Music Center has awarded Donald Martino a grant from the Margaret Fairbank Jory Copying Assistance Program to assist with the extraction and reproduction of parts for this performance of The White Island. Donald Martino The WliHe Island, for mixed chonis and chamber orchestra Donald Martina was born in Flainfield, New Jersey, on 16 May 1931 and lives in Newton, Massachusetts; he is currently Professor of Music at Harvard University. The White Island was one of the twelve new compositions com- missioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its centen- nial, this one intended specifically for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The composer selected texts from the seven- teenth-century English poet Robert Herrick; his score bears, at its end, the date 23 October 1985 and, at its head, the dedication "To John Oliver and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus." This is the first performance. It calls for a mixed chorus, generally in four parts, though both men's and women 's parts subdivide at certain points, and an ensemble consisting of flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet, contrabass clarinet (extended) and bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet (doubling flugelhorn), tenor/bass trombone, bass trombone, an elaborate percussion part for two players (five temple blocks, bass drum, two tom-toms, two timbales, two bongo drums, military drum, snare drum, medium and large tam-tams, medium and large cymbals, three timpani, six roto-toms, marimba, four tubular chimes, tuned gong, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and antique cymbal), piano (doubling celesta), and five string parts (two violins, viola, cello, and double bass), for single instruments or a small consort. Donald Martino's first composition teacher was Ernst Bacon at Syracuse University. In his undergraduate days he was he a^^ly involved with jazz and the music of the Broadway theater as a clarinetist. Even today his music frequently retains reflections, often much sublimated, of the harmonic and rhythmic turns of that musical world, and it is filled with indications of his love for the clarinet. During graduate work at Princeton, where he studied with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, he decided to pursue composition as his major acti\ity. Unlike most of the Princeton graduate students in composition, Martino was not yet committed to serial composition; probably the greatest influence on his work at that time was Bartok. But after earning his master's degree, he spent two years in Florence studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, who, though committed to twelve-tone com- position, always retained the tj^^ically Italian concern for a lyric, vocal quality in the melodic line, however complex it might become. Martino, too, boasts an Italian heritage, and combines the characteristic Italian musical strengths of the expressive singing line and a sense of the theatrical, even in works designed purely for concert use. During his studies with Dallapiccola he turned to twelve-tone music, but, like his teacher, even in his most complex, exacting music, a sense of line emerges out of the richly detailed writing. This is certainly true of The White Island, where the chorus projects the core expressive element surrounded by elaborate figuration and commentary on the part of the instruments. Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its centennial, and specifically conceived for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, The White Island took its impetus from two earlier choral works performed and recorded by Boston ensembles. The first of these was a series of unaccompanied choral works published as Seven Pious Pieces, composed as a kind of "penitence" on Sundays, one each week, while Martino was working on a very secular work, Augenmusik , "a Mixed Mediocritique for actress, danseuse, or uninhibited female percussionist"" and tape. The choral pieces were designed to ser\T a practical function, as anthems that might be within the capabilities of a good church choir. But the discover^' of the poet was almost accidental: Martino was looking over some music by his teacher Ernest Bacon, a composer who made many exquisite settings of the English language, and found a setting of Herrick's "The Soule." Robert Herrick (1591-1674), the greatest of the English Cavalier poets, is best known to students of English literature for the simplicity and sensuousness of lyrics like "Upon Julia's Clothes" or "Corinna's Going a-Ma\4ng." These love l\Ties are found in many anthologies, but the religious poetry is much less well-known. Martino was so attracted by "The Soule'' that he looked up more of Herrick's work in this line and found much that moved him to composition, first in the seven unaccompanied anthems. Even after finish- ing those, he had some Herrick texts that attracted him, but he did not yet know how he would set them. Two of them formed the starting point for The White Island, a contempla- tion of the inevitability of death and of the poet's coming to grips \Wth that fact. The musical style of The \Miite Island also goes back to the Seven Pious Pieces (1972) and involves a procedure that can be described as making twelve-tone music sound tonal. The "tonal" elements come from arranging the twelve notes of the basic set in such a way that they include sections of "traditional" scales, and from these the composer can, when he chooses, create a musical surface that sounds verj- tonal. Martino elaborated the technique in his Paradiso Choruses (1974), composed for the twentieth anniversary of Loma Cooke deVaron's work as director of the choral program at the New England Conserv^atory. Here, as Martino explained in an inter\'iew, the "three-ness" of Dante's Divine Comedy had an effect on the choice of tonal centers. Here you had the Dante terza rima, everj-thing was in triplets representing the holy number, the Trinity, and so forth. All that is infused in the poetrj', with the notion of the universe divided into three parts—Hell, Purgatorv^, and Heaven. I came up wdth what I called a "universe chain," which you can generate from the first six notes of a particular twelve-tone set. The three transpositions that were important to me were E major, C major, and A-flat. derived from just six notes. In the Paradiso Choruses, I associated E major. that extremely bright and exciting key, with heaven. And I associated A-flat with earth or purgatorj-, which I've come to think of as sjTionymous pretty much. That left C for hell—no way you can get around it. I'm not sure I would have picked C for hell, but/ it fit the plan. And certainly E major is an exquisite heaven key . That same universe chain gets reused in The \Mi.ite Island. It's exactly the same thing. You could call this the "little Paradiso," I suppose. The three transpositions that lie at the heart of The White Island are based on six pitches, consisting of three pairs of semitones: D-sharp and E, G and G-sharp, B and C. From these it is possible to produce the triads of A-flat major or minor, C major or minor, and E major or minor (remember that G-sharp is the same as A-flat, D-sharp the same as E-flat, and B the same as C-flat) for a symbolic and musical reference to the realms of Purgatory, Hell, or Heaven: Example 1 [^^=g#=^^^^-wa 'Paradise" "Pur^atopy" "Hell" Moreover it is possible to move from one realm simply by changing a single note to a different one from the same sub-set. Another arrangement of the twelve-tone set, used both melodically and harmonically in many parts of the work, divides it into three groups of four notes, in which each group represents the pitches traditionally identified as do, re, fa, sol in the keys of C, A-flat, and E: Example{^^^^^m2 Again the arrangement provides a structural framework for the ear and at the same time reflects the symbolic elements of the text. It allows the composer to move through a wide expressive range from near-hysterical terror to mystical tranquillity. When he received the commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a choral piece, Martino thought immediately of Herrick. He had not yet set all the poems that he found attractive. In particular, "His Letanie, to the Holy Spirit," which is now the third movement, had been in his mind for some time. When he came across "The White Island," he knew that it would be the final movement of his new work, but for a long time he thought of the litany as the opening movement, beginning with a rush of abject pleas for deliverance.

Load more

  20

Copy Link