After having played the Dvořák “New World” Symphony many, many times, I still listen all the way to the end when it comes on radio because it’s such a great piece! ERIK DYKE, NCS DOUBLE BASS

Big, Beautiful, Dark, and Scary

JULIA WOLFE BORN December 18, 1958, in Philadelphia PREMIERE Composed 2002; first performance April 2002, at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Bang on a Can All-Stars

THE STORY Julia Wolfe is an American composer inspired by classical, folk, and rock, bridging the gaps between genres. She is co-founder of New York’s music collective Bang on a Can. Currently on the faculty of New York University, she is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University. Wolfe received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2015 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016. Her multimedia oratorio Fire in my mouth, about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed more than 100 workers, was premiered in 2019 by the New York Philharmonic and a chamber choir of women and girls. A recording of the highly praised work was released in August. Wolfe’s work focuses on the ways in which sound is related to memory and experience, as well as the new harmonies formed from familiar chords with microtonal tunings or sounds found in the natural and urban environment. Wolfe composed Big, Beautiful, Dark, and Scary following the 9/11 tragedy; it was her response to standing with her children two blocks from Ground Zero when the planes struck the Twin Towers. For the premiere, she wrote: “This is how life feels now.” She originally composed it for the six-member Bang on a Can ensemble, subsequently transcribing it for symphony orchestra.

LISTENING TIPS Big, Beautiful, Dark, and Scary builds on repeated ascending chromatic scales against pounding rhythmic figures. These are musical gestures that we all know from film and TV soundtracks, and we know exactly how to respond emotionally to them. The work is not melodic, but one of its few fragmented melodies is from the 1890 ditty: East Side, West Side, all around the town The kids played ring-around-rosy, London Bridge is falling down. Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourk, We tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

INSTRUMENTATION Two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two (one doubling ), four horns, two , , bass trombone, , percussion, , electric guitar, strings

Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

BÉLA BARTÓK BORN March 25, 1881, in Romania (then Hungary); died September 26, 1945, in PREMIERE Composed 1936; first performance January 31, 1937, in Basel, Switzerland, Basel Chamber Orchestra, Paul Sacher conducting

THE STORY Béla Bartók composed Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in 1936 on commission from Swiss conductor and philanthropist Paul Sacher. Bartók wrote: “The general mood of the work — apart from the humorous second movement — represents a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life assertion of the last one.” The work is a feast of strikingly unusual sonorities and rhythms. Like most of Bartók’s music, it is constructed of very short, rhythmically dynamic musical motives, as opposed to the expansive themes of composers such as Mozart or Tchaikovsky. He employed these concise melodies in fugues and canons, often played inverted or in retrograde (upside down or backwards). On a larger scale, he maintains a tight architectural approach — Bartók was obsessed with symmetry, and grand arch forms encompass entire movements and the piece as a whole. Symmetry is even applied to the seating of the performers; the strings are divided into two equal groups, which Bartók specifies should mirror each other on opposite sides of the stage.

LISTENING TIPS First movement: The first movement, Andante tranquilo, is a slow, chromatic fugue; the fugue subject recurs throughout the piece, providing a sense of unity and a large formal design. The movement begins with muted strings. The strings gradually crescendo, finally removing their mutes. About halfway through, a cymbal crash announces the climax, at which point the theme is inverted. The dynamics gradually decrescendo, subsiding to the quietness of the opening, as the strings are muted once again to repeat the fugue — with the theme still inverted. Finally, in the coda, the theme and its inversion are played simultaneously, ending very softly, pianissimo. Participation of the percussion instruments is kept to a minimum and only to highlight strategic moments in the form.

Second movement: The Allegro features call-and-response between the string sections on either side of the stage. Its short, aggressive, initial theme contains a minor rearrangement of the pitches from the first movement fugue subject. The strings dominate the first half of the movement — albeit with loud punctuation by the timpani. Bartók later introduces episodes for piano and celesta with various combinations of percussion instruments, as well as for pizzicato (plucked) strings.

Third movement: The opening xylophone accelerando and slithery timpani set the stage for the mysterious Adagio. Its creeping, chromatic theme, accompanied by a quiet timpani roll, belongs to a style often referred to as Bartók’s “night music,” referring to a piano piece he had composed in 1926. Exactly halfway through the movement, the celesta stars in a swirling perpetual motion with the piano and harp, interrupted violently by a crash on the piano and contrasting percussive variations on the theme. The strings return with the creeping theme and the movement closes with the xylophone and timpani once again.

Fourth movement: The finale, Allegro molto, rolls out a series of dances, beginning in the style and rhythm of a Bulgarian folk dance. Opening with wild timpani and guitar- like strumming on the violins, the movement proceeds through the dances, the tempo becoming increasingly frenzied, egged on by the piano. A slow middle section repeats the first movement’s fugue, followed by an allusion to the second movement’s theme by a solo cello. The celesta leads into a repeat of the Bulgarian theme from the opening; in the coda, the theme is again repeated as a slow Hungarian dance and ends with a rapid flourish.

INSTRUMENTATION Timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, piano, strings

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK BORN September 8, 1841, near Prague, Czech Republic; died May 1, 1904, Prague, Czech Republic PREMIERE Composed 1893; first performance December 16, 1893, New York Philharmonic, Anton Seidl conducting

THE STORY Antonín Dvořák’s sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Mrs. Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. Because of Dvořák’s popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber’s first choice for a director. The fact that he spoke no English was of little consequence, since the language of musical discourse was German. He was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Mrs. Thurber’s own. Thirty years before his arrival, Dvořák had read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation. He was eager to learn more about Native American and African-American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. (He had intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never left the drawing board.) Dvořák shared with Mrs. Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit African-American students. One of them was Henry Burleigh, who became an important African-American composer in his own right. While Dvořák’s knowledge of authentic Native American music is questionable — his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show — he became familiar with African-American spirituals through Burleigh, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, composed while he was in New York.

LISTENING TIPS First movement: Just as Dvořák seldom quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, with his unsurpassed gift for melody, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own themes. In the first movement, we hear fragments of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” (We can deduce the importance of the “American” musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the finale. The symphony, however, is hardly an American pastiche.)

Second movement: The second motive in the Largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia. The New York music critic and Dvořák’s friend, Henry Krehbiel, claimed that the movement was inspired by incidents from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Which incidents, however, have never been definitively determined. Krehbiel posited the scene in which Hiawatha woos Minnehaha, while others have suggested Minnehaha’s funeral.

Third movement: With its rhythmic thumping, the pentatonic scale, and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion, the third movement is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance, also described in Longfellow’s poem. (Dvorák’s symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have reflected his initial ideas for his abandoned opera on Hiawatha.)

Fourth movement: One of the most important features of the Symphony overall is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the last movement, Dvořák brings nearly all of the symphony’s themes together, sometimes as one long continuous melody, sometimes in contrapuntal relationship to each other.

INSTRUMENTATION Two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three , tuba, timpani, percussion, strings

© 2019 Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn