Program Notes Final

Elizabeth Irvin Senior Thesis Recital February 26, 2010 The very sound of the French horn conjures images stored in the collective psyche. It’s an instrument that invites us to “dream backward to the ancient time.” John Williams Long before its introduction into the orchestra, the horn was a faithful companion of the night watchman, the woodsman and the hunter. Rough and boisterous, without the valves and slides of the modern instrument, it made its home first in the forests of medieval Europe, and then increasingly at the courts of the continent’s wealthy nobles. By the mid-seventeenth century, the horn was making cameo appearances in operas, and within the following century became a regular in the developing symphony orchestra. Limited technical capabilities—a result of the instrument’s rustic, unrefined design—contributed to the early horn being typecast as an instrument of the primitive forest. For the better part of two centuries, the horn remained something of a curiosity, used by composers to convey a mood or capture a special effect. Gradually, the construction of the horn became more refined and composers demanded more from its players. And yet, even as technology has domesticated the horn into an instrument capable of matching the dexterity of the clarinet and the chromaticism of the piano, it still retains some element of its distant primordial past. Twentieth-century composers in particular, fascinated by the fading echoes of the hunting horn, have gone to great lengths to coax ancient sounds out of modern instruments in everything from chamber music to film scores. The five pieces on this recital demonstrate, each in its own way, some aspect of the horn’s transformation from a primitive instrument of the forest to the noble and refined denizen of the concert hall…and back again. Through the juxtaposition of old and new, it becomes clear that every note that emerges from the bell of a modern horn rings with the overtones of nearly four hundred years of history. Benjamin Britten: Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was one member of a generation of composers including Elgar, Tippett, Holst, and Vaughn Williams who revived the British tradition of classical music in the 20th century. He is best known for his monumental works, including his War Requiem and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, as well as his operas, such as Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. Though these pieces may have made Britten’s reputation, some of his most beautiful and enduring compositions are song cycles for varied combinations of voices and instruments. In these intimate pieces, often featuring a tenor soloist (a role frequently filled by Britten’s partner Peter Pears), Britten explored texts ranging from the story of Abraham and Isaac to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Britten wrote Serenade for Horn, Tenor and Strings in 1943 for Pears and the legendary British horn player Dennis Brain. Within the bookends of two unaccompanied horn solos, Britten set six poems by British writers: Cotton, Tennyson, Blake, an anonymous 15th-century poet, Jonson, and Keats. Though during the composition process Britten described the Serenade to a friend as “not important stuff, but quite pleasant,” the finished work was an immediate critical success that has become a standard of both the horn and tenor repertoire. Britten himself re-evaluated the piece in an article mourning the sudden and tragic death of Brain in 1957: Some of my happiest musical experiences were conducting this work for him and Peter Pears—a succession of wonderful performances progressing from the youthful exuberance and brilliance of the early days to the maturity and deep understanding of the last few years. Brain approached Britten about writing him a solo during a late night wartime radio broadcast. Norman Del Mar, another member of the horn section, recounted Britten’s reaction to the request in the book Letters from A Life: “Britten responded to this immediate invitation – characteristic of Brain it seems – by questioning him in detail about the technical potential of the horn and what special effects might be persuaded from it.” Britten clearly paid close attention, for the Serenade is particularly notable for its innovative use of a wide range of techniques unique to the horn. I. “Prologue” and II. “Pastoral” The work’s Prologue and Epilogue are identical unaccompanied solos written for the natural horn, using only those pitches—the harmonic series built on a pedal F (the F an octave above, the C the fifth above that, the F a fourth above that, etc., in increasingly smaller intervals)—that would have been playable on the earliest of horns. Because of the physical properties of the harmonic series, some of these pitches sound out of tune to ears used to the even-tempering of the modern piano. (For example, the seventh, eleventh, and fourteenth harmonics are all noticeably flat, while the thirteenth is almost a quarter-tone sharp.) Britten was well aware of this effect and used it intentionally, taking a reviewer to task for criticizing Brain’s intonation and claiming that “anyone who plays it ‘in tune’ is going directly against my wishes!” Brain was a master of natural horn technique, once performing a Leopold Mozart concerto on a garden hose. In this afternoon’s recital, both the Prologue and Epilogue will be played on an alphorn. Britten did not write these movements for alphorn, but the instrument is ideally suited for both their dramatic character and melodic substance. Although more technically refined than Brain’s rubber instrument, the alphorn represents the oldest ancestor of the natural horn and the more modern valve horn. Incredibly, if one were to uncoil a modern horn, it would be twelve feet long, precisely the same length and therefore in the same key, as the alphorn being used this afternoon. Several composers have been inspired by alphorn music, most notably Brahms, whose first symphony contains a horn solo directly transcribed from an alphorn melody. The second movement, Pastoral, sets text from Charles Cotton’s “Evening Quatrains.” This movement is written for a valved horn, but yet Britten continues to use large arpeggios to evoke the rustic sound of the horn as it would have existed in the 17th and early 18th centuries. In setting the text, Britten conjures the horn Cotton might have encountered, one that would have been played more often on horseback through the forest than in the concert hall. Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in F Major for Two Horns, RV 538 There is good reason to give Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) credit for inaugurating the tradition of soloistic instrumental writing as we know it today. Though the term “concerto” had certainly been in use prior to the eighteenth century, it was Vivaldi who transformed the concerto from what was essentially chamber music into a form that highlights the skills of one or two players against the background of an orchestra. His prolific output of nearly four hundred solo and double concertos for a wide variety and combination of instruments forms the foundation of a tradition that continued through Mozart and Brahms to the present day. Of these roughly four hundred concertos, more than two hundred feature solo violin, while only two are written for horn – and both of these are double concertos for two horns and orchestra. The comparative scarcity of horn solos is a direct reflection of the intended purpose of most of these concertos; they were intended for performance by the wards of the Pietá, a Venetian girls’ orphanage. While the study of string instruments and woodwinds was considered an appropriate and even laudable occupation for these girls, the study of brass instruments was viewed as vaguely scandalous. The horn was frowned upon even more than the trumpet, and was not introduced to the Pietá until 1747, six years after Vivaldi’s death. Michael Talbot, a Vivaldi biographer, explains its exclusion as follows: The governors may have considered [horns] unladylike if not profane, for although the trumpet had long been used in sacred music as well as in pageantry, the horn was still associated with the worldly culture of courts and their favourite pastime of hunting. But even without relying on such historical guesswork as to the motives of the Pietá’s governors, it is clear that Vivaldi composed this double concerto with the hunting horn in mind. The piece begins with an emphatic statement of F major throughout the ensemble in a jaunty rhythm that would not have sounded out of place coming from a hunter on horseback. When the horns take over, the solo parts consist almost entirely of repeated tones, arpeggiations, and the occasional trill. Indeed, in the first movement the only time either horn plays a note that is not a part of a dominant or tonic harmony is in the form of a trill, while the rest of the orchestra is sequencing through more distant keys. The lack of harmonic variety in Vivaldi’s horn writing is directly tied to the technical capabilities of the 18th-century horn. He writes only repeated tones and arpeggios for the same reason that hunting calls contained only repeated tones and arpeggios – the horn could do nothing else without rocketing into the extreme limit of the instrument’s range. This technical limitation is made abundantly clear in the slower middle movement of the concerto, in which the horns vanish and the solo is taken up by a cello. The short movement is simple enough, but the mere presence of stepwise motion, minor keys, and the odd chromatic pitch make it utterly unplayable on a natural F horn.

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