T H I S   C O N C E R T,  led by assistant conductor Vinay Parameswaran, draws connections between old and new, between today’s musical patterns and the timeless, structured elegance of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rhythm, melody, and pattern remain the building blocks of music, here showcased in intriguing Modern, Minimalist, and Baroque works filled with lush transparency — and enveloping and involving the listener anew.

       The Estonian Arvo Pärt’s Fratres has been arranged for a multitude of instrumentations, and displays the composer’s “tintinnabulatory” style of writing, reverberant as bells.

       Works by Adams and Philip Glass lay stakes to the breadth and depth of Minimalism’s appeal and growth, while a concerto by J.S. Bach reminds us of that inimitable master’s place as forerunner for building elaborate music from basic parts — weaving math and music together, pairing intellect and soul.
    

GLASSWORKS
(reworked by Christian Badzura)
by Philip Glass (b. 1937)

Composed:  1982

Scored for:  piano and string quartet

Duration:  just over 5 minutes

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IN A LONG CAREER, Philip Glass has composed an extraordinary quantity of music in every kind of medium — from works for solo piano to symphonies, operas, and movie scores.  He has achieved broad recognition both as a serious composer and in the pop world. The style that we think of today as Minimalism was largely his creation.  It came about in the late 1960s in reaction to the terrifying complexities of Serialism, which had come to dominate the field of contemporary music, especially on college campuses, and which many people among the general public found challenging to listen to or like.

       Glass’s goal of simplifying the music’s overall language was achieved by applying a new time-scale to essentially simple, even banal, musical material, so that repetition (the most obvious process applied) was not quite what it seemed. Change would no longer occur within tiny fractions of the pulse, but now at long intervals, barely perceptible perhaps, but leading the listener from a basic starting point eventually to a quite new or different place, or even back to the starting point if desired. The hypnotic qualities of this music were quickly appreciated by many, sometimes in parallel with addictive substances or hallucinogenics of other varieties.

       Working in New York with Steve Reich and several others of like mind, Glass presented his works mostly in art galleries and unconventional spaces, and he used electronic instruments combined with traditional instruments. With Einstein on the Beach in 1975, he began a series of operas.  Indeed, many of his pieces have had some part of their origin in theater.

       Glassworks, which he wrote in 1982, was designed for a different and specific audience, named for Walkman addicts (an early walk-about music-player that suddenly allowed people to bring music with them anywhere).  Many of these listeners were, until then, mostly unfamiliar with Glass’s music.

       It was a highly successful move, for it brought Glass a popular following that led in turn to worldwide recognition.  And it made possible some of his more extravagant and adventurous projects for more traditional instrumentation, including symphonies and operas as well as piano pieces and string quartets.

        Of the six movements of Glassworks only the first, titled "Opening," is being performed on this week’s concert.  The full work requires flutes, saxophones, synthesizer, and a number of strings, but Opening is written for solo piano, playing two-against-three rhythms throughout, with a horn entry for the very last note. Composer-pianist Christian Badzura has softened the repetitive character of the piece by preserving the piano's constant triplets while superimposing entries from a string quartet with a more melodious character.  The impression of this version, in addition to the slow bending of the mind, is perhaps closer to a taste of actual honey, beyond the mere structure of a musical hive.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020

FRATRES
(for solo violin, strings, and percussion)
by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

Composed:  1977

Scored for:  originally for chamber orchestra, but designed to be played by any group; first presented by string orchestra and percussion in 1991; the percussion = claves and bass drum

Duration:  about 10 minutes

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THE ESTONIAN COMPOSER Arvo Pärt came to international notice in the 1970s with music that blended the style of American minimalists with a transcendental Christian faith.  He believes in the value of silence and stillness, and his compositions have a systematic structure beneath the calm and almost motionless surface.

       The main structuring of Fratres, meaning "brothers," was originally in three voices.  In the version in this week’s concerts, these are represented by the strings, over a long unmoving drone.  Their pattern of phrases, each one a little longer than the previous one, is repeated seven times.  It starts high in the violins and gradually descends at each recurrence, rising to loud and then receding to soft.

       To this framework the composer added a part for solo violin, who inaugurates the process with a cadenza-like sequence, and who then decorates the music with increasingly complex figures.  Pärt also added a two-bar passage for percussion (bass drum and claves) as a separator between each recurrence of the three-part entry.  A very special sense of stillness is achieved by the solemnity of this music, and by the solo violin's musings.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020

KEYBOARD CONCERTO NO. 5
in F minor, BWV1056
by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Composed:  circa 1730s

Scored for:  solo keyboard and string orchestra

Duration:  about 10 minutes

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HARD INFORMATION on the origin of Bach's keyboard concertos is thin on the ground. They are generally lumped together as being composed sometime in the 1730s and being derived from concertos for other instruments. For some of them, this is demonstrably the case, but for the Concerto in F minor (given the designation as “No. 5” long after Bach’s death), we know nothing about any other version — beyond the suspicion that, if it had been originally a keyboard concerto, the lefthand would surely have been given a more interesting balance with the right. Thus, the supposition that this was once an oboe concerto is plausible; the movements are shorter than usual for a keyboard work, in kind consideration for a wind player's lungs.

       The 1730s are a likely period for the production of keyboard concertos, because Bach was pulling back from the colossal commitment to music for the church, which had occupied him since his arrival in Leipzig in 1723.

       He decided instead to give more of his precious time to running concerts in the city, some of them promoted by purveyors of the latest craze, coffee (and its caffeinated effects).  His group was a voluntary association of professional musicians and university students who gave regular weekly concerts with public admission.  This alone would have been a heavy commitment, but he also remained in charge of the music at Saint Thomas's and a second church, Saint Nicolai.  Yet by then he had a large reserve of cantatas and other music to draw on for his church duties and could devote more composing time to instrumental music.

       The Concerto in F minor adopts the standard three-movement form inherited from Vivaldi and the Italians.  The middle movement, marked Largo, is remarkable for being a single theme elaborately extended, with a just a hint of a return of the opening phrase, but with no secondary material whatsoever.  Pizzicato strings provide the barest of accompaniments.  The singing qualities of the harpsichord are here put under the microscope.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020

SHAKER LOOPS
(for string orchestra)
by John Adams (b. 1947)

Composed:  1978, based on an earlier work; revised 1983

Scored for:  originally for string septet, adapted in 1983 for string orchestra

Duration:  about 25 minutes

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John Adams writes about this work:

“Shaker Loops continues to be one of my most performed pieces.  There are partisans who favor the clarity and individualism of the solo septet version, and there are those who prefer the orchestral version for its added density and power.  The piece has several times been choreographed and even enjoyed a moment of cult status in the movie Barfly, an autobiographical account of the poet Charles Bukowsky’s down and out days on LA’s Skid Row.  In a famous scene, Bukowsky (Mickey Rourke), having been battered and bloodied by his drunken girlfriend (Faye Dunaway), holes up in a flophouse room, writing poems in a fit of inspiration to the accompaniment of the insistent buzz of ‘Shaking and Trembling’.”

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IN THE FIELD OF Minimalist music, John Adams might be seen as the Mozart to Philip Glass's Haydn.  Without claiming either contemporary figure to be the equal of their 18th-century counterparts, the relationship is comparable because Adams has built on Glass's pioneering work and created a body of work that has a depth and sophistication that earns him the kind of appreciation that has always been awarded to the best music in the classical tradition.

       Ten years younger than Glass, Adams was similarly turned away from Serialism by the experience of being subjected to it too thoroughly at Harvard.  Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the 1970s, he was able to work out his own ideas about music with the school's new music ensemble, often using electronic resources.  His half-hour piano piece Phrygian Gates of 1977 was built largely on repetition, as was Shaker Loops, composed a year later.

       Shaker Loops was originally scored for string septet, derived from an earlier string quartet titled Wavemaker.  The work's name suggests a connection with the American Shakers, the celibate millenarian community whose doctines (not to mention their music and dancing) attained considerable popularity (or at least awareness across America) in the 19th century.  Their unorthodox practices were a particular focus of scholarly study in the 1970s.

       This music is visibly and audibly highly agitated.  The idea of shaking is omnipresent, partly from the almost ceaseless rapid movement of the instruments’ bows, and partly from the application of vibrato, which is subject to specific instructions from the composer.

       The loops of the title are the fragments of music that come round again and again (as similar musical ideas do in the works of both Pärt and Glass), slightly shifted or modified, producing out-of-sync effects.  Adams has explained that "rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence."

       The first movement stands on its own as an exercise in rapid repetition, while the last three movements merge together musically, more or less, with a greater range of dynamic and pace.

       The musical architecture of this work is strong and convincing, and stands as early and rewarding evidence that Minimalist music was bound to develop in Adams's hands  — and mind — into a major element and genre of modern American music.  His operas and major orchestral works followed, with Nixon in China reaching the stage in 1987, following by a full flowering of works and artistry as great in quality and variety as that of many of classical music’s proverbial old masters.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2020