Faculty Recital featuring Cellist Paul Christopher
Thursday, September 10, 2020, 6:00 pm for students, and 7:30 pm for community members
Magale Recital Hall or live streamed at https://capa.nsula.edu/livestream
PROGRAM
Three works for unaccompanied cello by Pulitzer Prize winning American composers: Donald Martino, Roger Sessions, and Charles Wuorinen.
Parisonatina al'dodecafonia for solo cello .... Donald Martino (1931-2005)
Six Pieces for solo cello .... Roger Sessions (1896-1985)
Cello Variations II for solo cello .... Chales Wuorinen (1938-2020)
Program notes:
Pulitzer Winners
An NSU Faculty Recital by Paul Christopher, cello
Program Notes by Jackson Harmeyer
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is awarded annually “for distinguished
musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or
recording in the United States during the year.” Administered by Columbia
University, this prize is one of the most prestigious awards available in
American art music. Past winners have included William Schuman, the first
recipient in 1943, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, George
Crumb, John Adams, and Steve Reich. Although the prize has rightly acknowledged
these and other distinguished composers of American classical music, the
Pulitzer has often received criticism for being too restrictive in its
selections and, more recently, too indiscriminating. Writing in 1998, composer
and music critic Kyle Gann lamented, “The Pulitzer Prize is given only to
Eurocentric composers… an extremely narrow slice of the current new-music
spectrum.” Indeed, though the prize recognized its first jazz musicians in the
1990s, these winning works had clearly applied classical models to a jazz idiom,
for example, Mel Powell’s concerto, Duplicates, and Wynton Marsalis’s
oratorio, Blood on the Fields. The current prize description, quoted
above, was adopted in 2004; while one past winner Gunther Schuller called the
decision, “a long overdue sea change,” another John Harbison derided it as “a
horrible development.” What is certain, however, is that aesthetic diversity
has greatly expanded over the past sixteen years, so that recent winners
include works in free jazz and even hip hop as well as more classical
compositions; many also reflect on social, racial, and ecological concerns.
The composers represented on tonight’s program are from the “old days” of
the Pulitzer when it was very much the property of academia and the serialist
idiom which was then orthodox. Donald Martino (1931-2005), our first composer, reacted to the 2004 criteria change, “The prize has
already begun to go in the direction of permitting less serious stuff, wording
or not. If you write music long enough, sooner or later, someone is going to
take pity on you and give you the damn thing.” Martino had won the Pulitzer in
1974 for his chamber sextet, Notturno. Nevertheless, we must not be too
quick to dismiss someone like Martino: while our era celebrates immediate
appeal and a multiplicity of perspectives, in the third quarter of the
twentieth century, intellectual rigor was the highest good. The more
complicated a piece of music, the more challenges it offered patient listeners.
Awards like the Pulitzer signaled that a composer had reached the top of his
field, that his vantage point had triumphed over the musical discourse. Moreover,
the three Pulitzer-winning composers whose music we hear tonight were among the
most accomplished of American academic composers, rivalled only by their esteemed
colleague Milton Babbitt. Martino was, from 1969 to 1981, chairman of the
composition department at the New England Conservatory; afterwards he taught at
Harvard, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1992. He was a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters; a recipient of three Guggenheim
Fellowships, another three awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a
Fulbright Scholarship, and a Kennedy Center Friedham Award; and was commissioned
by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Coolidge
Foundation.
Just as accomplished but somewhat older, Roger Sessions
(1896-1985) had been a teacher to both Martino and Babbitt as
well as numerous others, including Harbison, Robert Cogan, Edward T. Cone,
David Diamond, Tod Machover, Ursula Mamlok, Conlon Nancarrow, Ellen Taaffe
Zwilich, and the British composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. His profound
influence as a teacher places him in good company with Nadia Boulanger and
Arnold Schoenberg. His teaching career is commonly associated with Princeton,
but he also did a stint at University of California, Berkeley following World
War II and finally held a post at Juilliard from 1966 to 1983. Sessions was
actually the recipient of two Pulitzers—a Special Citation “for his life’s work
as a distinguished American composer” in 1974 and then the 1982 Prize for his
Concerto for Orchestra. Otherwise, his honors include election to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, a MacDowell Medal, and the Charles Eliot Norton
Professorship at Harvard where he presented a lecture series titled, “Questions
about Music.” Finally, Charles Wuorinen (1938-2020) taught at Columbia, seat of the Pulitzer, from 1964 to 1971 where he had
previously been a student and had co-founded the Group for Contemporary Music
with fellow classmates, flutist Harvey Sollberger and cellist Joel Krosnick.
His Pulitzer-winning work, Time’s Encomium, an electronic composition,
was developed at the pioneering Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. An
outspoken and often controversial figure, Wuorinen won the Pulitzer in 1970 but
was denied tenure by the same institution a year later. Rather than remain at
Columbia, he taught at the Manhattan School of Music throughout the 1970s and
later at Rutgers. He belonged to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received
a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and was commissioned by the New York City
Opera, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Symphony, and Boston Symphony
Orchestra. A late triumph was his operatic setting of Brokeback Mountain.
Aside from these academic and professional successes, our three
composers—Martino, Sessions, and Wuorinen—also share a common aesthetic.
Specifically, their music is rooted in serialism and predominately atonal in
character. Sessions, who was initially influenced by the neo-Classicism of Igor
Stravinsky, befriended Schoenberg when they were both living in California in
the late 1940s. Within the decade, Sessions had begun integrating aspects of
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method into his existing idiom, always insisting the
method was more a tool for him than an aesthetic in itself. Stravinsky and
Copland made similar usage of the method at this time while his pupil Babbitt
would instead endeavor to transform serialism into an encompassing aesthetic
statement. Martino for his part transplanted the essentially tonal ideas of Heinrich
Schenker to his atonal aesthetic, developing layers of structure in which
pitch-class sets are distinguished by differences in register, dynamics, and
tone production. Wuorinen, who borrowed his transparent instrumental textures from
Stravinsky, re-established the pitch hierarchies of tonal music without
compromising an atonal, serially-derived language. Wuorinen, however, has disparaged
tonality’s continued usefulness as an idiom in itself: “While the tonal system,
in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and
commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking
serious composers… it has been replaced or succeeded by the twelve-tone system,
first initiated by Schoenberg, subsequently developed into a world of
chromaticism.” And, when hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer
Prize, Wuorinen called the occasion “the final disappearance of any societal
interest in high culture.”
Tonight’s program begins with Martino’s Parisonatina al’dodecafonìa,
a 1964 work for solo cello. The cellist Aldo Parisot was the dedicatee and
first performer; the composition’s title references his name while its music
expands on a derived motto. Martino commented on the difficulty of his music,
“It may be at the margin of playability for most performers at a given point in
time, but ultimately it is negotiable.” Indeed, he protested when some of the
original challenges he had posed to Parisot were overcome and made to look easy
by later players: “The strain, the stress, is all part of the expressive
content of the piece.” Parisonatina
is in four brief movements. In the First, Agitato, register and timbral
devices indicated with special noteheads setup a polyphonic structure which
Martino likened to a conversation between six participants. The Second
Movement, Scherzevole, reorients this conversation, so that timbral
devices now distinguish successive sections in the manner of a rondo. The Third
Movement, Motto. Agitato, is lyrical while the Fourth Movement, Cadenza
sul Nome, makes room for limited improvisation. To accomplish this, Martino
notated a “chart,” as he called it, meant to guide performers in their own
realization of this material; he also provided a “sample solution” for
performers who do not wish to improvise. With the success of Parisonatina,
its dedicatee requested a concerto, although Krosnick, not Parisot, would
eventually give the larger work’s premiere.
Next we hear Six Pieces for solo cello
by Sessions. This set was composed in 1966 between his Sixth and Seventh
Symphonies and dedicated to his son, John, an accomplished cellist who later
taught at Smith College. John gave its premiere at an all-Sessions concert held
at Carnegie Hall on March 31, 1968 by the International Society for
Contemporary Music. Krosnick, before performing Six Pieces himself at
Juilliard, speculated on the set’s biographical elements, describing Dialogue
as a friendly conversation between father and son and Berceuse as a
lullaby for Sessions’s granddaughter. In order, the Six Pieces are Prelude,
Dialogue, Scherzo, Berceuse, Fantasy, and Epilogue.
These are familiar titles which will be self-explanatory to most listeners. Our
last piece tonight was also the latest written—Wuorinen’s Cello Variations
II, composed in 1975. This work, like much of Wuorinen’s cello music, grew
out of the composer’s friendship with the cellist Fred Sherry. Known for his
advocacy of new music, Sherry has been a member of Wuorinen’s Group for
Contemporary Music and has co-founded his own ensembles, Speculum Musicae and
the Tashi Quartet. As Wuorinen explained of Cello Variations II, “These
are variations in the ‘modern’ sense: the piece is a continuously
self-transforming fabric in which the initial materials (reminiscences of
celloish behavior from past music) are reprocessed into new entities.” Indeed,
unlike either Martino’s Parisonatina or the Six Pieces by Sessions, Wuorinen’s
Cello Variations II does not possess internal divisions and continues unfolding,
uninterrupted across its ten-minute span.
© Jackson Harmeyer 2020
About
Jackson. Jackson Harmeyer is a
freelance concert annotator based in Alexandria, LA. He serves as Director of
Scholarship to the Sugarmill Music Festival and as Marketing Chair to the
Chamber Music Society of Louisville. A project he is developing for next May’s
Sugarmill Music Festival, “A Scholarly Presentation in Lecture and Music:
Solomon Northup in the Central Louisiana Sugarhouse,” has been awarded a
prestigious Rebirth Grant by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. As of
August 2020, Jackson has begun a Master’s of Library Science with a
specialization in Music Librarianship at Indiana University where he is the
recipient of a May Copeland Fellowship and participates in the Midwest Chapter
of the Music Library Association. Previously Jackson earned an M.M. in Music
History and Literature from the University of Louisville with a thesis
entitled, “Liminal Aesthetics: Perspectives on Harmony and Timbre in the Music
of Olivier Messiaen, Tristan Murail, and Kaija Saariaho.” There he was a
recipient of the Gerhard Herz Music History Scholarship and was employed at the
Anderson Music Library where he did archival work for the unique Grawemeyer
Collection of Contemporary Music. Jackson has shared research at two meetings
of the South-Central Chapter of the American Musicological Society; the
University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival; the Music by Women
Festival; and the University of Louisiana System Academic Summit. Aside from
his studies, Jackson is a music blogger, composer, choral singer, avid reader,
and award-winning nature photographer.
Read additional program notes by Jackson at www.JacksonHarmeyer.com.
