APPALACHIAN SPRING & BEETHOVEN 6 WITH ALSOP( EARTH | SONGS)
mentoring, and financial support. Today, all 36 award winners hold over 30 music director or chief conductor positions.
In 2021, Alsop assumed the title of Music Director Laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. During her 14-year tenure as Music Director, she led the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, conducted more than two dozen world premieres, and founded the music education program OrchKids.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By Jacob Jahiel
Aaron Copland
Born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York Died December 2, 1990, in Sleepy Hollow, New York
SUITE FROM APPALACHIAN SPRING [ 1943 – 1944( BALLET); 1945( SUITE)]
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Aaron Copland’ s musical allegiance shifted from arch-modernist to populist sympathizer, the result of the composer’ s increasingly leftward political sympathies and desire to create widely appealing music in a distinctly American style.“ I felt that it was worthwhile to see if I couldn’ t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms,” he would later write. Over the course of the next two decades, Copland would achieve exactly that, ascending to his status as the“ Dean of American Music” with successful concert pieces such as El Salón México( 1936), Lincoln Portrait( 1942), and Fanfare for the Common Man( 1942); as well as the popular ballets, Billy the Kid( 1938), Rodeo( 1942), and Appalachian Spring( 1944).
Copland composed Appalachian Spring at the behest of an influential arts patron, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who commissioned the ballet for the dancer Martha Graham. It was Graham’ s idea to create an Americana-inflected work— " a legend of American living, like a bone structure, the inner frame that holds together a people.” Copland initially called the work“ Ballet for Martha,” but eventually settled on a title inspired by a line from“ The Dance,” a poem by Hart Crane. The work would net Copland a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, by which time he had arranged Appalachian Spring into this symphonic suite.
The Suite from Appalachian Spring comprises eight episodes, imagining life in a rural, 19th-century Pennsylvania town. The Prologue sets a pastoral scene, generous with wide-open sonorities and a pleasant, languorous atmosphere. Angular strings kick off an energetic dance, described by Copland as“ both elated and religious.” A wedding is held and a tender love dance unfolds, followed by the entrance of the“ Revivalist and his flock … Folksy feeling— suggestions of square dances and country fiddlers.” Another quick dance follows, after which a slow transition episode recalls material from the Prologue. The clarinet beckons in the seventh episode with a familiar Shaker tune,“ Simple Gifts,” the subject of five variations. With the eighth and final section, the newly married couple is left sitting“ quiet and strong in their new house” as hushed strings bring the suite to a peaceful end.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.
Brett Dean
Born October 23, 1961, in Brisbane, Australia Resides in Berlin, Germany and Melbourne, Australia
FIRE MUSIC [ 2011 ]
Not many orchestral musicians dabble in writing music; fewer still make composing their full-time job. Australian violist and composer Brett Dean is one of those rare cases. Following 15 years in the Berlin Philharmonic’ s viola section, Dean embarked on a career as an internationally recognized composer, earning accolades for imaginative works often addressing social and environmental issues. Fire Music arose from the ashes, so to speak, of the infamous“ Black Saturday,” a devastating series of bushfires across the Australian state of Victoria in 2009 which burned over a million acres and claimed the lives of 173 people. Of the work, Dean writes:
“ Fire Music was written in response to the disastrous“ Black Saturday” bushfires of 2009. As part of my background reading while writing the piece, I studied the uses and restorative power of fire in Australian and other indigenous traditions. Fire was( and still is) used in Australia not only for land management purposes( controlled burning), and as an agricultural technique( fire-stick farming) but also as a significant part of indigenous ceremonial and cultural life, such as in Aboriginal smoking ceremonies.
“ Whilst the 2009 fires obviously had utterly disastrous consequences, fire can also cleanse and replenish; these thoughts, as well as its use in ritual, informed aspects of my Fire Music, especially in the slow middle section. The material which developed even included specific musical evocations of the event; for example, the extended electric guitar solo about halfway through the piece evolved as a musical interpretation of the momentous, dizzying heat that greeted Victorians on the morning of February 7, 2009.
“ As the composition progressed I moved beyond the original trajectory of the fire itself and the piece started to follow its own internal, music-based logic. Nevertheless, the character of the force of destruction and ultimately rebirth that comes from such a fire remained the energetic source of material. It’ s not an uncommon working process for me; strong extra-musical ideas, after providing an initial stimulus, then recede into the background as the piece evolves in purely musical terms. The remnants of original‘ programmatic’ ideas become a point of reference only.
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