PROGRAM NOTES
HOLST THE PLANETS
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
BY AARON GRAD
Vivian Fung
Born 1975 in Edmonton ( Alberta ), Canada Currently resides in California
DUST DEVILS [ 2011 , REV . 2014 ]
Growing up in Edmonton , the seven-year-old Vivian Fung procrastinated practicing the piano by “ improvising , daydreaming , and coming up with songs .” Her first piano teacher nurtured that intuition and taught Fung how to notate her compositions , marking the first step in an academic career that culminated in 2002 with a doctorate from The Juilliard School . Now based in California ( where she is on faculty at Santa Clara University ), Fung uses her passion for travel to fuel her wide-ranging musical palette , including trips to Bali , the Yunnan Province in southwestern China , and her ancestral homeland of Cambodia .
Fung composed Dust Devils in 2011 for the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina , and she revised it in 2014 . She describes this 10-minute score as “ the journey of emotional swirls in my mind , sometimes calm , but more often than not , full of raw and intense energy .” The title comes from a natural phenomenon that occurs when hot updrafts swirl into a spinning spiral of dust , like a miniature tornado that arises out of thin air .
Instrumentation Two flutes , piccolo , two oboes , English horn , three clarinets including E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet , three bassoons including contrabassoon , four horns , three trumpets , three trombones , tuba , timpani , percussion , harp , piano , and strings .
Claude Debussy
Born August 22 , 1862 in Saint-Germainen-Laye , France Died March 25 , 1918 in Paris , France
NOCTURNES [ 1899 ]
The French composer Claude Debussy drew inspiration from outside of typical musical channels , with interests ranging from Indonesian gamelan music to Symbolist poetry . He was especially interested in the visual arts , and it is easy to find parallels between his musical language and the paintings of his French contemporaries , the Impressionists ( i . e ., Monet and
Renoir ) and Post-Impressionists ( i . e ., Cézanne and Gauguin ).
For a series of tone poems composed between 1897 and 1899 , Debussy drew influence from an American artist of the previous generation , James McNeill Whistler , who produced a series of paintings in the 1870s he called Nocturnes . By using the same title for his three orchestral scenes , Debussy was not referencing the musical definition of a nocturne ( most closely associated with the form that Chopin developed for solo piano ), but rather , as he explained in a preface to the score , “ all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests .”
Debussy ’ s note describes the visual inspiration behind each movement : “ Nuages ( Clouds ) renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow , solemn motion of the clouds , fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white . Fêtes ( Festivals ) gives us the vibrating , dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light . There is also the episode of the procession ( a dazzling fantastic vision ), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it . But the background remains resistantly the same : the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm . Sirènes ( Sirens ) depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently , amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight , is heard the mysterious song of the sirens as they laugh and pass on .”
Instrumentation Three flutes including piccolo , two oboes , English horn , two clarinets , three bassoons , four horns , three trumpets , three trombones , tuba , timpani , percussion , two harps , and strings .
Gustav Holst
Born September 21 , 1874 in Cheltenham , U . K . Died May 25 , 1933 in London , U . K .
THE PLANETS [ 1914-16 ]
Around the turn of the 20 th century , Gustav Holst helped end the dry spell in England that had plagued homegrown composers for 200 years . Beyond the English folksongs that fascinated his peers , Holst took inspiration from astrology and Sanskrit literature , and his great admiration for Wagner ’ s mythmaking operas helped him learn how to create new worlds in his music . He also kept pace with younger rivals like Stravinsky and Schoenberg , opening his ears to new approaches to the orchestra .
All those forces culminated in Holst ’ s masterpiece , The Planets , composed in seven movements for orchestra between 1914 and 1916 , and still his chief claim to fame .
Holst allowed the astrological meanings of the planets and associated traits drawn from Roman mythology to dictate the character of his seven movements , which have no plot or program beyond the connotations of each title . The cycle begins with Mars , Bringer of War , an ominous and ultimately brutal evocation of battle that took a page from Stravinsky ’ s ritualistic ballets . Holst ’ s approach to the orchestral sound of war has been imitated so often and effectively — John Williams ’ score for Star Wars being perhaps the quintessential example — that it ’ s easy to forget how original and astounding this sound was when it first reached the public in 1918 .
The answer to masculine Mars comes in the gentle strains of Venus , the Bringer of Peace , followed by the quicksilver charms of Mercury , the Winged Messenger . In this cycle organized purely for its musical flow and not any physical or astrological ordering of the planets , next comes Jupiter , the Bringer of Jollity , a gentle giant that is surprisingly nimble and buoyant , even with its brassy heft . Slow and noble music marches inevitably onward with clocklike regularity in Saturn , the Bringer of Old Age , and then Uranus , the Magician conjures a swirl of organized chaos unified by a recurring four-note motive .
There ’ s no Earth in this cycle that concerns the celestial arcs of astrology , and Pluto had not yet been discovered ( nor demoted to a dwarf ), and so The Planets stands as a set of seven , ending with Neptune , the Mystic . Tinkling celesta colors the quiet and unknowable mysteries of this most distant planet , and a concealed women ’ s choir heightens the sense of mysterious ritual .
Instrumentation Four flutes including two piccolos and alto flute , three oboes including bass oboe , English horn , three clarinets , bass clarinet , three bassoons , contrabassoon , six horns , four trumpets , three trombones , tenor tuba , tuba , two sets of timpani , percussion , two harps , celesta , organ , and strings .
Musical Terms Tone poem : A piece in one movement that illustrates the content of a poem , story , novel , painting , landscape , or other non-musical source .
22 OVERTURE / BSOmusic . org