CLEFWORKS OPENING NIGHT
Thursday, August 2, 2007 • 7:00 p.m.
RSA Activity Center, Downtown Montgomery
• Franz Schubert: String Quartet in D minor, “Death and the Maiden” (1824)
• George Crumb: “Black Angels” for Electric String Quartet (1970)
To begin the first concert of our Premiere Season, ClefWorks presents two composers whose music could not be more different: Franz Schubert and George Crumb. The former is a Viennese composer of the early 19th century most renowned for the beautiful melodies of his 600+ songs, the latter a Pulitzer-prize winning American composer whose approach to music draws as much on the dramatic theater as the concert hall. A common literary thread runs through the entire program: the poem “Death and the Maiden” by the German poet Matthias Claudius.
When Schubert set this poem to music in 1817, he was merely adding to an already enormous library of song composition, eventually totaling over 600 known songs by his death in 1828. At first, he wrote these songs and other small pieces for private gatherings of friends, where everyone present would take their turn at being both audience and performer. The kind of music written for such an intimate, personal setting is precisely what we mean by chamber music—music for a chamber, or a room, as opposed to a public concert arena. Today we even have a name for the gatherings where many of Schubert’s pieces were first performed: “Schubertiads.”
So it is apropos that we would begin a chamber music festival with Schubert, and build a program around a Schubert song. Some years later, Schubert borrowed the music from his own song to make up the theme of the second movement of his fourteenth String Quartet, popularly known as “Death and the Maiden.” Even when writing for two violins, a viola, and a cello—and no voices— Schubert can’t restrain his lyrical side, and this quartet abounds in some of the most beautiful melodies ever put to paper.
In contrast to Schubert’s fifteen complete string quartets, George Crumb has composed only one work for this specific instrumentation to date, despite a list of more than 50 published compositions. Perhaps the most remarkable quality about his oeuvre is the use of distinctive instruments in unusual combinations. His song “Lux Aeterna” calls for soprano, bass flute, soprano recorder, sitar (a classical Hindustani instrument similar to a guitar), and percussion, and his 1991 composition “Easter Dawning” is for carillon, or church bells. Given the official title of his “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet,” the instrumentation for our composition seems tame by comparison…
…except that he may as well have gone on to say “…and gongs, maracas, thimbles, guitar picks, and 20 wine glasses.” Where the one word description of Schubert’s music would be “lyrical,” we can best describe Crumb as “theatrical.” The quartet members become performance artists whose props include their instruments, wine glasses tuned to specific pitches, various percussion instruments, and even their own voices. The variety of instruments is not just for the novelty of asking string players to turn around and draw their bows across some wine glasses, but to bring the listener into a new world of unexpected and surprising sounds. Throughout his work, Crumb uses that expanded sound palette to paint pieces that give the impression of an unfathomable immensity, as if the sound were echoing through time as well as space, and our quartet uses that vast canvas to great effect.
But you ask, “And why does Black Angels belong on a program built around a Schubert song?” Simply put, Crumb quotes the same theme from the song that Schubert uses in the second movement of his own quartet. In Crumb’s hands, it suggests the echoes of a lost past, a time when society and culture were different from our own. In a dramatic sense, the quotation of the Schubert functions as an actor walking out of his scene to give an aside, or as a flashback in a movie.
ClefWorks is also partnering with Eric Sung, video artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Southeastern Louisiana State University, who has created an original video composition especially for this performance of Black Angels. This visual response will add yet one more artistic dimension to this evening’s performance, drawing our first ClefWorks program to an unforgettable close.
Thursday, August 2, 2007 • 7:00 p.m.
RSA Activity Center, Downtown Montgomery
• Franz Schubert: String Quartet in D minor, “Death and the Maiden” (1824)
• George Crumb: “Black Angels” for Electric String Quartet (1970)
To begin the first concert of our Premiere Season, ClefWorks presents two composers whose music could not be more different: Franz Schubert and George Crumb. The former is a Viennese composer of the early 19th century most renowned for the beautiful melodies of his 600+ songs, the latter a Pulitzer-prize winning American composer whose approach to music draws as much on the dramatic theater as the concert hall. A common literary thread runs through the entire program: the poem “Death and the Maiden” by the German poet Matthias Claudius.
When Schubert set this poem to music in 1817, he was merely adding to an already enormous library of song composition, eventually totaling over 600 known songs by his death in 1828. At first, he wrote these songs and other small pieces for private gatherings of friends, where everyone present would take their turn at being both audience and performer. The kind of music written for such an intimate, personal setting is precisely what we mean by chamber music—music for a chamber, or a room, as opposed to a public concert arena. Today we even have a name for the gatherings where many of Schubert’s pieces were first performed: “Schubertiads.”
So it is apropos that we would begin a chamber music festival with Schubert, and build a program around a Schubert song. Some years later, Schubert borrowed the music from his own song to make up the theme of the second movement of his fourteenth String Quartet, popularly known as “Death and the Maiden.” Even when writing for two violins, a viola, and a cello—and no voices— Schubert can’t restrain his lyrical side, and this quartet abounds in some of the most beautiful melodies ever put to paper.
In contrast to Schubert’s fifteen complete string quartets, George Crumb has composed only one work for this specific instrumentation to date, despite a list of more than 50 published compositions. Perhaps the most remarkable quality about his oeuvre is the use of distinctive instruments in unusual combinations. His song “Lux Aeterna” calls for soprano, bass flute, soprano recorder, sitar (a classical Hindustani instrument similar to a guitar), and percussion, and his 1991 composition “Easter Dawning” is for carillon, or church bells. Given the official title of his “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet,” the instrumentation for our composition seems tame by comparison…
…except that he may as well have gone on to say “…and gongs, maracas, thimbles, guitar picks, and 20 wine glasses.” Where the one word description of Schubert’s music would be “lyrical,” we can best describe Crumb as “theatrical.” The quartet members become performance artists whose props include their instruments, wine glasses tuned to specific pitches, various percussion instruments, and even their own voices. The variety of instruments is not just for the novelty of asking string players to turn around and draw their bows across some wine glasses, but to bring the listener into a new world of unexpected and surprising sounds. Throughout his work, Crumb uses that expanded sound palette to paint pieces that give the impression of an unfathomable immensity, as if the sound were echoing through time as well as space, and our quartet uses that vast canvas to great effect.
But you ask, “And why does Black Angels belong on a program built around a Schubert song?” Simply put, Crumb quotes the same theme from the song that Schubert uses in the second movement of his own quartet. In Crumb’s hands, it suggests the echoes of a lost past, a time when society and culture were different from our own. In a dramatic sense, the quotation of the Schubert functions as an actor walking out of his scene to give an aside, or as a flashback in a movie.
ClefWorks is also partnering with Eric Sung, video artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Southeastern Louisiana State University, who has created an original video composition especially for this performance of Black Angels. This visual response will add yet one more artistic dimension to this evening’s performance, drawing our first ClefWorks program to an unforgettable close.