CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Thomas Cabaniss, composer and Faculty, The Juilliard School.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus

STRAVINSKY Symphony in Three Movements
STRAVINSKY Four Studies for Orchestra
ELLIOTT CARTER Réflexions (NY Premiere)
VARÈSE Ionisation
VARÈSE Amériques

Sponsored by DeWitt Stern Group, Inc.

Program Notes:


IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)
Symphony in Three Movements

No composer has given us more perspectives on a “symphony” than Stravinsky. He wrote a symphony at the very beginning of his career (it’s his Op. 1), but quickly became famous as the composer of three ballet scores (Petrushka, The Firebird, and The Rite of Spring), and he spent the next few years composing for the theater and the opera house. When, in 1920, he finally returned to writing music for an orchestra on the concert stage, he composed the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which isn’t a symphony in the classical sense of the word.

With the Symphony of Psalms, his great choral work of 1930, Stravinsky was again playing word games. (And, perhaps he used the term partly to placate his publisher, who reminded him, after the score was finished, that he had been commissioned to write a symphony.) Then, at last, a true symphony: In 1938, Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, together with Mrs. John Alden Carpenter and several of her friends in Chicago, asked Stravinsky to compose something to honor the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1940–1941 season. To celebrate a milestone in the life of a great American orchestra, Stravinsky decided to tackle the “standard” by writing a symphony in C in the four orthodox movements, scored for a Beethoven orchestra. Two years later, Stravinsky began sketches for this Symphony in Three Movements—his final essay on what a symphony can mean. In the Symphony in C, Stravinsky had enjoyed masquerading as Haydn, but the new Symphony in Three Movements is much more a work of its own time.

In a program note written for the premiere in 1946, Stravinsky asserted that the symphony was absolute music, although touched “by this arduous time of sharp and shifting events, of despair and hope, of continual torments, of tension, and, at last, cessation and relief.” Two years later, he wrote a letter to the composer Ingolf Dahl insisting that “if passages from the program notes are used to imply extramusical connotations in my work, I have to disclaim any responsibility for such interpretations.” This was characteristic Stravinsky, and even though the composer’s followers had heard words to this effect time and time again, they always suspected there was more to the story. Finally, in Dialogues and A Diary, published in 1963, Stravinsky wrote openly about the genesis of the symphony. Those comments follow:

Igor Stravinsky on the Symphony in Three Movements
The symphony was written under the impression of world events. I will not say that it expresses my feeling about them, but only that, without participation of what I think of as my will, they excited my musical imagination. And the impressions that activated me were not general, or ideological, but specific: each episode in the symphony is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of war.

The third movement even contains the genesis of a war plot, though I accepted it as such only after the composition was completed. The beginning of the movement is partly and in some inexplicable way a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba—these are all related to those abhorrent pictures.

Though what I call my impressions of world events were derived almost entirely from films, the root of my indignation was a personal experience. One day, in Munich, in 1932, I saw a squad of Brown Shirts enter the street below the balcony of my room in the Bayerischer Hof and assault a group of civilians. The latter tried to defend themselves with street benches, but they were soon crushed beneath these clumsy shields. The police eventually arrived, of course, but the attackers had all dispersed. That same night I went with Vera de Bosset and the photographer Eric Schall to a small Allée restaurant. As we dined, a gang in swastika armbands entered the room. One of them began to talk insultingly about Jews and to aim his remarks in our direction. With the afternoon street fight still in our eyes, we hurried to leave, but the now-shouting Nazi and his myrmidons followed, cursing and threatening us the while. Schall protested, and at that they began to kick and to hit him. Miss de Bosset ran to a corner, found a policeman, and told him a man was being killed, but this information did not arouse him to any action. We were rescued by a timely taxi and though Schall was battered and bloody, we went directly to a Police Court. The magistrate was as little perturbed with our story, however, as the policeman had been. “In Germany today, such things happen every minute,” was all he said.

But to return to the plot of the movement, in spite of contrasting episodes such as the canon for bassoons, the march music predominates until the fugue which is the stasis and the turning point. The immobility at the beginning of this fugue is comic, I think—and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies, and the final, rather too commercial, D-flat sixth chord—instead of the expected C—in some way tokens my extra exuberance in the Allied triumph. The figure was developed from the rhumba in the timpani part in the introduction to the first movement. It is somehow, inexplicably, associated in my imagination with the movements of war machines.

The first movement was likewise inspired by a war film, this time of scorched earth tactics in China. The middle part of the movement was conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a series of cinematographic scenes showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields. The music for clarinet, piano, and strings that mounts in intensity and volume until the explosion of the three chords ... and that then begins all over again, was all associated in my mind with this Chinese documentary.

The formal substance of the symphony—”Three Symphonic Movements” would be a more exact title—exploits the idea of counterplay between several types of contrasting elements. One such contrast, the most obvious, is that of harp and piano, the principal instrumental protagonists. Each has a large obbligato role and a whole movement to itself and only at the turning-point fugue, the Nazi queue de poisson, are the two heard together and alone.


IGOR STRAVINSKY
Four Studies for Orchestra

These four studies for orchestra are the products of an unlikely marriage of music for string quartet and the piano roll. The first three pieces were originally written for string quartet in 1914, shortly after the scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring. They had no titles, just tempo markings.

Stravinsky began to orchestrate the three pieces almost as soon as they were finished and made a piano-duet arrangement as well. In the spring of 1916, Stravinsky took his first trip to Spain, where he passed many an evening in local taverns, “listening to the preliminary improvisations of the guitarist and the deep-voiced singer with astonishing breath control singing her long Arab cantilena embellished with fioriture.” The next year, when the Aeolian Company asked him to write something for the pianola, which Stravinsky had seen demonstrated in London in 1914, he produced a little piece inspired “by the surprising results of the mixture of strains from the mechanical pianos and orchestrinas in the streets and little night taverns of Madrid.”

In 1928, Stravinsky wrapped these four short pieces together as a set of orchestral studies, with a newly orchestrated version of the piano-roll piece serving as the finale. He now gave all four works descriptive titles and admitted a few additional memories of what had inspired him. The first is a stylized Russian dance, its melody limited to just four notes repeated in various permutations over an irregular pulse. Eccentric was inspired by the English clown Little Tich, who entertained Stravinsky in London in 1914: “the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and downs, the rhythm—even the mood or joke of the music—was suggested by the art of the great clown.” The third, Canticle, is a static litany—a wonderful kaleidoscope of ever-changing, yet unmoving parts. The piano roll of Madrid is now given the full-color travel-brochure treatment.


ELLIOTT CARTER (b. 1908)
Reflexions


EDGARD VARÈSE (1883–1965)
Ionisation


Amériques
On December 18, 1915, Edgard Varèse boarded the S. S. Rochambeau and sailed from Paris for New York City with 80 dollars in his pocket and a stack of letters of introduction in his suitcase. (An accomplished pianist, he played two pieces by Debussy at a shipboard concert.) Varèse had planned on a short visit, but he stayed nearly a half century, took an American wife, and became a US citizen.

Varèse left behind a European musical establishment that had recently been rocked by the radical work of a new generation of composers: In 1912 and 1913 alone, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Debussy’s Jeux, and Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra and Pierrot lunaire had been performed for the first time, and each had shaken the foundations of music. Varèse had not played a role in that revolution, but he came to the US poised to start his own.

Varèse welcomed a clean break with his European past—a liberation accelerated by the news that most of the music he had composed before arriving in New York was destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire. It is surely no coincidence that the first new score he began in the US was named Amériques—a title that was not meant as “purely geographic but as symbolic of discoveries—new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.” Shortly after arriving in New York, Varèse revealed the scope of his vision in an interview with the New York Telegraph:

Our musical alphabet must be enriched. We also need new instruments very badly … Musicians should take up this question in deep earnest with the help of machinery specialists. I have always felt the need for new mediums of expression in my work. I refuse to submit myself only to sounds that have already been heard. What I am looking for are new technical mediums which can lend themselves to every expression of thought and can keep up with thought.

It would be nearly 40 years before Varèse would emerge from semiretirement to fulfill his dream and write music for the electronic sounds of a technology he had long awaited; both Déserts (completed in 1954) and the Poème electronique, designed for Le Corbusier’s pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, became instant classics in this new world. In the meantime, however, Varèse found surprisingly fresh methods of expression with the materials at hand.

Varèse wrote all of his major compositions in this country, most of them in the 1920s, when Stravinsky, Bartók, and Schoenberg were making musical headlines in Europe. Varèse’s work pointed in yet another direction and, as Paul Griffiths has noted, it immediately transferred the center of radical new music to the US. In just a handful of scores, most of them lasting only a few minutes, Varèse elevated rhythm to a new prominence, granted percussion instruments a role of unforeseen importance (and complexity), and developed a new sound world, dependent not on melody and harmony, but on timbre, texture, and dynamics.

Varèse began Amériques not long after settling in New York City. “For the first time,” he later recalled, “with my physical ears I heard a sound that kept recurring in my dreams as a boy—a high whistling C-sharp. It came to me as I worked in my West side apartment, where I could hear all the river sounds—the lonely foghorns, the shrill peremptory whistles—the whole wonderful river symphony which moved me more than anything ever had before.” Amériques is Varèse’s new world symphony—a love song for a wondrous and stimulating new urban environment and a glorious shout of liberation.

Varèse recognized Amériques as a major step forward; with this work, he later explained to his American wife Louise, “he had begun working in a new idiom toward which his earlier scores had only been groping.” Today, in light of his subsequent music in this new idiom, Amériques sounds like his most traditional score. It calls for a very large orchestra—except for its massive percussion section, this is the orchestra of the late romantic composers—in contrast to the spiky, smaller ensembles of his later works. Varèse’s materials, too, appear conventional at first—the sinuous opening solo for alto flute over the tinkling of the harps lures the listener into the world of Debussy. But those assumptions are quickly shattered—literally, by the fff roar of the brass—and Varèse proceeds by drawing new patterns on familiar ground. Yet, like Webern’s Op. 1, the Passacaglia for Orchestra, Amériques is Varèse’s first important step and at the same time the last piece of its kind to come from his pen.

Varèse realized that percussion was the only section of the traditional orchestra that remained unexplored. In Amériques, he calls for a percussion battery of unprecedented size and uses a number of exotic instruments (the siren and the lion’s roar, for example) that were foreign to symphonic music. Percussion is given an active and sometimes dominant role in Amériques; at certain moments, the section even plays alone. This luxuriance of new timbres—and of nonpitched sounds—opened a new chapter in music.

If percussion plays a role of unforeseen importance in Amériques, in Ionisation, completed a decade later, it takes over completely. This extraordinary score, just a few minutes long, can, without risk of overstatement, be called a landmark. In its bracing sonorities, to take a line Schoenberg pointedly set to music more than two decades before, we breathe the air of a new planet.

Ionisation is scored for some three dozen percussion instruments, of which only three—chimes, celesta, and piano—are capable of playing notes in the equal-tempered scale. Composition based on the preeminence of pitch here gives way to a music of timbres and rhythms. As the first of many all-percussion scores written in this century, Ionisation is remarkably subtle in its use of those instruments. The form is articulated by changing sonorities—a passage scored only for metal instruments; a fleeting duet for drums and maracas; a hair-raising moment (the first sustained loud point in the score) when several players have the same triplet figure (a rhythmic unison); the first high, Morse-code clanging of the anvils, more than midway through. The grand and sonorous coda is marked by the entrance of the piano, celesta, and chimes—the three instruments of definite pitch. Varèse once defined his mission as the “liberation of sound” (just as Schoenberg promised the “emancipation of dissonance.”) Ionisation is the purest demonstration of his success, and of his eventual influence. It is the work of both a pioneer and a master.

From the beginning, Varèse’s music posed unusual challenges for both performers and listeners. Leopold Stokowski devoted 16 rehearsals exclusively to the preparation of Amériques in 1926. The Philadelphia performances provoked laughter, hisses, and boos. But the freshness and force of Varèse’s musical ideas, and the genuine originality of his sound world quickly gained respect, and the composer was regarded as a prophet.

In the months before the premiere of Amériques, Varèse worried that his music would be “doomed to sleep forever at the bottom of a drawer.” It has never been performed regularly, but his work is now regarded as fundamental, and it continues to sound fresh and invigorating, timeless, and utterly unique, even though it has inspired and influenced so many pieces written since.

—Phillip Huscher

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Adapted from comments written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor Emeritus
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished 118-year history began in 1891 when Theodore Thomas, then the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra in Chicago. Thomas served as music director for 13 years until his death in 1905—just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Chicago Orchestra’s permanent home.

Thomas’s successor was Frederick Stock, who began his career in the viola section in 1895 and became assistant conductor four years later. His tenure at the Orchestra’s helm lasted 37 years, from 1905 to 1942. Three distinguished conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947; Artur Rodzinski assumed the post in 1947–1948; and Rafael Kubelík led the Orchestra for three seasons from 1950 to 1953.

The next 10 years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are still considered performance hallmarks. For the five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.

Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. He held the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra for several weeks each season until his death in September 1997.

In January 1989, the CSO began a new collaboration with Daniel Barenboim as he was named music director designate. Mr. Barenboim assumed leadership as the Orchestra’s ninth music director in September 1991, a position he held until June 2006.

On May 5, 2008, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced the appointment of Riccardo Muti as its tenth Music Director. Muti became Music Director Designate in January 2009, and he begins a five-year contract as Music Director in September 2010.

Two of the world’s most celebrated conductors assumed titled positions with the Chicago Symphony beginning with the 2006–2007 season. Eminent Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink became the Orchestra’s new principal conductor, and French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez—the CSO’s Helen Regenstein Principal Guest Conductor since 1995—became the Orchestra’s Conductor Emeritus.