Program Notes: Concert 3
About our soloists
Frances Conover Fitch has toured extensively in North America and Europe and recorded for Swiss, German, Dutch and French National Radio as well as for the BBC and NPR. Her ensemble, Concerto Castello, won critical acclaim as well as an Honorable Mention in the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis of 1983. Widely sought after as a particularly sensitive and inventive continuo player, she has worked with ensembles such as Spiritus Collective, Cantata Singers, Emmanuel Music, Aston Magna, Boston Cecilia, the Handel and Haydn Society, Concerto Palatino, the Boston Camerata and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum.
Ms. Fitch has presented solo recitals at the Smithsonian Institution, the American Church in Paris and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She has participated in major music festivals including the Festival d’Art Lyrique/Aix-en-Provence, Pepsico Summerfare, Tanglewood, Boston Early Music Festival, Tage Alter Musik (Regensburg), the Castle Hill Festival and the Festival de Musica Antigua in Mexico City, where she also gave master classes at the National Conservatory. She has recordings on the EMI-Reflexe, Titanic, Harmonia Mundi, Koch International and Wild Boar labels, including her solo CD, O Ye Tender Babes: English Virginal Music (Wildboar), and a recent 2-CD release entitled Protégée of the Sun King (Centaur), featuring the music of Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre.
Formerly on the faculty at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and at Wellesley College, Ms. Fitch now teaches at Tufts University and at the Longy School of Music, where she is Chair of the Early Music Department and instructor in harpsichord, organ, chamber music, figured bass improvisation and bibliographic research. Ms. Fitch has degrees from Bard College and New England Conservatory and did post-graduate work at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam, where she studied with Gustav Leonhardt and Veronika Hampe. Her playing has been praised as “delightful,” “perceptive,” “alluring,” “spirited,” “stylish” and “spectacular” and noted for its “precision and delicacy of wit.”
Beverly Clark has held the principal flute chair with Symphony by the Sea since its inaugural concert. She has been principal flutist of several other North Shore orchestras during her long career and has performed as soloist with Symphony by the Sea, Cape Ann Symphony, Cape Ann Chamber Orchestra and Salem Philharmonic. She continues to perform with several chamber music ensembles.
In 1981, she was one of the five original founders of Symphony by the Sea. She has served on the orchestra’s Board of Directors since 1981 and is currently Secretary of the Board.
A founding member of the Greater Boston Flute Association, Ms. Clark served on the board of that organization for three years. For Symphony by the Sea she has produced children’s concerts and a regional flute fair. For many years, Ms. Clark maintained a large private studio in Marblehead, often serving as an adjudicator for the Massachusetts Music Educators Northeast District competitions.
Ms. Clark began her flute study as a child at the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. After graduating from the University of Connecticut where she majored in English and Music, she continued her flute training in the studio of Samuel Baron.
Outside the world of music, Ms. Clark holds a masters degree in Reading and has completed a pre-doctoral fellowship in Neuropsychology. She is a licensed school psychologist and neuropsychological diagnostician.
Peter Jarvis, a native of Canada, began studying the violin at age five. He graduated from the University of Ottawa, and later from Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh with a Masters in Music. His love of the rich chamber music repertoire led him to pursue a nine-year position in Musaeus, one of Canada’s premier touring string quartets featured numerous times on CBC radio and in recordings. He was principal second of the Lethbridge Symphony Orchestra and the Southern Alberta Chamber Orchestra, appearing annually as violin soloist.
In 1990 Mr. Jarvis moved to Ithaca, NY, where he was concertmaster of the Rochester Bach Festival and assistant concertmaster of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra. There he began his tenure with Reuning & Son Violins as their in-house violinist. When Reuning & Son relocated to Boston in 1994, Mr. Jarvis entered the Boston music community as a free-lance player, appearing with the Cambridge Chamber Players, Andover Chamber Orchestra, the Longwood Symphony and most recently as concertmaster of Symphony by the Sea. He has performed under notable conductors such as Loren Maazel, Carl St. Clair and Heiichiro Ohyama. He has collaborated in chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma, Naoko Tanaka, Desmond Hoebig and the Purcell and Orford String Quartets. An enthusiastic educator, Mr. Jarvis conducts the String Training Orchestras, String Chamber Orchestra and coaches chamber music at New England Conservatory.
PROGRAM NOTES
Sleeping in Air (1994)
Rodney Lister (1951– )
Rodney Lister received his early musical training at the Blair School of Music in Nashville, Tennessee. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory and a Master of Fine Arts degree and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He studied composition with, among others, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Virgil Thompson. Other activities have included co-founding and co-directing Music Here & Now, a concert series of new music by Boston area composers held at the Museum of Fine Arts, and serving as Music Coordinator of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. He was a founding member of the Music Production Company in 1982 and worked with that group as pianist and composer. He is currently on the faculty of Boston University, the Preparatory School of The New England Conservatory and Greenwood Music Camp. Asked to talk about Sleeping in Air, Mr. Lister made these remarks:
“Sleeping in Air was commissioned by the New England Conservatory Preparatory School, with funds provided by Dena and Felda Hardymon, for the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, and Melba Sandberg, who was the conductor of the orchestra at that time. The starting point for the piece was The Bat Poet by Randall Jarrell (which it seems a shame to refer to as merely a ‘children’s book’). The book is about a bat who realizes his inclinations to be a poet, initially in emulation of his hero the mockingbird, whom he thinks of as a great artist. Several of the bat’s poems are included in the book, the last of which is about the bat’s life, and that one is specifically behind this piece. The poem describes a mother bat flying through the night, hunting for food, with her baby holding onto her beneath her wings, and finally returning home to rest for the day, where, as Jarrel writes, ‘they sleep in air,’ upside down. Although there are no one-to-one correspondences to the poem in my piece, I generally thought of it as depicting the dream of the baby bat about his trip with his mother; the more animated middle section is perhaps the actual flight, and evokes the line in the poem, ‘her high sharp cries/like shining needle points of sound.’ The use of the piccolo is also perhaps an evocation of the baby bat.”
If you listen carefully you just might hear the five-note rhythmic pattern of “Rock-a-Bye Baby” being repeated in the music.
Here is Randall Jarrell’s poem:
A Bat is Born
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting.
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night in happiness she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needle points of sound
Go out into the night and, echoing back,
Tell her what they touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it’s going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon,
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak,
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others are all there.
They hang themselves by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.
Sleeping in Air is scored for piccolo, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, percussion and strings.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
The six Concerti Grossi, known as the Brandenburgs, were composed between 1717 and 1721 during Bach’s tenure as Kapellmeister or Music Director at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen (Bach’s “Cöthen Period”). Here, with a fine orchestra at his disposal, Bach’s genius flourished. Many of his best-loved instrumental compositions date from the Cöthen years.
In 1721 Bach selected and carefully copied six concertos written over the preceding four years and presented them as a gift to the brother of King Friedrich Wilhelm I. This was Christian Ludwig, who lived in his sibling’s royal palace, where he was addressed as Royal Highness and enjoyed the title Margrave of Brandenburg. Christian Ludwig had heard Bach’s brilliant harpsichord playing two years before and had asked him at that time to provide him with music to be played by his own court musicians. Now, in 1721, Bach was complying with Christian Ludwig’s request. Ironically, the six masterpieces were never really made public by Christian Ludwig, possibly because his court musicians lacked the skill to handle them. Only spottily performed during his lifetime, they were completely forgotten after the Margrave’s death in 1734. Not until well into the 1800’s — more than a century after their composition — were the concertos finally published and made known to the music world at large.
Brandenburg No. 5 features a solo group (concertino) of flute, violin and harpsichord against a background group (ripieno) of strings, the harpsichord alternating as solo instrument and background instrument. The middle movement, a tender and moving Affetuoso, features the concertino instruments alone. The concluding Allegro is built on an ABA pattern, with the A section and its repeat written in the style of a fugue.
It is not unlikely that Bach wrote the concerto expressly to showcase a new harpsichord that he had acquired in Berlin for use at Leopold’s court. This would account for the stunning sixty-five measure harpsichord cadenza that concludes the first movement. Almost certainly played by Bach himself at the Cöthen premiere, this virtuosic solo is often singled out as step one in the development of the modern piano concerto.
Selections from the Fairy-Queen Suites
Henry Purcell (1659–1695)
The Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic poem by Edmund Spenser published in the 1590’s and written in praise of Queen Elizabeth I, is in no way connected to Henry Purcell’s stage musical of the same title. Purcell’s Fairy-Queen was written a hundred years later, in 1692. It does indeed borrow a character from the 1590’s, but one taken from Shakespeare, not Spenser. She is Titania, Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Purcell’s work is a masque (also known as a semi-opera), a musical drama popular in 16th and 17th century England featuring masked performers and combining vocal and instrumental music, poetry, acting and dance. The complete play boasts some sixty musical numbers, two dozen of them instrumental, the others vocal.
Purcell’s Fairy-Queen is by no means an adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Most of Shakespeare’s plot is missing, and a number of quaint characters, nowhere to be found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have been added. These include monkeys, swans, Chinese Dancers, Green Men and Haymakers. The end product is not a unified play but a review, loosely stitched yet highly entertaining.
Music for Movies
Aaron Copland (1900–1990)
The movie house became a new music theater in 1927 with the release of the first talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Aaron Copland welcomed this development, finding in it an exciting new challenge to modern composers. In his view, the birth of film music meant the birth of a new listening public separate from traditional concert-goers. Composers must now connect with this new audience in the name of cultural advancement. “The cultural level of music is certain to be raised if better music is written for films,” he stated in 1941. Along with its social role, movie music also had an important esthetic function: that of making screen characters more real to the viewer. “The score of a motion picture,” Copland wrote in the New York Times in 1940, “supplies a sort of human warmth to the black-and-white, two-dimensional figures on the screen, giving them a communicable sympathy that they otherwise would not have, bridging the gap between the screen and the audience.”
Copland’s first film score was written for The City (1939), a documentary study of urban American life, filmed mostly in New York for presentation at the New York World’s Fair. The year 1940 saw the release of Copland’s first two scores written for Hollywood, Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck’s novel, and Our Town, after the play by Thornton Wilder.
Music for Movies was composed in 1942. A concert suite comprised of five numbers, it employs two excerpts from The City, two more from Of Mice and Men and one from Our Town.
- Moderato: “New England Countryside” (from The City). Pastoral in tone, the opening movement sets the mood of the suite as a whole. This segment of the film functions as an idyllic contrast to the urban harshness of New York City.
- Moderato: “Barley Wagons” (from Of Mice and Men). Under a folk-like theme played by flute, clarinet and violins, bassoon and violas evoke the steady plodding of the wagons.
- Con moto: “Sunday Traffic” (from The City). Piccolo and trumpet brightly capture the hustle and bustle of the city.
- Moderato, with calm: “Story of Grover’s Corners” (from Our Town). The picture of a peaceful, rural New England town (Peterborough, New Hampshire, was Wilder’s model for Grover’s Corners) emerges from Copland’s hymn-like Moderato.
- Allegro: “Threshing Machines” (from Of Mice and Men). Repeated eighth notes in the bass establish a mechanical rhythm. Over this, a machine-like, staccato theme generates a mood of busy gaiety, building eventually into the climax of the movement and of the suite.
These notes are written for Symphony by the Sea. They may be reproduced, provided that authorship acknowledgement is given to William R. Clark, © W. R. Clark