Tales of Country Scenes and City Lights



Claude Debussy
1862-1918

Claude Debussy
Fêtes (Festivals) from Nocturnes

Following France’s defeat in its war with Prussia in 1870-71, French cultural leaders opposed every German influence, including that of the German Romantic movement in music, symbolized by Richard Wagner. It fell to the younger generation of composers to break the “German bondage,” and the first major composer to create a new French musical language all his own was Claude Debussy.

Born into a totally unmusical family of tradesmen, Debussy showed his musical abilities at an early age and was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at age ten. Despite the fact that today some of Debussy’s most beloved works are for the piano, it took him some time to warm up to the instrument. When he was at the Paris Conservatoire, one of his teachers remarked, “Debussy isn’t very fond of the piano, but he loves music.” At age 18 he dropped his piano studies and concentrated on becoming a composer.

Debussy’s solution to Western music’s push against the limits of tonality was a style emphasizing modal and non-Western scales with accompanying harmonic structure that blurred the definitiveness of classic tonal cadences. In his frankly programmatic pieces, he concentrated on evoking mood rather than explicit tone painting. This blurring of classical parameters and expectations paralleled the impressionist paintings of contemporaneous visual artists. He frequented the famous Tuesday Evenings at the salon of Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, where the philosophy of Impressionism was developed. Another important influences on Debussy, was his exposure to the Javanese Gamelan ensembles that flourished in Paris at various international and trade fairs. The work that fully developed this new musical language was the orchestral work Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) inspired by a poem by Mallarmé. Debussy’s later orchestral works continue in the vein of musical impressionism with their suggestive rhythms, elusive tonality (the backbone of the classical tradition) and orchestral coloration.

The three Nocturnes had a long gestation period. Initially called Trois Scénes au Crepuscules (Three Scenes in Twilight), it was inspired by a collection of poems by Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier (1864-1936). In 1892 Debussy wrote a friend that the work was nearly finished, including orchestration, ready for a projected tour of the United States that never materialized. Two years later the work was reborn in a version for violin and orchestra for Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe; both of these versions have vanished without a trace. Finally, in 1899, Debussy finished the work in the form we know it today, publishing it a year later.

Underlying Fêtes, the second Nocturne, is a rapid ostinato pattern, over which the solo flute plays its own rhythmic pattern of triplets, the dance punctuated by trumpet calls.

The oboe chimes in with a new melody.

Suddenly everything hushes to the almost inaudible pulsating timpani, signaling the approach in the distance of a procession.

By means of a very gradual crescendo, the procession arrives as the opening flute theme plays against it in the violins.

After a climax in which all the dance themes are heard again, the sounds of the procession fade into the distance, and the solo woodwinds signal the cooling down of the Bacchic frenzy.



Jennifer Higdon
b. 1962

Jennifer Higdon
Violin Concerto

Composer, flutist and conductor Jennifer Higdon holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in composition, a B.M. in flute performance from Bowling Green State University, and an Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music and is currently on the music composition faculty of the Curtis Institute. She has received many national awards and grants, and her list of commissioners is a veritable who’s who of American music. Her music is extensively performed and also recorded.

Higden composed the Violin Concerto in 2009 for the violinist Hilary Hahn, on commission from the Indianapolis Symphony, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the Curtis Institute of Music. It received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in music.

The title of the first movement, “1726,” is the number of the street address of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, where Higdon met Hahn in her twentieth-century music class. It makes extensive use the intervals of unisons, 7ths, and 2nds, throughout the movement. The violin opens the Concerto with a slow introduction, playing its principal theme in harmonics and is joined a few measures later by glockenspiel and crotales played with knitting needles.

Dropping down into its lowest range, the violin plays a lyrical counter-melody against the theme, this time played by the flute.

Written in sonata form, the movement continues with an Allegro whose syncopated theme is also introduced by the violin. A jazzy orchestra joins in,

and, as in a jam session, the violin gets to strut its stuff with a twenty-first century Paganini-style lick.

Higdon is a flutist, and the Concerto sets up a delicate relationship between the flute and the violin. The middle of the movement suddenly slows down as the violin plays a sinuous melody over a ground of the main theme played by the flute.

The movement is symmetrical, ending with the harmonics and percussion as it began.

The title of the second movement, “Chaconni,” comes from the word “chaconne,” a Baroque form in which a melody or chord progression repeats throughout a section of music. The movement opens with a woodwind choir presenting the harmonic progression that serves as scaffolding upon which both soloist and orchestra develop the series of variations.

For some of the iterations, the violin embellishes it with delicate filigree in “conversation” with orchestral soloists or sections.

Higdon writes of her collaboration with Hilary Hahn: “The third movement, ‘Fly Forward,’ seemed like such a compelling image, that I could not resist the idea of having the soloist do exactly that. Concerti throughout history have always allowed the soloist to delight the audience with feats of great virtuosity, and when a composer is confronted with a real gift in the soloist’s ability to do so, well, it would be foolhardy not to allow that dream to become a reality.” The movement is a perpetual motion for the soloist who plays continuously.

There is a single musical idea, developed and transformed by both soloist and orchestra on which the entire movement is based.

A subsidiary motive, initially a subtle accompaniment figure but later expressed clearly by the violin.



Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastorale”

How and why did this symphonic tone poem come from the pen of a composer of primarily “absolute music?” To answer that question one must realize that Beethoven and his audience were more readily able to attach literary, specific emotional or extra-musical concepts to music. Beethoven himself had conjured the image of Napoleon, and then when the little emperor let him down, simply a hero in his Third Symphony. His Wellington’s Victory was the latest in a centuries’-long tradition of musical battles. And of course, there were musical models for many of the images in the Pastorale Symphony – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, bucolic Christmas pastorals with bagpipe drones, such as those from Handel’s Messiah or Corelli’s Christmas Concerto – not to mention an extensive vocabulary of rhetorical musical figures from the Baroque, bird calls and other perennial tone painting devices.

But Beethoven seemed to be searching for something different, an ideal way to portray and “express” nature. "Any painting, if it is carried too far in instrumental music, loses expressive quality...The overall content, consisting of more feelings than of tone paintings, will be recognized even without further description," he wrote in his sketchbook while working on the Sixth Symphony. This and other comments to himself as he worked reveal the Symphony as more than a sentimental outpouring. The Pastorale Symphony was another of the composer’s projects, another creative challenge to be met in the context of the trajectory of his self-fulfillment as an artist. As Beethoven’s biographer Barry Cooper puts it: “He was faced with two main problems in writing a symphony in the pastoral style: the first was to prevent the music from degenerating into scene-painting or story-telling; the second was to combine the pastoral style, leisurely and undramatic, with the thrust and dynamism of the symphonic style.”

Nevertheless, Beethoven wrote more words about this symphony than about any of his other compositions. He provided descriptive titles to each of the five movements, while at the same time commenting that the music was self-explanatory and needed no titles. The first movement, “Cheerful feelings awakened on arriving in the country,” builds up none of the intense tension so common in Beethoven's first movements, being instead an unhurried study in tranquility.

The second movement, “Scene by the brook,” is full of soft, murmuring accompaniment, which captures the sound of a flowing brook,

interspersed with the birdcalls and chirping insects – all within a tradition in tone painting common since the renaissance.

In a break with the classical symphonic structure, the last three movements run together as a continuous whole. The third movement, “Merry gathering of country folk,” suggests a village band with the lower strings imitating the drone of a bagpipe.

The dance is interrupted by the “Thunderstorm,” a superb impressionistic evocation of lightning, thunder and howling winds.

As the storm approaches, the thunderclaps come faster and faster

and then slow down as the storm passes. After the final rumbles, a solo clarinet, followed by a solo horn, lead into the “Shepherd's song: Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.”

The developing peaceful and bucolic scene ends in the final chords with the shepherd's pipe figure fading away into the distance.

Beethoven started the Symphony in the summer of 1807 and finished it in June 1808. It was premiered at a concert (Musikalische Akademie) of his recent compositions in the Imperial Theater in Vienna on December 22, 1808. The program, which was over four hours long, also included the premieres of the Fifth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the concert aria “Ah Perfido,” some improvisations by the composer, three movements from the Mass in C major and, to top it all off, the Choral Fantasia, which Beethoven composed as a grand finale to the occasion. Such monster concerts were the norm in the early nineteenth century, with people coming and going in the middle as they pleased. Not surprisingly, few stayed for the duration.

The gentle atmosphere of the Sixth Symphony is in sharp contrast to the high voltage and intensity of the Fifth, completed only a few weeks earlier. With his cantankerous nature, Beethoven fought, quarreled and argued with everyone, friend, foe or patron. But with nature he was at peace.