The composer has provided the following comments:
This piece was composed on the verge of an exciting moment in my life: the birth of our son Albert Shin Liang. Albert’s musical name—A, B (Bb), E, D (re)—asserts itself in different configurations and disguises as basic harmonic and melodic material. His heartbeat also makes an appearance in the form of changing tempi and pulsations. In a sense, I composed the piece in order to make a musical amulet for Albert.

On a technical level, I was fascinated by the dialectical relationship between the convergence and divergence of musical voices found in the traditional heterophonic music of Mongolia. There, the functionality of a principal line and its accompaniment can interchange, and often not synchronously.

The 18 strings are divided into antiphonal groups: left versus right, front versus rear. They diverge into various sub-ensembles, quartets, and also appear as 18 virtuosic soloists. Near the end, they converge into a singular voice.

Lou Harrison built a reputation for combining elements of Eastern and Western culture, championing the works of other progressive American composers, and featuring all manner of percussion instruments in his works. Profoundly influenced in 1935 by Henry Cowell’s course entitled Music of the Peoples of the World, Harrison began studying privately with Cowell. At his mentor’s suggestion, Harrison corresponded with Charles Ives, who sent him a crate of unpublished compositions. He learned a “license for freedom” from Ives, which he said was tempered by the valuable lesson of “simplicity and method” gained from classes with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles. In 1946 while working in New York as a music reviewer, Harrison conducted the premiere of Ives’s Third Symphony in the edition he had made. The work earned Ives the Pulitzer Prize, which he insisted on sharing with Harrison.

Harrison taught at numerous institutions, mostly in California, interspersed with studies in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, and New Zealand. In 1971, with his partner William Colvig, Harrison constructed an “American gamelan” out of everyday metallic materials—steel conduit tubing, cans, and aluminum slabs—for which he composed a number of compositions. He later wrote for traditional Javanese gamelan, both separately and in combination with Western instruments. Harrison is also known for writing the texts for several of his vocal compositions in Esperanto, the artificial international language, and was long recognized for his works supporting environmental responsibility and peace.

Already experimenting since 1949 with tunings other than equal temperament (the modern compromise system, in which, for example, F-sharp sounds the same as G-flat), Harrison used his second Guggenheim grant in 1955 to further his study of tuning systems. He always kept his own pianos in “Kirnberger No. 2” (named for Baroque theorist Johann Philipp Kirnberger) which, said Harrison, “has on the white keys an almost perfect C major in just intonation (only the tone ‘a’ is very slightly high) and then a whole lovely opalescence of intervals as one reaches out to the more remote keys”—essentially owing to the black keys being tuned to the mathematically precise ratios for fourths and fifths so esteemed in medieval and earlier times.

In May 1983, when Harrison began writing his Piano Concerto for jazz and classical crossover artist Keith Jarrett, he said he had always wanted to use three pianos tuned differently, one for each movement. For practical purposes, however, he settled on his favorite Kirnberger No. 2, and Jarrett even had his own piano tuned the same way so as get acclimated. Harrison selected the instruments for his orchestral accompaniment—strings, two harps, three trombones, and percussion—for their “ability to play the intonation with some grace and because I like an integration of percussion with other facets of my music, and besides, who can resist writing for harps?” The alternate tuning doesn’t hit the listener over the head, but rather bathes the ears in an intangible exoticism, sometimes sweet and sometimes piquant.

Harrison completed the Concerto in August 1985, and Jarrett played the premiere on October 20 at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, who had introduced the two in the first place. Jarrett has recorded the work, and several other pianists have taken it up, but, on the whole, this grand-scale Concerto is far too infrequently performed. It is regrettable that Harrison’s beloved Kirnberger No. 2 tuning and a style that ingeniously avoids pigeonholes seem to be its biggest impediments.

The Concerto is in four rather than three movements, the first two of imposing scope and the last two more concise. The majestic first movement sweeps the listener along an expansive sonata-form path beginning with a powerful, almost Brahmsian gesture that soon erupts into slightly Eastern-sounding ripples over a surging bass line. Chiming sonorities play a significant role, from big bell-like sounds to more delicate jangling. Continuously spun-out melodies, often reinforced by octave doublings, and harmonies that are not traditionally directional provide an open, sometimes Coplandesque feeling, which, combined with well-timed climaxes and a cohesive framework, create a compellingly dramatic whole.

In the aptly named Stampede, raucous tone clusters and catchy drummings launch a breathless barrage of perpetual motion. Harrison calls for the pianist to use an “octave bar” for some of the clusters and, like Henry Cowell, relies on the pianist’s forearm for the two-octave clusters. A quieter central section and a dramatic solo cadenza briefly interrupt the movement’s ferocious drive. Harrison points out that the movement is a heavily revised version of the eighth movement of his choral-orchestral-gamelan work Faust, also written in 1985.

The delicate opening piano chords of the third movement make for celestial contrast. A slightly darker, ruminative idea emerges before the strings surround the piano’s ethereal melody with a halo of sound. Meditative long-note melodies give the remainder of this movement a sense of timelessness at odds with its brevity.

The finale returns to the energetic world of the Stampede, but with a lighter touch. Constant piano decorations and light-textured percussion effects over a series of drones evoke an exotic atmosphere as the movement races to an emphatic conclusion.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe

Even today, a half-century after his death, Jean Sibelius is among the best-known of all Finnish artists, and is certainly the most easily recognized Finnish musician. He came of age during the first stirrings of nationalist sentiment in his native land, and played a large role in forging a Finnish artistic identity. For hundreds of years, Finland had been ruled by outsiders: the nation was a Swedish possession from the Middle Ages until Napoleonic times, then a Grand Duchy of Russia from 1809 to 1917. The long years of foreign domination left their mark: to this day, a significant minority of Finns in the southwest part of the country speak Swedish as their mother tongue.

Sibelius, too, grew up speaking Swedish. He was sent to a Finnish-language school from the age of ten, but did not gain a mastery of the language until he was an adult. Ironically, it was only while studying in Vienna in the early 1890s that he found a fascination for Finnish language and culture—due, at least in part, to having fallen in love with a young Finnish-speaking woman. He became enamored of the Kalevala, the Finnish national folk epic, whose strict meter and use of repetitive poetic imagery and rhythmic patterns struck him as “extraordinarily modern.” His interest in Finnish culture remained largely literary; unlike many nationalist composers in other European countries, he did not tramp about the countryside, collecting and cataloging folk tunes, nor did he make great use of Finnish melodies in his own works. Nevertheless, the musical language he crafted in the 1890s was permeated with the rhythmic and melodic elements gleaned from a study of Finnish folk poetry.

Another influence on Sibelius’s music, less easy to categorize in technical musical terms, is his love of nature. His biographer, Erik W. Tawaststjerna, was a personal friend of the composer and had access to many unpublished documents relating to the life of Sibelius and his family. He wrote:

“Even by Nordic standards, Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: he scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds just below Ainola [his home in the countryside]. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours.”

Whatever the sources of his style, Sibelius’s music provided inspiration to the nascent Finnish nation, which at the end of the 19^th century was in the process of extricating itself from Russia after hundreds of years of foreign rule. To honor his achievements, the Finnish government declared his 50^th birthday a national holiday and commissioned a new symphony from him. This was to be his fifth, and he conducted its premiere on his birthday in 1915. Sibelius was a harsh self-critic (in his 70s he burned a large quantity of unpublished manuscripts), and immediately set about revising the score. The new version was first heard exactly a year after the first, but again Sibelius was not satisfied. The turmoil surrounding the final years of World War I and the final winning of Finnish independence combined with his own health problems delayed the completion of the final version of the symphony, which was premiered in 1919.

Though Sibelius had almost 40 years to live, his output dwindled over the succeeding decade, and he wrote little after 1926. This pattern was not atypical for composers who had reached artistic maturity in the late 19^th century. The social and esthetic changes that swept Europe following World War I left many composers feeling adrift in a world with new audiences and a new music culture that exalted the breakdown of traditional tonality. Sibelius remained popular in the English-speaking countries, but on the Continent he was often regarded as a fringe character, a footnote to music history. His own difficult personality contributed to his precarious status. Alex Ross writes:

“The contrasts in the reception of his music, with its extremes of splendor and strangeness, matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing.”

The first fruit of Sibelius’s study of Finnish folk music was the sprawling work for orchestra and men’s chorus from 1892, Kullervo, based on an episode from the Kalevala. Describing the work in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary, James Hepokoski offers a summary of the characteristics of Sibelius’s “Finnish” style:

Shunning conservatory correctness, the work gave prominence to modally-tinged “Finnish” melodies and reiterative accompaniment patterns; obsessive ostinato repetition, long pedal point and epic recyclings of brief melodic ideas; bluntly cut rhythms; broodingly thick, dark an often minor-mode textures, redolent of stern historical burdens and inescapable tragedy; unmediated juxtapositions of utterly contrasting timbre fields; and a favouring of texturally stratified, prolonged sound-images at the expense of traditional, linear-contrapuntal development.

Many of these characteristics are still evident in his Symphony No. 5, composed more than 20 years later. When it came to composing symphonies, Sibelius definitely followed his own path in formal matters. Classically, symphonies were composed in sonata form, in which a variety of themes are presented in contrasting keys, the themes then developed and combined in imaginative ways to produce drama and build up a sense of tension or suspense, followed at last by resolution.

Sibelius, however, tended to eschew classical procedure and strived to create unique blueprints for each of his symphonies. This symphony proved to be a challenge.  Early in its creation he wrote:

“Spent the evening with the symphony. The disposition of the themes: with all its mystery and fascination, this is the important thing. It is as if God the Father had thrown down mosaic pieces from heaven’s floor and asked me to put them back as they were.”

Possibly because his compositions were experimental, Sibelius often subjected his major works to heavy revision after their completion. The Fifth Symphony went through two full rewrites, and the final version (the one most often performed today) goes so far as to collapse the first two movements into one.  There is a certain logic to this choice: the original second movement (the symphony’s scherzo) shares material with, and to a large degree continues and resolves the formal argument and thematic development begun in, the first.

His treatment of melodic material is also unconventional. Rather than setting forth a variety of clear themes, Sibelius opens the symphony with four notes in the horns that constitute the germ of the work: two rising intervals of the perfect fourth, separated by a whole step. Equally important is the rhythmic pattern of those notes: long-short-short-long. From these elemental units the rest of the movement grows in an almost seamless fashion; a word used by many writers is “organic.” Slow-moving bass lines, “obsessive ostinato” patterns, and long timpani rolls contribute to an air of expectation and suspense. A motive based on half-step motion emerges, and eventually a serpentine chromatic theme begins to compete for attention. This is distilled into a plaintive line for solo bassoon above buzzing strings. The tempo broadens, dominated by a broken version of the opening theme. Soon the clouds part and the brass bring us a proud affirmation of the original theme. The moment quickly passes, and we’re whisked away by the skittering “scherzo” which now forms the second half of the movement.

The slow middle movement consists of variations on a theme, first presented by plucked strings. Sibelius’s iconoclastic sense of form is apparent here: sometimes the variations adhere to the structure of the melody—standard procedure—and sometimes he seems to be exploring the implications of the theme in a stream-of-consciousness style. It’s an unsettling take on a traditional form.

While Sibelius was working on the symphony he recorded a near-miraculous event in his diary: sixteen swans flew in formation over his home in the woods:

“One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon…That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider.”

Alongside this passage he notated a melodic idea named by him the “swan hymn”; it was to become the principal melody of the final movement. Rushing strings establish an air of expectancy at the outset, and suggest to some a flock of birds taking flight. Following the sweep of the strings brings us to the majestic “swan hymn,” a rocking melody played by the horns. We’re allowed to enjoy it for a time, but the music moves on, re-introducing the scurrying string music, now shrouded in mystery. Finally, the “swan hymn” blazes forth in a grand apotheosis—but Sibelius closes the work with six hammer-stroke chords, spaced at uncomfortably wide intervals. He referred to the ending as “triumphal,” but it’s a very uneasy sort of triumph.

–©Victor Gavenda