INTRODUCING ERIK ROHDE

JOCELYN HAGEN
b. Minneapolis, MN, 19 April, 1980

Commissioned by the Minnesota Chorale and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and premiered on March 30, 2019 at Hopkins High School in Mahtomedi, MN with the commissioning ensembles under the direction of William Schrickel.

Minnesota composer Jocelyn Hagen composes music that has been described as “simply magical” (Fanfare Magazine) and “dramatic and deeply moving” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis/St. Paul). She is a pioneer in the field of composition, pushing the expectations of musicians and audiences with large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, opera, and publishing. Her first forays into composition were via songwriting, still very evident in her work. Her melodic music is rhythmically driven and texturally complex, rich in color and deeply heartfelt.

In 2019 and 2020, choirs and orchestras across the country began premiering her multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci that includes video projections created by a team of visual artists, highlighting da Vinci’s spectacular drawings, inventions, and texts. The composer writes:

In the summer of 2016 I attended an exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts featuring da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. Seeing these pages with my own eyes cemented my devotion to developing this project. The liquidity of his mind and the way he connects disparate ideas as a means of understanding them is genuinely inspiring. And da Vinci was known as much for his failures as his successes. That’s inspiring as well. He wasn’t afraid to take ideas out of context or take risks.

Inspired by the images of da Vinci, Hagen created a multi-media work for chorus and orchestra that uses advanced digital software to project images above the ensemble.  She says, “As a writer, da Vinci wrote from right to left, backwards, as if in a mirror. These beautifully scribed words scroll above the musicians and add a wonderful texture to the performance.”

The sixth movement of Notebooks is “Invention,” and is the only movement of the larger piece for orchestra alone.  Tonight’s performance presents the first performance of this movement as a stand-alone work, highlighting the colors and rhythmic drive of the orchestra and leaving the da Vinci imagery up to the audience’s imagination.  More about Hagen and her Notebooks project can be found on her website: https://www.jocelynhagen.com/

JOAN TOWER
b. New Rochelle, New York, 6 September, 1938

Commissioned jointly by the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer and premiered by the Glen Falls Symphony (NY) in October, 2005

American composer Joan Tower is among the upper echelon of living composers and is a Grammy award winning composer, conductor and successful pianist.  She was the first woman to win the Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1990 for her composition Silver Ladders, and has taught composition on the faculty of Bard College in New York since 1972.  She has won numerous accolades during her career, including receiving the League of American Orchestras’ highest honor, the Gold Baton, at the League’s 74th National Conference in 2019.  She has written many works for orchestra, including most famously several Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman, a response to Copland’s iconic Fanfare for the Common Man.

There are several important influences in Tower’s music, but her strong rhythmic sensibility and inspiration taken from Beethoven are at the fore of her musical language.  Her first piano concerto was written in homage to Beethoven and even quotes several of his piano sonatas.  Her highly rhythmic music, however, is a reflection of an experience she had moving as child.  Her reaction to this move, and even more strongly to her return home, is what is highlighted in this piece, Made in America, a surprisingly lyric piece for Tower based on the song “America the Beautiful.”  The composer writes:

I crossed a fairly big bridge at the age of nine when my family moved to South America (La Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position. When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song “America the Beautiful” kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea — as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, unsettling it, but “America the Beautiful” keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, “I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.” A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of how do we keep America beautiful.

FLORENCE PRICE
b. Little Rock, AR, 9 April, 1887
d. Chicago, IL, 3 June, 1953

Premiered in Chicago in 1934 with the composer as the soloist and Frederick Stock, conductor.

American composer Florence Price holds a remarkable distinction in history as the first female African-American composer to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra, and to have created a career at a time when diversity in western classical music was essentially unheard-of.  Having grown up in the deep south, she eventually studied at the New England Conservatory under the important early American composer George Chadwick, who recognized and encouraged her talent.  Her first compositional breakthrough was in 1932 when her Symphony No. 1 won a Wanamaker Foundation Award and was performed the next year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  The conductor of the performance was Frederick Stock, one of the few conductors at the time who were willing to program Price’s music.  It was he who encouraged her to write a piano concerto, which he premiered with her in 1934. The piece was met with almost universal critical acclaim for its’ technical assuredness and musical roots in the African-American tradition.  The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph wrote “There is real American music.”

Like most of her music, the work was lost after Price’s death, and only in the last two decades has her music started resurfacing and being performed.  In 2009 a huge collection of her scores and papers were discovered in a derelict old house which used to be her summer home outside of St. Anne, IL. The original orchestral score to the concerto was still lost, although the solo piano part and a two-piano reduction of the score had been found in the 1990s.  A reconstruction of the orchestral version of the concerto was created and premiered in 2016, but then amazingly, in 2018 the original manuscript of the orchestral score turned up at an audition in St. Anne, and the original version was prepared and released for performance in 2020.  It is Price’s original version that we will perform this evening.

The Concerto in One Movement is performed without a break, although the piece is indeed structured in a standard three-movement form.  The first movement is expansive and romantic, opening with a huge piano cadenza after the very brief orchestral introduction.  The middle movement is slower, and suggestive of a nostalgic African-American “sorrow song” similar to “Deep River” or “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”  This leads to the glittering, whimsical finale, based on the “juba,” a lively, syncopated plantation dance that predates the Civil War.  The “juba” Price considered to be essential to African-American music and often she included the rhythmic dance in her music.  You can hear the early seeds of what would become ragtime in the rollicking finale.

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
b. Bonn, baptized 17 December, 1770
d. Vienna, 26 March, 1827

Premiered in Vienna on 8 December 1813 with the composer conducting.

An undisputed titan of the symphonic repertoire, Beethoven has been a force to be reckoned with since his own lifetime.  As a student of Haydn, who bears the mantle of “father of the symphony,” Beethoven took the form and created something almost brand new out of it, establishing the primacy of the weighty, profound symphony for composers until this day.  In his day, Beethoven was a well-known yet tempestuous figure.  When this symphony was written, most of his contemporaries would have recognized him as the preeminent living composer.  However, the unstoppable popularity and mass appeal of Rossini plagued him for almost his whole career.  Many of Beethoven’s concerts were less than successful, while Rossini flew high (and rich!) among the masses.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, however, is somewhat of an exception to that lifelong trend.  Performed alongside the then-popular and now-obscure Wellington’s Victory, the Symphony No. 7 was premiered at a benefit concert for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau.  It was probably the most successful concert Beethoven gave in his lifetime.  Wellington’s Victory came off to huge acclaim, but the Seventh Symphony also gained quick popularity.  At the premiere, the second movement had to be encored, and went on to be often performed separate from the rest of the symphony (including today in several notable films).  After the premiere, the symphony was repeated a stunning three times within ten weeks.  At one of those following performances, the “applause rose to the point of ecstasy,” the second movement was encored again and again, and was described by the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as “the crown of modern instrumental music.”

The Symphony opens with Beethoven’s longest slow introduction.  Seemingly simple elements of scales and straight-forward chords combine to create a lyrical and grand opening, foreshadowing the fast movement to come.  Beethoven distills everything down to a single “E” passed between the winds and the strings and suddenly we are in the Vivace proper.  Here Beethoven unleashes a wild and joyous study in 6/8 energy – propelling us into his most rhythmic symphony.  Typical Beethoven signs abound: sudden shifts in dynamic, surprising accents, and a never-ending drive through the movement.

The second movement, not really a slow movement, but a ponderous “walking tempo,” is the symphony’s most famous.  After a somewhat unstable opening chord in the winds, Beethoven sets up the ostinato rhythm in the low strings: long, short, short, long, long.  This march-like movement unfolds with great drama through variations of two melodies, one rhythmic and serious, the other lyric and gentle.  The movement closes with the same chord of the opening, but felt very differently after the long emotional journey Beethoven takes us through.

After the grave second movement, the third movement explodes in ebullient joy.  Here we have a fantastic Beethoven Scherzo, with the orchestra scurrying through a cascade of notes, offset again and again by a calmer trio led by the winds.  Here Beethoven plays with the audience’s expectations: just when the audience suspects we are going back around to the softer trio one last time, the movement dashes to a surprise close.  The driving energy, however, isn’t over, but bleeds into the fiery finale, another dance-like movement that brings the symphony to its’ roaring, triumphant conclusion.