Cutting Room Floor: Seasonal Edition

For those of you coming to our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season this week, here's the usual trove of links, tidbits, and general info that we won't have time to get into on stage. To begin with, we're playing a wider assortment of music on our first half than we ever have before on this series, so here's a playlist of everything heard during the show:

VIVALDI Summer, from The Four Seasons
PIAZZOLLA Otono Porteno from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (arr. by Leonid Desyatnikov)
RASKATOV January, February, March, and April from The Seasons' Digest
VIVALDI Spring, from The Four Seasons
MESSIAEN Oiseaux Exotiques
RODRIGUEZ La Cumparsita (arr. by Sarah Hicks)
PIAZZOLLA Oblivion
HAYDN Introduction to Der Winter, from The Seasons
TCHAIKOVSKY January from The Seasons
LAM In Search of Seasons
"February" by Dar Williams

-- For a concert based mainly around Vivaldi's Four Seasons, we're actually spending very little time talking about the composer known as the Red Priest. But he was a fascinating man, born into poverty in Venice, trained in the priesthood, and celebrated for bringing a distinctly Italian sensibility to concert music. (His use of stringed instruments in particular revolutionized orchestral music.) There's an excellent condensed biography of Vivaldi at BaroqueMusic.org, as well as the story of how his music, lost to historians for centuries, came to be rediscovered and popularized in the mid-20th century.

-- Both Vivaldi and Raskatov included poems in their scores to describe the feelings intended to be imparted by each movement. Vivaldi's sonnets, which he wrote himself, evoke each season directly, while Raskatov's poems, which he takes from various Russian authors including Tolstoy and Pushkin, focus on specific characters or events for each month of the year. There's no online translation available of Raskatov's poems, but here's a translation of the Pushkin poem he uses for January, At The Fireside:

The night is shrouded in a twilit glow,
Silence reigns in the corner,
The fire is low in the grate,
The candle burns out.

To this, Raskatov adds, "It's terribly cold outside. An old clock strikes midnight." (Presumably, the hollow plunking sounds coming from the prepared piano in this movement of the piece represent the clanging of the clock.)

-- The March movement of the Raskatov contains a number of decidedly theatrical performance notes, including an indication that members of the violin section should "airbow," or pretend to play the notes on the page for several bars. This is the composer's way of bringing the idea of death and loss into the music. The poem he selected for this movement is about a lark, and Raskatov's notes call the setting "a sad thawing. An old lark, by some miracle still alive, welcomes the death of nature." As if to commemorate this passing, each violinist is asked to whisper the words "Requiem aeternam" (grant them rest) three times while holding the final note of the movement. So if you heard some whispering going on during the performance, that was it.

-- I first became aware of Raskatov's work when the violinist Gidon Kremer and his excellent ensemble, Kremerata Baltica, recorded The Seasons' Digest for a CD called The Russian Seasons, which is well worth a listen.

--Speaking of Gidon Kremer, he's an astoundingly great performer, and his version of Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, which was arranged specially for him (more on this below,) is truly awesome. Remarkably, the complete audio is available on YouTube, so here it is, season by season...









--The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was originally written by Piazzolla for his quintet - bandoneon, piano, violin, electric guitar and electric bass. In 1991, Brazilian arranger/composer/conductor Jaques Morelenbaum arranged the work for woodwind quintet, three celli and double bass for an album. Neither the original nor this initial transcription contain any overt references to Vivaldi's Seasons, although the title pays homage to the idea. It was in 1999 that Russian composer/arranger Leonid Desyatnikov, working with Gidon Kremer, reworked Piazzolla's originals into the set (featuring solo violin) from which we've extracted "Autumn". Desyatnikov creates virtuoso character pieces out of Piazzolla's originals, adding cadenzas for the violin and occasionally inserting an overt reference to Vivaldi; in "Autumn", for instance, towards the end of the of the cadenza there is a brief quote from Vivaldi's "Spring" - a clever play on the fact that when it's spring in Italy, it's autumn in Argentina!

-- Finally, Angel Lam, the young alum of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute whose In Search of Seasons we're featuring towards the end of our first half, has a fantastic website of her own, stuffed with audio clips, biographical info, and other assorted goodies. She's definitely an artist on the rise, and I'm guessing this week won't be the last time our orchestra puts her music on a program. Here's an interview she did while she was with us last fall...

Cutting Room Floor: More Debussy Than You Can Shake A Baton At

In past seasons, Sarah and I have written a series of Cutting Room Floor blog posts in the weeks leading up to each of our Inside the Classics shows, highlighting extra material that we didn't have time to include in the concert. This year, we're tweaking that idea a bit, and putting all the extra material in a single post. Mostly, what you'll find below are links to other sites with more in-depth information on some of the topics we'll be touching on all too briefly on stage.

When it comes to Debussy, the tidal wave of available biographical and musical information is almost overwhelming, and it took us a while to figure out just where we wanted to focus our ItC script. Eventually, we decided that we'd spend most of our time on Debussy's unique "layering" effects and how that distinctive style of composition contrasts with other composers, both in Debussy's time and other eras. But if you're listening closely, you'll hear references to a lot of other fascinating stuff about the man and his music. If any of those references made you want to learn more, click away below...

-- Debussy had a deep affection for Japanese landscape painting, and asked his publisher to print a copy of a painting of a huge wave by Katsushika Hokusai on the cover of the score to La Mer. Hokusai, for his part, had also taken much inspiration from the landscape painters of France and Holland. Learn more about this iconic artist here...

-- Speaking of art, Debussy's music is often called Impressionistic, after the visual art movement of the same name. But Debussy rejected the label, and Sarah and I think his music actually had much more in common with another style of art that gained currency in France in the 19th century - pointillism, which is primarily associated with its creator, Georges Seurat. Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grand Jatte, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, actually inspired another composer to compose an entire Broadway musical about him. Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George was a heartbreakingly beautiful (but fictional) account of the painter's life, and the lives of his 20th-century descendants.



-- Toru Takemitsu, a profoundly influential Japanese composer who died in 1996, had a deep fondness for Debussy's music, and La Mer in particular. During our concerts, we highlighted a brief section of Takemitsu's Quotations of Dream, which quotes Debussy's masterpiece directly. Bringing him into our evening was entirely Sarah's idea, because, as she wrote during the planning process, "Takemitsu's serious concert music is sadly underrepresented in the States. I think part of it might be the dreamlike quality and the transparency of textures and utterly Eastern instinct for time and space that is so far removed from our particular Western aesthetic. It's such a shame, as I know of few composers of the late 20th century who create such a distinctive sound world and speak with such an intensely individual musical voice."

-- More Takemitsu: The BBC did a short documentary on him a while back, which you can see here. Also, here's a section of another documentary on his work in film, containing a fascinating discussion of "ma", one of those nearly untranslatable words that captures the essence of his music. As it happens, Takemitsu is also the composer of one of my favorite works for solo viola, A Bird Came Down The Walk. And last but not least, Sarah herself was once featured as the narrator in a Takemitsu piece commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

-- From the "in case you were wondering" file: that overly cliched "Sea Symphony" that the orchestra played near the top of the show (the one that ended with a big foghorn blast from the tuba) was composed by Sarah. And if you thought you heard a familiar melodic snippet floating around in the violin area, you were right. It's from Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave.

-- Towards the end of the first half, I mentioned an ugly incident in Debussy's personal life which caused Parisian audiences to feel quite uncharitable towards him around the time that La Mer was premiered there in 1905. Debussy had always been a bit of a carouser - he was known to have had at least two simultaneous affairs in the 1890s, and one of his mistresses tried to shoot herself when she found out about the other one. Later, Debussy married a woman named Lilly Texier in 1899, but left her in 1904 for a married woman named Emma Bardac. Lilly, hugely distraught, did manage to shoot herself, though not fatally. Even before the advent of the celebrity-soaked culture we live in today, this was the kind of gossip that got whole cities buzzing, and Debussy was widely reviled in polite society for his actions.

-- Finally, because we always seem to get questions from people wondering where to find some work that we excerpted on the first half of these ItC programs, here's a complete playlist of everything we played, either in whole or in part, on this week's show:

DEBUSSY Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
DEBUSSY La Mer (The Sea)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherezade
HICKS A Sea Symphony of Sorts (not actually available outside of these concerts)
RAVEL Finale (The Enchanted Garden) from Ma Mere L'Oye (Mother Goose Suite)
DEBUSSY Claire de Lune
TAKEMITSU Quotations of Dream
STRAUSS Don Juan

Cutting Room Floor: Ask A 17-Year-Old Expert

Sorry for the light blogging this week. We do each have a good excuse - I'm getting ready for two big Mahler concerts on our subscription schedule this week and working overtime in an effort to get the logistics of our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season locked down and ready for our special guest's arrival next Monday evening.

Meanwhile, Sarah is frantically preparing scores for five (count 'em, five) different concerts that she's conducting this week and next. Specifically, she's leading one season preview concert, one full classical concert to be played 50 miles from Orchestra Hall, one set of Young People's Concerts, one pops show featuring two of the three Irish Tenors (one of whom made her drink a shot of whiskey onstage, mid-show, the last time he was here) and, of course, our ItC concerts. For these five shows, all of which contain different music, she has a grand total of four rehearsals with the orchestra. What was that about the glamorous life of a conductor?

Anyway, needless to say, we're very excited about Jay's impending arrival and the show we've built around his 5th Symphony. (I'm assuming you've all got your tickets already, right?) And while we'll be focusing our in-concert discussion with Mr. Greenberg primarily around the specific musical techniques he employs in his symphony, we know that all of you likely have many, many questions for him as well on a wider range of subjects. He'll be joining us for the post-concert Q&A, so you can ask him there in person, but if you can't make the show, or just prefer anonymity, go ahead and submit a question for Jay in the comments below this post, or through the Minnesota Orchestra's newly acquired Twitter account, and we'll do our best to get answers for you. If there's enough interest, we'll do an additional blog post after the concerts next week with Jay's answers...

Cutting Room Floor: Alternate Fingering

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

On the heels of our Mendelssohn concerts this week, we've got one last bit of Octet-based fun for your enjoyment. As those of you who were at the show will remember, the finale of the Octet for Strings begins with a ridiculously fast growling melody line in the second cello part, played in our performances by MN Orch principal cello Tony Ross. (Why was Tony playing second cello, you ask? Because he wanted to, and we don't argue with Big Tony.)

Anyway, Tony has played this piece a lot, and one of the frustrations cellists have with it is that, no matter how accurate and nimble your fingers are with that opening lick, it winds up just sounding like a bunch of ultra-low rumbling until the violas come in with the same line an octave higher. So Tony, ever the enterprising soul, has come up with a unique way of playing that opening growl that saves a great deal of wear and tear on the fingers...

(Apologies for the poor video quality. I don't have a real video camera...)

He actually threatened to play it that way at the show this week. And if he had, I'm betting only a few people would have been able to hear the difference. Looks totally ridiculous, though...

Cutting Room Floor: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

One of the themes we'll be turning to a lot in this week's Mendelssohn concerts is the composer's distinctive voice, his embrace of raw, unvarnished emotion, and how that approach stemmed from his teenage years, when he wrote some of his best-loved works. Illustrating this point for us will be the finale from Mendelssohn's incredible Octet for Strings, which we'll be tacking onto the end of the first half of the concert.

We won't actually be talking a lot about the Octet itself, though, which is why I wanted to get to it here. We could go on forever about the intricacy of the writing, about how impossibly hard it is from a compositional standpoint to get two complete string quartets playing together without cacophony being the result, or about the supreme confidence with which a 15-year-old Felix Mendelssohn obviously approached this task.

But what I want to talk about is that fantastic adolescent quality that pervades the Octet, the driving, pulsating energy that rushes up to you in the first moments of a performance and refuses to let go until you've been drained of all your stamina. Most composers aren't good at sustaining that level of intensity, and truth be told, most performers aren't, either. This is what led one teacher I used to study with to declare flatly that the Mendelssohn Octet should never be performed by anyone over the age of 18. It's a teenager's piece, written with a teenager's view of the world, and requiring a teenager's endless supply of energy to pull off, so why beat around the bush? Get a bunch of teenagers to play the damn thing.

We won't be taking that approach at our concerts, but there's something to the idea. At the summer camp that I wrote about last August, the Octet has become a signature piece, the first and last movements played more or less every year by groups of teens so thrilled to be part of the experience that you practically have to shield yourself during the performance to avoid getting soaked by their adrenaline.

This is at the camp's senior session, which comprises young musicians aged 14-18, many of whom are at just the right level to be attacking the Octet for the first time. At the junior session (ages 10-13) where I teach, we don't generally do the Octet. Trying to pick out eight kids that young who can handle the blazing speed, the non-stop passagework, and the various other pitfalls of the piece is just too risky, and we tend to stick more to Mozart, Haydn, and early Beethoven.

But back in 2003, we decided that we finally had a group that could handle the massive first movement of the piece, though we knew it would be a major stretch for all of them. I practically begged to coach the group, and embarked on one of the most exhausting yet exhilarating teaching experiences I will ever have. For six frantic days, I clapped rhythms, stomped beats, yelled entrance cues, begged for them to listen to each other, and spent many extra hours giving private lessons to a little blond girl from North Dakota who couldn't quite believe she'd been placed in the group.

In the end, the performance was exactly what we'd hoped for: the eight of them started off somewhat cautiously, like they weren't sure they could do this, even as they were plainly doing it. But somewhere about halfway through the performance, they hit their stride, and you could sense the crackle of electricity passing between them as they stampeded to the end.

The audio below is of that 2003 concert, starting roughly two-thirds of the way through the movement. It is not a professional-caliber performance - it's better. You can hear the group occasionally start to pull apart, then snap back together as collectively, all eight musicians recognize a milepost in their parts. At the 2:22 mark, you know for certain that you're listening to kids, as they hit the first of several climactic moments in the coda, and slam their bows into their strings like their lives depend on it. At 2:52, you hear the first cellist desperately attempt to calm himself after several minutes of frantic scrubbing for his last lyrical solo, which comes out of nowhere. And the moment the piece comes to its shattering conclusion, you'll hear the audience (made up of all the other kids at the camp, plus parents, faculty, and staff) explode like no crowd you've ever heard at a Juilliard Quartet concert. It brought tears to my eyes back in 2003. It still does.



The performers are violinists Oren Ungerleider, Nikki Leon, Rebecca Ryan, and Brian Ho; violists Nate Lesser and Geertrui Spaepen; and cellists Tavi Ungerleider and Chloe Perret. With the exception of Spaepen, who was a camp counselor, all were either 12 or 13 years old in August 2003.

Cutting Room Floor: Unauthorized Mendelssohn

Posts tagged as Cutting Room Floor are where we put all the material relevant to our Inside the Classics concerts that we know we won't have time to get to in the actual shows. Some of it is serious, some of it is silly, and some of it is just extra information about the featured composer or piece of music that we didn't know what else to do with. Click the tag to see all this extra source material in one place...

Composers who die young, like Mozart and Mendelssohn, almost always leave behind some unpublished work which trickles into the public realm over the years and decades following their passing. But in Mendelssohn's case, the amount of largely unknown material that he composed is truly staggering: musicologists estimate that as many as 270 pieces of music attributable to Felix remain unpublished. (And that number doesn't even take into account the works originally attributed to him that turned out to have been written by his sister Fanny.)

This year being the bicentenary of Mendelssohn's birth, there is understandably greater attention being focused on him than usual, and in New York this week, conductor Stephen Somary is presenting a concert featuring thirteen pieces of chamber music that Somary claims have never been heard in public before.

The reasons behind there being so much missing Mendelssohn are many. Some claim that Mendelssohn's international reputation was damaged when his music (along with that of all other Jewish composers) was banned by the Third Reich, removing him entirely from the repertoire in the heart of classical music's active European centers for years. Then there's the fact that Mendelssohn just wrote a huge amount of music - more than 700 works altogether - and it's only natural that some of it would never have gone to press.

But then there's the issue of what the composer himself wanted published, and that's what makes the reviving of long-lost manuscripts a controversial matter. It's very likely that at least some of Mendelssohn's unpublished music was stuff that he never wanted to see the light of day. The AP article about Somary's concert quotes conductor Leon Botstein as saying that, "If the composer leaves it unfinished or kept it out from publication, you have to respect the composer's wishes." Mendelssohn was known to be hugely critical of his own work, often revising and re-revising works for years after they had been premiered, so Botstein may have a point.

Still, the argument against Botstein's philosophy is that, if we were to go solely with a composer's recorded wishes in all matters, concert music would sound a lot different than it does in many cases. Beethoven's metronome markings, for instance, are notoriously erratic, and the vast majority of orchestras and conductors use them as a vague guide rather than as definitive tempo markings. Mahler famously removed the Blumine movement from his first symphony, but many orchestras today re-insert it. Sibelius wrote several different versions of his 5th symphony, all of which have been performed and recorded in recent years. And Mendelssohn himself was hugely unhappy with the Italian Symphony that we're featuring on next week's ItC concerts (despite nearly universal consensus that it was a masterpiece,) and tried for years to revise it. We make use of none of his revisions today, that I know of.

My own view tends to be that composers do not have an eternal say over the music they wrote. If a manuscript is available and hasn't been played yet, why not play it? It might turn out to be of little interest, in which case it can safely go back in the drawer. But on next week's concerts, we'll be featuring a song by Fanny Mendelssohn so seldom performed that our library had to order the music for it from some random person we found on the internet. It's stunningly beautiful, and I'd hate to think that it might have stayed buried because someone was worried about whether or not Fanny meant for us to hear it.

Cutting Room Floor: Felix's Dark Side

As has become the custom around here, we'll devote a few posts in the weeks leading up to our next Inside the Classics concerts to covering some of the things we won't have time to get to in the show. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries fitting this description.) In the case of Felix Mendelssohn, there's so much available material to choose from that it was initially tough even to know where to focus our energies. And just when I thought I was getting a handle on the man's biography, an article from one of Britain's leading dailies shattered a fair chunk of his squeaky-clean reputation only this past weekend.

At the heart of the posthumous bombshell dropped by London's Royal Academy of Music is an allegation that Mendelssohn may have written a letter to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, "declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused." Lind's husband destroyed the letter to preserve the reputation of his wife, but later swore out an affidavit testifying to the letter's existence, and placed it in the Royal Academy's Mendelssohn archive with orders that it remain sealed for a century. Now, after years of questions from scholars regarding the affidavit's contents, those in the know are speaking about it, just in time for the composer's bicentenary.

Now, the possible romantic link between a 19th-century composer and a woman not his wife might not seem like a very big deal, but in the case of this particular composer, it's causing quite a stir. As The Independent puts it:

"Until now, Mendelssohn has been deemed the happiest of composers... Born into a privileged family, he was a child prodigy, and went on to become a highly successful composer, conductor and educator. He was also gifted in painting and writing, enjoyed a happy marriage, and had five children. It has been thought that the only tragedies he experienced were the death of his sister Fanny in May 1847, followed by his own six months later, aged 38."

The circumstances of Mendelssohn's early death have always seemed a bit, well, storybook. Stroke risk ran in the family: a stroke killed Fanny, and doctors at the time pronounced Felix, too, a victim of "a series of strokes." But the suicide threat, coming shortly after Fanny's demise, would seem to at least suggest the possibility that Mendelssohn made good on his threat. It certainly makes clear that the composer's life was not as charmed as we've been led to believe.

We won't be getting much into Mendelssohn's personal life in our concerts, but in rethinking his reputation, The Independent touches on a theme that, by coincidence, Sarah and I had already decided to use as the centerpiece of our script...

"The nature of Mendelssohn's music could be a giveaway... Its emotional content is high-impact, driven, with deeply romantic sensibilities, but almost always within contained classical forms. But it packs such an intense punch in terms of nervous energy, something probably had to give."

Cutting Room Floor: Mozart On Wheels

On the heels of our Mozart extravaganza, here's one last piece of related brilliance for you to enjoy. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding it...

(That's Mozart's Symphony No. 40, by the way. Dude has excellent rhythm.)

Cutting Room Floor: Mozartian Myths

One of the things we're going to be getting into briefly in this week's concerts is the wealth of misinformation that's been floating around about our featured composer ever since a movie called Amadeus came out back in 1984. I was 8 years old at the time, and good little violin-playing nerd that I was, I went to see the film on its first weekend in the theaters. (It should also be noted that I nearly left in tears after the opening scene, in which a decrepit and evil-looking Antonio Salieri attempts a grisly suicide. I didn't know who Salieri was, I only knew that this was a helluva lot more intense than the next-most-intense movie I'd seen at that point, The Fox & The Hound.)

Like a lot of other moviegoers, I erroneously assumed that, in writing and adapting Amadeus, playwright Peter Shaffer's motivation had been to tell Mozart's fascinating life story to a modern audience. This was not remotely the case: Shaffer, who also wrote the disturbing psycho-drama Equus, in which a naked Harry Potter blinds six horses on Broadway, had seen in Mozart the bare bones of a fascinating character, and created a world around him that, while based on a thin layer of history, was mainly fictional. Mozart's excesses, while legendary, probably never approached the garish and off-putting level of Shaffer's character. And despite the guilt-racked protestations of Shaffer's Salieri, there's little to no evidence that the composer had a hand in the real Mozart's premature death at age 35.

While Salieri was certainly a professional rival of Mozart's, there's not much evidence that he even harbored much resentment toward the young phenom, which is only natural, since the two composers achieved roughly equal success in their lifetimes. (Salieri has since faded from historical view, but he was as much a presence in 18th-century musical society as was Mozart, and the free conservatory he founded in Vienna counted Beethoven and Schubert among its alumni.)

Interestingly, the idea that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's death (most scholars guess that rheumatic fever was the real culprit) did not begin with Shaffer, and like so many conspiracy theories, it includes a grain of true history. Rumors that Mozart had been poisoned actually began shortly after the wunderkind's death in 1791, sparked by witness accounts that the body was swollen and bloated. And only five years after Salieri's death in 1825, the Russian literary giant Alexander Pushkin published a longform poem accusing the Italian of having killed off his Austrian rival, and composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov later used the poem as the libretto for an opera. Shaffer was playing off Pushkin as well when he wrote Amadeus, although he never went as far with the murder plot as did the original.

Mozart has always seemed to be a figure ripe for the taking of dramatic license, and plenty of authors have used the outlines of his biography as fodder for their own melodramatic ideas. One such novel, Dark Melody, imagines a heroine who time-travels back to Mozart's final year of life, and has a whirlwind affair with the dying genius. Another recasts Mozart as the leader of a coven of vampires. And no less an august author than Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, among many, many others) penned a hilarious and touching tribute to Mozart, set in Heaven, in which such notables as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner argue about Wolfgang's life, legacy, and music.

With all this Mozartian fantasy floating around, it's no wonder that we sometimes want to believe more than was true of such an outsized personality. Truth be told, there were a couple of points in my preparations for this week's show when I wrote something I believed to be true into the script, only to find out later that it was part of the myth. If only truth really were stranger than fiction...

Cutting room floor: The Other Mozart

It's been a busy couple of days of script-polishing; writing our "Inside the Classics" shows is a multi-month process that begins with an initial brainstorming meeting, goes on to choosing musical examples, and proceeds with drafting, redrafting and redrafting again. With our upcoming Mozart show, there was just so much to say (it's pretty difficult to reduce the essence of Mozart down to 45 minutes!) that inevitably a few really important points had to be left out.

I have to confess that I have a soft spot for Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart (as well as Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann). Nannerl was the older Mozart sibling and one half of the brother-sister act that toured the capitals of Europe to tremendous acclaim. History has it that she was a brilliant pianist, with a talent "scarcely inferior to her brother's"; in fact, as late as 1765 (when she was 14), she had top billing in their concert advertisements.

But all good things must come to an end, or at least they do for a young woman in polite 18th century society, where it would be improper for a girl of marriageable age to be performing in public. In 1769, at the age of 18, Nannerl was forbidden from further concertizing and remained in Salzburg as brother Wolfgang continued his triumphal trajectory. Leopold, ever the controlling father, rejected suitor after suitor; Nannerl did not marry until 33 and settled in St. Gilgen with her husband, children and step-children. Years later, after her husband's death, she returned to Salzburg to live modestly as a piano teacher.

There's a quiet tragedy in Nannerl's story - but I always wonder if I see it as such through 21st century lenses. After all, in Nannerl's world, it was all that could be expected. It was probably extraordinary enough that she lived the childhood of a traveling musical prodigy (and that's certainly what she was). Who knows how her talents would have developed if she had been allowed to continue her musical career?

It all touches home for me. I've written several posts on my take on being a woman in my particular field; it's hard enough navigating the minefields of gender in the 21st century, much less the 18th. Change comes slowly; I'm reminded of the fact that women did not have the right to vote until 1920 - only a (long) lifetime ago.

And I think of the writings of Rousseau:

"The Education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young and to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable--these are the duties of women at all time and what they should be taught in their infancy."

And:

"Women, in general, possess no artistic sensibility...nor genius. They can acquire a knowledge...of anything through hard work. But the celestial fire that emblazens and ignites the soul, the inspiration that consumes and devours...,these sublime ecstasies that reside in the depths of the heart are always lacking in [women's artistic endeavors]."

Nannerl would have been fighting a losing battle.

Cutting Room Floor: From The Minds of Babes

As we draw within a few days of our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season, Sarah and I are in our usual mode of painstakingly cutting material from the show that we desperately want to get to, but simply won't have the time for. And as we did last season, we'll be using the blog as a way of giving you access to some of these extra bits and pieces. (Click the Cutting Room Floor tag to see all the entries that fall into this category.)

Later this weekend, Sarah will be writing about Mozart's largely ignored sister, who by all accounts was nearly as talented a musician as Wolfgang, but who was expected at a certain point to give up her music and settle down to raise a family. (All three of the "Young Wonders" we're featuring on this year's concerts actually had or have similarly talented siblings, so this is a subject we'll definitely be returning to throughout the year.)

But for today, I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about just what defines a prodigy in the neurobiological sense. What was so different about Mozart's 5-year-old brain as compared with yours or mine at that age, and how do the extraordinary minds among us develop differently than those with more average intellects? To that end, I've sought out an expert in this particular field to help us out - an expert, it should be said, to whom I have a deeply personal connection. Listen in below...

Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy

Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century.

The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient. (Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.) In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra will coincidentally be performing next season.) Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston.

If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the 1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements, some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy listening to.

The avant garde may have been fighting their way to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up. The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets, like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962 award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as "boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible, which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the '60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era.

But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium. There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally began paying attention to the important changes underway in our profession.

For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the '80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past. By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation.

The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003 for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.)

A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

Cutting Room Floor: Behind Every Great Composer...

The music world is full of behind-the-scenes figures without whom none of us on stage would have a prayer of making a living at what we do. These devoted music fans contribute the money that keeps us going, and some of them contribute countless hours of their time, as well. Some are board members of orchestras big and small; some devote their free time to helping keep organizations like Minnesota's Schubert Club aloft; and a select few go their own way, commissioning new works, finding and paying musicians to play them, and generally carving out a small niche in the music world that would otherwise not exist.

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was one of this last group. Born in Chicago in 1864, she would become one of the most influential figures in the then-developing American music scene, and while her name wouldn't ring a bell with the vast majority of musicians and music fans today, composers and musicians across the 20th century musical landscape (including Aaron Copland) owe her a debt of gratitude.

That such a prominent patron of the arts in the early 20th century could have been a woman might seem surprising, given the societal restrictions of the period. But a quick glance back through Western musical history reveals that an inordinately large number of patrons of the arts have been women, and this remains the case today. (Just off the top of my head, I could name nine or ten women who are major powers on the Minnesota Orchestra's board. I'm refraining because many of them are famously averse to public recognition for their charitable works, wanting only the music and an occasional conversation with Osmo in return for their tireless efforts.)

Sprague Coolidge's contributions to music were many, but she may be best remembered for having started the rural summer festival in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts that would later become known as Tanglewood. The Boston Symphony's idyllic summer home, to which listeners from around the world flock each July and August to hear grand symphonies while lying on a vast lawn sipping wine, began as an outgrowth of Sprague Coolidge's Berkshire Music Festival.

She was most passionate about chamber music, that connoisseur's genre so often ignored by the general public, and in her adult life, she commissioned some of the great works of the era: Bartok's 5th string quartet, Anton Webern's lone quartet, two quartets by Arnold Schoenberg, and (you knew this was coming) Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. (While our Inside the Classics concerts next week will be focusing on the orchestral version of Copland's masterpiece, remember that it began its life as a ballet score, to be played by just 13 musicians in an orchestra pit. At it's core, Appalachian Spring is a work of chamber music.)

Sprague Coolidge's role as a patron of the arts was a delicate one at times. In 1919, she famously held a competition for composers to create a new sonata for the viola, one of her favorite instruments (and mine, obviously.) Several prominent composers entered works, and eventually, the jury deadlocked between two distinctive pieces. One was by the eminent Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (his Grand Suite for viola,); the other was by Sprague Coolidge's neighbor, a British-born composer and violist named Rebecca Clarke. Aching for her friend, but mindful of the necessity of not allowing her competition to be sullied by accusations of favoritism, Sprague Coolidge broke the tie in Bloch's favor. (Both the Clarke sonata and the Bloch suite have since become standard repertoire for violists.)

Many of those responsible for music's creation and preservation toil in obscurity, and as I said, many of them wouldn't have it any other way. (To be honest, it's likely I'd never have heard of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge were it not for the fact that my connections to Western Massachusetts run particularly deep.) So it's somewhat apropos that you won't be hearing anything about the woman who commissioned Aaron Copland to write a ballet for Martha Graham in our concerts next week. Her name doesn't appear on the score, and even hardcore Copland fans frequently assume that it was Graham herself who paid for Appalachian Spring to be written.

But without her, 20th century music would have been quite different. She understood the importance of encouraging innovation, even if she didn't always like what she heard. Her perspective on the importance of new music is one that all of us in the music world would do well to remember: "My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document."

Cutting Room Floor: This Is A Dance, Isn't It?

As I mentioned in a previous post, finding enough material to fill the first halves of our Inside the Classics concerts is never a problem - the challenge comes in deciding what will have to be left out due to time constraints. In fact, after each of our first two concerts this season, Sarah and I have had several people ask, "Why didn't you talk more about...?", and the answer is always that we simply ran out of space in the show.

However, since we have no such limitations here on the blog, I thought I'd spend the next week or so offering up bits and pieces related to Appalachian Spring that we're not going to have time to explore in our upcoming concerts. These "cutting room floor" posts will have their own tag, so if you want to wait until after the concerts to read the extra material, you'll be able to click cutting room floor in our list of tags over in the right-hand column, and you'll get everything on one page.

The most glaring omission from the concerts is going to be any sort of prolonged focus on the fact that Appalachian Spring was originally composed not as a work of concert music, but as a ballet score written for the revolutionary 20th century choreographer Martha Graham and premiered in 1944. Those who attended our Firebird concerts last fall know that we spent a good chunk of time examining the interaction between Stravinsky's score and the dancing that it was written to accompany, but for various reasons, we decided not to do that for the Copland concerts. The major reason is simply that, while Stravinsky's ballets told a very definite story and managed to revolutionize the world of ballet as well as the world of music, Appalachian Spring is somewhat vague in its storyline and was more or less forgettable as a ballet. The piece took on a second life in the concert hall once Copland rewrote it for full orchestra in 1945, and it's that version that we'll be focusing on.

Still, anything choreographed by Martha Graham can't be dismissed entirely, and while the ballet version of Appalachian Spring is rarely performed these days, Graham's influence on both classical and modern dance is with us everywhere. Her signature style is unmistakable, whether accompanying Copland's wide-open scores or, as in this clip from "Night Journey," the sharp, angular sounds of William Schumann.



I find Graham's commentary on this clip fascinating. She talks about "the weight of the body against the floor" being emphasized, rather than minimized, as it would have been in an earlier era. Think about a 19th-century ballet like Swan Lake, in which all the dancers seem to be doing their best to convince you that they are, in fact, weightless, floating about the stage as easily as if they were on the moon. Weight is most decidedly the enemy in traditional ballet, and an almost ethereal style of movement is the goal. Graham turned that philosophy completely on its head, demanding that audiences embrace the raw humanity of her dancers, warts and all. People are heavy. Gravity weighs us down. Deal with it.

This, of course, is why Graham's choreography tends to make some viewers uncomfortable, just as attending a production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? makes us squirm in recognition of the everyday malevolence of people just like us. Rather than offer a vision of human movement that seems godlike and idealized, Graham gives us humanity as it is: endlessly complex, frequently awkward, but beautiful in a raw, earthy sort of way. To me, it's a fascinating contrast with Copland's idealized musical view of America, which we'll be getting into in depth at the Appalachian Spring concerts.

For more on Graham's technique (as well as a few musical clips from the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring,) check out this short clip from the Martha Graham Legacy Project. (They've disabled embedding on this clip, for some reason, so I can't include it on the blog.)