Program Notes

Charles Shadle (b. 1960)
Three Songs of Innocence and a Song of Experience (1999)

In the autumn of 1999 Anand Sarwate, a student who was a mainstay in both the Theater and Music sections at MIT asked me to compose some new madrigal-style pieces for the MIT Chamber Music Society. Like the Renaissance madrigal, they were to be short, a cappella pieces in which vivid text painting and imitative counterpoint were featured. I wrote four short settings of familiar poems by William Blake (1757-1827), for six solo voices. Two of the songs, "Spring" and "The Shepherd" were performed by Anand's group of singers under the extraordinary guidance of John Harbison. While conceived for solo voices, these works are also well suited to choral performance by lithe and highly skilled singers. Tonight's performance is the first of the complete work in its choral version.

The great and endlessly inventive draftsman and poet William Blake presented his "Songs of Innocence and Experience" to the world in the guise of children's literature. However, the poems are usually regarded as highly sophisticated explorations of the growth of consciousness. Blake seems to suggest that the loss of innocence is of fundamental importance to the psychic and spiritual maturation of the individual. Traditional images of purity, often with religious overtones, are revealed as laden with erotically charged meaning. In the poems of the first three of my songs this is implicit; in the final one it is extremely explicit.

The first song, "Spring," follows the stanza structure of the poem closely. Stanzas one, two and four employ similar music, suggesting the piping of the flute and the merry chatter of the birds, while the more sustained third verse reflects the curiously sensual description of the lamb.. "The Shepherd" evokes the eighteenth-century Pifa, a gentle pastoral dance in 6/8 meter. Here the drone of the bagpipes is omnipresent, and the use of Mixolydian mode and the "scotch snap" further suggest a rural atmosphere. In "The Blossom" a guileless text painting is again paramount, though darker images of longing also come to the fore. The very brief final song "The Sick Rose" is strikingly different from its companions. The harmony is extreme---barely tonal. A chromatic wedge figure pervades this movement, and suggests both the unfolding of the rose, and its "deflowering" by the worm. The piece concludes ambiguously with bare octaves. Does the experience of the rose represent loss or growth?

--Charles Shadle

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)
The Ballads of the Four Seasons (1923)

The British composer Arthur Bliss was born in 1891 and was educated at Rugby and Pembroke College in Cambridge. He also studied at the Royal College of Music from 1913 to 1914. During World War I, he served in the Royal Rusiliers and the Granadier Guards. In 1919, though, he won recognition as an able composer, showing influence by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Les Six. He wrote for theatre productions early, later writing ballets, film scores, and one full-length opera. He also experimented with instrumental-vocal music, using the voice to sing wordless syllables as if another instrument. Influenced by both World Wars, he also wrote tributes like his choral symphony, Morning Symphony.

Bliss sets English translations of classic Chinese poetry by Li Po in "The Ballads of the Four Seasons." The poem loosely tells a tale of Lo-foh, a heroine from a popular ballad in Chinese tradition. In the Spring and the Summer, she plucks mulberry leaves and gathers lotus lilies. But in the Autumn, she waits as her beloved fights in the battles against a barbarian foe. "From ten thousand houses comes the sound of cloth-pounding," refers to the Chinese laundering process that produced a metallic sound like swords clashing. In the Winter, our heroine sews a soldier's jacket to be taken to her beloved on the battlefield.

--Stuart Stanton

William Cutter (b. 1956)
Then movement comes in sound (1987)

Then movement comes in sound was written while I was a graduate student in composition at Boston University's School for the Arts. I had been interested in exploring new methods of text painting through the use of unusual doublings, spacings of harmonies, and in general, effects that were normally thought of in terms of instrumental orchestration. I found the perfect opportunity to employ some of these ideas in texts by Hildegard Jone and Stefan Georg, which I found incredibly rich in imagery and in English translations that I felt were beautiful and true to the original German.

The work begins with the "sound" visually and aurally traveling across the chorus from low to high (bass to soprano) with each of the voice parts dovetailing one another creating one melodic line stretching over three octaves. The flute joins in as the nightingale which is rather abruptly transformed into violent figurations depicting a sudden storm, albeit metaphorical. The middle section of the work "dissolves in peace" in a bittersweet chorale-like setting of the heartbreaking text of Stefan Georg.

--William Cutter

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Songs of Travel (1901-1904)

Along with Sir Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams was one of the composers most responsible for the reemergence of British classical music in the twentieth century. A notable contributor in virtually every field of composition, his Songs of Travel, written between 1901 and 1904, represent his first major foray into song-writing. Drawn from a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson poems of the same name, the cycle offers a rather different take on the "wayfarer cycle." A world-weary yet resolute individual, Stevenson's traveler shows neither the naivety of Schubert's miller in Die Schöne Müllerin nor the destructive impulses of the heroes of Schubert's Winterreise and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

The three songs drawn from this cycle form the core of the narrative. "The Vagabond" introduces the traveler, heavy chords in the piano depicting a rough journey through the English countryside. "Youth and Love" shows a determined youth leaving his beloved as he ventures into the world; particularly notable is the exotic accompaniment of the second stanza, revealing bird songs, waterfalls, and trumpet fanfares. Finally, "Bright is the ring of words" offers the true climax of the piece: a reminder that while all wanderers (and artists) must eventually die, the beauty of their work shall remain as a testament to those who remain.

--Ahmed Ismail

Randall Thompson (1899-1984)
Frostiana (1958)

Commissioned in 1958 for the two-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Frostiana, a setting of seven poems by Robert Frost, was composed between June 15 and July 7, 1959 in Gstaad, Switzerland. This lovely set of choral pieces with piano accompaniment demonstrates Thompson's lyrical and simple style with a kind of New England directness and charm. The work was first performed as part of the Bicentennial Commemoration at an Inter-Faith Convocation in the Amherst Regional High School on October 18, 1959. The composer conducted and the poet was present.

Randall Thompson was educated at Harvard and counted among his teachers Archibald T. Davidson and Ernest Bloch. He twice won a Guggenheim Fellowship and held a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. His early works, including several songs, varied considerably in style. But in 1922 he began studies at the American Academy where, inspired by the masters of the Renaissance, he developed the musical style which led him to the forefront of American choral composers. During his career he intermingled both teaching and composing, having been director of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music as well as a professor at his alma mater, Harvard University. Though he composed symphonies, songs, operas and instrumental works, he is best known for his choral compositions.

--William Cutter

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Neue Liebesliederwalzen, Op. 65

Johannes Brahms was well known for his works for both large and small forces. While his piano concertos rival Beethoven's, Tchaikovsky's, and Rachmaninov's for popularity, his contributions to the realm of song were no less than those of Beethoven and Schubert. However, unlike all of the aforementioned composers, his reputation is also based on his numerous choral works, in particular 1868's Ein Deutsches Requiem. Just following that work, Brahms had what some have called his "year of song," much like Schumann in 1840: of the next twenty works he published after the Requiem, all but four were written for voices--the exceptions being three string quartets and the Variations on a theme of Haydn.

Brahms wrote the Neue Liebesliederwalzen ("New Love-song Waltzes") between 1869 and 1874. The texts are from an eclectic collection of love-poems from many lands, including Turkey, Poland, Latvia, and Sicily, translated into German by Georg Friedrich Daumer. Like the Liebeslieder songs of 1868, the Neue Liebeslieder are written for a vocal quartet and four-hand piano duo. Unlike the earlier piece, however, the ensemble numbers are separated by two groups of songs for the individual members of the quartet. And while the work is intended for six performers, it loses little when performed by soloists and chorus, so long as it is performed in the spirit of chamber music. [To that end, we are performing the work without a conductor.]

Unlike the ensemble numbers, the solo songs depict a dizzying array of characters--bass as enraptured paramour, alto as jilted lover, tenor as Lothario, and soprano as a woman repeatedly unlucky in love. In addition, the piano accompaniment of the Neue Liebeslieder are just as important as the vocal lines to the overall fabric of the piece. The two pianists, playing a single piano with four hands must work as if they were a single pianist, even when the two parts seem to be in direct opposition to one another. Fortunately, throughout most of the work, each of the pianists play one "hand"; only in No. 13, a tender duet for soprano and alto voices, do the two pianists have to "cross over."

The seven quartets are naturally the main attraction of the work. Rather than being constrained by the limited resources, we find an amazing example of the economy of small means. The score brims with brilliant choral effects: the craggy shores of the first song, depicted by harsh cries of "zertrümmert" (wrecked); octave leaps on "Well auf Well" representing "wave upon wave" in No. 7; the half-sung, half-whispered sighs "Weiche Gräser im Revier" of No. 8, over which the sopranos and tenors have a soaring line; and the hushed references to the gloomy shade of the dark forest in No. 12, to name but a few.

Brahms ends the cycle "Zum Schluß" ("In conclusion"), turning his attentions away from the lovers and addressing himself to the Muses which have inspired countless artists, musicians, and poets. The changes run much deeper, though, than just the "audience": the meter broadens from the standard 3/4 to a more expansive 9/8, and the vocal writing becomes truly contrapuntal for the only time in the cycle, climaxing in an a cappella transition from C major to F major. Perhaps the most significant change is the poet: for this last song, Brahms turns to the words of Goethe. Of Brahms's hundreds of vocal works, only a handful set texts by the doyen of German poetry--indeed, Brahms was always reluctant to set the great poet's works, feeling there was usually nothing he could add! However, those rare cases where he felt differently produced some of his greatest work, notably the Alto Rhapsody. Here, just as in the Rhapsody, words and music unite to offer us the hope of consolation and peace which the despairing lovers Daumer depicts will never achieve.

--Ahmed Ismail

Text and Translations

Three Songs of Experience and a Song of Innocence

The Ballads of the Four Seasons

Then movement comes in sound

Songs of Travel

Neue Liebesliederwalzen, Op. 65 (New Love-Song Waltzes)