The enormous range of style and technique in Charles Ives’s music did not develop quickly or casually. Ives was a young organ prodigy in Danbury, Connecticut, when he began composing in familiar forms and genres: songs for the parlor, marches for his father’s band, pieces for organ and church choir. Meanwhile, his father, George Ives, encouraged an inquiring and adventurous spirit. At the same time as he was writing conventional music for immediate use, young Charlie was also experimenting with music in two keys, with free harmonies, with effects of space and juxtaposition.
In 1898, Ives graduated from Yale, having studied with the German-trained, conservative Horatio Parker. At the same time, Charlie played ragtime piano at parties and local theaters. After college, realizing that the kind of music he wanted to write would never earn him a living, he got a job in life insurance, where he made his fortune while composing on nights, weekends, and vacations.
Every kind of music excited Ives if it was earnest and authentic, whether a Brahms symphony, a sentimental hymn, a ragtime, or a town band. As a composer he never left anything behind, neither his conventional side nor his experimental, exploring ideas often decades ahead of their time—polytonality, polyrhythm, collage effects, complex rhythms, free harmony, and on and on—and never lost a sense of traditional genres centered on the music he grew up with in Danbury.
Composed around 1908, The Unanswered Question is perennially Ives’s most popular work and one of his most prophetic. It is a kind of musical collage in three layers. A distant background of strings represents “the Silence of the Druids.” Over it a trumpet repeatedly intones “the Perennial Question of Existence,” and a group of winds attempts to solve the question with increasing fury. Finally, the trumpet asks the question one last time, answered by an eloquent silence. For Ives, a question was better, more productive, than an answer. His life, his spirituality, and his music are an abiding illustration of that vision of endless questioning, endless exploration.
—Jan Swafford
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Unsuk Chin was taught to read music by her father. Her first instrument was the piano, and she aspired to be a concert pianist before focusing on composition at the National University of Seoul, where she studied with Sukhi Kang. Chin followed the example of Kang’s teacher, eminent Korean composer Isang Yun, in deciding to further her studies in Germany, where she worked with György Ligeti. Chin’s prominence among composers today is attested by commissions from ensembles that include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London and Seoul philharmonic orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Among other recognitions, she received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her Violin Concerto in 2004. Her opera Alice in Wonderland was first produced by the Bavarian State Opera in 2007.
Unsuk Chin’s works are characterized by colorful textures of highly active and virtuosic individual parts, unusual combinations of instruments, and extended playing techniques that create unique, pungent sounds. Her interest in the spectral harmonic makeup of sound and use of microtones can result in ethereal, otherworldly sonorities. These sounds are incorporated into a musical architecture with a sure sense of narrative and expressive effect. The composer’s remarks on her new piece appear below.
—Robert Kirzinger
With my Violin Concerto No. 2, titled Scherben der Stille (Shards of Silence), I decided to break my “principle” of writing only one concerto for an instrument. Given that there is such a great history with symphonic repertoire, it is always a challenge for a contemporary composer to try to add something to a genre that is new and in a way that is idiomatic for the ingenious 19th-century invention, the symphony orchestra. Besides, I want to write for many other instruments, ensembles, and setups, and every new project requires ample research time. To provide a slightly far-fetched comparison, Glenn Gould once remarked that he only records a piece once but decided to make an exception with the Goldberg Variations, his first and last recording; both are entirely different, but equally brilliant, which is fascinating.
I decided to break with this “principle” because of my encounter with Leonidas Kavakos’s unique musicianship and artistic personality, which resulted in new ideas for tackling this genre’s challenges. Therefore, this work is very different from my First Violin Concerto, which I composed 20 years ago. It also reflects the manifold new experiences I have had with this instrument since then, especially and most recently in Gran Cadenza, a violin duo commissioned by and written for Anne-Sophie Mutter. Nevertheless, it is very different from all the other music I have written for the violin, whether in soloistic function or as part of an ensemble.
My Violin Concerto No. 2 is a subjective portrait of and a dialogue with Leonidas Kavakos’s musicianship, which is burningly intense and, at the same time, impeccable and completely focused. The concerto is cast in one movement: The solo violin part forms the foundation of the whole work, and the soloist triggers all of the orchestra’s actions and impulses. The work also features a composed solo cadenza that is very virtuosic. The music is rich in contrast: The musical fabric emerges from utter silence but—hence the title of the work—is juxtaposed seamlessly with rough edges, tonal shards, and incisive outbursts from which new shapes appear.
A small motivic cell of five musical notes (or, to be more precise, two notes embellished by three natural harmonics) soon turns into a line or a phrase, and forms the creative nucleus of this piece; it appears all over, in a variety of shapes and characters. The orchestra joins the soloist inconspicuously, starting from the almost imperceptible rustle of the beginning. Together with the soloist’s actions, it results in delicate, iridescent soundscapes, the music moving between emergence and decay. These minimal moves already catalyze many of the upcoming developments. But soon, the orchestra appears with more angular textures, and the motivic proto-cell turns into a manifold of shapes—occasionally resembling a delicate song, then morphing into ritual-like repetitive pulsations and, toward the end of the piece, into “beats” that have a scream-like character. These changes sometimes happen with more fluent transitions and, more often, unexpected turns and even harsh contrasts.
Structurally speaking, the Violin Concerto No. 2 consists of different sections that merge seamlessly: The grand form of the work resembles a labyrinth.
© 2022 Unsuk Chin
On December 9, 1832—two years after its first performance, and as vividly recounted in his own Memoirs—Hector Berlioz won the heart of Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had never met, with a concert that included the Symphonie fantastique, for which she had unknowingly served as inspiration when the composer fell hopelessly in love with her some years before. The two met the next day and were married on the following October 4. (The unfortunate but true conclusion to this seemingly happy tale is that the two were formally separated in 1844.)
Berlioz had seen Smithson for the first time in September 1827 when she played Ophelia in Hamlet with an English troupe visiting Paris. By the time she left Paris in 1829, Berlioz had made himself known to her through letters, but they did not meet. Gossip (later discredited) linking Harriet romantically with her manager impelled him to conceive a narrative program for a new work that ended with the transformation of her previously unsullied image into a participant in the infernal witches’ Sabbath in the last movement of the Symphonie fantastique.
Though Berlioz ultimately came to feel that the titles of the five individual movements—I. Reveries, Passions; II. A Ball; III. Scene in the Country; IV. March to the Scaffold; V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath—spoke for themselves, his own detailed programmatic description was distributed to the audience at the first performance. It is worth quoting from the opening paragraph, with its reference to the symphony’s principal musical idea:
A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.
The idée fixe, as much a psychological fixation as a musical one, is introduced in the violins and flute at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section. Its appearance “everywhere” in the course of the symphony includes a ball in the midst of a brilliant party; a quiet summer evening in the country (where it appears against a background texture of agitated strings, leading to a dramatic outburst before the restoration of calm); in the artist’s last thoughts before he is executed, in a dream, for the murder of his beloved (at the end of the March to the Scaffold); and during his posthumous participation in a wild witches’ Sabbath at which the melody representing his beloved appears, grotesquely transformed, to join a “devilish orgy” whose diabolically frenzied climax combines the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead with the witches’ round dance.
Today, more than 190 years after its first performance, it is easy to forget that when the Symphonie fantastique was new, Beethoven’s symphonies had just recently reached France, Beethoven having died only in 1827. With its much more specific programmatic intent, Berlioz’s work is already a far cry even from Beethoven’s own “Pastoral” Symphony of 1808. David Cairns has written that “Berlioz in the ‘Fantastic’ symphony was speaking a new language: not only a new language of orchestral sound ... but also a new language of feeling.”
Countless aspects of this score reflect Berlioz’s individual musical style, among them his rhythmically flexible, characteristically long-spun melodies, of which the idée fixe is a prime example; the quick juxtaposition of contrasting harmonies, as in the rapid-fire chords at the end of the March; the telling and often novel use of particular instruments, whether the harps at the Ball, the unaccompanied English horn in dialogue with the offstage oboe at the start of the Scene in the Country, or the quick tapping of bows on strings to suggest the dancing skeletons of the Witches’ Sabbath; and his precise concern with dynamic markings. And all of this becomes even more striking when one considers that the Symphonie fantastique is the composer’s earliest big orchestral work, composed when he was not yet 30, and that the great, mature works—Roméo et Juliette, La damnation de Faust, the operas Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict among them—would follow only years and decades later.
—Marc Mandel
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