Opera has occupied the center of Matthew Aucoin’s universe since he was in grade school. By the age of 11, he could play the entirety of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the piano from memory. It was perhaps no surprise, then, that he would become one of the youngest composers ever to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.
Aucoin’s Eurydice, a Met co-commission with Los Angeles Opera, received its premiere in Los Angeles in February 2020, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by the composer. The Met premiere on November 23, 2021, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, was greeted with widespread acclaim. On December 4, the production was seen in cinemas worldwide on the Met’s Live in HD series.
Based on the 2003 play by Sarah Ruhl, who wrote the libretto, Eurydice tells Orpheus’s tale from the standpoint of Eurydice, who in most versions plays an ancillary role to the lyre-strumming hero. Musical settings of this legend, in which Orpheus travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife, are as old as opera itself: Jacopo Peri’s 1600 Euridice is the oldest opera for which we possess the entire score. Notable among the dozens of others are those by Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, and, more recently, Philip Glass and Jonathan Dove.
Aucoin came to international attention with his 2015 opera Crossing, based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries, which The New York Times called “a taut, teeming, and inspired work.” His compositions (which also include symphonic, choral, and chamber music) have been praised for a challenging yet accessible musical language, and for vocal writing that is remarkably wedded to the contours of the text.
Born and raised in the Boston suburbs, Aucoin distinguished himself early on as a sort of wunderkind, both in music and in poetry. (His mother is a technical writer, his father the theater critic for The Boston Globe.) He majored in English at Harvard College, where Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jorie Graham was a mentor.
At The Juilliard School he studied composition with Robert Beaser and earned a graduate diploma. When he auditioned for the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, the committee instead invited him to join the Met staff immediately: He was an assistant conductor from 2012 to 2014.
Aucoin was a Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he worked with Riccardo Muti. He has had works commissioned and performed by Yo-Yo Ma, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich, the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Brentano String Quartet, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chanticleer, and by singers such as Paul Appleby, Julia Bullock, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and J’Nai Bridges.
He was artist-in-residence at Los Angeles Opera and composer-in-residence at the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2018, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently co-artistic director of the American Modern Opera Company, which Aucoin calls “an opera company, a new-music ensemble, a rock band, and a touring theater troupe, rolled into one.”
Aucoin’s music juxtaposes atonality and chromatic harmonies with a fundamentally tonal language, and it embraces a broad range of popular idioms. Zachary Woolfe’s New York Times review of Eurydice describes the orchestral score as “massive and assertive, but agile; it keeps moving, endlessly eclectic, but unified by a muscular grip on the pace.”
The composer described his music as “explosively tonal” in a 2018 NPR interview. “My rhythmic language owes a lot to my background in jazz and playing in a rock band when I was in high school. There’s a very American sense of groove or pulse … but the harmonic language comes from somewhere else; it comes from the past century of classical music, everything from the Second Viennese School to John Adams.”
The composer has written the following about the Suite:
The Eurydice Suite is an orchestral condensation of my opera Eurydice, which is based on Sarah Ruhl’s surreal and heartbreaking play. Like the opera, the Suite begins with an unsettling sound: the metallic “ping” of oblivion that announces the passage of the newly dead through the river of forgetfulness. And like the opera, the Suite toggles between the world of the living and the subterranean realm of the dead.
The Suite’s first movement is a tour of the underworld: its watery percussion sounds, its “strange high-pitched noises, like a tea kettle always boiling over.” Near the end of the movement, we hear a strange sound from the contemporary world: the keening wail of a New York subway train pulling out of a station. Eurydice, newly arrived in death, hallucinates that she is alone on some unknown train platform, waiting for someone—she can’t quite remember who—to meet her.
The second movement pays a visit to the world above, where Orpheus (in the guise of a solo clarinet) mourns luxuriantly. He drops a letter into the earth, hoping it will reach the underworld; and as his music fades away, we return down below, where Eurydice’s father patiently builds her a room out of string. In the third movement, the string section embodies the slow weaving of that delicate room.
The fourth movement is a phantasmagorical montage of the opera’s final act: the disastrous walk toward the world above, and the many missed connections that lead to every character being dipped once again in the river of forgetfulness.
—Paul J. Horsley
Once shunned by some for his full-bodied Romanticism, Samuel Barber became recognized as one of our nation’s leading composers. His “rehabilitation” is a relatively recent phenomenon and was partly an outgrowth of the rise of what was called the “new Romanticism” during the 1980s. Since then, Americans have embraced the music of this native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, with unprecedented vigor.
The Barber of the 1940s was a thoughtful fellow, more pensive than the brash youth who had burst onto the American scene in the early 1930s with the School for Scandal Overture and the Music for a Scene from Shelley. Inundated with commissions, during the years after World War II he composed a whole series of durable masterworks, including the Cello Concerto, the ballet Medea, the Hermit Songs for voice and piano, the Prayers of Kierkegaard, the Piano Sonata, and Knoxville: Summer of 1915. With these pieces, he not only asserted his central position in American music, but he also affirmed the essential Romanticism of much of the nation’s existing music—at a time when postwar refugees from Europe were seriously challenging this Romantic strain with complex styles of serialism, atonality, and aleatory.
Based on a passage from James Agee’s prose poem of the same title, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a piece of pure nostalgia. It embodies the rough-edged American sentimentalism of the 1940s, which also found expression in the late novels of Thomas Wolfe, for instance, or the films of Frank Capra, or the photography of Robert Frank. When Barber first encountered Agee’s poem in 1945, it sounded immediately familiar to him. “The text moved me very much,” he wrote to his uncle. “This was actually prose, but I put it into lines to make the rhythmic pattern clear. It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away, and all of you are in it!” At the time, Barber was staying with his family at Mount Kisco, New York, where both his father and his Aunt Louise were gravely ill. Doubtless his proximity to his family at the time made Agee’s text all the more poignant. “The summer evening he describes ... reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home. I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both five. You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.”
Barber says he composed the piece in a few days, completely caught up in the similarities between his childhood and Agee’s. The work was finished in April 1947 and received its premiere on April 9 of the following year, with soprano Eleanor Steber and Serge Koussevitzky leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber, committed to other concerts in Italy, was unable to attend the performance, which was at best an equivocal success. Later Barber revised the work slightly, trimming some lines of text and reducing the orchestral forces.
The work is in three large sections, though the large central part divides itself further into three; these five main sections are reflections of the varying moods of the text. Agee’s text is written as continuous prose, but Barber divided it into line divisions, partly to facilitate his musical setting—but also, perhaps, to underscore the work’s essential identity as blank verse.
—Paul J. Horsley
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Valerie Coleman has always felt interconnected with boxer Muhammed Ali, who hailed from the same West End inner-city neighborhood. She found her career in music at an early age, pretending backyard sticks were flutes and composing three full-length symphonies by age 14. In high school, she studied flute and composition at Tanglewood, subsequently earning a double Bachelor of Arts degree in composition/theory and flute performance from Boston University and a master’s degree in flute performance from the Mannes School of Music. She is currently a member of the composition and flute faculty at Mannes; prior to this appointment, she served on the faculty at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami as assistant professor of performance, chamber music, and entrepreneurship. This season, Coleman is leading a yearlong residency at The Juilliard School in its Music Advancement Program through the American Composers Forum, and she has been named to the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater New Works dual commissioning program.
As a solo flutist, Coleman has performed with major symphonies and in concert halls nationwide. In 1996, she founded the quintet Imani Winds, championing composers “underrepresented from the non-European side of contemporary music” and providing a performance forum for Black musicians that approaches classical music from similar backgrounds. Under her leadership, Imani Winds became one of the country’s most successful chamber ensembles and enabled Coleman to contribute new works to the wind chamber music repertory. In 2009, she established the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, an intensive summer program for instrumentalists and composers. More recently, she co-founded and performs as flutist with the performer-composer trio Umama Womama. Coleman also adjudicates for numerous competitions, including the National Flute Association’s High School Artist Competition, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award, and the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
In 2002, Chamber Music America selected Umoja—whose full orchestral version The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned and premiered in September 2019—as one of its “Top 101 Great American Works,” and in 2005 Coleman was nominated with Imani Winds for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album. In 2017, she was named one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” by The Washington Post, and last year, American Public Media’s popular classical radio program Performance Today named her the 2020 Classical Woman of the Year, an award given to a “woman who has made a significant contribution to classical music as a performer, composer, conductor, music teacher, or supporter.”
Coleman writes that “hybridity is often overlooked and undervalued by institutions, but is one of the most treasured, career-sustaining traits an artist enjoys in the real world, especially in the field of chamber music.” She claims that a favorite aspect of residencies and touring is meeting hybrid creator-performers and playing works they have written. Having balanced a many-sided career herself, she finds that “hybrid artists continually challenge the boundaries and stigmas put in place that say a person cannot possibly show excellence or dedication in both areas.” As a composer, Coleman continues to stretch these boundaries by encouraging initiatives of diversity and collaborating in the performance arena to amplify historically underrepresented musical voices. Her own musical inspiration is derived from influences that range from Mozart concertos to jazz improvisations to contemporary poetry, and her compositional style often draws from the works of historical figures and poets, including the writings of Robert F. Kennedy, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, and Cesar Chavez.
“This Is Not a Small Voice” sets a poem of the same name by Philadelphia poet Sonia Sanchez, excerpted from her 1995 book Wounded in the House of a Friend. Born in 1934, Sanchez is an award-winning writer and professor who has authored more than a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, essays, plays, and children’s books. In “This Is Not a Small Voice,” the speaker asserts that the collective voice heard rising up out of our cities is not a soft, quiet sound, but instead is loud and commanding, establishing a foundation of collaboration, solidarity, and support. The poem celebrates the strength of Black individuals and communities, whose collective “voice” sweeps like a “river,” spreading love, healing, and creative “Genius” through every corner of our cities. The powerful words of Sanchez, combined with Coleman’s inventive compositional style, achieve a compelling musical blend for an enduring work that reflects current times.
—Nancy Plum
Composers require advocacy. Mozart needed Haydn to promote his string quartets. Mendelssohn revived Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and Leonard Bernstein breathed new life into Mahler’s symphonies. Sometimes history’s vagaries forge new paths for an artist’s legacy, such as the discovery of 10 waterlogged master tapes of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ live concerts. The legacy of Florence Price, a composer of great talent, finds itself at a crossroads in 2022 with the nation’s spotlight on the injustices perpetrated on Blacks and the 2009 discovery of a treasure trove of her works at her summer home in St. Anne, Illinois—where scores were strewn on the floor after an apparent robbery. The home’s new owners contacted the University of Arkansas and donated the scores to Price’s archive. An important step in the long march for social justice is to perform, record, teach, conduct, research, and respect the life and work of Florence Price.
Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887. Her father was a dentist and her mother a music teacher, and Price attended the same elementary school as composer William Grant Still, although he was two years younger. She demonstrated precocity for school and music, graduating from high school as valedictorian at age 14. Her parents sent her to the New England Conservatory of Music to pursue organ and piano, and she studied composition with George Chadwick, who had taken an interest in spirituals, including them in his own music. Upon graduation, Price moved home to Arkansas for a brief time before taking a job at what is now Clark Atlanta University as head of the music department. She returned to Little Rock, where racial injustice made it impossible for her to thrive. She left for Chicago in 1927 and became part of a community of exceptional musicians and intellectuals known as the Black Chicago Renaissance.
In 1932, the Chicago Defender announced a musical contest, “an event of paramount importance open to all musical composers of the Race,” cosponsored by NANM (National Association of Negro Musicians) and the Wanamaker’s department store. Margaret Bonds, a student and composer friend of Price’s, recalled, “We all prayed, and Florence won $500 for a symphony [her First Symphony]. Our prayers were powerful because Florence also won $250 for a piano sonata, and I won $250 for an art song.” It was this symphony that Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, would include in a 1933 concert, enshrining Price’s Symphony No. 1 as the first composition by a Black woman to be played by a major orchestra. The concert was part of the Chicago World’s Fair, whose theme was “A Century of Progress.” Contemporary writings about the event emphasized the symphony as a symbol of uplift and community.
Price composed more than 300 pieces, 40 of which are large-scale works, 100 or so songs, chamber music, and settings of spirituals for piano and voice. Marian Anderson sang Price’s arrangement of “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord” to conclude her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial before 75,000 people. Together, Price and Anderson advocated for equality through music’s unstoppable pulse.
Price’s First Symphony is a panoply of gorgeous instrumental timbres expertly displayed within a traditional four-movement symphonic frame. The first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, is in sonata form. It opens with a syncopated bassoon solo that recalls Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. Instruments swell and billow. A long contrasting middle section captures tranquility, as if Price is musically painting the great American pastime: sitting on the porch. Peace is disturbed with a return of the first theme and brass and percussive blasts end the movement. The second movement is marked Largo, maestoso and commences with a four-part brass hymn texture, which infuses the symphony with transcendence. The movement is optimistic and full of space, much like music by Copland, and like Debussy’s tone poems it rarely reaches an overwhelming forte, reverent in its subtle changes in dynamics.
Leading us out of church and into a party, the third movement, Juba Dance: Allegro, is in duple meter (4/8) with a catchy syncopated melody. Price intended that each of her symphonies have a juba, or stomping, dance, which some scholars see as the precursor to tap dancing. She demonstrates her gift for catchy melodies and introduces small and large African drums and a wind whistle into the work. The last movement, Finale: Presto, is a Haydnesque rondo in 6/8. The dance continues faster, as strings take over the orchestration, propelling the pleasing movement forward. Trumpets and flutes take on the rondo theme, and the symphony ends triumphantly with a triple fff.
—Aaron Beck
Program notes © 2022. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, Paul J. Horsley, Nancy Plum, and/or Aaron Beck.