In a career that spans more than six decades, Meredith Monk’s name has been synonymous with innovative vocal techniques and pathbreaking interdisciplinary ventures in music, dance, theater, and film. “Early Morning Melody” was featured in her 1989 film Book of Days, which the composer describes as “a poetic incantation of that which connects us.” The incantatory melody is suggestive of awakening, an aural stretching of muscles.
Philip Glass—along with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich-—is a founding father of minimalism, defined as a style of music “characterized by an intentionally simplified rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic vocabulary.” Repetition—of harmonies, melodies, and rhythmic patterns—is the thread that runs through nearly all Glass’s compositions, from chamber music and symphonies to the operas Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha. The Melodies for Saxophone were written as incidental music for a dramatization of Jean Genet’s novel Prisoner of Love. In No. 10, a simple, languorous tune is interwoven with contrasting episodes.
Luke Howard’s dreamily impressionistic soundscape crosses Glass’s transparent minimalism with the mellow, improvisatory flow of smooth jazz. The saxophone’s long-breathed cantilena, enmeshed in a skein of gently rippling figurations, might evoke sunbeams filtered through a forest canopy. Fortified by a swell of sustained strings, the music becomes more active, both rhythmically and harmonically, before fading away. Howard, an Australian composer and pianist, straddles the worlds of classical music and jazz, and is known for his work with contemporary choreographers and dance companies.
Francis Poulenc’s music is a quirky blend of graceful lyricism and piquant, often acerbic harmonies. Early in his career he allied himself with the circle of irreverently anti-Romantic composers known as “Les Six,” but later he reconnected with the Catholic faith of his childhood. In works like Litanies to the Black Virgin and Dialogues of the Carmelites, his music took on a more overtly religious tone, prompting one critic to describe him as part monk and part rascal. The Oboe Sonata, written in 1962, was Poulenc’s swan song. In its economy of means and expression, the music conveys an unmistakable sense of summing up, not only of Poulenc’s own work but of an entire musical tradition. The capsule description he gave to baritone Pierre Bernac provides insight into his frame of mind: “The first movement will be elegiac, the second scherzando, and the last a kind of liturgical chant.” If the luminous outer movements give the sonata its predominantly meditative tone, the driving, percussive rhythms of the central Scherzo reveal an affinity with Prokofiev, to whom the work is dedicated. The oboe’s swooping arpeggios recall a similar passage in the latter’s Romeo and Juliet. In ending on a stubbornly unresolved dissonance, the final Déploration (a traditional musical lament) serves as a fitting close to Poulenc’s career as musical boulevardier par excellence.
The late English jazz saxophonist Barbara Thompson made a seismic impact on a generation of performers and composers, Jess Gillam among them. “Barbara has been a huge influence on me since I was very young,” Gillam said in a recent interview. “There weren’t many female role models as saxophone players, and she was a pioneer.” The Unseen Way takes its title from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore: “Where roads are made, I lose my way ... And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.” Gillam observes that Thompson’s music “is completely notated, but it sounds spontaneous, and audiences often think it’s improvised.”
An 18th-century music writer quoted Handel as saying that Georg Philipp Telemann “could write a church piece of eight parts with the same expedition as another would write a letter.” Telemann’s music is often undervalued, in part because he was so facile and prolific, but contemporaries rated him on a par with Handel and Bach. When the post of cantor at Leipzig’s St. Thomas School fell vacant in 1722, Telemann was considered a shoe-in. Only after he withdrew his application (his employers in Hamburg belatedly raised his salary rather than let him go) did the Leipzig town council offer the coveted job to Bach. Telemann’s vast catalog comprises more than 3,000 works in all the major genres and styles of the day. The four movements of the Sonata in F Minor for bassoon or recorder—which Telemann published in his pioneering music periodical Der getreue Music-Meister (The Faithful Music Master)—combine the suavity of the French idiom with Italianate brilliance and German contrapuntal techniques.
One of several works on tonight’s program written especially for Jess Gillam, Lumina was premiered at the 2021 Cheltenham Music Festival in England. Ayanna Witter-Johnson is a boundary-crossing London-born British cellist, singer, and composer of Jamaican descent; among the numerous eclectic influences on her art, she lists Bach, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Nina Simone, Michael Jackson, and Maya Angelou. Witter-Johnson describes her saxophone solo as “an invocation of the spirit of adventure, curiosity, admiration for sound, and joy” that reflects “the breadth of Jess’s musical tastes.” In Gillam’s words, the piece “begins quite reflectively, [exploring] one theme in different rhythmic iterations.”
British composer-saxophonist Harle wrote this bracingly energetic solo for Gillam’s chart-topping debut album of 2019, the same year she premiered his saxophone concerto Briggflatts at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. RANT! is steeped in folk songs and dances associated with Gillam’s native Cumbria. The “rant” is a vigorous, jig-like country dance in duple meter that is often performed in clogs. Harle explains that the “folk tunes include ‘The Ulverstone Volunteers,’ which is a trumpet ‘call to arms’ from [Gillam’s] own hometown.” He adds that “the piece opens with a quote from ‘Cumberland Nelly,’ and this is the tune that I have fed through RANT! to eventually reappear in the final climactic section.”
Arguably the greatest songwriter of his time, John Dowland failed to obtain a court position in his native England until he was nearly 50. The repeated rejections embittered the composer and may be one source of his famously melancholy disposition. Dowland’s signature work—and one of the most famous of the 17th century—is “Lachrimae” (“Tears”), whose dolorously descending melodic line serves as a musical emblem of grief. “Flow, my tears, fall from your springs” is one of several vocal and instrumental versions of the “Lachrimae” pavane; its text ends: “Happy, happy they that in hell / Feel not the world’s despite.”
After cutting his musical teeth as a precocious teenager working in German opera houses, Kurt Weill scored his first big popular success in 1928 with The Threepenny Opera, transplanting John Gay’s 18th-century social satire to Weimar Germany. With his wife, Lotte Lenya, who shared his left-wing political views, he immigrated to Paris shortly after the Nazis seized power and subsequently immigrated to the United States, where he reinvented himself as a composer of “Broadway opera.” “Je ne t’aime pas” (“I don’t love you”) is a miniature psychodrama about a lover racked by rejection and jealousy. Composed in Paris, it was tailored for the earthy vocal style of the celebrated diseuse Lys Gauty.
A leading figure in the tango revival, Astor Piazzolla imparted a cosmopolitan flavor to Argentina’s national dance. His four-part “history,” originally scored for flute and guitar, traces the tango’s path from Argentinian brothels at the end of the 19th century to modern concert halls. Of the work’s first three movements, the composer wrote:
Bordel 1900: The tango originated in Buenos Aires in 1882. It was first played on the guitar and flute. Arrangements then came to include the piano and later the concertina. This music is full of grace and liveliness. It paints a picture of the good-natured chatter of the French, Italian, and Spanish women who peopled those bordellos as they teased the policemen, thieves, sailors, and riffraff who came to see them. This is a high-spirited tango.
Café 1930: This is another age of the tango. People stopped dancing it as they did in 1900, preferring instead simply to listen to it. It became more musical and more romantic. This tango has undergone total transformation: The movements are slower, with new and often melancholy harmonies. Tango orchestras come to consist of two violins, two concertinas, a piano, and a bass. The tango is sometimes sung as well.
Night Club 1960: This is a time of rapidly expanding international exchange, and the tango evolves again as Brazil and Argentina come together in Buenos Aires. The bossa nova and the new tango are moving to the same beat. Audiences rush to the night clubs to listen earnestly to the new tango. This marks a revolution and a profound alteration in some of the original tango forms.
—Harry Haskell