When Charles Wuorinen died in 2020, The New York Times characterized him as “a combative proponent of 12-tone composition, a cerebral idiom he mastered in hundreds of eloquent works.” That description is true as far as it goes: Growing up in an academic environment—his father was a professor of history at Columbia, where he later earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees—Wuorinen was predisposed to take a “cerebral” approach to composition. He emulated two apostles of high modernism, Schoenberg and Babbitt, and even conducted grant-funded research into fractal geometry at Bell Labs in the 1970s. Yet the cutting edges of Wuorinen’s music perceptibly softened over the decades, as illustrated by works like his 2004 opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on the Salman Rushdie novel. As the critic Andrew Porter observed, Wuorinen “brims with lively ideas. He effortlessly commands—and combines—a diversity of techniques. A big, generous creativity pours through even the overschematic channels he sometimes devises.”
A case in point is Wuorinen’s short but musically eventful Trombone Trio of 1985. Scored for trombone, mallet instruments, and piano, it’s among a series of trios for various ensembles written in the early 1980s that reflect the composer’s distinctively iconoclastic take on serialism. Following Babbitt’s lead, Wuorinen extended the 12-tone principle from pitch to other musical parameters, including timbre, rhythm, and time (the golden ratio, applied to temporal duration, serves as a subliminal structural device in the Trombone Trio). Although the work’s pointillistic soundscape seems chaotic at first, the disjointed motives and gestures gradually coalesce to reveal what Alex Ross calls Wuorinen’s “flair for instrumental drama.” The trio’s underlying spirit of playfulness is manifest in its extremes of register, the sonic gap between the trombone’s earthy gruffness and the celestial shimmering of the vibraphone, and the ear-teasing contrast between lingering resonances and sharp, percussive attacks.
—Harry Haskell
Growing up in Los Angeles as the son and grandson of professionals in the theater and film worlds, Michael Tilson Thomas had ample support for developing his precocious musical gifts. A scholarship to study conducting at Tanglewood, where he won the coveted Koussevitzky Prize in 1969, led to an appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Later that year, the 24-year-old Tilson Thomas became a household name when he stepped in for a suddenly indisposed William Steinberg on the podium. Leonard Bernstein, whose career had been similarly jump-started a quarter-century earlier, became something of a mentor to the young conductor. In 1971, he bequeathed Tilson Thomas the directorship of his nationally televised Young People’s Concerts, coinciding with the latter’s first major posting as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Bernstein, Tilson Thomas has pursued a parallel career as a composer. His small but varied catalog ranges from settings of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Rainer Maria Rilke to orchestral and chamber music and an electronic dance score.
Among Tilson Thomas’s earliest works is Street Song, written in 1988 for the Empire Brass Quintet. He describes it as
a work in three continuous parts—an interweaving of three songs. The first song opens with a jagged downward scale suspending in the air a sweetly dissonant harmony that very slowly resolves. This moment of resolution is followed by responses of various kinds. The harmonies move between the world of the Middle Ages and the present, between East and West, and always, of course, from the perspective of 20th-century America. Overall, the movement is about starting and stopping, the moments of suspension always leading somewhere else. The second song is introduced by a yodel-like horn solo. It is followed by a simple trumpet duet, which was first written around 1972. It is folk-like in character and also cadences with suspended moments of slowly resolving dissonance. The third song is really more of a dance. It begins when the trombone slides a step higher, bringing the work into the key of F-sharp and into a jazzier swing. The harmonies here are the stacked-up moments of suspension from the first two parts of the piece. By now, I hope these “dissonant” sounds actually begin to sound “consonant.” There is a resolution, but it is in the world of a musician who after many after-hours gigs greets the dawn. Finally, the three songs are brought together, and the work moves toward a quiet close.
—Harry Haskell
Champion was the first opera composed by Terence Blanchard and depicts the conflicts and crises in the life of boxer Emile Griffith. In 1962, while weighing in at the welterweight boxing championship at Madison Square Garden, the young prizefighter’s opponent, Benny “Kid” Paret, hurled homophobic slurs at Griffith, who was then a closeted bisexual. During the fight, Griffith exploded in fury and delivered a series of punches that ultimately killed Paret—an incident that haunted him for the rest of his life and ultimately became conflated with his struggles with his sexuality. When Blanchard was initially approached to write an opera, this subject emerged as the story that he felt most inspired, even compelled, to set to music. In addition to his passion for boxing, he saw the truly operatic dimensions in the confluence of love, violence, death, and forgiveness, and in bringing them to the stage, he wove together both contemporary and classical musical idioms to create a wholly new sound world, one that he characterizes as “opera in jazz.”
Born in New Orleans and initially finding success as a jazz trumpeter, Blanchard has gained widespread recognition as one of today’s leading composers of film scores and is especially celebrated for his close collaboration with director Spike Lee. His second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019), opened the Met’s 2021–2022 season and was the first opera by a Black composer to be performed by the company. All of Blanchard’s musical background, from his gospel-infused youth to his experience as a jazz soloist to his mastery as a film composer, comes through in the score of Champion. He employs a compositional approach rooted in—but not limited to—the many different possibilities of jazz itself, from dream-like internal states to rhythm-driven dissonances of the external modern world, and many important musical passages emerge from rhythms appropriate for both dance (in the night-club scenes) and boxing—two worlds which are related in Emile’s psyche.
This afternoon’s program features two selections from the opera’s first act. The duet “Champagne dreams and lime juice money” comes early in the course of the drama, as the later-in-life Griffith reflects on the moment that he left his home on the island of St. Thomas to move to Manhattan. Initially begun as a kind of call and response with the older Griffith asking his idealistic, younger self about his plans for the future, ultimately the two come together in unison with the words “I can sing!”
The second excerpt is Young Emile’s pivotal aria “What makes a man a man?.” After enduring Paret’s insults and unsuccessfully trying to confide in his manager, the gruff Howie Albert, about his inner turmoil, Griffith muses on the differences and contradictions between one’s private and public personae—a theme explored by characters throughout the operatic canon, from Bellini’s Norma to Verdi’s Philip II to Strauss’s Marschallin. In Blanchard’s handling, the aria begins intimately, as a quiet question inside a young, conflicted man’s mind, but soon takes on truly operatic proportions, with a sweep that will be familiar to listeners acquainted with Blanchard’s cinematic compositions.
The founder and former flutist of Imani Winds, a quintet dedicated to introducing new voices into the classical canon, Valerie Coleman is increasingly in demand as a composer. A series of works commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, includes Umoja: Anthem of Unity, Seven O’Clock Shout (described as the orchestra’s “anthem in response to COVID-19”), and This Is Not a Small Voice, set to a poem by Sonia Sanchez. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Coleman has long advocated for diversifying the classical music field, both demographically and stylistically. “I have been asking myself what role do I have as a Black person in the healing of a nation,” she recently told an interviewer. “At the same time, for perspectives to be opened up, there has to be a level of nurturing. Everything that I write comes from that viewpoint of healing. To me, it is one of those things that each of us has to ask ourself: ‘What role do I play in the healing of our society and bringing people together?’”
Coleman describes her 2015 work Rubispheres as “a series of chamber trios depicting urban life and landscapes in the world”—specifically, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Washington Heights, which she came to know as a student at the Mannes College of Music in the 1990s. Scored for flute, clarinet, and bassoon, the three musical vignettes exemplify Coleman’s hybrid “urban-classical” style, with its infusion of jazz, Afro-Cuban, and other popular elements. The first movement—named after DROM, New York City’s famed world-music hub—pulses with jazzy rhythms and lively, riff-based repartee. Coleman switches gears in the middle movement, a luminous, faintly Coplandesque Serenade that, by her account, took shape in a spontaneous “musical moment” while her two-year-old daughter was sleeping in her arms. The final Revival, in Coleman’s words, “brings the fervor of old Southern baptisms held down by the river in juxtaposition to bebop. There is a spiritual renewal that occurs within a revival, full of shouts and dancing; the vigorous riffs and ‘punk-tuations’ drench the old-school memory with a modern youthful sound.”
—Harry Haskell
A musical magpie, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein took inspiration wherever he found it and delighted in toppling cultural and stylistic barriers. In addition to West Side Story and four other more-or-less traditional musicals, he wrote one opera, three symphonies, and a wide array of other concert-hall music, as well as such hybrid works as the operetta Candide and the even more wildly eclectic Mass.
West Side Story is so familiar today that it’s easy to forget how breathtakingly original it seemed when it opened on Broadway in 1957. Loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, the show projected the tragedy of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers onto a street-gang rivalry between the all-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins combined elements of European opera, Latino music and dance, and American popular musical theater into what has been described as a “Broadway opera.”
By contemporary Broadway standards, the score was daringly dissonant, as illustrated by the ominous tritone (the interval of an augmented fourth) that pervades the Prologue, the first of the numbers from West Side Story that the late trombonist, arranger, and composer Jack Gale stitched together in his resourceful concert suite for brass quintet, an abridged version of which closes out today’s program. The frenetic energy of the Prologue gives way to the yearning strains of “Maria,” and Gale’s medley continues in the same vein, mixing Bernstein’s mellow, laid-back ballads with sassy, upbeat paeans to multiculturalism American style.
—Harry Haskell