Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s journey to becoming a professional musician began after falling in love with sound—in particular, the resonance of the viola after hearing it played by Michael Tree. It soon became the instrument at which she excelled—at age 16 she won the Primrose International Viola Competition. But it was a recognition of music’s power to plumb the depths of memory and emotion, and a desire to examine the spiritual aspects of different world religions that led Ngwenyama to pursue an advanced degree from Harvard Divinity School after completing her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. This lifelong curiosity around sound, meaning, and communication came together nearly 20 years later to manifest as her work Primal Message. Ngwenyama is an alum of the 1992 New York String Orchestra Seminar.
In November 1974, scientists broadcast a three-minute message into space from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The Arecibo message, as it became known, marked the first attempt at communicating with other potential life forms more than 22,000 light years away. It was 1,679 bits in length—a semi-prime number formed by multiplying the primes 73 and 23—and conveyed different elements of human life through mathematical equations. To the ear, the radio waves of the binary code sound like constantly varying rhythms of two different tones. A 2017 piece by Steven Johnson in The New York Times Magazine about the Arecibo message resonated with Ngwenyama. As she began reflecting on what message she would send through music, her thoughts immediately went to using prime-number musical intervals like 2, 3, 5, and 7 or harmonic relationships that translated as 5-1-5-1 as the building blocks of the work. The title itself contains multiple meanings. In addition to utilizing primes, the medium of sound is elemental—or primal—as is our fundamental desire to communicate and connect.
Primal Message opens with a gorgeous melody stated by the cellos as the rest of the ensemble hovers, twinkling and sliding between notes that loosely evoke the tones of the original Arecibo message. Embedded in the spirit of the work is a plethora of human emotions: longing, relief, triumph, elation—the totality of the human experience. In a poignant real-life coda to the story, the Arecibo Observatory collapsed in December 2020. But, as Ngwenyama declares in the score, “the message floats on.”
The remarkable career of Clara Wieck Schumann began at the moment of her birth. Her father, Friedrich, was a headstrong, determined music teacher who believed his child could be the most convincing advertisement to prove the efficacy of his pedagogical methodology. This resulted in a deeply complicated relationship, emotionally unhealthy yet professionally beneficial, since he also deliberately trained and equipped his daughter with more practical business skills than most young women received at the time. Clara made her debut as a soloist at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at the age of 11. She became famous as a teenager, so much so that a dessert appeared in Vienna bearing her name. “They are serving torte à la Wieck in the inns, and all my enthusiasts go and eat cake,” she amusingly noted. Ultimately, her career as a performer would span more than six decades; intertwine with her husband, Robert Schumann; and conclude with her last concert in 1891. Throughout, she was a valued colleague alongside many of the individuals who would come to define the era, including Nicolò Paganini and Franz Liszt.
Published as Op. 7 and dedicated to violinist and composer Louis Spohr, Clara’s concerto came relatively early in her output, and was her largest-scale composition to date. Originally begun in 1833 as a single-movement work for piano and orchestra, or Concertsatz, Clara ultimately decided to expand it into a full concerto, keeping the original material by repurposing it as the third movement. She received assistance with the orchestration from her father’s student, Robert Schumann, with whom she was developing a romantic attachment. The concerto was completed in 1835 and premiered with Clara as soloist at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn, the newly installed music director with whom she would become fast friends. That same month, Clara shared her first kiss with Robert, whom she would marry five years later.
Clara’s lively concerto is a powerhouse showpiece that demonstrated her broad-ranging technical prowess through passages of rapid finger work and expressive lyricism. It is also marked by distinctive touches and characteristics. One example is the lack of pauses between the movements as each elides into the other, a structure that may have been inspired by Mendelssohn’s piano concerto from a few years earlier. A strikingly unique feature is her choice to write the second movement for piano solo with a brief section in duet with the principal cello. This format for the slow movement inspired the slow movements in both Robert’s Piano Concerto, also in A minor, and Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which share a similar texture.
In 1801, Beethoven began to reveal to his closest friends that he was losing his hearing. By that point, he had already been experiencing symptoms for a few years, but did everything he could to hide the reality of his condition. After emerging from the crisis toward acceptance, Beethoven’s middle period of composition became marked by a conscientious resolution to persist through—and even triumph over—his condition. “Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art,” he wrote defiantly. He was concurrently energized by the optimism of the era’s revolutionary spirit and its initial promise to enlighten and elevate humanity. Together, these factors fueled the earnest quality that gave this period of Beethoven’s life and work its nickname, “Heroic.”
The symphonies nos. 7 and 8 were written simultaneously beginning in late 1811 and completed in April and October of 1812, respectively. Receiving a delayed premiere, Symphony No. 7 was programmed on a run of two benefit concerts presented in December 1813 to raise money for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Hanau. Though that battle was lost to Napoleon’s troops, the evening was focused on victories, including the recent battle of Leipzig and the earlier triumph of Wellington’s forces at the battle of Vitoria, which Beethoven immortalized in another new work performed that night, Wellington’s Victory. Because of the nature of the event, a star-studded orchestra was assembled, including Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the violinist whose quartet premiered many of Beethoven’s string quartets; Antonio Salieri, the esteemed kapellmeister; and other prominent musicians like Louis Spohr and Johann Hummel. The symphony was received enthusiastically—the second movement received so much applause that it was repeated as an encore.
Overall, high spirits dominate the character of Symphony No. 7. To introduce the work, Beethoven writes one of his most extended and elaborate slow introductions, out of which emerges the euphoria of the rollicking first movement. The second movement hypnotically floats, swirls, and builds around a distinctive repeating rhythmic pattern (demonstrating Beethoven’s knack for making themes identifiable by rhythm alone). For the third movement, the composer turns the energy back up and breaks down the structure into five sections, alternating three bouncingly jovial scherzos with two trios that slow the pace with woodwind and horn chorales. For the fourth and final movement, Beethoven raises the intensity to yet a new level. Richard Wagner famously described the symphony as the “apotheosis of the dance,” but it is hard to imagine anyone dancing to this frenzied yet joyous conclusion as the orchestra hits full tilt. The music seems to strain as hard as it can, perhaps for its creator to be able to feel it, despite his increasing inability to hear.
—Kathryn Bacasmot