A virtuoso on steel pan as well as a prolific composer, Andy Akiho draws on a wide range of traditions, from Caribbean steel bands and Balinese gamelan to bebop and classical. This heterogeneous mix can be heard in the first movement of his LIgNEouS Suite, of which the composer writes:
In the spring of 2010, I attended an exhibit of composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’s original architecture sketches at the Drawing Center in NYC. When I left, I was inspired to sketch out a pitch world with color-penciled “LI - NE- -S” by connecting vertical rows of chromatic pitches, expanding the full range of the five-octave marimba, with geometric diagonal lines and collapsing triangles. These visually linear note combinations became the foundational scales for the piece. Then, I intuitively worked at the marimba, improvising on these scales, and these improvisations became the fundamental building blocks, or rhythmic and melodic cells, of this work.
LigNEouS means “made, consisting of, or resembling wood.” This title was chosen because the marimba, violin, viola, and cello are all primarily made of wood. Also, the marimbist is often required to play with dowel rod bundles (rutes) and mallet shafts, without typical yarn mallet heads, in order to enhance the extremely wooden sounds and to articulate the highest overtones of the marimba. I also wanted to use industrial timbres in addition to the melodic marimba bars, accomplished through glissandos and strikes to the metallic resonators. To mimic snap (Bartók) pizzicatos, a string technique produced by vertically snapping/plucking a string to rebound off the fingerboard, the marimbist is instructed to snap an extremely large rubber band that is placed on the low D of the five-octave marimba. Finally, the string parts feature non-pitched scratch tones, a technique adopted from Xenakis’s string quartets.
James Lee III is perhaps best known for his colorful orchestral piece Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula, which blends biblical imagery relating to his Seventh-Day Adventist faith with the cosmic evocations of Holst’s The Planets. His 2018 Clarinet Quintet draws its inspiration from a different source: the complementary, and deeply intertwined, musical heritages of Native Americans and African Americans. “Dvořák said that when he listened to music of Negro Americans and Native Americans, he couldn’t really distinguish between the two,” Lee has said. “When you hear the music of the spirituals, it has the same sort of scale or construction of minor modes and minor pentatonic scales that you will find in Native American music as well. So that is something I have been very interested in. Because historically, many African Americans have been reclassified from being so-called Indians to being so-called Africans.”
The second and fourth movements of Lee’s four-movement Clarinet Quintet reflect his interest, both personal and professional, in Indigenous history and culture. The scherzo-like “Awashoha,” he explains, takes its title from a Choctaw Indian word meaning “to play somewhere,” while 18th-century artistic depictions of Native Americans provided the impulse behind “Celebrated Emblems.” Permeated with ostinato-type repetition, both movements further reflect the composer’s debt to Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera in their driving rhythms and sophisticated melodic interplay. The shifting meters of “Awashoha” imbue the music with a fidgety, slightly jazzy vitality that contrasts with the steadier pulse of “Celebrated Emblems.” The latter has an especially rhapsodic feel, with its wailing melodies and vaguely “exotic” pentatonic scales.
Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza came of age in the period of cultural ferment that followed his country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1962. Both Indigenous and Western musical traditions were cultivated in colonial Uganda, and Tamusuza—who was born Catholic and conducted a church choir as an adult—positioned himself at their intersection. One vehicle for that synthesis was his string quartet Mu Kkubo Ery’Omusaalaba (On the Way of the Cross), the first movement (“Ekitundu Ekisooka” in the Luganda language) of which became an international hit when Kronos Quartet recorded it in 1992. The quartet’s title is derived from an oratorio by Joseph Kyagambiddwa honoring Catholic Ugandans who were martyred in the 19th century. The complex polyrhythmic texture of Tamusuza’s music is rooted in Luganda speech-patterns and repetitive, singsong melodies that are often bounced back and forth in call-and-response fashion. At the same time, Tamusuza asks the four strings to imitate sounds and idioms associated with traditional Ugandan drums and other instruments—for example, by beating the bodies of their instruments with their hands. The overall effect is light, airy, propulsive, and dance-like—the sort of music Dvořák might have written if he had spent time in Africa instead of the United States.
Ernest Chausson is chiefly remembered today for a single work, the moodily rhapsodic Poème for violin and orchestra, but in his tragically foreshortened lifetime he was widely regarded as a leading light of the French Romantic school. As a young man, Chausson fell under the spell of Wagner and even spent his honeymoon at Bayreuth; his opera Le roi Arthus translates the medieval Arthurian romances into an up-to-date Wagnerian sound world. Later, prodded by Debussy, he did an about-face and adopted the more classically concise style represented by his Piano Quartet in A Major and Chanson perpétuelle (Perpetual Song), the last work he completed before his death in a bicycling accident in 1899.
Written in a feverish, late-Romantic idiom, Chanson perpétuelle is set to a poem by Charles Cros (better known as a pioneer of sound recording) and dedicated to mezzo-soprano Jeanne Raunay. What Chausson called his “gloomy mélodie” limns the volatile emotions of a suicidal woman who has been jilted by her lover. The composer, happily married himself, confessed that the work was an exercise in empathy. “I feel the grief I would have felt had I found myself in that situation,” he explained to a friend, “and I feel it all the more vividly because I am happy.” Chausson’s miniature “drame lyrique” is scored alternatively for piano quintet, full orchestra, or piano alone. In the quintet version, the mezzo-soprano’s tender recollections of lost innocence stand out in particularly sharp relief.
A child prodigy on the piano, Amy Beach made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age 18, playing Chopin’s F-Minor Concerto. Unlike pianist Clara Schumann, who gave up her composing career in deference to her husband, Robert, Beach obliged her spouse by redirecting her considerable talent to composition, then considered a more suitable profession for a blue-blooded Boston woman. Largely self-taught, she wrote a handful of large-scale symphonic works, a mass, and a one-act opera, all of which she published under her married name, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. However, she is best known for her vocal and chamber music, which is characterized by a distinctive blend of late Romanticism and impressionism, laced here and there with a soupçon of atonality.
Beach enjoyed an enviable reputation on both sides of the Atlantic when she took part in the well-received Boston premiere of her Piano Quintet in 1908. A local reviewer somewhat patronizingly opined that the work “may not disturb the supremacy of the Schumann, the César Franck, or the Brahms piano quintettes, but it is a fine composition nevertheless.” Sounding a theme that echoed throughout her career, he added that “we are glad to see that Mrs. Beach does not bow down before the fetish of incomprehensibility and ugliness, which rules so much modern music. She still writes melodies and develops their figures in true classical manner.”
The first of the Quintet’s “classical” melodies—introduced by the upper strings in unison after a quietly ominous prelude—recalls the swooning chromatic theme from the finale of Brahms’s F-Minor Piano Quartet, a work that Beach had not only performed but clearly taken to heart. The final phrase of the theme is echoed by the lower strings, whereupon the Allegro moderato proper gets underway, with the first violin playing a variant of the opening melody against the piano’s rippling arpeggios. Here, as in the later two movements, Beach emulates Brahms’s technique of thematic transformation: The chromatic theme will return, subtly altered, in both the Adagio espressivo and the Allegro agitato. Equally Brahmsian is the Quintet’s blend of muscularity and tender lyricism. The latter is especially prominent in the slow movement, whose long-breathed theme in D-flat major is presented by the muted strings before being picked up by the piano. In the vivacious, triple-time finale, Beach recapitulates the first-movement prelude before bringing the work to a rousing conclusion with a brisk coda.
—Harry Haskell