Ellen Reid is an American composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, avant-pop, and ensemble and choral writing. She was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera p r i s m. Her orchestral work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, among many others.
In 2020, Reid created Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled work of public art that reimagines urban parks as interactive soundscapes. SOUNDWALK premiered in New York’s Central Park and continues to expand to urban parkland around the world, including Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, London’s Regent’s Park & Primrose Hill, and Tokyo’s Ueno Park. An album of music written for the project, Big Majestic, was released on New Amsterdam / Eclipse Projects. Its featured performers include Kronos Quartet, Shabaka Hutchings, James McVinnie, and Lisel.
Reid is known for her crackling, lyrical film scores, and she has worked with A24, Amazon Studios, and Duplass Brothers Productions. Her work has been featured at film festivals including SXSW, IFC Fest, Tribeca Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her concert work was also an inspiration for artist Alex Prager’s short film Run.
In 2016, Reid cofounded Luna Composition Lab with composer Missy Mazzoli. The organization provides mentorship, education, and resources for female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13–18, and is the only initiative of its kind in the United States.
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Reid received her BFA from Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. She serves as the contemporary music chair of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and she is currently the first composer to be in residence with both Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw concert hall and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra simultaneously. Her music is exclusively published by Chester Music, part of the Wise Music Group. She lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.
Body Cosmic is a meditation on the human body as it creates life and gives birth. The first movement, Awe | she forms herself, unspools a melody against the pulse of an ostinato, reflecting the surreality of creating new life, so common and yet so astonishing. Dissonance | her light and its shadow explores the conundrum of bringing new life into the simultaneously beautiful and crumbling world, moving between big splashes of smearing brass and tumultuous percussion and moments of warmth and blazing beauty.
This piece was written in response to my own experience with pregnancy and childbirth, a period of time that coincided with my dual residency at the Concertgebouw concert hall and with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Spending time in Amsterdam, working in the Concertgebouw’s storied halls, activated over 140 years of music making, is a looming presence in this work. Thank you to the incredible musicians of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose generous artistic contributions rang loudly in my mind’s ear as I wrote this piece.
—Ellen Reid
The two Prokofiev violin concertos make a fascinating pair, revealing the opposing sides of Prokofiev’s musical personality. The first is lush, phantasmagoric, and thoroughly Russian; the second, heard on this program, is elegant, classical, and international.
Commentators tend to classify the Violin Concerto No. 2 as representative of an increasingly conservative, more “accessible” style, but the reality is more complicated. It should not be forgotten that Prokofiev, with his early “Classical” Symphony, was one of the first to experiment with the Neoclassicism that became all the rage with Stravinsky and others. By the time he came to write the Second Violin Concerto in 1935 (20 years after the first), its wit, understatement, and refined orchestration were established trademarks for this genre.
The internationalism of the work is spelled out in Prokofiev’s own account of its evolution:
In 1935, a group of admirers of the French violinist [Robert] Soetens asked me to write a violin concerto for him, giving him exclusive rights to perform it for one year. I readily agreed, since I had been intending to write something for the violin at that time and had accumulated some material. As in the case of the preceding concertos, I began by searching for an original title for the piece, such as “Concert Sonata for Violin and Orchestra,” but finally returned to the simplest solution: Concerto No. 2. Nevertheless, I wanted it to be altogether different from No. 1 both as to music and style.
The variety of places in which [the Second Violin Concerto] was written is a reflection of the nomadic concert-tour existence I led at that time: The principal theme of the first movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the orchestration I completed in Baku, while the first performance was given in Madrid in December 1935.
One feature the two concertos share, despite differences in style, is an abundance of great tunes. In the Second Concerto, these unfold from beginning to end. There are no cadenzas in this supremely civilized piece, indeed very little showing off by either soloist or orchestra: The main discourse consists of seamless melodic interplay between the two. This is a concerto in the manner of Mozart rather than in the struggle-and-conflict mode characteristic of Romantic concertos. Indeed, the entirety of the slow movement, with its long, sinuous melody and elegant bass countermelody, sounds Mozartean.
The two bittersweet main tunes in the sonata-form first movement are equally memorable. Only in the steely, acerbic finale does Prokofiev allow things to get rowdy, concluding the work with an impish diablerie. In this finale, the two sides of Prokofiev—the lyrical and the ironic—finally come together.
Surely one of the earliest and most impressive advertisements for psychotherapy is the case of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Throughout the late 1890s, Rachmaninoff was plunged into a terrible state of depression that left him barely able to function. This state was occasioned by the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, during which he had fled from the hall in horror, later destroying the score. Nor could Rachmaninoff have been cheered by the reviews, the most notorious of which was composer César Cui’s: “If there were a conservatory in Hell, Rachmaninoff would get the first prize for his symphony.”
Rachmaninoff’s friends were so concerned about his debilitated state that they talked him into seeing Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a pioneer in psychoanalysis and hypnosis as well as an amateur musician. So dramatically successful was Dr. Dahl’s therapy that by the summer of 1900, Rachmaninoff found “new ideas stirring within me.” These became the genesis of the Second Piano Concerto, now one of the most popular works in the repertoire, the success of which enabled him to take another, formerly dreaded plunge into writing a symphony.
Even so, Rachmaninoff apparently needed seclusion to try another symphony after the traumatic reception of his First. He resigned from his position as conductor of the Imperial Grand Opera in Moscow, as well as from piano engagements, and moved to Dresden for two years to devote himself exclusively to composition. (It is sometimes forgotten that Rachmaninoff was a great conductor as well as composer and pianist, enough so to be offered the job of music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) Freed from distractions and buoyed by an apparently happy marriage, Rachmaninoff completed his Second Symphony, conducting the successful premiere in St. Petersburg in 1908; during his first American tour in 1909, he conducted the work with The Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom he later premiered his Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff’s lush idiom found a happy counterpart in the sumptuous sound of the Philadelphians; the two seemed made for each other.
The Second Symphony is perhaps the most lyrical and unabashedly “Russian” of Rachmaninoff’s large-scale symphonic works, full of allusions to Russian chants and marches and stuffed with the sinfully luscious big tunes that make Rachmaninoff sound like a Hollywood composer before Hollywood. (He actually did settle in Hollywood after emigrating from Russia, though he never wrote for the movies.) Written before the relatively fleet and concise American works—the Third Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Symphonic Dances—the Second Symphony is an expansive summation of Rachmaninoff’s early style. The second subject of the finale and the main theme of the slow movement are two of the most extended tunes he ever wrote, and the soulful opening movement is a continual stream of brooding melody. The epic nature of the symphony has led some maestros to make cuts.
This is the least morose of the three symphonies, but it’s still Rachmaninoff, and a brooding undercurrent haunts the music even in the happier sections. Rachmaninoff was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of Poe (celebrated in his favorite symphonic work, The Bells), who advocated an underlying melancholy in all quests for the Beautiful, and whose ideas about art were a perfect match for Rachmaninoff’s temperament. Even the celebratory Allegro molto, with its dance-like brass and tambourines, concludes with a reference to the gloomy motif that opens the first movement. Indeed, the entire symphony is haunted by this idea, suggestive of a dark force of fate that recalls Tchaikovsky’s similar device in the Fourth Symphony.
The orchestration is forceful and colorful, full of generous solos and chamber sections as well as massed orchestral effects. The extended clarinet solo in the third movement, an idea that expands and meanders with remarkable freedom, is a gift to clarinetists; the layered strings in the mysterious opening of the first movement move from dankness to poetic transparency, allowing the violins to show off their full colors; the timpani and percussion in the second movement and finale have a shivery frisson we find only in the Symphonic Dances. In the sweeping coda, the entire orchestra seems to brighten, expand, and open up, as the minor-key motif that binds the symphony together finally resolves into the major before a breathless scamper to the finish line. A consummate musical chef, Rachmaninoff always saved the most sumptuous course for the end.
—Jack Sullivan