As a pioneering Black composer of classical music, Florence Price faced a double hurdle. She described her situation succinctly in a 1943 letter to Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra: “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” Although a decade had already passed since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price’s First Symphony and her vocal music had been championed by the likes of Marian Anderson, Koussevitzky and most of his establishment peers turned a deaf ear to her appeals. Consequently, Price was forced to eke out a living by composing popular songs under a pseudonym, teaching piano, and turning out choral and orchestral arrangements for a Chicago radio station.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and educated at New England Conservatory in Boston, Price moved to the “Windy City” in 1927 to escape the toxic racial environment of the Jim Crow South. She continued to compose prolifically in her adopted home, eventually compiling a catalog of some 300 works, most of which remained unpublished for decades. The Octet for Brasses and Piano was part of a substantial trove of Price’s manuscripts that were serendipitously discovered in 2009 during the renovation of a run-down house in St. Anne, Illinois, that she had once used as a summer residence. Although it dates from 1930, almost any page of this richly melodious work could have been written decades earlier. Price’s conservatively tonal harmonic language, lightly spiced with chromaticism, reveals virtually no trace of modernist influences. Melodically, too, the music is unabashedly Romantic, owing a discernible debt to Brahms and Dvořák. The Octet demonstrates both Price’s mastery of compositional technique and her impeccable taste. As Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, Price “seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals.”
The practice of adapting a piece of music, more or less freely, for a medium different from the original has a long and respectable tradition. The fact that the title pages of many Renaissance publications advertised the music they contained as, say, equally “apt for viols or voices” suggests that no hard and fast line was drawn between vocal and instrumental music—or between originals and arrangements. In the 16th century alone, some 235 of Josquin’s vocal works were published in arrangements for keyboard, lute, or other plucked strings. This statistic is not surprising given the Franco-Flemish master’s exalted status: One contemporary compared him to Michelangelo as a “prodigy of nature.” Josquin’s exemplary craftsmanship and taste are illustrated by his copious output of Latin masses and motets, as well as his (mostly) French-texted chansons.
These four arrangements for bassoon quartet attest to Josquin’s effortless command of polyphonic voice leading and to his music’s wide expressive range, from the anguished dissonances of the penitential motet “De profundis clamavi” to the limpid lyricism of the chansons “Belle pour l’amour de vous,” “Mille regretz,” and “De tous biens plaine”—the last a resetting of a song by Hayne van Ghizeghem to which Josquin cleverly added two lower voices in canon.
Ravel conceived his Sonata for Violin and Cello as a memorial to Debussy. The first movement was performed by itself in 1921, having been published the year before in a Debussy commemorative issue of a leading French music journal. (In the eyes of many, Ravel was Debussy’s spiritual heir.) By his own account, it took Ravel another year and a half of “hard labor” to finish the piece, in which time, he observed with characteristic self-deprecation, the famously prolific Darius Milhaud “would have managed to turn out four symphonies, five quartets, and several settings of poems by Paul Claudel.” Ravel considered the Sonata a turning point in his career. Both the linear transparency of the part writing and the cool austerity of the harmonic language signaled a departure from the luxuriant impressionism that characterized many of his earlier works.
The opening Allegro has the feel of a two-part invention, with the violin and cello nipping playfully at each other’s heels, often a half-beat apart, while the ambiguous A-minor/major tonality generates a series of gently astringent harmonic clashes. Ravel’s deliberate avoidance of what he called “harmonic charm” is even more pronounced in the second movement, where the violin and cello often play simultaneously in different keys. The propulsive motor rhythms and sharply etched pizzicato effects are synchronized like clockwork. (Ravel once referred to the Sonata as a “machine for two instruments.”) A lean-textured and searingly intense slow movement leads to a boisterous, Hungarian-flavored finale, marked by shifting meters, angular motivic gestures, and abrupt dynamic contrasts.
The classical music of India has served as a source of inspiration for many Western composers, from Massenet and Rimsky-Korsakov in the 19th century to Cage, Messiaen, Stockhausen, and others in the 20th. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned the Quebec-based harpist-composer Caroline Lizotte to write a piece for Judy Loman and Jennifer Swartz in 2006, she set out to evoke the “meditative atmosphere” of a classical Indian raga. An adventurous musician, Lizotte was an early adopter and champion of the electroacoustic harp and has composed a Concerto Techno for harp, live techno, and orchestra. Although her Raga is written for two conventional acoustic harps, the music features a number of extended techniques such as tone bending and knocking. The score also calls for cymbal, ankle bells, and a custom-designed “super-ball stick” used to brush the strings.
Lizotte explains that “a raga, the musical framework for the art music of India, is both a mode and a melodic form, and is associated with specific emotions and with a season or a time of day. In general, a raga opens with a simple and quiet musical statement that is gradually amplified until all the elements of the music intertwine and catch fire. Everything begins in this raga with a strange drumstick sliding on the metal strings of the harp to make a plaintive, distant sound; it resembles the song of a whale on the high seas. And off we go, riding the waves, until we come ashore in India with one of that land’s typical scales. We buy several percussion instruments, and then sail off again with the good old pentatonic scale oscillating between minor and major, spiced up by bells and antique cymbals.”
“I am at the height of my powers and must make use of my youth while it lasts,” Schumann confided to his diary in September 1842. Despite its ups and downs—the composer had begun to complain of worrisome bouts of despondency and depression—his 32nd year had truly been an annus mirabilis in terms of chamber music. A surge of creativity had already produced, in quick succession, the three string quartets of Op. 41. At the time of the diary entry, Schumann was deeply immersed in his Op. 44 Piano Quintet, and before the year was out, he would finish both the Piano Quartet, Op. 47, and the Op. 88 Phantasiestücke for piano trio.
In preparation for resuming the chamber music project that he had set aside several years earlier, Schumann had steeped himself in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Like them, he found the discipline of writing chamber music for strings, with and without piano, both challenging and liberating. Deliberately distancing himself from the literary models that had inspired much of his earlier programmatic music, he concentrated instead on structural clarity and the craft of composition. It’s no coincidence that both the Piano Quartet and its cousin, the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, feature elaborate fugal finales that recall material presented earlier.
Schumann’s command of thematic transformation is evident in his handling of the gently sighing four-note figure that the strings play at the outset of Op. 47. It generates much of the thematic material for the first movement and resurfaces throughout the quartet in various guises. (Keeping track of the family resemblance among themes is one of the pleasures of listening to Schumann’s music.) The Mendelssohnian Scherzo, in G minor, contrasts a torrent of driving eighth notes with two Trio interludes of a sweeter, more relaxed disposition. The tenderly yearning theme of the Andante cantabile—again derived from the embryonic four-note figure—is one of Schumann’s most inspired melodies. The slow movement ends with a rumination on a group of three notes, which Schumann deftly transforms into the three staccato chords that set the fugal machine in motion in the athletic Finale.
On April 5, 1843, Clara Schumann recorded in her diary: “In the evening, we played Robert’s E-flat–Major Quartet for the first time at our house, and again I was really enchanted by this beautiful work, which is so youthful and fresh, as if it were his first.” Schumann himself considered the work “more effective” than his popular Piano Quintet and devoted part of that summer to revising the score. The first public performance took place on December 8, 1844, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with Clara again at the keyboard.
—Harry Haskell