A Ned Rorem Celebration
works for violin, cello and piano

Roger Zahab, violin; David Russell, cello;
Robert Frankenberry, piano

Three Slow Pieces (1978)
for cello and piano

Autumn Music (1996/97)
for violin and piano

Spring Music (1990)
for violin, cello, and piano

ABOUT THE PROGRAM:

Autumn Music (1996/97)
This challenging nine minute work was composed in 1997 and served as the required work for the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, but Ida Kavafian and Anne-Marie McDermott gave the first official public performances, in Washington and New York.

Three Slow Pieces (1978)
To attempt to track in any way the evolution of Ned’s ideas from piece to piece is to court the composer’s scorn. Ned is such a superb note writer; I shudder to take on the task of contributing these lines. But none yet exist for the Three Slow Movements for Cello because the music was safely stowed (not available from Ned’s publisher or even from Ned himself) in a drawer in Ned’s distinguished colleague and friend Seymour Barab’s studio, having not enjoyed the light of day for decades. Thanks to Mr. Barab, they are now being aired again, and may be enjoyed by generations of cellists to come.

Ned was 22 when he composed his setting of Robert Hillyer’s “Early in the Morning.” He set the poem from the perspective of an old man. (“Nostalgia,” I recall him quipping, “is the bread of creativity.”) Five years later, he used the same lovely release that he used in the Hillyer setting to modulate into B Minor for the B section of “Slow Movement for Cello,” which, according to his note, was written in “Fez, November 1950.” The barcarolle accompaniment in the piano, the dotted rhythm melody, the lushly planed thirteenth chords all return in numerous works over the years, as often as do Ned’s beloved waltzes.

The second movement, which Ned notes as having been finished on 23 March 1971, is dedicated specifically to Mr. Barab. A few years later, this fantasy on an ostinato ends up as the sixth movement of the orchestral work for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Air Music (1975) in the same key, and with the same title. In 1984, Ned presented an analysis of Air Music in Florida in which he described the music as originally having been composed to underscore a scene in the Pacino vehicle Panic in Needle Park. Two years later, he revisited the effect again, more rapturously, in “…indifferent blue” from his sumptuously scored Wallace Stevens tone poem Sunday Morning.

In September of 1958, at the MacDowell Colony, he penned the third movement, “Memories of Feeling,” in which he unfolded what has become one of the core melodic gestures in his catalogue: the descending line do – si – la - la-flat - fa. This “dying fall,” when arrayed vertically, includes both the major and minor thirds of the triad, while suspending in it the fourth: spaced closely, this assemblage of intervals can be dark and brooding; spaced widely it can be rapturous; stack thirds on top, and the group is transformed into something ephemeral and subtle, enigmatic and enticing.

Spring Music (1990)
Ned writes, “Having already written The End of Summer and Winter Pages, I am beginning to round off a seasonal cycle, which is one reason for the title, Spring Music. Another reason is the need for a tag. I’ve composed many works for three instruments (the first even called Trio), and have found that names help the auditor—not to mention the composer—to tell them apart. Finally, the work wishes to reflect (insofar as non-vocal music reflects anything) the season of optimism.”

Francophile Ned would disagree, I am certain, but Spring Music has always reminded me of Brahms’ closely-argued, meticulously crafted C Major Trio: it is at once broadly and generously “public” in its bright, brilliant gestures and showy roulades while also being abstract, even inscrutable in its “private” sections.

Above all, as in Brahms, there is in this trio a palpable love of impeccable craftsmanship. Each musical idea is presented with the utmost clarity; development is through superimposition and juxtaposition of discrete ideas, the interplay of gesture and texture, the alternation of inherently “fast” and “slow” music. There is not a single extra note: glittering passagework is reduced to its essence and repeated for busy touring chamber musicians; even the nostalgic moments are gently acerbic in their honed-down, epigrammatic expression.

Written on commission from the Carnegie Hall Corporation for the Beaux Arts Trio, Spring Music was premiered on February 8, 1991. The great String Symphony (1985) and Bright Music (1988) especially provided a lot of material to Spring Music: a delicious fistful of musical ideas return in widely-varying guises throughout the works written during this period. Later works, such as the English Horn Concerto (1993), revisit them in even more austere contexts.

—Daron Hagen
Program Note Copyright ©2008 by Daron Hagen. Used by Permission.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Words and music are inextricably linked for Ned Rorem. Time Magazine has called him "the world's best composer of art songs," yet his musical and literary ventures extend far beyond this specialized field. Rorem has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos and an array of other orchestral works, music for numerous combinations of chamber forces, ten operas, choral works of every description, ballets and other music for the theater, and literally hundreds of songs and cycles. He is the author of sixteen books, including five volumes of diaries and collections of lectures and criticism.

Ned Rorem is one of America’s most honored composers.  In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1976 for his suite Air Music, Rorem has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (1951), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1957), and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1968). He is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; in 1998 he was chosen Composer of the Year by Musical America. The Atlanta Symphony recording of the String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles received a Grammy Award for Outstanding Orchestral Recording in 1989. From 2000 to 2003 he served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In 2003 he received ASCAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and in January 2004 the French government named him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. 

His most recent publication, Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings, chronicles Rorem’s dark journey after the death of 32 year companion, Jim Holmes. In his diary, Lies, (published by Counterpoint Press in 2000) Rorem said: "My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer's present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise. I don't believe that composers notate their moods, they don't tell the music where to go — it leads them....Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it - it's simple as that. Others may have more talent, more sense of duty. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need."

Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana on October 23, 1923. As a child he moved to Chicago with his family; by the age of ten his piano teacher had introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, an experience which "changed my life forever," according to the composer. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, two years later receiving a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He studied composition under Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, taking his B.A. in 1946 and his M.A. degree (along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition) in 1948. In New York he worked as Virgil Thomson's copyist in return for $20 a week and orchestration lessons. He studied on fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood in the summers of 1946 and 1947; in 1948 his song The Lordly Hudson was voted the best published song of that year by the Music Library Association.

In 1949 Rorem moved to France, and lived there until 1958. His years as a young composer among the leading figures of the artistic and social milieu of post-war Europe are absorbingly portrayed in The Paris Diary and The New York Diary, 1951-1961 (reissued by Da Capo, 1998). He currently lives in New York City and Nantucket. Ned Rorem is published by Boosey & Hawkes.