Timeline (2011 — World Premiere)

Philip Rothman n born in 1976

Philip Rothman is the Green Bay Symphony’s 2008-2009 Composer-in-Residence under the Music Alive program of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer; he held a Music Alive residency with the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in 2004-2005. Rothman, born in Buffalo in 1976 and now based in New York City, earned a Bachelor of Music degree summa cum laude from Rice University and a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, which he attended on a full scholarship; his composition teachers have included Samuel Adler, Edward Applebaum, Samuel Jones, Richard Lavenda and Stephen Shewan. His compositions have been performed by the Utah Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Maryland Symphony, National Philharmonic of Lithuania, Juilliard Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony and United States Military Academy Band, as well as at such major venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Rothman’s compositions have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today, the syndicated radio program Indianapolis on-the-Air and the McGraw Hill Companies’ Young Artists Showcase. His recent work includes orchestrations for the feature films The Nanny Diaries, Hollywoodland and What Just Happened? as well as HBO release Taking Chance. Rothman has also served as creative advisor and project director for Ford Made in America, a major commissioning consortium sponsored by the Ford Motor Company Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. His numerous honors include four ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, a Renée B. Fisher Foundation Award, the Brian M. Israel Prize, a fellowship from the American Symphony Orchestra League, a Meet The Composer Fund grant and ten annual ASCAP Special Awards since 1998.

“Tres Danzas Concertantes” for Guitar and String Orchestra (1958)

Leo Brouwer n born in 1939

Leo Brouwer, born in Havana on March 1, 1939, is one of Cuba’s leading classical guitarists and composers. He began composing and publishing his guitar pieces in the mid-1950s, but did not undertake formal training until coming to the United States in 1960 to study at the Juilliard School with Vincent Persichetti and Stefan Wolpe and at the Hartt College of Music with Isadore Freed and Joseph Iadone. A decisive moment of Brouwer’s education occurred during a trip to the 1961 Warsaw Autumn Festival, where he heard music by Penderecki, Stockhausen and other modernists that helped to shape his compositional ethic and idiom for the next two decades. Much concerned with the place of the artist in a revolutionary society, Brouwer returned to Cuba later that year to take up posts with Radio Havana and the music department of the Instituto de Arts Industria Cinematograficos (he has written the scores for more than sixty films) and to teach composition at the Havana Conservatory. Visits to Cuba by the politically sympathetic Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze in the 1960s allowed Brouwer to keep abreast of recent developments in European music, and his compositions of those years, aimed at cultivating a sophisticated musical art in his homeland, abandoned the indigenous folk and dance influences of his earlier works for a dedicated avant-gardism by incorporating tape, electronics, jazz, pop, serialism, unconventional notations, chance, multi-media and other new techniques. In 1969, Brouwer helped to found the Grupo de Experimentaciones Sonoras to further the cause of contemporary Cuban music. Since the early 1980s, the avant-garde elements of Brouwer’s middle-period works have given way to the lyricism, tonal harmony and traditional forms of what he terms his “new simplicity.” He has toured and recorded widely as a guitarist and conductor, and served as Principal Conductor of the Cordoba Symphony (Spain), Artistic Director of the Havana Symphony and as a member of the International Council of Music. He has been elected a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes Nuestra Señora de la Angustias in Granada, and was appointed Honoris Causa Professor of Art at the Instituto Superior de Arte de Cuba in 1996. For his contributions to Cuban music, Leo Brouwer was awarded the Orden Félix Varela, his country’s highest honor for culture.

The Tres Danzas Concertantes, originally written for solo guitar and string orchestra in 1958 and later transcribed for two guitars, is Brouwer’s earliest significant work, dating from the years when instinct more than training was driving his creativity. “These pieces were a sort of résumé of my first hearings of Bartók and Stravinsky,” he said. “Harmony? I knew nothing of harmony, but I had in my head the sounds I wanted, vertical and horizontal. I was clearly thinking of the spirit of my country, of [the composers] Roldan and Caturla, of the Afro-Cuban drums. Three dances from my country, my culture — some of their melodies sound Asiatic, some harmonies sound European, and the rhythms are African. That’s Cuba!”

Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral” (1807-1808)

Ludwig van Beethoven n (1770 -1827)

There is a fine and often fluid line that separates program and absolute music. Usually composers intend their work to be heard either with some extra-musical reference or as a universe unto itself, but Beethoven tried to link both worlds in his “Pastoral” Symphony. This work, with its birdcalls and its horncalls, its thunder, wind and rain, its peasant dances and babbling brooks, is decidedly and lovably programmatic. Yet the composer insisted that the Symphony is “more an expression of feeling than painting” — that it is more pure, abstract emotion than naïve imitations of various familiar country noises. It is, in truth, both.

The extra-musical associations of the “Pastoral” Symphony run far deeper than its imitations of nightingales and rainstorms. Actually, there are at least three layers of “meaning” here. The first and most obvious of these three is the evocation of natural noises, but this was only a point of departure for Beethoven into the second degree of reference in this work, since these woodland sounds were simply the external manifestations of what was, for him, a much deeper reality: that God was to be found in every tree, in every brook; indeed, that God and Nature are, if not the same, certainly indivisible. It was into this pantheistic philosophy that Beethoven retreated when his deafness became profound. As he grew increasingly alienated from the world of men, he sought and found refuge in Nature. “How happy I am to be able to wander among the bushes and grass, under trees and over rocks; no man can love the country as I love it,” he rejoiced. He sought to voice his essential belief in the divinity of Nature in this Sixth Symphony, just as he sought in the Ninth Symphony to express another of his fundamental ideas: the hope for universal brotherhood. The second layer of meaning in this work is, in the words of Basil Lam, “not that it is merely descriptive, but, in the broadest sense, religious.”

The third plane on which the “Pastoral” Symphony exists is heavily influenced by the other two. This third layer, the purely musical, reflects the stability, the calm and the sense of the infinite that Beethoven perceived in Nature. “Oh, the sweet stillness of the woods!” he wrote. The style in which he chose to cast this work has about it a certain noble simplicity, an uncluttered directness of expression that implies the balm that Nature must have been for the composer’s troubled soul. Missing from the Sixth Symphony are the dramatic contrasts and profound emotional journeys of the contemporaneous Symphony No. 5. Instead, each movement combines a singularity of mood with a deep, quiet spiritual satisfaction to create a sense of massive grandeur, of infinite continuity, as though Beethoven had unearthed music that had always existed as part of the rocks and hills he loved so much. It is from this deep core of the music that Beethoven derived the unusual formal device of a fifth movement, a departure from the four-movement symphonic standard that had been the norm since Haydn’s early works of nearly a half-century earlier. This inserted movement depicts a storm through the thunderous rumblings of the basses and timpani, the lightning flashes of the piccolo and the gusts of the trombones. More than simply a contrast to the surrounding movements, this section serves as a foil to set the tranquility of the rest of the Symphony into bold relief. “The Darkness Declares the Glory of the Light” has here become music. The “Pastoral” Symphony, the most gentle and child-like work that Beethoven ever composed, grants us not only a deeper understanding of the great composer, but also, through his vision, a heightened awareness of ourselves and the world around us.

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Beethoven gave each of the five movements of the “Pastoral” Symphony a title describing its general character. The first movement, filled with verdant sweetness and effusive good humor, is headed The Awakening of Cheerful Feelings at the Arrival in the Country. The violins present a simple theme which pauses briefly after only four measures, as though the composer were alighting from a coach and taking a deep breath of the sparkling, fragrant air before beginning his brisk walk along a shaded path. The melody grows more vigorous before it quiets to lead almost imperceptibly to the second theme, a descending motive played by violins over a rustling string accompaniment. Again, the spirits swell and then relax before the main theme returns to occupy most of the development. To conclude the first movement, the recapitulation returns the themes of the exposition in more richly orchestrated settings, a common practice in the 19th-century symphony. It is worth noting that the textural figuration Beethoven supplied for this movement, and for most of this Symphony, contributes an aura of relaxed yet constant motion to the music. Indeed, the “background” throughout this Symphony is of unfailing interest and is as important as the themes in defining the sylvan character of the music. There is a fascination in listening to these inner voices, of perceiving the multiple planes of the texture, an experience comparable in the visual world to discerning the play of light and shade in the layers of foliage of a great tree or spying a darting fish beneath the shimmering surface of a rushing stream. There is even one extended section in the finale (noted below) where Beethoven dispensed with the “melody” completely and continued with only the “accompaniment.”

The second movement, Scene at the Brook, continues the mood and undulant figuration of the preceding movement. The music of this movement is almost entirely without chromatic harmony, and exudes an air of tranquility amid pleasing activity. The form is a sonata-allegro whose opening theme starts with a fragmentary idea in the first violins above a rich accompaniment. The second theme begins with a descending motion, like that of the first movement, but then turns back upward to form an inverted arch. A full development section utilizing the main theme follows. The recapitulation recalls the earlier themes with enriched orchestration, and leads to a most remarkable coda. In the closing pages of this movement, the rustling accompaniment ceases while all Nature seems to hold its breath to listen to the songs of three birds — the nightingale, the dove and the cuckoo. Twice this tiny avian concert is performed before the movement comes quietly to its close. When later Romantic composers sought stylistic and formal models for their works it was to Beethoven that they turned, and when program music was the subject, this coda was their object.

Beethoven titled the scherzo Merry Gathering of the Peasants, and filled the music with a rustic bumptiousness and simple humor that recall a hearty if somewhat ungainly country dance. The trio shifts to duple meter for a stomping dance before the scherzo returns. The festivity is halted in mid-step by the distant thunder of a Storm, portrayed by the rumblings of the low strings. Beethoven built a convincing storm scene here through the tempestuous use of the tonal and timbral resources of the orchestra that stands in bold contrast to the surrounding movements of this Symphony. As the storm passes away over the horizon, the silvery voice of the flute leads directly into the finale, Shepherd’s Song: Joyful, Thankful Feelings after the Storm. The clarinet and then the horn sing the unpretentious melody of the shepherd, which returns, rondo-fashion, to support the form of the movement. It is at the expected third hearing of this theme that the melody is deleted, leaving only the luxuriant accompaniment to furnish the background for imagining the rustic tune. The mood of well-being and contented satisfaction continues to the end of this wonderful work.

Hector Berlioz, writing with his customary Romantic effulgence, had the following to say of the “Pastoral” Symphony: “Ancient poems, however beautiful and admired they may be, pale into insignificance when compared with this marvel of music. This great poem of Beethoven — these long phrases so richly colored — these living pictures — these perfumes — that light — that eloquent silence — that vast horizon — these enchanted nooks secreted in the woods — those golden harvests — those rose-tinted clouds like wandering flocks on the surface of the sky — that immense plain seeming to slumber under the rays of the midday sun.... Yes, great and adored poets, you are conquered: Inclyte sed victi [‘You are glorious but vanquished’].”

©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda