Twentieth Century

Bartók’s First Violin Concerto: A Portrait of Idealized Love

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For fifty years, Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36 was treated much like a forgotten love letter relegated to the bottom of a dusty drawer. Completed in 1908, thirty years before Bartók wrote the monumental work we now know as Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, the First Concerto remained unpublished until 1956, after the composer’s death. Its posthumous premiere, performed by Hansheinz Schneeberger, occurred two years later in Basel, Switzerland. …

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Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”: Perennial Mysteries in a Cosmic Expanse

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The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the …

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Remembering György Pauk

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György Pauk, the renowned Hungarian violinist and teacher, passed away last Monday, November 18 in Budapest. He was 88. Pauk lost both of his parents to the Holocaust. He was raised by his grandmother in a Budapest ghetto where he experienced “hunger, cold, and fear.” Pauk began playing the violin at the age of 5. At 13, he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where his teachers included violinist …

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Walter Piston’s Sinfonietta: American Mid-Century Neoclassicism

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It can be argued that, far from being restrictive and stifling, rules and parameters create conditions for the ultimate creativity. Such is the case with the music of American composer Walter Piston (1894-1976), with its sublime contrapuntal lines and adherence to neoclassical structure and form. Born in Rockland, Maine, Piston taught for many years at Harvard University, and contributed three significant text books on the technical building blocks of music: Harmony (1941), Counterpoint (1947), …

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Ives’ “Elegie”: A Yankee Take on the French Chanson

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Charles Ives’ 1901 song, Elegie is haunting and hypnotic. Its gloomy and forlorn text, a setting of a poem by Louis Gallet, expresses the heartache of a narrator whose beloved is forever gone. The blue skies and birdsongs of springtime are replaced with late autumnal chill. The vocal line rises over an unrelenting rhythmic ostinato which begins to render time infinite and unmeasurable. French composer Jules Massenet wrote a song using the …

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Ives’ “Calcium Light Night”: Sounds of a Nineteenth Century Fraternity Party

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For years, “Calcium Night” was a boisterous tradition at Yale University, where Charles Ives was a student between 1894 and 1898. Students wishing to join a fraternity paraded around the campus, singing their fraternity’s song under the glow of a calcium light, the “limelight” used on theater stages before electricity. (The calcium light was so blinding that it was used during the American Civil War to illuminate artillery targets, and on navel …

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David Diamond’s String Quartet No. 3: From Adventure to Elegy

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Rooted in diatonic and modal harmony, much of the music of American composer David Diamond (1915-2005) unfolds as a dynamic weave of contrapuntal voices. It flows in a seemingly continuous stream, in which one phrase opens into the next without resolution. Listening to this music, we are forced to celebrate the magic of each fleeting moment. Diamond composed his String Quartet No. 3 in 1946, shortly after the end of the Second …

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