Twentieth Century

Steve Reich’s “Eight Lines” (Octet): Cantillation Meets Pulse

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Steve Reich’s Eight Lines is the exuberant, optimistic music of late twentieth century capitalist America. Composed in 1979 and originally titled Octet, it emerged from a world inundated with repetitive mass advertising and equally repetitive, slickly produced popular music. Built on minimalism’s satisfying, unrelenting pulse and sunny, jazz-infused repeating riffs, Eight Lines is a hypnotic musical joy ride which can alter our perception of time. We experience this music on a visceral level. Its rhythmic groove and swing …

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Hovhaness’ “Mysterious Mountain” (Symphony No. 2): Ode to the Eternal

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Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain, is the music of vast, majestic, metaphorical summits. Unfolding as an arc, its three movements do not take a linear, goal-oriented journey. Instead, they add up to a reverent and awe-inspiring celebration of the eternal. According to Hovhaness, the Symphony’s title does not refer to a specific mountain, but to “the whole idea of mountains.” He wrote, Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know …

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Copland’s “Music for the Theatre”: Jazzy American Vignettes

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In the 1920s, jazz entered the concert hall and infused new symphonic music with a brash, vibrant, and distinctly American sound. On February 12, 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was premiered in New York at a concert bearing the grandiose title, An Experiment in Modern Music. A year later, the young Aaron Copland returned home from studies in Paris with the eminent Nadia Boulanger and wrote the chamber orchestra suite, Music for the Theatre.  At moments, …

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Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet: The Choreography of CARION

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The word, bagatelle, translates as “a trifle, or something of little importance.” In music, the bagatelle refers to a piece which is brief, light, and unpretentious. Some of the most famous examples spring from the keyboard works of Couperin and Beethoven. Between 1951 and 1953, the Hungarian-Austrian composer, György Ligeti, composed a set of 11 bagatelles for piano, titled Musica ricercata. Each intricately constructed miniature centers around a specific pitch class (or …

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Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto: Brilliance, Structure and Symmetry

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Regarding his first two piano concertos, Béla Bartók wrote, I consider my First Piano Concerto a good composition, although its structure is a bit – indeed one might say very — difficult for both audience and orchestra. That is why a few years later…I composed the Piano Concerto No. 2 with fewer difficulties for the orchestra and more pleasing in its thematic material…Most of the themes in the piece are more popular and …

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Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin”: Paavo Järvi and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra

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Maurice Ravel completed the solo piano suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin, in 1917 amid the devastation of the First World War. The 17th century word, tombeau, refers to “a piece written as a memorial.” Ravel dedicated each of the suite’s movements to the memory of a friend who was lost in the war. Yet, there is nothing somber or elegiac about this music. The bleak, mechanized dehumanization of the twentieth century battlefield is left …

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Franco Donatoni’s “Hot”: Imaginary Jazz

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The young virtuoso saxophonist, Ryan Muncy, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last week. Critics noted his talent and capacity to “show off the instrument’s malleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement.” (The Chicago Reader) Before joining the International Contemporary Ensemble, he served as saxophonist and artistic director of the Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente. Muncy’s solo debut album, Hot, was released in 2013. The title track features a thrilling 1989 chamber …

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