Twentieth Century

Vaughan Williams’ “Sancta Civitas”: An Oratorio of Revelation

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In a 1988 biography, Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote that her husband “was an atheist during his later years at Charterhouse and at Cambridge, though he later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian.” Ironically, it was Ralph Vaughan Williams who helped the Anglican Church to compile, through the The English Hymnal of 1906, “a collection of the best hymns in the English language.” For Vaughan Williams, music inhabited the …

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Vaughan Williams’ “Three Shakespeare Songs”: The Stuff of Dreams

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Following the 1948 premiere of his Sixth Symphony, Ralph Vaughan Williams was asked to provide the “meaning” of the work’s bleak, apocalyptic closing Epilogue. For many listeners, the music suggested a chilling portrait of a world decimated by nuclear war. The composer who had so vividly captured the pastoral glory of “England’s green and pleasant land” in earlier pieces, now seemed to deliver only alienation from nature in the face of twentieth …

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Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony: Scream of the Apocalypse

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Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony begins with an apocalyptic scream. It comes in the form of three pitches (F, G, and A-flat) which rise with desperation in octaves before plunging into a hellish, rumbling inferno. The original Greek translation of the word, “symphony,” suggests the harmonization of disparate elements. Yet, this is music of destabilization, disintegration, and alienation. Punctuated by tumultuous shrieks in the strings and ferocious brass jabs, these terrifying opening …

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Respighi’s “The Birds”: A Technicolor Homage to the Baroque

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From Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, composers have been drawn to the idyllic sounds of bird calls echoing in the forest. These sounds are celebrated in shimmering sonic technicolor in Ottorino Respighi’s 1928 suite for small orchestra, The Birds (Gli uccelli). In the five-movement suite, Respighi transcribed four distinct bird songs into musical notation, and simultaneously paid homage to existing music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The intimate classical orchestra is augmented by …

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Adventures in Fourths: Music of Debussy, Bartók, and Gershwin

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The Greek name for the interval of the perfect fourth was diatessaron. Translating as “across four,” it is a word which brings to mind Pythagorean harmonic ratios. Wide open sonorities that suggest neither major nor minor, perfect fourths and fifths became prevalent in the early medieval polyphony of composers such as Léonin and Pérotin. In the piano pieces below, we hear twentieth century composers exploiting the perfect fourth for purely expressive reasons. Here are three …

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Ligeti’s “Lontano”: Harmonic Alchemy

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In Italian, Lontano means, “in the distance.” This is the title of a haunting orchestral dreamscape, written by the avant-garde Hungarian-Austrian composer, György Ligeti, in 1967. The piece unfolds in vast sonic waves. Tone clusters form and dissipate in a gradually shifting kaleidoscope of color. Terrifying dream images emerge and dissolve. Ligeti drew parallels between Lontano and parts of Bruckner’s majestically unfolding Eighth Symphony. In his program notes, he offered a technical description of the work’s …

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Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony: An Expression of Nature’s Divine Logic

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Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major begins with the breadth and majesty of a vast, unfolding Nordic landscape. A mystical horn call rises and falls in an expansive arc, which opens the door to all that follows. Picked up by the woodwinds, the motif begins to fragment, spin, and develop with a sense of self-organizing inevitability. In his famous meeting with Gustav Mahler, Sibelius expressed admiration for the symphony’s “style and …

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