Twentieth Century

Samuel Barber’s “Let Down the Bars, O Death”: Conspirare

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It was during the summer of 1936 that Samuel Barber composed the String Quartet that would give rise to the iconic Adagio for Strings. During the same summer, Barber created an a cappella choral setting of Emily Dickinson’s 1891 poem, Let Down the Bars, O Death. It unfolds as a somber, homophonic chorale. As with the Adagio, it reaches upwards in search of a searing climax. When the poem’s first line returns, the hushed opening phrase is transformed …

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Janáček’s “In the Mists”: Four Coloristic Pieces for Solo Piano

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In the Mists is a cycle of four solo piano pieces, written in 1912 by the Czech composer, Leoš Janáček (1854-1928). The pieces are intimate, fleeting, and tinged with melancholy. Vivid impressionistic colors blend with elements of Moravian folk music. They reveal psychological “mists,” perhaps of a composer who suffered the tragic death of his daughter. Harmonically, they inhabit distant, “misty” keys with five and six flats. Fluidly changing meters suggest music which …

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David Diamond’s “Rounds for String Orchestra”: Freedom and Adventure

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In 1944, the American composer David Diamond (1915-2005) received a commission from Dimitri Mitropoulos with a simple and specific instruction. “These are distressing times,” he wrote. “Most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.” Mitropoulos, then principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, had become disillusioned with the stream of thorny, “distressing” twelve-tone pieces which crossed his desk. Diamond’s response was the jubilant, three-movement Rounds for String Orchestra. It remains …

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Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto: Straddling the Tonal Precipice

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Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, Op. 38 is lushly cinematic. It is an exhilarating drama between two dueling titans—the brazen, summit-scaling solo piano and the twentieth century orchestra, with its vast sonic power. The Concerto’s expansive Neo-Romantic lines straddle the precipice between tonality and serialism. The music never loses its tonal bearings, yet it often ventures far into a tumultuous chromatic sea. The legendary American music publisher G. Schirmer commissioned Barber to write the …

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Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites”: “Salve Regina,” An Ode to Martyrs

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Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, tells the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, sixteen Carmelite nuns who were executed at the guillotine during the final days of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Driven from their convent and arrested, the nuns elected to take a vow of martyrdom rather than renounce their vocation. One of opera’s principal tragic heroines is Blanche de la Force, a woman from an aristocratic family who enters …

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Remembering Stanley Drucker

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The legendary clarinetist Stanley Drucker passed away on December 19. He was 93. Born in Brooklyn, Drucker entered the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 15, but left after a year to accept a position with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. He went on to become principal clarinetist of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1948, Drucker joined the New York Philharmonic. His nearly five-decade-long tenure as principal clarinetist of the New York …

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The Bells of Vienna/Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Christmas Carols”

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Today’s post celebrates the memory of Karl Haas, the German-American musicologist and host of the long-running radio program, Adventures in Good Music. One of the program’s most popular episodes, The Story of the Bells, aired for many years on Christmas Eve. It documented the varied sounds of church bells across Europe and the Middle East. In Haas’ words, “It’s an awesome sound…a sound which leaves no room for human voices.” To continue this tradition, …

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