Twentieth Century

Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments: Enter Neoclassicism

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Igor Stravinsky’s 1923 Octet for wind instruments is a playful drama filled with zany, spirited voices. Its comic “characters” take the stage with endearing exuberance and sincerity. With witty allusions to Baroque and Classical form, it represents the beginning of Stravinsky’s dry, pared-down neoclassical period. When this piece was premiered at the Paris Opera in October, 1923, it was met with bewilderment and what Jean Cocteau called, “a scandal du silence.” Among the …

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Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”: Desires and Dreams

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The flute’s gentle siren call emerges, solitary and alluring. It wanders freely from C-sharp down to G-natural and back again, drifting hazily into our consciousness, and beckoning us forward with quiet, seductive power. This is how we enter the sensuous dreamscape of Claude Debussy’s colorful and fleeting 1894 tone poem, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Debussy’s inspiration arose from a poem by the French symbolist, Stéphane Mallarmé. …

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Debussy and the “Tristan Chord”

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On Monday, we heard the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a work which opened the door to the dissolution of tonality and the atonal sound world of the twentieth century. One composer who was profoundly influenced by this music was the young Claude Debussy. In 1887, Debussy called Tristan und Isolde “the most beautiful thing I know, from the point of view of the profundity of the emotion.” Yet, in a …

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Poulenc’s Flute Sonata: Clara Andrada de la Calle in Concert

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Francis Poulenc wrote his Sonate pour flûte et piano in 1957 in response to a commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation at the U.S. Library of Congress. The work is dedicated to the memory of Coolidge, one of the twentieth century’s greatest champions of chamber music. A sense of restless melancholy pervades the first movement (Allegretto malincolico) of Poulenc’s Sonata. It opens with an expansive melody filled with delightfully unexpected twists …

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“Clocks and Clouds”: György Ligeti’s Sonic Dreamscape

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In his 1966 essay, On Clocks and Clouds, the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper considers a world poised between two opposing processes. “Clocks” are neatly ordered systems that can be measured and solved through reduction. “Clouds” are “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The essay’s title took on poetic significance for the Hungarian-Austrian composer, György Ligeti (1923-2006), inspiring the 1973 tone poem, Clocks and Clouds. Ligeti wrote, I liked Popper’s title and it awakened …

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“Dirge for Two Veterans” from Kurt Weill’s “Four Walt Whitman Songs”

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At the end of June in 1913, 53,407 veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg from both sides of the American Civil War returned to the hallowed ground in south central Pennsylvania where they fought. They were there to observe the 50th anniversary of the war’s bloodiest battle. The peaceful reunion was marked by an extraordinary sense of Union–Confederate camaraderie, as the photograph above illustrates. Similarly, the journalist John Nichols observes that Walt Whitman’s 1867 …

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Vaughan Williams’ “In the Fen Country”: A Symphonic Impression

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The Fens are a bleak, desolate, and relentlessly flat marshland found in East Anglia on the east coast of England. They resemble a slice of the Netherlands, transported from the other side of the North Sea. Their austere mystery inspired Graham Swift in his 1983 novel, Waterland, to ask, “what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates …

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