Twentieth Century

Remembering Oliver Knussen

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Oliver Knussen, the influential British composer, conductor, and teacher passed away last Sunday. He was 66. As a conductor and teacher, Knussen will be remembered for his associations with Tanglewood (where he served as head of contemporary music activities between 1986 and 1993), the Aldeburgh Festival, the London Sinfonietta, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, among other organizations. In a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle interview, Knussen talked about his life in music, including his aversion to composing up against deadlines. …

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Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony: “Turning Space Upside Down”

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It begins with a distant drumbeat in the night- a barely-audible triple-beat timpani summons. Then, a strangely amorphous scale in the brooding low strings rises out of the darkness. A vague remembrance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde blends into a gradually-shifting kaleidoscope of veiled colors. Icy dissonance opens out into a vast, magnificent, sonic expanse. These are the first, primal seconds of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony. Actually, we don’t perceive this piece as having a …

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George Rochberg at 100

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Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of American composer George Rochberg (1918-2005). An influential composition teacher and chairman of the music department at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, Rochberg was originally an exponent of serialism and twelve-tone techniques. The turbulent Symphony No. 2, completed in 1956 and premiered by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, is a prominent example of Rochberg’s atonal period. In the mid 1960s, following the tragic death of his …

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A William Schuman Fourth

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In celebration of Independence Day, here is Chester, the final movement of American composer William Schuman’s 1956 New England Triptych. It’s a setting of one of the most famous hymn tunes of William Billings (1746-1800), America’s first choral composer. Originating in Billings’ 1770 songbook, The New England Psalm Singer, Chester became a marching song for the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Schuman’s Chester opens with a statement of the simple hymn melody before the music erupts into a spirited, celebratory …

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Britten’s “Peter Grimes”: The Individual Against the Crowd

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Benjamin Britten’s 1945 tragic opera, Peter Grimes, is a dark story of isolation and alienation- the solitary social outcast set against the collective insanity and “mob rule” of the crowd. For the composer, a homosexual, staunch pacifist, and conscientious objector during the Second World War, it was a subject very close to my heart — the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual. The …

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Ned Rorem’s “Early in the Morning”

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Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist. -Ned Rorem Early in the Morning, an art song by American composer Ned Rorem (b. 1923), is filled with wistful nostalgia. The text, by the poet Robert Hillyer, offers a distant memory of a far-off summer morning. Both the words and the music are shrouded in a dreamlike haze. We’re presented with the ephemeral- sights and smells of the morning- …

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A Sublime Moment from Khachaturian’s “Spartacus”

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Today marks the 115th anniversary of the birth of the Soviet Armenian composer, Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978). In celebration, let’s listen to a lushly beautiful excerpt from the second act of Khachaturian’s 1954 ballet, Spartacus. This soaring adagio occurs at the moment when the Thracian king, Spartacus, and his wife, Phrygia, celebrate their newfound freedom from captivity. This music is filled with the “exotic” modal scales of Armenian folk music. For example, listen to the clarinet’s statement around …

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