Unique Concertos

By Georg Predota, Interlude

Works by Milhaud, Fleck, Van de Vate, O’Boyle, and Adams

Darius Milhaud: Concerto for Percussion and Small Orchestra

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud writes, “I have always been very interested in percussion problems. In the Choéphores and in L’homme et son désir I used massive percussion. After the audition of Choéphores in Brussels, an excellent kettledrummer, Theo Coutelier, who had a percussion class in Schaerbeek near Brussels, asked me if I would like to write a concerto for a single percussion performer. The idea appealed to me, and this is how I came to compose the concerto. The school at Schaerbeek had only a few orchestral musicians, two flutes, two clarinets, one trumpet, one trombone, and strings.” Composed in Paris between 1929 and 1930, “jazz was enjoying a decisive influence on my musical composition. I wanted to avoid at all cost the thought that anyone might think of this work in a jazz way. I therefore stressed the rough and dramatic part of the piece. This was also why I did not write a cadence and always refused that anyone adds one.”

Milhaud’s Concerto for Percussion and Small Orchestra is a benchmark in the world of percussion. It is the first of its kind to utilize a multi-percussion setup that includes over twenty wood, metal, and membrane instruments performed by one player. Eager to avoid any references to the newly popular jazz genre, Milhaud dabbled in polytonality. If you listen carefully, you can hear the tonalities of C major, A minor, A major, and C-sharp minor sounding simultaneously. The concerto is cast in two sections titled “rude et dramatique”, and “modere.” The first features bi-tonal harmonies in the orchestra, while the second explores much more lyrical regions. The concert premiered at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1930. 

Béla Fleck: Juno Concerto

Béla Fleck

Béla Anton Leoš Fleck, born in New York City in 1958, was named after his father’s favorite composers: Bartók, Webern, and Janáček. He played guitar in High School and took an interest in the French horn. However, when his grandfather brought home a secondhand banjo, it became an overwhelming obsession. The modern banjo—a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a circular resonator—is thought to have been derived from instruments used in the Caribbean and brought there from West Africa. Early instruments had a varying number of strings and used a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. The banjo is often associated with folk and country music, and it “occupied a central place in African-American traditional music and the folk culture of the rural South.” Fleck was always drawn to the instrument’s Bluegrass roots, and he became the world’s leading exponent of the banjo. In the process, Fleck has won at least 14 Grammy awards and produced an award-winning documentary exploring the banjo’s African roots.

A critic wrote, “Béla Fleck has taken banjo playing to some very unlikely places—not just bluegrass and country and “newgrass,” but also into jazz and the classical concerto.” To be sure, Fleck’s artistic pursuits have explored an astonishing variety of musical styles and traditions. And that includes the use of the banjo as a solo instrument together with a symphony orchestra. The “Juno Concerto” is actually Fleck’s second banjo concerto, and it was specifically written for his young son. The work unfolds in the customary 3 movements and features many elements expected in a concerto, including a number of dazzling cadenzas. A critic wrote, “the grandiose interplay between banjo and orchestra makes you wonder why banjos and orchestras aren’t sharing stages all the time.” 

Nancy Van de Vate: Harp Concerto

Nancy Van de Vate

In the early 1970s, American composer Nancy Van de Vate explored the reasons why compositions by women simply did not appear on records. Among the reasons she cited were “a lack of university teaching positions held by or available to women, the lack of sufficient numbers of performances of their works, and the lack of commissions and prizes awarded to women.” In order to improve the situation, Van de Vate founded the “International League of Women Composers” to create and expand opportunities for women composers of music. That organization grew rapidly, and it evolved into the “International Alliance for Women in Music.” It currently “represents a diverse spectrum of creative specialization across genres within the music field and include composers, orchestrators, sound ecologists, performers, conductors, interdisciplinary artists, recording engineers, producers, musicologists, music librarians, theorists, writers, publishers, historian, and educators.”

Nancy Van de Vate also discovered that conventional titles like symphony, sonata, and concerto drew more attention in composition competitions requiring anonymous submissions. Judges and panelists were influenced by the titles ascribed to particular works, and many of her own compositions, therefore, use traditional titles. Her large orchestral works, however, have very descriptive titles such as “Journeys,” “Dark Nebulae,” and “Chernobyl.” Her Harp Concerto dates from 1996 and was first performed on 21 June 1998 with the Moravian Philharmonic in Olomouc. The harp, it seems, was rediscovered in the 20th century, and together with Ginastera, Glière, Jongen, Milhaud, Jolivet, Rautavaara, Rodrigo, and Villa-Lobos, Van de Vate contributed to a growing repertoire for that instrument in the concerto genre. 

Sean O’Boyle/William Barton: Concerto for Didgeridoo

Australian didgeridoos

The didgeridoo, called by different names in various cultures, is a wooden drone pipe played with varying techniques in a number of Australian Aboriginal cultures. While the historical origin of the instrument is uncertain, Aboriginal mythology ascribed it to the power of creating dreams. The instrument is generally fashioned from the termite-hollowed trunks or branches of a number of trees. The sound of the didgeridoo is considered the voice of the ancestral spirit of that tree, and it is always stored upright to keep the ancestral spirit safe. The didgeridoo can produce a blown fundamental pitch “and several harmonics above the fundamental.” Basically, a performer does not blow air into the instrument. The distinctive buzzing tone is produced by the continual buzzing of the lips, with the shape of the mouth, tongue, cheeks, chin, and teeth influencing the tone quality. Didgeridoo performers have perfected the technique of circular breathing, “in which the player reserves small amounts of air in the cheeks or mouth while blowing. This allows the player to snatch frequent small breaths through the nose while simultaneously continuing the drone pitch by expelling the reserved air.”

William Barton © Keith Saunders

The buzzing sound of the didgeridoo has become an easily recognizable icon of Aboriginal Australia. Contemporary bands and culturally hybrid world music groups have adopted that colorful instrument, and a number of Australian composers have used the instrument in chamber works. In addition, the legendary player William Barton collaborated with Sean O’Boyle to bring the didgeridoo into the concert hall. The work showcases the incredible expressive power of the instrument, and Barton writes, “The didgeridoo is a language. It is a speaking language. And like any language, it’s something that you’ve got to learn over many months and many years. It’s got to be a part of you and what you do.” 

John Adams: Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra

Walt Disney Concert Hall

To celebrate the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2002, then LA Phil’s music director Esa-Pekka Salonen approached John Adams for a work to inaugurate the venue. When Adams looked at the artist’s rendition of the unfinished building, he was struck “by the sweeping, silver-toned clouds and sails of its exterior, and its warm and inviting public spaces.” In his composition, Adams wanted to “reflect the experience of those who, like me, were not born here and for whom the arrival on this side of the continent had both a spiritual and physical impact.” Originally, Adams was looking to incorporate a spoken part for the narrator, and searching for a suitable California-based text, discovered Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur. That novel celebrates the California spirit, and Adams “realized that what I had to say was something that could only be expressed in music.”

John Adams and Tracy Silverman

During the genesis of his Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra, Adams heard violinist Tracy Silverman perform in a jazz club. “When I heard Tracy play,” he writes, “I was reminded that in almost all cultures other than the European classical one, the real meaning of the music is in between the notes. The slide, the portamento, and the “blue note” all are essential to the emotional expression… Tracy’s manner of playing was a fusion of styles that showed a deep knowledge of a variety of musical traditions.” After collaborating with Silverman, Adams wrote a part for electric violin “that evokes the feeling of free improvisation while the utmost detail is paid to both solo and instrumental parts, all written out in precise notation.” For Adams, The Dharma at Big Sur expresses the “so-called shock of recognition, when one reaches the edge of the continental land mass… For a newcomer, the first exposure produces a visceral effect of great emotional complexity. I wanted to compose a piece that embodied the feeling of being on the West Coast, literally standing on the precipice overlooking the geographic shelf with the ocean extending far out into the horizon.”

Symphony guide: Webern's op 21

This article is more than 10 years old

In this luminous, miniature symphony, time goes backwards as well as forwards. It's an extraordinary work.

The symphonic principle, as we've been discovering, can take in a gigantic range of interpretations.

Anton Webern's Symphony, Op 21 for strings (without double-basses), harp, clarinet, bass clarinet, and two horns is a piece that takes the idea of symphonic self-referentiality to an intensely concentrated extreme, and it's so focused in its choice of notes and precise disposition of rhythm and texture, that the result is a distilled expression and extension of symphonic logic into every dimension of music that's pretty well unparalleled in the story of the symphony. The paradox is that this apparently tiny, pocket-sized piece (its full score is written on just 16 pages), does things with the most important elements of all, our old friends musical space and time, that much grander symphonies take ten times as long to achieve. And Webern's Symphony manages something even more remarkable: the whole academic discourse of score-based musical analysis is (or was) based on proving how "organic" and "logical" symphonic structures can be, supposedly endowing Beethoven's music, say, with the objective power and glory of natural phenomena. But Webern's little symphony is probably the most genuinely "organic" symphony ever composed, in the sense of creating networks of connections between its smallest scales and its largest dimensions, so that there's a symbiotic relationship between the way every fragment of motive and melody sounds and the shape of the whole symphony. That all-pervasive connectivity, this "striving for unity", as Webern put it, was inspired by his love of nature (Webern was a keen alpinist); as he said, referring to Goethe's idea of the "Urpflanze" - the ur-plant: "the root is really nothing other than the stalk, the stalk nothing other than the leaf, the leaf again nothing other than the blossom: variations of the same idea." 

Composed in 1928, the Symphony is in two movements, a two-part first movement, with both halves repeated, which is based on the idea of complex species of canon, in which the same, or similar, musical material is played by different combinations of instruments. (What's a canon? Think of a round such as London's Burning only much, much more complicated, in this case...) Webern told Schoenberg that this movement lasted 15 minutes; in fact, it's more like seven in performance. The second movement is a three-minute set of variations on an 11-bar theme, which crams in as much expressivity as the variation-based finale of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, but on a somewhat more concentrated scale!  Now, if you want to delve into the canonic complexities of Webern's symphony, or the subtleties of the way it manipulates its 12-tone row, I refer you to composer George Benjamin's essay on the Symphony, as well as his thoughts on the piece in a collection of essays published for Alexander Goehr's 70th birthday. George describes the idea of the canon in the first movement: "The simultaneous ramifications on past, present, and future inherent in any one creative decision provide a sustaining context, the sequential nature of canon literally pulling the music forwards, devouring empty manuscript paper ahead". But he finds poetry in all this constructivism: this first movement of the Symphony seems "weightless - a complex, crystal-like object hovering in space". And that's the greatest connection of all: between the way this music is made, and the sounds it makes.

Benjamin's description beautifully captures the sense of stasis in this first movement of the Symphony, the uncanny feeling that time is not moving like an unstoppable arrow, but rather softly expanding and exploding in all directions, like the growth of a crystal - or, since it's nearly Christmas, a snowflake. The limpid clarity of the music, the spaces and silences around the musical material in the orchestration, the fact that Webern makes it impossible for you to miss a single note, and that each pitch has its own definite meaning and expression - it's all part of the articulation of the structure of the music. Every line you're hearing is a usually symmetrical fragment of the grander design of the 12-note row - itself symmetrically constructed - that the whole piece is based on. You literally hear time going backwards as well as forwards in this music, since Webern's canons play with the fact that the second six notes of the row are a transposed version of the first six, played backwards, and there are also bigger symmetries at work, to do with the shapes of both halves of the movement.

Keeping up? Not sure I am, but that's not the point! Rather, the thing is that all of this structural unity creates a symphonic form that sounds neither completely predictable nor totally random. When you listen to the Symphony, you're taken in by the centripetal concentration of the music, and you're set out on a meditative journey in the first movement into a vortex of almost infinite musical connectivity. This is an emotionally moving experience, too, in the range of expression Webern conjures, which includes heightened, violent lyricism as well as pointillist brilliance.

The connections continue in the Variations movement, in which the second half of each tiny variation - from a march to a moto perpetuo, from a lyrical reflection to an enigmatic coda - contains the same notes as the first half, played backwards, and in which the whole movement pivots around its exact middle point, the 4th variation. Webern himself was pretty thrilled with what he'd discovered in this piece: "Greater coherence cannot be achieved. Not even the Netherlanders [the Renaissance polyphonists like Ockeghem, whose music Webern had intensely studied] have managed this … The entire movement thus represents in itself a double canon with retrograde motion … What you see here (retrograde, canon, etc. - it is always the same) is not to be thought os as 'Kunststückerln' [artistic tricks] - that would be ridiculous! As many connections as possible should be created, and you will have to admit that there are many connections here!"

But I think George Benjamin again gets closer to what it's like to listen to this Symphony: "Paradoxically, this product of hermetic constructivism seems infused with intense emotion, that emotion evenly diffused across the whole surface of the music. Gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classical and Romantic music; in its place a world of rotations and reflections, opening myriad paths for the listener to trace through textures of luminous clarity yet beguiling ambiguity." 

Anton Webern: “Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing”

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Anton Webern

Throughout his short life—having been accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945—the music of Anton Webern (1883-1945) was almost totally unknown. With the end of WWII, however, the musical world was in need of revitalization and eagerly adopted Webern’s compositional style. His music began to serve as an often-imitated model, and Igor Stravinsky accessed Webern’s influence in 1960. “Of course the entire world had to imitate him, and of course it would fail miserably. Webern was simply too original, too purely himself to worry about the limits of his appeal. Nothing composed since can diminish his strength nor stale his perfection.” The cool and constructive side of Webern’s music, in which economy and extreme concentration reign supreme, provided the stimulus for young composers gathered for holiday courses in new music in the German city of Darmstadt. Hailed as the father of a completely fresh musical movement, Webern’s ideas spawned musical experimentations throughout the world. Webern’s music is inherently poetic, and his uncompromising determination to pursue a new aesthetic established a novel musical syntax entirely his own.

Anton Webern, 1912

One of the great innovative voices of 20th century music, Anton Webern was born in Vienna. His father was a mining engineer, and his mother a competent pianist and accomplished singer. His father’s career brought the family to the provincial capitals of Graz and Klagenfurt, where Webern learned the rudiments of music theory and took piano lessons. He also took cello lessons and played in the local orchestra.

Sketch of Webern

His first compositions, 2 Pieces for Cello and Piano, and several songs date from this period. After graduation, his father rewarded him with a trip to Bayreuth and the operas of Wagner left a deep impression on the young musician. In 1902, Weber matriculated at the University of Vienna, studying musicology under Guido Adler and eventually submitting a dissertation on the Dutch composer Heinrich Isaac. Meanwhile in 1904, Webern became a student of Arnold Schoenberg at the University of Vienna. He progressed quickly under Schoenberg’s tutelage, and he became close friends with fellow student Alban Berg.

Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, Anton Webern and Erwin Stein

Webern’s formal study with Schoenberg ended in 1908, and although he only composed the first two opus numbers during his time of apprenticeship, all of Webern’s subsequent works show a clear influence and deep reverence for Schoenberg. In the years following their apprenticeship, both Berg and Webern worked for Schoenberg during this crucial time in the master’s creative life. They copied parts, made piano reductions and produced numerous arrangements for both his private and professional life. Between 1908 and 1913, Webern took up short-lived posts as coach and conductor, but he loathed the theatre routine and preferred to focus on his creative work. His compositions had been increasingly atonal, but with his settings of poetry by Stefan George, Webern embarked on a novel stylistic direction. Extreme conciseness of form is buttressed by melodic and harmonic fragmentation, wide intervallic leaps, complex cross-rhythms, unusual use of dissonance and timbre resulting in shimmering and quickly changing tone colors.

Alban Berg and Anton Webern

Webern briefly served during World War I but was discharged because of poor eyesight. Unable to secure an academic appointment, he settled on the outskirts of Vienna and began to devote his time to private teaching, conducting and composition. When Schoenberg formulated the 12-tone method of composition, Webern quickly adopted the system and wrote to Berg, “12-tone composition is for me now a completely clear procedure.” He would employ the serial technique for all further compositions, “and developed it with severe consistency to its most extreme potential.”

Anton Webern, ca 1940

Webern was not politically active, but he fell victim to the rising tide of right-wing nationalism. Schoenberg left Europe in 1933, and with Berg’s death in 1935 Webern’s isolation was complete. He music was branded “degenerate art” and performances and publications banned in Germany and Austria. When his son Peter was killed during military service in 1945, Webern and his wife fled to the town of Mittersill in the mountains near Salzburg. Four months after the war had ended, Webern was shot while smoking a cigar on the veranda of his daughter’s house, indirectly the victim of his son-in-law’s black market activities. Webern’s music, to quote the scholar Julian Johnson, “is characterized by an ungraspability of surface, with melodic outlines distributed in a texture of pointillist color, timbre and angularity. Below this seemingly fractured surface, however, his music is organized strictly in accordance with contrapuntal rules that provide the structural frame. For a new generation of composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Webern’s music “was the cornerstone and model for an entirely new epoch.”