John Adams (b. 1947)
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)

Developed in the early 1920’s, Dodecaphony, or 12-tone music, was the brain-child of Arnold Schoenberg, in which every aspect of the music's development was derived from a row of 12 different notes arranged in an order of the composer's choice. No note could be repeated until the other 11 in the scale had sounded. This ‘tone row’ served as the basis of the music's melody and harmony. This was meant to give composers a compositional frontier on which to build, as Schoenberg was convinced traditional musical ideas had exhausted all possibility for originality.
Though taken up by a number of composers in the intervening years, serialism didn’t take the musical world by the throat until the 1960’s, at which time no composer could be taken seriously unless he used it. The only trouble was that serialism was responsible for some pretty challenging music which led many to scratch their heads in bewilderment.

As a reaction against this massive wave of tone-rows, a group of young composers hoped to reverse the trend of confusing complexity by creating a music that relied on the simplest and most essential materials. This genre relied on a constantly repeating pattern of thick but traditional harmonies which changed just often enough to keep the listener from going bananas, but further kept up interest through the use of vibrant, fluid and often mesmerizing rhythms and interesting instrumental colors. This bare-bones, back-to-basics style came to be known by the astonishingly original title of – get ready for this – “Minimalism.” Though this new style might not seem to have been a permanent alternative, minimalism has managed to survive more than four decades.
As a second-generation minimalist, Massachusetts-born composer John Adams had the benefit of improving on the genre. Certainly the vibrant rhythms and late-Romantic-period harmonies still play an important role. But when one takes into account Adams’ sound dramatic sense, his ability to transcend the seeming limitations and get right to the heart of the music and his inspired use of American idioms and subject matter, we find a minimalism that is less idiosyncratic than its predecessors.

But before getting too wrapped up in all that, it should be mentioned that Adams has an amazing sense of humor. With titles like Road Movies, Slonimsky’s Earbox and John’s Book of Alleged Dances the composer is reminding us music-lovers that maybe we don’t have to be so serious all the time.

One of the works that combines this sense of humor with a keen musical understanding is Short Ride in a Fast Machine, written in 1986 for the opening concert of the Great Woods Festival in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Amid the constant tapping of a wood block and the occasional twittering piccolo, the work begins with a swirling fanfare-like section. Soon a tuba starts the machine on its inexorable ride inspiring ever-intensifying agitated outbursts from the orchestra. But this is only a short ride, remember, and a Coplandesque brass fanfare heralds the journey’s sudden halt. The composer’s own words sum up the piece best. He said, “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a really terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?”

 

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
The Fountains of Rome (1916)
Scored for 3 flutes and piccolo, 3 oboes and English horn, 3 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings, celeste, 2 harps and piano

Ottorino Respighi was an extremely prolific composer. His bulging catalogue included everything from opera to instrumental music, ranged in inspiration from the beauty of nature, to fairy tales and visual art, contained a variety of harmonic influences, and displayed a gift for orchestral color that was remarkable. He seemed to be able to conjure up the right mood for any scenario and could enchant even the most stolid listener. Yet despite this variety, Repighi today is known primarily for his “Roman Trilogy” which is made up of The Pines of Rome, Roman Festivals and, perhaps most popular of all, The Fountains of Rome.

Respighi wrote in the score, “In this symphonic poem the composer has endeavored to give expression to the sentiments and visions suggested to him by four of Rome’s fountains, contemplated at the hour in which their character is most in harmony with the surrounding landscape, or in which their beauty appears most impressive to the observer.” No doubt Respighi was as awestruck by the spectacle as every other visitor to Rome. In a letter to his wife Elsa he expressed his surprise and wondered “why no one has ever thought of making the fountains of Rome sing for they are, after all, the very voice of the city.” Years later, Elma herself commented that her husband had captured the glory of these works of art “before these dreadful automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and police sirens ruined it all.”

Respighi chose four of Rome’s most famous fountains. The suite begins with the Fountain of the Giulia Valley at Daybreak with a lush, pastoral sound, an oboe intoning a quasi-oriental melody. The inspiration for this sound came, no doubt, from Respighi’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. The composer further illuminated the scene by writing, “Droves of cattle pass and disappear in the fresh damp mists of a new Roman day.”

One of Bernini’s masterpieces is displayed next in The Triton Fountain in the Morning. A stirring horn call introduces the demi-god commanding the waves by blowing on his conch shell, and supported by four dolphins. Bells, swirling strings and winds, and magical glissandi depict “troops of naiads and tritons, who come running up, pursuing each other, and mingle in a frenzied dance between the jets of water.” These lines from Ovid’s Metamorphosis were the inspiration for the fountain:

Already Triton, at his call, appears
Above the waves; a Tyrian robe he wears;
And in his hand a crooked trumpet bears.
The soveraign bids him peaceful sounds inspire,
And give the waves the signal to retire.
His writhen shell he takes; whose narrow vent
Grows by degrees into a large extent,
Then gives it breath; the blast with doubling sound,
Runs the wide circuit of the world around:
The sun first heard it, in his early east,
And met the rattling ecchos in the west.
The waters, list'ning to the trumpet's roar,
Obey the summons, and forsake the shore.

Next we come upon the famous Trevi Fountain at Noon. This is the fabled fountain that inspired the film, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and the much talked about water-soaked embrace in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Here, Neptune himself is the inspiration in a chariot drawn by sea-horses, the majestic, exciting flow of this almost impressionistic water music sounding as “a train of sirens and tritons follows.”

The final scene is The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset. This gentle music is described by Respighi: “The air is full of the sound of tolling bells, of twittering birds, and rustling leaves. Then all melts away gently in the silence of the night.”

 

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14 (1830)
Scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion, strings and 2 harps

Like many great stories, this one started with a woman.

In 1827 a troupe of English actors came to Paris to perform some of their repertoire of Shakespeare plays. On the night the troupe first performed Hamlet, a young 24-year-old French composer named Hector Berlioz was in attendance, and he was enraptured by the spectacle he saw in front of him. It was not simply Shakespeare’s genius, an inspiration that would remain with him all his life, that struck him spellbound, but the young Irish actress who happened to be playing Ophelia in the performance. Her name, as Berlioz wasted no time in finding out, was Harriet Smithson, and the young man was immediately and hopelessly smitten.

After the performance Berlioz must have nearly sprinted backstage as he handed a note to the manager asking for an introduction. The impetuous, love-struck youth may very well have been dreaming of the lifetime of bliss he and Harriet would share when he found out to his horror, that Miss Smithson did not receive uninvited, unknown French composers to her dressing room. But this news seems only to have strengthened his resolve, and he persisted in his quest day after day, night after night to obtain an audience, only to be rebuffed each and every time. For more than two years Berlioz’s passion for Harriet remained constant, but she would not see him, she would not speak to him, she would not reply to his messages.

In 1830, Harriet and her fellow actors returned to England. It was almost more that Hector could bear. He wrote to a friend, “She is in London and yet I seem to feel her around me: I hear my heart pounding, and its beats drive me on like the piston strokes of a steam engine. Each muscle of my body trembles with pain...!” It seemed that it was not to be. But this unhappy dark cloud had a silver lining.
The same year that Harriet was apparently gone from his life forever, Berlioz wrote to a friend that he was at work on a symphony that would represent an “Episode from an artist’s life.” A “Fantastic symphony in five parts” that would follow the artist from his first love-struck glimpse of his ideal woman, to an opium-induced dream undertaken in the throes of agony over his unrequited feelings. There, on the pages of his manuscript, was the only place that Berlioz could express his longing for Harriet and his tortured existence without her.

Perhaps almost in desperation, he submitted the work as his fourth attempt to win the Prix de Rome, one of the most important and prestigious awards in muisc. The judges, notoriously indifferent to progressive composers, openly dismissed his previous attempts, but this time they could not ignore the power and originality of what they saw before them. Hector Berlioz won the prize. The Symphonie Fantastique was first performed in December of 1830, just before the composer left for 18 months of study in Rome, a benefit of the Prix de Rome. With this success, Berlioz could at least be assured that his deep feelings for Harriet were now immortalized in music, even if they could never be expressed in real life.

It must have seemed like a pronouncement from heaven, therefore, when at an 1832 performance of the Symphonie, Hector and Harriet finally met. After a courtship of about a year, they were married. Sadly, this was not to be the happy ending that Berlioz had dreamed of. Harriet was far from the vibrant, romantic and tragic heroines of Shakespeare’s plays, and soon the lovelight left his eyes. They were divorced in 1844, but some years later Franz Liszt, in a typically penetrating and heartfelt utterance, wrote to Berlioz, “She inspired you, you sang of her, her task was done.”

When the Symphonie Fantastique was first performed, it was truly a work like no other. Berlioz displays an uncanny ability to extract from the same orchestra his colleagues were using, sounds the like of which had never been imagined. His harmonies are strikingly original and boldly adventurous. Scarcely a moment of this symphony goes by without some unanticipated touch of brilliance, with stirring, sometimes shattering emotional impact. It’s no wonder this music profoundly influenced Liszt, Schumann, Wagner and countless others.

The composer was concerned that the symphony’s detailed subject matter and its innovative touches would confuse the listener. He offered the following program distributed to patrons at the first performance of the work.

Part One
REVERIES —PASSIONS
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted with that moral disease that a
well-known writer calls the vague des passions, sees for the first time a woman who
embodies all the charms of the ideal being he has imagined in his dreams, and he falls
desperately in love with her. Through an odd whim, whenever the beloved image
appears before the mind’s eye of the artist it is linked with a musical thought whose
character, passionate but at the same time noble and shy, he finds similar to the one he attributes to his beloved.
This melodic image and the model it reflects pursues him incessantly like a double
id`ee fixe. That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the
symphony, of the melody that begins the first Allegro. The passage from this state of
melancholy reverie, interrupted by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied
passion, with its movements of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its
religious consolations—this is the subject of the first movement.

Part Two
A BALL
The artist find himself in the most varied situations—in the midst of the tumult of a
party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beauties of nature; but everywhere, in
town, in the country, the beloved image appears before him and disturbs his peace of
mind.

Part Three
SCENE IN THE COUNTRY
Finding himself one evening in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds
piping a ranz des vaches in dialogue. This pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling
of the trees gently brushed by the wind, the hopes he has recently found some reason
to entertain—all concur in affording his heart an unaccustomed calm, and in giving a
more cheerful color to his ideas. He reflects upon his isolation: he hopes that his
loneliness will soon be over. —But what if she were deceiving him!—This mingling
of hope and fear, these ideas of happiness disturbed by black presentiments, form the
subject of the Adagio. At the end one of the shepherds again takes up the ranz des
vaches: the other no longer replies.—Distant sound of thunder—loneliness—silence.

Part Four
MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD
Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The
dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by
the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is
condemned and led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution. The
procession moves forward to the sound of a march that is now somber and fierce, now
brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled noise of heavy steps gives way without
transition to the noisiest clamor. At the end of the march the first four measures of the
id`ee fixe reappear, like a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five
DREAM OF A WITCHES’ SABBATH
He sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers,
monsters of every kind, come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts
of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved’s melody
appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness: it is no more than a
dance tune, mean, trivial, and grotesque: it is she, coming to join the sabbath.—A roar
of joy at her arrival.—She takes part in the devilish orgy.—Funeral knell, burlesque
parody of the Dies irae, sabbath round-dance. The sabbath round and the Dies irae
combined.