Two Rivers Brass Quintet - Concert on the Lawn: June 25, 2017

Eric Ewazen

(Born in Cleveland, Ohio on March 1, 1954)

A Western Fanfare

Ewazen is one America’s finest living composers. He studied composition with a handful of the 20th Century’s most important composers (Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt and Gunther Schuller, to name a few) at the Eastman School of Music and the Julliard School. He has remained an important figure in the New York City scene and teaches composition at Julliard.

Ewazen began writing more and more for brass instruments from the 1990’s onwards, and many of his commissions feature brass. “A Western Fanfare” is one such commission. It was requested by the Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara, California) in 1997 for their 50th Anniversary. Ewazen responded with a fanfare for a brass orchestra and percussion, which he soon afterwards arranged for brass quintet. It’s meant to be celebratory, and it bursts with energy and pride. It’s also extremely fun and a bit devilish to perform.

Surprisingly, perhaps, for a 20th to 21st Century composer, Ewazen is unregretful in his tonal approach to music because, as he says, it’s “the language that speaks to me.” But tonality also speaks wonderfully to audiences and performers, and he believes that when a performer gets excited about a piece of music, he or she will really “sell” it to the audience. “A Western Fanfare” is one of those kinds of pieces: exciting, lyrical and tonal, wonderfully “brassy” and fresh. This concert’s performers will have no trouble “selling” it and listeners will want to hear more of Ewazen’s great pieces.

Anonymous

Sonata from “Die Bankelsangerlieder” (c. 1684, Germany)

As composer Eric Ewazen pointed out in a 1994 interview, the Renaissance period witnessed the flourishing of works composed for brass instruments. Most notable was the antiphonal music of Giovanni Gabrieli (c.1553-6 – 1612) in Italy, and as the Renaissance spread throughout Europe, so did its musical designs. Near the end of this epoch in the late 17th Century, Germany was at its own Renaissance height and a group of unattributed vocal works called “Die Bankelsangerlieder” was published. At the very end of the collection was this “Sonata” scored for five brass instruments.

The Renaissance term “bankelsanger” referred to a travelling singer, otherwise known as a “troubadour” in Renaissance France, who made his living by standing on a bench in taverns and singing for his supper. The term “Sonata” came from the Italian word “sonare” which simply meant “to sound” or “play” – a precursor form to what became the fugue and later the classical sonata form we know from Mozart and Haydn. The anonymous Sonata that’s included in today’s program is a remarkable piece because of its energy and brass sonorities. Notable also is its within-group antiphonal playing that sounds like a “Call and Response” – a technique that clearly prefigures the fugues soon to come in the Baroque era. This Sonata is timeless, too, in its beauty. Indeed, it has remained so popular that most listeners have probably heard it before without knowing its title, and yet it never grows old for performers or listeners alike.

Leonard Bernstein

(Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918; died in New York City in 1990)

Selections from West Side Story/arranged by Jack Gale

1. Prologue

2. Something’s Comin’

3. Maria

4. Tonight

5. America

6. I Feel Pretty

7. Somewhere

Like many composers before him – Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Gounod and Berlioz, just to name some of the more famous – the American composer Leonard Bernstein was attracted to Shakespeare’s tale of tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Bernstein’s first musical vision for this tragedy of “star-cross’d lovers” began by imagining the feuding parties as Catholics and Jews in the lower East side of New York’s Manhattan during Passover and Easter. It then eventually morphed into a musical focused on Puerto Rican and Anglo street gangs in the city’s upper West Side. This contemporary scenario was perfectly suited for Shakespeare’s tale of woe, and Bernstein hoped it would awaken the public’s awareness to what some called New York City’s “War zone” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

But even without the “story,” the music to West Side Story is undeniably Bernstein’s masterpiece. In the honored tradition of classical composing from Mozart to Mahler, motives and just a few themes are the driving force for the whole work, and they give the music an extraordinary cohesiveness. That and Bernstein’s uncanny ability to absorb musical genres, which is heard in the jazz and Latin-feel that pervades the score, make the work both contemporary and ageless, from the swinging coolness in the “Prologue” to the popping, ethnic cross-rhythms in “America.” Bernstein’s greatest strdength, though, was his understanding that a beautiful tune always wins the day, and in this work he magically created some of America’s most cherished songs. Many of these songs are heard in our program’s excellent brass quintet arrangement: “Maria,” “Tonight” and a wonderful brass-chorale rendition of “Somewhere.”

John Cheetham

(Born in Taos, New Mexico in 1939)

Scherzo

Cheetham was born and raised in America’s Midwest, and he has essentially remained there all of his life, save for PhD studies at the University of Washington. He served as Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Missouri (Columbia) from 1969 – 2000. Because of this background, he might be even more “American” than Aaron Copland (Copeland was long considered the Dean of American composers until his death but he was actually more of a “New York city boy” than Cheetham). And Cheetham’s music reflects his middle-America sentiments – libertarian, unapologetically conservative, singable melodies and bracing rhythms. Such is his Scherzo for brass quintet.

Like composer Eric Ewazen, Cheetham writes equally for the performer as well as the listener. His Scherzo is quick-paced and catchy, and is thorny to play with its changing meters and rhythms. However, the musical delights are very much worth the performers’ effort. The main tune is something you’ll find yourself humming or whistling on the way home from the concert; as Cheetam says, “a good tune goes a long way.” In a recent e-mail exchange with Cheetham, he described his Scherzo as follows:

“[The Scherzo] was written in 1962 during my senior year at the University of New Mexico for a faculty quintet teaching at a UNM summer music camp. Through no fault of my own, it immediately became popular and was published and recorded by 1964. Its simple ternary design and tuneful melodies make it easily accessible.”

Johann Sebastian Bach

(Born in Eisenach, Germany in 1685; died in Leipzig, Germany in 1750)

Contrapunctus IX, “alla duodecima,”
from The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080

As Bach entered the last decade of his life, he renewed his interest in keyboard music and especially counterpoint, or the way in which fugues are made and how musical themes can be manipulated. In this decade, he began his ultimate offering to musical counterpoint – a series of fugues and canons all derived out a single musical theme – The Art of the Fugue. He worked on this series for 10 years but never finished it. His son, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, gathered, titled and published it in 1751 just after his father’s death.

The Art of the Fugue may well be Bach’s seminal work. It contains 14 fugues and four canons, all in D-minor, arranged in increasing difficulty. These pieces are, as Bach historian Christoph Wolff has observed, “an exploration … of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.” That “single subject” is disarming in its simplicity but it is nevertheless rich seed material for Bach’s fugal explorations that follow. Instead of calling them “counterpoint(s),” Bach preferred the Latin word “Contrapunctus.” Number IX (9) is a study of turning that simple subject into a new derivation and into a double fugue (two themes treated as a fugue at the interval of a twelfth, thus the subtitle “alla duodecima”). Bach then adds the original “single subject” fugue theme into the mix as an additional subject. Always a masterpiece, this Contrapunctus becomes especially spirited and extremely powerful when performed by a brass quintet.

Victor Ewald

(Born in St. Petersburg in 1860; died in Leningrad in 1935)

Brass Quintet No.1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 5

1. Moderato – Più mosso

2. Adagio non troppo lento – Allegro vivace – Tempo I – Adagio

3. Allegro moderato

Brass ensembles of every imaginable sort were a big part of Russia’s musical history, but it was Victor Ewald who established the nation’s first works for brass quintet with four exceptional works written between 1888 and 1912. Quintet No. 1 was published in 1890 and since then has remained in the genre’s performing repertoire as a huge favorite with performers and audiences.

Ewald was a civil engineer by trade but a serious musician by avocation. He wasn’t one of the “Russian Five” (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, etc.), the Russian Nationalist musicians, but he was very close in their orbit. He often played chamber music with them, in sessions that came to be known as “Friday Evenings,” and he was an integral part of their musical discussions. He wrote his four quintets essentially for these chamber music gatherings and he himself played the bass part which was equivalent to the tuba part you will hear in our performance.

Ewald’s Quintet No. 1 is challenging to play, packed with fantastic melodies, and has a wonderful “Russian-ness” – that indescribable sound, dark and rich and melancholic. And fittingly, for the performer/composer Ewald, the opening theme played on the tuba exemplifies that very special sound. Later in the third movement, a lovely Russian-folksong theme emerges that would have made his Nationalist musician friends proud. Although Ewald never tackled the larger orchestral genres, he could well have been considered the “Russian Sixth” based on the wealth of lyricism and inventiveness filling his delightful Quintet No. 1.