Lex54 Concerts

I composed program notes for Lex54 Concerts in June, 2016. They are printed below or can be downloaded as a PDF here. To purchase tickets or for more information, visit www.lex54concerts.com

*Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to these notes. All rights of my work for Lex54 Concerts belong to the Lex54 Concerts exclusively. Sharing my work for said series here follows fair use of copyrighted material.*

“Kafka-Fragmente” (1985-1986)  -  György Kurtág (b. 1926)

The legendary Austro-Hungarian (current-day Czech Republic) writer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), developed a very close relationship in the last four years of his life with the writer Milena Jesenská. He wrote some of his most personal yet cryptic writing to her: prose and poetry about life and misery, joy and peril. The writing is deep, but fragmented; some entries contain only a few words. It is the text of these letters, along with selections from Kafka’s private journals, that György Kurtág (b. 1926) set to music in his Kafka-Fragmente. The massive cycle of miniatures is scored for violin and soprano, and lasts just under an hour. The violin seldom serves as pure accompaniment, since the duet mostly resounds as one body, like a solo instrument. The ensemble displays multiple layers, echoing and elaborating the musical poetry. Kurtág’s music illuminates the uniqueness of Kafka’s text, being boldly beautiful at times and brokenly agitated at others. Although you'll hear a relatively small excerpt of this work tonight, each movement performed was carefully selected and represents the expression and affect of the piece as a whole.

     When Kurtág composed Kafka-Fragmente almost sixty years after the late Franz Kafka penned them, he was writing in a world very different from the one in which Kafka lived. And yet, regarding artistic ancestry and religious heritage, there is a strong lineage that connects these two men. The new forms of reactionary art that came from a Post-World War II world invariably influenced Kurtág’s music. Like most art created in middle to late Twentieth Century, much of new music reflected the devastation and disfigurement that WW II left in its wake. It was widely believed that society would never return to its cultural traditions, and standards and all that was left were fragments and broken pieces of the previous world. Although Franz Kafka died well before the reign of the Third Reich, his writings are brooding, foreboding, and fragmentary. Kurtág’s music magnifies this, contextualizing Kafka’s text in the mangled Post-Holocaust world.

“Philomel” (1964)  -  Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

    Philomel is arguably the best known work of Milton Babbitt (1916-2011), and has upheld a legacy as one of the most important pieces of electroacoustic music to date. The American poet, John Hollander (1929-2013) wrote what he declares as a "cantata text”, recognizing that it is "somewhere between a lyric poem and a frankly programmatic libretto.” Describing the text as a libretto is appropriate since the story and music are operatic in structure and design. 

Philomel tells the story of the ancient myth of Philomela, as it appears in Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses. King Tereus of Thrace, Philomel’s brother-in-law, rapes her then cuts out her tongue to ensure her silence. Philomel foils his plan by sewing a tapestry that depicts the crime and reveals it to Procne, her sister and the wife of Tereus. Procne agrees to her help sister seek revenge on Tereus. They devise a gruesome plan to kill Tereus’s son and feed his remains to his father. Enraged, Tereus chases them deep into the forest but they elude him; the gods turn the sisters into birds – Procne into a swallow, Philomela into a nightingale

      Hollander’s libretto organizes this story into three parts, a sequence Babbitt imitates in his music. The first part introduces the distressed Philomela who is unable to speak. The performing soprano sings her woes in the forest, but we also hear them as ‘thoughts’ by the recorded soprano. The second part depicts Philomela escaping from Tereus, and the third is Philomela's transformation into a nightingale.

     Babbitt approaches each movement with a different compositional procedure. The first section starts with synthesized sounds that slowly blend with the sopranos—both the recorded voice and live performer. Hollander’s text includes a play on words for the names “Philomela” (“Feel a million filaments”) and “Tereus” (“tearing,…trees…tears”). Babbitt accents the wordplay with electronic sounds and manipulations of the voices. The second section is written in what’s called ‘echo verse’ or ‘echo poetry’, where the last word or two of a verse is repeated at the end of the verse. The verse is usually a question, and the echo is the answer. Hollander only includes a portion of the penultimate word in the echo, just as a true echo would naturally sound, and in turn, creates a new word (“...forest’s tongue? Stung.” “...unclouded eye?  Die.” “...forest’s light?  Slight.”). Babbitt’s musical treatment of this is organic; for the most part, he gives the verse to the live soprano and the echo to the recorded soprano.The third and last section is the most traditional in compositional method. Akin to an opera, Babbitt composed a group of five arias with recitative. Celebrating the return of her voice (as a nightingale), Philomela sings a collection of songs in a classic strophic style.

Milton Babbitt’s approach to electronic music with the background of a strict serialist composer is what makes this work a seminal masterpiece. Babbitt was intrigued by mathematics, and his first aspirations were as a mathematician. Immersed in twelve-tone composition, music technology came as a natural next step in his evolution as a composer. Philomel is an exquisite testament to his marriage of math and music. By using a live soprano in conjunction with a recorded soprano—with sung and spoken text—Babbitt reveals the conscious and subconscious, the two dimensions of Philomela’s psyche. The composer’s insistence that the work could not be conceived without electronics proves his specific expressive intentions for Philomela’s soliloquy. The work remains one of the most important monodramas of the twentieth century.