October 6 & 7, 2024
october concert
Elizabeth Brown
Pentalogue for Woodwind Quintet
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sextet in E flat major Op. 71
Carl Nielsen
Quintet for Winds Op. 43
Sunday, October 6, 3 pm * First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich * 108 Sound Beach Avenue, Old Greenwich, CT
Monday, October 7, 7:30 pm * Greenwich Historical Society * 47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob
Program Notes
When audiences (excepting those in Greenwich) go to a chamber music concert, they typically hear a string quartet, a piano trio, or a cello sonata. But chamber music is far broader than this. For example, for centuries composers have written superb chamber music for winds that is seldom heard today. This concert gives listeners the opportunity to experience some prime examples of a repertoire that is as rewarding as it is unfamiliar.
Artists have often responded through their art to events of their time. Witness Picasso’s Guernica, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Composer Elizabeth Brown’s (b. 1953) wind quintet Pentalogue is her response to events during the COVID epidemic.
Born and raised in Camden, Alabama, Brown studied flute at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Julliard School before starting her career as one of New York’s most successful freelancers. But her curiosity led her to explore other instruments, studying the shakuhachi (the traditional Japanese bamboo flute) in1982 after a tour in Japan, learning to play the theremin (an electronic instrument that you do not touch, but control by manipulating radio waves with your hands. Think 1950’s science fiction movie soundtracks), and exploring the đàn bầu (a one string Vietnamese zither).
But how did Brown, the player, become Brown, the composer? While not trained as a composer, she wrote “[I] always had private music in my head.” And when, in her late 20s, a choreographer boyfriend "asked me to write a piece for his dance company…I started writing and never stopped”. Fortunately, her lack of formal training proved an advantage. “Had I studied composition early on, my natural voice might have been squelched considerably.” The result: Brown the composer absorbed the diverse musical traditions of all the instruments which Brown the performer played, calling it “an ongoing compositional education”.
Brown wrote Pentalogue in 2021 for the Sylvan Winds. In five movements, it was composed “during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time also full of political turmoil, including Black Lives Matter’s heartbreaking ‘I can’t breathe’ protests. I was trying to write something with beauty and hope, but the five movements contain all my anxiety about breath. Maybe that’s why three dark musical quotes insinuated themselves into my subconscious so many times that I gave up trying to get rid of them.” Those quotes are a flute obbligato phrase from Bach’s Cantata 198, written to commemorate a royal death, the macabre and arch double bass solo based on Frère Jacques from Mahler’s First Symphony, and, of all things, “Three Blind Mice”. Yet the music, with all of its influences and references, uses Brown’s “gentle maverick” voice to speak directly and engagingly to the listener.
One of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) innovations as a symphonist was his use of wind instruments, elevating them from the role of primarily supporting and coloring the music of the string section to one of full participation in the symphonic fabric (an innovation that was not always welcome. A review of the premiere Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 said that “The wind instruments were employed excessively, so that it was more military band than orchestral music.”). Yet Beethoven, the innovative composer of chamber music, used wind instruments in his chamber works sparingly, mostly while a young man working as a court musician in his hometown of Bonn. And much of that music was composed to meet a specific demand.
That demand came from the Bonn court of Archduke Maximilian Francis of Austria (1756-1801). Maximilian Francis loved music, knew Mozart and Haydn, and was an early benefactor of Beethoven. One of the court’s ensembles, a wind ensemble called a Harmonie, played for aristocratic social functions such as feasts (which Mozart mimicked in the dinner scene from Don Giovanni), providing light music that the Archduke felt aided his digestion (perhaps too well – late in life he was described as “grossly corpulent”). Beethoven, as a court musician, saw an opportunity and took it, writing multiple pieces for the court Harmonie.
Therefore, you might think that the Sextet, with the late Opus number 71, for pairs of clarinets, horns and bassoons, is an outlier from Beethoven’s “middle period”. It is not. Written in Bonn in 1796, and first performed in 1805 in Vienna, it was finally published five years after that by Breitkopf & Härtel, with Beethoven assigning it a late opus number. Beethoven, trying (yet again) to supplement his income, did not make much of a case for the music, telling his publisher that it “was composed in one night - All that one can really say about it is that it was written by a composer who had produced a few better works, yet for some, works of this type are the best.” (He might have been referring to his immensely popular Septet, Op. 20, once saying “That damned thing! I wish it were burned!”).
While Beethoven did not compose the Sextet in one night, he was probably self-conscious of its musical style which he had long outgrown. Regardless, it is an excellent example of how the young Beethoven used the techniques of his day to emulate the conventions of Harmoniemusik. It is in four easy going movements (one of which is a minuet, rather than a typical Beethovian scherzo) that are frequently described as “charming” - a quality not often associated with Beethoven’s music.
Chance events can have surprising results. Chasing a goat into a cave yielded the Dead Sea Scrolls, sloppy laboratory work resulted in penicillin (and LSD), and an accidental meeting during a walk in Seneca Falls, New York ignited the woman’s suffrage movement. And it was hearing some music in the background during a phone call that inspired the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) to write his Quintet for Winds, Op. 43.
A country boy from a poor family, Nielsen studied violin and piano and joined the army as a bugler and trombonist before enrolling in the Copenhagen Conservatory. A solid, if stolid student, after graduation he pursued a modest career as a violinist while finding his way as a composer. It was not an easy life. In 1925 he wrote “If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade … No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.” But Nielsen’s struggles gave him an independent streak, allowing him to find a distinctive musical voice by rejecting the shellac and varnish of the highly (and to him, overdeveloped) Germanic composing style of the time stating, “We must go back ... to the pure and the clear.”
The seeds for composing the Quintet were planted in 1921 when Nielsen was on the phone with the pianist Christian Christiansen. In the background, he heard four members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet rehearsing some Mozart. Nielsen was so taken by the quality of the playing and the personalities of the players that he decided to write a concerto for each of them (sadly completing only the Flute and Clarinet Concertos before his death) as well as a quintet for them to play together. Composed and premiered in 1922, the quintet reflects the distinct characters of both the players and their instruments.
Nielsen describes the quintet as “…one of [my] latest works, in which [I have] attempted to render the characters of the various instruments. At one moment they are all talking at once, at another they are quite alone. The work consists of three movements: a) Allegro, b) Minuet and c) Prelude – Theme with Variations. The theme for these variations is the melody for one of C[arl] N[ielsen]’s spiritual songs, which has here been made the basis of a set of variations, now merry and quirky, now elegiac and serious, ending with the theme in all its simplicity and very quietly expressed.”
© 2024 Ubaldo Valli