PROGRAM NOTES SPONSORED BY THOMAS WARD

Some composers have left behind only traces of themselves within the extant historical record, save their musical works. Dominique Phinot (ca. 1510-ca. 1556), a Franco-Flemish composer from the first half of the 16th century, is a perfect example of this. Neither his birthplace nor birth year are fully verified by scholars, but he is still survived by over a hundred motets. Even Phinot’s execution, which one 16th-century historian attributed to punishment for homosexual activities, receives hardly more than a passing mention in the historical record. Any evidence of Phinot’s existence is felt rather in the voice he left behind in his compositions, one said to have influenced the celebrated Palestrina himself.

Phinot’s voice survives in the work of an artist who composed beautiful music for a religious institution that denied his right to exist because of his sexuality. O Sacrum Convivium is one of Phinot’s best-known works today, a motet composed for a double-choir (or eight voices) and intended for use during communion. The meditative setting progresses slowly but steadily, placing the two four-part groups in constant conversation with one another, never allowing one to merely repeat the other, permitting each successive phrase to breathe new life into the repeated text.

Claude Vivier (1948-1983) was born in Montreal but remained in an orphanage for over two years before being adopted by the Vivier family. For a time the young Claude saw the priesthood, rather than music, as his future. Following his expulsion from seminary for “immature behavior” at 16 years old, however, Vivier instead went on to study composition with Gilles Tremblay at the Montreal Conservatoire in 1967. After receiving a scholarship from the Canada Council for the Arts, which enabled him to travel to Europe to study music, he flew overseas to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. Vivier’s life was tragically cut short in 1983, stabbed to death in mysterious circumstances by a possible lover in Paris in the composer’s apartment. Despite the brevity of his life, Vivier was a fairly prolific artist, composing about 50 works that range in genre from ballets to choral works and chamber pieces for eclectic instrumental combinations.

Despite his rejection from seminary, Vivier continued his relationship with the Church – and spirituality, more broadly – through music. In 1973, the same year he completed Chants, a work he described as “the first moment of my existence as a composer,” Vivier also wrote Jesus erbarme dich. The short piece for soprano and choir opens with the soloist’s wavering enunciation of Jesus’ name, producing an eery yet plaintive effect from the outset of the piece. This initial haunting atmosphere pervades the rest of the piece, partly through the cold dissonances produced by the choir. In addition, the choir and soloist fragment “Jesus” in repeated phrases, turning the name into an abstraction and a prayer simultaneously. The wavering soprano vocal line reappears at the end, joined at the final chord by the choir in uneasy harmony.

Despite being born into a military family, Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was more likely to break rules than to follow them. Smyth bucked convention at every turn, including her own father’s belief that women should not pursue professional careers in music. She rebelled on a larger scale too, as is evidenced by her involvement in the British Women’s Suffrage Campaign in the early 1910s, as well as her lifelong commitment to advocating for better opportunities for women composers and professional musicians. Trained as she was within the German Romantic tradition, under the tutelage of Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Smyth did not always endear herself to a British public navigating widespread anti-German sentiment in the early 20th century. Nor did her open attraction to women or frequent donning of masculine apparel conform her to mainstream expectations. Despite – or perhaps because of – her defiance of so many British societal conventions, Smyth managed to carve out a niche for herself within a rapidly modernizing world.

Although Smyth is perhaps better known for large-scale works like operas, her earlier chamber music pieces, such as today’s Piano Trio, constitute a beloved part of her compositional oeuvre. The elegant opening line of the first movement, voiced by the cello and then the piano soon after, gives way over time to a high-pitched call of urgency when the same subject is uttered by the violin, adding expressive depth to the movement. The second movement begins with the same pacing implied by its tempo marking “Andante” (at a walking pace); one can easily imagine this as a soundtrack to a walk through manicured gardens. Smyth fluidly glides into alternately jaunty and languorous speeds thereafter as she guides her opening motifs through different variations. The Scherzo, by contrast, opens with positively frenetic ebullience before evening out into the more measured rhythms of a dance. In the final movement, Smyth rounds out her Piano Trio with an adept mixture of the lyricism, playfulness, and focused energy of the three preceding movements.

The allure of nature for radical 20th-century American composer John Cage (1912-1992) was certainly more philosophical than religious. Cage helped promote Dadaist anti-art tendencies in the stuffy realm of classical art music in the post-WWII era. His works pushed the boundaries of what could be called “music.”
Cage’s Aria does not specify voice type or range, and some performances have featured everything from one to a dozen musicians. Striking sound effects go hand-in-hand with the experimental, graphic notation. Rather than indicating exact pitches or rhythms, Cage notates Aria with a series of colored gestural shapes whose general contours and lengths can be variously interpreted by performers. It is one way that Cage reinforces the uniqueness of every live performance. Each color is to be equated to a different vocal technique or style determined by the performer in advance. For instance, blue could be jazzy, orange could be sprechstimme, red might be nasal, yellow bluegrass, etc. A further estranging device is Cage’s use of multiple languages: English, French, Italian, Russian, and Armenian. The last-mentioned stems from the influence of Cathy Berberian, an Armenian-American soprano and pioneering advocate of new music. Aria was written for Berberian, whose premiere of the work in Rome in 1958 caused a sensation.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s (1840-1893) theater works, both opera and ballet, are highlights in the entire Russian repertory. Among his operas, there is none better than Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky composed the entire three-act opera during the final months of 1877, arguably the most traumatic year of his life. He had not thought Pushkin’s verse novel sufficient compelling to support an opera, but he soon realized that a brilliant treatment of character development could outweigh the poem’s dramatic banality. He was also fascinated by those same hackneyed plot elements (a debonair cad who disdains a simple girl’s utter devotion, only to regret his actions later), for they touched on a matter too close to home. Tchaikovsky struggled to accept his homosexuality. That struggle was intensified by Tsarist Russia’s harsh penalties for such behavior. At the exact moment he considered setting Onegin, he entered into a disastrous marriage to a former student, Antonina Miliukova. Within six weeks he had fled from her and was on the verge of suicidal breakdown; she was apparently oblivious to his torment. Clearly he regretted his treatment of Antonina, but he knew just as surely that being with her was impossible. The novel’s romantic tension between Onegin and naïve Tatyana provided Tchaikovsky a creative outlet for his own anguish.

The Fantasie on Themes from Eugene Onegin, penned by Ekaterina Walter-Kühne (1870-1930), has become one of the staples of the harp repertory. It begins with quotations of the opera’s overture before shifting the bulk of attention to the beloved waltz theme from Act II. Three different appearances of the waltz are separated by virtuosic cadenzas that pass quickly through short snippets from Tchaikovsky’s material. Such arrangements for keyboard or harp brought concert music into the growing world of the domestic salon.

Emily Masincup and Jason Stell, © 2026