Tonight’s program celebrates the changing historical sense of what it means to be avant-garde, the impulse to move art beyond prevailing norms. Of course, not all novelty is good or lasting or influential. But just as surely, there would be no life in art without experimentation and transcendence of the past. No Liszt without Beethoven. No Beethoven without Handel. No Handel without Monteverdi. As Newton famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton wrote those words in 1675, though a variant of the idea reaches all the way back to the 12th century. A Parisian philosopher and church official, Bernard of Chartres, said he could only see further by being “perched on the shoulders of giants,” by whom he meant the ancient Greeks and Romans. Medieval musicians were concerned with the legacy of antiquity, as they hoped to recapture the Platonic sense of music’s ethical impact.

One important center of study in this regard was Constantinople, the city which inherited Rome’s mandate and helped bequeath a treasury of ancient writings to the modern world. As capital of the Byzantine empire, the city produced extensive music and architecture to glorify the orthodox religion it had embraced. In the ninth century, the abbess Kassia (810-865) emerged as one of the finest and most prolific composers of liturgical hymns; she created both the verse and music for exceptional pieces that remain in active use today. Her combination of monophonic chant and polyphonic elaboration, producing sumptuous harmonies, points ahead to a style that eventually emerged at Paris in the 11th century.

A towering presence in 20th-century music, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is remembered for his profoundly influential system of pitch organization that replaced the governing sense of key with an atonal, relativistic method. According to his “method of composing with twelve tones,” all twelve unique pitches in the musical octave are given equal prominence. The pieces heard this evening directly predate that development and thus offer a fascinating glimpse of Schoenberg in the midst of a dramatic transformation.  The Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Short Piano Pieces), Op. 19 celebrate introversion. They function almost like a manifesto that attempts to say something extremely powerful in the fewest possible words. Prior to Op. 19, Schoenberg was occupied with several large, late-Romantic scores. It was the bloated excess of this style that motivated Schoenberg’s complete about-face in Opus 19, from broad narrative universes to aphoristic concision. In a letter to Busoni, the composer clearly voiced his need for change: “Away with pathos! Away with 24-pound protracted scores!  My music must be short.  Lean!  In two notes, not built, but expressed.”

The first five Klavierstücke were composed within a single day in February 1911; the last was added a few months later. No. 1 is written from start to finish without any perceptible motivic repetition, whereas the second piece fixates on the interval of a major third. No. 3 outlines a striking contrast between the hands, with a forte theme in the right literally smothering quiet, pianissimo octaves in the left. No. 4 starts airy but ends with a violent irruption, while the next piece stays more lyrical throughout. The final piece, No. 6, was not composed until June. It appeared just weeks after the death of Gustav Mahler, Schoenberg’s musical father figure, and it is easy to appreciate the spare textures – bordering on complete silence – as a means of saying farewell.

Like many of his generation, young Giulio Caccini (1551-1618) first began to earn recognition as a singer. Fortunately his talent was so remarkable that no less a figure than Francesco de Medici brought the youth to Florence, already the nexus of innovation in art and music. By the early 1580s, Giulio’s reputation at court allowed him to network with other creative artists who were pushing a revival of ancient Greek art, poetry, and music. Out of these meetings of the Florentine Camerata, Caccini – with his prodigious voice and ability to accompany himself on the lute – helped invent the genre of solo song. This style, also known as monody, offers a much simpler style than previous music. Rather than a complex network of overlapping voices (i.e., polyphony), monody features a single vocal line supported by minimal chords.

Consider “Queste lagrim’amare” from Caccini’s Le nuove musiche, published in 1601. The text – perhaps written by Giulio himself – deals with the visceral pain of rejection in love. He indicates all pitches and rhythms as well as the text underlay for a single treble voice. Lasting about four minutes in duration, the melody of “Queste lagrim’amare” flows between declamatory and florid styles, always carefully responding to the rhythm of the poetry. Everything centers on the the powerful imagery of the text: “Fierce disdain, wicked heart, bitter desire! Do you really want me to die? I will die, but the one who dies is one who adores you.”

Composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, Leah Reid’s works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music to electroacoustic works and interactive sound installations. Her interests involve the perception, modeling, and compositional applications of timbre. In her works, timbre acts as a catalyst for exploring new soundscapes, time, space, perception, and color – something that will become patently obvious when listening to Apple.

Apple,scored for four sopranos and lasting around six minutes, explores the sounds and rhythms contained in Gertrude Stein’s poem “Apple” from Tender Buttons. In 1920s Paris, Stein hosted one of the most important modernist salons, filled with figures like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Matisse. However, it was the influence of Pablo Picasso that shaped the Cubist verbal explosions found in Tender Buttons. Reid celebrates that aspect in her musical treatment of the poem Apple.  The work contains eight sections that examine the poem from various angles.  As Reid states, Apple is highly theatrical, and the performers are directed to explore a vast repertoire of dramatic characters and singing styles. At the start Reid drills down to the phonemic level, using a “normal” vocal style to focus on the sound /aep/. The following sections take bites of text and present them in everything from percussive whispers to Sprechstimme to more fulsome melodic effusiveness. It may be useful to know the text, though Reid’s phonemic study makes it barely recognizable, as if heard through a fractured sonic prism.

Giovanni Gabrieli (1554-1612) worked his entire life in Venice, though he spent several formative years studying with the Renaissance master Orlando de Lassus in Bavaria. His other seminal teacher was his uncle Andrea, organist and composer at St Mark’s Basilica prior to Giovanni assuming the same post in 1585. For St Mark’s dynamic worship services, Gabrieli would produce dozens of the greatest sacred vocal and instrumental compositions of the time, drawing admirers from across Europe. In the great private halls and public cathedrals, Gabrieli’s music like Hodie completi sunt helped fashion a new sound that literally rose to the occasion, featuring a brilliant antiphonal and polyphonic manner that took inspiration from physical space.  He published two collections entitled Sacred Symphonies (Sacrae Symphoniae) in 1597 and 1615.

The newest music on tonight’s concert is the world premiere of Stefan Heucke’s Trumpet Concerto, subtitled “The Glory of Life.” Heucke has been a featured composer-in-residence in Staunton on two prior occasions. As Heucke notes, the inspiration for this new concerto arose on one of those visits:

I planned a three-movement concerto for trumpet and orchestra for the Brazilian trumpeter Bruno Lourensetto, whom I met in Staunton before the pandemic.  The work was to increase in tempo from movement to movement, beginning with a sombre Funeral March, followed by a lyrical Intermezzo at a moderate tempo and concluding with a Fugato in which polyphony and virtuosity were to intermingle. That’s exactly how I composed it.

However, while working on the third movement, I suddenly felt that something was missing.  It needed a resolution after the dramatic fugato.  Shortly beforehand, I had come across a diary entry by Franz Kafka that expressed exactly what I was looking for.  Because the concerto was commissioned by the Staunton Music Festival and I knew that there were many excellent female singers at the festival, I decided to add an epilogue to the concerto in which a soprano in the orchestra sings Kafka’s wonderful text in dialogue with the solo trumpet:

It is very well conceivable that the glory of life lies around everyone and always ready in all its fullness, but concealed, in the depths, invisible, very far away. But it lies there, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes.

Franz Kafka, Diary, October 1921

(translation by Nina Tichman)

The concerto had thus expanded into four movements and I was able to musically close an arc from the gloomy beginning to a bright conclusion.  The final movement also exists in a purely instrumental version, and the entire concerto also in a reduced orchestration as Opus 138a.

INTERMISSION

Around 1700 the Italian instrumental style – dynamic, chromatic, virtuosic – was sweeping north across the Alps, wonderfully infecting every composer it came into contact with. While he was not alone in fostering this brilliant new manner, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1733) certainly merits the lion’s share of the attention. Around 1728 Vivaldi published six flute concertos as his Opus 10 in Amsterdam.  The second concerto in the set is a curious work in G minor, subtitled “La notte” or “The Night.” This particular concerto takes a page from The Four Seasons by injecting some suggestion of program music. The work’s novel forms breaks from the normal fast-slow-fast design to present six sections of alternating slow and fast material.

The opening Largo establishes a rather oppressive nocturnal mood which is followed – after two extended flute trills – by a more familiar series of harmonic sequences and solo/tutti conversations described as “fantasmi” (ghosts) in the score itself. Within a minute Vivaldi steps back to a reposeful Largo tempo scored for solo flute and three strings. The next Allegro section features stunningly virtuosic flute writing. Perhaps even more striking, Vivaldi’s third Largo section attempts to capture “il sonno” (sleep) with a pianissimo pile of pitches: C-G-F-D which morphs into a diminished 7th chord, creating an unsettling bed of sound behind the tentative flute figures. At last, Vivaldi brings the flute concerto to a lively conclusion with a classic Allegro moving seamlessly between minor and major, between brilliant solo episodes and forceful gestures from the full ensemble.

Composer Matthew Burtner has dedicated his life to singing the joy and fragility of nature in music and sound. Burtner is an Emmy-award-winning Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, and his works have graced Festival concert programs for the past 20 years. In addition to numerous projects raising awareness of global climate issues, Burtner has pioneered ecoacoustics, incorporating the sounds of nature at a fundamental, generative level in his sonic productions. Born in Alaska, he continues to delve deeply into the lives of glaciers and the expressive power of the northern wilderness.

Commissioned by the BBC, Auroras (2020) uses audio recordings of the Northern Lights in Alaska that Burtner captured using very low frequency (VLF) sensors to audify the aurora’s electromagnetic energy into electronic sound. VLF emissions are among the lowest frequency, longest wavelength forms of acoustic waves, allowing them easily pass around large objects (such as mountains) and into the ocean, making them useful for submarine communications. Not unlike the pioneering work done in the 1960s that detected the universe’s ambient background radiation, Burtner’s VLF study of the Northern Lights gives voice to natural phenomena. As Burtner puts it, “Those sounds are noisy and complex with beautiful streaks of frequency and crackling rhythms.” In the piece we hear tonight, VLF signals directly and mapped into different synthesizers. In this way Burtner orchestrates the energy of the aurora borealis to explore different sonic characters.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is certainly no stranger to discussions about progress in music. His entire middle or “heroic” period provides countless examples of formal and harmonic innovations, and the late works still challenge performers and audiences alike. Beethoven’s Egmont Overture (1810) is actually just the first part from a suite of incidental music he composed to accompany Goethe’s play of the same name. Because of Egmont’s political nature, the Overture enjoys a special place among revolutionary movements. Just as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony played a role in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and at the opening of the Berlin Wall shortly thereafter, Egmont offered a musica rallying cry for the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Goethe’s play and Beethoven’s music celebrate the life of the Count of Egmont, a Flemish nobleman who protested the rising power of the Inquisition. His stoic behavior before and during his execution in 1568 helped spark outrage against Spanish overreach and eventually fueled The Netherlands’ war for independence. Beethoven was clearly sympathetic to such emotions, and the work emerged quickly in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Overture begins with a powerful call to action, a brutal blast of F minor and a quick chord progression to A-flat major. The gesture is both imperious and yet undeniably aspirational. Beethoven’s response – a dolorous contrapuntal theme played in the winds – only further widens the dramatic resources on display. A new motif soon appears in the strings. This four-note falling gesture is sheer simplicity, but Beethoven will latch onto it as the kernel from which the Overture’s mighty main theme will emerge. Here we find familiar hallmarks of his best orchestral music: invigorating dynamic and tonal crescendos that culminate in thunderous timpani rolls, rhythmic drive propelled by taut motivic patterns, colorful interactions between strings and winds, and – not to be overlooked – the element of surprise.  During the conventional recapitulation, Beethoven inserts a moment of complete silence, programmatically linked to the very moment of Egmont’s execution. Immediately thereafter he begins two interlinked codas that vanquish the oppression of F minor with the liberating power of F major.

To call the closing moments an “apotheosis of liberty . . . in an ecstatic outburst of sound,” as one writer has, is accurate and also demonstrates the hyperbolic power of Beethoven’s music. It is the kind of emotion that lifts us from the banal to defy conventions, challenge authoritarians, and call out for a more humane tomorrow.

Jason Stell, © 2025