Notes + Text

Program Notes

by Ed Sien

The unanimous night of our ancestors has largely been tamed by a piercing electric glow that outshines the stars.  Night’s fall has become merely an epiphenomenon of the spinning earth, a conventional sign for the approach of sleep, a time for television and sex—sometimes at the same time, alas!  Nearly as addicted to artificial light as we are, the Romans were the inventors of the candle.  Yet they and their successors for over two millennia would have been astonished by our nearly magical capacity to carry light in our very pockets; we will almost certainly never understand what our forebears experienced when the sun set. However, since at least the reign of Victoria, when gaslights illuminated both private and public spheres, the night has also become the time of joyful conviviality, for the gathering of intimates, for dancing, late night conversations, and delicious licentiousness of all kinds.   The many-eyed night, formless, terror-ridden, and unstable, has lost a great measure of its potency and its mystery.

Personified, amplified, revered, and reviled throughout the ages, the night and its effects have inspired thousands of works of art in all media, perhaps as act of subtle propitiation.   The works of the composers you hear tonight are three apostrophes to the night, written at a time when the unrelenting grip of night had already been loosened, but its symbolic physical and psychological referents—solitude, loneliness, sickness, death—still gripped the human mind, as they will forever.  Most striking, perhaps, about this particular series of musical selections is that they all feature soloists, as if an individuating force acting against the all-encompassing scrim of night.

Written originally to accompany a quickly vanished play by Irwin Shaw, Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City” represents the night thoughts of the residents of a darkened New York City as overheard by the work’s protagonist, represented by the trumpet solo (in the play, the anti-bourgeois, artist figure was a jazz trumpeter).  Copland retooled his incidental music into the piece we now know today.  Orchestral strings, enriched by an English horn, form the backdrop for the trumpet’s doleful musings.  The piece opens with a shimmer that is poetically unparalleled in depicting the lonely vibrancy of “the city that never sleeps” in its nocturnal incarnation, as it prepares to wake to dawn.  The people wandering the streets are silently trodding to their destinations, showing neither joy, nor hope, nor anticipation of the coming day.

Benjamin Britten wrote the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings in 1943, setting poems that evoke the many moods of night, beginning just after twilight and ending in deepest midnight.  In many ways the pinnacle of his early vocal music, hauntingly intimate, and written for his partner Peter Pears and the terrifyingly talented horn virtuoso Dennis Brain, the Serenade displays Britten’s matchless mastery in setting English poetry, and his superb control over evocative musical effects.  A serenade is, of course, “night music,” and it is of no little consequence that Britten composed this cycle in the very midnight of World War II.  Here, night’s more sinister tattoo is precisely to the point, as Britten finds musical emphases for the blighting sin that worms its way into the rosy heart of European culture.  The prelude, played as if on a “natural” horn (no valves are used), with its atmospheric, “wobbly” intonation, prefigures the tonal relationships explored in the song settings; the concluding postlude, note for note the same, deliquesces them into silence.

A stunned silence begins David Schiff’s inspired reworking of his “Singing in the Dark” (2001) for a solo group of saxophone, upright bass and rhythm section. “Singing in the Dark” is in four discrete movements, played without a break.  Each movement has a title: Meditation on a Shadow, Spinning Out of Time, Almost Like Praying, and WWDD (What Would Duke Do?).  A solo saxophone laments plangently against the nervous strings, setting up a seemingly ineradicable tension between them that is not fully resolved until the final section.  “Singing in the Dark” mixes improvisation on various jazz modalities with strictly written “classical” composition.  In the penultimate movement, the strings and the saxophone begin to edge towards a reconciliation of their respective roles and, following an improvisatory cadenza for the soloist, the final moments of the work dance their way into a new dawn, a musical metaphor for the path from shock to hope and healing that we experience after great grief.

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