The Program:


Satie:Gymnopedies No. 1 and 2


Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez


Freund: Cyrillic Dreams


Respighi: Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 2





Music evolves, a reflection of the time in which it is written and performed. Even compositions handed down through the ages are reinterpreted by successive generations. It’s the same for musical instruments. Their origins are left behind, and their engineering changes depending on how they are being used and who is playing them.



The lute and the guitar, while both are plucked-instruments in the string family, have nearly as many differences as similarities. The lute was considered a more classical instrument, while the guitar has often been a part of the folk tradition, moving from culture to culture along the trade routes on land and sea.



Great music has no doubt been lost along the way since the earliest devotional songs chanted in monasteries. But over time, there have been collectors and interpreters who have managed not only to preserve but to re-imagine early music, making it relevant to their own time. In the first suite of the 20th-century piece Ancient Airs and Dances by composer and musicologist Ottorino Respighi, we have a 20th-century transcription of Renaissance lute songs by various composers including Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei), a famous lutenist, composer and music theorist of the 1500s. Galilei, in turn, took part in a movement seeking to revive ancient Greek music.



Part of Respighi’s genius was his gift for transcription – his deftness at rewriting music with different orchestration. While you won’t see lutes in a performance of Ancient Airs and Dances, you will hear the composer’s (and performers’) recapturing of their singular rhythm and cadence, which carry forward through this latest incarnation of their sound.



Also during today’s program, you’ll see and hear the classical guitar in what has become the most well-known composition for that instrument: Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Besides being perhaps the most popular composition for classical guitar, the Aranjuez is also known for its delicate orchestration – coupling the quiet, more intimate guitar with its more-evolved and amped-up brethren, the instruments of the modern-day orchestra.



Three shorter pieces round out today’s selections: the familiar and lovely Gymnopedies 1 and 2, and the lush and freshly minted Cyrillic Dreams by young composer Stefan Freund. Gymnopedies No. 1 and 2

By Erik Satie (1866-1925)



Today, these pieces seem mainstream, but when they were composed they were thought to be harmonically progressive — an almost simplistic “anti-music.” Satie was limited in his talents and skills, but embraced these limits, using his wit and charm in writing ambient music. At a time when Satie’s reputation was ebbing, his popularity was given a boost by the composer Claude Debussy — an admirer of Satie — who sensitively orchestrated two of these simple piano pieces.







Concierto de Aranjuez

By Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)



In 1939, Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo made an interesting, if potentially risky, choice when he put classical guitar on the stage with a symphony orchestra for his Concierto de Aranjuez – and it turned out to be a choice that defined the classical realization of Spanish guitar sound. It’s impossible to hear this piece and not immediately think of Spain, of flamenco dancers and castanets. Even Rodrigo’s atonal notes don’t come across as jarring, because they conjure up the familiar Moorish harmonic influence which permeates much of the music of the Iberian peninsula. The second movement of the concerto became a standard so quickly that by the time jazz great Miles Davis recorded it in his Sketches on Spain, just 20 years after it was written, his management neglected to pay royalties to Rodrigo; everyone assumed it was a traditional composition long out of copyright.



Like Respighi, Rodrigo was a composer who was influenced by modern times but took a step back – in Rodrigo’s case, to the Romantic style of writing. His work was in large measure a celebration of one instrument: the classical guitar. Of his 10 well-known orchestral pieces, four are for guitar. Composers championing a single instrument aren’t unusual, but they are frequently performers on that instrument. “Instrumental champions” don’t always live up to the bill of a superior composer, though we do have positive examples. Beethoven championed the piano successfully. Schubert wrote one of his greatest sonatas – and one we still love today -- for an instrument that no longer even exists, the arpeggione. On the other hand, Paganini broke ground in exploring technical writing for the violin, but is not ranked among the great composers.



Plucked instruments have an articulation that’s unique from those which are bowed or blown. With guitars, pizzicato strings, or harps, the quality of sound is defined by the precise beginning to a note, and the way in which the note (or chord) either resonates or is stopped from resonating. Rodrigo frequently chooses to alternate the playing of the guitar with that of the orchestra, so that the comparison of sound is flattering to the guitar rather than competitive with the orchestra. Rodrigo never mastered the guitar; despite his blindness from a young age, he was famous early on as a virtuoso pianist. The fact that he’s remembered as the composer who boosted the guitar’s classical status is perhaps a disservice to Rodrigo, who wrote great music that just happened to include the guitar.







Cyrillic Dreams

By Stefan Freund (b. 1973)



In 2008, the young Stefan Freund, among the most awarded composers of his generation, visited Russia, where he found inspiration in the omnipresence of the Cyrillic alphabet – and was intimidated by it. These feelings, he said, “… resulted in a series of dreams and nightmares where I was surrounded by these foreign letters. Cyrillic Dreams captures the hazy atmosphere of these night-time episodes by using arpeggios based on the harmonic series and melodies derived from the overtone scale. Trills, harmonics, glissandos and blurred runs set the scene for music inspired by the colorful domes and clamorous bells of Moscow and St. Petersburg.”



Freund wrote Cyrillic Dreams for the Columbia Civic Orchestra’s 2009 European tour, and he conducted its premiere in Austria. Later in the year, the Tennessee Tech University Orchestra commissioned a work from Freund, who wrote DiverTennmento, which premiered in Wattenbarger Auditorium last fall and was recorded for a future broadcast on WCTE-TV. The composer was present at the performance, which also included the Tennessee premiere of Cyrillic Dreams.



A native of Memphis, Freund is also a cellist and a member of the music faculty at the University of Missouri. He has won awards from, among others, the Music Teachers National Association, ASCAP-BMI and the National Society of Arts and Letters, and he has been commissioned by a number of symphony orchestras as well as Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Lincoln Center Festival.







Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 1

By Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)



In his youth, Respighi played violin and viola professionally on stages in Russia and Germany, but he lived most of his life in his native Italy, teaching composition in Rome. Co-author of the textbook Orpheus, Respighi was an academic -- a scholar of 16th through 18th-century Italian music, including the operas of Monteverdi. While he wrote in the 20th century, his style is generally considered Neo-Renaissance or Neo-Baroque. In his lifetime, Respighi was beloved for his devotion to the earlier Italians; his popularity is said to have rivaled that of the opera composer Puccini.



Respighi was a colorful orchestrator; he made “sound pictures” of notes and instruments. In his most famous work -- the symphonic poem trilogy of Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals – the music suggests water splashing in the fountains of the great city’s piazzas, gladiators returning victorious to Rome.



All three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances are based on multiple Renaissance compositions – and yet Respighi was writing 400 years later, at a time when composers of classical music were trying to be one thing or the other – new and innovative or true to the styles of the past. Respighi chose both. He was adept at borrowing music, taking something that already existed and making it new. In Ancient Airs and Dances, he captures the rhythmic, dance-infused Renaissance style, but in a modern orchestral setting; for instance, the articulated sound of the lute is frequently captured through the use of harp or pizzicato (plucked) strings.







Notes by Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott