Bryan Symphony Orchestra

Tickets

Directions and Parking

The Bryan Symphony Orchestra performs all regular subscription and education concerts in Wattenbarger Auditorium, the concert hall of the Bryan Fine Arts Building on the Tennessee Tech University campus. The Bryan Fine Arts Building is located on the corner of 12th Street and North Dixie Avenue in Cookeville.

From Interstate 40, take Exit 286 (Willow Avenue). Turn north on Willow and travel approximately two miles to 12th Street and turn right.

Free parking on concert Sundays is available anywhere on campus. The nearest large parking lots are across Dixie Avenue from the Bryan Fine Arts Building, between Tucker Stadium and the Volpe Library, behind the Roaden University Center and at the former Prescott Middle School, two blocks away on 10th Street.

Concert Events

Crossville Preview Luncheon: 11 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 15, Palace Theater on Main Street. These catered lunch gatherings feature insightful presentations by BSO Music Director Dan Allcott and news and announcements from Executive Director Gail Luna. Reservations required by Monday, Feb. 13; call 931-484-6133.

BSO Backstage: The February episode of "BSO Backstage" on public television station WCTE-TV, Ch. 22, airs at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 9; at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 12; at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16; at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb.16; and at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 18. WCTE-TV, the Upper Cumberland's public broadcasting affiliate, is available on Cookeville Charter Cable Ch. 10 and two channels on the digital tier, as well as Ch. 22 on the Dish and Direct satellite systems in the Cookeville area. BSO Backstage, currently in its 14th season, is hosted by WCTE President Becky Magura, who interviews BSO Music Director Dan Allcott and Executive Director Gail Luna for each episode, which is taped a few weeks before each subscription concert.

Concert Preview Lecture: Tennessee Tech music professor Catherine Godes gives a pre-concert lecture on the program's compositions and composers at 2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 19, in Room 223 of the Bryan Fine Arts Building. The presentation is free, and ticket holders are welcome to attend.

Music Lovers' Dinner at Mauricio's: Follow up your concert experience with an early Sunday dinner at Mauricio's, a fine-dining experience in Italian cuisine located in a beautifully restored Victorian-style home at 232 North Peachtree Avenue, just a few blocks from the TTU campus. Reservations are necessary; call 931-525-2633.

Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES

February 19, 2012

ROSSINI: Overture to The Turk in Italy

INCE: Domes

MOZART: Violin Concerto no. 5 in A major

HAYDN: Symphony no. 100, “Military”

A mere ribbon of water, the Bosphorus Strait, divides Europe and Asia. One country, Turkey, straddles the Bosphorus, and its largest city, Istanbul, is literally cut in two by this waterway. To the west of Turkey is Christianity. To the east of Turkey is Islam.

With our images of harems and pashas, domes and minarets, Turkey has long been a source of fascination for Westerners, as has every country on the other side of the Bosphorus. In the 1700s, we started calling this phenomenon “Orientalism,” but our scrutiny of Turkey actually began much earlier, in the late 1400s, when the cultural influence of Turkey began in earnest. Turquerie, or the Turkish style, began showing up in our decorative arts, particularly in Venice, spreading to France and beyond. By the early 1600s, military leaders were copying the style of Turkish military bands in Europe, and by the end of the 17th century, the Turkish musical influence flourished in the West.

It was the brass and percussion of the Turkish military band that really attracted us, and the sound was as exotic to Western ears as the Ottoman Empire it represented. This was the music of the Janissary, the elite Ottoman troops composed of Christian converts to Islam, and they were among the very earliest armies to establish musical bands, although the musicians performed ceremonially, never in battle.

The Janissary or Turkish sound was unique, as were the instruments. They ranged from cymbal (zil) to a looped trumpet (boru) and a pole festooned with small bells (cevgen). Drums included several types - davul, nakkare and kos. Played simultaneously, the overall effect was a contrast between shrill and jangling and low and booming– the characteristic highs and lows of the Turkish sound. European symphonic composers seeking to reference the Turkish sound relied on this pervasive and stylized percussion.

Orientalism, over time, in other arts and as a scholarly field, came to feel vaguely derogatory. Painters, for instance, were accused of exploiting Eastern traditions with salacious or gratuitous depictions of scantily clad belly dancers, nudes in public baths. By the mid- to late-20th century, particularly in academe, the term came to represent outsider interpretations of the East by the West.

The alla turca style in music, however, never felt the sting of criticism. Its proponents – from Mozart to Beethoven to Rossini and Haydn-- enlisted the sound chiefly to lend an air of exoticism or foreign effect to a composition. Music, as is often the case, eschews prejudice or partisanship through its abstractness.

OVERTURE to THE TURK IN ITALY (1814)

By Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)

There are actually two Turks in Italy in this opera buffa, or comic opera, by Gioachino Rossini and his librettist Felice Romani: One is the Turkish Prince Selim, the other an escaped member of his harem, Zaida, who loved her former master but fled his enclave because her rivals convinced the prince she deserved to die. Already, the plot thickens.

Zaida finds refuge in a gypsy camp on the Italian shore of Naples, where she’s befriended by a poet seeking a good story; when he learns of Zaida’s plight, he introduces her to a newcomer from her homeland who might be able to help her – but the newcomer turns out to be Prince Selim himself. The story goes from there; because this is a comedy, it eventually ends well for Zaida, but not before a mad romp through all the classic plot points of comic opera: mistaken identities and masquerades, romantic triangles and love and lust, intrigue, blackmail – you name it.

But first, there’s the overture, which is known for its very long introduction. There were, in fact, two versions of the introduction, which includes a somewhat melancholy solo atop full orchestra. In one version, the solo is played by the horn; in the other, the oboe – the same version that Rossini used as an introduction for his dramatic opera Sigismondo. (The Sigismondo version is the one we’ll hear today.)

Rossini, the master of self-reference, wrote some of the most brilliant overtures of all time – frequently written on the eve of the performance, and having nothing to do with the actual opera they accompanied. Equally self-reverential, he believed that, in time, his overtures would outlive the operas they prefaced. He was probably right: Many of his overtures remain popular in the modern-day repertory.

DOMES (1993)

By Kamran Ince (b. 1960)

Turkish-American Kamran Ince has found a unique voice in contemporary classical music. He gives us the spirituality of Ottoman court music, the tradition of European art music, and the energy of Turkish folk music mixed with what he calls the “extroversion of the American psyche.”

“Domes,” one of his earliest published pieces, is a nocturne for small orchestra – but richly orchestrated nonetheless. A simple descending four-note theme runs hauntingly throughout, but it is still somehow overwhelmingly “melodious.” As in the Mozart to follow, the strings are the main character here. They play those classically Turkish highs and lows, subtly backed in timbre by woodwinds, brass, piano and harp.

What saves “Domes” from a purely literal reading of the Turkish sound is Ince’s instrumentation. Where it would have been obvious to use piccolo and bass drum, we have a full complement of strings instead. The sounds he elicits from violin, viola and cello are uncommon; we’re not accustomed to hearing strings sound like this, which makes them that much more compelling.

Repetition, another hallmark of the alla turca style, is omnipresent, too. The composer has likened this obsessiveness to the incessant movement of the whirling dervishes -- a physical prayer or meditation of Sufi tradition. He describes the overall mood as “spiritual obsession, ever descending lines searching for something, trying to feel what they are searching for, to seek out what they are feeling.”

In both spirit and sound, there’s a noticeable relationship here with “The Unanswered Question” by Charles Ives, that other distinctly American composer, who we last heard two years ago in Wattenbarger Auditorium. Both compositions are as beautiful as they are philosophical.

Ince, a native of Montana, is director of composition at the University of Memphis.

VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 5 IN A MAJOR, “TURKISH” (1775)

By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Mozart achieved the pinnacle with nearly everything he did, even when copying the style of others. His contribution to the alla turca style is no different. His 1782 singspiel, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (“The Abduction from the Seraglio”), was the most famous of the genre, premiering at the height of the Turkish fashion craze in Europe.

Previous to that contribution, however, were his two A major pieces, the Piano Sonata (k331) and the Violin Concerto we’ll hear today. In the finale of this concerto -- a rondo -- it’s the contrasting theme which provides a delicate yet distinctly “Turkish” sound reference. Listen for it about halfway through. This is classic rondo style, in which the main theme is interrupted by music as unlike the main theme as possible; in this case, the loud crashing and repetitive turca allegro is actually represented through the rhythmic efforts of a chamber-sized orchestra, amidst the otherwise elegant and melodic finale.

Despite the Turkish Concerto’s technical demands, and its Turkish effects, it remains at its core a Mozart concerto. Wolfgang Amadeus was just 19 years old when he wrote his cycle of five violin concertos; this is considered the moment when he came of age. The scant 16 years Mozart had left gave us an uninterrupted stream of music that is rivaled by other classicists but not surpassed.

SYMPHONY NO. 100 IN G MAJOR, “MILITARY” (1794)

By Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

One of Haydn’s 12 “London symphonies,” the 100th was immediately nicknamed for its second movement, which so impressed its first audience with its loud and crashing war-like overtones that “Encore! encore! encore! resounded from every seat. The ladies themselves could not forbear," read the review in London’s Morning Chronicle. Years later, conductor Thomas Beecham explained the initial reception by quipping that the "English do not like music, only the noise it makes."

Again, this is the Turkish “noise” – shattering percussion with cymbals and triangle punctuating bass drum. The second movement is brilliantly set up by the calmness and sobriety of the first, in sonata form with a slow introduction – in marked contrast to the rich orchestration of the second movement. The second, which has its roots in a concerto written for the king of Naples, evokes the Janissary sound, but not necessarily war itself, as it was often written; there is no march here. Instead, there’s an overt violence present each time the “Turkish music” begins, with an abrupt shift from C major to C minor to an insistent trumpet fanfare and tympani roll – and, certainly, in sheer volume. The third and slower movement – a minuet – provides respite before the fourth, in sonata rondo form, which ends with one last comment from the so-called Turkish instruments.

The 100th is the most popular of Haydn’s London symphonies; we heard the 104th just last March. The London symphonies were the Viennese master’s triumph; the reception Haydn and his music received in England was unprecedented – but that success was not preordained. He could just have easily been met with boredom or incomprehension – literally, because Haydn spoke no English. It’s said, in fact, that his friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart worried about exactly that – that Haydn couldn’t survive, let alone succeed, in a country where he didn’t speak the language. Haydn is reputed to have responded, “My language is understood all over the world.”

***

Where the Turkish sound of Mozart, Rossini and Haydn is a translation of Janissary music into the European symphony orchestra, the music of contemporary composer Kamran Ince is commentary from a man who, as a Turkish-American, bridges the cultural divide. While “Domes” predates the 2001 terrorist attacks on Manhattan and Washington D.C., its composer has said he was influenced by religious extremism – in this case, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan and, the same year, the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco, Texas. He also cites spirituality as an important component, and says that, “at times, I felt as if a hand was helping me from above.”

But most of all, he credits the architectural metaphor itself as his chief inspiration. As a man who has lived half his life in a predominantly Christian world and the other half in a predominantly Muslim world, Ince was inspired by what he calls “probably the greatest creations of the Christian and Muslim worlds”: the domes of Western cathedrals and Eastern mosques. Their similarities, he says, inspired in him a “peculiar, peaceful silence” from which the music grew.

-- By Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott