AMERICAN MAVERICKS - Sunday, September 7, 2014 at 3pm, Durham Arts Council

Charles Ives Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano

Karel Husa Evocations of Slovakia

Aaron Copland Sextet

John Duffy “We Want Mark Twain”

PROGRAM NOTES written by Florence Nash Charles Ives: Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano

No composer ever got more mileage out of American traditional music than Charles Ives (1874-1954), Connecticut Yankee

and musical non-conformist. The son of a bandmaster and trained as an organist, young Ives grew up with quantities of band

music, hymns, folk songs, jigs and reels, and his compositions are studded like a magpie’s nest with scraps and bits of

everything that caught his ear. His four sonatas for violin and piano (1914-1917, No. 2 revised 1919) exemplify this

quintessential Ives-ness. Although each sonata has a distinct personality that readily stands alone, they are deeply related to

each other and, a critic notes, “might almost be thought of as a long single work. . . . Themes, rhythmic material, compositional

devices, and a use of interrelated quotations from the hymns and dance music of the period tie the four works into a rich and

complex musical strand.”

Sonata Number 2 is a vividly melodic piece, more accessible than the preceding sonata, and is one of Ives’ most frequently

recorded chamber works. Starting with the first movement, based on the song “Autumn,” the sonata works its way through a

kaleidoscope of popular American tunes of that time, including “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Sailor's Hornpipe," "Turkey in

the Straw," "The White Cockade," and "Nettleton." Ives also wove in reworked portions of own earlier compositions, including

bits of his first sonata and what he called his “Pre-First” sonata, as well as his

"Ragtime Dances." “In the Barn,” the lively second movement where many of these tunes crop up, was originally composed

for a small theater orchestra, then re-scored in 1907. The hymn tunes of the third movement return the mood to the

reflectiveness of the first.

As a self-professed “unrepentant modernist,” Ives became a bit ambivalent about the violin and piano sonatas. In his

“Memos,” writings on his life and music, he looked back on these and some other early works as being perhaps a little “weak-

minded and regressive.” But artists are not their own best critics. This sonata is richly representative of Ives and lacks nothing

of authority for being “easier.”

Karel Husa: Evocations of Slovakia, for clarinet, viola & cello

After studying conducting and composition at the conservatory in his native Prague, Karel Husa left for Paris in 1945 to

continue his studies, leaving behind years of Nazi suppression of modern music in Czechoslovakia, where, he recalled, “you

could be arrested for carrying a Bartok score.” A pupil of Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, and André Cluytens, among

others, Husa gained international attention when his First String Quartet was performed at the 1950 ISCM Festival in Brussels

and received the Lili Boulanger Award. A second quartet soon followed, and, in 1951, Evocations of Slovakia, which was

premiered on the French Radio Concerts. Husa wrote this work, he said, at a time when he realized he would never return to his

homeland. While the music shows Honneger’s influence, it is Bartok’s presence that is felt in the vigorous rhythms, gypsy

clarinet, and the folk-like melodies and string effects. That, Husa said in an interview, was because Slovakian composers lived

“within earshot of one another.” He added, “I always tried not to study any of Bartok’s music . . . . because I thought that I will

find so many good things that I will probably steal them.”

In 1954, Husa was invited to join the music faculty of Cornell University. His move to the U.S. was permanent, and he became

an American citizen in 1959. He later also taught at Ithaca College, retiring in 1992. In 1969 Husa won the Pulitzer Prize for

his Third String Quartet, and the Gravemeyer Award for his Cello Concert in 1993. His best-known work, Music for Prague

1968, for concert band, has received thousands of performances, and his commissions include the New York Philharmonic

(Violin Concerto and Concerto for Orchestra), the Chicago Symphony (Trumpet Concerto), the Colorado String Quartet, and

the Louisville Orchestra, among many others.

His conducting career has also continued with appearances with major orchestras on every continent. He has received honorary

doctorates from the New England Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute, the University of Louisville, and, in the Czech

Republic, Masaryk University and the Prague Academy of Musical Arts. In 1995, Husa was awarded the Czech Republic’s

highest civilian recognition, the State Medal of Merit, First Class, and in 1998, he received the Medal of the City of Prague. On

October 21, 2011, the University of Massachusetts Amherst Wind Ensemble held a performance celebrating his 90th birthday.

Karel Husa now lives and works in Apex, North Carolina.

Copland: Sextet for clarinet, piano and string quartet (1937)

Clarinet virtuoso Sherman Friedland, who played the Sextet many times over 50 years, recalled driving once with his wife

Linda from Tanglewood back to New York, “the two of us singing those canons and stretti, blowing the horn in 7/4 time, as it

is in the piece, causing a hell of a racket. It was wonderful!” (Just as well the highway patrol didn’t hear this display of

virtuosity gone wild.) Friedland relished the work and played it “just about every chance I get,” while still acknowledging the

difficulties of the score, with its extreme registers and “relentlessly” shifting rhythms. “It is truly an exciting creation,” He

declared, “no matter what slight accidents might occur.”

Three smoothly linked but contrasting movements in shifting, complex colors, the Sextet had a circuitous origin. Copland’s

Short Symphony (1931-33) was commissioned by Carlos Chavez for the

Orquesta Sinfonica de México and premiered in 1934 as “a brave but not completely satisfactory essay.” Both Stokowski in

Philadelphia and Koussevitsky in Boston signed on for additional performances, but the music was too difficult to master in the

allotted rehearsal time, so both performances were cancelled and the work seemed doomed to obscurity. To get the piece back

into circulation, Copland decided to recast the score for the present ensemble, simplifying some of its intricate cross-rhythms

and time signatures. Since its re-emergence as the Sextet, this has become one of his most popular chamber works.

According to Copland’s own notes, “The first movement’s main impetus is rhythmic, with a scherzo-like quality. All melodic

figures result from a nine-note sequence, a kind of row from the opening two bars. The second movement, tranquil in feeling,

contrasts with the first movement and with the finale, which is again rhythmically intricate, bright in color and free in form.”

Later program notes call the Sextet “a compressed glossary of Copland’s composition style: frequent time signature changes

and shifts, open sonorities, broad vertical gestures, reconstructed elements of jazz, leaping melodic motives, and unmistakably

‘direct and vigorous.’”

John Duffy: We Want Mark Twain for narrator & string quartet

One of fourteen children of Irish immigrant parents, John Duffy was born (June 1926) and grew up in the Bronx, an all-

American beginning for “one of the great heroes of American music,” whose more than 300 works for symphony orchestra,

opera, theater, television and film have gained many awards, including two Emmys and an ASCAP award for special

recognition in film and television music. As a young man, Duffy studied composition with Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell,

Luigi Dallapiccola, Solomon Rosowsky and Herbert Zipper. While still in his twenties, he was appointed music director,

composer and conductor of Shakespeare under the Stars, the first in a succession of similar posts that include the Guthrie

Theater, the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, and NBC and ABC television. He was founding president of Meet

the Composer, an organization dedicated to the creation, performance, and recording of music by American composers.

Duffy composed “We Want Mark Twain” in 2005 for the Ying Quartet, on commission from the Howard Hanson Institute of

American Music at the Eastman School of Music. He revised it in 2009. “In conceiving this work,” Duffy said, “I read Twain’s

writings, over a long period of time, and felt an inspirational kinship with the ideas of this extraordinary man. A curious thing:

the second movement, “Tom and Becky, Lost in the Cave,” I had set years before, and realize, now, that my own grief over my

sister’s tragic death, my own wanting, desperately to save my sister, is akin to Tom saving Becky. In composing Twain, I

wanted the musicians to be part of the drama; to call out, yell out, sing out, stomp their feet, join in with the narrator, so the

drama is felt viscerally.”

A reviewer called Duffy “one of the last of a breed of American visionary artist-impresarios, . . . .who dared to do the

impossible, and in so doing, would forever change the landscape of American contemporary performing arts. They combined

the now all-too-rare quality of artistic and administrative imagination.”

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