AARON GRAD

Writing Samples

Aaron Grad has been Program Annotator for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra since 2005, completing program notes and interviews for their house programs in Carnegie Hall. Other clients include The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra and international orchestras managed by Columbia Artist Management, Inc. (Dresden Philharmonic, Kirov Orchestra, Orchestre National de France). For more information, please call (917) 584-5549 or e-mail aaron@aarongrad.com.

Piano Concerto No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 53 [1931]

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Born April 15,1891 in Sontsovka, Ukraine

Died March 5, 1953 in Moscow

Pianist Paul Wittgenstein was born in 1887 to a wealthy and cultured Viennese family. When he made his public debut as a pianist at the age of 26, he received some good reviews but was unlikely to make any great impact in his field. The course of his life and his role in music changed drastically during World War I, when he lost his right arm after being injured and held captive in a Russian attack. Choosing to forge ahead with his career after the war, he used his family fortune to commission new works that employed only the left hand. Wittgenstein engaged some of the world’s top composers, including Ravel, Britten, Hindemith, Strauss, Korngold and Prokofiev.

Prokofiev’s contribution to the Wittgenstein repertoire dates from 1931. The commission provided welcome income for the perennially cash-strapped composer, and the task of composition seems not to have hampered the fun of a family beach vacation that summer, during which the 40-year-old maestro learned to swim. After dispatching the concerto to its patron in the fall, Prokofiev received this terse note from Wittgenstein: “Thank you for the concerto, but I do not understand a single note in it and I will not play it.” Prokofiev never performed the work himself, and it did not reach the public until a concert in 1956 in West Berlin.

If Wittgenstein’s summary dismissal of Prokofiev’s concerto seems inexplicable, it is worth noting that contributions from Ravel and Britten also did not much please the prudish pianist, who preferred to play his commissioned works from the conservative Franz Schmidt above all others. Prokofiev was a gifted pianist, and, although his writing was idiomatic for the instrument, it may have been too challenging for Wittgenstein. The brief outer movements whiz by at a lively vivace tempo, providing capricious and outgoing bookends for the weightier inner movements. The piano makes up for its multiphonic limitations by darting through flitting single-note lines and dizzying leaps. The second movement, at a relaxed andante tempo, features arcing themes and rich harmonies that waver between conventional consonance and slithering chromaticism, always with that eerie transparency that makes Prokofiev’s best music so beautiful yet disquieting. The third movement is an unbroken thread of melodic exchanges that mutate through wide-ranging keys, tempos and moods, undergirded by a pulsing rhythmic backdrop. Rounding out this sunny and mischievous piece, the vivace recap dissipates into a sly ending.

Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach

Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig

Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins has long been a favorite of performers and audiences alike, providing a unique forum for collaboration among soloists who most often stand alone. Still, the success of the Bach “Double” goes far beyond its instrumentation. The marvel of the work is its perfect synthesis of the two sides of Bach’s voice, what one may call the Apollonian and the Dionysian. On the one side is the simple elegance of form and texture that Bach absorbed from sunnier climates, particularly Italy, and its master of the concerto, Vivaldi. On the other side is the ordered chaos of contrapuntal music, which continued to fascinate Bach even as it passed out of fashion with the younger composers of the day. Bach was one of the rare geniuses (Mozart and Beethoven may be his only true company in this regard) who could hold the opposing ideals of his time in utter balance, producing music of surface beauty, structural integrity, and limitless fascination.

The opening exposition of the concerto borrows elements of a fugue, with the second violins (solo and tutti) stating the subject first in the home key of D Minor, followed four measures later by the first violins’ entrance at the fifth scale degree, A. This highly memorable subject begins with an ascending scale fragment that leaps up and then gradually snakes its way back down an octave to the starting pitch, passing through 10 of the 12 chromatic pitches on the way. In counterbalance, the solo episodes unveil a theme of dramatic leaps and descending scale fragments. The movement proceeds in this ritornello format, interspersing tutti statements of the iconic subject around churning elaboration by the soloists.

The stately slow movement relies on the same construct for sharing solo duties, introducing the theme with the second solo violin in the home key of F Major, and following with the first solo violin imitating the material up the interval of a fifth. The two solo lines mostly dance in subtle opposition of each other, with nearly constant motion. When the voices do unite, especially the four times a figure appears with harmonized eighth notes descending over a static bass pedal, the simplest music takes on uncanny transcendence. The allegro finale returns to the propulsive mood of the concerto’s opening movement. This time the first solo violin has the honor of starting, followed just two eighth notes later by the second violin, at the same pitch instead of transposed. This echo effect, featured throughout the movement, appeared often in prior works for multiple soloists by Corelli and Vivaldi. It reminds us that for all the secular masterpieces these composers left us, their home space was always the reverberant Church, where echoes from above took on hallowed meaning.

The following is an example of an interview conducted for an Orpheus Chamber Orchestra program.

In Their Own Words

Ned Rorem, composer

How did you come to start composing songs?

I started writing songs on pre-existing texts pretty young, not because I loved songs, but because I loved poetry. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t link my two loves, which were music and poetry, so I did. I was also lucky in that I had good people to sing them immediately, fellow students at Northwestern University, and at The Curtis Institute where I went to school when I was still a teenager.

For all the music and all the words you have written, have you ever linked the two?

No. I flatter myself that, whatever my songs are worth, at least my choice of texts is pretty good. If the Ned who writes words and the Ned who writes songs were both good, then I wouldn’t need to write, I would just be able to drop them. They are two separate things entirely. It’s also rather European of me, because Americans are almost always specialists, and Europeans are general practitioners.

11 Songs for Susan has a unique format, mixing new songs with orchestrations of old songs and including texts by seven different poets. Did you conceive this new work as a unified song cycle?

It’s a song cycle if I say it is. I’ve written several so-called cycles, usually all on one poet or all on one theme. But these are not on one theme, and they certainly are not just on one poet. I was supposed to write a bunch of songs for Susan Graham, and so that’s what I did. Susan is one of the few real singers – that is to say with a real voice and a real reputation – who does contemporary music. When Orpheus Chamber Orchestra asked me to write a piece for her, I was very pleased to do it.

You included three songs with Paul Goodman texts in this piece, and you have written many others over the years. What is the history behind your Goodman settings?

I’ve written perhaps 400 songs, of which the first songs were by Paul Goodman, who was a friend from my childhood. He was about ten years older than me. I wrote Clouds a long time ago on a Paul Goodman poem, and the orchestration just asked for strictly strings. The Lordly Hudson is one of the first and one of the most popular songs I ever wrote. I haven’t actually heard this orchestral setting of The Lordly Hudson yet. I’m sure it will sound good, but I don’t know if it needs all of this.

When you orchestrate songs, do you ever change or add musical material?

No, I’m not writing new material at all; I take it exactly as it is. I’m looking, for example, at I Strolled Across an Open Field, which is a rollicking song, and the orchestration is sort of obvious. It asks for these things.

One of the new songs, Wild Nights, and another that is decades old, The Serpent, share a daringly sparse style of accompaniment, with often just a single line supporting the singer. What draws you to this sound?

I’m an economical composer. I like to put down on paper what needs to be put down, and not put down what doesn’t need to be put down. It’s the same with orchestration: I try to keep as near to the original impetus as I can. And I try not to obliterate the singer with too heavy an orchestra. I don’t like doublings in orchestration.

Your music has been a major influence on many younger American composers. Do you pay attention to what they are doing? Do you like what you hear?

I taught for about 15 years, but then I stopped teaching, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. How do you teach? What does it mean? All you can do is deal with something that already exists and say what’s wrong with it. But you can’t make a person compose who isn’t a composer. The farther I get from it, the less I know about it. And I don’t feel an urge to keep up on what’s happening, but I just do, by the nature of things. I try to go to friends’ concerts and hear what’s going on, and some of it I like and some I don’t. I would say this: I think America, with all of its vulgarity, is the most interesting country musically in the world today. I can’t even think of the name of a composer in France or Germany, let alone what they are doing.

What drives you to keep writing new music?

Money! I’ve said almost all I have to say, both in my books and in my music. I don’t really think much about it anymore unless I get a commission. I’ve got a couple of very small commissions at the moment, but if I died now, I wouldn’t be ashamed of leaving what I’ve done.

Seeing the song title Death and the Young Man brings to mind Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Did you have any such connection in mind? Is Schubert an important figure for you?

No, I didn’t have Schubert in mind at all. I am not a lusty fan of Schubert. Those eight letters just make me yawn when I hear them. People are shocked when I say that. Schubert wrote some marvelous songs, but I don’t sit down and listen to them or play them out of desire. I think the whole universe is divided between two aesthetics, French and German, and if that’s the case – and it is – then I am definitely French. So I could live without Beethoven, I could live without Schubert, but I couldn’t live without Debussy and Ravel and Satie, especially. Satie’s big piece called Socrate is a masterpiece.

So much vocal music in the Western canon is sacred in nature, but in your output religious texts are relatively scarce. Still, a song like Alleluia, with its single word, does seem to have an ascendant spirit to it. What is your perspective on the intersection of religion and music?

I am an atheist; I don’t believe in God. But I do believe in the literature that believers have produced over the years. There are some great works in the Bible, and that’s what attracts me: the poetic value rather than the religious value. As for Alleluia, Lou Harrison had written a non-vocal piece for strings called Alleluia, and he was an influence on me when I was still a teenager, so I wrote a piece called Alleluia. I thought it was kind of cute just to have the singer sing one word in different ways.

You are known as the great American composer of songs, and you also have written many successful instrumental pieces, including a Pulitzer prize-winning orchestral work. What people seem to connect to in your music, no matter the format, is its “singing” nature. Is that a core quality of your music?

All music is song. Everything is sung, whether there is a singer around or not, even The Rite of Spring, even Bolero. The pitched human voice is what impelled music from the days of the cavemen up to the present. Even with people who’ve never written for the voice, music is the voice.