Read our program notes below ahead of the Reflections concert series. The notes are written by artistic director Sam Hollister. For more information about the event series, head to our events page.
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Born in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France, Carlos Salzedo grew up around a combination of Spanish, French, and Basque cultures, so his music carries an eclectic feeling of cultural fluency. The composer’s Suite of Eight Dances, for harp, contains music that is gracefully fluid and evokes the sense of a gently shimmering liquid surface—in other words, an imagery-based take on reflection. In “Siciliana,” Salzedo paints the picture of a calm tidal pool. His varied cultural ties manifest in his use of spacious compound meter: the division of each beat into three smaller pulses. This gives the music a rustic Celtic feeling. On the other hand, “Rumba” involves a very uneven rhythmic accompaniment—constantly on the offbeat, lilting forward almost uncontrollably like a proudly bubbling brook.
About a decade after the suite premiered, tragedy struck the world of French music. The composer Arthur Honegger passed away from a sudden heart attack. He had had a profound impact on reconciling genuine French musical sounds with formal and contrapuntal expectations left over from Romanticism, a strong legacy which made his passing terribly painful for the world of music. One fellow Les Six member, Francis Poulenc, composed a Sonate pour clarinette et piano (Clarinet Sonata) in memory of the lost icon. Thus, the piece serves here as an example of inward reflection, a personal meditation on the memory of someone lost to the universe. In the deeply emotional second movement, we hear Poulenc’s reflection in the form of a constantly aching chord progression. It is a progression taken straight from the Romantic-era harmonic textbooks that Honegger so revered, but infected with the knowledge of its own death.
We conclude our program with a journey through one of those Romantic-era soundscapes that sparked Honegger’s passion and Poulenc’s subsequent nostalgia. Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings presents, in five movements, what feels like images of pastoral countryside. The movements’ quaint and bucolic character is a perfect vehicle for a study in the simplest of forms: ABA. In other words, each movement is a near perfect example of mirrored musical ideas, of reflected structure. The first musical idea in each movement returns at its conclusion, originally as a perfect copy but ultimately improved and made wise by the events of the B section.
I have always felt that Dvorak, more than anyone else, perfected the feeling of “delight” in his music. We hope you enjoy the uplifting conclusion to our journey through musical reflection.