Four Centuries of Great Music January 12, 2024 Celebrating the music of four composers with birthday anniversaries in January

Composers born in January – FCGM-01-12-25

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are celebrating the music of four composers with birthday anniversaries in January: Barbara Pentland, Ulysses Kay, Max Bruch and Alexander Scriabin.  Yes, January is the birth month of Mozart, Schubert and Philip Glass.  But I thought you would like to hear music from composers you might not be as familiar with.

Let’s open this first hour with the music of Barbara Pentland.
01/02/1912-02/05/2000
Barbara Pentland was born on January 2, 1912 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to a wealthy, politically conservative family.  She was born with a heart condition that restricted her outdoor activities so devoted her time from early on to academic pursuits.  She started the piano at age 9 and developed an early interest in composition.  Her piano playing was encouraged but her early ventures into composition were strongly discouraged by both her teacher and family, who viewed the pursuit as an eccentric hobby that was “too exciting for a delicate child”.

She continued her piano studies in Montreal and Paris and upon returning from France she embarked on a concert performance career beginning in `1930.  In 1936 she entered the graduate music program at Juilliard in New York City with an emphasis in composition add studied with Frederick Jacobi and Bernard Wagenaar.  She continued her studies at Tanglewood in the summers of 1941 & 1942 with Aaron Copland.  She began composing in a neoclassical style.

Pentland’s compositional language began to shift away from neoclassicism in 1955 when she encountered the work of Anton Webern for the first time while visiting Darmstadt. Although she never became a strict 12-tone, serial composer in Webern’s manner, she did adapt elements of his style and technique into her new “free atonal” musical language. It is the work of this period which is regarded as her finest, and “drew on the textures and organizational principles of the Webern school but was suffused with a lyricism that was expressly individual”.  Her string Quartet No. 3, composed in 1969, is entirely representative of this new or mature style.

Her third string quartet has short musical motives and and more jagged in contour. Gone are the long lyrical gestures and busy scale passages of her earlier quartets. There is a new economy
in her “initial impulse,” both in its first statement and in its subsequent development during the quartet.  
out.  This work is frequently non-pulsatile and full of nervous energy. The listener is required to focus on small rhythmic/melodic units and the myriad of ways in which they interrelate. However, her approach to form, remains entirely traditional, with individual movements conforming to classical models.   There are   4 movements: Allegro; Adagio molto; Allegretto pagliaccesco
and Largo, presto.

Her opening material in the first movement serves as the generative source for all subsequent movements.  Further,
each movement grows out of the previous one, and thus the last movement relates to the first, creating an explicitly circular structure.   She uses mirror techniques remain in not only on the horizontal plane (many of the movements embody formal palindromes), but also in the vertical plane as well often using palindromic note progressions.

Here is a performance of her String Quartet No. 3 by the Purcell String Quartet from the album Barbara Pentland: Canadian Composers Portraits

You have been listening to a performance of String Quartet No. 3 by the Purcell String Quartet from the album Barbara Pentland: Canadian Composers Portraits

Purcell String Quartet
Barbara Pentland: Canadian Composers Portraits
Centrediscs Recordings

Next on Today’s episode of Four Centuries of Great Music celebrating the music of four composers with birthday anniversaries in January is music by American composer
Ulysses Kay.  Kay was born 5 years and 5 days after Barbara Pentland  on January 7, 1917 in Tucson, Arizona.  

Kay, the nephew of the classic jazz musician King Oliver, studied piano, violin and saxophone.  He attended the University of Arizona, where he was encouraged to become a composer by the African-American composer William Grant Still. He went for graduate work to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and there studied under Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers.  Ulysses Kay met the eminent neoclassical composer Paul Hindemith in the summer of 1941 at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood at the same time that Barbara Pentland was there so undoubtedly knew one another  and followed Hindemith to Yale for a formative year of study from 1941 to 1942.  After serving in the Navy in World War II be continued his musical studies at Columbia University.   He studied in Rome for 4 years after receiving the Rome prize and a Fullbright Scholarship.  His career included an appointment as a  distinguished professor in music at Lehman College of the City University of New York. After two decades teaching there, he retired.  Known for his symphonic and choral works, he also wrote 5 operas.

Today we will listen to two works.  First his Concerto for Orchestra written in 1948.  In Kay’s Concerto for Orchestra, by contrast to both Baroque and traditional styles, he uses families of instruments (brass, woodwinds, and strings) as his soloists, using their differing timbres as their solo voices. In addition, he uses texture as a point of contrast.  The work is in three movements: I. Toccata marked Allegro moderato; II. Arioso marked Adagio and III. Passacaglia marked Andante.

The fast first movement starts this process of using families of instruments with the strings as the featured element.  The second movement starts with the woodwinds, first clarinets, then flutes. The strings enter next, countering the woodwinds. Each family of the orchestra has a role and has its own section of the movement. After a brass chorale-like section and a climax on a dissonant chord, the orchestra drops out, and we finish as we begin: woodwinds and strings.  Taking his final movement from a 17th-century Baroque bass pattern, the passacaglia, Kay constructs a variation movement, again contrasting families of instruments. After the introduction, each variation builds until, by the end of the 2nd variation, the full orchestra has entered and builds to a brief climax. The next variation begins with the woodwinds, then the brass, starting with the French horn, announces the final variation. He builds with counterpoint that becomes increasingly dense in texture and dissonant in harmony until the brilliant brass conclusion.

Here is a performance of Ulysses Kay’s  Concerto for Orchestra by Kellen Gray, Royal Scottish National Orchestra from the album African American Voices II

01/07/1917-05/20/1995

Concerto for Orchestra (1948)

8 — Toccata: Allegro moderato 4:50
9 — Arioso: Adagio 6:11
10 — Passacaglia: Andante 7:08

Kellen Gray, Royal Scottish National Orchestra
African American Voices II
Linn Records

We are going to close this first hour of today’s Four Centuries of Great Music celebrating the music of four composers with birthday anniversaries in January with more music by American composer Ulysses Kay, his Pieta for oboe and orchestra.  Written in 1950 in Rome during one of his stays following winning the Rome Prize for the second time, it is in the words of conductor of performance of this work that we will be listening to, JoAnn Falletta, this work represents “Kay’s personal reflection on Michelangelo’s masterpiece”.

It is freely structured cantilena without obvious form, although there is a recurring motif of three repeated notes followed by a rising second (either major or minor) that weaves it way subtly through the piece.  Kay obviates any sense of clear rhythm buy avoiding accented downbeats and by shifting between duple and triple divisions of the same basic pulse sometimes with one in the solo line and one in the accompaniment.

Here is a performance of Ulysses Kay: Pieta
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta from the album Light in a Time of Darkness

Ulysses Kay: Pieta
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta
Light in a Time of Darkness
Beau Fleuve Records

Max Bruch
01/06/1838-10/02/1920

1 Bruch Violin Concerto – i. Allegro moderato
2 Bruch Violin Concerto – ii. Adagio
3 Bruch Violin Concerto – iii. Finale
RANDALL GOOSBY, violin
YANNICK NEZET- SEGUIN conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra
MAX BRUCH • FLORENCE PRICE Violin Concerto
Decca Classics

Alexander Nikolaevich SCRIABIN
01/06/1872-04/27/1915

1-16 Sonata No. 3 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 23_ I. Drammatico
1-17 Sonata No. 3 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 23_ II. Allegretto
1-18 Sonata No. 3 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 23_ III. Andante
1-19 Sonata No. 3 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 23_ IV. Presto con fuoco

01 Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 6_ I. Allegro con fuoco
02 Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 6_ II. Andante
03 Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 6_ III. Presto
04 Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 6_ IV. Funebre

Ruth Laredo, piano
Alexander Scriabin: The Complete Piano Sonatas
Rhino Entertainment