PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
MICHAL RATAJ
Temporis for Cimbalom and Large Orchestra
Michal Rataj was born in Pisenk, Czech Republic, on January 26, 1975. He composed Temporis in August 2015 for the Ostrava Day Festival; the conductor of the premiere was Rolf Gupta. The score calls for a solo cimbalom and a large orchestra, consisting of two flutes (one doubling alto flute), two oboes, two clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), bassoon and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, tenor trombone and bass trombone, timpani, three percussionists with a huge list of instruments, harp, piano and strings (specifying twelve first violins, twelve second violins, ten violas, eight cellos and six double basses). Duration is about 18 minutes.
Michal Rataj studied musical science at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University (1999) and composition at the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (2003) in Prague. He also studied in London and Berlin, completing a doctoral dissertation on electroacoustic music in 2006. The following year, a Fulbright Scholarship brought him to UC Berkeley for post-doctoral research, where he found, in an encounter with a cimbalom player, the first inspiration that led to Temporis. He is best known for electroacoustic music and sound composition. In the discussion below, all direct quotations come from an essay the composer has written about this piece.
The ideas that led to Temporis began with an "unorganized session" in 2014, when Rataj and Jan Mikušek were performing on Palm Sunday in Prague, for which he assembled cimbalom, viola da gamba, male vocalist and live electronics (which he performed). He called the result an "electro-acoustic collage of a world instrument, a period instrument, Gregorian chant and computer-based sound synthesis."
The cimbalom brought back his experience in Berkeley in 2007-2008, when he was undertaking research at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. He met a street cimbalom player and listened to him regularly. The two of them together developed a special "micro-bow" for Temporis, which is conceived as a concerto for cimbalom and large orchestra.
The piece to be played here grew out of elements of several recent works. Rataj uses “twelve consecutive and always different harmonic centers, spectral fundamentals, upon which harmonic relationships are organized” (the term spectral refers to a recent development drawing especially on computer analysis of the sound “spectra” of sonorities, which can be manipulated to produce novel and unusual sounds; the word spectra suggests something almost ghostly, otherworldly. A number of composers today work with sounds in this way as a contrast to traditional serialism.
Materials from the liturgical work of 2014 developed into the basic material, first, of a radio work; they were then shaped into a harmonic series based on a twelve-tone grouping. The cimbalom suggested writing a concerto. In 2013, he composed Spatialis, dealing with issues of sound and space. For the present work, “The idea of space has been suddenly prolonged into another attribute of space, which is TIME. Thus Temporis began.” Using the sound material from the radio work and selecting twelve different fundamentals (C#-D#-F#-A-G#-G-A#-B-D-F-E-C[/D]), the piece is organized in 12 sections (by analogy to the months of a year). “Starting with the longest / slowest part over the C fundamental, each part becomes shorter until the last one of about three seconds only.” A highlight of the work is the elaborate cimbalom cadenza in the latter part.
"Temporis pays tribute to cosmological time, its compression and expansion, and its reflection in our own minds. The piece has been dedicated to Jan Mikušek, who discovered the cimbalom for me and also to my music mentor, Milan Slavický, who first taught me about time in music. Special thanks to Bruno Ferrandis, who has believed in my music."
GUSTAV MAHLER
Symphony No. 9 in D major
Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (now Kalište), Bohemia, on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He began his Ninth Symphony during the late spring of 1909, finished the orchestral draft that fall, and reported to his friend and assistant Bruno Walter on April 1, 1910, that the score, "a very positive enrichment to my little family," was complete. Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance on June 26, 1912. The score calls for four flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, four clarinets (one doubling E‑flat clarinet) and bass clarinet, four bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam‑tam, triangle, glockenspiel, low‑pitched chimes, two harps and strings. (Mahler’s autograph has only a single harp; the decision to divide the part between two players was Bruno Walter’s.) Duration is about 81 minutes.
Mahler composed his last works—Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony and the unfinished Tenth—under a medical sentence of death. He had known from the summer of 1907 that he was suffering from an incurable heart defect that forced him to give up the vigorous regimen of walking, cycling and swimming. The discovery came under tragic circumstances: the composer’s two daughters contracted scarlet fever, and the elder one died. Mahler and his wife Alma were shattered. Soon afterward, Alma’s mother, who came to help during this sad period, suffered a heart attack. The doctor who examined her also found that the strain had affected Alma’s heart. In a morbid joking mood, Mahler remarked, "You might as well examine me too." And thus he first learned that his activities must be severely curtailed.
By that summer, he had already agreed to resign from the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, though for reasons of politics, not health. Despite the brilliance of his years as director there—still regarded as one of the high points in the history of the Vienna State Opera (as it is known today)—Mahler simply decided he could take no more of the virulent anti‑Semitic attacks from the Viennese press.
But he certainly did not withdraw from active music‑making. In fact, he undertook new challenges in New York, first at the Metropolitan Opera and later with the New York Philharmonic. And, of course, he continued composing actively. Already in the summer of 1907, whether because of the tragedy with his daughter, or in spite of it, Mahler began sketching some musical settings of Chinese poems in a German translation by Hans Bethge. This was ultimately to grow into Das Lied von der Erde, a "song‑symphony" that Mahler refused to number—it would have been his Ninth Symphony—because of a superstitious fear that no composer after Beethoven had been able to complete more than nine symphonies. The Ninth, therefore, was "really" his Tenth. Still, though he plunged into his next work with great energy after completing the Ninth, the one he was willing to call the Tenth was left a fragment when a streptococcal blood infection ended his life.
The Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde have much in common: Both call for a large orchestra but employ it with the utmost refinement, often in textures that are almost those of chamber music. Both are often contrapuntal in conception, no doubt much influenced by Mahler’s enthusiastic study of Bach (he owned a copy of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition of the complete works), though entirely original in their treatment. And both works are without question valedictory in tone.
Mahler may have known or sensed that the end was not far off, but that scarcely justifies all the sentimental nonsense that has been written about his last years. Much of it we owe to Alma Mahler’s book about her husband. Alma missed no opportunity to portray herself as the guiding light without whom the composer could barely function. It is true that his output of mighty compositions was vastly greater during the years of their marriage than before it, but we must realize that Mahler was by no means the emotional cripple that popularized versions of his biography have made him out to be. He loved life, he wanted to live it to the fullest, and he wanted to continue writing music more than anything else. It is the strength of that feeling that makes his final works so poignant.
The Ninth is the last of Mahler’s instrumental symphonies in the typical four movements, but everything else about it is unusual. Its four movements turn the usual tempo relationships inside out, beginning and ending with slow movements, reserving the second and third place for faster music. This procedure was not unprecedented, to be sure; at least two earlier symphonies of valedictory character—Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, No. 45 in F‑sharp minor, and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique—end in a slow tempo. Mahler’s Ninth proceeds from an opening movement in D (though we are left in doubt as to whether it is really major or minor) to a finale firmly in D‑flat (though even there, the question of major or minor is answered affirmatively only in the last moments).
Alban Berg wrote of Mahler’s Ninth, "The first movement is the most glorious he ever wrote." As Michael Kennedy has remarked,
"This great movement is sufficient testimony to why the evolutionary Mahler has had a greater influence than the revolutionary Schoenberg. In it we hear the sparse, fragmentary textures of Webern, the epigrammatic style of Berg, the 'total thematicism' of Schoenberg."
The movement expresses a poignant longing to stay, to avoid ultimate departure, through one of the simplest of musical ideas—a descending thematic idea that progresses down the scale (mi, re, do); the easiest way to hear this line in your head is to think of the notes we have sung since childhood to the words "Three blind mice." It’s that simple. This extremely basic melody resists coming to its final note, its point of rest, on do. We often hear it truncated in the Ninth as a kind of musical "sigh," whether of resignation or longing.
The first movement begins with nothing more than an irregular pulse in the cellos and fourth horn, suggesting the beating of a worn‑out heart. The harp softly tolls a few resonant notes that become an important motive. The muted second horn sings a tiny fragment, followed by a rustle in the violas, and the second violins begin the theme proper. It starts twice down the scale—mi, re—without finishing, then moves off in another direction, as if avoiding the consequences of this descent. If this is a sigh of resignation, the resignation is not yet total; hope still remains. Michael Kennedy has pointed out that the figure is similar to the opening of Beethoven’s E‑flat sonata, Les Adieux, Opus 81a, which was closely connected to the beginning of Mahler’s career. His performance of this work won the composer an audition for and entry into the Vienna Conservatory. And it begins with the same descending gesture—a figure that Beethoven explicitly labeled "Farewell."
In contrast to Beethoven’s "Lebewohl," Mahler is not ready to complete his leave-taking. This omission of the final note in the descent generates much of the first movement’s activity. At the same time, it recognizes the inevitable. Abstract music, by itself, can get no more explicit than this. Mahler sometimes left specific indications of his feelings on paper: in the short score (though not in the final score), when the principal subject returns for the first time, he wrote "O vanished days of youth! O scattered love!"
Berg was sensitive to this mood in Mahler’s score. In a letter to his wife, he described Mahler’s "expression of exceptional fondness for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy nature to its depths—before death comes. For he comes irresistibly. The whole movement is permeated by premonitions of death." But Berg was equally impressed by the formal organization of the movement. It was not simply a full‑fledged sonata form in slow tempo, such as we often find in the second movements of Beethoven symphonies, but a movement organized on dramatic principles. Berg wrote, "The whole movement is based on a premonition of death which constantly recurs...that is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano." Throughout the movement, the opening passage, marked "Andante comodo" (which means something like "At a comfortable walking speed") speeds up to a faster tempo (unspecified). This quasi‑Allegretto is a dramatic outburst of energy that opposes the predominantly lyrical and major‑mode character of the Andante comodo with something more violent. There are six such eruptions in the movement. The fifth of them—the longest and loudest—disintegrates the musical materials so that they must be reassembled in the final sections.
The very last measures return to the opening "sigh," the unfinished descent to do. Three times the oboe sings mi, re—but refuses to make a final step. The last time, the oboe sustains its note for four full measures, even though the tonic harmony has already arrived, and a well‑behaved melody would finally have come to rest. But this one is absolutely determined not to yield. Finally the D appears—but in another instrument (the flute) and in a different octave! Life is too precious to be let go of easily.
The two middle movements are closely related by key (C major and its relative, A minor), though both are distant from the keys of the first and last movements. Both are also linked by a satirical quality. The scherzo is cast as a Ländler, that Austrian country dance that Mahler made the basis of so many varied movements, usually with an ironic touch. This one is the most ironic of them all. Its structure is quite simple—a scherzo with two Trios. The performance indication, "Rather clumsy and rough," describes only the first part, a dance of cheerful clodhoppers. The contrasting Trios are in different tempos: the first a quick waltz, hyper‑energized, the second a gentler and more lilting dance whose theme is related to the first movement’s "sigh." The coda dispatches the scherzo with a nose‑thumbing gesture of piccolo and contrabassoon four octaves apart.
Mahler privately dedicated the third movement, the Rondo-Burleske, "to my brothers in Apollo," a sarcastic response to those who suggested he lacked technical skill. This is a complex, aggressive movement (Mahler calls for a "very defiant" performance) filled with motivic counterpoint in textures derived from his study of Bach (though sounding nothing like the Thomaskantor). Vigorous march-like passages contrast with racing figures imitated throughout the orchestra, satirically colored and interrupted in the central passage by a strongly contrasted theme of soaring warmth ("with great feeling"), though it is soon cast aside for a saucy conclusion.
The finale is in the unexpected key of D‑flat, far from the tonality in which the symphony began. A sorrowful two‑bar preface for the violins leads to a richly solemn threnody growing out of earlier themes (it hints at Beethoven’s farewell—even completing the three‑step descent). During the course of the movement, Mahler refers in passing to some of his earlier works— "Abschied" ("Farewell"), the conclusion of Das Lied von der Erde and a passage in his Kindertotenlieder where the text runs "Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh’n" ("The day is lovely on those heights"). Austere contrapuntal lines intertwine in a musical narrative that manages to express a poignant sense of loss—just like Das Lied von der Erde, but in purely abstract musical terms, without the aid of a text.
Even on the hushed final page, for strings alone, Mahler is not ready to say farewell. The first violins complete their soaring melodic line, settling onto A‑flat, the dominant of the home key—and stay there. It is up to the second violins to complete the melody and close the symphony. They rise to F, the third degree (mi) in the scale of D‑flat major, then sink through F‑flat (hinting that the conclusion will be in the minor) to E‑flat (re)—but not to D‑flat. There is a final phrase in which the second violins waver between F‑natural and F‑flat, between major and minor, before settling on the major mode. They still refuse—gently but steadfastly—to descend to do. Even in this poignant final moment, Mahler, through his music, holds firmly onto life.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)