Clinton Symphony Orchestra

Opening our Clinton Symphony “Music of the Holidays” concert (7:30 pm, Saturday December 8 at Clinton High School) will be the delightful Canzon per Sonar Septimi Toni a 8 by Giovanni Gabrieli played by the brass section.  Later in the concert, we will hear an arrangement of traditional Christmas carols, A Canadian Brass Christmas.  Please enjoy these program notes, and plan to join us on Saturday evening.

Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612) was born in Venice, one of five children. While not much is known about Giovanni’s early life, he studied with his uncle, composer Andrea Gabrieli, who considered Giovanni “little less than a son.” As a protégé to Andrea, Giovanni visited several of the major music centers of western Europe. In Munich, with the blessing of his uncle, he stayed to study with Orlando de Lassus until 1579. Lassus had a significant influence on Gabrieli’s musical development.

Returning to Venice in 1584, Gabrieli took up the position as principal organist at St. Mark’s Basilica in 1585, then, in the following year, he assumed the post of principal composer on his uncle’s death. Gabrieli continued to prosper when he took the post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, another post he retained for life. Much of his music was written specifically for the two churches at which he was organist.

San Marco had a long tradition of musical excellence and Gabrieli’s work there made him one of the most noted composers in Europe. The vogue that began with his influential volume Sacrae symphoniae (1597) was such that composers from all over Europe, especially from Germany, came to Venice to study.
After 1600, Gabrieli began to show signs of ill health, so much so, that other musicians were hired to perform the duties he could no longer do. He died in 1612 in Venice, of complications from a kidney stone.

Canzon per Sonar Septimi Toni a 8 by Giovanni Gabrieli was designed for use in San Marco during mass and vespers for important liturgical commemorations and occasions. Brass is the setting for our concert, however this work has been arranged for and performed by numerous and widely various instrumental and vocal groups.

Although a composer of original material, Calvin Custer (d. 1998) is best known for his rousing arrangements of other composers’ works. A graduate of Carnegie-Mellon and Syracuse Universities, Custer served as an all-purpose performer with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra (SSO) for twenty-four years.

Four years after joining the SSO as a keyboardist and horn and brass performer, in 1966 Custer was appointed Associate Conductor and Resident Conductor for the group. He was instrumental in the orchestra’s community outreach programs and performed regularly with the SSO Percussion Ensemble and the Syracuse Symphony Rock Ensemble.

A Canadian Brass Christmas Suite is a medley of six Christmas pieces based on arrangements for the popular Canadian Brass ensemble. The six carols referenced in the suite are Ding Dong! Merrily On High, I Saw Three Ships,The Huron Carol, and Here We Come A’Wassailing.

Program notes by William Driver

The Clinton Symphony’s Holiday Pops concert is coming up this Saturday, December 8, 7:30 pm at Clinton High School.  Today’s pieces come from the screen….big and small.  Learn about the Charlie Brown Christmas, which songs are in our Christmas Movies medley, and the story behind White Christmas.

By the early 1960s, Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts had become a sensation worldwide. Television producer Lee Mendelson acknowledged the strip’s cultural impression and produced a documentary on the subject, titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Mendelson, a fan of jazz, heard a song by Vince Guaraldi on the radio not long after completion of his documentary, and contacted the musician to produce music for the special. Guaraldi composed the music for the project, creating an entire piece, “Linus and Lucy”, to serve as the theme.

The first instrumentals for the special were recorded by Guaraldi at Glendale, California’s Whitney Studio. Recycling “Linus and Lucy” from the documentary, Guaraldi completed two new originals for the special, “Skating”, and “Christmas Time Is Here”. In the weeks preceding the premiere, Mendelson encountered trouble finding a lyricist for Guaraldi’s instrumental intro and penned “Christmas Time Is Here” in “about 15 minutes” on the backside of an envelope.

By April 1965, Time featured the Peanuts gang on its magazine cover, and plans for an animated half-hour Peanuts Christmas special were commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company. When Coca-Cola commissioned A Charlie Brown Christmas in spring 1965, Guaraldi returned to write the music.

   Christmas at the Movies ( arr. Bob Krogstad) recalls some of the most memorable songs and themes from our favorite Holiday films, including Somewhere in My Memory (from “Home Alone”), How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Miracle on 34th Street; The Polar Express; A Christmas Story; and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

     White Christmas is considered the most popular song in America’s history. The composer of the tune, Irving Berlin, came to America with his family from a backward Russia, hoping to fulfill the great promise of his adopted land: In America, one can become whatever he wants to be, limited only by his own ambitions.

Berlin had his first world-wide success in 1911, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a tune so infectious that it revived the ragtime mood that had gripped the country a decade before with Scott Joplin. For a time, he wrote a song a day, most often at night while the rest of the city slept. During World War II, he maintained a troupe of entertainers who traveled from camp to camp to keep up the morale of the troops; he was away from home and family for three and a half years.

Where, when, and how White Christmas came to be written is open to question. One account by Berlin states that in 1940 he was poolside at a hotel on a hot day in Phoenix, Arizona, when the words and tune came to him. He called his secretary in New York City and told her to get pencil and paper and copy down the words to the “greatest song that’s ever been written.”

The song was introduced in the wartime film Holiday Inn (1942).

Program notes by William Driver

The Clinton Symphony’s Holiday Pops concert is coming up this Saturday, December 8, 7:30 pm at Clinton High School.  This week I’ll be posting the program notes in groups.  Today we have some of our symphonic favorites: Concerto Grosso, Op.6 No. 8 – Corelli; A Mad Russian’s Christmas – Tchaikovsky, arr. Bob Phillips; and Trepak (from “Nutcracker Suite”) – Tchaikovsky.

Arcangelo Corelli (1653- 1713) was an imminent Italian violinist and composer known chiefly for his influence on the development of violin style and for his twelve Concerti Grossi, which set the concerto grosso as a standard of composition.

After studying in Bologna, Corelli went to Rome where his activities for the early 1670s are vague. In 1677 he made a trip to Germany, returning to Rome in 1680. On June 3, 1677, he sent his first composition, Sonata for Violin and Lute, to Count Fabrizio Laderchi of Faenza. In the years following, Corelli continued to rise in popularity and prestige within musical Rome, eventually in 1689 becoming music director for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a position he held for the rest of his life.

Corelli did not live to see the publication of his Opus 6, consisting of 12 Concerto Grossi, which was published in Amsterdam the year following his death.

Concerto Grosso in G minor, Op 6, No 8 ‘Christmas’ was first performed on Christmas, 1690 and bears the inscription “Made for the night of Christmas.” The concerto is made up of six short movements which alternate in tempo between fast and slow. The final movement is a serene Pastorale which suggests the nativity scene.

Following the success of his opera Pique Dame, Peter Ily’ich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) accepted a commission from the director of the Russian Imperial Theaters for a ballet. The ballet was to be based on Alexandre Dumas père’s adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Tchaikovsky liked neither Dumas’ adaptation nor Hoffman’s original story but felt compelled, for financial reasons, to fulfill his obligation.

He began work on the score in early 1892 and finished the piece by late summer of the same year. To generate public enthusiasm for the ballet, the composer made a suite of eight of the numbers and presented The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 72a to the St. Petersburg branch of the Musical Society on March 19, 1892. The complete ballet debuted in December 1892 to generally poor reviews. While the suite was an immediate success, the complete ballet did not achieve great popularity until the 1950s. It has since become standard Christmas fare.

Trepak is one of the several consecutive ethnic dances in the ballet. It is based on the traditional Ukrainian folk dance known in Ukrainian as the Tropak or Tripak (Russian: Трепак) (Ukrainian: Трoпак, Трiпак) and is characteristically in 2/4 time.

A Mad Russian’s Christmas is an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Trepak arranged for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra by Bob Phillips.

Program notes by William Driver

The final group on Sunday’s Musical Friendships Chamber Music Concert will be a brass quintet; Ben and Brooke Logan, trumpets; Vanessa Leavett, horn; Joseph Titus, trombone; and Lee Stofer, tuba.  They will be performing three works arranged for brass quintet:

Adagio, K.411 – W. A. Mozart (arr. for Empire Brass Quintet)
An Academic Procession – Johannes Brahms (arr. Michael Moore)
Girl with the Flaxen Hair – Claude Debussey (arr. David Sabourin)

The following program notes trace the history of the brass quintet:

The Brass Quintet as an independent ensemble arrived relatively late in the chamber music realm and relied to some degree on the development of brass instrument design and manufacture in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While Russian composer and engineer Victor Ewald (1860-1935) is considered the innovator of the modern brass quintet, a French violinist and composer Jean–François Bellon (1795-1869) wrote several brass quintets in the 1840s primarily to display the virtuosity possible with the improved designs in brass instruments. Bellon, however, used a variety of instrumental configurations for his quintets, and it was Ewald who arrived at the modern equivalent of the brass quintet.

Photographic evidence from about 1912 shows that Ewald himself played in a brass quintet. It is seen to consist of two piston-valved cornets, rather than the modern choice of trumpets; a rotary-valved alto horn, rather than the French horn; a rotary-valved tenor horn, rather than the trombone; and a rotary-valved tuba (played by Ewald himself). Of these instruments, it is the alto and tenor horns that are most strikingly different from their modern quintet counterparts.

Ewald wrote four quintets specifically for brass quintet and transposed a string quartet into a fifth quintet. Wikipedia offers the following summary since Ewald:

The contemporary brass quintet appeared in the late 1940s created by the Chicago Brass Quintet, followed in the 1950s by the American Brass Quintet and the 1960s by the Eastman Brass Quintet. However, it was 1970 with the founding of Canadian Brass that the brass quintet finally became a major hall (i.e. Carnegie Hall main stage) attraction and accepted as a legitimate member of the chamber music world…Canadian Brass established both the style and popularity of the quintet medium throughout the world, having performed more than five thousand concerts and selling more than 500,000 quintet music books and creating a library of over 600 compositions and arrangements for brass quintet….Notable contributions to the [brass quintet] literature include many commissions by modern ensembles such as the American Brass Quintet and transcriptions by other ensembles such as the Canadian Brass.

The three arranged pieces programmed for today’s program are as follows:

Adagio, K.411 – W. A. Mozart (arranged by the Empire Brass Quintet)
An Academic Procession – Johannes Brahms (arranged by Michael Moore for Atlanta Brass Ensemble)
Girl with the Flaxen Hair – Claude Debussy (arranged by David Sabourin for Touch of Brass)

Program notes by William Driver

The third work on our Musical Friendships Chamber Music Concert on Sunday, November 4th, will be Duo for Violin & Viola No. 1, K.423W, by W.A. Mozart.  It will be performed by Andrew Calhoun, violin, and Peter Calhoun, viola.

Program notes for this piece:

Mozart – Duo for Violin and Viola, K423

In July 1783, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) returned to his native Salzburg from his adopted city of Vienna. He took with him his new bride Constanze to meet his father Leopold and his sister Nannerl. He planned to keep a low profile, for he did not want to draw the attention of the Archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus Colloredo. Mozart had left the employ of the Archbishop under a cloud of acrimony in 1781. Since Colloredo considered his house musicians little more than hired help and since the young Mozart considered himself more than a common employee, the two were often at loggerheads.

After an extended stay in Vienna with the Archduke and his entourage, Mozart sought to lengthen his stay so that he could compose music on commission, but the Archbishop refused and insisted that the composer return to Salzburg with the group. Mozart, resentful and eager to write music that could earn him a year’s salary in a couple of months, resigned from his post to remain in Vienna. The Archbishop was outraged at the impudence of the upstart composer but relented. Afterwards, Mozart wrote to his father, “I am no longer so unfortunate as to be in Salzburg’s services – today was that happy day for me.”

It was an anxious, nerve-wracking visit for Mozart; not only was he bringing Constanze to meet his father for the first time, but he also expressed concern that the archbishop might have him arrested.

Michael Haydn, brother to Franz Joseph Haydn and good friend of Mozart, had assumed the role of composer and musician at the court of Archbishop Colloredo. The Archbishop had commissioned Haydn to compose a set of six duos for violin and viola, of which the composer had completed four before he fell seriously ill. An autocratic Colloredo, without regard for the sick composer’s condition, threatened to cut Haydn’s salary until the commission was completed. Mozart on hearing of the plight of his friend offered to write the remaining two duos so that Haydn would not have his salary cut.

Mozart wrote two duos, one in G and one in B-flat major. The Duo for Violin and Viola in G, K423 on today’s program has been described by one critic in the following manner:

There is a surprising equality to the violin and viola parts, which gives a completeness to the sense of dialogue between the two instruments.  Even in a light work such as this, the operatic Mozart’s ability to flesh out whole characters in pure musical conversation shines very clearly.

It should be noted that the Archbishop, while praising Haydn’s compositional skills, favored Mozart’s two duos over Haydn’s four – which must have given Mozart some pleasure in having gotten one over on his old nemesis.

*Program notes by William Driver.

The second piece on our Musical Friendships Chamber Concert (3:00 pm, Sunday November 4, Zion Lutheran Church in Clinton) will be Nocturne for Piano, Violin & Violoncello by Franz Schubert. It will be performed by Nadia Wirchnianski, piano; Asa Church, violin; and Robert Whipple, violoncello.

Please enjoy the following program notes:

Franz Peter Schubert(1797-1828) is considered, like Beethoven, a transitional composer between the late Classical-ism of Mozart and Haydn and the early Romanticism of Mendelssohn and Schumann. He became the embodiment of the long-suffering artist who labors to produce great masterworks which are met with rejection, only to find acceptance just as his young life is cut short by cruel fate.

Born in Himmelpfortgrund, Austria, Schubert showed a predilection for music at an early age, and he was nurtured in these native tendencies by his father, a school master, and an older brother, Ignaz. In additional to his skills at playing the violin, piano, and organ, Schubert possessed an exceptional voice that earned him a position at the Stadtkonvikt, which trained young aspiring vocalists to one day sing at the Imperial Court. In due course in 1808, he received a scholarship to the Imperial Court’s chapel choir, where he impressed the court organist Wenzel Ruzicka, not only with his voice but with his skill as a violinist in the student orchestra. He was promoted to leader of the orchestra, and, in Ruzicka’s absence, young Schubert conducted as well. While there, Schubert studied with the eminent court composer Antonio Salieri, who pronounced the young man a musical genius.

When his voice broke in 1812, Schubert left the Court – although he continued to study with Salieri for another three years – and soon entered a teacher training college in Vienna, after which he took an assistant’s position at his father’s school.

Composing seemed to come naturally to Schubert, and he had an extraordinary ear for melody. While he worked as a schoolmaster, he composed several works including piano pieces, string quartets, symphonies, and an opera. Inspired by a great trove of Romantic poetry from German writers, Schubert began to put their words to music in the form of Lieds (Songs). Two such Lieds based on works by Johann Wolfgang Goethe took Vienna by storm and made Schubert a name among parlor composers: Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), and Erlkönig (Fairy King).

Having found an audience for his music, Schubert left teaching to seek his fortune with music full time. Soon the prolific composer produced a startling array of works in various genres, from operas to lieder. A piano work Sonata in B-flat Major was followed by an operetta Die Zwillingsbrüder (The Twin Brothers) was followed by incidental music for a play Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp) was followed by a string quartet movement Quartettsatz, and so on.

Despite its growing popularity, publishers were reluctant to offer Schubert’s music because they considered it so nontraditional that it would not sell. Yet, in Vienna, Schubert’s songs and dances were so popular that wealthy citizens gave concert parties called Schubertiaden to enliven their Viennese social life.

During the mid-1820s, Schubert’s fortunes waxed and waned, from a modicum of recognition to near abject poverty. So dire did his circumstances become that he ventured briefly back into teaching. To add misery to his uncertainty, he contracted a venereal disease, possibly syphilis, that was slowly but surely killing him.

Suffering terribly as he did, nevertheless, he continued to produce music at a phenomenal rate in both the chamber and orchestral realms. By 1826, after years of public and official neglect, Schubert had behind him an impressive body of work including eight symphonies, a major song cycle, notable operas, and numerous chamber pieces. This extraordinary output was instrumental in his growing popularity in Vienna and with his negotiations with several music publishing firms. However, the death of Ludwig van Beethoven hit Schubert hard, as it did most of Vienna.

As if sensing his own approaching death, Schubert continued to pour his soul into his compositions, completing the Great C Major Symphony and the last great string quartet, among other masterworks. It was in these last months of his life that the ailing composer turned to the piano trio as another means of expression. Aside from a single movement composed during the summer of 1812 (the so called Sonatensatzin B flat major, D. 28), two piano trios and a nocturne of 1828 are his only ventures in that format.

The Piano Trio in E-flat major (Nocturne) (Adagio only), D. 897 (Op. posth. 148) This substantial one-movement work is probably a discarded movement for the Piano Trio No 1 in B-flat major, D. 898. One scholar lauded the rich, melodic content of the movement:

Sensuous rather than emotionally probing, extravagant in both ornamentation and expression, the Notturno unfolds as a bewitching succession of instrumental and harmonic colors over a static rhythmic and tonal framework of startling simplicity.

The Nocturno, Op Posth. 148, as it is often observed, was found among Schubert’s papers after his death, without title, signature, or date. It was not published until two decades after the composer’s death by Anton Diabelli in 1845.

~program notes by William Driver