Johann Sebastian Bach
Alessandro Marcello
Adagio from Concerto in D minor, BWV 974

After serving in positions as organist and church musician at Arnstadt and Mühlhausen from 1703 to 1708, Bach won a more prestigious job at the court of Weimar, presided over with iron will by the Saxon Duke Wilhelm Ernst, a stern religionist who insisted that his servants attend daily devotions and always be prepared to answer questions about the minutiae of the morning’s sermon. Wilhelm Ernst passed his musical sympathies on to his son Prince Johann Ernst, just 12 when Bach arrived in 1708 but already well versed in music theory, organ, violin, and trumpet, and eagerly involved with the acquisition of instruments and performing materials for the court’s music library. In February 1711, Ernst was sent for his university studies to Utrecht, where he continued his musical tuition, attended concerts, and assembled printed and manuscript scores to take home, most notably of the Italian concertos that were then setting the fashion for instrumental music throughout Europe. Upon his return to Weimar, in July 1713, Johann Ernst asked Bach to make keyboard arrangements of several of these concertos, so Bach duly transcribed five for organ (BWV 592–596) and 16 for harpsichord (BWV 972–987), most by Vivaldi but one each by Alessandro Marcello, Torelli, and Tele­mann, and then paid obeisance to Johann Ernst by including five of the gifted young Prince’s own works in the set (BWV 592, 595, 982, 984, 987).

Bach arranged the Concerto in D minor (BWV 974) from the Oboe Concerto in the same key by Venetian composer and violinist Alessandro Marcello (1673–1747), who held weekly musical gatherings at which his own compositions were almost exclusively performed. Bach kept the musical substance of Marcello’s Concerto intact in his arrangement, but elaborately embellished the melodic line in the poignant central Adagio.

Philip Glass
“The Poet Acts” from The Hours

“You know there is a maverick tradition in American music that is very strong. It’s in Ives, Ruggles, Cage, Partch, Moondog, all of these weird guys. That’s my tradition.” Thus Philip Glass traced his artistic lineage in an interview with composer Robert Ashley. Glass, born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, began his musical career in a conventional enough manner: study at the University of Chicago and Juilliard; a summer at the Aspen Music Festival with Milhaud; lessons with Nadia Boulanger in France on a Fulbright scholarship; many compositions, several of them published, in a neoclassical style indebted to Copland and Hinde­mith. In 1965, however, Glass worked with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in Paris on the score for the film Chappaqua, and that exposure to non-Western music was the turning-point in forming his mature style. He began writing what is commonly known as “Mini­malist” music (though Glass loathes the term; Debussy likewise insisted that he was not an “Impressionist”), which is based on the repetition of slowly changing common chords in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases. Glass’ works stand in stark contrast to the fragmented, ametric, harshly dissonant post-Schoenberg music that had been the dominant style for the 25 years after the Second World War. Minimalist music is meant, quite simply, to sound beautiful and to be immediately accessible to all listeners. Indeed, Glass represents the epitome of the modern “cross-over” artist, whose music appeals equally to classical, rock, and jazz audiences. Philip Glass’ reputation as one of America’s most successful and widely known composers has been recognized with election to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Oscar nominations, the 2010 Opera Honors Award from the NEA, and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barrack Obama in 2015.

The 2002 film The Hours, based on the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cun­ningham, was directed by Stephen Daldry and starred Nicole Kidman, who earned an Oscar for her portrayal of the novelist Virginia Wolfe, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. The carefully interwoven plot concerns three women of different generations—Virginia Wolfe (1923, rural England), homemaker Laura Brown (1951, Los Angeles), and book editor Clarissa Vaughan (2001, New York City)—whose troubled emotional lives reflect Wolfe’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Each is touched by suicide—a shell-shocked World War I friend of Mrs. Dalloway kills himself in the novel (Wolfe was to drown herself in 1941), Laura comes to the point of suicide but retreats, Clarissa witnesses an AIDS-wracked poet and intimate friend (Ed Harris, in an Oscar-nominated role) throw himself from the window of his upper-story loft (as had the veteran in Wolfe’s novel). The Hours received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture and another for Philip Glass’ score, whose brooding, introspective mood distills the film’s quiet but intense emotions.

Bach
Capriccio from Partita No. 2 in C minor, BWV 826

Much of Bach’s early activity after arriving in Leipzig in 1723 as the music director for the city’s churches was carried out under the shadow of the memory of his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, a respected musician and scholar who had published masterly translations of Greek and Hebrew, practiced as a lawyer in the city, and won wide fame for his keyboard music. In 1726, probably the earliest date allowed by the enormous demands of his official position for new sacred vocal music, Bach began a series of keyboard suites that were apparently intended to compete with those of Kuhnau. In addition to helping establish his reputation in Leipzig, these pieces would also provide useful teaching material for the private students he was beginning to draw from among the local university’s scholars. The Partita No. 1 in B-flat major (BWV 825) of 1726 was the first of his compositions to be published, with the exception of two cantatas written during his short tenure in Mühlhausen many years before (1707–08). Bach funded the venture himself, and he even engraved the plates to save money. (Copies could be had directly from the composer, cash in advance.) Bach published an additional partita every year or so until 1731, when he gathered together the six works and issued them collectively in a volume entitled Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice), a term he borrowed from the name of Kuhnau’s keyboard suites published in 1689 and 1692. Bach continued his series of Clavier-Übung with three further volumes of vastly different nature: Part II (1735) contains the Italian Concerto and an Ouverture (Suite) in the French Manner; Part III (1739), for organ, the Catechism Chorale Preludes, several short canonic pieces, and the “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue; and Part IV (1742), the incomparable Goldberg Variations. The brilliance of the closing Capriccio of the Partita No. 2 (BWV 826) rivals some of Bach’s concerto movements.

Manuel de Falla
Siete Canciones Populares Españolas (Seven Popular Spanish Songs)

When Falla was preparing his opera La Vida Breve (The Brief Life) for its first Paris performance, at the Opéra Comique on December 30, 1913 (it had been premiered in Nice on April 1st), he received two requests—one from the soprano Luisa Vela, who was performing the leading role of Salud in the cast of La Vida Breve; the other, from a Greek singing teacher. Vela was planning a series of solo recitals during the coming months, and she asked Falla to provide some songs in Spanish style for her programs; the Greek singing teacher wanted advice about the appropriate accompanimental style for some melodies from his homeland. Falla experimented with setting one of the Greek songs, and discovered that he could extrapolate a suitable harmonic idiom from the implications of the melody itself. He tried out this new technique in the songs he was preparing for Vela, which he had decided would be settings of seven popular indigenous melodies culled from various regions of Spain. The Siete Canciones Populares Españolas were largely completed by the time he retreated to Spain in 1914 in the face of the German invasion of France; he and Vela gave their premiere at the Ateneo in Madrid on January 14, 1915.

“El Paño Moruno” (“The Moorish Cloth”) comes from Murcia in southeastern Spain. “Seguidilla Murciana,” also from the province of Murcia, is a popular dance song in quick triple time. “Asturiana” is a lament from the northern region of Asturias. The “Jota,” mainly associated with the central province of Aragon, is one of the most familiar of Spanish dance forms. “Nana” is an Andalusian lullaby. “Can­ción” (“Song”) exhibits the pattern of mixed rhythmic stresses that characterizes much of Spain’s indigenous music. “Polo,” Andalusian in origin, evokes the Gypsy world of flamenco.

Bach
Prelude from English Suite No. 2 in A minor, BWV 807

The six English Suites were composed between 1717 and 1723, when Bach was director of music at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig, though ideas and perhaps even complete movements for them may date from as early as 1715, when he was serving as organist and chamber musician to Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar. (It is from the early Weimar period [1708–17] that most of Bach’s organ works date.) The origin of the English Suites’ name is unknown. An early copy of the First Suite (none of the composer’s autographs survives) bears the words, “Fait pour les Anglois” (“Made for the English”), though this designation does not appear to have originated with Bach. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in the first biography of the composer (1802), speculated that these works were created “for an Englishman of rank.” In 1933, Charles Sanford Terry made a further pleasing but entirely unconfirmed conjecture: “Between the Anglo-Hanoverian court [of England] and the petty German principalities, conventions were not infrequent. A military commission perhaps visited Cöthen, was entertained by the Prince, and received from his Kapellmeister the compliment of a composition specially dedicated.” To further honor this hypothetical British dedicatee, Bach borrowed for the Gigue of the First Suite a theme by Charles Dieupart, then one of the most popular harpsichordists in London.

The English Suite No. 2 begins with a prelude in quick tempo employing the ritornello form (orchestral refrain with solo episodes) of the Italian concerto.

Glass
Opening No. 1 from Glassworks

In 1981, Philip Glass became the first composer since Aaron Copland to sign an exclusive contract with the CBS Masterworks record label. His debut release on CBS, and one of the first albums to use the new digital recording technology, was Glassworks. “This music was written for the recording studio,” Glass noted, “though a number of the pieces soon found their way into my ensemble’s repertory. A six-‘movement’ work, Glassworks was intended to introduce my music to a more general audience than had been familiar with it up to then.” The album became a great success, far outstripping even the most optimistic sales projections and bringing Glass’ distinctive musical voice to a wide international audience.

Fugue in C minor from
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 847

“For the Use and Profit of the Musical Youth Desirous for Learning, as well as for the Pleasure of those Already Skilled in this Study” was the heading on the manuscript of the 24 preludes and fugues that Bach composed during his tenure as Kapellmeister at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen from 1717 to 1723. The pieces were originally intended as study material for his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, and he made a copy of the volume for each of them (Friedemann was 13 in 1723; Emanuel was nine), but he also used Das Wohltemperierte Klavier—The Well-Tempered Clavier—as teaching material for his students when he joined the faculty of the Thomasschule in Leipzig after leaving Cöthen. Between 1739 and 1744, Bach created a second set of 24 such pieces for his youngest child, Johann Christian (born in 1735).

Each of the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises 24 paired preludes and fugues, one in each of the major and minor keys, arranged in ascending order (C major, C minor, C-sharp major, C-sharp minor, etc.). The Fugue No. 2 in C minor from Book I (BWV 847) is based on a sharply incised theme of almost playful nature.

Glass
Etudes No. 9

Glass’ Etudes for Piano are perhaps his most pragmatic pieces. He wrote the 10 Etudes of Volume I in 1994 and added 10 more for Volume II by 2014. Glass wrote, “The Etudes’ purpose was two-fold. First, to provide new music for my solo piano concerts. And second, for me to expand my piano technique with music that would enhance and challenge my playing. Hence, the name Etudes, or ‘studies.’ The result is a body of work that has a broad range of dynamic, tempo, and emotion.”

Mathias Duplessy
Sonata for Guitar and Mandolin
(World Premiere)

Mathias Duplessy’s guitar is a window onto the world of music. In a review of the 2016 CD Crazy Horse by his group Violins of the World, an online music critic wrote that the album is a “collaboration of French guitarist Mathias Duplessy, Chinese erhu master Guo Gan, Mon­golia’s horsehead fiddler extraordinaire and throat singer Naraa Puredorj, and French nychelharpa player Aliocha Regnard, with Mon­golian overtone singer and horsehead fiddle player Enkhjargal Dandarvaanchig, Indian sarangi player Sabir Khan, and Tunisian violinist and composer Zied Zouari thrown in for good measure.” The CD also features Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess, a favorite piece and composer of Duplessy since childhood. [The erhu is a Chinese one-string fiddle. The Mongolian horsehead fiddle has a trapezoidal sound box, two strings made of horse tail hair, and a long neck topped by a carved horse head. The Swedish nychelharpa is a bowed fiddle whose pitches are controlled by a keyboard attached along the neck. The bowed Indian sarangi has three resonance chambers carved from a single block of wood, the open face of the lowest one covered with parchment, three playing gut strings, and three dozen steel or brass strings that resonant sympathetically. Violins of the world, indeed! (There are videos on YouTube.) The non-instrumental sounds on the album are created by “throat singing” and “overtone singing,” which respectively use the vocal chords to produce extremely low sustained pitches and simultaneous multiple notes.]

Duplessy was born in Paris in 1972, began teaching himself to play guitar when he was six, started composing soon thereafter, and was performing professionally by age 18. He loved classical music from early in life and explored jazz as a teenager, but he has devoted most of his life to music of cultures around the world, learning flamenco among the Romani in Granada, studying traditional music in India, and learning to play an entire menagerie of string, wind and percussion instruments, from the jaw harp and banjo to vièle (medieval fiddle) and berimbau, a single-string musical bow struck with a stick with an attached rattle, an instrument associated with the Brazilian tradition of the capoeira, an amalgam of dance and martial arts rooted in the challenge dances brought to the New World by African slaves. In addition to pieces written for his own internationally diverse collaborators, Duplessy has also composed in more traditional Western styles, notably in works for his friend and musical ambassador French classical guitarist Jérémy Jouve, and for films; he won the 2020 award for Best Documentary Film Music from the Union of Film Composers for On nous appelait Beurettes (“We Were Called Beurettes,” slang for a person born in France of North African descent).

Duplessy wrote, “The three movements of the Sonata for Guitar and Mandolin are ‘paintings’ in different colors, each marked by different influences: European film music from the 1970s, a bit of Ravel or Prokofiev or jazz or Baroque, music of passion and vital energy. Like Miloš and Avi, this music is steeped in diverse cultures and in love with many different styles!

“First movement. It’s a bit of a tribute to Ennio Morricone [Italian composer of some 400 film scores and recipient of two Oscars]. It was born from a fast and dramatic guitar arpeggio, over which the mandolin plays a melodious theme imbued with a certain sense of nostalgia.

“Second movement. I was intrigued to layer mandolin and guitar playing tremolo, and developed a romantic and sad melody around the mixing of the two instruments.

“Third movement. I wanted a playful last movement in which Miloš and Avi have fun and challenge each other. The virtuosity is like fireworks, with an energy that is sometimes jazz, sometimes Gypsy, and with harmonies that travel between the Baroque and Prokofiev.”

—©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda