"Class of 1915" for Strings, Winds and Piano (2011, world premiere)
David Schiff (b. 1945)

David Schiff, R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College, was born in New York City and holds degrees from Columbia University, Cambridge University, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. His compositional honors include the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, the League of Composers-ISCM Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Schiff is active as a music critic, and has written books about the music of Elliott Carter and George Gershwin. His articles appear regularly in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Opera News and Tempo. Recordings of his works have been issued on the Delos, Argo, CRI, Naxos and New World labels.

Schiff writes, "When I heard that CMNW was planning to mark the centenary of Reed College with Pierrot Lunaire and other music from 1912, I volunteered to compose a work for the five Pierrot instrumentalists based on popular music contemporary with Schoenberg's masterpiece. I have titled this suite 'Class of 1915,' the first class to graduate from Reed. I imagine that Reed students back then, like my Reed students today, kept up with the latest 'indie' music.

"The second decade of the twentieth century was a breakthrough era in American popular music, witnessing the first published blues and foxtrots. Musicologists usually point to Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' (1911), Jerome Kern's 'They Didn't Believe Me' and W.C. Handy's 'St Louis Blues' (both from 1914) as the most important songs from the period, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Some of the most influential music of the period was composed by African-Americans; studying both sheet music and recordings from the period, I drew on this legacy for the music of 'Class of 1915.'

"The first movement is an arrangement of five foxtrots, a dance craze launched by Vernon and Irene Castle and their musical director, James Reese Europe, that established a dance form as essential to the twentieth century as the minuet was to the eighteenth. The songs are: 'The Castle Doggy' by James Reese Europe; 'Palm Beach' by Luckyeth Roberts; 'Some of These Days' by Shelton Brooks (a song that became closely associated with Sophie Tucker); 'Ballin' the Jack' by Chris Smith and James Reese Europe; and 'Carolina Fox Trot' by Will Vodery. James Reese Europe, among his many other accomplishments, presented the first ever concert of African-American music at Carnegie Hall in 1912; Luckyeth Roberts, one of the giants of stride piano, and Will Vodery were mentors to the young Duke Ellington.

"The second movement is more a composition than an arrangement. Since 'The St. Louis Blues' is so central to the canon of American music, I composed an homage to its composer, showcasing the bass clarinet.

"The final movement is an arrangement of 'Castle House Rag' by James Reese Europe, based on the astonishingly vibrant recording he made with his orchestra in 1914."

Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in A Minor (1914)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Ravel first mentioned that he was planning a piano trio in a letter of 1908, but he only got around to sketching ideas for the piece in 1913 at his summer retreat in the seaside town of St. Jean-de-Luz in the southern Basque region (and just across a small river from his birthplace); he did not begin serious work on the score until the following April at St. Jean. He spent the next three months dabbling leisurely with the score, balancing his labors with long explorations of the surrounding countryside and abundant socializing, but this pleasant schedule was ruined when the Guns of August unleashed their fearsome roar across the continent to start World War I in 1914. Ravel pledged to aid France's war effort, but first he determined to finish the Trio. He applied himself unsparingly to the work at the beginning of August, and then reported to the garrison at Bayonne to apply for military service. His constitution was frail, however, and his height and weight below the minimum standard, so he was refused entry into the army and instead worked as an orderly in a military hospital, an exercise in patriotism that impaired his health for the rest of his life. The premiere of the Piano Trio was given on January 28, 1915 at a Société Indépendente concert in the Salle Gaveau in Paris by pianist Alfredo Casella, violinist Gabriele Willaume and cellist Louis Teuillard, but, in a country absorbed with war, the event drew little notice. More peaceful consideration of the work has since recognized it as one of Ravel's consummate creations.

The first movement, written in an irregular but easily flowing meter (8/8) derived from Basque folk music, follows traditional sonata form. The main theme, begun by the piano and taken over by the strings, is a close-interval melody in sensuous, tightly packed parallel harmonies which rises to a peak of intensity before subsiding for the presentation of the subsidiary subject, a lovely, wide-ranging theme that arches through much of the violin's compass. The development is concerned exclusively with the principal theme and so leads seamlessly into the recapitulation, where shortened versions of the main and second subjects provide balance and formal closure. A specter of the main theme hovers above the quiescent coda.

The second movement, titled Pantoum, serves as the Trio's scherzo. The pantun is a Malaysian poetic form in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third of the next. Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and other French 19th century writers adapted the pantun for some of their works, and Ravel here made an ingenious musical analogue of the technique by inserting music from the scherzo into the central trio.

The third movement is a passacaglia, the old Baroque form in which a melody is repeated intact several times (eight in this Trio) and glossed on each recurrence by different counterpoint and harmonies. The theme of this Passacaille is a pensive melody that first unwinds in the deep bass notes of the piano before migrating to other instrumental territories.

The finale is music of enormous tensile strength whose feverish, pent-up emotion is held precisely in check by the clarity of its melodic and contrapuntal lines and the integrity of its sonata-rondo form.

Pierrot Lunaire, Melodrama on Three Times Seven Poems of Albert Giraud, Op. 21 (1912)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

By 1912, Arnold Schoenberg, having succeeded in "emancipating the dissonance" and abandoning traditional tonality in order to create a more richly expressive musical art with his compositions following the Piano Pieces, Op. 11 of 1908, had already established himself as a high priest of modernity when the actress Albertine Zehme asked him to write a new work for her. Frau Zehme was a specialist in melodrama, the venerable German theatrical form in which a monologue is spoken above a musical background, and she specified that the solo part be for a speaker rather than for a singer. To fulfill the commission, Schoenberg chose to set 21 of the 50 poems from the 1884 cycle Pierrot Lunaire by the Belgian critic and dramatist Albert Giraud (1860-1929). Schoenberg knew the poems not in their original French, however, but in an 1892 translation, actually a thorough reworking into German, by the playwright Erich Hartleben (1864-1905). (Schoenberg, an avid numerologist, chose 21 poems to match the opus number of the work.) To evoke the strong images of Giraud's verses and to meet Frau Zehme's requirement, Schoenberg developed a startlingly innovative style of vocal delivery that he called Sprechstimme—"Speaking-Voice"—which required a delivery that is partly spoken and partly sung. (He had already experimented with Sprechstimme in his Gurrelieder of 1900-1901.) The songs were composed quickly between March and June 1912, some in a single day, and the actress began experimenting with Sprechstimme as soon as Schoenberg had started work. She had perfected the difficult new style by the time of the premiere, and Pierrot Lunaire was enthusiastically received by the public, though the critical response was rather cool. Schoenberg toured Germany and Austria with Pierrot during the winter, and it created a sensation at every performance. Except for the Three Songs of Op. 22, it was the last music he was to write for the next decade, the crucial time when he withdrew from active composition to formulate his twelve-tone theory.

Pierrot is the painted-face clown of French pantomime, descended from the Italian commedia dell' arte, who is "moon-struck" ("luna"—"loony"—"Lunaire") for love. By the late 19th century, Pierrot had become an artistic vehicle for the depiction of deep emotions masked by a carefree appearance, symbolizing the sufferings of a sensitive person showing a happy face to the world. (Frau Zehme dressed as Columbine for the premiere; Schoenberg and the instrumentalists were hidden behind screens.) Schoenberg grouped the poems into three parts comprising seven numbers each. In Part I, Pierrot, drunk, is subject to a whirlpool of feelings and fantasies about love, sexual longing, religious hysteria and neurasthenia. Part II finds him plunged into a nightmare world of pillage, violence and blasphemy. He climbs slowly from this murky depth in Part III, journeying toward his home in sunny Bergamo and returning, at last, to the daylight world and thoughts of a fabled, contented yesteryear. Though Schoenberg claimed to have conceived the work in a "light, ironical, satirical tone" (Pierre Boulez went so far as to call it "un 'cabaret' supérieur"), the words of Pierrot Lunaire and their musical realizations form one of the most difficult and challenging of all listening experiences. "In their intense and morbid expressivity they seem to breath the stuffy atmosphere of that enclosed nightmare world of expressionist German art in the decade before 1914," wrote Charles Rosen in his perceptive study of the composer. "Even the wit and gaiety are macabre; against a background of controlled hysteria, the moments of repose take on an air of death... To approach this work, we need a sympathy for the period in which it was written (or at least a suspension of distaste)."

Each of Giraud's poems was disposed in the form of a rondeau, an ancient French thirteen-line genre in which lines one and two are repeated as lines seven and eight, and line one as line thirteen. Schoenberg virtually ignored the rigor of the verses' construction in his musical settings, however, investing the work with an enormous formal and sonorous variety. The ensemble of eight instruments played by five musicians (piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola and cello) is disposed differently in each of the 21 numbers, with all of the instruments heard only in the last song. The formal types range from a free, non-repetitive stream of counterpoint (Enthauptung—"Decapitation") to one of the most tightly controlled and elaborate canons written since the end of the Renaissance (Mondfleck—"Moonspot").

Pierrot Lunaire is one of the seminal works of modern art, "the solar plexus as well as the mind of twentieth-century music," according to Igor Stravinsky. It influenced composers from Webern to Ravel to Boulez, and continues to amaze and disturb listeners a century after it was first heard.