After studying at Budapest’s Academy of Music from 1945 to 1949, Ligeti began his career writing in a folk- influenced style indebted to his Hungarian predecessors Bartok and Kodaly. Ligeti fled Hungary in the midst of the Soviet invasion in 1956, and he went on to hone his signature style of micropolyphony in the 1960s, a sound that reached a worldwide audience when several examples appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even during the early Hungarian phase of his career, Ligeti was experimenting with novel ways of organizing notes and ideas. In eleven short movements for piano composed between 1951 and 1953, grouped under the title Musica ricercata, the premise was that each portion would use a fixed number of pitches: two in the first movement, three in the second, and so on, until the final movement used all twelve chromatic pitches. The full piano suite did not receive a complete performance until 1969, but Ligeti arranged Nos. 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 into the Six Bagatelles in 1953, and in that form it has become a darling of wind quintets around the globe. A casual listener is unlikely to suspect the rigorous rationale behind these brief and whimsical movements that live up to label of bagatelle, named after the French word for “trifle.”

Aaron Grad ©2019

Admirers of Mozart’s serenades will find much to appreciate in his five violin concerti, which together mark the pinnacle of his music for violin. In the late eighteenth century, the serenade genre, rooted in the tradition of musical courtship (think of the lover, supported by his mandolin-strumming friends, singing beneath his beloved’s window), expanded to include more public celebrations: weddings, graduations, and the like. Per Mozart’s contemporary J.A.P. Schulz: “The title ‘serenade’ is also used for purely instrumental compositions, which, to honor or congratulate specific personages, are performed at dusk in front of their houses… The composer must strive to write simple, flowing melodies, set primarily to consonant rather than dissonant harmonies.”

The violin concerti, all completed in the year before Mozart’s twentieth birthday, might be heard as an extension of the serenades that mark his early years in Salzburg (Eine kleine Nachtmusik, et al.). They are untroubled works, recalling the serenades in both their compositional style and idyllic character. Equally so, the serenades, a number of which feature virtuosic solo violin writing, foreshadow the concerti. Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon surmises that the third, fourth, and fifth concerti specifically “are the highest examples of his serenade style after it has been detached from the serenade proper and reconstituted within a separate genre.”

The Fourth Violin Concerto is set in D major: a logical choice of key for the glorification of the violin, as it capitalizes on the instrument’s natural resonance. The opening Allegro bespeaks an irrepressible joie de vivre immediately from its opening measures. The opening theme is as uncomplicatedly ebullient as a nursery rhyme: a martial succession of unison Ds and a giddy outline of a D major chord prepare the way for “simple, flowing melodies, set primarily to consonant rather than dissonant harmonies” indeed. The Andante cantabile second movement responds to the gaiety of the Allegro with sublime beauty. Solomon describes this music as “inhabit[ing] a world of plenitude, [in which] beauty is everywhere for the taking. … [T]he beauties succeed each other with a breathtaking rapidity, their outpouring of episodic interpolations suggesting that we need not linger over any single moment of beauty, for beauty is abundant, it is to be found ‘here, too,’ and ‘there, as well.’” The concerto concludes with a playfully indecisive Rondeau: the meter vacillates between a graceful 2/4 and galloping 6/8 tempo, but the music’s prevailing lightness of spirit is assured.

Aaron Grad ©2015

When I listen to and watch a string orchestra play, I'm reminded of a flock of birds. Visually and aurally, the performers seek unity on many levels: attention to tuning, tone, clarity of rhythm, consistency and pressure of bowing. They glide and dive in formation, soaring together or splitting into layers of counterpoint before regrouping into a single unit. During my year living in Rome, I was often treated to the graceful spectacle of a starling murmuration. Their stunning, geometrical displays of aviation prior to settling down for the night are a humbling sight to behold. In fact, starlings' mass motion suggests "emergence," a concept in Game Theory that explains how simple interactions can engender complex systems.

In Murmurations I attempted to map onto a musical structure some of the behavior I observed in the starlings' flight. Their collective push and pull, swoop, and parallel movement manifests in the opening movement "Gathering near Gretna Green", titled for the Scottish village where starlings frequently assemble. The music hovers and swoops, culminating in a cadenza; the lone concertmaster briefly separates from the flock for a rare individual moment, and is again swallowed up into the mass motion. In the middle movement, "Soaring over Algiers," the melodic line glides alone, then in double, and finally triple layers of counterpoint, over arpeggios in the lower strings. I was inspired to write the third movement, "Swarming Rome," upon learning that starlings signal and sense subtle directional intent to and from their neighbors seven birds distant. Here the notes travel in loose clusters, darting and fluttering, far enough from each other to maneuver through the air, yet close enough to respond to sudden shifts in the murmuration's rhythm and cadence.

Murmurations was co-commissioned by the New Century Chamber Orchestra, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and partner A Far Cry. For inspiration, violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Steve Copes, Jae Young Cosmos Lee, and Chao-Liang Lin; writer Siobhan Roberts and Noah Strycker; mathematician Helmut Hofer; and photographer Richard Barnes. Special thanks to Alecia Lawyer, Parker Monroe, Kyu-Young Kim, Todd Vunderink, Anthony Cornicello, and Elizabeth Dworkin.

Derek Bermel ©2015

(Duration: 21 min)

Franz Joseph Haydn became a court composer for Austria’s wealthy Esterházy family in 1761, and four years later he was put in charge of all the court’s vast musical activities. His patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, was an avid musician and a true supporter of the arts, but he kept his Kapellmeister on a tight leash, especially during the long stretches of time spent at an isolated summer palace where the musicians had to produce an endless stream of operas and other entertainment. Under those demands, Haydn later wrote, “I was forced to become original.”

In 1779, Haydn negotiated a new contract that gave him more leeway to compose and publish independently, and soon his music was attracting followers throughout Europe. One foreign admirer was a young French count, Claude-François-Marie Rigolet, who commissioned six symphonies that Haydn composed in 1785 and 1786. These “Paris” Symphonies earned Haydn the handsome sum of 25 louis d’or each, plus additional fees for publication. (By comparison, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart earned only 5 louis d’or for his “Paris” Symphony from 1778.)

Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies capitalized on the large orchestra employed for the Concerts de la Loge Olympique, conducted by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. In the Symphony No. 85, the slow introduction references the classic French overture with its majestic dotted rhythms and unison statements, details that show Haydn’s awareness of his intended audience. The Vivace body of the movement is a model of economy, with a small collection of themes that gain intrigue when placed in unexpected contexts, such as a surprise detour to F-minor on the way to the anticipated key of F-major.

The second movement Romanza was another local crowd-pleaser, with a set of variations on the French folksong La gentille et jeune Lisette. The Menuetto makes a game of chortling grace notes and offbeat accents, and its contrasting trio section strikes up the unlikely pairing of bassoon and violins over pizzicato. The same pairing returns to begin the Presto finale that bounds along with a particularly active and independent bass line. Queen Marie Antoinette purportedly loved this symphony the most of Haydn’s offerings for Paris, earning it the nickname “La Reine” (“The Queen”).

Aaron Grad ©2023