PROGRAM NOTES
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) Punctum
“A photograph’s punctum is the accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” This is how Roland Barthes described the ineffable emotion you experience when confronted with a sound or image that moves you deeply, resonating subjectively with your memories. The concept comes from his 1980 book on photography, death, and memory, Camera Lucida, and provides the inspiration for Caroline Shaw’s Punctum.
Shaw describes Punctum as “essentially an exercise in nostalgia,” and at its center is a historic and well-known melody pieced together with deconstructed modules of its sound. As Shaw explains, “the piece explores a way of saturating the palette with classicism while denying it form, and of disturbing the legibility of a harmonic progression in order to reinforce it later.” That melody she uses is most popularly known from its appearance in Johann Sebastian Bach as the chorale “Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded” in his St. Matthew Passion, but its history stretches back over one hundred years prior. One of its earliest known publications (it is unknown how long it may have been passed down orally) was in the early 1600s as a song about a young man’s lovesick emotions by Hans Leo Hessler. It was then adapted by Paul Gerhardt as “Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded” (used by Bach) and would later find use as the melody of Tom Glazer’s protest song, “Because All Men Are Brothers,” and “American Tune” by Paul Simon. This fractured presentation of the melody serves as a representation of the pointillistic nature of memories and their connections to our emotions, as Barthes described—the way the slightest detail can trigger a flood of feeling for an individual. Utilizing a melody that has had so many uses and connections for people over a long stretch of time underlines the idea. Shaw emphasizes this mystical connection through the sudden integration of the disparate parts into a full statement of the melody. As she summarizes in her own note on the work, “One could also say the piece is about the sensation of a particular secondary dominant in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.”
Komitas (1869-1935) :: Armenian Folk Songs
The Armenian composer, Soghomon Soghomonian, was given the name Komitas upon ordination in the Armenian Apostolic Church in 1894. He had first entered service in the church after being orphaned at age twelve. It was during this time that his extraordinary musical talents were recognized and subsequently cultivated. From that point, Komitas received a unique blend of training, ranging from Armenian liturgical singing to Western music theory during an extended time of study in Berlin.
Today, Komitas is most remembered for his role in preserving the rich heritage of Armenian folk songs. Traveling and collecting, he amassed a catalog of several thousand works—many of which he arranged—in a remarkable feat of codifying the collective of a cultural memory. This conservation effort took a significantly poignant turn when Komitas fell victim, alongside countless others, to the Armenian genocide. He was eventually rescued from deportation but suffered a mental breakdown because of the trauma and lived almost the entire final seventeen years of his life in a Parisian psychiatric clinic.
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) Tenebrae
The three Tenebrae (Latin for “darkness”) services are held in sequence on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday of Holy Week leading up to Easter in the Christian faith. Each night begins in light and ends in shadow as fifteen ceremonial candles are extinguished one by one following the reading of each Psalm. Eventually all candles in the church are put out and the congregation are surrounded by darkness, except for the light of one candle representing hope.
Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae is a prolonged meditation on these poles of darkness and light, despair and hope. To construct the work, Golijov took musical fragments from the Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae (Third Lesson of Tenebrae) by the French Baroque composer, François Couperin, “as sources for loops,” using the repetition to “write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground.” The central tension of the piece in which we find ourselves suspended was inspired by a juxtaposition of perspectives that Golijov experienced in his life within the span of a week in September, 2000. As he explains in his note for the work: “I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence...and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain.”
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10
An underappreciated figure in 20th century music, Frank Bridge is remembered almost exclusively thanks to his student, Benjamin Britten. Sadly, even during Bridge’s lifetime his accomplishments were increasingly forgotten despite his many accomplishments as a talented violist who played in Joseph Joachim’s string quartet, a prolific composer, and a conductor. Bridge felt it keenly. In May 1933, he wrote to the director of his alma mater, the Royal College of Music, in exasperation: “...I have been bitterly hurt at the almost complete indifference to my existence in London Music.”
In Bridge, the precocious young Britten (who at age fourteen had already written upwards of 100 pieces) found a much needed teacher and friend. Bridge encouraged Britten’s originality, exhorting, “you should find yourself and be true to what you found,” and pay “scrupulous attention to good technique.” Of the teacher who impacted his development more than any other, Britten said, “He really taught me to take as much trouble as I possibly could over every passage, over every progression, over every line...I, who thought I was already on the verge of immortality, saw my illusions shattered.” On a personal level, Britten became increasingly curious about Bridge’s pacifism, eventually adopting the position of renouncing violent action for himself—a tricky position to take in Europe with a second world war looming.
In 1937 Boyd Neel commissioned Britten to compose a work for his orchestra to perform at the Salzburg Festival. Britten fulfilled order in a matter of weeks with the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, using a melody from Bridge’s sublime Three Idylls for string quartet. Bridge was very moved by this gesture, writing to his former student, “...Your title page really touches me. I don’t know how to express my appreciation in adequate terms. It is one of the few lovely things that has ever happened to me and I feel the richer in spirit for it all, including the charming dedication. Thank you & thank you, Benji...God bless you, keep in good health. You’ll have lots of prosperity before posterity has anything to say – thank goodness. Much love and continued good luck, Your ever devoted F.B.”
Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
