Little Moonhead: Three Tributaries
inspired by Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.4
For solo violin, two flutes, harpsichord (doubling celesta) and strings. Approximately 12 minutes.
Carnegie Hall Premiere: March 21, 2009
Melinda Wagner is a celebrated American composer. She has amassed a wide-ranging catalog of chamber and orchestral music, but she is perhaps best known for works featuring soloists with orchestra, including the Trombone Concerto commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for principal trombonist Joseph Alessi, Extremity of Sky commissioned by the Chicago Symphony for pianist Emmanuel Ax, and the Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion, commissioned for Paul Dunkel and the Westchester Philharmonic and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her new work for Orpheus, Little Moonhead, continues in this vein by showcasing a solo violin and two flutes along with string orchestra and keyboards. The piece is modeled after Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 4, and it represents the fourth installment of Orpheus’ ongoing New Brandenburg project.
Wagner’s “New Brandenburg” plays with the translation of the name Bach, meaning brook or stream. Subtitled Three Tributaries, the work unfolds in flowing movements organized in a typical fast-slow-fast pattern. Little Prelude (with Rills) features cascading scale fragments and arpeggios. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a rill can be “a small brook; a rivulet” or “a long narrow straight valley on the moon's surface.” The second movement, Moon Ache, explores music that the composer describes as “a bit melancholy,” with haunting muted strings and simple, airy melodies. The finale, Fiddlehead, races at a quick tempo marked “scrubby and impertinent.” A Fiddlehead is an edible frond of an unfurled fern plant, resembling the scroll of a violin. Besides the pun of the movement title, this fanciful piece saves one more inside joke for the final measures, when Bach’s signature motive of B-flat, A, C, B-natural – or, as spelled in German notation, B, A, C, H – appears first in the violas and then throughout the ensemble.
–Aaron Grad
Melinda Wagner was born in Philadelphia and received graduate degrees in Music Composition from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise.
Ms. Wagner was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her colorful Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion, commissioned by Paul Lustig Dunkel and the Westchester Philharmonic. Since then, she has written Concerto for Trombone, for Joseph Alessi and the New York Philharmonic, and a piano concerto, Extremity of Sky, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony for Emanuel Ax, who has also performed it with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, and the Staatskapelle Berlin. In addition to Extremity of Sky (2002), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has commissioned two other major works: Falling Angels (1992), and a forthcoming work for the 2011-12 season. Ms. Wagner is also one of six prominent composers involved with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s New Brandenburg commissioning project; her Little Moonhead will be premiered this evening.
Ms. Wagner has also written for band: a version of 57/7 Dash (originally for orchestra, commissioned by Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops), and Scamp, commissioned by the United States Marine Band. Her chamber works have been performed by the New York New Music Ensemble, the Network for New Music, the Empyrean and Left Coast Ensembles, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and many other leading organizations.
Commissions have also come from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Barlow Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the Ernst and Young Emerging Composers Fund, the American Brass Quintet, and guitarist David Starobin.
Ms. Wagner is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards, resident fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, an honorary degree from Hamilton College, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Pennsylvania.
Melinda Wagner has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Syracuse University, and Hunter College. She has lectured at many schools including Yale, Cornell, Juilliard, and Mannes. Ms. Wagner has served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, percussionist James Saporito, and their children.
What has it been like for you to be one of the six composers selected for the Orpheus New Brandenburg Project?
It has been an incredible honor to be in the company of such fine composers, all of whom I respect and admire a great deal. Also, it has been a pleasure to create music for Orpheus, and exhilarating – as well as a bit intimidating – to be coupled with Bach, whom I revere.
Why do composers love Bach so much?
Bach is a steady presence throughout our lives as musicians. In my own experience, which is shared, I’m certain, by many composers, Bach (and Mozart) represented my first introduction to serious music for the keyboard. Later, I had the life-changing opportunities to sing the greatest choral music ever written – Bach’s Magnificat, for example, and the motet Jesu Meine Freude and the incomparable Mass in B minor. We all learn about four-part harmony through Bach’s chorale harmonizations, and we learn tonal counterpoint by studying his fugues. I admire the music of Bach for its clarity, precision, and inventiveness. I love it for its beauty and daring, and for the breadth of its emotive landscape. I can be just as moved by Bach as I am by Mahler!
What was it like writing for basically the same ensemble as Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 4?
This was a true challenge, especially at first! The anatomy of this ensemble is orchestral in nature, yet each section of players is quite small by modern standards. I am accustomed to composing either for a much larger or much smaller ensemble, so I did have to adjust. In “Brandenburg” No. 4, Bach puts into motion a relatively small number of voices, each presented in broad brushstrokes, through doubling. In addition to all of its lightness and air (and the delicacy provided by soloists), there is a kind of orchestral heft, along with pristine clarity. My own music tends to be much more dense, with many more voices, compound chords, and divisi strings. Ironically, I suspect that Little Moonhead will sound more like a chamber work, perhaps because my “brushstrokes” are pencil-thin.
Your one addition beyond Bach’s instrumentation is celesta. What motivated you to include that extra sound?
My one indulgence! I really enjoyed the playful element of contrasting the plucky, overtone-saturated sound of the harpsichord with the sonorous, liquid sound of the celesta. These instruments are worlds apart in obvious ways, yet they can both add a colorful patina, or sheen, to the sound of the ensemble. I used them both as “highlighters,” so to speak.
Speaking of liquid, your title and movement names play with the translation of Bach as “brook” or “stream.” Did that idea factor into your compositional process?
In the very early stages of my piece, before there were any notes on the page, I thought it might be fun to make a play on words in the music, based upon the translation of the word “bach.” Some of my ideas – the use of the word “rills” in the title of the first movement, for example – came out of that. There are a lot of overlapping scales and arpeggios throughout the work, but these ultimately came from listening to Bach, not from thinking about his name. Still, such ideas can be like a carrot at the end of a stick for me, providing impetus, especially at the beginning when everything is an unknown.
Words seem like an important part of how you communicate your ideas to the musicians, with instructions like “ham it up” and “show off” in the score. Considering that many composers today stick with the same Italian expressions that have been used for hundreds of years, how did you come to adopt your style of direction?
All composers strive to find comfortable and effective ways of communicating to players through notation and written directions. This is a challenge. When I was younger, I used to flood my scores with information, thinking I was being helpful. Actually, I was cultivating rather wooden performances – the poor players were so busy trying to read all of my directions that they could not flow with the music! I eventually learned to stand back and let the players own the work. When I eased up on the directions, my music became more alive and free to evolve with each performance. I still use Italian in my scores, but I have found that a pointed phrase in English now and then is very effective. I particularly like using American colloquialisms, such as “ham it up.” These words evoke a certain physicality, a sweep of the bow arm – a smile perhaps!
Interview conducted bycomposer Aaron Grad has been the Program Annotator for Orpheus since 2005. To comment or to read his blog about music, please visit www.aarongrad.com.