Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra

Robert Spano, program director

Carlos Simon

Motherboxx Connection from Tales: A Folklore Symphony

Carlos Simon’s Motherboxx Connection is the first movement from Tales: A Folklore Symphony, which was co-commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra and premiered in 2022. The piece is scored for piccolo, flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, glockenspiel, and strings.

Mother Boxes are sentient, living supercomputers with vast, varying arrays of powers that first appeared in Jack Kirby’s DC comic Forever People in 1971. They are deeply loyal to their owners/creators and can, among other things, access Boom-Tubes for teleportation, transfer energy to heal a user, control non-sentient machines, merge living things into more powerful living things, and tap into the vast knowledge of the Source. They are mysterious, powerful, and dangerous devices.

In the 2010s the artists John Jennings and Stacey Robinson, under their alias Black Kirby, recast the Mother Box as the Motherboxx, a device meant to comment on the nature of Blackness. Jennings and Robinson see Black Kirby as a way to “appropriate [Jack] Kirby’s bold forms and energetic ideas”; combine them “with themes centered around Afrofuturism, social justice, representation, magical realism”; and use “the culture of Hip Hop as a methodology for creating visual communication.” In one artwork they depict the Motherboxx as a regal Black woman in profile floating in front of a multihued nebula. Her left arm stops just below the shoulder, replaced by a ray of blue and yellow light, and she is wearing a white shawl with patterned orange trim. She gazes intently into a glowing computer interface that floats above her right hand. Her intentions are unclear, but her power and presence are undeniable. Scholar Regina N. Bradley equates her to “the technological equivalent of the ‘mother land’ in the black diasporic imagination. She is where black identities merge and depart.” These ideas are central enough to Jennings and Robinson’s work that they titled the book collecting the products of their collaboration Black Kirby: In Search of the MotherBoxx Connection.

After composer Carlos Simon read Jennings and Robinson’s book, he was inspired by many of their characters, but especially the Motherboxx, to write this piece. He captures her energy and knowledge through a series of brilliant, fleetfooted fanfares that bound through the orchestra. Like Jennings and Robinson’s art, every moment is saturated with ever-changing bursts of color. It feels like the soundtrack for the moment a superhero discovers and masters her power; the music’s subtle syncopations keep us on our toes through each twist and turn. The multi-movement Tales: A Folklore Symphony, from which Motherboxx is excerpted, explores stories and lore from the African diaspora.

— © Dan Ruccia

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart

Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, “Haffner”

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed the six movements of a serenade from which he took the four movements of this D-major Symphony, K. 385, in Vienna at the end of July and beginning of August 1782. The present form of the Symphony took shape the following winter, and it received its premiere on March 29, 1783, in Vienna. The score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. The flutes and clarinets are a late addition, made when the composer recast the work into four movements.

The Haffner family of Salzburg has been immortalized through two compositions by Mozart, the Serenade, K. 250 of 1776, commissioned for a family wedding, and the Symphony, K. 385 of 1782. Actually the Symphony was intended simply to be another serenade for use at the celebration given for Sigmund Haffner, a boyhood friend of Mozart’s, when he was elevated to the nobility in recognition of his generous benefactions to the city. Leopold Mozart urgently requested some suitable music from his son Wolfgang. This happened not long after the younger Mozart’s arrival in Vienna, when he was busy trying to establish himself in the capital with pupils and commissions for compositions while preparing for his forthcoming wedding to Constanze Weber. Mozart’s first reaction was that he was too busy: “I am up to my eyes in work,” he wrote on July 20. But he promised to burn the midnight oil and send something—one movement at a time—with each biweekly post. He finally delivered the complete score by early August.

Just before Christmas Wolfgang wrote to ask his father to send “the new symphony that I composed for Haffner at your request” so that he could perform it in a concert he was planning for Lent, which was the most popular time for concerts because opera houses and theaters were closed. When Wolfgang saw his music again, he wrote: “My new ‘Haffner’ Symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it. It must surely produce a good effect.” He nevertheless chose to adapt it to the normal pattern of Viennese symphonies—four movements—and added parts for flutes and clarinets, which had been lacking in the serenade. Even though it survives only in its four-movement form, the “Haffner” Symphony still recalls the many earlier serenades Mozart had composed for use in Salzburg, as it is generally lighter in construction and somewhat more loose-limbed than a normal symphony. The pomp of the first movement is splendidly worked out with material based almost entirely on the opening gesture, with its dramatic octave leaps and their linear equivalent, running scales in eighths or sixteenths. The Andante is lush and delicately elaborate, filled with those graces we call “Mozartean.” The Menuetto contrasts a vigorous and festive main section whose grand melodic leaps remind us of the first movement with a more graceful Trio.

The finale seems to be a reminiscence—whether intentional or otherwise—of Osmin’s comic aria “O, wie will ich triumphieren” from The Abduction from the Seraglio. The opera was first performed on July 16, 1782, just two weeks before the composition of this finale. Osmin’s aria begins with the same general melodic shape but many repeated notes, which Mozart cut to the witty minimum for his symphonic movement. His satisfaction with the Osmin aria and his recollection of that recently-performed score may explain the complete fluency with which he noted down this movement in his manuscript, as if at a single sitting. Mozart was also clearly pleased with the finale to the Symphony, at least enough to use it, isolated from the rest of the work, as the concluding music for an entire concert. (Concerts in those days often involved a variety of pieces, genres, and performing forces, and it was rare to hear an entire work performed continuously and in full.) As Mozart correctly recognized, this witty play of dynamics in engineering the various returns of the rondo tune was the perfect vehicle to send the audience home in a cheerful mood. — © Steven Ledbetter.

Johannes Brahms

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He completed his First Symphony in 1876, though some of the sketches date back to the 1850s. Otto Dessoff conducted the first performance in Karlsruhe on November 4, 1876. The Symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

Brahms was only too aware that he was treading in the footsteps of giants. Beethoven in particular was an overwhelming gray shadow behind him. Brahms’s fear of direct comparison—and his own high standards—made it difficult for him to create works in any medium that Beethoven had made uniquely his own. He had started symphonies time and again for nearly two decades, but in every case he either abandoned them unfinished or turned the music into some other kind of piece; elements of both the First Piano Concerto and the German Requiem were at first intended for a symphony. Abandoned works he simply destroyed—he was painfully aware of the way musical scholars were studying Beethoven’s sketches for clues as to the way he created his music, and he did not want anyone second-guessing him!

At the age of forty-three Brahms finally completed a Symphony that met his standards and let it out into the world. He had been working on it actively since at least 1868, when he sent Clara Schumann the horn theme of the finale. This is an amazingly late age for a composer who would distinguish himself as one of the greatest of symphonists to finish his first work in that genre.

The First Symphony was a tough nut for first listeners to crack. It is hard for us to imagine that music we hear so frequently and with such satisfaction should have been regarded as exceptionally difficult to listen to, devoid of melody or charm or grace (all charges that were leveled against Brahms’s symphonies). It is worth noting that, even a half century after the death of Beethoven, it was still not easy for a music lover to know his symphonies well, because only the handful of orchestras in major musical centers could hope to perform them well. And even the relatively small number of listeners who knew the Beethoven symphonies would have found Brahms—for all his admiration of Beethoven and all his moments of homage to the older master—to be exceptionally novel and hard to figure out.

Brahms himself admitted that his First Symphony was “not exactly amiable.” It traces a lengthy progress from the dark tension of its opening C minor to a glorious and sunny conclusion in C major. In this respect it follows a plan similar to that of two of Beethoven’s most famous symphonies, the Fifth (in its choice of key and progress from minor to major) and the Ninth (in achieving its bright conclusion with a theme of such universal melodic appeal that it lingers forever in the ear).

The Symphony opens with a tense introduction that provides the principal germs of the first movement. It is astonishing to realize that the introduction was an afterthought. Brahms originally began the movement with music heard when the fast tempo arrives, but he decided that this made for too abrupt a start. He therefore created a lengthy introduction that seems to put us instantly in the middle of some titanic struggle made up of pounding timpani strokes and a tense, syncopated rising chromatic line that suggests utter seriousness ahead. So cleverly did Brahms invent this introduction out of ideas that form the main theme of the movement that we could easily be convinced that it was the other way around—that the slow introduction somehow gave rise to the main theme.

Yet this lengthy moderato opening prepares the main argument of the movement; the Allegro takes up the idea of the timpani strokes (abstracted into the other instruments of the orchestra) and the rising chromatic line. Its mood is prevailingly somber, its darkness only slightly relieved by the horn and wind colors of the secondary theme.

Brahms’s concern for unity reveals itself through the reworking of musical ideas from one movement to another: the attentive listener who pays particular attention in the opening seconds of the Symphony will find that many later passages make frequent reference to the passing chromatic notes of the introduction: an oboe theme in the slow movement foreshadows a clarinet theme in the next movement and so on. The inner movements are essentially lyrical, expanding on the character of the dolce (sweet) and espressivo (expressive) markings that appear occasionally in the opening movement. The oboe theme in the second movement is wonderfully calm and expansive. The third movement is entirely grazioso (graceful), far removed from the struggles of the first and last movements. It is also harmonically far afield from the home key, a brief visit to a gentler world.

Like the opening movement, the finale begins with a lengthy introduction that plays an important part, starting out in the minor mode (as the whole Symphony had done) but reaching for a new goal through a constant sense of struggle. This is finally achieved with the arrival in C major and the appearance of the magnificent horn theme that Brahms had sent to Schumann in 1868. He sent this melody in a letter from Switzerland dated September 12, 1868, in anticipation of her birthday the next day. Above the melody he wrote, “Thus sounded the alphorn today,” and underneath the notes he wrote German words (as if thinking of this as a song): “High on the peak, deep in the valley, I greet thee many thousand times.”

It is not clear when he decided to include this melody as the climactic point of the last movement’s slow introduction, but it establishes for the first time a sunny and airy sense of C major, the key toward which the Symphony ultimately aims. Another fascinating feature about this long-breathed theme can only be seen on paper, not heard in performance: it offers a trompe-l’œil to the listener. It sounds like a wonderfully serene melody played by a single horn, but Brahms divides it between first and second horns so it can seem virtually unending, with no apparent pause for breath.

The trombones enter for the first time in the entire Symphony with a chorale melody, building up to the first statement of the main theme—a hymn-like C-major melody first hinted at (though in the minor) in the opening bar of the movement. (Brahms was short-tempered with those who pointed out that it sounded like a rerun of Beethoven’s Ninth: “Any ass can see that!” he retorted.) This marks the onset of the final struggle to establish C major, which is finally achieved with a climax for the entire orchestra on the chorale melody and a powerful affirmation of the major key achieved through a carefully crafted battle plan that conquers all in the end. The ghost of Beethoven would have been pleased with his disciple. — © Steven Ledbetter