Chamber Music

Sarah Gibson

Soak Stain

Visual art was central to Sarah Gibson’s musical world. Her mother was a self-taught visual artist, and arts and crafts were all around her as a child alongside the rickety old piano that formed the launchpad of her life in music. “Much of my music is inspired by visual art,” she explained to BMI in 2018. “Whenever I have writer’s block, I go to an art museum. I love reading the placards that museums post next to the artwork and very often my titles come from these museum descriptions or quotes found in the descriptions by the artist. . . . I’m drawn to bright colors, so often the titles reflect artwork that is vibrant and bold.” For instance, her orchestral piece warp & weft draws on Miriam Schapiro’s concepts of feminist collage; to make this mountain taller uses Aristide Maillol’s sculpture La Montagne as a metaphor for women’s strength; and I prefer living in color takes David Hockney’s massive landscape Snails Space as inspiration for an ode to her home in Los Angeles.

Soak Stain derives its title and imagery from the work of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler. After seeing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and observing him at work, Frankenthaler was determined to find her own way to work with canvases on the floor. So she started diluting her paints until she could pour them out of coffee cans onto a flat canvas and allow the paint to be absorbed into the fibers. Sometimes she would tilt the canvas or push the paint with brushes or rollers to give specific shapes to the resulting pools of paint. But often she would just let gravity, capillary action, and what she described as “well-ordered collisions” determine where and how the colors moved. She called this technique “soak-stain.”

“In Frankenthaler’s paintings,” Gibson writes, “this technique allows one to see colors competing and blending with contiguous rivals. I love this approach and the way it provides structured blocks of color in Frankenthaler’s works and leaves amoeba-like and uneven edges as various colors meet.” To invoke that sensation, Gibson creates a few large blocks of diaphanous timbres that gradually (or abruptly) collide, each marked by a particular evocative sound. At the beginning, she piles string harmonics around buzzing percussion and melodic figures that twist, echo, and dissolve. Later, she pairs different string harmonics and vibraphone with low, flutter-tongued piccolo (an evocative, eerie grouping) to nearly stop time. At the center of the piece are two long quasi-minimalist buildups full of unison lines and swarms of sixteenth notes. These three moods twirl and intertwine, sometimes shifting with clearly defined edges, sometimes dissolving seamlessly from one to the next. In her own words, she was trying to create “clear formal structures defined by liquid melodies and melting textures.”

Soak Stain is one of the final works Gibson would complete before her tragic death due to cancer at age 38 in 2024. — © Dan Ruccia

Bohuslav Martinů

Duo No. 1, “Three Madrigals,” H. 313

Schoolmates of the composer Bohuslav Martinů might not have expected him to reach the lofty achievement of being paired on a concert program with another now-canonic Czech composer, Antonín Dvořák. Expelled from the Prague Conservatory in 1910 for “incorrigible negligence,” Martinů went immediately on to fail at earning a teaching certificate. His ability on the violin, however, assured him a place in the Czech Philharmonic, and his studies in composition would bring him to his true calling by the early 1920s, when he moved to Paris to study with the composer Albert Roussel.

Also like Dvořák, he left the Czech lands for the U.S., where he saw a great deal of professional success. After seventeen years in Paris, Martinů found himself blacklisted by the Nazis and managed to escape to America with his wife. Life was difficult at first, but commissions from Serge Koussevitzky and an invitation to teach at Tanglewood in 1948 gave the composer renewed confidence (although injuries from a severe fall left him unable to accept the permanent Tanglewood appointment). He taught at Princeton for a few years, then divided his time between Nice, Philadelphia, Rome, and Basel.

Martinů’s Three Madrigals for violin and viola were composed in 1947 while the composer stayed in the U.S. recuperating from his fall. While there he heard a performance of Mozart’s Duos for violin and viola performed by the sibling duo Joseph and Lillian Fuchs; Martinů dedicated both the present work and another Duo composed in 1950 to the pair. (Lillian Fuchs would go on to teach for over twenty years at the Aspen Music Festival and School.)

The title evokes the music of the Renaissance, specifically a form of vocal polyphonic music in which two or more singers express the emotions and images of a poem in an imaginative musical treatment. Often the music comically or literally represents the meaning of the text through musical techniques. The form of the madrigal grew out of the text to which it was set, with free-ranging segments changing character rapidly from one moment to the next.

Each Madrigal displays unique musical textures and a three movement form, mirroring the Mozart Duos. The first allegro movement leaps to center stage: strident double-stop rhythmic drives alternate with nimble melodic runs and repeated developing phrases. The central movement, Andante, opens with an enigmatic atmosphere, delicate trills slowly drifting like fog across the scene; moments of startling lyricism and episodes that veer through the registral extremes of both instruments risk breaking the spell, but the quavering fog is never far away. The final movement kicks off with a bundle of flourishes that almost cross the line into folk dance fiddling, but then jump back to more upright and tonal (if still quite lively) call and response. Throughout the piece each instrument is both leader and accompanist, supporting and commenting on the other’s musical remarks.

— © Joseph Pfender

Antonín Dvořák

Piano Trio No. 3 in F minor, B. 130, op. 65

The F-minor Trio was a work that gave Antonín Dvořák a great deal of trouble, determined as he was to produce a serious piece on a grand scale. The composer’s mother died in mid-December 1882, and when he began this Trio early in the following year, he seems to have considered it to be in some sense an expression of his grief. And there were professional tensions, too: Dvořák was toying with the idea of turning his back on his own nationalism and writing a thoroughly German opera in order to woo the managers of the major European opera houses, to whom Czech opera was a less interesting—and even useless—commodity.

Whatever the relative importance of each of these particular emotions and tensions, the result was the only chamber music in his output to which the word “epic” is applicable, in the words of Dvořák’s biographer John Clapham. The detailed working-out of the principal motives of the first movement achieved a density of expression that Dvořák rarely matched. This is implicit in the main theme; though different from that of Brahms’s F-minor Quintet, here the Trio clearly recalls some of its elements, namely the arpeggiation of the tonic triad and the stress on the minor sixth falling to the dominant. The secondary theme is a lyrical tune first presented in the cello; it is in D-flat major, but there are Schubertian hints of the minor mode throughout. The discourse is built largely on the principal theme, culminating in a fortissimo recapitulation that is immediately clouded by a string of seventh chords over which the right hand of the piano rolls a mysterious arpeggiation. The remainder of the recapitulation continues this process of growth and reinterpretations.

The second movement, a dance in C-sharp minor (with a middle section in D-flat major), is fascinatingly ambiguous in its rhythms. It is written in 2/4 time, but the accented beat of the phrase does not always seem to correspond with the downbeat, and some phrases want to go in triple meter instead. The middle section, though ostensibly in the major mode, again has many Schubertian tinges of the minor and a wide-ranging enharmonic modulatory scheme.

The third movement is a contemplative dialogue between violin and cello for much of its course, with momentary martial dotted rhythms. The finale is a lively dance-like movement in furiant rhythm (that is, a shifting Bohemian dance in 3/4 time), structurally a rondo with a final reference to the main theme of the first movement rounding off the coda at the very end. Though Opus 65 is not his best-known work in the medium (the Dumky Trio, Opus 90, holds that distinction), it is surely the most solidly constructed and refined of Dvořák’s piano trios. — © Steven Ledbetter

The Aspen Contemporary Ensemble (ACE) was formed to address the training and performance needs of composers of contemporary repertoire. Members of the ensemble (Antonina Styczen, flute; Ian McEdwards, clarinet; Seth Schultheis, piano; Xin Yi Chong, percussion; Laura Gamboa, violin; Maya Irizarry Lambright, violin; Felix Veser, viola; Miles Reed, cello, Lukas Munsell, double bass) are selected by audition. A stripped-down version of this ensemble became the standard instrumentation for hundreds of compositions in the twentieth century, inspired by the scoring of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. ACE appears regularly throughout the summer playing the energetic and challenging new chamber music of the world’s leading artists. The ensemble also provides concert performances of new works composed in Aspen by students in the Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies. These performances are an essential element in the training of composers, who must experience their compositions firsthand with a live ensemble to complete the act of creation. The residency of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble is made possible by an endowment gift from Susan and Ford Schumann.