FWCO Spring Concert

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
L’Ascension

1. Majesté du Christ demandant sa gloire à son Père
2. Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui désire le ciel
3. Alléluia sur la trompette, alléluia sur la cymbale
4. Prière du Christ montant vers son Père

Messiaen may or may not have had clinical synesthesia – a cross-coupling between two or more senses – but like that other mystic Impressionist composer Alexander Scriabin, he acknowledged a connection between visual color and his unique harmonic language. He called out “the gentle cascade of blue-orange chords” in the piano part to his Quartet for the End of Time, and he even said of himself: “I am affected by a kind of synopsia, found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me… to see colors which move with the music, and I sense these colors vividly.”

That connection between harmonic and visual color, his phonetic mimicry of birdsong and his deeply held Catholic faith were the three foundations of Messiaen’s music. But at the heart of his melodic and harmonic language were seven musical scales – he called them “modes of limited transposition” – that lent his music an otherworldliness heard in no other composer’s voice.

Messiaen described L’Ascension as “four meditations for orchestra” on Christ’s Ascension into heaven. It was one of his earliest major works, composed in 1932-33. He later transcribed three of its four movements organ; the third, not lending itself to keyboard, he rewrote completely.

The brass chorale of the opening meditation (“Majesty of Christ Demanding His Glory of the Father”) has the languorous lines of medieval plainchant, but cast in Messiaen’s third and seventh modes, evokes an aura of reverential mystery. The second meditation (“Serene Alleluiahs of a Soul that Longs for the Heavens”) alternates between woodwinds in unison and the phonetic twittering of birds. The third meditation (“Alleluiah on the Cymbal, Alleluiah on the Trumpet”), written for full orchestra led by trumpets and percussion, is uncharacteristically dancelike and joyous, leading to a sublime unison apotheosis and a propulsive galop. The final meditation for gauzy strings alone (“Prayer of Christ Ascending Toward His Father”) traces an upwardly moving scale to its celestial destination.

George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue

In the wee hours of January 4, 1924, George Gershwin was shooting pool with lyricist Buddy DeSylva at a billiards parlor on 52^nd & Broadway. Gershwin’s brother, Ira, was scanning the music listings in the New York Tribune’s overnight edition when he spotted notice of a concert that Paul Whiteman was giving on Lincoln’s Birthday to showcase “American Music.” Besides reporting on new pieces from Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin, the final paragraph contained this zinger:

“George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto.”

Gershwin called Whiteman the next morning to learn why the bandleader had put out a press release about the ‘concerto’ without telling him. Whiteman was in a race against his rival Victor Lopez to put on a ‘serious’ jazz concert, and with Carnegie Hall booked solid, he’d put down $7,000 on Aeolian Hall, home of Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony, and turned his PR lady loose. He and Gershwin had worked together on George White’s Scandals and chatted idly about someday doing a serious concert piece together. But with preparations in high gear for a Broadway opening of Sweet Little Devil, Gershwin was in no position to deliver a full concerto in five weeks’ time. The best he could do was a single-movement fantasia or rhapsody.

Gershwin hunted through his sketchbook and found a musical doodle that became the opening clarinet solo and the work’s foundational blues theme. Its lovely slow theme had come to him while playing piano at a friend’s home. And the structure of the piece was suggested by his train ride to Boston a week earlier to oversee the pre-Christmas opening of Sweet Little Devil. In Gershwin’s words:

“It was on that train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is so often stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the heart of noise – I suddenly heard – and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end… By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece.”

Working in a back room of the apartment he shared with his parents, Gershwin sketched the music for two pianos. And each day, Whiteman’s pianist/arranger, Ferde Grofé, arrived to collect the previous day’s pages to orchestrate. Its working title was An American Rhapsody, but Ira suggested the new name after visiting an art gallery where he saw James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold and Arrangement in Gray and Black (aka “Whistler’s Mother”).

By early February, the Whiteman band was in rehearsal at the Palais Royale nightclub for his so-called “Experiment in Modern Music.” Gershwin was remarkably open to others’ ideas. He’d written out the clarinet’s opening run as a 17-note rising scale, but when reed man Ross Gorman – out of boredom or friskiness – shmeared it in rehearsal, Gershwin loved the effect and wrote it in. When Victor Herbert suggested a pretty arabesque lead-in to the slow melody, Gershwin used that as well.

The concert drew music’s greatest names – Stokowski, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Sousa, Bloch, Heifetz, Kreisler, Galli-Curci. The box office was mobbed by patrons vying for a ticket, and cars were lined up around the block. Whiteman’s confection of miniatures got off to a brisk start with the Dixieland Jazz Band’s Livery Stable Blues and the razzy Limehouse Blues, and he brought in Zez Confrey to wow the audience with his piano pyrotechnics. As the concert settled into his band’s catalogue of dance numbers and fluff like Yes, We Have No Bananas, a mood of weariness began to take hold, and hot, restless audience members began to wander out. But as soon as Rhapsody in Blue was announced and George Gershwin walked onstage – next to last on the program – they raced back to their seats. Gorman’s howling intro had them at “Hello,” Gershwin invented a piano cadenza where he’d left a page blank and Whiteman waited for his nod to bring the orchestra back in. When it was over, the hall exploded. Whiteman would recall, “At half-past five on the afternoon… we took our fifth curtain call.”

The next day’s reviews were consumed by Rhapsody in Blue, and the critics returned to it in their Sunday columns. The New York Sun’s stodgy critic William James Henderson wrote: “If this way lies the path toward the upper development of American modern music into a high art form, then one can heartily congratulate Mr. Gershwin.” The New York Times’ Olin Downes called the composer’s voice “fresh and new and full of promise.” And Deems Taylor, in his Sunday column for the World, wrote: “Mr. Gershwin will bear watching.”