Notes for: July 11, 2006
Elliott Schwartz is arguably Maine’s most prominent living composer. His music is played throughout the United States and Europe, and the Library of Congress is now developing an archive of his manuscripts, correspondence and other documents.
Schwartz recently retired from the Bowdoin College faculty, where he was the Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music and has served since 1964, including 12 years as department chair. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of California (San Diego and Santa Barbara), Ohio State University, and Cambridge University (UK), and extended residencies at Oxford and Harvard.
His music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Houston Symphonies, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Tanglewood, De Ijsbreker (Amsterdam), and the Bath Festival (UK). In 2006, he celebrates his 70th birthday with appearances as featured guest composer at the New England Conservatory, the Library of Congress (Washington, DC ), the ACA Festival in New York, Butler University, the University of Minnesota, and the Royal Academy of Music (London).
In addition to composing, Schwartz has written widely on musical topics; he is co-author with Daniel Godfrey of Music since 1945, and co-editor with Barney Childs of the anthology Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music.
For this evening’s performance of Vienna Dreams, Schwartz has provided the following program note:
“In my 1998 composition Vienna Dreams for viola, clarinet and piano, fragments of three Viennese chamber works – the Mozart trio for these same instruments, the Schubert ‘Arpeggione’ sonata, and the Brahms clarinet-cello-piano trio – intersect and interact with each other in a state of free association. While a number of quotes are fairly literal, and may be recognizable, quite a few have been distorted, pulverized, and grafted onto other Viennese neighbor-fragments.
“Moreover, there is another prominent level of quotation, suggesting that the three main sources (Mozart, Schubert, Brahms) are being filtered through the sensibility – perhaps the ‘memory’ – of a fourth Viennese composer, Gustav Mahler.
“Finally, a colleague has pointed out to me that the overall harmonic language of Vienna Dreams may reveal the presence (or ghost) of a fifth Viennese figure – Arnold Schoenberg – hovering over the entire fabric.”
Victor Carr, Jr., writing in Classics Today, adds the following comment:
“Elliott Schwartz’s compositional style has been described as ‘post-eclecticism’ for its use of quotations from the enormously wide range of music created in the 20th century and earlier. These fragments are all filtered through Schwartz’s individualistic musical language, which though primarily 12-tone is so shot through with consonance that it sounds like atonal music that’s been stretched to the brink of tonality, rather than the other way around. Vienna Dreams cleverly weaves strands into such a complex tonal overlay that it’s often difficult to discern the source melodies even as you feel that they are definitely ‘there’ somewhere.”