Notes for: August 13, 2013
Fred Lerdahl is highly respected as a composer, teacher and music theorist.
As a composer, he has twice won composer awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Naumburg Recording and Martha Baird Rockefeller Recording Awards, the Rome and Koussevitzky Composition Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Three of his compositions were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
As a teacher, he is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from Lawrence University, and has also taught at the University of Michigan, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.
As a theorist, he is best known for his work on pitch, space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems or “musical grammar[s].” Lerdahl has “always sought musical forms of [his] own invention,” including the spiral form “in which a simple and stable musical idea is expanded on,” and results in a “recurrent motif of interweaving patterns.”
Composed in 1981, Waltzes is a cycle of twelve virtuoso waltzes for violin, viola, cello, and bass. It was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, where the first nine waltzes were premiered later that year. Soon thereafter Lerdahl composed the final three waltzes, and dedicated the entire work to violist Scott Nickrenz.
Lerdahl has provided the following program notes for the work:
The character of Waltzes arose from three impulses: first, to compose a work that was suitable for summer-festival listening; second, to provide a challenge for brilliant string players accustomed to 19th-century repertory; and third, to simplify the intricacies of my contemporaneous string quartets (1978 and 1982).
The piece includes occasional references to the music of past composers, transformed to fit my syntax and style and the playful character of the work. The instrumentation, for “low” string quartet, is reminiscent of Schubert’s Vienna; the lack of a second violin often forced high writing for the viola and cello.
The part-writing and motivic treatment, which are quite classical in spirit, are woven out of a harmonic and voice-leading system of my own invention, one that I have used in one form or another in a number of pieces. This system is “tonal” in an extended sense and allows for orderly progression across the extremes of consonance and dissonance.
The individual movements, all in some variant of ABA form, break down as follows: