Key Details
Sunset Center Theater
July 17 & 24 at 7:30 PM
Program
ANGÉLICA NEGRÓN
Marejada
AARON COPLAND
Appalachian Spring
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral”
About the Program
Beethoven subtitled his Pastoral Symphony “Recollections of Country Life”. Each of its five movements depicts a countryside scene. The first movement conveys the calm joy of arriving in the countryside, with gentle, flowing melodies. The second evokes a babbling brook, while woodwinds mimic birdsong. In the third, people dance and celebrate with lively rhythms. The fourth depicts a sudden, dramatic thunderstorm, one of Beethoven’s earliest musical portrayals of nature’s power. The final movement offers a peaceful shepherd’s song and a sense of restored serenity. For fans of Disney, this piece will sound familiar, as it was featured in Fantasia (1940).
Appalachian Spring takes its title from a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse and evokes the optimism and spirit of pioneer life in early America. Featuring the iconic Shaker melody Simple Gifts, Copland’s work is one of his most celebrated, known for its open textures, folk-inspired melodies, and enduring association with the quintessential “American sound.”
Celebrating a different perspective on the American landscape, Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón is our featured composer this year. Her work, Marejada, captures the movement and energy of the sea through inventive textures and rhythmic drive. Negrón offers a fresh and compelling voice that complements Copland’s vision while reflecting her own cultural and musical soundscape.
Program Notes
By Georgeanne Banker
Angélica Negrón- Marejada
“Marejada is a piece written for the Kronos Quartet, inspired by the pixelated landscapes of artist Justin Favela and the desire to escape to a place that feels and sounds like home,” Angélica Negrón writes. The piece combines field recordings from the waves in Seven Seas Beach in Fajardo, and birds from La Jungla Beach in Guánica, both located in Puerto Rico, along with undulating gestures in the strings reminiscent of the sound of waves.
“I wanted to capture the feeling of joy and calmness I feel when I’m in Puerto Rico in these beautiful places while also expressing the complexity of the diaspora experience for those who, like me, cannot be physically present in those places and close to their friends and family most of the time.
“When Kronos approached me in March 2020 to write a piece for them to rehearse and perform together during this difficult moment of social isolation, I wanted to create something playful and rhythmic yet flexible and malleable that would be fun to put together,” Negrón notes. “…But also, something that took into consideration the limitations of the video communications platforms and use those challenges as compositional material and creative impulse.” Assuaging the frustrations of virtual performances like delay, cancellation, and asynchrony, Negrón embraced them in her work.
Throughout Marejada, whose title refers to a rough, swelling sea, Negrón guides the performers to play like waves or coquí frogs, to make sounds with found objects, and, while always performing together, encouraging journeys of their own.
Aaron Copland - Appalachian Spring, Suite for 13 Instruments
When choreographer Martha Graham secured three ballet commissions from patron Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1942, she quickly corralled Aaron Copland to provide one of the scores. “I hope you are having a good summer,” Graham wrote to him, “and I hope you can do this. That is, I hope you really want to do it” (he really did).
Collaborating by mail, the pair brought their scenario to a Pennsylvanian homestead, where an eight-part tale of a newlywed bride and groom, a Pioneer Woman, a Revivalist, and the Followers would unfold. “This is a legend of American living. It is like the bone structure, the inner frame that holds together people,” Graham wrote.
Copland distilled his vast, hallmark sound into a score for four violins, pairs of violas and cellos, bass, and piano. “I was really putting Martha Graham to music,” Copland reflected. “I wasn’t thinking about the Appalachians or even spring…It was a ballet for Martha.” Graham titled the work Appalachian Spring after a line from a 1930 Hart Crane poem, though “Ballet for Martha” remains its endearing subtitle. Appalachian Spring premiered in 1944, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year.
The ballet wheels from the tranquil to the kinetic, from an ardent pas de deux to a plucky interlude, which, per Copland, has “suggestions of square dances and country fiddlers” (keep an ear out for the revelers’ forebears in Beethoven’s “Pastoral”). The keystone is set by the clarinet, which introduces a theme and variations on the Shaker song “The Gift to be Simple.” Muted strings sing a “prayer-like” coda, “my favorite place in the whole piece,” Copland said. As the day ends, a soft melody rises over grounded tones. A house of smooth lines is built, and the newlyweds begin their life together.
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”
“How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” - Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to Therese Malfatti, May 1810
Had Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 been the only work he premiered on the frigid Viennese evening of December 22, 1808, it would have been enough to make waves. But of course, we’re talking about Beethoven here. That evening also saw the premieres of his Fifth Symphony and Choral Fantasy, and the first public performance of his Piano Concerto No. 4. While the musicians were under-rehearsed and the theater freezing, this watershed concert remains one for the musical time travel wish list (don’t forget a blanket!).
Written at the same time as his Fifth, Beethoven’s Sixth was just as bold: here was a five-movement, programmatic piece in the pastoral tradition, with descriptive movement titles, bird calls, folk dances, and thunderstorms that rattled the foundations of Papa Haydn’s symphonic form. Once a (rebellious) student of Haydn’s, Beethoven’s new symphony emulated his mentor’s 1801 oratorio The Seasons—still in concert rotation then—in its programmatic reverence for the natural world. For if anything, the Sixth Symphony, which Beethoven titled “Pastoral,” is a tribute to his own favorite place: the outdoors.
The Symphony opens with the Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the countryside. A pastoral drone supports springy long-short-short-long-long motif from the violins, a strand of the landscape’s rhythmic DNA, while the trail never strays far from the home key of F major.
The forest comes alive in the Scene by the Brook. Grounded by two flowing, muted cellos, the Scene concludes with Beethoven’s own field recording, a trio of birdcalls, with the flute as the nightingale, the oboe as the quail, and the clarinet as the cuckoo (anecdotally the fateful, four-note theme of his Fifth Symphony is said to be inspired by the yellowhammer birdcall, but that’s a story for another note).
The Merry gathering of country people—a rollicking party with a merrily offbeat band—is interrupted by a Storm that swells the orchestra to terrible dimensions, adding the timpani, trombones, and piccolo. The clouds rumble into the distance, yielding to the Shepherd’s Song. Joyful, grateful feelings after the storm. Our outdoor adventure has taken us there and back again, and we are glad to be home.
