Page 178 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY NED ROREM (b. 1923)
Ned Rorem is most widely known as an American composer of art songs, and is also a literary figure, having published volumes of diaries documenting his professional musical life, his youthful involvement in midcentury gay culture, and, more recently, his experiences as an aging artist. He is a keen observer of human behavior, a keen analyzer of creative efforts, and his work—both musical and literary—often grows from the intersection of these traits.
Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1923 and grew up in Chicago. In the mid-1940s, he studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, enrolled at the Juilliard School, and traveled to Paris in 1949, where he lived intermittently through 1958. In 1976 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. (“If I die in a whorehouse, [my obituary] will still say, Pulitzer Prize winner, Ned Rorem,” he once told a
journalist.) Today, at age 94, he lives on Nantucket.
The Emerson String Quartet premiered Rorem’s String Quartet No. 4 in 1995 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Its
ten movements were based on ten paintings by Pablo Picasso, but only “sort of,” Rorem cautioned in a published 1998 letter to a friend. He explains the “sort of” in his program note:
expect you to know that his piece is about the sea, or hell, or a summer garden, or even about such generalities as love and weather, much less knives and forks, unless he tells you so in words.
Thus it was with the Fourth String Quartet. The ten sections were (I persuaded myself) inspired
by ten pictures of a certain powerful painter, each section titled after a specific canvas. Indeed, until today, the Emerson Quartet programs listed these famous titles complete with my verbal descriptions.
Now I find the device irrelevant, in that no music irrefutably depicts other than itself. Henceforth listeners must make way for their own images.
But these paragraphs are unfair to those who enjoy reading as they listen, so I’ll add that the music came rapidly, four of the movements being writ- ten in January of 1994, the six others during a fortnight at Yaddo [the artists’ colony] the following July. Most of the ten “pictures” are related themati- cally, and are all related, I pray, theatrically.
The paintings may have served as prompts for Rorem,
but he wasn’t trying to make aural translations of the images—rather, he was using music as another way to get at the ideas behind the paintings. In the end, the music comes untethered from its original grounding, but still carries some inarticulable imprint of it. Rorem doesn’t want his audience to be guided by the paintings, or to try to reconstruct correspondences between music and image. While the original program (and CD booklet) for the quartet name the paintings, Rorem later retitled the movements with only the abstract descriptions used in
this program.
In keeping with the composer’s wishes, we will say no more here about the paintings. As for the music, listen for the ways Rorem contrasts activity with stasis: especially in the movements “Absolutely strict,” with its binding motif that circles without end, and “Cold and Hot,” with its impas-
String Quartet No. 4
Composers sometimes seek to conjoin their muse with other arts—with the poetry of song, for in- stance, or more exceptionally with the visual,
by representing through sound their special Pictures at an Exhibition. I too have done so, giving graphic titles (Eagles, Sunday Morning, Pilgrims), complete with literary footnotes, to non-vocal compositions. Since music is the one art without provable meaning, a composer cannot
178 The Music at Tippet Rise