Page 95 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

But the violin has only intonation to vary the theme, which repeats constantly. This is then the challenge for the player: can you play the same thing twenty different ways and make it sound more complex each time?
PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937) Partita VI: Evening Song
Glass wrote his Seven Partitas for Solo Violin based on Bach’s. Often when you play a Bach piece, its stringent and rigid structures mask an inner melody which is quite personal or emotional, contradicting its apparent structure. Glass has picked up on these hidden, almost popular songs couched in more formal forms. In Bach’s Sixth Partita, Glass has found a beautiful melody which he stresses, placing a repeated note under it, rather than above it.
Similarities can be found with Bach’s own keyboard Partita No. 6 in E Minor. In the Air and the Gavotte, the extremes of the melody make similar intervals to Glass’s. But it would be petty to suggest a methodology; Glass has taken the ends of phrases in general, high and low, and juxtaposed them
in his own way to create a poignant, Bach-like ostinato, interwoven with scales to fabricate a modern response to Bach’s repose, stillness, silence, until the ostinato slows and only single notes remain. It is Schenkerian Bach, where only the structural elements remain, and the song captures Bach’s underlying sadness in a way that is as effective and structural as Bach himself. What mad joy and desperate grief will the violinist discover in the interstices between the two giants?
PHILIP GLASS
Knee Play 2 from Einstein on the Beach
Knee Plays are the five entr’actes, or interludes, joining the nine scenes of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach, the way the knee joins the leg together. They allow time to change
the sets, but also provide a continuity between the four acts. Knee Play 2 is a Bach-like scale played endlessly and finally desperately (theoretically by Einstein himself, who was a renowned Bach violinist) during the opera’s abstract monologues about buying glasses and during the song “Mr. Bojangles.”
BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)
Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB124
This is one of the most difficult pieces ever written. Itspoignant and inventive harmonies are a narrative of the hardship and poverty endured by Bartók, struggling to support his family while he was dying of leukemia in America. You can hear the pain of his realization that he was at the time the greatest living composer, but completely neglected in a strange land, fighting for his and his family’s survival. Bartók had been hired by Columbia University during his last years from 1940 to 1945 to transcribe certain Yugoslavian folk music which only Columbia had. Bartók was in any case desperate to leave Hungary because of Hitler.
Columbia paid him so little that on weekends his rec- reation was to ride the subway with his family. He was relatively unknown in America and could get only about eight concerts a year, and so lived in abysmal poverty. His arthritis was so bad that he couldn’t play the piano, which affected his will to compose. He was dying of leukemia, and weighed only 90 pounds when he collapsed during a speech at Harvard.
Harvard stepped in and paid for his hospitalization, and ASCAP paid for his later care. The wealthy and brilliant conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, hired him to compose his final piece, the Concerto for Orchestra, which renewed Bartók’s enthusiasm for composition.
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