From Maestro James Blachly: Program Notes for “America @ 250 Part I & Brahms 3”
Notes on the Program by Maestro James Blachly
Tonight’s program begins with a musical question, as presented in Charles Ives’s iconic and enigmatic work “The Unanswered Question.” The piece was composed in 1906, but not premiered until decades later, and only became an established concert work after the Second World War. Yet despite its being composed more than a century ago, the piece continues to sound strikingly forward-looking. Leonard Bernstein, the great American conductor and composer, used the title of this work as the overarching thesis of his famous Norton Lectures at Harvard, and suggested that the unanswered question was, at least for his purposes in those lectures, “whither music?” In other words, what will classical music sound like in the future? The answer is, of course, as widely varied as each individual composer we have, with no end to creativity.
As we celebrate America, it seems fitting to begin with Charles Ives, a composer who represents so much of our American ideals. He was boldly individualistic, and composed music that was ahead of its time. He incorporates a wide variety of musical traditions, celebrating in much of his music not only the orchestral tradition, but also camp meetings, church revivals, children’s songs, folk music, military bands and marches, and much more.
This work exists in a much broader context, but the specific soundscape it creates is unique, with a slow, steady passage of the sustained strings, an increasingly agitated group of woodwinds, and, repeated seven times, the “question” as posed by a solo trumpet – the question that remains unanswered. We can speculate about what Ives himself meant with this “unanswered question,” but we are also invited to pose our own, to consider what in our own lives might remain unanswered – an invitation to reflect and imagine.
We follow the Ives with a piece that was composed especially for this evening, by Levi Taylor, a Los Angeles-based composer who enjoys as much success in writing music for film and television as for the concert hall. This piece is called “One Foot After the Other,” and over the course of roughly six minutes, we hear a theme of something rising from the depths, ultimately growing and increasing in energy and sound before returning to a quiet calm. The work is an elaboration on a shorter piece that I heard of Mr. Taylor’s, and was immediately drawn towards – the sonority and direction seemed to me like a larger work ready to be brought to life. I am personally so grateful that Levi Taylor accepted my invitation to expand that work, and we are honored to be giving the world premiere of this work tonight.
The end of the first half is a piece of music I consider one of the great American masterpieces – Samuel Barber’s Second Essay for Orchestra. Despite the fairly unpoetic, generic title, this is a piece that is packed with intensity and emotion, as well as a rewarding example of compositional skill and integrity. Composed in 1942, I hear so many connections between this piece and the Copland Symphony No. 3 that we present in March at the end of our American @ 250 celebration. Both works seem to embody, in sound, the strength of the American character during that decisive Second World War, a conviction that was as firmly rooted in a common sense of moral imperative as it was in military might. We all benefit from the actions of the heroes who fought to defend this country and world from tyranny, and this music represents a sense of that courage and strength. The opening theme you hear in the flute, then carried on in the clarinet, is changed and elaborated upon in a multitude of ways over the course of these ten minutes, at times played slowly in the lowest instruments, and at other times increased in speed and adjusted to form the basis of a repeated melody that becomes its own fugal section. For many American musicians of subsequent generations, Barber, who grew up in Pennsylvania and attended the Curtis Institute of Music, is a composer who represents American creativity in a particularly compelling way.
If the first half represents a uniquely American sense of freedom in music, the Brahms Symphony No. 3 does so on a very personal level. Composed in 1883 in Wiesbaden, a beautiful resort town in western Germany just off the Rhine River, the symphony seems to be fully unfettered, an expression of freedom both in the musical notes that form the basis of the first movement, and in the feeling we get in listening and performing the work.
Brahms’s close colleague Joseph Joachim was famous for having a musical motto of the notes F-A-E, which he used to mean “Frei aber einsam,” or, free, but lonely. Brahms, who remained a bachelor his entire life, played on this theme with his own combination of letters: F-A-F, “Frei aber froh,” or free, but happy. Indeed, while Brahms never married, he had an abundance of important friendships and professional partnerships, including the inspiring, tragic, and complex relationship he had with the entire Schumann family – not only Robert Schumann, who declared the young Brahms a musical savior – but also with Clara Schumann, who, as the preeminent concert pianist of her day, was a life-long creative muse, advocate, and thought partner. She said of this symphony that she had trouble choosing which movement was her favorite, and I think that is a sentiment many of us share. Each movement is a true delight in its own way.
The first movement is energetic and surging in its opening bars, revealing a sense of inner tumult and striving, a mixing of sonorities from a bright, optimistic F major, immediately into a chord that with just a few changes becomes a fully diminished seventh chord, and then mixing between major and minor in revealing, ambiguous, and rewarding ways. The movement repeats these opening bars several times, each with the F-A-F theme prominent, but because of those mixtures of sonority-dark and light, major and minor – we are left uncertain exactly what the music is telling us. In other words, there are always layers to the emotional landscape, just as we each are so much more than meets the eye.
The second movement is particularly lovely, and is so lovingly written that we have to simply count ourselves grateful for the gift of the music itself. A series of short phrases begins in the woodwinds, but soon invites a soaring build of harmony, all while beguiling melodies flow like a fresh-water stream throughout.
The third movement is one of the greatest melodies Brahms composed, repeated six times by various instrument colors, a dark-hued C-minor rising and falling melody that evokes some of the great tragedies of Brahms’s life-but in a poetic and profound way, makes us able to feel grateful that we can experience the richness of being a human being – even the difficult aspects of life.
The fourth movement is truly a finale – a culmination of the rest of the symphony, but begins with a deceptively soft murmur in unison throughout the orchestra, before bursting forth with energy and rhythmic drive.
Hans Richter, who conducted the premiere of the piece, gave it the nickname “Brahms’s Eroica,” a reference to Beethoven’s own third symphony, which has the name “Eroica.” Like the Beethoven symphony, Brahms’s Third expands the orchestral palette, with a bold, unique vision for the form, and, like the Beethoven symphony, reveals a sense of rhythmic and personal drive and energy, a kind of surging yearning.
While some composers wrote music to match a specific concept or plot, Brahms wrote what became known as “absolute music,” or music for its own sake, without a specific meaning attached to it. What that ultimately means is that whatever you hear in Brahms’s music is the correct interpretation. Whatever it means to you, whatever your experience with this music, is in fact the true meaning of the music.
- Notes © 2025 by James Blachly