I’m very happy to share my new double-album Világ featuring the Sonata for solo violin by Béla Bartók along with compositions written for me by Aida Shirazi and Stewart Goodyear and works by Manfred Stahnke and Franco Donatoni. 

“Világ” is a Hungarian word meaning “world” or “illumination”. It also resembles the word “village” in English. In Sanskrit, “vilag” means “to cling to”; in Hindi, “separated”.

A celebrated artist of the 20th century, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) is known for documenting the folk music of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and other countries of that region, and for his brilliant synthesis of elements of that music in his exquisitely constructed, passionately expressive compositions. 

His Sonata for solo violin (1944), composed for Yehudi Menuhin, is one of his last pieces. Dense with notes and technical challenges for the player, it’s been increasingly embraced by violinists and listeners. The four movements evoke essential forms from the Sonatas and Partitas for violin by Johann Sebastian Bach: chaconne, fugue, slow aria (the Largo from Bach’s C major Sonata comes to mind), and fast presto. Like Bach’s pieces, Bartók’s Sonata features inspiring large-scale ambition, athletic virtuosity, and a down-to-earth connection to rambunctious folk dances and catchy rhythms and melodies.

I first learned the Bartók Sonata when I was a college student. Returning to it these days, I’m most struck and delighted by its undulating phrases and by its buoyancy and playfulness on the one hand and melancholy on the other. I enjoy the Tempo di ciaconna’s sweeping sarabande lilt and the lively conversations with the theme amid the intensity of the Fugue. The Melodia, to me, suggests solitude and tranquility, like a lone figure who is getting solace from nature. Then comes the sound of buzzing insects in the Presto (Bartók was an avid collector of bugs), which brings us back to the village and the hearty dancing.

For this recording, I studied the manuscript facsimile and Peter Bartók’s 1994 edition for Boosey&Hawkes, which refers to the manuscript and the composer’s sketches and letters to Menuhin. These sources contain some notes and articulations that differ from the 1947 Menuhin edition. I made choices that felt good to me and I play the original quarter-tones in the Presto. 

In my frequent work with composers, I had noticed quite a few drawing upon the music of their native countries – the tunes, native instruments, characteristic rhythms. Thinking about what the many cultures of the world mean to people today, I chose for this album to put the Bartók Sonata next to pieces I had recently commissioned from my friends Aida Shirazi, from Iran, and Stewart Goodyear, from Canada. I decided also to release two works I’ve recently been playing a lot, by Manfred Stahnke and Franco Donatoni. While these don’t draw from the composers’ own ethnic cultures, they explore ideas inspired by folk music and un-formalized language.

Aida Shirazi (b. 1987) emigrated from Iran to complete her college studies in the United States and Europe. She is a co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association, a talented group of women who are supporting each other’s artistry and the rights of women. In an interview last year, Aida said “Even when I don’t use anything deliberately or borrow anything [from traditional Iranian music], there is still something with the sonority that people come and say, “Oh, this sounds very Iranian.” I really like it when it’s on a more subconscious level. It leaves something for the audience to hold onto, to interpret, to connect with your music in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily think of. …What happens if you don’t even know who the composer of this piece is, and what would your interpretation be like? It’s that kind of relationship with identity, and how that identity can be liberating or reductive when it comes to the reception and interpretation and appreciation of the work.” She writes about her piece:  

      Sāniyā is a four-movement work about being taken with a sensual experience as mundane as gazing at the quivering leaves of a tree in the summer breeze and lyricizing it to create a dramatic sonic journey. It is inspired by the game of light and shade, creating forms that appear and disappear all at the same time. The work is the result of my fascination with the sunlight traveling through the leaves and bringing about countless shades of green, impossible to differentiate for the human eye. Sāniyā aspires to capture changes in the white noise of the fluttering leaves in the breeze. Searching for a proper title, I came across the word “sāniyā”, which means the light and shade of the woods in Maazandaraani dialect, which belongs to the people of the Northern Iran. I would like to thank Miranda Cuckson for commissioning this piece. Sāniyā is dedicated to her.

As a concert pianist, Stewart Goodyear (b. 1978) is known for his performances of the classical repertoire such as the complete piano works of Beethoven. As a composer, he has long written and played his own piano pieces, often flavored by music of the Caribbean. His mother is from Trinidad, his father was British. I’m honored that he has branched into writing for violin with this five-movement suite. It dips into both sides of his family background, from the Anglo-Canadian grace of the Waltz to the calypso and steel band in the Dance. He writes about Solo:

    My love for the violin began as soon as I was introduced to music, and I actually wanted to be a concert violinist before I became a pianist. Growing up in Toronto, I was surrounded by the different sounds and styles of playing the violin, and adored both the techniques of the fiddler and the violin virtuoso. In Solo, I wanted to create a fusion of both styles in each movement, and therefore create a tour of my childhood with this work. The Waltz and Prelude pay homage to the Canadian folk tradition, the Dance is a fusion of Calypso and toccata writing, and the Chant and Elegy are through-composed, rhapsodic movements. The Elegy closes the suite, and is a very intimate and personal lament for the loss of life due to the COVID pandemic.

German composer Manfred Stahnke (b. 1951) has a keen interest in folk idioms, especially those of non-European countries. Like Hungarian composer György Ligeti and American Ben Johnston, with whom he studied, he has absorbed and been inspired by the rhythmic and harmonic characteristics of various cultures, with the aim of expanding his musical language beyond the Western tradition. His music has a strong basis in microtonal tuning possibilities. Capra 4, from a decades-spanning series of pieces for violin, is a sequence of seven brief interrelated explorations of different jaunty rhythms and tunings. He writes:

    The title Capra refers to the physicist Fritjof Capra and his book The Tao of Physics, as well as to the old Latin name for the goat, and via that to the gusla, the Balkan violin, which is covered with a goat skin and very often carries a goat head. In 1987 I started a series of violin solo pieces. The first, Capra 1, was inspired by a Nepalese violinist, a guest at Hamburg Musikhochschule. I was completely fascinated by his playing improvising on fixed speech-like patterns, I suppose. My Capra series is both full of spontaneity and full of “rules” of many musics from all over the world.

Capra 4 (2013) had to wait for a long time to be performed and is now realized in a wonderful manner by Miranda Cuckson. In an additional title it is called Zahlentanz – Dance of numbers, since it runs through the world of the first integers. It starts with just intonated thirds, which use number 5 from the overtone series. Then follows a contemplation of fourths and fifths, numbers 3 and 4. Quite strange is the next movement, based on the numbers 7 and 4. The next uses a scale idea from Indonesia, “Slendro”, where every scale step is close to the overtone proportion 8/7. I combine 8/7 with 3/2, the just fifth. In the next movement, I divide 3/2 into four quasi-equidistant steps. This idea is related to the music of the Tepehua of Mexico, who play a violin imported from Spain long ago. The next movement combines diminished “fourths” 21/16 with augmented “seconds” 8/7 and septimal “sixths” 12/7. The last movement uses overtone and undertone series, a hint to Harry Partch and his “Otonality” and “Utonality”.

Franco Donatoni (1927-2000) was a major Italian artist whose long musical trajectory took place in an era shaped by Bartók and Stravinsky, then by Stockhausen, Boulez, and John Cage. A questioning thinker and the teacher of many well-known composers, Donatoni explored and probed a variety of opposing avenues with his music. He said, “my personal history as a composer is an alternation between ‘separations’ and ‘unifications.’”  

Argot: two pieces for violin (1979) is from his late period, during which his music had a renewed lightness and he became intrigued by repetition and mutation. “Argot” means a type of language used only among a specific group, or an informal way of speaking (ie, slang) that is not bound by standardized rules. When in use by a people, this kind of language tends to morph and shift, with words developing multiple variations.

The first part of Donatoni’s Argot is more overtly virtuosic, with sections of fast-flowing notes and quick staccato utterances, like chatty, impulsive talking. The second part is also sectional but with more simple fragmented gestures that suggest improvised folk music with intricate ornaments and slides. These are continually altered and toyed with, so that the gestures are both constant and gradually transformed.

While planning this album, I had the most fleeting of exchanges with Donald Martino. Having decided to apply for a Copland Fund grant to make a recording of his music, I wrote him a letter asking if I could obtain scores to two of his recent works: the Sonata for Solo Violin, and Romanza. He emailed me in return, saying he was sending the pieces. He thanked me for my interest in his work and suggested we talk in a few weeks, after he returned from his vacation. About a week later, I was looking at his website, dantalian.com, and I was shocked to read there a notice that he had just passed away while on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Though haunted by an eerie feeling of sadness, I soon continued with my plans. As I looked through his violin music, I realized I should also obtain his Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano. I contacted his wife, Lora, who kindly found a copy of it in his office and mailed it to me. Some months later, the Copland grant came through.

I regret very much not having met Donald Martino in person, and not having his reactions and ideas during my process of working on his music. Exploring his work has been an engrossing experience and I am gratified to be able to present these pieces to listeners. Martino’s music appears to provoke a range of responses. Enthusiasts extol the Romantic qualities of his music, with its rhapsodic freedom and large, elegant gestures. People also praise his inspiring mastery of craft: his handling of complex but clear textures, cohesive but free-sounding structures, and vibrant instrumental color.

At times one hears criticism of his work as dry or hard to follow. I believe this may stem from several factors. Martino was a highly learned musician who was thoroughly engaged by the techniques of the Second Viennese School, and who studied with the most probing exponents of serialism: Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Like Babbitt and Sessions especially, he was known for his vast knowledge and a cerebral mastery of mathematical processes. His reputation as an “academic” was reinforced by his many professorial positions at prestigious universities. In aesthetic terms, his music’s tendency to proceed in a stream of notes can perhaps make it seem amorphous and difficult to follow. 

It is important therefore, for the listener but especially for the performer, to recognize that in Martino’s music, intellectual control forms the underpinning for a freewheeling Romantic sensibility. His cerebral interests aside, he had a deep love for styles of music that embrace intensity of emotion, impulsiveness, and virtuosity. These included jazz (he was a jazz clarinetist and arranger), Italian Baroque music, the Romantic piano works of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, and the Expressionist music of Berg and Schoenberg. His music should therefore come across as serious, committed and thoughtfully created, but also flamboyant and dazzling, full of sensual movement, aural color, volatile mood changes, and jazz-influenced improvisatory flair. 

This CD offers three previously unrecorded works that were written in the last few years of Martino’s life, as well as a piece from an earlier period. Whereas the Fantasy-Variations of 1962 is a striking example of his extremely detailed writing at the time, in his late music his writing became more streamlined and simplified. Though still filled with an abundance of notes and gestures, there are fewer symbol markings than before, and material is spun out into longer sections. 

Like the solo violin sonatas of Bartók and Sessions, Martino’s Sonata for Solo Violin (2003) is a large-scale, majestically sweeping, fiery work in four movements. The fff 7ths that open it recur at the close like pillars of a temple. In the highly rhapsodic first movement, Maestoso brillante, extensive, elaborate virtuosic outbursts settle into lyrical episodes. The second movement, Adagio molto, has a soulful melancholy that recalls the slow movement of Bartok’s solo sonata. After a sighing opening, a single-lined melody becomes increasingly lively, turning first into an ornate, waltz-like passage full of élan, and then into a spiky, flamboyant scherzando, before fading out mysteriously. The third movement, Intermezzo: Fughetta in omaggio, is a four-voice fugue played entirely pizzicato. Measured and resolute, it is a clear successor to the fugue in Bartók’s sonata. Intriguingly, Martino wrote out his “ideal” polyphonic vision on two staves, leaving it up to the performer to figure out which notes to actually play. (The score provides one possible version, fingered by dedicatee Robert Mann.) The fourth movement is sectional, Presto or Andante in character, with strongly defined reprises and passages of quickly alternating pizzicatos and bowed elements. The brilliant coda is a scurrying whirl of notes that broadens into a triumphant close. 

Based on a twelve-tone row, the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (2004) opens with a firmly striding pulse before unleashing a cascade of contrapuntal runs that essentially flows onward through the piece, tumbling over unexpected polyrhythms and meter changes, and occasionally taking on a dance-like character. While the instruments are equal partners, the violin often takes flight in extravagant roulades, which the piano punctuates with strong injected chords. In the second movement, Lento, the violin part settles into spacious, cantabile melody, while the piano adopts a Lisztian character with sweeping passagework. The third movement is a quick scherzo with a tipsy-sounding middle section. The final movement brings a return of the opening, with its declarative start and its dizzying stream of notes barreling to the finish. Martino indicated that the movements should follow each other attacca, and the work has the feel of an extended single movement: the excitable Animato first movement trails off suddenly from its peak, to be succeeded by the sweetly singing Lento, and the brief Presto vanishes from the scene, to be followed by the impassioned final movement. 

The Romanza for Violin Solo (2002) is a relatively brief work of lyrical fantasy. Recalling the instrumental romances of the 18^th-19^th centuries, the predominantly cantabile music sometimes takes flight into elegant, capriccioso gestures and brilliant episodes. A quality of informal, but intense, lyricism is illustrated by the expressive markings, including Adagio flessibile, Con moto, Con anima,  Andante cantabile, Comodo; liberamente, and Andantino. The material announced at the outset features large, languorously Romantic leaps and consonant intervals, establishing a sweet, genial atmosphere that later turns more passionate and emphatic. 

The Fantasy-Variations for Violin (1962) presents a veritable encyclopedia of violin effects, ranging from many sorts of pizzicato to harmonics, glissandi, varied bowing styles, and combinations thereof. Martino indicated in minute detail not only the desired dynamics, but in many cases, extremely specific nuances of phrasing and pacing. The work has the feeling of a scherzo, with brief phrases and different characters succeeding each other abruptly, and a nervous intensity which pervades the piece. Recurrences of the bold opening 10^th mark the start of some of the variations, but other variations are obscured by discursive elaborations. In the work’s middle section, marked Il più presto possibile, the mute is quickly applied and removed amid hushed scorrevole murmurings. Following a climax, the scherzando variations resume. As the work draws to an end, gestures become more relaxed, melodic and almost elegiac. A last confident flourish provides the close.

American artist Ralph Shapey (1921-2002) displayed a natural aptitude for composition and violin playing from a young age. Born to Russian parents in Philadelphia, he studied with Emmanuel Zetlin and Stefan Wolpe. After freelancing in New York, where he was inspired by Abstract Expressionist painters including Willem de Kooning, he accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago. There he founded and conducted the Contemporary Chamber Players and was renowned as a teacher for decades. His works were played by outstanding musicians including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Juilliard Quartet, Gilbert Kalish, Russell Sherman, Charles Neidich and Walter Trampler. His work won him awards (including the MacArthur, Kennedy Center Friedheim and Fromm) and an ardent following.

Though he was hailed as a major composer, performances of his music were never abundant, probably in part because of his bluntly combative, controversial personality. Yet his works are still heard and people continue to discover his music. His pieces are viscerally moving and brilliantly constructed, combining intriguing concepts with intense emotive power. His music is rewarding as an immediately graspable aesthetic experience, and for the intelligent vitality of his vision as an American artist. Known as a “radical traditionalist,” he combined a fervent understanding of the music of past Germanic composers like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms with a bold spirit of innovation that is distinctly American.

This recording comprises a significant segment of Shapey’s works for the violin, a genre illuminating for its relevance to his experience as an instrumentalist and for his sense of the violin’s potential. Except for the Four Etudes, these pieces have not been recorded before, and they have been rarely, if ever, performed. As on my previous Shapey album, the pieces span much of his compositional career, and together the two albums include most of his music for violin and violin/piano duo.

Shapey’s Sonata for violin and piano (1949) was one of his first major works. It represents both a culmination of his years of study with Wolpe and an assertion of his own viewpoint. Shapey composed his Sonata in response to Wolpe’s violin/piano Sonata (written months earlier), which Shapey later described as one of Wolpe’s finest compositions. However, Shapey’s fiery piece (and his likely fiery performance of it) signalled a period of rivalry between student and teacher. Some of its ideas are akin to Wolpe’s: the isolation of motivic cells that are rotated and altered, the positioning of motives as objects within an unmetered stretch of time and mobile texture. Shapey’s Sonata has the neoclassical traits found in his early work, but its hefty sonorities and jagged contours point to the intense physicality of his later music.

The opening violin motive D-Gb is clearly derived from the motive that begins Wolpe’s sonata. The movement features brusque figures in the piano and a warmly assertive violin line. Contrasting episodes include lively staccato passages and a grotesque march. The ensuing Scherzo is brash and swaggering, jolted by changes of meter and accentuation. Its bravado is relieved by elegant cantabile sections. In the violin’s Rubato recitative, Shapey places arcing gestures within a meterless expanse, creating an eloquent, unhurried sequence of ideas. Shapey shared with Morton Feldman a fondness for the pure musical tone itself and he rarely employed “noise” effects. Here, though, he contrasts normal and “snap” pizzicato, and uses slides and ponticello. In the final Allegro, the visceral pulse is tugged against by jazzy syncopations in a web of interlocking figures. A refrain is delivered in forceful octaves or ninths. While the sonata is not a serial work, this chromatic line comes close to including all twelve pitches of the scale.

Like his Partita (1966), Shapey’s Sonata No. 1 (1972) is a large-form work that shows his imaginative approach to expanding the violin’s possibilities as a virtuosic and expressive vehicle. The Sonata is remarkable for its economic handling of material and its use of fractions of rhythmic units to subvert the listener’s expectations of pulse. In the first movement, a theme and three variations based on a few measures from his String Trio (1965), the violin traverses huge intervals from low to high and hurdling complex chords. The mood shifts, becoming by turns delicately impish, grandly sweeping and solemnly rhetorical. The Quasi March movement is based mainly on a distinctive repeated-note triplet. Shapey’s use of unusual chords introduces surprisingly resonant dissonant harmonies. In the middle section, the violin line is angular but disarmingly sweet and moderate in pace. In the Cantabile movement, Shapey creates a lyrical melody of graceful sighs and broadly embellished upbeat gestures. The finale, despite its irregular rhythmic groupings, is somewhat reminiscent of a Baroque gigue. Spritely chords engage in dialogue with scatterings of notes across strings and registers. After the middle section’s elegant filigree, the first section is repeated.

Adagio and Allegro (1955) is one of several short pieces that Shapey composed early on. Gruff and confident like a feisty terrier, this character-filled piece opens with exchanges of repeated-note figures. The Allegro sets off at a sturdy, striding pace that is jostled by meter changes and sudden eruptions. The opening returns at the end, closing with the piano growling in the bass and the violin tearing off a furious tremolo.

Though the Four Etudes (1980) were commissioned by the String Teachers Association of America as a pedagogical tool, they stand with his other solo violin works as a highly expressive concert piece. Shapey wrote: “Each piece explores a specific technical problem while at the same time incorporates those from each other. I hope that the learning and performing of these, while giving precedent to technical problems, will at the same time give pleasure as a piece of music. At all times, Make Music!” Though only the third movement is titled Variations, all the movements are variations of the opening Maestoso. The pitch content remains the same as Shapey explores some of his favorite characters: a poised march, spikily disjointed passagework, and gently vaulting lyricism. The final Brillante, with its elaborate arabesques, recalls Henryk Wieniawski’s Etudes, which Shapey was known to have played. In his own Brillante etude, he convincingly translates the Romantic virtuoso tradition for the modern era.

The Sonata No. 3 (1998) is one of several violin/piano works that Shapey wrote around the turn of the millenium. His late style revels in sensual spirituality and the moment-to-moment resonance of sound, much like the music of Olivier Messiaen. Melodic development or narrative is subsumed within swathes of texture, intricately meshed counterpoint and reverberating harmonies. Large sections of music establish essentially static moods of heightened joy, exultation and love. The two Rondo‘s are vivacious and full of panache, and the exuberance of Shapey’s ubiquitous dotted rhythms is contrasted by sections of full-throated romanticism. The Aria movement is played with a wooden mute, giving this meditation a yearning, hushed quality. The final movement is Shapey in fist-shaking, triumphant mode, tempered by outpourings of tender lyricism before the mighty close.

An artist of vehement conviction, Ralph Shapey (1921-2002) was a striking figure in the landscape of American music. Born to Russian parents in Philadelphia, he studied with Emmanuel Zetlin and Stefan Wolpe and showed an aptitude for composition and violin from a young age. After some years composing and freelancing as a violinist in New York, where he was inspired by Abstract Expressionist painters there including Willem de Kooning, he took a professorship at the University of Chicago. There he also conducted the Contemporary Chamber Players, through which he was a proponent of many other composers’ work. His own music earned him commissions, awards including the MacArthur and Fromm, and an ardent following.

Shapey considered himself a “radical traditionalist”. Whereas the works of some contemporaneous composers such as Leon Kirchner and George Perle have a passionate sweep and richness of texture akin to Schoenberg, Berg and the Romantics, Shapey’s inspirations came mainly from even earlier: Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. He sought to emulate those composers’ concise motives and their ingenuity in creating from those building blocks. At the same time, his music was experimental in its unpredictable sense of time, startling intervals and extreme juxtapositions of characters, from brash to ethereal. Similarly, his many works for the violin feature its traditional attributes while expanding its virtuosic and expressive potential with unusual chord configurations and wide-ranging intervals requiring large stretches and leaps.

“Four Etudes” was commissioned in 1982 by the American String Teachers Association. Like many composers, from Bach to Debussy to today, Shapey used the etude to explore not only technical challenges but also particular musical ideas. In the score he says: “The main thematic material is common to all four etudes. Each piece explores a specific technical problem while at the same time incorporates those from each other. I hope that the learning and performing of these, while giving precedent to technical problems, will at the same time give pleasure as a piece of music. At all times, Make Music!”

The brief first Etude is followed by “Quasi March”, which proceeds with brisker energy. The third Etude is a theme with three variations exploring off-kilter rhythms and delicate long lines. The final Brillante features elaborate arabesques that recall the Etudes by 19th-century violinist Henryk Wieniawski.

Ross Lee Finney (1906-1997) came from the generation of American composers that included Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson – artists who grappled in the 20th century with the various European and indigenous influences on American classical music. Finney, who was born in Minnesota and grew up in North Dakota, grew up singing and playing American folk songs, and he always retained a great love and affinity for the tunes of his country. After his studies with Nadia Boulanger and Alban Berg in Europe, Finney sought to combine serial composition with melodic/harmonic qualities of folksong, and the fluctuating balance and coexistence of these elements was central to his compositions throughout his life. Finney had some prominent premieres and was an important figure for his nurturing and support of classical music in the Midwest: he was a well-regarded teacher for many years at the University of Michigan, where his pupils included George Crumb and William Bolcom, and where he also he founded the school’s electronic music studio.

Fiddle-doodle-ad is Finney’s suite of violin/piano transcriptions of American folk tunes. Written in 1945 as World War II was reaching a close, it comes from a time when he was making especially direct use of folk material in his compositions.  The eight melodies are presented simply, with little embellishment or departure from their basic forms, and with subtly enriched harmonic support.  The suite is artfully organized in a satisfying sequence of moods, ranging from the rambunctiousness and whimsy of Rye Whiskey and Rippytoe Ray to the sorrowful Wayfaring Stranger, and from the pure simplicity of The Nightingale to the intriguing asymmetries of Cotton Eye Joe and Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death.

Czech composer Leo’s Janácek (1854-1928) developed a highly personalized manner of writing that incorporated piquant inflections and gestures from Moravian folksong, remarkably vivid atmospheres, and a beguiling mixture of fantastical and earthy qualities. Deeply involved in the collection and study of his country’s folk music, Janácek was a forerunner to the ethnomusicological work of Hungarians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and was contemporaneous with Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, whose music also displayed a deep, personal association with folksong. Janácek became known mainly for his vibrantly colorful and soulful operas – Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Case, House of the Dead– and he put much of his own effort into seeing those works produced in opera halls. However, his small but tremendously distinctive output of chamber works garnered great fondness and admiration in later years. These works often had an autobiographical bent – relating to his youth, falling in love, etc. They include some piano pieces (Into the Mists, the Sonata), two programmatic and fiercely Romantic string quartets, and the Sonata for Violin and Piano.

The Violin Sonata was written in 1914 amid the early rumbles of World War I. Janácek kept revising the piece until 1920, by which time he was at work on his opera Katya Kabanova. It is in four movements, with moods that shift suddenly from sweetly wistful and warmly relaxed to breathless and impassioned. Pizzicato gestures evoke sounds from nature, and melodies have a plainness and directness that contrasts with the flourishes that suddenly erupt throughout the piece.

Kaija Saariaho wrote her Nocturne for solo violin in 1994. She had just commenced work on a new violin concerto called Graal Théâtre, when the great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski died. In her sadness, she composed Nocturne, and it was performed in tribute to him in Helsinki. Returning then to work on her violin concerto, she decided to use the Nocturne as its opening music. Nocturne features languid sweeping gestures, the open strings of the violin, rustling harmonic trills, and crunchy bow-pressure sounds – a sound that she employs with an unusual delicacy.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the work of the Italian composer-philosopher Luigi Nono (1924-90) was his melding of music with words and political message. His early work was based on musical study of polyphony, the madrigal tradition and the Second Viennese School, and later on, serialism, which was explored at the Darmstadt courses. However, his interest in pointedly political, anti-fascist themes soon was shown Il canto sospeso, for solo singers, chorus and orchestra (1955). The piece incorporated text from letters by political prisoners during World War II. He thereafter wrote many large-scale pieces encompassing ideas drawn from philosophy, politics, history and religion. His work strove toward a new kind of music theater, involving text (often documentary material from recorded speeches and riots), spatialization, improvisation, electronics and amplification.

In 1979, Nono’s string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima marked a turning point in his work. At this time, he found a need to renew his approach and his interest turned more toward introversion and reflection, silence and listening, rather than outward statement and protest. As he said, “Listening is very difficult. Difficult to listen to others in the silence…When one comes to listen, one often tries to rediscover oneself in others. To rediscover one’s own mechanisms, system, rationalism in the others. Instead of hearing the silence, instead of hearing the others, one often hopes to hear oneself. That is an academic, conservative, and reactionary repetition…Perhaps one can change the rituals; perhaps it is possible to try to wake up the ear. To wake up the ear, the eyes, human thinking, intelligence, the most exposed inwardness.”

Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima consists of 52 musical sections linked to 53 fragments from Friedrich Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion and poems to Diotima. Diotima, a character in Hyperion, is surmised to represent a woman with whom Hölderlin was in love. (She also is a figure in Plato’s Symposium). In his quartet, Nono stipulates that the text not be read aloud or presented to the audience in any way, but that the fragments be thought silently, or “sung inwardly”, by the performers while they play the piece. Meanwhile, the music progresses haltingly with numerous fermatas, sometimes on held tones but often in silence and for long spans. Thus the fermatas allow time to think on and internalize the text and for listeners fully to experience the silence or stillness.

Helmut Lachenmann put it: “It is not just the composed score of the Diotima quartet which puts across this music’s message: it is the perception of its reflection in our inner selves, across the space of silence and also remembrance, reflection, self-discovery as opened up by the fermata.” Also: “the silence into which Nono’s late works lead us is a fortissimo of agitated perception.”

In the music, Nono sought to explore varied, nuanced sound qualities, inspired by Schoenberg’s idea of Klangfarben. The players are asked for different kinds of timbres and dynamics, often at quiet volume. Material occasionally returns in the piece, perhaps due to subtle links in the text. Nono developed some material from Giuseppe Verdi’s scala enigmata, a scale that Nono also employed in other works. Other references are Ockeghem’s “Maleur me bat” in the viola part at section 48 (perhaps an hommage to Nono’s teacher Bruno Maderna, who liked to use it as a harmonization exercise), and an expression marking from Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 132 – “mit innigster Empfindung” or “with innermost feeling” – at section 26, exactly halfway through the piece. That section is notable for its anomalous absence of fermatas. Nono’s quartet was commissioned by the City of Bonn to mark Beethoven’s 210th birthday, and was premiered by the LaSalle Quartet.

In Franco Donatoni’s Ciglio II for violin and flute (1993), the two instruments are combined in an intricately crafted, shifting texture. Sometimes the two parts are bound together in rhythmic unity, their spurts of activity punctuated by silences. Sometimes they pass fragments back and forth to create a sinuous stream of contiguous patterns. The piece is in several sections of different tempos, which segue suddenly but smoothly into each other. The music keeps metamorphosing through changes in the articulation (staccato or legato), the addition of delicate grace-notes or double-stops, tremolos and trills, and varied timbres.

Morton Feldman’s personal aesthetic involved simple held tones, a mostly quiet dynamic, spare textures, gentle timbres, a sensation of time often without discernible pulse or meter, a gradual sense of evolution, and a love for silence and for sound itself. A native and longtime resident of New York City, he studied with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe and was associated with New York composers including Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and John Cage. He and Cage met at a performance of Anton Webern’s Symphony, a piece that stunned them both. Their close friendship, along with painters including Pollock, Guston and Rothko, provided a stimulating milieu for experimentation.

Feldman made influential innovations in the areas of indeterminacy, notation, and temporal space. His early music used graphic, pictorial notation to convey open-ended instructions to performers. From the 1950s-70s, he tried ways of notating chance-based scores to give players choices regarding elements like pitch or rhythm. After returning to traditional notation in the 1970s, he explored extreme duration in his music, writing pieces that are several hours long.

Feldman’s piece Four Instruments, for piano, violin, viola and cello was written in 1975, after he had returned to conventional notation. This eight-minute work, marked “Extremely quiet”, is a compact example of Feldman’s style, with tones of irregular durations suspended in a transparent texture. Beginnning in rhythmic unison, the piece sometimes puts the instruments in dialogue but is mostly chorale-like, with the strings playing harmonies together.

Spring of Chosroes, for violin and piano, was written in 1978 and commissioned by the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress, which still owns his sketches for the piece. In the 1970s, Feldman developed an interest in Middle Eastern rug designs and he wrote several pieces inspired by them. Spring of Chosroes refers to a renowned carpet owned by King Chosroes of Persia in the 6th century AD. Woven with gold, silver, magnificent jewels and crystals, it depicted a beautiful garden. Feldman’s precisely crafted piece musically conveys the variously sized and exquisitely patterned sections of the rug, with each note radiating beauty like individual gemstones.

The title Anthèmes I refers to the ideas of “anthems” (hymns) and “themes” (or thematic development). Pierre Boulez took inspiration for this piece from his childhood experiences of Lent services, in which the Jeremiah Lamentations were read: the numbers of the verses were announced in Hebrew, then the verses read in Latin. Boulez took the form of this recitation, (though not the content) as something of a model for this piece, alternating brief passages of suspended harmonics and glissandos with longer, more lively sections. The piece is structured around the number 7: the work as a whole is in 7 sections, and its opening flourish – a 7-note motif derived from Boulez’ earlier work explosante-fixe – provides material for the rest of the piece. The piece is also held together by a recurring focus on specific notes, mainly the D at the opening and close of the piece. The trill on this D is itself a unifying idea throughout, lending the music an elegantly fluttering, sighing grace amid much angularity. The 7 verse sections progress from very brief to several minutes long at the last section, and each presents a contrasting character. Anthèmes I was commissioned for the 1991 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. Boulez later expanded Anthèmes I into Anthèmes II for violin and electronics.

One of the most revolutionary composers of the 20^th century, Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) was born near Naples and lived in Switzerland and Rome. After an early period in which he showed much mastery of counterpoint and form, he experienced a severe psychological breakdown. As he recovered, he spent many days playing single notes on the piano, concentrating on the variations and nuances of the sound. His music thus evolved into an exploration of the dynamism of sound itself.  Focused upon reiterations of pitches and on movement within a narrow range, his work treats notes not as single events, but as variable, eventful processes in themselves, affected by timbral changes, microtonal adjustments and layerings, and qualities of resonance and decay. The transfixing, trance-like quality of his music arises also from his immersion in yoga and forms of mysticism, after trips to India and Nepal.

Scelsi took inspiration for his titles from ancient languages, and meanings are often hard to identify. The title of his solo violin piece Xnoybis (1964) is of unknown origin. It means, according to one source, “the ability of energy to ascend to the spirit.”

Xnoybis draws the listener into the mesmerizing interior of sound, revealing astonishing timbres in the interaction of, and spaces between, tones. The piece is written scordatura – the strings are tuned to D#-B-G-F instead of E-A-D-G – notated with a separate staff for each string. Close microtones are layered, creating a pulsing “beating” of frequencies, sometimes augmented with a “wide vibrato, halfway between ordinary vibrato and trill.” Timbral variations also come from playing near the bridge or on the fingerboard, percussive left-hand plucking, and a large range of dynamics.

Though the three movements share a state of heightened concentration, they each explore a distinct idea. The first movement is mainly characterized by alternations of tone-colors and the sudden intrusion of pitches from different registers, upper or lower.

The second movement is based on unisons and oscillating figures. Strands of microtonal polyphony continually converge and pull apart. 

The third movement is an acutely intense study in sustained tension. Struggling upward from C three-quarters-sharp to F natural, the tones drag each other along, pushing up incrementally on each string.  At one point, the pitches fall in a precipitous descent, then climb back tenaciously, to reach the F at the end.

Salvatore Sciarrino is known for his exploration of new extended musical  techniques, his exquisite focus on the qualities of individual sounds, and his handling of silence and near-silence.

Sciarrino wrote Omaggio a Burri after the death of his friend, Italian painter Alberto Burri. Sciarrino and Burri shared a central belief that art must maintain its connection not only to metaphysical and spiritual meaning, but also to physical materiality. For Burri, this meant experimenting with unusual, often rough-textured matter, such as pumice, burlap, and charred wood, and creating paintings with three-dimensional protuberances. For Sciarrino, this has involved an exploration of any physical means of sound production, unlimited by traditional ways of playing or singing; a keen awareness of “natural” sound (breathing, percussive dropping or tapping); and a synesthetic approach to his art.

Omaggio a Burri begins with soft murmurs that develop into a clock-like marking of time (Sciarrino writes “Al tempo degli orologi, eighth-note=60”) played by the wind instruments.  After a while, this is supplanted by a stream of melismas that eventually devolve from tone into delicate noise, ending in mere key-clicks. The violin plays an atmospheric layer of sighs, breathy quasi-harmonics and high-pitched whispers.

English composer Brian Ferneyhough’s music is highly dense and complex, with flamboyant gestures skittering across large registral expanses and calling for vigorous physical choreography. His notation is very layered and detailed, with polyrhythms nestled within polyrhythms, microtonal pitches and frequent alternations between avant-garde instrumental techniques. While the surface activity of the music is often fast-moving, the pulse, as shown in the time signature and the metronome marking, is often very broad. Ferneyhough has described this as a “tension-field between tempo and meter”. In Intermedio alla ciaconna, a solo violin work dedicated to violinist Irvine Arditti, this tension is amplified by Ferneyhough’s use of the chaconne or passacaglia: a ground-bass line that underpins the music. The chaconne is presented at the outset of the piece as very loud, sustained double-stops outlining eight chords (a chord series upon which he based a group of compositions he called “Carceri d’invenzione”, after the prints by Piranesi). The violin sets forth playing mercurial, brilliant flourishes and irregular explosions. A relatively lyrical, calm interlude in the middle of the piece builds to some very high glissandos and a jagged climax, after which the chaconne intervals return as weighty, sliding tones. The music splinters into sparse utterances at the close.

Stefano Gervasoni works with subtle elements in order to intrigue the listener and draw them into the composition. He has said: “I like a kind of music that is not too obvious, that does not impose on us an aesthetic programme and does not exhibit its complexity, but that contains a high degree of ambiguity. The theatrical side to my music does not show openly but is rather revealed in intricate details.” In his Due Voci (Two Voices) for violin and flute, he combines the timbres of the instruments with great delicacy, specifying tone colors and dynamic shapes that  form composite effects. In the piece’s four movements, rhythms feel unstable but are actually carefully notated. The unison is explored as both a pitch and rhythmic element. At times, the instruments unite to create sounds on the same pitch; sometimes, as in the third movement, they are in rhythmic unison while kept slightly separated pitch-wise, a second apart.

Gervasoni wrote these thoughts on Due Voci:

When a voice speaks, there are at least two voices being heard. A voice is always accompanied by its counter-voice.
There can be one or more counter-voices of the intentions that have remained hidden, and work as a background to the manifest voice. At least another voice, moreover – that of the listener -, joins in with the speaking voice – even though this is alone and talking to itself. A voice talking is always meeting its hearing voice.
Every utterance, while it aims outward, also aims at flowing back to itself and at gathering its own hearing. Since no solo can be reduced to mere oneness, it is always at least a unison. No unison can be a perfect coincidence of two solos.

JS Bach composed his three Sonatas and three Partitas for solo violin between 1703 and 1720 in Weimar and Cöthen. They were published in 1802 by Nicolaus Simrock, and were not widely performed until Joseph Joachim brought them into his repertoire in the mid-late 1800’s. Bach’s pieces were very much part of an exploration of solo violin writing that had been burgeoning in Germany, among composers including Westhoff, Biber, Pisendel, Walther and Vismayr. 

The six Bach works are a timeless achievement in their use of the violin’s polyphonic potential (through chordal writing and implied harmonies in single-line passages), their expression of a huge gamut of emotions and characters, both exalted and earthy, and as a unified body of music linked by aspects of form and possible religious subtext. In these pieces, Bach demonstrated how to combine gravitas, liveliness, virtuosity and sheer compositional ingenuity in music for the solo violin, giving the instrument a comprehensive multi-dimensionality more associated with keyboard instruments. Whereas the Partitas present sequences of Baroque dance forms such as Sarabandes and Gigues, the Sonatas are in the four-movement, slow-fast slow-fast “sonata da chiesa” form, incorporating free-flowing preludes and brilliantly devised fugues.

The Partita No. 2 consists of four dance movements – Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue – followed by a monumental Chaconne. This D minor Partita was written following the sudden death and burial of Bach’s wife Maria Barbara while he was away traveling. Its opening movements, with its familiar dance forms, can be interpreted as looking back with mournful intensity at an energetic life. The Chaconne then lets forth an outcry of grief that builds and falls in gigantic waves. Its inexorable 3/4 rhythm and bass line seem to convey the onward flow of time. A chaconne is a slow dance in 3 that originated in Spain; as a musical form, it is a set of variations on a repeating ground bass. The Bach Chaconne is in three large sections, the middle one arriving as a transcendently beautiful epiphany, when the cresting waves of the D minor beginning section give way to a sublimely tender and peaceful D major.

Mario Davidovsky’s pioneering work in electronic music in the 1960s led him to explore detailed aspects of sound as a defining expressive element. The electronic medium was revolutionary in that it demonstrated new capabilities to control sound: precise attacks, from very hard to emerging out of silence; infinite potential for sustaining; decays ranging from the most gradual to sudden stops with no after-resonance; abrupt transitions between extreme dynamics or different timbres. In writing for electronics, Davidovsky used his ear, accustomed to the refinement of traditional instruments, to create highly specific and nuanced sounds and phrases. His concentration on such elements was reflected in his instrumental writing as well, leading to new technical challenges for performers and a new emphasis on articulation and Klangfarben as means of determining form and defining material.

Davidovsky is especially renowned for his Synchronisms for acoustic instruments with electronic tape, in which he achieved a remarkably organic combination of different mediums. His Quartetto involves a similar blending of disparate sound worlds. The three strings tend to work as a unit, with which the flute interacts with florid phrases or rapid jagged gestures. Other times, Davidovsky uses the pitch unison as a focal point, combining instruments in unison phrases. In quiet unison passages, the flute’s sound and the strings’ sul tasto  melt together to create a beautifully cushioned tone. At louder moments, the flute’s timbre stands out of the texture, as though approaching the same pitch from a different perspective.

Georg Friedrich Haas (born 1953) is widely recognized as one of Austria’s leading composers. Venturing beyond conventional equal temperament, he has probingly explored the sonic, harmonic, and expressive possibilities of microtonality. His work uses minute intervals like eighth-, sixth-, and quarter-tones, and pitch relationships drawn from the overtone series, causing intense beating of frequencies and “difference tones” that buzz along with the actual played pitches. In addition to generating a radical focus on sound itself, Haas’ insistence on microtonality has created new wells of expressive meaning in these sonic distances. His music finds nuances of despondency and malaise, but also surprising beauty and warmth, in the uncomfortable spaces between tones.

Reinhard Kager writes: “A touch of futility hangs over this music, quietly bemoaning the impossibility of ever achieving perfect harmony, let alone the harmonic co-existence of human beings.” Haas’ violin piece de terrae fine (2001) is a stark expression of this state of mind. Haas relates that, while composing this piece on a year’s sabbatical in Ireland, he was mired in a severe depression. The work’s title, meaning “about the end of the world”, evokes not just an apocalyptic vision but a devastating sense of isolation. The music’s line of winding microtonal motions seems to trace the twinges in a person’s lonely, anguished train of thought. Long tones swell in heaving sighs. At times, the overwhelming feeling of desperation suddenly gives way to a sickly nostalgia, with startlingly sweet double-stops and feather-light, sliding arpeggios. Around two-thirds through the piece, the mood turns to anger, as pounding, massive chords burst out. Moving upward in microtonal increments, the chords build in accelerating waves to a violent frenzy of raging despair – followed by a collapse into exhaustion, as a few tremulous, fragile utterances vanish into silence.

Anton Webern (1883-1945) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential and path-breaking composers. Born in Vienna, he studied cello and piano before taking up composition studies with Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg and his twelve-tone method of writing were decisive influences in shaping Webern’s own work, as was his close collegiality with fellow Schoenberg pupil Alban Berg. Though Webern worked for years as a conductor, he sought always to focus on composing. His relatively small oeuvre consists of astonishingly crafted works in which expression is distilled into its simplest essentials. Following his late-Romantic early works, his mature output combined a devotion to dodecaphonic technique with his interest in the clear contrapuntal textures of Renaissance music. Mostly very brief, his pieces feature a meticulous handling of twelve-tone organization, spare textures, wide-ranging intervals, and a detailed concentration on timbral quality, involving then-uncommon extended techniques and a passing around of lines quickly from one instrument to another (Klangfarbenmelodie). Though not very appreciated during his lifetime, Webern’s music later garnered huge interest from other composers, spawning a whole area of new music often referred to as “post-Webern”.

Webern first imagined his Op. 22 quartet in 1928 as a concerto for violin, clarinet, horn, piano and strings, “in the spirit of some of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos”. By end of 1930, it had changed into a two-movement quartet for saxophone, clarinet, violin and piano. Though it met hostile criticism from critics at its Vienna premiere, Berg declared it “a miracle. What amazes me above all is its originality.” Its first movement, Sehr mäsig, is in a modified sonata allegro form. The second movement, Sehr schwungvoll, is a flexible version of rondo form, with two themes, the second of which is canon-like. 

Hailed in recent decades as a pathbreaker especially in the areas of tempo relationships and texture, Elliott Carter was a late bloomer who found his distinctive style in 1951 with his daringly complex First String Quartet. In that work, he introduced the idea of metric modulation to create the sense of motion between different, independent layers of music. He soon followed this with his Second String Quartet, in which the four parts set up a paradigm of heterogeneous interaction, and many more works in which he further developed his revolutionary ideas of eliminating a uniform rhythmic framework. When composing his violin/piano Duo in 1973, he was evidently thinking about the beginnings of his pioneering discoveries over twenty years earlier, for he wrote about this piece:

 The general form is quite different from that of the music I wrote up to 1950. While this earlier music was based on themes and their development, here the musical ideas are not themes or melodies but rather groupings of sound materials out of which textures, linear patterns, and figurations are invented. Each type of music has its own identifying sound and expression, usually combining instrumental color with some “behavioral” pattern that relies on speed, rhythm, and musical intervals. There is no repetition, but a constant invention of new things – some closely related to each other, others remotely. There is a stratification of sound so that much of the time the listener can hear two different kinds of music, not always of equal prominence occurring simultaneously. This kind of form and texture could be said to reflect the experience we often have of seeing something in different frames of reference at the same time.

Carter’s Duo is a landmark work for the violin/piano combination. Carter positions the instruments in obvious opposition to each other, making this the premise of the composition. The violin engages mainly in legato passages, held tones and long lines, moving in irregular streams of rubato and transitioning with sometimes mercurial suddenness from one character to another. The piano part emphasizes the percussive nature of the instrument and often adheres to very steady pulses (at a variety of rates). It also exploits the possibilities of pedaling to blur and reveal specific sounds. The constantly evolving interaction of the players creates an unfolding drama of layered speeds and activity, beginning and ending in states of distinct separateness. As Carter wrote, ” the long opening section for the piano forms a quiet, almost icy background to the varied and dramatic violin, which seems to fight passionately against the piano… [Toward the end] as the piano reaches a point of extreme slowness, the violin is heard increasingly alone, isolating for a few measures at a time the various elements of its part, with the quiet and more lyrical aspects given more prominence than previously.” Carter dedicated the Duo to his wife of many years, Helen.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was among the avant-garde composers who thrillingly revolutionized post-World War II classical music. A Greek who became a French citizen, he was not only a musician, but an engineer, architect, mathematician and author of major theoretical works on music. In his compositions, he used ideas stemming from his interests, pioneering electronic and computer music, and applying stochastic and aleatoric processes, and set and game theory. While his works derive from intellectual concepts and treat sounds as objects put through experimental processes, the results are tremendously visceral and emotional. Tension and excitement build up as layers accumulate and clash, and the combination of control and disorder in the rhythm creates a wild sense of motion. Xenakis wrote “Mikka S” in 1976 following his first solo violin work, “Mikka”. Both pieces mainly explore the glissando, a sliding pitch effect. Whereas “Mikka” consists of a single line, “Mikka S” ups the ante with two contrapuntal lines that move independently. At some moments, the violinist’s fingers even have to converge and cross directions. The two lines are in almost constant motion and often create a buzzing microtonal friction. Toward the end of the piece, the continuous sliding gets shattered into jagged eruptions of bowed attacks.

Violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was one of the most celebrated performers of his time and a busy touring artist. Many of the great composers of his time, including Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Cesar Franck and Ernest Chausson, wrote works for him. He studied with Henri Vieuxtemps and Henryk Wieniawski, and in turn took up teaching at the Brussels Conservatoire, where he was a professor of violin for decades. Ysaÿe also turned to conducting and composing. Among his compositions are a Sonata for Two Violins, works for orchestra, two string trios and an opera. His Six Sonatas for Solo Violin Op. 27, from 1923, remain his most well-known oeuvre. In these pieces, he drew upon a wealth of experience and insight as a violinist, developing highly idiomatic passages and patterns that bring the violin’s coloristic and timbral potential to the fore.  The music of these sonatas is in a French Romantic-Impressionist vein, featuring rosy harmonies, whole-tone scales, languidly arching phrases, and brilliantly cascading passages.

The Six Sonatas are each dedicated to a well-known violinist of the time. The Sonata No. 5 is dedicated to Ysaÿe’s student Mathieu Crickboom. This Sonata is an embrace of renewal. The two movements – “L’Aurore” and “Danse Rustique” – portray the wondrous progression of dawn to day, beginning with the quiet mystery of sunrise and bursting into rambunctious physicality in the rustic dance. “L’Aurore” opens with gentle stirrings of nature against a glowing backdrop of harmonies, and gradually unfolds into rising waves of arpeggios. “Danse Rustique” then erupts into a vivacious celebration of the day, with romping dance sections framing a middle section that is rhapsodic and sighingly romantic.