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NEVA PILGRIM graduated
magna cum laude from Hamline University, received a
Master of Music from Yale University, and studied at
Vienna Academy of Music on a Ditson Fellowship. But what
is probably of more interest, and perhaps of more
importance, is the fact that she grew up in a large
family on a farm in Minnesota, and learned from early on
what hard work meant. In addition to her wonderful
musicianship and dedication to music, she has always had
the energy and the imagination to make dreams come
true—not only her own dreams, but the dreams of the
vast multitude of composers whose music she has sung and
promoted. A quick count of her repertoire reveals that
she has sung the music of well over one hundred 20th
century composers, and since many of these composers are
represented by two or more works, the degree of her
contribution to the music of our time is incalculable.
I first met Neva at the University
of Chicago in 1965. I was a fledlging assistant professor
in the Music Department; Neva's husband, Richard, was a
doctoral candidate in the History of Religions
Department. During the first semester I heard Neva sing
with the Contemporary Chamber Players. While I don't
remember what she sang, I recall the strong impression
she made on me, and my instantaneous decision to write
something for her. (The result of that was Haiku of
Basho.) Neva became the workhorse of that group, and sang
piece after piece on that stage in Mandel Hall. Since
1968 we have lived in separate cities, but fortunately we
live in an age when geography has become more of a
nuisance than a barrier. Neva and I have done many things
together, and shared many wonderful musical moments. She
went on to help found the Syracuse Society for New Music,
without question one of the most active contemporary
music scenes in this country. The Society is now more
than a quarter of a century old, and Neva has been the
driving force of that organization for most of that time.
Its newsletter alone is a gold mine of information about
the national contemporary music scene, and the amount of
new music and recording that gets done in Syracuse is
quite overwhelming.
Neva has performed with dozens of
groups and dozens of conductors at a huge number of
venues and recorded for a large array of record labels.
She has commissioned a remarkable amount of music of
every possible stylistic persuasion, and has been a
staunch supporter of young and unknown composers. She has
given generously of her time to organizations like The
National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State
Council on the Arts, The Copland Fund, and is currently
President of the New York State Music Teachers
Association. The Minnesota farm work ethic has never
abandoned her; she always has yet another cause to fight
for, and more new (and old) music to sing. Bravissima,
Neva!
—Richard Wernick
Ernst Krenek's works exceed 220 in
number, and most major trends and styles of this century
are represented among them, from atonality through
dodecaphony and serialism to aleatoric and electronic
music. His compositions include over 20 operas, ballets,
symphonies, chamber works, choral music, lieder, and solo
works for a variety of instruments. Born in Vienna in
1900, Krenek achieved international fame with his opera,
Jonny spielt auf in 1927. When he emigrated to America in
1938, he began a new career as an educator, starting with
an appointment to the faculty of Vassar College. In 1942
he became head of the Music Department at Hamline
University and soon afterward dean of its school of fine
arts.
Krenek became an American citizen
in 1945 and in 1947 moved to Southern California, where
he lived until his death in 1991. Despite his teaching
schedule, Krenek maintained an extraordinary creative
drive and from 1950 on, he devoted himself mainly to
composing despite many invitations to serve as a lecturer
or visiting professor. He returned annually to Europe to
conduct his operas and orchestral works and supervise
production of his television operas. His opera Pallas
Athene weint was commissioned for the opening of the new
opera house in Hamburg in 1955, and was followed by two
other operas for this institution: The Gold Ram (1964)
and Sardakai (1970). In 1960 the Republic of Austria and
the City of Vienna honored him with their Great Silver
Cross and Gold Medal. Dr. Krenek was appointed a Regents
Lecturer at UCSD in 1970, and his talks were published by
the University of California Press under the title
Horizons Circled.
The Verhaeren Songs were written in
1924 when Krenek lived in Switzerland and where he first
encountered the incipient neo-classicism of Stravinsky
and Les Six. The results of that infatuation with French
music, literature and anything else, are unmistakable,
sounding more French to the composer himself than any
other music he had ever written. Krenek recalled that the
Verhaeren Songs were performed at a Hauskonzert, but then
he lost track of them. In 1975, when several
organizations and universities in Minneapolis and St.
Paul hosted a festival honoring Krenek on his 75th
birthday, Neva Pilgrim gave the modern and American
premiere of these songs with members of the Minnesota
Orchestra. She performed them several times in Central
New York subsequently.
Renata Pandula, a Czechoslovakian
poet who moved to West Germany in 1968, had written a
cycle of 30 poems entitled Zeit (Time), lyrical and
philosophical reflections on the experience of time.
Krenek set two of the poems for soprano and string
quartet so that Dusan Pandula, the poet's husband and
head of a renowned string quartet, could perform them for
his wife's pleasure. The musical diction is free and
flexible, according to the character of the poems. Mr.
Krenek gave these songs to Neva Pilgrim following her
performance of the Verhaeren Songs in St. Paul,
Minnesota. She sang the Los Angeles premiere in January
of 1978 on the Monday Evening Concerts, having been
coached in them previously with the composer. During the
Fall of 1978, Ms. Pilgrim and the Madison Quartet
performed them at Colgate, Cornell and Syracuse
Universities prior to recording them.
Richard Wernick was born in Boston,
Massachusetts in 1934, and earned his BA from Brandeis
and his MA from Mills College, studying under such
distinguished composer/teachers as Irving Fine, Harold
Shapero, Arthur Berger, Ernst Toch, Leon Kirchner, Boris
Blacher and Aaron Copland. He has taught at SUNY-Buffalo,
the University of Chicago and at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he was the Magnin Professor of
Humanities.
Wernick won the Pulitzer Prize for
music in 1977, and is the only two-time first prize
Friedheim Award recipient. In addition he has been
honored by awards from the Ford and Guggenheim
Foundations, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and
the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1983-1989 he
served as the Philadelphia Orchestra's Consultant for
Contemporary Music and from 1989-1993 as Special
Consultant to the Music Director.
Mr. Wernick has composed numerous
solo, chamber, and orchestral works, vocal, choral and
band compositions, as well as a large body of music for
theater, films, ballet and television. He has been
commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Ravenna
Festival of Italy, the Juilliard Quartet, National
Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Emerson Quartet,
Syracuse Society for New Music (A Poison Tree, recorded
on Spectrum), to name but a few, and has written solo
works for violist Walter Trampler, mezzo-soprano Jan
DeGaetani, and pianist Lambert Orkis, among others.
Haiku of Basho is a setting of five
haiku by and (in one instance) about Matsuo Basho
(1643-94), generally acknowledged to be the foremost
writer of this form of Japanese verse. The first four
poems of the cycle are fine examples of how Basho was
able to capture the essence of seemingly inconsequential
moments or vignettes and, using the most frugal means of
literary expression, communicate to the reader a sense of
the timeless and eternal. The fifth poem, written a
century later by Sengai, is more in the nature of a
17-syllable one-line joke, a play on the word `basho'
which means `banana leaf.'
Wernick writes that there are no
programmatic connections between the haiku and the music,
nor any word painting. The relationship of the music to
the words is rather one of attitude — attempting,
through an economical and tightly woven means of abstract
musical expression, — to create sound images similar
to (or analogous to) the poetic images evoked by the
haiku. The attitude is perhaps best summed up by Basho's
own admonition to his pupils: `Do not seek to follow in
the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.'
The melodic and harmonic aspects of
the score are derived from one tone row that appears
throughout the piece in several forms. There is a
departure from conventional 12-tone technique in that the
rows are used only as the basis for harmonic and melodic
materials that are then subjected to more or less
standard procedures of development and variation. The
improvisational qualities of the Haiku are partially
achieved by the use of metrical modulation in which the
conjunction and the superimposition of even and uneven
metrical units generate continuous changes in the speed
of the music. Apart from a few places where the speed may
vary at the discretion of the conductor or one of the
instrumentalists, the relationship of rhythm to speed is
directed by the composer's notation, and is intended to
provide a feeling of freedom without the composer
abdicating control of the music.
George Rochberg, born July 5, 1918
in Paterson, New Jersey, studied at the Mannes School of
Music with Hans Weisse and George Szell and then with
Menotti at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.
Following his studies at Curtis, Rochberg taught there
for six years. He also served as Editor and Director of
Publications at Theodore Presser for 9 years, and as
chairman of the Music Department of the University of
Pennsylvania and later as its Composer-in-Residence.
Rochberg met Dallapiccola in Italy in 1950, and became
impressed by the expressive power of serialism, writing
some elegant works in that style. However, after the
death of his son, Paul, the composer reembraced tonality
and argued articulately against the serialist orthodoxy.
His subsequent new works at first referred to other works
or styles, in the manner of `collage'. But he also
explored the pop music of his youth, especially in Eleven
Songs (1970), which were premiered by Neva Pilgrim with
the composer at the piano.
As a result of that collaboration,
Rochberg wrote Songs in Praise of Krishna for Ms. Pilgrim
during the summer of 1970. The cycle was premiered by Ms.
Pilgrim and the composer at the University of Illinois on
March 16, 1971. The texts for this cycle of 14 songs are
drawn from a small volume titled In Praise of Krishna,
beautifully translated from the Bengali by Denise
Levertov and Edward C. Dimock, Jr. The lyrics celebrate
the classical Indian legend of Radha, a beautiful girl,
and Krishna, the god, or more symbolically, the longing
of flesh for spirit and spirit for flesh. Rochberg set
the poems as though they were a libretto for an opera
— which, in a very real sense, they are since they
center on the passions of human and divine love.
Three characters speak: Radha,
Krishna, and an old woman (Krishna's messenger to Radha).
Each character has his or her own music. Since Radha is
at the center of the poems, she sings ten of the fourteen
songs. The work is highly chromatic, but with tonal
centers. In order to bring out the psychology of what
might be called `internal opera', Rochberg used
considerable variety. Numbers 2, 4, 9, 10, 13 are true
songs in the lieder tradition. But many of the sections,
e.g. numbers 1, 5, 8, combine elements of arioso and
recitative. All three — song, arioso, recitative
— are called for in numbers 6, 7, 12, 13. The role
of the piano is to accompany, set off, punctuate,
establish atmosphere and connect and extend the lines of
the singer.
When the cycle begins, we are
literally at the end of the story: Hymn I “It was in
bitter maytime” Radha is describing how Krishna has
left her. She is full of the pain of loss. The events of
Hymn II, “After long sorrow” though appearing
as the second song of the cycle, occur somewhere halfway
through the story; Krishna has returned and Radha
alternates between the pain of remembering his absence
and the joy of having him back. From numbers 3 to 14, the
final song of farewell, each song encapsulates a
different shade of the progression of Radha's passion.
Krishna's songs, numbers 3 and 11, are interpolations of
a kind to show the character of Krishna whose love for
Radha is curiously remote, yet full of sweetness and
desire. In her two songs, numbers 9 and 10, the old woman
messenger pleads with Radha and flatters her, all with
the intention of softening her anger against the newly
returned Krishna.
Radha expresses her first awareness
of love in number 4; the terrors and fears accompanying
the knowledge that she will give herself to Krishna in
number 5; her sense of deep fulfillment after being with
Krishna in number 6; the bitterness and jealousy over his
faithlessness in number 7; her distractedness and painful
uncertainty in number 8; her absolute ecstasy and
complete submission to love in number 12. In the last
song, the transcendent, shining Radha of number 13 is
transformed into the suffering woman who must learn to
live with the loss of her lover and dearest friend.
Songs in Praise of Krishna was
recorded at the RCA studios in New York City (with Gene
Rochberg, the composer's wife, serving as page turner).
George Rochberg went on to write another major work for
Neva Pilgrim also in the 1970s. His Phaedra for orchestra
and soprano was commissioned by the Syracuse Society for
New Music and the Syracuse Symphony for the Bicentennial
on a grant from the New York State Arts Council. Neva
Pilgrim premiered the work with the Syracuse Symphony
under conductor David Loebel. Not only were Rochberg and
Pilgrim musical collaborators for many years, but the
Rochbergs' are godparents of the Pilgrims' second son,
Jason.
R. Murray Schafer was born in
Canada in 1933 and studied composition at the Royal
Conservatory of Music in Toronto and with Weinzweig at
Toronto University. After being expelled from the latter
for insubordination, he went to Europe to study and
travel from 1956-61. During that time he met Ezra Pound
and edited his writings on music in Ezra Pound and Music.
He moved back to Toronto in 1961, and then taught at
Memorial University, Newfoundland from 1963-65. In 1965
he joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver. In 1970 he founded the world Soundscape
Project, which he directed until 1975, and which led to
his revolutionary 1977 book, The Tuning of the World.
Schafer then decided to live on farms in rural Ontario in
order to have more time to compose. Most of his time and
energy during the past two decades have gone into
creating music theater works and five string quartets. He
continued to devote time expanding the his Patria cycle,
and became increasingly interested in performance
situations in which the environment played an integral
role in the work. In 1979 he wrote Beauty and Beast, an
opera for solo voice, masks and string quartet that is
one of the many musical components of Patria III: The
Greatest Show. Neva Pilgrim has performed that work many
times with several different quartets. Schafer's music
makes use of various reference points and a wide variety
of techniques from aleatoric to electronic. He is
considered to be Canada's most illustrious living
composer.
Requiems for the Party-Girl was
awarded the Fromm Foundation Prize in 1968. The work was
composed in 1966 on commission from the CBC. It was
intended to be part of Schafer's opera-in-progress,
Patria, and is a cycle of connected arias documenting the
mental collapse and suicide of a young woman. The text is
by the composer, though he was influenced from the
thoughts of Kafka and Camus. Schafer writes that he
called the young woman simply `The Party-Girl,' “and
as such she is the prototype of those strange
harlequinesque creatures one meets occasionally at
parties, beneath whose furious demonstrations of
gregariousness and joie de vivre one detects obscure
signs of terror and alienation. As the gossiping voices
around her whisper their absurd propositions in her ear,
there is laughter in her eyes to disguise the anguish in
her heart. She is resolved to suicide from the beginning
and she knows that no one will prevent her. `Outstretched
hands are rare,' she says.
“If only she could discover a
friend. But her methods are bizarre. She says, `Whenever
I go out I leave a paper on my desk for visitors to sign
... No one signs. Though people are coming and going and
seldom silently.' But as the cycle progresses the voices
of the world become fainter and few, for the Party-Girl's
resolution obliterates this whole confused and whirling
picture around her to fix itself now on the only absolute
future she can comprehend. “The music is calm,
detached. Then suddenly, she kills herself. At the moment
she dies the strings begin a long sustained chord very
softly, like an organ tone over which the dead spirit of
the girl looks back reflecting on what has just happened.
`On my door I had written, “Come in, I have killed
myself.” I had written “I” but there is no
longer any “I”.' The work ends with furious and
spasmodic repetitions of the `Requiem' by the singer,
accompanied by throngs of bells.” The music is
partly improvised, and is performed without conductor.
The Madison Quartet performed
throughout the U.S. and made major appearances in New
York, Boston and Washington, D.C. They served as
artists-in-residence at L'Ecole Hindemith in Vevey,
Switzerland and were in residence at Colgate University,
having performed more than 75 concerts in New York State
before disbanding.
William Nichols, clarinet, a native
of Little Rock, Arkansas, holds a DMA from the University
of Iowa. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship
at the Vienna Academy of Music as well as an NDEA
Fellowship. Dr. Nichols taught at Syracuse University and
performed regularly with the Society for New Music, prior
to joining the faculty at the University of Northern
Louisiana.
The Contemporary Chamber Players of
the University of Chicago was under the direction of
composer/ conductor Ralph Shapey from its inception until
recently. Comprised of up to two dozen musicians of
extraordinary capabilities, the players not only met
exacting technical standards, but had the facility for
contemporary music. Paul Fromm, patron of the arts par
excellence, lived in Hyde Park where the University of
Chicago is located. He was a regular attendee and
financial supporter of these concerts as well as for
hundreds of composers nationally through the Fromm
Foundation commissions and awards.
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