What’s a style study?

In the Philharmonic Fridays concert on February 16, 2018 four style studies (or: style compositions) will be performed. A style study is a composition based on imitation or adaptation of preceding pieces, or more in general: It is a composition purposely using a specific style as a framework, inspiration, or point of departure. To a certain extent this is nothing new: to imitate, adapt and change the style of immediate predecessors has been common practice for centuries, and we can find many works in which composers take works by others as a point of departure.

The most important difference between such past practices and the works to be presented in the concert as style studies is that these pieces are not based on music of today, last year or even of the 20th century, but on music written in a more distant past. In this way we hope to contribute to a recovery of past, and largely lost composition traditions, practices, techniques and attitudes - the past being: The time before ca. 1930.

Since some years the Music Theory major department is encouraging students to produce style compositions  - as a continuation of writing courses like harmony and counterpoint. In the past the resulting pieces were only performed during final exams, but since 2015 public concerts in the Conservatory are organized, in which chamber music or symphonic compositions are performed. The Philharmonic Fridays concert of February 16, 2018 is the second time that works for symphony orchestra are performed. The stylistic focus of the works in this concert is about the second half of the 19th century.

For further information (for instance an introductory video), and video recordings of previous concerts, you can have a look at our youtube channel Style Composition and our facebook page.

Launcelot: Overture and Duet between Morgan and Mordred (first act)

Music by Isaac Albéniz

Words by Francis Money Coutts

Orchestration and Arrangement by Alberto Martín Entrialgo

Historical context

Around 1893 Francis Money-Coutts, a wealthy English banker who was also a poet and writer educated at Cambridge, proposed to Isaac Albéniz a collaboration through which the Spanish composer would set Coutts’s poetry to music. The products of this fruitful association were numerous songs and stage works, including the King Arthur trilogy, which consisted of the operas Merlin, Launcelot, and Guenevere. Coutts based his libretto on the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance entitled (using French) Le Morte d’Arthur by the English author Sir Thomas Malory. The three libretti were published in 1897, but Albéniz only completed and published Merlin; he also started (and perhaps even finished) Launcelot, but Guenevere never became more than a project.

Various manuscripts of the second act of Launcelot are preserved, as well as the proofs of the first act of the vocal score (by Mutuelle). The score was never published, and the orchestration of the first act is missing. The existence of proofs of the first act could indicate that Albéniz completed the opera, although no evidence supports this claim. Given that neither the overture nor the duet has formal closure, I composed an ending for the occasion.

Background of the  Arthurian legend as conceived by Malory and Coutts

King Uther is in love with Gorlois’s wife, Igraine. Merlin casts a spell on Igraine so that Uther can spend at least one passionate night with her. When Gorlois finds out, he confronts Uther, and the duel results in Gorlois´s death. The fruit of Uther’s and Igraine’s love affair is Arthur, on whom Morgan, the legitimate daughter of Igraine and Gorlois, swears revenge.

In Merlin, king Uther dies without a legitimate heir. Morgan claims the throne for her son Mordred; simultaneously, the archbishop of Canterbury reveals that he has received a divine message: the knight who takes the sword (Excalibur) out of the stone will be crowned king of England. Arthur, to the astonishment of the crowd, is the only one who accomplishes this task, and is thereby proclaimed King of England. The opera’s dramatic action mainly relies on Morgan’s attempts to overthrow Arthur and replace him with Mordred, an end for which she will deploy all means at her disposal: by conspiring and colluding with anyone she sees fit.

Morgan’s desire to destroy Arthur continues in Launcelot. In the duet performed today, Morgan and Mordred express their discomfort with the king and announce their plans to overthrow him. Arthur has married Guenevere, but Morgan discovers that the Queen is in love with the knight Launcelot, and that her love is reciprocated. Morgan pretends to use their mutual love to destroy the king, so that her son, Mordred, could finally seize power:

Lo! When the kingdom is riven. Cleft by a false women’s shame, then to my son shall be given England, her freedom and fame!

 

But Launcelot is a knight in His Majesty’s service, and the King orders him to seek the Holy Grail. But Guenevere tries to convince Launcelot to stay with her. He is thus trapped between his duty as a knight and his love for Guenevere. 

Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828 - 1882): Sir Launcelot in the Queen's Chamber

Aljoscha Ristow

Overture: Ariadne and Theseus

Ariadne and Theseus is a concert overture in Romantic style, and programmatically related to the Greek myth of the same name. The work is mainly influenced by the composers Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Hector Berlioz, who may be regarded as a countercurrent to the so-called New German School of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Regarding the style, this overture could be dated back to the 1880s. That would also go along with the contained melodic references to the Song of Seikilos, one of the oldest surviving compositions from ancient Greece, which was discovered in 1883 on a historic tombstone. The conflict between the ancient modality of the song and Romantic tonality is intended to express a gleam of hope within the otherwise very tragic narrative of the myth.

As long as you live, shine Grieve you not at all Life is of brief duration Time demands its end. Seikilos [of] Euterpe, 200 BCE – 100 CE

The song appears for the first time in the slow introduction of the overture, which refers to a very sorrowful situation for the citizens of Athens: According to the myth, King Aegeus of Athens had to send seven young men and seven young women every nine years as a sacrifice to the Minotaur, a half-animal creature living in the complex labyrinth under King Minos’s royal palace in Crete. Not before the tribute was due for the third time King Aegeus’s son Theseus volunteered to be one of the sacrifices, and planned to relieve Athens of this burden by killing the Minotaur.

When Theseus arrived in Crete, he met Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, and they fell in love. She was the one who gave Theseus the well-known Ariadne’s thread that helped him find his way out of the labyrinth after successfully killing the Minotaur. The unrolling of the thread, as well as the complexity of the labyrinth, are musically realised in the two themes of the overture, as they constantly lead away from the tonal center - thereby delaying the finding of an end. In the overture the heroic spirit of Theseus’s victory against the Minotaur is finally represented by the glorious reappearance of the Song of Seikilos halfway the recapitulation.

However, in the myth the joyfulness did not last very long. On the way back to Athens, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island Naxos. The reasons for this infamous act are not entirely clear, since different versions of the story exist. To make things worse, Theseus forgot to hoist white sails as a sign of victory when approaching Athens, as agreed before. Hence, when King Aegeus saw his son’s ship arriving in Athens with black sails, he believed that Theseus had died when fighting the Minotaur. As a consequence, he threw himself down from a rock and deceased in the sea, which is therefore still known as the Aegaean Sea.

Niccolo Bambini (1651–1736): Arianna e Teseo

Nuit d´eté

Text by Paul Bourget; music by Inés Costales

De rêve...

Music and text by Claude Debussy; orchestration by Inés Costales

De Rêve is part of Debussy's song-cycle Proses Lyriques. The cycle contains four songs, and was composed in 1892-1893. Only for these four songs Debussy wrote the texts himself. His decision to use own poetry for a complete vocal work probably stems on the one hand from his admiration of Richard Wagner (even though this admiration was paradoxical), and on the other hand from his idea that he was a writer - an idea he has kept throughout the 1890s.

Debussy's texts adhere closely to the Symbolist poems of Bourget, Baudelaire and Verlaine; Debussy used poems of these symbolists in earlier works already. In Proses Lyriques Debussy deliberately chose to write in free verse, thus avoiding any metric constraint. As Debussy claims that rhythmic prose is superior to classical poetry, he indeed underlines that he is faithful to symbolist aesthetics.

Nuit d´eté could have been composed around the same time. I took Proses Lyriques as a point of departure, though I also used earlier and later Debussy songs as references and sources of inspiration. I chose to set Paul Bourget's poem Nuit d´eté to music, a poem from Les Aveux, a collections published in 1882.

As the cycle Proses Lyriques was composed in the same period as Debussy was completing both his String Quartet and the Prélude à l´après-midi d´un faune, I took the instrumentation of the Prélude for the orchestration of both De rêve and my own song, Nuit d´eté. Even though no orchestral score by Debussy of De rêve is existent, many annotations in the voice-and-piano manuscript may reveil that Debussy had an orchestrated version of De rêve in mind from the beginning.

Paul Bourget in 1899	Debussy, painting by Marcel Baschet, 1884. Versailles Museum

Davide Catina

Overture: Gaston de Foix

16^th Century Italy was a theatre of constant wars between national and continental forces, all concerned with the political balances within the strategically vital Peninsula.

A central episode of these so-called Italian wars was the War of the League of Cambrai (1508-1516), which saw as its main operating powers the Republic of Venice, the Papal States and France; other states and kingdoms such as England, Spain, the Duchy of Milan, and the Holy Roman Empire took part in the conflict, supporting or fighting against the three main powers.

Death of Gaston de Foix at the Great Battle of Ravenna (1512)

Gaston de Foix Nemours, nephew of king Louis XII of France (and brother of Germaine de Foix, second wife of Ferdinand II of Aragon), went down in history as one of the main figures of the conflict. In 1511, at the age of 21, he was appointed head of the French army by king Louis XII. His courage and charismatic power have been reported by a great number of historians of the time, as well as writers, poets and philosophers.

After having sacked the Lombardic city of Brescia on the 19^th of February 1512, where he defeated the Venetian army, Gaston de Foix moved forward to the city of Ravenna. On Easter Sunday (11^th of April) he fought the Spanish-Papal coalition in one of the most ferocious battles of the time.

The battle was won by the French, but Gaston was fatally killed during one of the last cavalry charges; his death was a terrible loss to his army and, according to reports, determined the future political balances of Italy and continental Europe.

This display of events, culminating with the Battle of Ravenna, could very well fulfill the dramatic needs of a 19^th century opera composer. The political element, and the Renaissance-based plot, were common stylistic features within Italian operatic aesthetics of the 19^th century. This Concert Overture, with its half-programmatic content, focuses on the figure of Gaston de Foix and is inspired by the composers of the 19^th century operatic tradition, starting from Verdi and Tchaikovsky, and more on the background Wagner and Weber.

Agostino Busti (1483-1548): Detail of Monumento Funebre di Gaston de Foix Museo d'Arte Antica del Castello Sforzesco, Milano.

Upcoming Philharmonic Friday 2017-2018:

Friday, March 16, 12.30   Bernhard Haitinkzaal

Paul Hindemith, Der Schwanendreher

Concerto after old Folk Songs for Viola and small Orchestra

Orchestra conducted by Ed Spanjaard; soloist: Take Konoé