American Portraits

Samuel Barber: String Quartet, Op. 11

Notes by J. Peter Berkholder

Samuel Barber (1910–1981) composed his String Quartet in 1936 in an Austrian mountain town while in Europe as a fellow of the AmericanAcademy in Rome, where the Pro Arte Quartet premiered the work that December. It reflected the influence of Beethoven’s late quartets, with an impassioned first movement in sonata form, an ethereal slow movement, and a bright, rollicking finale. Despite several successful performances, Barber grew dissatisfied with the piece. He revised the first movement and replaced the finale with an abbreviated and varied reprise of material from the first movement. The result, premiered and published in 1943, departs from tradition with a circular form that traces an intense emotional journey.

The opening movement’s active first theme is suffused with an accented neighbor figure, featured in a rising unison line and then varied in myriad ways amid changing textures. The tranquil second theme, stated in chordal fashion like a hymn, is followed by a quick closing theme that recalls the neighbor figure and changing textures of the first theme. A soft, arching melody over pulsing accompaniment leads to development of the neighbor figure and a series of new episodes. The neighbor figure returns, leading to a varied recapitulation of all three themes.

The second movement is in another world. As the lower instruments sustain slowly changing chords, a melody in the first violin circles around a note, then gradually rises, like a distant cousin of the neighbor figure from the first movement but in an entirely different mood. It moves mostly in notes of the same duration, like a plainchant, with no perceptible meter or accent, rising and falling with little sense of phrase or climax. The viola emerges from the texture to take over the melody, then the cello. The intensity gradually increases as all four instruments take turns on the melody, each slowly moving to the top of its range until they peak in a transcendent climax. After a pause, soft, low chords lead to a recollection of the beginning, returning to the circling figure that started it all. Throughout, there is a sense of suspended time, of a profound emotion that can be expressed in no other way. (The day Barber finished this movement, he wrote to a friend that “it isa knockout!”) In 1937, Barber arranged it for string orchestra as the Adagio forStrings, which became his most popular and frequently performed work (including on a nationwide broadcast following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination).

Suddenly, the finale bursts in. The first movement’s initial theme, varied and shortened, leads directly to the soft, arching melody that launched that movement’s development. Almost imperceptibly, this blends into an episode from late in the development. A soft undulation becomes a trill that swells and grows to loud waves of sound, before variants of the accented neighbor figure bring the quartet to a swift and dramatic close.

The Edge of Everything: Elegy for Rachel Louise Carson

Notes by Gabriela Lena Frank

Before she became the woman who changed how the world understood its own fragility, Rachel Louise Carson was a writer. Not a scientist who happened to write well, but a writer whose instrument was language, whose ear for cadence and image drew readers into the breaching, teeming, imperiled world she loved. Her sea trilogy-Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea — won a National Book Award and made her the foremost science writer in America, lauded not merely for her rigor, but also for her lyrical and poetic voice. She understood what too many still resist: that precision and beauty are not enemies, that the most faithful rendering of the natural world demands both the microscope and the poem.

She was also a woman who had to fight to be heard. Early in her career, she signed her articles “R. L. Carson,” obscuring her gender so that readers would take her science seriously. When she finally claimed her full name — Rachel Louise Carson — it was an act of defiance as much as identity. J. Drew Lanham captures this moment in his text with the incantatory insistence of her name, spoken aloud like a spell against erasure: “Rachel Louise Carson. Rachel. Louise. Carson.”

And then there is the bitter irony of her death. Carson’s Silent Spring warned the world that the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides was poisoning the earth and everything that lives on it, including us. She linked these poisons to cancer, to cellular damage, to the slow unraveling of bodies exposed to what industry called progress. She was right, and she was also dying. Breast cancer had metastasized even as she wrote, and she hid her illness so that chemical companies could not weaponize it against her credibility. She wore a wig before Congress, argued armed with a typewriter and the truth, and died in 1964 at the age of 56 — taken by the very blight she had spent her final years trying to name.

I wanted the text for this elegy to come from someone for whom Carson’s work was not simply admirable but personally urgent — someone who lives at the intersection of science and poetry, of witness and advocacy. J. Drew Lanham is a MacArthur Fellow, an ornithologist, and the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. He is a Black man in America who has written unforgettably about what it means to love the natural world from a body that the natural world’s gatekeepers have not always welcomed. His voice carries the authority of a working scientist and the music of a poet laureate, and when he channels Rachel Carson’s first person in this text — her wonder at tide pools, her fury at poisoned fields, her quiet insistence on kinship with every living thing — you hear not ventriloquism but recognition. One witness calling across the decades to another.

In setting Drew’s text, I worked as dramaturg alongside my role as composer, shaping the words so that the narrator has genuine dramatic scope — room to inhabit Carson as a character, to build from quiet wonder through defiance into the devastating momentum of the central climax, where Carson’s tireless labor and the cancer consuming her converge: “I warned of this. And . . . it found me first.” The narrator is not someone to be merely accompanied. She is a full member of the ensemble, a fifth voice whose silences are as composed as the quartet’s, whose breath and timing shape the music.

The quartet, in turn, is no backdrop but carries the elegy’s emotional undertow — the tidal pull that runs beneath Carson’s words. In passages where the narrator speaks freely, the quartet answers, comments, breathes with her, sometimes falling silent at precisely the moments where the weight of a word needs space to land. In the work’s most intense pages, the instruments surge forward on their own, carrying what language alone cannot hold. This is ensemble music: five voices sharing the labor of mourning and insisting that attention itself is an act of love.

I write this from the hills of rural northern California, where I live with my husband on land we tend with great care and not a little anxiety. We are in fire country. We have watched neighbors lose homes, watched smoke turn our sky the color of rust, stored thousand gallons of water against catastrophe. We tend our forest, grow food on terraces, keep chickens, forage and process acorns in the indigenous way, and try to live in some version of the reciprocal relationship with the earth that Carson spent her life articulating and defending. Her warnings are not historical to me. They are the view from my kitchen window — the drying forests, the unpredictable seasons, the insurance companies fleeing because they have done the math on what unchecked human appetite will cost.

Carson wrote, near the end of her life, that “it is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.” She did not write from despair. She wrote from love-fierce, precise, unsentimental love for a world she knew was worth saving, even as she knew she would not live to see whether we would listen. This elegy carries both her urgency and her hope. The final words — “Same air, same water, same soil, same earth, same faith” — are not a requiem’s closing darkness but an invocation, a reminder that we share one world and one fate with every creature that breathes, swims, creeps, or flies.

We are, all of us, saltwater kin.

George Walker: Lyric for Strings

Notes by Dominick-René de Lerma

George Walker (1922–2018) wrote Lyric for Strings in 1941 as a memorial to his grandmother. He later incorporated it as the second movement of his First String Quartet (1946). Lyric opens with the instruments entering one at a time, establishing the dark warmth of its F-sharp major key. An eloquent melody weaves its way through the different string groups. After a brief interlude of cadential figures, the melody returns and builds to an intense climax. A varied restatement of the theme is again followed by cadential figures that draw this work of remarkable expressiveness and simplicity to a quiet close.

Lyric for Strings exhibits the intense romantic spirit of a composer better known as a neo-classicist. Completely tonal, and as tender and heartfelt as any work in the string orchestra repertoire, the elegiac piece is unique in the composer’s output: Dr. Walker has stated that he does not repeat a success.

Steps for Justice

Notes by Jennifer Higdon

The challenge of creating a musical portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg allowed me to wade into a wealth of available material: a goldmine of wisdom from a lifetime of contemplating the law and how it relates to our humanity. This moment in our history, the founding ideas of personal liberty, freedom, and the empowerment of our fellow citizens, as reflected in her writing, provided the pillars for this piece.

I was fortunate to have several opportunities to talk with the Justice. The first time was at Santa Fe Opera, when she came backstage following a performance of my first opera. I was so awestruck by her graciousness and appreciation for what everyone brought to the performance; her telling me that the music moved her was something I will never forget. Every subsequent meeting evoked the same feeling when we spoke: here was a brilliant, compassionate, and considerate human being.

There are those individuals who go through life breaking down boundaries and working to make the world better for everyone. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of those angels. The opportunity to honor her, while shining light on those beliefs that she held as the highest hopes for her fellow citizens, is an aspiration that I hope this piece conveys. If it reveals even a glimmer of her brilliance, I will be thrilled.

Texts by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Patrice Michaels; used with kind permission.

“Steps for Justice” was commissioned by the 92nd Street Y in New York and Washington Performing Arts for the Fourth Annual Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Concert in Washington, D.C.

Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land

Notes by J. Peter Burkholder

In Black Angels, George Crumb (1929–2022) upended the string quartet tradition while remaking it for a new age. The violins, viola, and cello are amplified with contact microphones, like electric guitars, while the performers use both traditional and novel techniques, play percussion instruments, make vocalizations, and speak, creating a constantly changing world of unusual colors. It is not a conversation among friends, as string quartets were thought of in the 18th century, but a dramatic showpiece, a nightmare in sounds, hailed at its premiere with a standing ovation.

Written in 1970 and subtitled Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, it reflects on the political turbulence of the late 1960s and the war in Vietnam (Crumb marked it “in tempore belli,” in time of war) through imagery of death, grief, the devil, and God. Crumb called it “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world” that “portrays a voyage of the soul” in three stages: “Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption).”

Two “fateful numbers” — lucky 7 and unlucky 13 — suffuse the score. There are 13 movements; the 1st, 7th, and 13th are threnodies, songs of mourning; groups of 7 or 13 notes, chords, or gestures appear often; many events are marked to be 7 or 13 seconds in duration; ranging from whispers to shouts, the performers count to 7 in Hungarian, German, French, and Japanese and say “13” in Japanese, Russian, Swahili, and German. Even the harmony is affected: Images 4, 5, and 7, associated with the devil, feature an extremely dissonant chord combining an open fifth, the interval between adjacent strings on these instruments, with a diminished fifth (the interval dubbed “the devil in music” in the Middle Ages) below it; a fifth spans 7 half-steps, a diminished fifth 6, so the chord’s outer notes span 13 half-steps.

In each section, movements are played without breaks between them, with 13-second pauses between sections. In section I, Departure, Image 1 is “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects.” All four performers bow rapidly over the bridge while constantly changing pitch, producing a buzzy, whiny, insect-like sound. New sounds signal Image 2, “Sounds of Bones and Flutes,” with tongue clicks, notes hit with the wood of the bow, plucked glissandos, whispers, and a mysterious melody. Image 3, “Lost Bells,” pairs a bowed tam-tam (flat gong) with delicate cello and violin harmonics and two brief melodies of 13 and 7 notes respectively. In Image 4, “Devil-music,” the first violinist plays a virtuosic, special effect-filled cadenza marked “Vox Diaboli” (voice of the devil) that introduces the dissonant chord mentioned above. This alternates with loud crashes on the tam-tam as violin II and viola play the famous chant, Dies irae, from the Catholic Mass for the Dead, moving their bows slowly with great pressure to produce a low, rough sound. Image 5, “Danse Macabre” (dance of death) takes its name from medieval paintings where Death or the devil plays the violin as humans dance to their demise. Pyrotechnics and special effects continue in violin II and viola, alternating with violin I and cello playing Dies irae while shaking maracas or whistling.

Section II, Absence, begins with Image 6, “Pavana Lachrymae” (tearful pavane). Here Crumb mixes references to older music, borrowing the title from a mournful 1596 piece by John Dowland and repositioning the instruments to produce the thinner sound of a consort of viols from that era while quoting music from Franz Schubert’s 1817 song (and 1824 string quartet), “Death and the Maiden.” Image 7, “Threnody II: Black Angels!”, marks the work’s climax with energetic bursts of dissonance, trills, glissandos, and sudden changes from loud to soft and back, evoking the winged lost souls of fallen angels that medieval and Renaissance painters represented as black angels. Image 8, “Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura” (sarabande of dark death), again invokes the sound of a viol consort, now playing a soft, slow dance. Images 6 and 8 both include recollections of the insect sounds from Image 1, beginning a process of reflection that continues through the rest of the piece. Image 9, “Lost Bells (Echo),” recalls the sounds of Image 3.

Section III, Return, sets a new, calmer mood with Image 10, “God-music.” The violinists and violist play soft tones on crystal glasses tuned with water while the cello sings a slow, elegant aria, marked “Vox Dei” (voice of God), in its high register. In Image 11, “Ancient Voices,” soft, rapid notes in one violin underpin plucked glissandos in the other. The brief Image 12, “Ancient Voices (Echo),” drops the rapid figures and echoes only the plucked glissandos. Image 13, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” recalls Image 1 while mixing in other sounds heard along the way: whispered counting, the sarabande (now a distant memory, sounded by tremolos on the strings with thimble-capped fingers), fragments of melody high in the cello, and the bowed tam-tam.

J. Peter Burkholder is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and author of the four most recent editions of A History of Western Music and Norton Anthology of Western Music. He has served as President of the American Musicological Society, and his scholarship on Charles Ives, modern music, musical borrowing, and music history pedagogy has won numerous awards and been translated into six languages.