Takashi Yoshimatsu

Ode to Birds and Rainbow

Takashi Yoshimatsu was both in Tokyo, Japan on March 18, 1953 and lives there now. Ode to Birds and Rainbow was written in 1994 and has been performed widely since. At least two commercial recordings are available. It is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, percussion, piano and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos and basses). It lasts about seventeen minutes in performance.

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Takashi Yoshimatsu was born in Tokyo in 1953, at a time when Japanese composers had embraced avant-garde techniques. Yoshimatsu absorbed these, but opposed the general fashion, returning to popular rhythms and romantic melody and coming to be regarded as the standard-bearer of Neo-Romanticism in Japan. He studied briefly under Japanese composer and poet Teizo Matsumura but acquired much of his craft by himself.

He has written six symphonies, shorter works for orchestra, a dozen concertos, solo piano music and several pieces for traditional Japanese instruments. He also wrote the score for the 2003-2004 television remake of the anime classic Astro Boy. He is a great admirer of Sibelius, but also claims influences from progressive rock (Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd), the Beatles, and traditional Japanese musical scales and instruments. Nature, especially birds, recurs as a theme in his works.

Ode to Birds and Rainbow is a memorial to the composer’s sister, who died in 1994 and expressed a desire to be reincarnated as a bird. Yoshimatsu calls it “an ode to a soul at play amidst birds and rainbow in the sky.”

The work employs the compositional techniques of minimalism, a style characterized by the use of short melodic or rhythmic patterns. Repetition, steady pulses, and gradual, almost imperceptible changes of harmony combine to create a profound cumulative effect. The harmonies themselves are usually consonant and simple. Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams are among the best known US composers in this style.

Yoshimatsu builds sound pictures in which piquant details emerge from lush textures. The opening of the piece grows gradually richer as 4 solo cellos join 3 basses, and are then joined successively by 5 solo violas, 6 solo second violins, and 7 solo first violins. This texture sustains the entire introduction of the work, with flutes finally, gently, announcing the start of Tapestry 1. There is a sense of inexorable building, with the gradual introduction of all the instruments, each color added with care. In this section, and elsewhere in the piece, it is tempting to hear the wind instruments as birds, either alone or in ever more cacophonous flocks. When the ruckus dies down, the Canticle introduces a feeling of stasis, or perhaps meditative calm, which lasts for several minutes. Tapestry 2 emerges imperceptibly from the Canticle, building with aparadoxical sense of pulsating, animated inertia to the climactic moment of the piece, after which the texture thins to just a couple of birds on a wisp of breeze. The piece ends with a whispered question.

The composer uses relatively modest forces: pairs of winds and brass, no tuba, harp or timpani, and just a few percussion instruments. The piccolo is almost his only indulgence. Yet his imagination and ear for color contribute to a piece that never feels monotonous. It pulls its listeners along. What will happen next, and when will it happen? What if it doesn’t? Is it going to sound like this forever?

– Martin Webster

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Aaron Copland

Suite from The Tender Land

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 and died in Peekskill, New York in 1990. He composed his opera The Tender Land in 1952-54 on a commission from Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein for The League of Composers, and it was first performed by the New York City Opera under the direction of Thomas Schippers in 1954. Copland revised the work in 1954 and extracted the Suite in 1958. The Suite was first performed in Chicago by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Fritz Reiner the same year. The score of the Suite calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, optional piano and celeste, and strings.

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We’ve all had the frustrating experience of having a favorite television show cancelled; well, Aaron Copland knew something of this first-hand. He was commissioned to compose The Tender Land, the first ever opera written specifically for television. When it was finished, the network didn’t like it, and the NBC Television Opera Workshop said:  “You’re cancelled.” The opera was instead premiered by the New York City Opera, to surprisingly cool reviews. It may be that an opera intended for the intimacy of television was simply unsuited for the opera house.

Copland’s inspiration came largely from Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941), a book with text by James Agee accompanied by the incomparable photographs of Walker Evans, about the desperate poverty of tenant farmers in America’s depression-era rural south. For Copland and his librettist Erik Johns, the book was not a story to tell but a point of departure. The story of the opera is about Laurie, a farmer’s daughter who is “strange inside,” a “puzzle to her mother,” and beguiled by a stranger visiting town. About to graduate high school—the first of her family to do so—she simultaneously wants to be free and to settle down, to remain connected to her home yet aching to leave it.

The Suite begins with the Introduction and Love Music from Act III of the opera. Laurie has fallen in love with a drifter—much to the chagrin of her stern father, and of the drifter, too. The cascading trumpet fanfare is taken over by the entire orchestra, whereupon the rural scene is set. The love music is both tender and stirring, yet its serene ending contains a sense of foreboding.

The Party Scene is a combined celebration of Laurie’s graduation and the coming harvest. Based on the folk tune “Cottage by the Sea,” it’s called “Stomp Your Foot” in the opera, and stomp they do: its riotous opening leads to copious country-style hijinks.

The finale of the Suite, The Promise of Living, follows without pause. Based upon the folk tune “Zion’s Walls,” in the opera it is the vocal quintet finale of Act I. Yet even in its hymn-like orchestral guise, it conveys the promise and hope of a teenage girl coming of age.

– Mark Rohr

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Jean Sibelius

Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82

Jean Sibelius was born in Tavestehus, Finland in 1865 and died in Järvenpää in 1957. He composed his Fifth Symphony in 1915 and led the first performance in Helsinki the same year. He later revised the symphony quite drastically; after two separate revisions the work was completed in 1919 and performed in its final form in 1921. The score calls for 2 flutes 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

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We often take the symphonies of Sibelius for granted, fitting them into the continuum of early twentieth century symphonic practice somewhere between Mahler and, say, Shostakovich. Yet the way Sibelius composed a symphony was utterly different than the approach taken by almost any other symphonist you could name, and that difference has a profound effect on the meaning we take from his music.

A traditional symphonic sonata form usually presents two or more themes, develops them by breaking them down into smaller bits, then brings them back again in their original form. But Sibelius described his approach to the sonata like this: “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down the pieces of a mosaic from the floor of Heaven and told me to put them together.” Sibelius only shows us fragments at first, the individual tiles of the mosaic, one at a time. As the movement develops he combines them, fitting the tiles together in different ways. Some tiles grow in importance while others don’t seem to fit the picture and fall away. The fragments collide and evolve into bigger pieces until, at last, the picture becomes clear. By the time he composed his Fifth Symphony, Sibelius was not just ordering his movements this way, but applying this method to the symphony as a whole.

As the first movement opens we hear a placid horn call in wide intervals, then scale-wise music in the winds. The interplay and tension between these two fragments—tiles of the mosaic—are part of the movement’s (and the symphony’s) final picture. After a large climax is reached, we hear what sounds like a development beginning. But before long it’s clear that Sibelius has actually begun a scherzo surreptitiously, using materials we have heard before. In Sibelius’ first version of the symphony these were two separate movements; in his final revision he integrated the two in a remarkable demonstration of musical sleight-of-hand.

The second movement is a charming, almost Baroque-sounding theme and variations. It is based on multiple themes, all of which can trace their rhythm back to the opening melody heard in the winds. This movement is Sibelius at his most playful, yet there is an undercurrent of tension that implies unfinished business.

Out of the tremendous whirling that begins the third movement we hear many of Sibelius’ fragments, both new and old, but a grand horn theme like tolling bells soon begins to dominate. The scale-wise fragments will continue to have their say, but the noble horn melody will increasingly become the picture we are meant to see.

The ending is simply remarkable. After long minutes of dense, continuous sound, the clarifying lens of silence suddenly appears, punctuated by short, sharp, climactic chords. The time between these chords seems agonizingly long, but vital, too: it is the breathtaking silence that gives the chords their sense of resolution.

Sibelius once said, “These new symphonies of mine are more in the nature of a profession of faith than my other works.” His mosaic method of composing the Fifth Symphony was not merely a technical matter: it allows us to hear a musical journey from ambiguity to certainty—or as Sibelius called it, “faith.” The power of that arrival is strong enough to feel in your bones.

– Mark Rohr

Mark Rohr was the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s Bass Trombonist from the mid-1980’s and program annotator from 1991 until his passing in 2019. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes at his bequest.