LINER NOTES:

MACHAUT
We kick off with the greatest poet-composer of the 14th century, Guillame de Machaut. Writing in the twilight days of the trouveres — the northern cousins of the better-known troubadours, those great lyricists who spilled out love songs steadily to their patrons — Machaut was also lucky enough to have a church gig. Consequently he was uniquely poised not only to master the secular styles of courtly love, but also to birth the idea of the Catholic Mass as a unified piece of music. Pioneering in his liturgical work, he loved a good throw-back in his secular songs. Here he cleverly uses one of the standard “formes fixes,” the Rondeau (which goes ABaAabAB for those keeping score) to enjoy a small pun when the poet repeats his mantra in quotation marks.

CARMINA BURANA: AXE PHEBUS AUREO & ICH WAS EIN CHINT SO WOLGETAN
From Machaut we go back even further in time to the medieval poet-composers of the original Carmina Burana. They were attracted to stories of intimacy, lust, and love, and relished composing secular music alongside their otherwise liturgical output. The original Codex Buranas is a collection of 234 poems, mostly in Latin (Axe Phebus aureo) or medieval German (Ich was ein Chint so wolgetan), beautifully illustrated and separated into categories: songs of morality and mockery, songs of springtime love, songs in the tavern, and so on. These songs are fun and they are charming, rich with the feeling of community and shared storytelling, even when their lurid stories end in tragedy. The 11th and 12th century poems are printed without any melodies or music, only with certain marks of cantillation. It is a musicological feat to find tunes for these, and we are indebted to generations of musicologists and players for the versions we used here.

PÄRT
The great analogs to the lonely lovesick protagonists of courtly love lyrics are the singing spinners of 19th century German romanticism. Es sang for langen Jahren sets the “Spinner’s Night Song” by Clemens Brentano (perhaps best known as co-compiler of Mahler’s favorite Des Knaben Wunderhorn). Brentano equates the difference between melancholy and mourning as that between singing and crying. Pärt adds the shiver of the spinner’s hands in the cold and the musical image of the “shake” (or short trill) of the nightingale – that clear and pure thread connecting the present to the past.

VIVIER
Claude Vivier’s music has always been wonderfully in a category of its own. With a mystical focus on the shimmer of different tones, and the life within each note, he could turn the simplest of ideas into an entire piece. Piece pour violon et clarinette is exactly what its title suggests, nothing more. A piece. Some notes. For two instruments. And yet it wraps the listener so carefully and completely in the timbres of those two instruments that what percolates upwards is the delicate, delightful feeling, of levitation.

DUFAY
With Guillaume DuFay’s Flos Florum comes a touch of spring. DuFay’s cosmopolitan style, bringing together trends from all over Europe, made him a titan of the 15th century. This particular Marian anthem springs to life with a font of polyphonic melodies, but ends with an extraordinary moment of homophony (all voices moving together), as the final plea to Mary recedes back into solitary prayer.

FOSS
Nature is on full display in German-American composer and conductor Lukas Foss highly imaginative 1978 setting of Wallace Stevens’ 1917 series of epigraphs, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Foss was flaunting a dramatic exuberance in a time when new music in America was tending more cerebral. The piece is scored for three instrumentalists and singer, with the percussionist and pianist playing mostly inside the piano — dropping bowls, scraping cowbells, rubbing the case, and plucking strings — while the flute takes on the voice of the bird. The effect is visceral, even frightening at times.

ADÈS
Picking up where DuFay’s open chords left off five centuries ago, Thomas Adès — a master of modern virtuosic writing — turned to a sparse, faux-ancient musical language for these medieval Latin words. The Lover in Winter is the first official piece in Adès’ catalogue, and the text, from the Oxford Book of Latin Verse, is a perfect schoolboy’s choice. Written in 1989 when he was only 18, the work wends its way from chillingly austere open intervals to expressive melismas and wandering chromatic lines, evincing the isolation and piercing longing of a cold season.

WOJTACKI
In 2016, Polish composer Emil Wojtacki set out to create a new setting of the Compline service in the “extraordinary form,” the most ornate and detailed version of the liturgy. Compline is the last service before Vesrpers. It is intimate, and littered with angels. Wojtacki imbued the liturgy with fresh vigor, scoring the service for harpsichord, gamba, theorbo, baroque flute, and baroque violin — all tuned to the slack-jawed low pitch of French baroque music, and fitted with extra frets to create slurpy, mystical quarter tones. Ángeloi seamlessly blends microtonal psalms with chant responses, as you can hear in this excerpt from our world premiere of the full work.

LIGETI
Ligeti’s Nouvelles aventures is patently insane. It is a mini opera for three singers and seven players, with a text entirely made up of nonsense sounds. No real words are ever spoken, but the intent behind each sound is crystal clear. The singers, and sometimes the players as well, become outlandish characters, loose atoms zinging off mid-conversation, shape-shifting at a feverish pace. A masterclass in wordless storytelling, Nouvelles aventures is dramatic, funny, and scary all at the same time. The suspense grabs the audience from the first, well… yelp.