Read below for program notes for the Focus Series concert “Both Slides of the Trombone” on March 19, 2025. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2024.
Shaker Loops by John Adams (b. 1947)
“Tonality for me has always been the essential tool for building form… I tell young composers that I don’t think you can be a great composer unless you have a feeling for harmony.”
– John Adams
John Adams, one of America’s most respected and prolific composers, started his musical training much like anyone else born into a musical family: His father began teaching him to play the clarinet when he was in the third grade. He began composing when he was 10 and later attended Harvard University.
Adams’ style is eclectic, but many of his works blend a kind of repetitive minimalism, with little melodic and harmonic fragments cycling and evolving over long periods of time, with large-scale orchestral romanticism. Shaker Loops is a perfect example. The piece, which is in four sections played without pause, began its life as a string quartet, and Adams later orchestrated the piece for a full string orchestra. It is frenetic and mechanical at some times, hypnotically peaceful and still at others.
He describes the music himself as follows:
Having experienced a few of the seminal pieces of American Minimalism during the early 1970s, I thought their combination of stripped-down harmonic and rhythmic discourse might be just the ticket for my own unformed yearnings… I gradually developed a scheme for composing that was partly indebted to the repetitive procedures of Minimalism and partly an outgrowth of my interest in waveforms. The “waves” of Wavemaker were to be long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake…
The “loops” idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of prerecorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum… The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term “to shake”, meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another. The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. Although, as has since been pointed out to me, the term “Shaker” itself is derogatory, it nevertheless summons up the vision of these otherwise pious and industrious souls caught up in the ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminated in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence.
This dynamic, almost electrically charged element, so out of place in the orderly mechanistic universe of Minimalism, gave the music its raison d’etre and ultimately led to the full realization of the piece. Shaker Loops continues to be one of my most performed pieces.
Blue Bells of Scotland by Arthur Pryor (1869-1942)
“O where and O where does your highland laddie dwell;
O where and O where does your highland laddie dwell;
He dwells in merry Scotland where the bluebells sweetly smell,
And all in my heart I love my laddie well.”
Bandleader and trombonist Arthur Pryor opens his arrangement of the Blue Bells of Scotland with a grand statement of the opening bars of the tune, an old Scottish folk song, for the whole orchestra. The trombone enters with a leap from a low note to a high one, sliding up and down and then flying up and down the register in arpeggios.
This arrangement is no picnic for the soloist.
It’s a showpiece designed to demonstrate the technical prowess of the performer with dazzling effect due to the sheer speed. After a lengthy cadenza where the trombone plays freely and dialogues with the orchestra, the piece settles into a gentle statement of the song in full. What follows is several repetitions of the song in different instruments of the orchestra, with the trombone whizzing around and decorating the melody with scales and quick arpeggios, building to a stunningly difficult finale.
Pryor himself was born for the stage. Literally — his mother gave birth on the second floor of a theater in Missouri. His father was also a bandleader who taught young Arthur the basics, wrapping him on the head with a violin bow whenever he hit a wrong note if the legends are true.
He progressed so quickly that he joined John Phillip Sousa’s famous band when he was only 13 years old, touring throughout the U.S. and Europe. When his father passed away, Arthur left Sousa to run the family band, keeping the Pryor name front and center for concertgoers all around the country.
He passed away in 1942 due to complications from a stroke, leaving behind hundreds of arrangements and compositions for band and orchestra, many featuring the trombone.
Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120 by Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
“Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.”
– Robert Schumann
Many young husbands have tales to tell of difficult fathers-in-law. Pianist Friedrich Wieck, who would — kicking and screaming — become father-in-law to the composer Robert Schumann, was as cliché as it gets, even threatening to shoot the unassuming Robert at one point before his marriage to Wieck’s daughter Clara.
Clara had demonstrated prodigy-level aptitude at the piano at an early age, and he immediately placed her on a strict course of musical study and practice with a regimen of his own devising. Later, when Robert himself abandoned his study of law and came to study with Wieck, he quickly fell for Clara. Friedrich immediately opposed the union, noting Robert’s shifts of temper, his proneness to alcoholism, and his precarious financial prospects as a composer — not unreasonable concerns — and the pair resorted to sneaking around and sending letters.
It sounds like good fun until one remembers that the patriarchal laws of the time forbade Clara to marry without her father’s blessing. Schumann had to sue Wieck in the Saxon Court of Appeals, and after a bitter court battle, the pair finally married in 1840. After this, all was bliss for a time. Schumann’s first symphony, the “Spring” symphony, came swiftly, a sunny outpouring of musical affection that took Europe’s musical world by storm. His second symphony — called Symphony No. 4 due to its delayed publication — arrived in 1841, a darker, more intense offering.
The first movement begins with a resounding chord, followed by a questioning, probing tune in bassoons and strings. There’s consternation and drama as the music slowly winds itself into knots, accelerating until a great burst of stormy melody explodes from the strings. From here, it’s off to the races, a mix of thorny counterpoint and fierce orchestral effects, brass and bass instruments blasting at particularly tempestuous moments.
Next, a slower, almost funereal tune opens the second movement, with Schumann’s warmth still pervading the movement. Then, the scherzo, a stern, quick-stomping affair with a smooth, winding middle section. The finale begins, like the first movement, with winding, questing figures in the strings building to a quicker, sharper tune that carries the music to a shockingly positive conclusion.
The initial premiere of this symphony didn’t capture the public’s imagination to the same degree as Schumann’s first symphony: “The Second Symphony did not have the same great acclaim as the First,” he later wrote. “I know it stands in no way behind the First, and sooner or later it will make it on its own.” In 1851, 10 years after its premiere, he revised the symphony, thickening the orchestral textures and linking the movements together. Schumann’s inner circle disagreed on which was the “better” version, with Brahms preferring the former and Clara the latter.