Read below for program notes for the Classics Series concert “Brahms Symphony No. 1” on February 28 and March 1, 2026. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2025.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman by Joan Tower
The American composer Aaron Copland, who wrote staples like Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, crafted his famous Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, inspired by a speech by Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in which Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the “Century of the Common Man.” The fanfare is for brass and percussion, a grandiose, optimistic response to the U.S. entry into WWII, and it remains one of Copland’s best-loved works.
Nearly a half-century later, Joan Tower, another key figure in American musical history, embarked on her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, a collection of fanfares that would span several decades, inspired by Copland’s earlier work. Tower, known for her intensity and candor, wrote the first Fanfare for the Houston Symphony as a part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Texas’s signing of its Declaration of Independence.
This first fanfare uses the same instrumentation as Copland’s work and begins similarly. Tower sends her brass whizzing and whirling soon after, however, alternating pomp and circumstance with frenetic momentum and building to a sharp final blast.
Her official program note for the work is as follows:
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1 was inspired by Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and employs, in fact, the same instrumentation. In addition, the original theme resembles the first theme in the Copland. It is dedicated to women who take risks and who are adventurous. Written under the Fanfare Project and commissioned by the Houston Symphony, the premiere performance was on January 10, 1987, with the Houston Symphony, Hans Vonk, conductor. This work is dedicated to the conductor Marin Alsop.
Later, she spoke more informally about the music: “This was after the ’60s and ’70s when the consciousness-raising was happening and all these feminists were lashing out about women not having enough power or income, and I was reading a lot of the feminist books. I was really on board with that…” she told the publication MusicWorld in 2019.
She continued: “So then I started thinking about [Aaron] Copland and the only fanfare I knew, Fanfare for the Common Man, and the title really bothered me. For the “common man?” What the hell is that? It’s kind of elitist. So, I had to turn that one around. An ‘uncommon woman’ means a woman who takes risks, who is adventurous.”
There are now six fanfares in the complete work, dedicated to various women and commemorating a variety of anniversaries with a variety of instrumentation. Tower added the sixth fanfare in 2016.
Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 77 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich could have been imprisoned or exiled for his first violin concerto.
The dusky nocturne that opens this work is tonally dense — it is not in a simple major or minor key and even teeters on the edge of tonality at times. This sort of abstraction and dissonance had been decreed bourgeois. This sort of music was outlawed under Josef Stalin’s Zhdanov Doctrine. Publishing such a work would have had severe penalties.
So he didn’t publish it. Instead, Shostakovich hid the score, which he’d completed in 1948, for seven years in a desk drawer. During that period, he worked with the Russian violinist David Oistrakh to revise and polish the score, biding his time until the danger passed.
In 1953, Stalin died, loosening some of the strictures on Soviet artists. Shostakovich asked Oistrakh to give the premiere of the work with the Leningrad Symphony in 1955, hailed as a great success by critics of the time. Oistrakh himself, one of the 20th century’s most famous violinists who also premiered concertos and sonatas by famous composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian, described the concerto as an “innovational work, remarkable for the surprising seriousness and depth of its artistic content… which demands complete emotional and intellectual involvement, and gives ample opportunities not only to demonstrate virtuosity but also to reveal deepest feelings, thoughts and moods.”
The first movement holds its tension and solemnity throughout. In the second movement, the violin cuts loose with a devil-may-care ferocity, with the odd pairing of flute and bass clarinet delivering the movement’s breakneck speed melody before the violin takes up the tune itself. In this movement, Shostakovich, a shy and softspoken man, pens his famous musical signature, the notes D-S-C-H, a recurring motif in the concerto and many of his other works, easily recognizable once the ear picks it up.
The third movement is a passacaglia, which repeats a heavy, noble melody in the bass. The violin enters before long to dance freely and passionately above, weaving countermelodies in heartrending harmony. The movement finishes with a cadenza, a solo passage for the violin, that hearkens back to various themes earlier in the concerto, before transitioning directly into the finale.
Oistrakh had to ask for a break, here, given the speed and ferocity of the Burlesque movement: “Please consider letting the orchestra take over the first eight bars in the finale to give me a break; then at least I can wipe the sweat off my brow.” To which Shostakovich replied: “Of course, of course, why didn’t I think of it?” and adjusted the music the very night before its long-delayed premiere.
Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 by Johannes Brahms
The third movement of German composer Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 begins with a liquid-smooth clarinet solo accompanied by little drops of sound of pizzicato strings. Then, the orchestration reverses, with the strings taking over the melody while the clarinet bounces around with a lilting arpeggio for a moment. It’s an almost light-hearted contrast, probably the closest thing to levity in Brahms’ colossus of a first symphony, a work that underwent a 21-year gestation before seeing the light of day.
This from the man who once declared: “I shall never write a symphony!” and who took nearly two decades to complete his first.
The symphony opens with a pounding set of footsteps in the timpani, a slow tattoo that beats itself into the eardrums, while the entire orchestra screams through a desolate first statement of the melody. This steady pulse trudges toward the initial burst where the movement takes off at full steam, the pace nearly doubled, tempestuously minor throughout with only a few moments of brightness for contrast.
Next, the Andante sostenuto movement is a more affirming but still weighty affair, with gorgeous, lyrical solos for violin and oboe serving as the movement’s heart.
Two factors contributed to Brahms’ excruciating progress with his first symphony. First, a perfectionist nature that led him to burn many of his early works and revise finished pieces ad infinitum before pulling the trigger on publishing. Second, he had a deep-rooted, understandable fear of publishing something that didn’t measure up to the memory of that symphonist before him: a certain Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven, who died shortly after Brahms’ birth and whose ninth symphony both inspired and intimidated Brahms deeply.
An early attempt at a symphony was ultimately adapted into the first piano concerto, and the germ for the actual Symphony No. 1 didn’t occur until Brahms caught wind of shepherds blowing a tune on the alphorn and jotted it down in a sketchbook. This tune became the introduction of the final movement of the symphony, a great, swelling affair in the French horns that changes the symphony’s affect from a dark C Minor to brilliant, fiery C major. Then, after a five-minute introduction, comes a tune of such rustic simplicity and simple positivity, the heart can’t help but sing. It is one of the greatest examples of building and releasing musical tension in the Western canon.
In response to assertions that this remembered Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” tune in the Ninth Symphony, Brahms retorted: “Any ass can see that!” He saw this symphony as a form of homage rather than imitation, a continuance rather than a repetition. Critics and historians supported this position, with the most influential Viennese critic of the time, Eduard Hanslick, referring to the C Minor symphony as “Beethoven’s Tenth.”