Pictures of Folklore
Artists
Performers
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Macomb Symphony Orchestra -
Andrew NeerConductorAmerican conductor, Andrew Neer, was born in Tucker, Georgia and currently resides in Grosse Pointe, Michigan with his wife, Mary Lynn. He is quickly becoming known for his dynamic and expressive conducting style. His focus has been to educate and expand appreciation of music. He believes that at the heart of everything, music is the soul of America and provides transformative experiences for those performing and participating in the audience.
Living in Michigan for most of his life, he is thrilled to join the Macomb Symphony Orchestra family. He attended Central Michigan University (CMU) studying Composition, Trumpet and Music Theatre Performance. Following his time at CMU, he obtained two Master of Music degrees in Composition and Conducting, respectively, from Wayne State University, Detroit MI. His composition experience ranges from that of the art song to film scores.
In the summer 2013, he was invited to conduct Verdi’s La Traviata for Michigan Opera Theatre’s community programs, receiving high acclaim. In early 2016, he embarked on an international conducting career, appearing with orchestras in Romania and Bulgaria. He is honored to study privately with orchestral conductor & mentor Kenneth Kiesler. In 2023, Andrew completed Doctoral Studies in Orchestral Conducting at the world-renown University of Michigan. In addition to working with orchestras, Mr. Neer has been honored to lead choruses and conduct operas in and around Metropolitan Detroit.
Info & Repertoire
Join your Macomb Symphony and Music Director Andrew Neer in an adventure through Pictures of Folklore.
This concert is all about Folklore and tales. Modest Mussorgsky was arguably one of the most influential Russian composers of the Romantic period.
Program
Sibelius: Finlandia
Carlos Simon: TALES: A Folklore Symphony
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel orchestration)
Tickets
General: $25
Senior: $20
Groups (15 or more): $18/ticket
Veterans: $15
Children 12 & under: FREE
About the Music
By Dr. Eldonna L. May
Sibelius, Finlandia
Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957)
Finlandia, Op.. 26 (1899; rev. 1900)
8 minutes
ORCHESTRATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, and triangle), and strings
WORLD PREMIERE: July 2, 1900 in Helsinki with the Helsinki Philharmonic Society conducted by Robert Kajanus
US PREMIERE: The Los Angeles Philharmonic first performed Finlandia on February 4, 1921, with Walter Henry Rothwell conducting.
Finlandia (1899), whose revised version (1900) was published in 1901, again by Fazer & Westerlund, formed the nucleus of the orchestral works that introduced Sibelius to larger Europe in the early 1900s. This introduction began in earnest in July 1900 – only a few months after the death of his youngest daughter, Kirsti – when Sibelius, Kajanus and the Helsinki Philharmonic went on tour throughout northern Europe: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany (Lübeck, Hamburg and Berlin), the Netherlands and France (Paris, concluding with concerts at the Finnish pavilion at the World Exhibition). Besides presenting Sibelius to these countries, the concerts’ subtext was Finland’s current political struggle against an ever more oppressive Russia, and political metaphors could effortlessly be read into such works as Finlandia and the First Symphony. The tour was successful and Sibelius was gratified by the attention he was beginning to receive in Germany. After Hamburg, he summarized his hopes in a letter to his wife, Aino (16 July 1900): ‘I can win a place, I believe, with my music. No, I don’t believe; I know I can’
The composer wanted to create something recognizably Finnish, but without resorting to direct imitation of folk music. As he wrote to his wife Aino, “I would not wish to tell a lie in art … But I think I am now on the right path. I now grasp those Finnish, purely Finnish tendencies in music less realistically but more truthfully than before.” Many of his early efforts in this direction were ephemeral – a composer in search of his voice – but the 1899 Finlandia has transcended both its local association and its political objective. Originally the finale of a suite of incidental music to accompany a historical tableaux, it was performed first at an event whose announced purpose was support of a journalists’ pension fund but whose organizers sought to promote a spirit of national unity. The title Finland Awakens attracted negative attention from the czarist régime, so for a while the piece was known as Impromptu – surely one of the great misnomers in music history!
Within Finland, the turn-of-the-century years were also Sibelius’s most overtly political. In the late 1890s Russian policy in Finland turned towards harsh repression. Tsar Nicholas II appointed Nikolay Bobrikov Governor-General in 1898 to carry out a program of ‘Russification’, and in 1899, with the much-despised February Manifesto, Bobrikov began the process of stripping Finland of its political autonomy, limiting free speech and assembly, shutting down newspapers, arranging deportations and the like. Such policies drew fierce resistance from the Finns, and Sibelius composed a number of frankly patriotic, protest pieces, in a simpler, more populist (even incendiary) style. Some had electrifying results in Finland but proved to be crafted for local consumption only.
One of his resistance pieces proved more exportable. Although by the time of the 1900 tour it had been revised and rechristened as Finlandia, this brief, call-to-action tone poem began life in 1899 as Suomi herää (‘Finland Awakens’), the finale of a set of incidental music accompanying staged, historical tableaux depicting Finland’s history. It was destined to become Sibelius’s best-known work, an inextinguishable symbol for Finland itself. In terms of its political content, the tone poem’s sequence of events could hardly be easier to grasp: political subjugation, sudden awakening and conflict, and a nationally centered hymnic liberation into the future. Yet its musical form is non-traditional, not sharing the sonata form with expanded ‘introduction-coda frame’ of some of its obvious predecessors, such as Beethoven’s Egmont and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overtures. Similarly notable is Sibelius’ use of allusion in the famous ‘Finlandia Hymn’ section, whose incipit apparently paraphrases and reconfigures rhythmically an inner section of a similarly titled, patriotic choral work from the early 1880s by the Finnish composer Emil Genetz, Herää, Suomi! (‘Awaken, Finland!’), as would probably have been evident to its first listeners.
Like all successful symphonic poems, Finlandia’s extra-musical meaning generates the music’s formal shape. The composer described this meaning in stirring words: “We fought 600 years for our freedom and I am part of the generation which achieved it. Freedom! My Finlandia is the story of this fight. It is the song of our battle, our hymn of victory.” His genius is that this story functions simultaneously on both exterior and interior levels – capturing just that intersection where patriotism feeds personal identity and vice versa. Massive chords establish the music’s parameters of great depth and seriousness. Very slowly they yield to a woodwind choir, then to the strings; the judiciously restrained orchestration suggests that there is power held in check. The accumulated tension yields to more defiant strains, then to a resolute, even jaunty section before settling into the strains of the last reverent theme (later used for the hymn “Be still, my soul,” whose text emphasizes patience in the face of suffering), which Sibelius gradually builds into triumph.
The compositions of Jean Sibelius constitute a case study in the capriciousness of musical taste and the power of the artistic avant-garde. Pigeonholed by many as primarily a Finnish nationalist, whose dark, remote music was a shallow representative of Romanticism’s last gasp, Sibelius was nevertheless deemed the champion of American and British conservative musical tastes between the world wars. Typical was Olin Downes, music critic of the Times, whose relentless public support of Sibelius bordered on sycophancy. Likewise, Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, programmed a cycle of Sibelius’s symphonies, and dogged the composer to finish the eighth—which he never did. But, those who favored the avant-garde of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and company—and that included most of continental Europe and American intellectuals—were scathing in their contempt. One respected and well-known critic entitled an essay about Sibelius, “The Worst Composer in the World.” These controversies, and Sibelius’s life-long struggle with alcoholism and depression no doubt played a signal part in his composing nothing of significance from the nineteen thirties until his death in 1957 at the age of 91.
But today Sibelius enjoys a respect, while not approaching the heights of pre-World War II times, that seems to secure his reputation. While he was a prolific composer, and his symphonies enjoy frequent performance, none of his works achieved the popularity of Finlandia. Finland had for centuries languished under the rule of Sweden, and then in the early nineteenth century fell under the control of Russia, becoming by the end of the century a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. After tightening control of Finland by Russia in 1898, the Finns were distinctly unhappy. Surging nationalism manifested itself in variety of ways, including a patriotic melodrama given in 1899 in Helsinki, ostensibly to raise money for a newspaper pension fund. Sibelius contributed incidental music to this enterprise, the last tableau of which was entitled Suomi Herää (Finland Awakens). He reworked the piece into a symphonic tone poem the next year, and renamed it Finlandia. It opens with ominous brass chords, moves on into a tumultuous faster section that seems to parallel a growing national sense of strength, and ends triumphantly with a powerful chorale (heard earlier, in a soft aura of confidence). The chorale has entered the realm of popular church music under the title, “Be Still My Soul,” but it stands alone as the most affirmative statement of the confidence and independence of the Finnish people.
Carlos Simon, Tales: A Folklore Symphony
Tales: A Folklore Symphony is a four-movement piece for orchestra that explores African American folklore as well as Afrofuturist stories. The work was commissioned by the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra and the Sphinx Organization for its 25th anniversary.
I. MOTHERBOXX CONNECTION
“Where are all the black people in comics?” This is a question posed by the creative duo Black Kirby (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson). Based heavily in Afrofuturism, Black Kirby’s characters show black people as heroes using ancient customs and futurist motifs from the African and African American diaspora. This piece is inspired by the many heroic characters found in the work of Black Kirby, but mainly Motherboxx Connection. (Black Kirby: In Search of the Motherboxx Connection)
According to scholar Regina N. Bradley, Motherboxx Connection is “a pun on Jack Kirby’s motherbox, a living computer connected to the world, the Motherboxx too is a living computer with a heightened awareness of racial and sexual discourses surrounding the black body. The motherboxx is the technological equivalent of the “mother land” in the black diaspora imagination. She is where black identities merge and depart.”
To represent the power and intelligence of the motherboxx, I have composed a short, fast-moving musical idea that constantly weaves in and throughout the orchestra. A majestic, fanfare-like motif also provides the overall mood of strength and heroism. I imagine the motherboxx as an all-knowing entity that is aware of the multi-faceted aspects of blackness.
II. FLYING AFRICANS
Once, all Africans could fly, but lost their ability once they crossed the Atlantic Ocean as enslaved humans. This story tells how one African maintained the ability and secretly passed the gift on to others. The Negro Spiritual, “Steal Away” is referenced in the woodwinds, as well as the cello section, while the upper strings hover effortlessly in the higher register.
Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus
Steal away, steal away home
I ain’t got long to stay here
III. GO DOWN MOSES (Let my People Go)
The Jewish biblical story of the Plagues of Egypt resonated with the enslaved and they created songs that related to this story of bondage. While the horrific plagues that swept across Egypt are compelling in and of themselves, the focus of this piece is recounted from the perspective of the stubborn Pharaoh, who unwillingly loosens his grip on the enslaved people. The Pharaoh’s hardened heart is conveyed through two sharp, accented chords. The spirit of God, represented by light, heavenly, metallic sounds from the percussion, signal the beginning of each new plague. Frogs, pestilence, and sickness are not enough to break the Pharaoh’s will. It is only with the “Angel of Death,” which takes the life of the Pharaoh’s first-born child, represented by dark, brooding harmonies, that he relents in despair. The orchestral texture grows thinner and thinner as the Pharaoh loathes in emotional anguish. The once prideful Pharaoh is now broken down to a powerless whimper. I use the Negro Spiritual “Let My People Go (Go Down Moses)” as a musical framework throughout this movement.
Go down Moses
Way down in Egypt land
Tell ol’ Pharaoh to
Let my people go!
When Israel was in Egypt land Let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand Let my people go!
IV. JOHN HENRY
The story of John Henry is traditionally told through the work song, each with wide-ranging and varying lyrics. The well- known narrative ballad of “John Henry” is essentially the battle between man versus machine. Enslaved prisoners would often sing the story more slowly and deliberately, often with a pulsating beat suggestive of swinging the hammer. These songs usually contain the lines “This old hammer killed John Henry / but it won’t kill me.” Writer Scott Nelson explains that:
“… workers managed their labor by setting a “stint”, or pace, for it. Men who violated the stint were shunned … Here was a song that told you what happened to men who worked too fast: they died ugly deaths; their entrails fell on the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died.”
Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition
Modest Mussorgsky (1839—1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition (Ravel orchestration)
33 minutes
ORCHESTRATION: 2 flutes/piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets/bass clarinet, 2 bassoons/contrabassoon, alto saxophone, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, xylophone, bells, triangle, tam-tam, cymbals, rattle, whip, side drum, bass drum), celesta, 2 harps, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
WORLD PREMIERE: Paris on October 22, 1922, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky conducting.
U.S. PREMIERE: The Boston Symphony Orchestra, November 7 and 8, 1924, in Symphony Hall, Koussevitzky conducting.
Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition as a set of piano pieces in June 1874. At least a dozen orchestrations of Pictures from an Exhibition have been made; the earliest is by Mikhail Tushmalov (?1891), the best known by Ravel (1922). A new Polnoye akademicheskoye sobraniye sochineniy M.P. Musorgskogo v 34-kh tomakh (‘The Complete Academic Collection of the Works of M.P. Musorgsky in 34 Volumes’), initially projected to start in 1989, to mark the sesquicentennial of Musorgsky’s birth, finally began to appear in 1996. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) made his orchestral transcription in the summer of 1922 for Serge Koussevitzky, who introduced the Ravel version at one of his own concerts in early in his first Boston season.
It was Ravel who told Serge Koussevitzky about these fascinating pieces and sparked his enthusiasm. At the time, the Pictures at an Exhibition were quite unknown, and the Russian publishing house of Bessel, which had issued them in 1886 in a version heavily edited by Rimsky-Korsakov, had so little faith in them that it had no difficulty going along with Koussevitzky’s stipulation that Ravel’s transcription should be reserved for a number of years for his exclusive use, since clearly there was nothing in it for the publishers. The Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures quickly became a Koussevitzky specialty, and his frequent and brilliant performances, notably his outstanding 1930 recording with the Boston Symphony, turned the work into an indispensable repertory item. What would particularly have pleased Ravel is the way the popularity of “his” Pictures led pianists to rediscover Mussorgsky’s.
Even so, Ravel was not the first musician to orchestrate Pictures at an Exhibition, having been anticipated by Mikhail Tushmalov in 1891 (his version also being tampered with by Rimsky-Korsakov, who conducted the first performance) and by Sir Henry J. Wood in 1920. During the time that Ravel’s score was available only to Koussevitzky, an orchestration appeared by Leonidas Leonardi (“whose idea of the art,” remarked a contemporary critic, “is very remote”), and later there were scorings by Leopold Stokowski, Lucien Cailliet (the uncredited ghostwriter of many orchestrations attributed to Stokowski, though the Pictures do seem to be Stokowski’s own), and Walter Goehr—not to forget the electronic version by Tomita, Elgar Howarth’s transcription for the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, the Yamashita reduction for solo guitar, Keith Emerson’s rock presentation, and Vladimir Horowitz’s own rethinking for piano. In this whole scene, Ravel’s edition is the time-tested survivor, and for good reason: he is Mussorgsky’s peer, and his transcription stands as a model of what we would ask for in such an enterprise by way of technical brilliance, imaginative insight, and concern for Mussorgsky’s own name.
Pictures at an Exhibition proved to be a welcome rarity in Mussorgsky’s anguished experience – a composition born quickly and virtually painlessly. Reporting to his friend Vladimir Stassov about the progress of the suite he was writing for piano (Pictures’ original medium), Mussorgsky exulted: “Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and over-eat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” The fevered inspiration was activated by a posthumous exhibit in 1874 of watercolors and drawings by the composer’s dear friend, Victor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the previous year at the age of 39.
The Pictures are “really” Victor Hartmann’s. He was a close and important friend to Mussorgsky, and his death was an occasion of profound grief for the composer. The critic Stasov organized a posthumous exhibition of Hartmann’s drawings, paintings, and architectural sketches in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1874, and by June 22, Mussorgsky, having worked at high intensity and speed, completed his tribute to his friend. He imagined himself “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.” The roving music, which opens the suite, he calls “Promenade,” and his designation of it as being “nel modo russico” is a redundancy. Mussorgsky’s enthusiastic and reverent homage to Hartmann is a series of musical depictions of ten of the artist’s canvasses, all of which hang as vividly in aural space as their visual progenitors occupied physical space.
Gnomus
According to Stasov, “a child’s plaything, fashioned, after Hartmann’s design in wood, for the Christmas tree at the Artists’ Club…It is something in the style of the fabled Nutcracker, the nuts being inserted into the gnome’s mouth. The gnome accompanies his droll movements with savage shrieks.”
Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
There was no item by that title in the exhibition, but it presumably refers to one of several architectural watercolors done on a trip of Hartmann’s to Italy. Stasov tells us that the piece represents a medieval castle with a troubadour standing before it. Ravel decided basically to make his orchestra the size of the one Rimsky-Korsakov used in his edition of his opera Boris Godunov, the most famous of earlier orchestrations of Mussorgsky, but not, alas, as honorable as Ravel’s. He went beyond those bounds in adding percussion and, most remarkably, in his inspired use of the alto saxophone here. In this movement, Ravel makes one of his rare compositional changes, adding an extra measure of accompaniment between the first two phrases of the melody.
Tuileries
The park in Paris, swarming with children and their nurses. Mussorgsky reaches this picture by way of a Promenade.
Bydlo
The word is Polish for cattle. Mussorgsky explained to Stasov that the picture represents an ox-drawn wagon with enormous wheels, but adding that “the wagon is not inscribed on the music; that is purely between us.”
Ballet of Chicks in their Shells
A costume design for a ballet, Trilby, with choreography by Petipa and music by Gerber, and given in St. Petersburg in 1871 (no connection with George du Maurier’s famous novel, which was not published until 1893). A scene with child dancers was de rigueur in a Petipa spectacular. Here we have canaries “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor, with canary heads put on like helmets.” The ballet is preceded by a short Promenade.
Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
Mussorgsky owned two drawings by Hartmann entitled “A rich Jew wearing a fur hat” and “A poor Jew: Sandomierz.” Hartmann had spent a month of 1868 at Sandomierz in Poland. Mussorgsky’s manuscript has no title, and Stasov provided one, “Two Polish Jews, one rich, one poor,” and he seems later to have added the names of Goldenberg and Schmuyle. Another small alteration here: Mussorgsky ends with a long note, but Ravel has his Goldenberg dismiss the whining Schmuyle more abruptly.
The Market at Limoges
Mussorgsky jots some imagined conversation in the margin of the manuscript: “Great news! M. de Puissangeout has just recovered his cow…Mme. de Remboursac has just acquired a beautiful new set of teeth, while M. de Pantaleon’s nose, which is in his way, is as much as ever the color of a peony.” With a great rush of wind, Mussorgsky segues the listener directly to the next movement.
Catacombae. Sepulcrum Romanum
The picture shows the interior of catacombs in Paris with Hartmann, a friend, and a guide with a lamp. Mussorgsky adds this marginal note: “The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards skulls, apostrophizes them—the skulls are illuminated gently from within.”
Con mortuis in lingua mortua (Among the dead in the language of the dead)
A ghostly transformation of the Promenade, to be played “con lamento.”
The Hut on Chicken Legs
A clock in 14th-century style, in the shape of a hut with cock’s heads and on chicken legs, done in metal. Mussorgsky associated this with the witch Baba-Yaga, who flew about in a mortar in chase of her victims.
The Great Gate of Kiev
A design for a series of stone gates that were to have replaced the wooden city gates, “to commemorate the event of April 4, 1886.” The “event” was the escape of Tsar Alexander II from assassination. The gates were never built, and Mussorgsky’s majestic vision seems quite removed from Hartmann’s plan for a structure decorated with tinted brick, with the Imperial eagle on top, and, to one side, a three-story belfry with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic helmet. It was inspired as a tribute to old Russia, a piece of heartfelt nationalism. The music opens with an expansion of the opening promenade, includes a baptismal hymn from the Russian Orthodox faith, and moves steadily to an enormous climax and glorious tribute colored by tubular bells to Tsar Alexander II.
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