Muhly PLEASURE GROUND by ScoresOnDemand

NICO MUHLY Pleasure Ground

for Baritone and Orchestra

(Full Score)

2014

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St. Rose Music Publishing

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Commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and The MusicNOW Festival in honor of Louis Langrée with support from Ann and Harry Santen

World Premiere Performance March 21, 2014

duration circa 20 minutes

INSTRUMENTATION

2 Piccolos (2nd doubles Alto Flute)

2 Flutes

2 Oboes

English Horn

2 Clarinets in Bb

Bass Clarinet in Bb

2 Bassoons

Contrabassoon

4 Horns in F

3 Trumpets in C

2 Trombones

Bass Trombone

Tuba

Timpani

Percussion (3 players)

Tenor drum

Bass drum

Triangle Guiro

Tam-tam

Tambourine

Crotales (with bow)

Glockenspiel

Marimba

Vibraphone (with bow)

Harp

Piano (doubling Celesta)

Strings

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CONTENTS

Part One .................... 01 II. Part Two ....................32 III. Part Three ...................54 .

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PROGRAM NOTE

I have long been interested in Frederick Law Olmsted; as a New Yorker, I am surrounded by his work. More so, even, than architecture, landscape design is subject to constant change both natural and human-imposed. In researching Olmsted, I realized that he was a melancholic: deeply affected by his time in the Civil War, he spent many of his later days in private anguish about how his work had been mangled and abused. The piece sets various texts — both formal and private — by Olmsted.

We begin in the 1850s, with his observations about gardens he visited both in England and in America. The music is eager, optimistic, and energetic. After several playful and bucolic episodes, the orchestra and voice shift into a slightly more poetic expression of the artistic power of ‘directing’ nature. The first movement flows seamlessly into the second, which sets some of Olmsted’s private letters written during the war. An uneasy texture in the clarinets and strings is the bed over which a long, drawn-out melody unfolds in the piccolo and oboe. This cycle of twelve chords repeats over almost the entire movement, occasionally stopping to allow the voice to describe another tragic scene. One was particularly moving, when Olmsted writes, “One of our most efficient men, who worked through all with untiring nonchalance, today, being the first day of rest, broke out in hysterics, and for hours afterwards, was in a swooning state. We send him home tomorrow, with an attendant, if he is well enough.” I set this text over a nervous and quietly relentless drone over two octaves of Gs. Winds and brace menace the drone, and the movement ends in a state of dreamy anxiety.

The title Pleasure Ground is a musical joke, a ground being a recurring bass-line that gives structure and melodic content at the same time. I use several grounds in this piece, but the third movement is particularly devoted to one cycle of thirteen chords. At first, the ground is hidden inside a chorale-like texture of strings, over which violent brass and percussion snarl and fight. As the baritone sings about nature having overrun his designs, some small ensembles of instruments echo the voice: a bass trombone, sometimes, and others, a little gamelan of harp, bells, and winds. On the text, “I have done a great deal of work in my life…” we first hear the ground bass in its proper position at the bottom of the orchestra. It goes through two cycles, and suddenly transforms into the material from the very opening of the first movement, but here transformed from youthful optimism into something melancholic and halting.

The piece ends with a delicate, drone-like texture under the words, “If man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees?” This text slowly unfurls over a chordal drone, illuminated from within by slowly shifting woodwinds, and from without by celesta, glockenspiel, harp. The idea here is an ideal garden: designed but not fussed-with, communal, and fragilely eternal.

—NM

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TEXTS

adapted from the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted

Five minutes of admiration and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America, there was nothing comparable with this People’s Garden.

Gardening has reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of.

With increased knowledge of the operations of nature, with eyes opened to a thousand wonders hitherto unseen, our sensibility to the Beautiful will be awakened.

What artists, so noble, has often been my thought, as he who with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outlines, writes the colours, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realise his intentions.

And all this magnificent pleasure-ground is entirely, unreservedly, and forever the People’s own.

II.

I found still a great number, including the worst cases, lying on litters, gasping in the fervid sun.

I do not describe such a scene.

Then, and frequently since,I saw more appalling than were ever imagined in the wildest mania of delirium tremens.

There were volunteers busily doing what little could be done.

Had you seen the noble men, as I have, in these last days, smiling in their last cruel struggle with death, or had you part in the crowd of those who are now coming here, eager to know how fell this or that son, brother, or father, reported in the dead or missing.

Thank God, this comes not us.

Pray God it comes not again in our time or with our children.

The horror of war can never be known but on the field.

It is beyond, far beyond all imagination.

One of our most efficient men, who worked through all with untiring nonchalance, today, being the first day of rest, broke out in hysterics, and for hours afterwards, was in a swooning state.

We send him home tomorrow, with an attendant, if he is well enough.

III.

The trees had grown thickly, their lower limbs were dead or dying, and two-thirds of all were decayed in the trunk. Many had been mangled by violence. Where these old trees were not yet decrepit and drawn up by the effect of excessive shade beyond the possibility of restoration to moderately wellproportioned and umbrageous forms, the less promising have been taken out and an attempt made to develop open-wooded or park-like scenery.

I have done a great deal of good work in my way, but it is constantly and everywhere arrested, wrecked, mangled, and misused and it is not easy to get above intense disappointment and mortification. If man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees?

compiled by Tyne Rafaeli from the following sources:

The People’s Park at Birkenhead, near Liverpool. May, 1851. Staten Island, New York.

Appeal to the citizens of Staten Island. Richmond County Agricultural Society. December, 1849. Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. 1852.

Letter to Henry Whitney Bellows. White House on the Pamunkey. June Third, 1862.

Letter to his wife, Mary Perkins Olmsted. Sanitary Commission. Floating Hospital. White House. June Eleventh, 1862

Letter to the Brooklyn Park Commissioners. January First, 1874.

Letter to Charles Loring Brace. November First, 1884.

Trees in Streets and in Parks. September, 1882.

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