colleen potter thorburn harp
doctor of musical arts recital Morse Recital Hall October 9, 2014 • Thursday at 7:30 pm
Robert Blocker, Dean
Doctor of Musical Arts Recital
colleen potter thorburn · harp Thursday, October 9, 2014 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall
François Couperin 1668–1733 Jean-Philippe Rameau 1683–1764
Les Baricades mistérieuses from 6ème Ordre de clavecin L’Egyptienne from 5ème Suite, Nouvelles suites de Pièces de clavecin
Paul Hindemith 1895–1963
Sonata für Harfe I. Mässig schnell II. Lebhaft III. Sehr langsam
André Jolivet 1905–1974 Félix Godefroid 1818–1897
Prélude pour harpe La Danse des sylphes intermission
Antonio Vivaldi 1678–1741
Concerto in D minor, RV 540 transcribed by Arnold Bax I. Moderato II. Lento III. Allegro risoluto Shuaili Du, Jing Yang, violins Yuan Qi, viola Zhilin Wang, cello
Marcel Tournier 1879–1951
Images, 3ème Suite, Op. 34 I. Les Anesses grises sur la route d’El-Azib II. Danseuse à la fontaine d’Aïn-Draham III. Soir de fête à Sedjenane
Luciano Berio 1925–2003
Sequenza II
This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.
Artist Profile
Harpist Colleen Potter Thorburn recently joined the Virginia Commission for the Arts’ Touring Directory as a solo artist presenting concerts throughout Virginia. She also performs as principal harpist with the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in New London; with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra; and as a substitute harpist for the Philadelphia Orchestra. An advocate for new music, Colleen performs and commissions new works with the horn-and-harp duo Apple Orange Pair, founded in 2010 with hornist Emily Boyer. Apple Orange Pair has been the recipient of a Yale alumniVentures grant and an artist residency at the Atlantic Music Festival in Maine. They released their first album in 2013. Colleen maintains a private studio in southwest Virginia, where she also teaches online music courses and community music lessons as a music instructor at Bluefield College. She holds degrees in harp performance from Yale (MM, MMA) and the University of Illinois (BM), and her teachers include June Han, Ann Yeung, and Laura Hearne.  colleenpotterthorburn.com
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Notes on the Program
This program presents several of the harp’s modern faces alongside some of their historical antecedents. These selections focus particularly on evocative uses of the solo harp in French composition from the 18 th through the 20 th centuries, and on modern adaptations, extensions, and transformations of these styles. The musical works range from transcriptions of Baroque keyboard music to Romantic salon music to showcases of the harp’s associative storytelling powers. The program culminates in the iconic Sequenza II of Luciano Berio, which simultaneously combines, transforms, and challenges the solo harp’s historical associations and evocations. françois couperin Les Baricades mistérieuses jean-philippe rameau L’Egyptienne The inventive titles and evocative musical language of these and other selections from the 18 th-century French keyboard repertoire would prove influential on later French composers such as Ravel and Marcel Tournier. Both Couperin’s and Rameau’s music enjoyed revivals in the late 19 th century. The “mysterious barricades” in Couperin’s title are an enigma, variously thought to refer to physical barriers or walls, a mental conundrum, or the music’s harmonic structure. The piece is a rondeau with a recurring refrain, and the texture is a modified style brisé with perpetually offset eighth notes, creating the “mysterious” effect of suspensions and occasionally blurred harmony. “L’Égyptienne” comes from a keyboard suite that shows Rameau, like many in 18 th-century France, fascinated by foreign
cultures and remote peoples. “L’Égyptienne” is an exuberant, perpetual-motion “chase” of a jagged broken chordal motif; the music is propelled forward by sequences and strongly defined harmonic progressions. paul hindemith Sonata für Harfe Among Paul Hindemith’s compositions are at least 26 sonatas—one for nearly every orchestral instrument. He composed the harp sonata in 1939, while living in Switzerland (seeking refuge from Nazi rule in Germany) in collaboration with the Italian harpist Clelia Gatti-Aldrovandi. He completed the harp sonata in October 1939, only weeks after Germany’s invasion of Poland. Like Hindemith’s sonatas for horn and for trumpet, composed the same year, the harp sonata is often seen as a nostalgic work that exploits the harp’s idiomatic resources as well as its associations with an ancient past to conjure images of old Germany. The influential harpist-composer Marcel Grandjany described the first movement as evoking the grand chords of an organist practicing in a great cathedral, and the second movement as depicting children playing in the square outside the cathedral with strains of the organ occasionally heard in the background. At the start of the third movement, Hindemith included in the score a funeral poem by Hölty, which begins: “My friends, when I am dead, hang the little harp behind the altar…” The structure of this final movement can be interpreted as closely following the stanzas of this poem.
Notes on the Program
andré jolivet Prélude pour harpe André Jolivet was active in Paris from the 1930s to the 1970s, and his music exhibits a variety of styles and influences. His early works, in an atonal idiom, reflect his studies with Varèse. Other works from the 1930s are characterized by mysticism and exoticism, and with Messiaen, he sought a more human, timeless expression by founding the musical collective “La Jeune France.” Among Jolivet’s other experiences, he was music director of the Comédie Française from 1945 to 1959, during which he encountered anew the works of Lully. Many of Jolivet’s compositions included the harp: aside from the Prélude, he wrote a harp concerto (1952) and several chamber works. The Prélude, his only work for solo harp, unfolds in a short ternary form that develops a single initial motive through expressive chromatic writing. félix godefroid La Danse des Sylphes Félix Godefroid was one of a handful of virtuoso harpists who, beginning in the middle of the 19 th century, composed prodigiously for the instrument and gave concert tours performing their own works. He studied first at the Paris Conservatory with François Joseph Naderman, who taught the single-action harp; recognizing the double-action harp as the way of the future, Godefroid left to study instead with Parish Alvars and Théodore Labarre. Godefroid’s works include an opera, La harpe d’or (The Harp of Gold).
La Danse des Sylphes is one of three harp works by Godefroid that remained in print after his death; others were rediscovered more recently. Godefroid depicts sylphs, spirits of the air, in a manner consistent with ballets of his time, with elegant, nearly classical melodies and dazzling passagework over a simple harmonic structure. La Danse des Sylphes also shows off the growing virtuosic capabilities of the mid-19 th-century harp—with seven pedals and a doubleaction mechanism introduced in 1810— that Godefroid helped to promulgate through his compositions and his touring, leading his friend Franz Liszt to describe him as the “Paganini of the harp.” antonio vivaldi, arr. arnold bax Concerto in D minor, RV 540 The second half of this program opens with an arrangement by Arnold Bax of a Vivaldi double concerto, originally for lute and viola d’amore soloists. The original concerto (RV 540) is among a group that Vivaldi composed in 1740, his final year in Venice, for the visit of the Dresden prince Friedrich Christian. Vivaldi died in Vienna the following year. Bax arranged RV 540 for harp and string quartet in 1927—a time when Vivaldi’s music was not widely known to the public—at the request of the London harpist Maria Korchinska, whom Bax befriended along with her husband. This concerto arrangement is among Bax’s lesser-known works, as it was not published during his lifetime. It displays some of the same lush, colorful harmonies and textures as his other chamber works for harp. After Bax’s death, Korchinska kept possession of the manuscript, which in the 1970s came to the attention
Notes on the Program
of the American music publisher Lyra. Korchinska’s collaboration with Lyra and editor Dewey Owens resulted in the publication of a set of parts, though with several errors and misreadings of Bax’s manuscript. Today’s performance returns the Lyra parts to a state closer to Bax’s original manuscript. Bax’s arrangement allows the modern harp to participate retroactively in the music of Vivaldi (who never composed for the harp), and in it we can hear a fanciful reimagining of the harp’s Italian Baroque roles as both a solo and continuo instrument. At times, the harp plays the part of the solo lute in Vivaldi’s concerto; more often, it is given continuo-like chords that tie together the string ensemble; and at other times, it performs modern figurations crafted by Bax. The part of Vivaldi’s solo viola d’amore is mostly assumed by the first violin, though in alternation with its role as a member of the string quartet—not unlike a solo violinist’s role in a Baroque concerto. Among the many modernizations in this arrangement, Bax significantly alters the structures of the first and third movements to feature three statements of the ritornello rather than Vivaldi’s original four, perhaps reflecting the influence of post-Baroque ternary forms. marcel tournier Images, 3ème Suite, Op. 34 Harpist-composer Marcel Tournier, like his predecessor Félix Godefroid, contributed enormously to the modern pedal harp’s repertoire. Following in a line of Paris Conservatory-trained harpists, Tournier perpetuated many of Godefroid’s technical innovations (such as the enharmonic trill or tremolo) through his compositional output
and his teaching at the Paris Conservatory from 1911 to 1951. Many of Tournier’s solo harp works are highly imaginative, making creative use of the harp’s idiomatic resources through often simple means—for example, creating unusual scales through unique pedal configurations. His music is equally valued for its pedagogical import as for its effectiveness in a concert setting. Tournier wrote four sets of Images, which were published between 1925 and 1931. Each set contains three character pieces with evocative titles reminiscent of Debussy’s piano preludes, or even of the earlier keyboard gems of Rameau and Couperin. These works place Tournier directly in line with his main compositional influences, Debussy and Ravel, and Tournier has often been called the “Ravel of the harp.” The third set of Images (1925) is the only set to venture completely outside of France, exploring the possible colors and sound worlds of Northern Africa, a fascinating and popular destination for French citizens. The three pieces in this set use familiar musical techniques of the early 20 th century— the pitch vocabulary of whole-tone and augmented-second scales in alternation with the minor mode; stratified textures and ostinato; and effervescent neoclassical harmonies—to vividly and playfully evoke the sights, sounds, and delights of a donkey ride, a fountain dance, and a rustic street celebration at sunset. luciano berio Sequenza II Luciano Berio’s fourteen Sequenzas for solo instruments are to the modern instrumental repertoire what J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied suites and partitas for violin and cello were
Notes on the Program
to earlier centuries. While Berio defined a “sequenza” as a “sequence of harmonic fields” explored throughout a solo piece, the term is now equally associated with a solo work that makes unusually virtuosic and unconventional demands on the performer. Sequenza II, composed in 1963 for the harpist Francis Pierre, follows on the heels of Sequenza I for flute (1958) and can be seen as a culmination of the unusual techniques and effects that Berio had previously explored in his harp writing for Différences (1959) and Circles (1960). Sequenza II can be understood in three broad sections. The first section can be executed rather gracefully, in reference to “classical” 19 th-century harp technique: it is mostly calm and melodic, with a few faster arpeggiations. The middle section, however, features a growing cacophony of vertical elements, making increasing use of unusual techniques: striking the soundboard, using the fingernail to pluck or to glissando, tremolos for both hands and both feet, smacking the strings, and loudly striking the soundboard immediately after plucking a string with the same finger (in imitation of the Bartók pizzicato). It is in this central section that the formative harp technique of past masters like Godefroid and Tournier, referenced in the opening section of the Sequenza, is gradually permeated, questioned, destroyed, and transformed by these more percussive, aggressive ways of playing the instrument. Berio’s desire for the performer is not a virtuosity of traditional technique per se, but what he called a “virtuosity of the mind” as the performer engages dialogically with music of all earlier eras. The harp’s traditional association with the sylphide melodies of Godefroid (and the image of
harpists as “blond wraiths,” as Berio said in an interview) is undermined for the audience, who watches the harpist’s four limbs engaged spastically in what at times appears to be a struggle against the harp. The third and final section ceases many of the unusual techniques, but the perceived tempo is even more frenetic—due in part to the rapid juxtapositions of vertical chords, unbroken, played fortissimo and then pianissimo, high on the harp and then extremely low, and muffled immediately, running counter to the harp’s “natural” principles of resonance. This texture comprises multiple layers of sound and events: amidst the violent fortissimo attacks are ringing, softer harmonics and single pitches that redirect the harmonic sequence from earlier in the Sequenza toward its closing pitch center. - Colleen Potter Thorburn
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