MONDAY, SEPT. 26, 2022 • 8 P.M.
The Ohio State University School of Music
Timashev Recital Hall
PROGRAM
Tonight’s concert is in celebration of the centennial of Allen Sapp (1922–1999), one of Ohio’s most notable composers. Sapp was a student of Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Nadia Boulanger, and began his career on the faculty of Harvard University in the 1950s. In 1961, Sapp was appointed Chair of the music department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Collaborating with Lukas Foss (then Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra), they founded the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the university, transforming Buffalo into one of the major centers for experimental music in the 1960s and 70s. In 1978, Sapp was named Dean of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and served as professor of composition there through the remainder of his career. The composer of more than 140 works in a wide variety of genres, his compositions have been performed by distinguished musicians and orchestras worldwide.
You are cordially invited to join us for the reception following the concert in the lobby, with the opportunity to meet the musicians, as well as family and former students of Allen Sapp.
Colloquies V: “The Cage of All Bright Knocks” (1986)
Allen Sapp (1922–1999)
Katherine Borst Jones, alto flute
Jiung Yoon, piano
Violin Sonata I (1942)
Allen Sapp
Kia-Hui Tan, violin
Anita Chiu, piano
Moral Maxims: 30 Songs for Thirty Years (1982)
Allen Sapp
Helen Allen, soprano
Dana Carlson-Kottke, soprano
Chelsea Hart Melcher, soprano
Jenna Hunnicutt, soprano
Annabella Petronsi, mezzo-soprano
Katherine Rohrer, mezzo-soprano
Lara Semetko-Brooks, soprano
Philip Everingham, piano
NOTES
Colloquies V: “The Cage of All Bright Knocks” was composed in 1986 while Sapp served on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. The piece was commissioned by flutist Laura Kahler, who gave the premiere performance on November 14, 1986. It is one of a set of seven compositions in Sapp’s “Colloquies” series. Each of these compositions in the Colloquies series features the piano “in conversation” with one or more other instruments. The following additional remarks are quoted from the program notes written by Sapp for the premiere performance:
All [of the Colloquies compositions] have in common: a) a theatrical character; b) conscious episodic or “moment” construction; and c) conscious relationships to contemporary drama of the allusive, concentrated, elliptical variety — Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionescu come to mind.
The Cage...is a series of episodes in a kind of one-act play, the characters changing roles often, moods even more often, and the range of conversation consciously very differentiated. There are nostalgic intimate moments, angry confrontations, irritating sermonettes, sudden inflections of calm broken by discontinuous petulance — and so it goes. There are various unifying devices, including several bits of melody which urgently return, a few colors that are used to mark time passage, and some pitch clusters (C-sharp being in the center of most of them) which keep anchoring the music to a common tonal base. The title is a remembrance of my long association with and affection for John Cage.
The title makes a playful reference to the name of the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, a significant museum of modern art in Buffalo. It was the venue for the 1968 “Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today” which was organized by Sapp and featured works and performances by John Cage among many other luminaries.
Violin Sonata I was composed in the months following the composer’s graduation from Harvard in 1942. Sapp was awarded the John Knowles Paine Fellowship that year, which normally would have paid for travel to study overseas, but this was not possible in wartime. His teacher and mentor, Walter Piston, made special arrangements for Sapp to study privately with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood in the summer of 1942, then continuing his studies with Copland in New York in the autumn of 1942. Copland also made arrangements for Sapp to study privately with Nadia Boulanger, who lived and taught in the United States during World War II. The influence of both Copland and Boulanger may be readily heard in this work, but they also perceived elements of originality. In my personal interviews with the composer, he recalled these memories of that time:
I brought over the sketches [to Copland] and he found them very interesting, and a very novel approach to the medium — clearly not at all I think the kind of fashionable Harvard stuff that he might have expected to see. I think that's what endeared me to him in part, that I had gone through that Harvard system and had emerged — and with the blessing of the Harvard people — but without the mannerisms and the idiosyncrasies of the Harvard style. It was a very fresh and spontaneous kind of music. The relative bleakness and seriousness and sobriety of the piece attracted him.
Sapp also brought the Violin Sonata to his lessons with Boulanger:
She was very pleased with it, the crispness and incisiveness that she admired ... She had very strong ... positive reactions. I expected her to be very critical. She wasn’t ... She liked my harmonic style and diatonic style at that time. She saw the Stravinsky influences and the Piston influences, and the Copland influences of course, but she sensed some originality.
There may have been several reasons why Sapp decided to begin working on his first sonata for violin and piano at this time. One may have been the strong influence of his mentor Walter Piston, who played both violin and piano and had recently composed his own Violin Sonata in 1939. Copland was also interested in the medium, as he was just beginning to conceive of his own Violin Sonata around this time (published in 1943). However, perhaps the most significant reason Sapp composed his Violin Sonata I at this time was his recent engagement to pianist Norma Bertolami, who performed frequently with her younger sister, the violinist Viviane Bertolami. Sapp dedicated his Violin Sonata I to his 16-year-old future sister-in-law, who was an extraordinarily talented young violinist that would soon begin studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. She is also the violinist who commissioned and gave the premiere performance of the Violin Concerto of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in 1952.
Sapp completed work on Violin Sonata I in January 1943, only a few days before he reported for basic training for entry into the U.S. Army. Allen and Norma married that summer while he was stationed in Virginia, just a few weeks before he was deployed to England. The first performance of Violin Sonata I was at a League of Composers concert in New York City on January 21, 1945, performed by Viviane Bertolami and Norma Bertolami Sapp. Copland and Boulanger were both in attendance, and each sent letters of congratulation to him in Europe.
Moral Maxims: 30 Songs for Thirty Years is a song cycle consisting of thirty brief songs, the shortest being only four measures long, and the longest only 52 measures. This work is dedicated to the composer’s eldest son, Christopher S. Dawson, in celebration of his thirtieth birthday in 1982. The composer includes his son’s initials “C D S” prominently in melodic figures in the first and last songs of the cycle (the pitch E-flat is spelled and pronounced “Es” in German, standing for the initial “S”). This set of miniatures is a celebration of the poetic form of the epigram, “A short poem ending in a witty or ingenious turn of thought, to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up” (Oxford English Dictionary). The texts in this song cycle are selections from Reflexions, ou, Sentences et maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1678) by François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680). Sapp set English translations of these selected epigrams from the edition Reflections & Moral Maxims of Francois duc de La Rochefoucauld (San Francisco: D. P. Elder and M. Shepard, 1902).
I. Nature makes merit, but fortune sets it to work.
II. We have not enough strength to follow all our reason.
III. Strength and weakness of mind are misnamed; they are really only the good or happy arrangement of our bodily organs.
IV. There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks of it, few persons have seen it.
V. In growing old we become more foolish — and more wise.
VI. It is great folly to wish only to be wise.
VII. Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.
VIII. Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion.
IX. Little minds are too much wounded by little things; great minds see all and are not even hurt.
X. We deceive ourselves if we believe that there are violent passions like ambition and love that can triumph over others. Idleness, languishing as she is, does not often fail in being mistress; she usurps authority over all the plans and actions of life, imperceptibly consuming and destroying both passions and virtues.
XI. Magnanimity despises all to win all.
XII. It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself.
XIII. We often go from love to ambition, but we never return from ambition to love.
XIV. Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
XV. We may forgive those who bore us, we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
XVI. However we distrust the sincerity of those whom we talk with, we always believe them more sincere with us than with others.
XVII. There is great ability in knowing how to conceal one's ability.
XVIII. When we do not find peace of mind in ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
XIX. We pardon in the degree that we love.
XX. They only are despicable who fear to be despised.
XXI. Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.
XXII. More persons exist without self-love than without envy.
XXIII. However rare true love is, true friendship is rarer.
XIV. In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
XXV. It is difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love — plus many mysteries.
XXVI. What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind.
XXVII. He is really wise who is nettled at nothing
XXVIII. As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.
XXIX. The extreme delight we take in talking of ourselves should warn us that it is not shared by those who listen.
XXX. In all professions, we affect a part and an appearance to seem what we wish to be. Thus the world is merely composed of actors.
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