Jane Bernstein
Premiered on November 22, 2015, by Tufts Chamber Orchestra for the concert Gloria, at Distler Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts Univerisity, Medford, Massachusetts.
The Suite Of Old-Style Items [Bernstein Bunch], Op. 576 (2015) for strings is dedicated to Jane Bernstein, Austin Fletcher Professor of Music, celebrating her scene-transforming 40 years at Tufts University.
- Upon Ormavoyt
- Cromatica (Interlude By Twos) [attacca]
- Alternatim (Ormavoyt Again)
- Fragments/Glow
When Jane Bernstein was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, I started searching for a way to celebrate her singular achievement with a piece of music. I had long known of Professor Bernstein’s prolific work as a scholar of sixteenth-century Italian and French music print culture, and had for some time been interested in playing and reacting to keyboard music by a number of early Italian, French, and English composers. Lo and behold, one fine Lilly Music Library day I came across a new Musica Britannica volume of Tudor keyboard music that was filled with riches new to me, and in an Appendix found some of Bernstein’s scholarly acumen applied to ‘Ormavoyt,’ a melody that ‘may have been intended for improvisation upon’ and that in turn derived from the tenor part of Guillaume Dufay’s chanson Or me veult bien ésperance mentir (circa 1470, found in the famous ‘Mellon’ chansonnier in the Yale Beinecke Library collection). I took the ‘for improvisation upon’ literally, and made a piano piece using the Dufay tenor line as a ground/cantus firmus. It was really like finding something incomplete that I could “finish” more than five hundred years later; it felt like a collaboration with Jane Bernstein (even though she hadn’t known I was doing it).
Suite Of Old-Style Items [Bernstein Bunch], a new celebration of Bernstein’s continuing achievements in her vibrant career at Tufts, opens with an orchestrated tweak of the original 2005 piano piece Upon Ormavoyt. It turns out to be an energetic, edgy, and dancelike starter for tutti archi. The suite/bunch then proceeds to Cromatica (Interlude By Twos), an abstraction of a meltingly touching passage from Girolamo Frescobaldi’s keyboard Toccata cromatica per L’Elevazione (from Fiori musicali, published in 1635). I seek a glassy, otherworldly sonority in this short movement for violins and violas only (playing two notes at a time col legno tratto); the movement is a little ode to Jane Bernstein’s husband and Frescobaldi scholar James Ladewig. Returning suddenly to Ormavoyt in Alternatim, the third little piece of the suite concentrates on bits of the cantus firmus (Dufay’s tenor line) in the low strings, offset by pizzicato comments from the violas. The suite closes with Fragments/Glow, taking yet another keyboard source as a springboard: a Fantasia by Nicolas Strowgers (composed circa 1575 and found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book [published circa 1612]). Having performed the Strowgers at the piano with short composed comments of my own before and after it, and having then transformed it as a movement for saxophone quartet, this most recent filtering feels both closer to and further abstracted from its source. A recurring upward cello solo line gives way to hesitant upper-string comments, finally working toward a more replete, “glowing” conclusion.
I hope that in outlining my thoughts for this small musical offering to Jane Bernstein, the atmosphere of musical inquiry she inspires in her colleagues and students becomes palpable. I feel fortunate to have received her generous support and musical encouragement throughout my time at Tufts, and offer this music to her in continuing gratitude. I extend thanks as well to conductor and Director of Orchestral Activities John Page, and to the Tufts Chamber Orchestra, for their enthusiastic and loving rehearsals and performance of the work.