Defiance

Varium cæli (2019)
by Osnat Netzer (b. Haifa, Israel, 1979)

Israeli-American composer Osnat Netzer, who currently teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, wrote this brief work for string orchestra on commission from the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, which gave the first performance, under the direction of Mei-Ann Chen, in Houston on September 27, 2019. The composer has offered the following comments on her piece:

Varium cæli could be translated as “changeable weather,” “changing sky,” or even “different air.” I sketched out the plan for the piece over a weekend with friends in Vermont during which the weather rapidly oscillated between warm and sunny and cool and stormy. We laughed that this is typical New England… but even for New England, it was unusually fickle and unpredictable. Though not fit weather for a hike or a swim, it was great weather for staying in and composing.

The various meanings of the Latin seemed appropriate: “different air” was fitting as I wrote Varium cæli a mere three weeks before moving from Boston, where I’ve lived for many years, to Chicago, to start a new life. “Changing sky” is literally the experience of that Vermont weekend, and “changeable weather” reflects my preoccupation with climate change while writing the piece. When I received a commission from ROCO, I was told that the theme of the concert on which the piece would premiere is “Time for Hope.” My hope springs from the actions I take to bring about the changes I want to see in the world. Hope without action is not hope at all; it is complacency. With this in mind, I’ve decided to donate 20% of my commission fee to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Lamentation on the Disasters of War after etchings by Francisco de Goya (2006)
by Karim Al-Zand (Tunis, Tunisia, 1970)

Born in Tunisia, Karim Al-Zand grew up in Canada and is a long-time faculty member at Rice University in Houston. Lamentation on the Disasters of War, originally for string sextet, received its premiere on April 30, 2006, at Houston’s Zilkha Hall. The Enso String Quartet was joined by violist Katherine Lewis and cellist Valdine Ritchie. The string-orchestra version was premiered by the Chicago-based Fulcrum Point Ensemble directed by Stephen Burns.

The composer has written the following commentary on his work:

Lamentation on The Disasters of War is a string sextet based on Francisco de Goya’s harrowing engravings of the Napoleonic wars in 1808 Spain. It was composed in 2006 as a response to the US invasion of Iraq, a country where members of my family still reside. The work is an elegy for the victims of war, and a plea for peace in our time. A version for string orchestra also exists.

Napoleon’s incursion into Spain in the year 1808 marked the beginning of a brutal and ultimately futile war. Though the French army was the world’s superpower, the following six years of bloody conflict proved that even “the most determined of invaders, equipped with strong armies and copious intelligence about its enemy, can make myopic blunders that seem close to madness.” Napoleon’s ill-fated decision to march on Spain was in part a product of his own arrogance, which did not allow him to foresee the resistance his occupation would inspire. As he wrote to one of his senior officers, he found the Spanish people “vile and cowardly, about the same as I found the Arabs to be” and he was convinced that when he brought “the words liberty, freedom from superstition, destruction of the nobility, I will be welcomed…You will see how they think of me as the liberator of Spain.”

Among other things, the war brought a new word into the military lexicon: guerrilla. Bands of insurgents operated out of the mountains, continuously sapping the French forces of both manpower and morale through kidnapping, torture, execution and public displays of mutilation. The civilian population of Spain was brutalized by both sides in the conflict, caught in a cycle of “oppression and outrage, atrocity and counter-atrocity; pillage, marauding, starvation, maiming, torture and murder.” They were beaten and raped by soldiers, terrorized and executed as traitorous sympathizers and driven from their homes by unremitting violence and bloodshed. Eventually thousands fled; their towns and cities conquered and re-conquered, houses burned and razed, churches looted and defiled. The ongoing military campaign also caused a devastating and widespread famine. In all, tens of thousands died. Eventually Napoleon was ousted and the Spanish monarchy was restored, only to usher in a new era of ruthless and despotic rule under Ferdinand VII.

Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) produced the series of 82 etchings known as The Disasters of War during the period from 1812 to 1820. The work is both a response to the horrific conflict he witnessed and a commentary on the ravages of war in general. What distinguishes The Disasters of War from earlier treatments of bellicose subjects is the unflinching realism of its portrayal (it almost serves as a kind of documentary, eye-witness account) and Goya’s refusal to see either side in the conflict as having absolute moral superiority. The imagery is dark and violent, its message profoundly pessimistic.

Lamentation on the Disasters of War uses some 30 of Goya’s etchings, which can be projected behind the ensemble before the performance. While the composition is inspired by Goya’s work, it does not attempt to literally portray the events and actions depicted in the images. The piece is dedicated to my late cousin Husam Al-Zand (1966–2005) who was tragically killed in Iraq last year; to his surviving wife and children; and to the rest of my courageous family in Baghdad. Peace be upon them.

PROTEST MEDLEY (Arranged by Mike Blankenship)
“No More” (1970) by The Lumpen (active 1970-72)
“Talking ‘bout the Revolution” (1988) by Tracy Chapman (b. Cleveland, 1964)
“I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)” (2002) by Lauryn Hill (b. East Orange, New Jersey, 1975)

Funk, folk-rock and neo soul meet the symphony with these three great hits from the 1970s, ‘80s and early 2000s, all three carrying a strong political message.

The short-lived band The Lumpen, formed by members of the Black Panther Party, was formed in Oakland. One of their most memorable concerts, with the participation of Muhammad Ali and Curtis Mayfield, was performed at San Quentin, where the performance was interrupted by the prison guards. “No More,” written by band member Bill Calhoun, shows a strong blues influence; it was one of two songs The Lumpen recorded on a 45-rpm record released by Black Panther Party Productions.

Tracy Chapman’s “Talking ‘bout the Revolution,” written when Chapman was still in high school, became one of the most influential American protest songs of all time and spent many weeks at the top of the charts.

Lauryn Hill’s “I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)” was written in memory of Amadou Diallo, a young man from Guinea who became a victim of mistaken identity when he was fatally shot by police in New York City on February 4, 1999. Hill first released the song in 2002, and presented it in a new version in 2016, after several more tragic killings of Black people at the hands of the police.

Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905,” Op. 103, 1956-57)
by Dmitri Shostakovich (St. Petersburg, 1906 – Moscow, 1975)

On January 9, 1905 (January 22 by the Gregorian calendar), a peaceful demonstration of workers and peasants appeared in front of the Winter Palace, the Czar’s residence in St. Petersburg. They wished to hand Nicholas II a petition, asking the monarch to alleviate their economic conditions, which had become unbearable. The Czar’s guards began to shoot at the crowd, killing hundreds. The event, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” set off widespread strikes and protests all over the country.

The Soviet regime regarded these atrocities as a prelude to the two revolutions of 1917 (February and October), the first of which overthrew the Czarist regime and the second brought the Bolsheviks to power. The year 1905, therefore, played an important part in the Communist narrative. Yet, regardless of any Party ideology, the brutality of those shootings had to arouse the deepest revulsion in any sensitive human being, and the program of Shostakovich’s symphony carries a deeper message. Some writers have alleged that, while the composer was ostensibly concerned with the events of 1905 (in which his own grandfather had taken part), what he may really have been thinking about was the Hungarian revolution of 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks shortly before the symphony was written. In the end, the music is a denunciation of all tyrants, and a requiem for victims of violence everywhere.

In this symphony, Shostakovich took special pains to make sure his message was clear to every listener. He adapted many of the symphony’s principal themes from songs of the workers’ movement–songs that every resident of the Soviet Union learned to sing in school, as well as from his own work for mixed chorus, Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets, Op. 88 (1951). He wove these themes together in a complex tapestry, subjecting them to substantial transformations, and bringing them back repeatedly, sometimes in their original form and sometimes with changes, in the course of the symphony’s four movements, which are played without pause.

Here is a partial list of the quotations Shostakovich used in the symphony:

Listen, a prisoner’s song (“Like an act of betrayal, like a tyrant’s conscience, the night is dark”).
The Prisoner, another prisoner’s song (“…but the walls of the prison are strong, fastened at the gate by two iron locks”).
Worker’s Funeral March (“You fell a victim in the fateful battle, with selfless love for the people…”)
Rage, Tyrants (“Rage, tyrants, mock us….although our bodies are trampled, we are stronger in spirit–shame, shame, shame to you, tyrants!”)
Varshavianka (“Hostile whirlwinds swirl around us…We have entered into fateful battle with our enemies, our destinies are still unknown.”)
Bright Lights: A quote from the then-popular Soviet operetta by Georgi Sviridov, combined with the famous revolutionary march Boldly, Comrades, Keep Step!
Movement 6 from Shostakovich’s Ten Poems, on words by Arkady Kots (1872-1943), titled “January 9” (“Bare your heads”).

With these diverse building blocks, Shostakovich created a veritable opera without words. The symphony portrays not just emotions and musical characters but definite places and actions. (It is no coincidence that the symphony was later choreographed with great success in Russia.) The eerie opening, where the slow-moving melody is played in five parallel octaves by muted strings, is a striking depiction of the motionless Palace Square on an ice-cold January day. This frozen image will return several times as a powerful contrast to the intense drama unfolding in the second movement. The contrast between motion and immobility is one of Shostakovich’s main dramatic strategies in this work: the delirious activity in the second and fourth movements is offset by the calm, yet extremely tense music in the first and third.

The slow first movement (“The Palace Square”) sets the stage for the drama, with the glacial string theme, a trumpet call that turns into a wail, a hint at the Orthodox response “Lord have mercy on us,” and the two prison songs (Nos. 1-2 in the above list). It clearly represents “silence before the storm,” and the storm indeed breaks out in the second movement (“The Ninth of January”). Against an agitated accompaniment in the lower strings, we hear a new theme, played softly at first and then rising in volume until a full orchestral fortissimo is reached. During a momentary respite, the “Bare your heads” theme is heard briefly, played by the first trumpet, before the earlier melody returns, building to an even more powerful climax than before. All this is, however, only a prelude to what follows. After a brief recall of the “frozen” opening of the first movement, the most violent section of the symphony begins: a ferocious fugue, started by cellos and basses, and rapidly escalating into a graphic depiction of sheer horror, with the entire orchestra pounding on a single rhythm of equal notes, at top volume and (for most instruments) in a high register. This is certainly the moment where the Czarist guards open fire. The first-movement image of the empty Palace Square then returns, as an image of “silence after the storm.”

The Russian title of the third movement, “Vechnaia pamiat” (“Eternal Memory”), alludes to a funeral chant of the Orthodox church. But its actual melodic basis is the Worker’s Funeral March (No. 3), played by the violas to the sparsest of accompaniments. A second, less subdued section and leads to an impassioned passage where the entire orchestra shrieks out the “Bare your heads” theme in what seems a flashback of the past atrocities. No. 3 returns and the mood becomes calmer, but soon we hear the “tocsin” (the alarm bells) with a new call to battle as the fourth and last movement begins. The relentless march rhythms of Nos. 4 and 5 grow more and more furious until, finally, they are swept aside by another memory of the horrors, played powerfully by the whole orchestra. The glacial string music of the first movement returns, complemented by a long English-horn solo based on “Bare your heads,” before the final upsurge that, with its musical material taken from the second movement, seems to suggest that the struggle is not over.

It is hardly the optimistic conclusion that one would associate with a piece celebrating Soviet political ideas. For all the revolutionary songs Shostakovich used, there were enough disturbing overtones in the work for some to perceive, or at least suspect, a hidden underground meaning. According to one story, Shostakovich’s son Maxim, the future conductor who was nineteen at the time, whispered into his father’s ear during the dress rehearsal: “Papa, what if they hang you for this?” And the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, said, when asked what she thought of all those revolutionary quotations: “[They] were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.” The Eleventh Symphony has been called both a piece of Communist propaganda and a coded anti-Communist tract. It is neither: it is a complex, dark score of exceptional dramatic power that is about struggle and suffering in a universal sense.