Frenzied Tango

Of the third movement Fugue, Ives’s program says only that it is “an expression of the reaction of life into formalism and ritualism.” … [It is] the kind of piece Ives used to play Sunday after Sunday at the organ. This particular one, transferred from the First String Quartet to the Fourth Symphony, is in a way the most revolutionary movement of all. …

The Fugue precedes in much the same gentle, beautiful way it did in the Quartet, now fleshed out in color with basses, flute, and clarinet, and with horns entering periodically in the manner of a [J.S.] Bach chorale prelude. … It ends nearly as did the original, but with the addition of a delicate shadow line in clarinet, and a trombone playing a fragment of “Joy to the World”: And heav’n and nature sing … repeat the sounding joy. … Ives found that joy in a New England church, in the revealed religion he called in the Essays “the path between God and man’s spiritual part — a kind of formal causeway.” Here that causeway is symbolized by the formal tradition of the fugue. The country church is not the end of the Pilgrim’s journey, but for Ives it is a critical stopping place.

— Jan Swafford, writing on Ives’s Fourth Symphony in Charles Ives: A Life with Music (1996) 

You’ll often hear composers speak of the “materials” of a piece. The word is useful in that it encompasses everything from notes and harmonies to timbres and techniques. It’s also a dodge; we use it to cast our music in a more objective light, as if it were simply something to be assembled like flat-packed furniture. So the “tunes” in this piece are a corrective — a challenge to myself to come clean about my intentions and influences, rather than approach them sideways, as pure abstractions.

Primary among those intentions was to write a concerto that would speak to the style and expertise of its soloist, the pianist Aaron Diehl. Aaron is a musician who takes a wide view of American musical history, a tradition that is, in a sense, made of tunes: early hymnody, folk songs, parlor songs, work songs, the blues, and ragtime are the roots of its family tree. I’ve always been fascinated by this protean admixture, in which sacred and secular, art and kitsch, mainstream and recondite bump up against each other. (The title Made of Tunes is drawn from the song “The Things Our Fathers Loved” by Charles Ives, a composer who shared this fascination.)

Aaron’s part includes opportunities for improvisation, sections in which I pass him a tune, or a rhythm, or a harmony, and he responds with something I wouldn’t have thought of. The boundary between the piece’s improvised and notated music is often intentionally blurry, the soloist’s excursions catching the tail of an idea and elaborating further, before handing it back.

The first movement, Come, Labor On, counterposes hymnody and motor. Taking its main tune and title from Thomas Tertius Noble’s hymn (which I remember singing as a child — one of my first experiences of four-part harmony), the form is a slow-fast-slow palindrome. After a stately orchestral introduction, the soloist instigates rhythmic drama, introducing an ostinato pattern perforated by emphatic cross-rhythms. After a huge orchestral pileup, under which organ and brass play an entire hymn verse in elaborate harmony, the movement ends with a piano-led recapitulation of the introduction.

The second movement, American Nocturnal, is a series of six variations on an original theme, derived from smashing the melody notes of the hokey patriotic tune “America the Beautiful” into a series of expanding and contracting intervals. (The original tune is never heard.) The movement is dominated by expressive exchanges between piano and wind soloists. Each variation ends with a low orchestral rumble, longer and more threatening with each iteration, until, in the sixth variation, it overwhelms the soloist, who finishes the piece in a ruminative daze, accompanied by distant saxophone echoes of the first movement.

— Timo Andres

Frenzy is a one-movement symphony that, in the course of its 20 minutes, encompasses a variegated yet unified symphonic structure. Its title notwithstanding, the piece is generally buoyant and extroverted and postpones its real frenetic energy to the concluding moments. What makes Frenzy unique in comparison to my other works is its focus, almost to the point of obsession, on the development and transformation of small, vivid motives that continue to resurface in various guises throughout the piece. This kind of classic development treatment of motivic ideas — the German term Durchführung is familiar to most musicians — differs from the gradual “change-via-repetition” technique in my earlier, minimalist-influenced works. In fact, once completed, Frenzy revealed itself, much to the surprise of its composer, as a melding of the two approaches toward musical form. On the one hand, its rhythmic event horizon is still essentially pulse-driven while on the other its melodic world is about shapeshifting and the “spinning out” of ideas.

The opening bars present two contrasting gestures: a punctuated tattoo in the winds and brass and an urgent, muscular theme in the upper strings. Both these ideas reappear throughout the piece, always transformed in one way or another and yet always identifiable.

In place of a “slow movement” the music’s surface simply quiets down; density and forcefulness yield to feelings of lightness and transparency. The pulse is still there, now carried along by a congenial interplay among the two harps and celesta while the strings limn a lyrical melody that floats above them.

The final section is indeed frenetic, with hard-driven, choppy string figures, tsunami-like waves of brass, and madly scurrying woodwinds, all of which come together to earn the piece’s title.

Frenzy is dedicated to my longtime friend Simon Rattle, who conducted the first performance with the London Symphony Orchestra in March of 2024.

— John Adams

I arrived at Nadia [Boulanger]’s house with a suitcase full of scores, the complete classical oeuvre I had written to that point. Nadia spent the first two weeks analyzing the work. “To teach you,” she said. “I first must know where your music is going.”

One day, finally, she told me that everything I had brought with me was well written but that she could not find the spirit in it. She asked me what music I played in my country, what I wanted to do. I had not told her about my past as a tango musician, much less that my instrument, the bandoneon, was in the closet in my room in Paris.

I thought to myself: if I tell her the truth she will throw me out the window. … But after two days I had to tell her the truth. I told her I made my living arranging for tango orchestras. …

Nadia looked into my eyes and asked me to play one of my tangos at the piano. So I confessed to her that I played bandoneon; I told her she shouldn’t expect a good piano player because I wasn’t. She insisted, "It doesn’t matter, Astor, play your tango." And I started out with Triunfal. When I finished, Nadia took my hands in hers and with that English of hers, so sweet, she said, "Astor, this is beautiful. I like it a lot. Here is the true Piazzolla — do not ever leave him." It was the greatest revelation of my musical life.

— Astor Piazzolla recalls his studies with the French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir (1990)