Anna Clyne: Looking Glass

  I. Tempo giusto
 II. Allegretto
III. Con moto

Commissioned in 1937 by the American diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss as an anniversary present, Stravinsky’s Chamber Concerto in E♭ Dumbarton Oaks is named for the couple’s historic estate in Washington D.C.

In 1944, the estate played host to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, at which the plans for the founding of the United Nations were laid; as a result, one might associate the concerto with the three decades Stravinsky spent living in North America. In fact, Dumbarton Oaks was to be the last work he composed while living in Europe, and stylistically the genesis of the piece had strong roots in France.

While Stravinsky has been described by the celebrated musicologist Richard Taruskin as a composer who was an ‘outsider to all traditions of West and East alike’, between about 1920 and 1950 his musical language was part of a Parisian revival of neoclassical ideals shared by artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. Pithily encapsulated by Jean Cocteau as demanding a ‘call to order’ (rappel à l'ordre), this artistic movement rejected the avant-garde work of the pre-war years in favour of a return to what they saw as Classical rationality.

Stravinsky’s piece fits into this neoclassical outlook, with the work being inspired by the Baroque concerto grosso form and especially the model of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. But, as Stephen Walsh writes, over the course of the work the music gradually departs from these models, with its imagery becoming ‘fragmentary and kaleidoscopic’.

Stravinsky himself was unable to conduct the private premiere performance, having been hospitalised with tuberculosis – so instead this role was taken by Nadia Boulanger, one of the foremost pedagogues of the twentieth century, who had also brokered the commission.

Alongside contemporaries such as Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák is considered one of the foremost nineteenth-century Czech nationalist composers. In 1891, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Dvořák was faced with a difficult decision: Jeannette Thurber, the president of America’s National Conservatory of Music, offered him a teaching job in New York. Accepting the position would increase his salary by a factor of 25, but would also require him to leave his beloved Bohemia behind. Dvořák had already achieved significant renown in the United States (his music had been performed there since 1879) and ultimately he chose to take the job, bringing his family with him.

Thurber, who was one of the first major American music patrons and was strongly invested in the task of establishing a national musical culture for the still-young nation, had selected Dvořák for the post because she felt his skill as a nationalist composer could be turned to the establishment of an American musical voice. She had founded the National Conservatory in 1885, a mere two decades after the end of the Civil War, and she cultivated a radically progressive environment at the institution: it actively welcomed women, people of colour, and those with disabilities, sometimes offering them full scholarships.

It was in this environment that Dvořák began to search for an American musical language. He asked a Black student, Henry Thacker Burleigh, to teach him spirituals and plantation songs from the South, and requested transcriptions of native American melodies from the music critic Henry Krehbiel.

Various musical elements that Dvořák borrowed from these examples (or perhaps more accurately, those that he imagined to represent these traditions) found their way into the String Quartet No. 12 in F major, subtitled “The American” – which he composed in just 72 hours whilst on holiday in Spillville, Iowa. The opening viola solo is based on a pentatonic scale, and elsewhere in the work, folk elements are represented by static drone accompaniments, repetitive rhythmic figures, plagal cadences, and flattened leading notes. And while such folk elements could be read as American, they share much in common with Czech and other Slavic folk traditions too; commentators have noted the similarity, for instance, between the opening melody and accompaniment of the “American” quartet and Smetana’s Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life”. Dvořák’s quartet thus represents a synthesis of these two national identities.

This piece is based on the premise of trying to conceal something that invokes discomfort, which only grows stronger under its suppression. This discomfort comes in the form of a motif that first appears in bar 20. Its outbursts become more frequent, and the subsequent reactions grow increasingly violent. As the parts try to repeat the opening phrase, they find they cannot do so without the motif interrupting it.

The quartet tries a change of tempo and feel, but to no avail – the motif insidiously wriggles its way into the repetitive texture. After the music forces itself to calm down (with a simulation of deep breathing), the opening theme is repeated, tentative and foreboding. 
  
The motif then returns in the second violin, invoking the most violent outburst of all. The instruments all whip themselves into a frenzy, ending with the theme’s pitches disintegrating into a cauldron of chaos. Finally, the troubles can be put to rest, and the music ends peacefully.

Despite this analysis, I like to think of this as having what Laurence Kramer calls a hermeneutic window - the listener may draw their own allegories depending on whatever they feel from the music.

© Alexander McNamee

Looking Glass explores light through music as it reflects and refracts on surfaces. The string quartet, which is not electronically augmented, is expanded through the orchestration of the sinfonietta ensemble around them. This acoustic padding from the sinfonietta ensemble is further extended by the live electronic processing that forms the Augmented Orchestra.

Used in literature by the world-renowned author Lewis Carroll, a looking glass can also be viewed as a metaphor for entering a surreal, unfamiliar, and often reversed world, much like looking into a mirror where everything is distorted and upside down.

This is a musical imaginary landscape that is both mysterious and playful, inviting the listener into its world.

© Anna Clyne

Anna Clyne is a 2025/6 Cultural Programme Visiting Fellow in association with New College, Oxford.

Looking Glass is commissioned by John Kongsgaard, Chamber Music in Napa Valley.

Aaron Copland is often remembered as one of the pioneers of a distinctly American compositional voice – and it was through a string of works with a patriotic and popular tone in the late 1930s and early 1940s that he first acquired this reputation. He wrote that he was attempting to find a musical style that could express what he wanted to say in the ‘simplest possible terms’, while also reaching out to a ‘new public [that] had grown up around radio and the phonograph’.

Appalachian Spring was composed for the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1944, and was explicitly inspired by Graham’s ‘restrained, simple yet strong’ style of choreography. Set in rural Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century, the ballet is love story told against the backdrop of the American frontier, and it evokes this context through the incorporation of local musical flavours such as square dances and country fiddle-playing.

Stylistically, the work is remarkably light in its textures: often there is only one clear musical voice operating at any given time, creating an aesthetic of simplicity. This is buttressed by the use of straightforward and diatonic harmonic language throughout.  

The seventh movement, which is a theme and variations on the Shaker tune Simple Gifts, is surely the most well-known portion of the work – and Joseph Brackett’s original text for that tune, which begins ‘‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free’, chimes well with Copland’s artistic ethos. At the time of the work’s premiere, Simple Gifts was virtually unknown outside Shaker communities – but the tune achieved immense popularity in 1963, when it was adapted by the English songwriter Sydney Carter into the well-known hymn Lord of the Dance.

Appalachian Spring won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, and it remains one of Copland’s best-loved works.