Steven Stucky
Born November 7, 1949 in Hutchinson, Kansas.
Silent Spring (2011)
WORLD PREMIERE
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
APPROXIMATE DURATION: 17 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION: piccolo, three flutes, alto flute, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, piano (doubling celesta), strings.
Steven Stucky is one of America’s most highly regarded and frequently performed composers. Born in Hutchinson, Kansas on November 7, 1949 and raised in Abilene, Texas, he studied at Baylor and Cornell universities, where his teachers in composition included Richard Willis, Robert Palmer, Karel Husa and Burrill Phillips. Stucky taught at Lawrence University in Wisconsin from 1978 to 1980, and has since been on the faculty of Cornell University, where he founded the new music group Ensemble X and is now Given Foundation Professor of Composition; he has also taught at the Aspen Festival, Eastman School of Music and University of California at Berkeley.
Stucky’s compositions have been widely performed throughout the United States and abroad by leading chamber ensembles and symphony orchestras, and he has fulfilled commissions from the orchestras of Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Singapore, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Baltimore, Cincinnati and St. Louis, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yale University, Boston Musica Viva, Cornell University and other distinguished organizations. He was one of ten composers selected internationally to contribute a work to the centennial celebration of New York’s Carnegie Hall; Angelus was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in that celebrated auditorium on September 27, 1990. Stucky was Composer-in-Residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1988 to 2009, and hosted the New York Philharmonic’s Hear & Now concert series from 2005 until 2009. His other residencies include the American Academy in Rome, Princeton University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotà, Colombia, Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and National University of the Arts in Taipei.
In addition to composing, Stucky is also active as a conductor, writer, lecturer and contributor to music journals in America and Britain; he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for his 1981 book, Lutosławski and His Music. Among his other honors are the ASCAP Victor Herbert Prize and First Prize from the American Society of University Composers, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2005, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Second Concerto for Orchestra. He is a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, chair of the American Music Center, a board member of the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The composer writes, “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was serialized in The New Yorker beginning in June 1962, then published in book form that September. It was not the celebrated marine biologist’s first bestseller: that had been The Sea Around Us in 1951. But with Silent Spring, the Pittsburgh-area native and Chatham College alumna galvanized public opinion and earned a permanent place in twentieth-century American history. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with the Rachel Carson Institute is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication by commissioning this new work for orchestra.
“Those years around 1960 saw an intense intersection between scientific progress and public discourse: the incontrovertible link between smoking and lung cancer (first established in 1950, but widely known a few years later); the first manned space flights in 1961 by Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepherd; the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963. The world view of my own generation, just coming of age in those years, was strongly shaped by these discourses, including of course the one about conservation and the environment, still ongoing, that Rachel Carson helped so forcefully to launch.
“I was delighted, therefore, to be asked to create this musical tribute. But I was perplexed, too: how to make a connection between science and music, or more to the point between her science and my music? I reread Silent Spring and Carson’s other work, and I reveled again in the distinctive mixture of hard science and eloquent lyricism that defines her voice. But how to make music about that?
“I didn’t try to. Instead, I gathered together four of Carson’s own titles: The Sea Around Us; The Lost Wood and Rivers of Death (both chapter titles in Silent Spring); and Silent Spring itself. With these phrases as cues, I could fashion a one-movement orchestral tone poem in four sections that tries to create its own dramatic and emotional journey from beginning to end, without referring specifically to any scientific details.
“The result is music at once ‘abstract’ and ‘programmatic’ (admittedly fuzzy terms). The Sea Around Us is murky water music: it rises from the depths of the orchestra until it reaches a grand but melancholy chorale evoking the vast expanses of the sea. The Lost Wood calls forth a desolate chaconne (i.e., a set of variations over a cyclic chord progression). The somber atmosphere grows more and more intense until it leads to a short, scathing scherzo, Rivers of Death. This diabolical ‘death scherzo,’ too, escalates until it cannot go any further, instead bursting into the ecstatic mass singing that begins the final section, Silent Spring. But — like the insects and birds that Rachel Carson wrote about — one by one those ecstatic orchestral voices fall quiet. We are left with near-silence.
“Rachel Carson’s trenchant writing gave us facts and figures, gave us marching orders, gave us the heart to change some of our habits. But, like all great writing, it also gave us the spiritual and psychological space in which to contemplate our own thoughts about the world around us, about our own place in that world, about our own hopes and fears. Music can aspire to do the same. It cannot — should not attempt to — explain, preach, proselytize, comment on external life. Its domain is emotional life, not ‘real’ life. It is non-specific, non-semantic, non-representational. But music aspires to (and my Silent Spring aspires to) grant us access to our deepest emotional planes, to that region where — beyond words, beyond numbers, beyond theories and proofs — we live our fullest lives.” |