The city known as Tremontaine, after the locale’s three mountains, was renamed Boston by English settlers who had come from Boston, Lincolnshire. The official renaming was on September 7, 1630 in the old-style calendar, which today is recognized as September 17, 1630 (More on that date “fuzziness” below in the Coda). That means that on September 17, 2030, Boston will turn 400 years old. Woohoo! That’s going to be some party!

Even though we’re 8 years away from the milestone birthday, I think all birthdays should be celebrated! To celebrate the city’s 392^nd birthday we’re saluting some classical composers who had close ties to Boston.

William Billings (1746-1800) was born in Boston to a poor family. When he was 13 or 14, his father died and William had to stop his education to apprentice to a local tanner to help feed the family. Although that became his official vocation, he spent most of his life in pursuit of a music career. It’s believed that he was largely self-taught in music, although it’s possible he received some musical training from John Barry, the choir master from the New South Church. He joined Barry as a partner in Boston in 1769 and they advertised their “singing schools” in a Boston newspaper. He also taught singing in Stoughton, MA, and in Providence, RI.

Billings composed approximately 350 songs in all, and most were religious hymns along with a few patriotic anthems. Almost all the songs were for four-part chorus, singing without any musical accompaniment. Only one hymn called for organ accompaniment, and that was a piece written to celebrate a new organ in a local church. Despite having an actual trade, plus the music career, Billings died in poverty at age 54. Due to the young country’s lack of meaningful copyright laws, many of his songs were simply appropriated by others and showed up in hymnals around the country.

One of Billings’ most famous pieces today is the Revolutionary War song, “Chester.” Paul Hillier leads His Majestie’s Clerkes.

Fun fact: the Stoughton Musical Society was founded by some of his students over 200 years ago, and still performs to this day!

Although he was born in Maine, and not in Boston, John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) had a lot to do with the city’s musical advancement. In fact, he begins a long line of composers who were dubbed the “New England Classicists,” or “The Second New England School,” or simply “The Boston Six.” Paine came from a family of music teachers and composers, and his grandfather is credited with building Maine’s first pipe organ. Paine gave organ recitals from around age 18 to fund a European music education trip. He studied music for three years, mostly in Germany, and traveled around Europe giving recitals and gaining a solid reputation as a musician.

When he returned to the United States he settled in Boston. At just 22 years old, he was appointed Harvard’s first organist and choirmaster, and helped establish the curriculum for the school’s new music department, the first college music department in the country. He stayed on as Music Professor there until 1905, and Harvard’s Paine Hall was named for him. He also served as director of the New England Conservatory, and was noted for his lecture series there. While his composing style is described as “Beethovenian,” Paine is credited with beginning America’s symphonic tradition.

Here’s Zubin Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic in Paine’s Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 23.

Fun fact: John Knowles Paine was the first guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in their first season!

WCRB always gets lots of enthusiastic phone calls from listeners who enjoy the music we play by George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931). He was born in Lowell, MA, and was given organ lessons by his older brother. When he was about 16 he dropped out of high school to work at his father’s insurance company, but when he traveled to Boston for work, he would take in concerts. That’s apparently what prompted his interest in pursuing a music career. He was accepted at the New England Conservatory where he studied organ, piano and music theory. Just four years later he became a music instructor at Olivet College in Michigan. It was there that his composition career began, but he realized that American composers needed to study in Europe in order to be taken seriously. He traveled and studied in Leipzig for 2 years, and then to Munich and France for an additional year, before returning to the States.

Although his early musical output relied on his German compositional education, one of the things Chadwick did differently from those who came before him was that he wanted to establish an “American” sounding catalog of music. For that matter, even while in Germany as a student, his Rip Van Winkle Overture included some American themes. He composed, conducted and performed as an organist to great acclaim, before being named Director of the New England Conservatory in 1897. He is credited with transforming the NEC into a respected music school in the style of German conservatories, with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra hired as teachers.

Here’s Neeme Järvi conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in the Rip Van Winkle Overture.

Fun fact: Chadwick wrote some of the most popular patriotic songs during World War I, including “Land of Our Hearts” and “The Fighting Men.”

Frederick Converse (1871-1940) was born in Newton, MA and went to Harvard, where he studied with John Knowles Paine. Like so many others intending to pursue a music career, Converse studied in Germany before returning to the United States. He taught at both the New England Conservatory and at Harvard, but eventually gave up teaching to devote himself to composition. Converse’s music blended the German compositional style with American themes; for example, he wrote “Flivver Ten Million,” a piece to celebrate the ten-millionth Ford vehicle!

Here’s JoAnn Falletta conducting the piece with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Fun fact: The first American opera to be performed at the original Metropolitan Opera House in New York was Converse’s The Pipe of Desire in 1910. But that was four years after it premiered in Boston at NEC’s Jordan Hall!

Boston’s history is rich with many cultural advancements, including in the music world. William Billings, John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick and Frederick Converse are but a few of the American composers with ties to the city. You can be sure others will be celebrated in blog posts leading up to Boston’s 400^th! Meantime, happy birthday, Boston!

Coda: OK… so why does Boston have 2 September birthdays? Here’s the explanation right from the Boston.gov website.

This text is an expanded version of the article originally published (in Estonian translation) by Sirp, 16 September 2022.

An extreme example of disorientation caused by juxtaposition – first glimpsed in Erkki-Sven Tüür‘s Symphony No. 1 (in both its original and revised versions) – occurs in the opening part of his Symphony No. 2 (1987). Titled ‘Vision’, the first movement is filled with strangeness – a mixture of rumble and distant activity – where the only clear sound is a bell. This continues for a couple of minutes, until dissonant trumpets suddenly appear from nowhere, heralding an enormous crash, causing the full orchestra to launch into a loud, relentlessly busy, extended sequence. The effect is like an inversion of the beginning of Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie, with something like a black sun suddenly exploding into view. The only stable aspect of this sequence is a deep drone far below, holding in place the chaos above. After a few minutes, everything subsides, arriving at a similar music to the start, soft and distant, with rumbles below. We end up asking the same question as in the middle movement of Symphony No. 1, though even more forcefully: what the hell just happened?

Tüür doesn’t so much answer that question as provide a second movement that pushes the idea of juxtaposition to even further extremes. Titled ‘Process’, over the course of its 20-minute duration the music veers wildly between material that can be described as either clear or ambiguous. But which is which? The fast, rhythmic (somewhat minimalistic) material seems to provide certainty, but Tüür often gives it the power and subtlety of a piledriver, complicating it with explosive accents, aggressive repetitions, and harsh clusters. Likewise, the quiet, slithery material at first seems nebulous and unclear, though its gentleness ensures that all the edges are soft, making it sound more tangible and focused.

The reality is that these opposite forms of material are, in different ways, both ambiguous and clear at the same time, which makes the result of their juxtaposition all the more disorienting. (This is despite the fact that, as in the first movement, the different sections of the movement tend to be harmonically static, with their underlying ‘tonic’ often clearly audible.) What Tüür does with the juxtaposition in this movement could hardly be more basic: he simply keeps it going. As the minutes pass, far from familiarity bringing relief, this complex mingling of extreme but confusing contrasts starts to feel more and more overwhelming, surrounding us on all sides with a violent, volatile music that resists our efforts to predict or understand. This is another important characteristic of Tüür’s symphonic writing; similarly long and intense periods of radical juxtaposition appear on multiple occasions in the later symphonies.

Symphony No. 2 was the first of Tüür’s symphonies to be commercially recorded. Performed by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Mägi, it was originally released on Melodiya in 1988. This recording was reissued by Finlandia Records in 1994 and Apex in 2003. Though long out of print, second-hand copies of both of these CDs are available online.

In both of these early symphonies, Tüür’s approach can be thought of as an oscillating juxtaposition, alternating between highly contrasting ideas. (Indeed, even the titles of the two movements in Symphony No. 2 are stark contrasts: the involuntary passivity of a ‘Vision’ answered by the deliberate activity of a ‘Process’.) In Symphony No. 3 (1997), however, this approach is developed into a parallel juxtaposition, where contrasting ideas are presented simultaneously. However, it is not immediately obvious that this is where the music is going.

In the first movement, ‘Contextus I’, Tüür takes time setting up a variety of discrete ideas, including a kind of ‘ghost jazz’, filled with soft suspended cymbal strikes and a network of pizzicati; a cloud of rapid, individual woodwind lines; boisterous, dissonant brass; and rhythmic strings with a strange, distant rising or falling, followed either by more winds or a vibraphone solo. It’s the strings that prevail from this steady presentation of ideas, though shortly after Tüür starts to layer up the ideas, placing them side by side, to the extent that the juxtapositions become convoluted and blurred, no longer merely oscillating or interrupting but overlapping and giving the distinct impression of ideas in conflict, pushing against each other.

He explores something similar in the second movement, ‘Contextus II’. Initially, the juxtapositions oscillate between another busy wind texture – by now a firmly established trope in Tüür’s symphonies, prominently occurring in almost all of them – and a slow-moving, octave-doubled string line. At a similar point to the previous movement, additional ideas appear and again start to be heard in parallel, jostling together in a way that starts to feel uncomfortable, most obviously in the collision between lyrical strings and punchy brass. Yet while the nature of this parallel juxtaposition suggests friction and discord, Tüür nonetheless retains the possibility that, being in parallel, the contrasting ideas are not necessarily impacting upon or otherwise affecting each other. They could possibly be simply adjacent parts in a wildly incongruous chorus. As such, the word ‘Contextus’ could simply refer to the way we keep perceiving these discrete ideas differently depending on the ever-changing (clear or ambiguous) context.

While the juxtapositional approach used in Symphony No. 3 becomes more convoluted than before, it nonetheless consolidates the fundamental nature of Tüür’s contrasting ideas, established in the first two symphonies, tending either toward clarity (often melodic or rhythmic) or ambiguity.

Symphony No. 3 was released by ECM in 1999 in a recording by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies; though nearly 25 years old, it is still in print and readily available.

In both Symphony No. 4 (2002) and No. 5 (2004), Tüür continues these ideas within a relationship between soloists and the orchestra. Subtitled ‘Magma’, Symphony No. 4 also suggests ideas playing out in parallel, here seemingly unaffecting each other, with the solo percussionist (a part originally composed for Evelyn Glennie) riding on top of them, either wildly embellishing these ideas or following her own path in the foreground.

When writing about this symphony following its performance at the 2018 Estonian Music Days, i commented on the “vast volcanic scale of the work [and] the sense of awe that it projected”. In no small part this is due to the several occasions when Tüür again allows his convoluted juxtapositions to continue for long periods of time, making it easy to feel not just awestruck, but also lost in the midst of such a welter of simultaneous, and therefore only half-tangible, trains of thought. Importantly, though, the soloist’s role at times acts as a foil to this disorientation, either as a locus of stability in the midst of apparent chaos or as a catalyst for partial or complete orchestral clarity. The work thereby demonstrates a subtle but significant shift in Tüür’s use of juxtaposition, now enabling – via the soloist – the possibility of collaboration between the symphony’s contrasting elements.

A recording of Symphony No. 4 ‘Magma’ by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Järvi, with the work’s dedicatee Evelyn Glennie as percussionist, was released by Virgin Classics in 2007. This disc is out of print but copies can still be found.

Symphony No. 5 features an electric guitar soloist in addition to an entire big band as a concertante group. The concept of contrasts is expanded here to encompass both notated and improvised music as well as stylistic differences. Continuing the idea of juxtapositional collaboration heard in Symphony No. 4, Tüür has referred to this coming together of diverse elements from jazz, rock and classical as “trilateral negotiations in a constructive atmosphere”. That description suggests openness, perhaps even sympathy, though the reality is more complex and argumentative.

Indeed, the first movement is not far being a shouting match, with the strings, winds, brass and band all having their own, entirely separate, gestural ideas, the music being the turbulent result of them all being thrown together in close proximity. Again it falls to a soloist to facilitate unity, which comes with the grand entrance of the electric guitar at the start of the second movement. Its extensive solo, essentially silencing everyone else, at first seems like a red herring, being yet another contrasting element with no obvious connection. But it proves catalytic; immediately thereafter there’s a sense of the orchestral sections (principally, at this point, strings and winds) acting with regard to each other. Having been silent, the band comes to the fore in a showcase third movement, now supported and embellished by the orchestra. This is extended through the final movement, leading to music full of confident swagger, though once again Tüür demonstrates his willingness to effortlessly brush aside bold, powerful ideas in favour of much less assertive material, in this case arriving in a dark place full of unsettling, hovering chords, with guitar notes sliding strangely in the middle distance.

Symphony No. 5 was released by Ondine in 2014 in a recording featuring Nguyên Lê on electric guitar and the UMO Jazz Orchestra alongside the Helskinki Philharmonic, conducted by Olari Elts.