Cygnus Ensemble

Cygnus is now collecting notes from all the composers whose works are on this program.

Necessary facts:

Ruskin 

David Lang's opera Modern Painters is a sendup of the Victorian critic John Ruskin.  Ruskin put the Pre-Raphaelites on the map. 

Pound 

Richard Wilson's Visits to St. Elizabeth's is a setting of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop.  The poem is about Ezra Pound, who narrowly escaped a capital sentence after the WWII.  Throughout the war Pound was flaunting his fascist sympathies while living in Rapallo Italy.  He almost converted Yeats to fascism.  When faced with his death sentence many great poets intervened on Pound's behalf, saving his skin.  Instead of execution Pound was in house arrest at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C.  for his mental and physical ills.   Bishop visited Pound there out of respect for his work.  The poem expresses that respect, as well as her strong objections to the nature of one who would make Pound's political decisions.    Pound began as a Pre-Raphaelite poet, and his later work (particularly his imagist work) can be thought of, to an extent, as a refinement of Pre-Raphaelite modes.  While Pre-Raphaelites tapped into the power of historical or mythological scenes and situations, the imagists, influenced by haiku and other Eastern forms, use powerful images from every day life to provoke responses in the reader.   In both cases the emotion is not the artist's, but the response of the reader to the images that the artist describes.  The poet can in that way become immune to the accusation of being a solipsist.

 Pre-Raphaelite folk/rock

It seems that following  the fall of Pound, the Pre-Raphaelite and imagist approaches disappeared from high art.   Brickle is an exception today.  Serious music still avoids, for the most part, references to past music.   It is curious that in folk music Pre-Raphaelite subject matter can be found.   In England, Pre-Raphaelite music never really went away--Britten often treats material that we might see in a Pre-Raphaelite painting--his Curlew River,  Noyes Flood,  Glorianna, etc.  Oliver Knussen, more recently, has treated Elizabethan material.  (In a conversation with Knussen at Tanglewood,  sometime in the late '80's,  Knussen commented that he thinks of Millais' Ophelia when he hears one of Britten's string quartets.) It shouldn't surprise us to find a Pre-Raphaelite rock  band like Jethro Tull--a band that frequently has fun with Pre-Raphaelite stuff.  The band's name comes from an English agriculturalist, Jethro Tull, whose agricultural innovations are thought to have helped make possible the industrial revolution.   Ruskin and William Morris were deeply concerned about the problems of the Industrial Revolution.  They fought against the ills that came with industrialization--against child labor, wage inequities,  poor working conditions, etc.

 Steve Reich

Cygnus puts Reich on its Pre-Raphaelite programs  because of Reich's admitted influence from the Medieval composer Perotin.  The pre-Rapahaelites celebrated the authenticity of the high Middle Ages, when Europe first successfully purged its culture of Hellenistic elements.  The best example of this is the Romanesque arch giving way to the Gothic arch.  This emphasis upon authenticity led to the streamlining of Gothic architecture in the 20th C.--the Gothic Woolworth building is streamlined into the Deco Chrysler Building, which is further abstracted into the Seagrams building--the glass box.  Since Perotin, there is nothing more pure, abstract and contextual than the music of Reich; also, since Perotin, there has also been nothing more transparent than Reich's music, except.  While the processes in Reich can be compared with Perotin, the tunes in Electric Counterpoint come from Africa.