WNMF 1: Samy Moussa

WNMF Program

To open the Winnipeg New Music Festival this year, the WSO welcomes back Canadian composer and conductor Samy Moussa who has twice been featured at WNMF with his orchestral music.

He returns to lead the orchestra from the podium in a program that plays on light and shadow, from Dark Patterns by American composer-pianist Timo Andres, to Moussa’s own Nocturne, and circling back to Dawning by Welsh master Huw Watkins. The evening culminates in Moussa’s monumental Symphony No. 2.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Timo Andres – Dark Patterns (2022)

Dark Patterns is a repetitive, methodical, obsessive piece. This focus was a reaction to my initial idea for the piece’s most brazen outburst, a passage in which chromatic scales peel off in layers from a broad, arch-shaped melody. The task of writing the piece became, essentially, digging a foundation and building a structure to support this brief dramatic moment.

The piece contains two kinds of material—a scale and a melody, both “circular” patterns that lead into restatements of themselves, and both of which pivot harmonically around a repeated central E. This regular pulse, heard first in the flute, harp, and muted piano, is interrupted, with increasing frequency and urgency, by low pedal tones that form the first rising scale. The end of this scale leads directly into first notes of the melodic material of the piece, introduced by a solo bassoon and always accompanied by chattering E’s. That scalar upbeat to the melody becomes increasingly elaborate, intense, and harmonically adventurous with each new iteration, yet always ends up drawn back to that central E.

A return to the opening material follows, but compacted and concentrated, the low, rising scale underscoring tempestuous excursions around the E. As the scale gradually rises from the bass to the treble, it turns distant and ambiguous, a hazy recollection of the bassoon melody accompanied by gently motoric percussion, keyboards, and harp. Wind solos moving at different speeds accumulate momentum once more, building to a section that is essentially a huge, scalar upbeat to that original dramatic crux—the climactic restatement of the bassoon melody. After this, the music plunges down once more, for a dark and chaotic restatement of the opening scale pattern, this time tangled in baleful natural-horn calls, the ostinato E now heard in shrill string harmonics.

Samy Moussa – Nocturne  (2014)

Nocturne is a work dedicated to Moussa’s principal composition teacher at the Université de Montréal, José Evangelista. Moussa writes that “this could well be the composition in which I have maximized to the fullest economy of means in harmonic terms. The work is based on four chords, the most important of which is a major-seventh chord, which gives rise to nearly everything in the score. The melodic unfolding of this chord is heard in the opening ‘theme’ played by the solo horn, which returns throughout Nocturne, sometimes in inversion, but hopefully always recognizable. The overall colour is rather grave, due to the use of the low register of most instruments. Three times the music attempts to rise from the depths; each time it falls back.”
(Duration approximately 10 minutes.)

Huw Watkins – Dawning (2019)

Dawning is a short, celebratory overture commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne written to be paired with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. It begins quietly, with playful flutes and clarinets above gentler strings, but quickly builds in energy and momentum, soon reaching some exuberant music for the whole orchestra. After the first climax, there is a much quieter passage – a slow-moving chorale for strings accompanying delicate brass fanfares – but thereafter, the music regains its vitality and remains high spirited until the end.

Samy Moussa – Symphony No. 2  (2022)

In three movements, played without a break

Samy Moussa turned to a quote from Xenophon’s Anabasis – ‘At this stage entered musicians blowing upon horns such as they use for signal calls, and trumpeting on trumpets, made of raw oxhide, tunes and airs, like the music of the double-octave harp.’ Though Moussa’s vision of this passage is primarily aesthetic rather than metaphorical, we might think we hear such instruments right away, their menace turned to majesty as they become a quartet of regular orchestral horns buttressed by a pair of flugelhorns (which have a warmer, rounder sound than their trumpet cousins), euphonium and tuba. Two of the horns push up through small steps to a major chord and then, with the woodwind now engaged, another. Not so much a theme, this music is more a state of being – effort and arrival, repeated – and it will recur throughout the symphony, usually associated with the brass.

Here immediately, though, it is brought back by the strings, and followed by a magniloquent descent, in slow triple rhythm. These two types of music are alternated further, until the woodwind carry the first music into the upper air and leave it floating.

A new sort of music arrives: a quick scale pattern descending through four notes. Soon this is snaking everywhere in the woodwind and tuned percussion. The scoring has all the usual keyed instruments – vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel and so on – together with harp and piano, as well as a timpani part that becomes more prominent through this passage. Returning frequently, the original four-note pattern is keyed to grand harmonic modulations as the music grows in power.

Everything the symphony needs is now in place. The harmonic progression reaches a point where the brass can bring back the first music, but this does not now happen. Instead the work moves into what is marked in the score as the second movement, though the musical progress is continuous. The symphony remains a play of forces: a whirling pounding and the brass group’s first music.

Eventually this music rises to where a breakthrough seems inevitable. Yet this does not occur. Instead the symphony moves into its third movement, but again there is no break, only a shift of tone, a release into airiness. The re-entry of the brass changes this, and a solo flugelhorn announces the end by restoring the grand descent in threefold steps. But the brass seem intent on starting all over again, to the shock of their companions. An F major chord provides the conclusion promised from the unison F of the beginning, but we may sense that in the background the great sphere is still turning, will not be stopped.

Programme note © Paul Griffiths