WNMF 4: Absolute Jest

For this closing concert of WNMF 2025, music director Daniel Raiskin and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra begin with two nature-inspired Canadian works. Manitoban Nic Bray first presents the world premiere of his Spruce, the winning piece of this year’s CMC Emerging Composer Competition. We are then joined by Montreal-based Keiko Devaux for her texturally rich Listening Underwater.

The festival comes to a resounding end as the WSO is joined by the Attacca Quartet for a performance of the concerto for string quartet Absolute Jest by American master John Adams.

BUY WNMF Pass

PROGRAM NOTES

Nic Bray – Spruce (2023) for orchestra

Beams of sunlight gently twist between emerald needles, cascading across a calm but flowing creek near a shaded hammock as the overwhelming, yet calming beauty of the mighty spruce tree seeps from my consciousness into my subconscious.

Spruce was originally conceived while camping at Riding Mountain National Park, laying in a hammock, looking up at the simultaneous might, beauty, chaos, and tranquility of the spruce tree. This piece brings the simplicity, the complexity, and the awe-inspiring beauty of the spruce tree to life. After rising from the hammock, using a stick, I scrawled the form of the composition into the dirt below my bare feet. This would lay the foundation for the formal structure of the piece and would serve as the first step in the writing process. The work cycles through these emotions as they occurred to me in the moment, climaxing in a feeling of overwhelming love not only for nature, but for the life it brings and life itself.

Keiko Devaux – Listening Underwater (2023) for orchestra

The inspiration for this work brought together my general interest in hydro-acoustics with underwater noise pollution and the effect it has on sea-life communication. For this piece I focused particularly on the communicative sounds of toothed and baleen whales. Toothed whales, which include orcas and dolphins, use echolocation to communicate, navigate, and hunt whereas baleen whales produce a series of sounds or “songs” to communicate. Using these two types of vocalizations as inspiration points created a nice contrast between echolocation—a series of clicks and pops—in the ultrasonic range, with the pitch-bending/wavering “songs” produced by baleen whales in the infrasonic range creating two very distinct frequency bands.

The piece establishes and builds an underwater environment of organic ambient noise including surface waves, deeper swells, general underwater movement, and an overall muffled quality with frequencies in the mid-range more attenuated highlighting the extreme high and low intermittent and droned sounds. Eventually the underwater communication, expressed as foreground melodic themes is introduced. These thematic motifs are presented as communicative calls in one section of the orchestra receiving a response in another section often truncated or diffused in nature. As these call-response motifs continue to build and develop in nature, the thrum of human noise (ships, machinery, drilling, etc.) begins its slow crescendo. As this crescendo builds, the calls adapt by adjusting their frequency range higher or lower. Eventually, as the noise builds, the responses become more distant, diffused, disfigured, and ultimately lost. As this crescendo reaches its climax, the underwater calls and responses are stamped out, and the ocean is “silent” again. As the piece comes to an end, melodies are slowly reborn and begin to call out again, first to no response, and eventually life and communication rebuilds and reemerges.

John Adams – Absolute Jest (2011) for string quartet & orchestra

Absolute Jest was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in celebration of its 100th anniversary, and first performed March 15, 2012 by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. A revised version was given its first performance December 1, 2012 by the New World Symphony, conducted by the composer and also featuring the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

The idea for Absolute Jest was suggested by a performance by Michael Tilson Thomas of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a piece that I’d known all my life but had never much paid attention to until hearing MTT conduct it. Hearing this (and knowing that I was already committed to composing something for the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary) I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language.

But there the comparison pretty much ends. Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets since I was a teenager, and crafting something out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135, and the Grosse Fuge (plus a few more familiar “tattoos” from his symphonic scherzos) was a totally spontaneous act for me.

“String quartet and orchestra” is admittedly a repertoire black hole – is there a single work in that medium that is regularly heard? And there are good reasons for why this is. The first is a simple issue of furniture: the problem of placing four solo players in the “soloist” position but still in front of the podium (so that they can follow the conductor) is daunting. The inner players, the second violin and viola, are frequently lost to the audience both visually and aurally.

But placement on the stage aside, the real challenge is in marrying the highly charged manner and sound of a string quartet to the mass and less precise texture of the large orchestra. Unless very skillfully handled by both composer and performers, the combining of these two ensembles can result in a feeling of sensory and expressive overload.

At its premiere in March of 2012, the first third of the piece was largely a trope on the Opus 131 C-sharp-minor Quartet’s scherzo, and suffered from just this problem. After a moody opening of tremolo strings and fragments of the Ninth Symphony signal octave-dropping motive, the solo quartet emerged as if out of a haze, playing the driving foursquare figures of that scherzo, material that almost immediately went through a series of strange permutations.

This original opening never satisfied me. The clarity of the solo quartet’s role was often buried beneath the orchestral activity, resulting in what sounded to me too much like “chatter.” And the necessity of slowing down Beethoven’s tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to make certain orchestral passages negotiable detracted from its vividness and breathless energy.

Six months after the premiere I decided to compose a different beginning to Absolute Jest – a full 400 bars of completely new music, replacing the “quadrangular” feel of the Opus 131 scherzo with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that launches the piece in what is to my ears a far more satisfying fashion.

The rolling 6/8 patterns recall the same Ninth Symphony scherzo but also summon up other references – of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, of the Eighth Symphony, and other archetypal Beethoven motives that come and go like cameo appearances on a stage.

The high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the F-major Opus 135 Quartet (Beethoven’s final work in that medium) enters about a third of the way through Absolute Jest and becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow section that interweaves fragments of the Grosse Fuge with the opening fugue theme of the C-sharp-minor Quartet. A final furious coda features the solo string quartet charging ahead at full speed over an extended orchestral pedal based on the famous “Waldstein” Sonata harmonic progressions.

Absolute Jest had elicited mixed responses from listeners on its first outing. Quite a few reviewers assumed, perhaps because of its title, that the piece was little more than a backslapping joke. (One Chicago journalist was offended and could only express disgust at the abuse of Beethoven’s great music.)

There is nothing particularly new about one composer internalizing the music of another and “making it his own.” Composers are drawn to another’s music to the point where they want to live in it, and that can happen in a variety of fashions, whether it’s Brahms making variations on themes by Handel or Haydn, Liszt arranging Wagner or Beethoven for piano, Schoenberg crafting a concerto out of Monn or, more radically, Berio “deconstructing” Schubert.

But Absolute Jest is not a clone of Grand Pianola Music or my Chamber Symphony. Of course there are “winks,” some of them not entirely subtle, here and there in the piece. But the act of composing the work (one that took nearly a year of work) was the most extended experience in pure “invention” that I’ve ever undertaken. Its creation was for me a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic transformation and formal design. The “jest” of the title should be understood in terms of its Latin meaning, “gesta:” doings, deeds, exploits. I like to think of “jest” as indicating an exercising of one’s wit by means of imagination and invention.

Composer John Adams is Creative Chair for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.