<\/p>\n
How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven\u2019s hammering three- or four-note motives, Schubert\u2019s juxtapositions of heavenly melodies and harmonic abysses, Brahms\u2019s pensive parallel sixths, Mahler\u2019s agonized four-note turns. Even in the case of many-sided figures such as Monteverdi or Stravinsky, who hover between eras and assume various guises, you can pick out the face behind the mask. But it\u2019s not enough to develop a set of mannerisms. What matters is how these signatures interact with the more abstract mechanisms that go into the making of large-scale forms. When that happens, we experience a portion of a life unfolding in sound.<\/p>\n
The Czech composer Bohuslav Martin\u016f, the focus of this summer\u2019s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, had one of those voices which reveal themselves in a matter of seconds. Take the opening of his Second Symphony, from 1943, which the Orchestra Now performed on the festival\u2019s first weekend, under the direction of Leon Botstein, Bard\u2019s president and chief musical curator. The first violins unfurl a lilting, lightly bopping tune in D minor. Ascending patterns elsewhere in the strings blur the outlines of that governing idea. The real Martin\u016f giveaway is an underlying buzz of activity in the piano and the harp\u2014D-minor triads mixed with C-sharp-minor, B-flat-major, and E-flat-major ones, suggesting a rickety machinery behind the lyrical action. These and a few other basic elements recur throughout Martin\u016f\u2019s \u0153uvre: curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.<\/p>\n
Although Martin\u016f\u2019s music is lavishly documented on recordings, it is not so often heard live. One problem is that there is too much of it. His catalogue runs to about four hundred scores, including sixteen operas, fifteen ballets, thirty or so concertante pieces, and chamber works for every conceivable instrumental combination. (If you have a group consisting of a clarinet, a horn, a cello, and a snare drum, you\u2019re in luck.) History tends not to favor hyper-prolific composers, who are suspected of producing music by the yard. Yet, even when Martin\u016f seems to go on autopilot, the journey remains idiosyncratic and unpredictable. There\u2019s an inherent tension in his mixture of materials. He is the kind of figure who profits from Botstein\u2019s summertime festivals, which, for thirty-five years, have demonstrated how much great music exists outside the standard repertory. After days of immersion, I wanted to hear still more.<\/p>\n
Martin\u016f was something of a chameleon, despite his telltale tics. In a program note, the musicologist Michael Beckerman, who served as one of two scholars-in-residence at this year\u2019s Bard festival (the other was Ale\u0161 B\u0159ezina, the director of the Bohuslav Martin\u016f Institute, in Prague), observed that the composer\u2019s array of styles includes \u201cjazz, medieval miracle plays, Slovak folk music, Renaissance madrigals, a range of modernist musical languages, Moravian folk music and poetry, the Baroque concerto grosso, Mexican musical instruments, Stravinskyian neoclassicism, and Byzantine chant.\u201d From 1923 to 1940, Martin\u016f lived in Paris, and turned out enough up-to-the-minute works\u2014about soccer, silent-movie shoots, transatlantic flights\u2014that he could have been mistaken for a seventh member of Les Six. Somehow, though, he escaped from the trend-chasing frenzy of the period with a crisp, confident sense of self.<\/p>\n
The Bard programs managed to touch upon most aspects of Martin\u016f\u2019s output, although, given practical limitations, they couldn\u2019t encompass the full profligacy of his imagination. A Sunday-afternoon concert included a suite of jazz-tinged numbers from his 1927 ballet \u201cLa Revue de Cuisine,\u201d but we could not, alas, see the danced narrative, which involves complex romantic entanglements among kitchen implements (Pot, Lid, Whisk, Broom, and Dishcloth). Then again, the chamber-music presentation\u2014the performers were the clarinettist Yoonah Kim, the bassoonist Thomas English, the trumpeter Zachary Silberschlag, the violinist Luosha Fang, the cellist James Kim, and the pianist Andrey Gugnin\u2014emphasized the elegance of the writing over the silliness of the scenario, showing how the composer blends the tango and the Charleston with his own folk inheritance. Martin\u016f\u2019s dabblings in jazz are free of condescension; they are urban but not urbane.<\/p>\n
In 1941, Martin\u016f fled Nazi-occupied Europe and took refuge in the United States. As he contended with the terror of war and the disorientation of exile, his musical palette audibly darkened. You can already sense an emotional shift in his spellbinding Double Concerto, from 1938, which Botstein conducted alongside the Second Symphony on the festival\u2019s opening night. The piece is scored for two string groups, timpani, and piano\u2014an instrument that often gives a metallic bite to Martin\u016f\u2019s orchestral textures. The central Largo movement pivots around a clash of B-minor and B-major chords, with the latter repeatedly struggling to win out over the former. In the wake of episodes that evoke a crawl across a wasteland, the conflict is resolved in favor of the major, in a beatific pianissimo. But when the same fraught passage returns, in the finale, it collapses in defeat, with stinging discords and pizzicato thuds.<\/p>\n
Before Martin\u016f came to America, he had displayed little interest in symphonic composition. He wrote considerable quantities of orchestral music, but he preferred mixing chamber groups with larger ensembles, in the Baroque manner. He distanced himself from what he called the \u201cclimax clich\u00e9\u201d\u2014cheap swells of sound and emotion. America was, however, mad for symphonies, the more heroic the better, and Martin\u016f found his way into the form. Between 1942 and 1953, he produced six numbered works in the genre\u2014one of the most distinctive of twentieth-century cycles, comparable in its resolute independence to the same-numbered cycle by Carl Nielsen. Although Martin\u016f\u2019s symphonies have no shortage of awe-inspiring moments, they avoid the climax clich\u00e9, the odor of Romantic bombast. The rugged, restless Third Symphony, from 1944, seems to be heading toward a triumphant conclusion, but it trails off into low, shuddering chords, as if prophesying a new age of fear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven\u2019s hammering three- or four-note motives, Schubert\u2019s juxtapositions of heavenly melodies and harmonic abysses, Brahms\u2019s pensive parallel sixths, Mahler\u2019s agonized four-note turns. Even in the case of many-sided figures such as Monteverdi or Stravinsky, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2006354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[22008,365925,362131],"class_list":["post-2006353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-magazine","tag-musical-events","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/The-Czech-Composer-Bohuslav-Martinu-Is-One-of-Musics-Great.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2006354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}