Conrad Tao & Rite of Spring Program Notes

Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes

World Premiere October 27, 1901; Paris, France
25 Minutes

Nocturnes was one of Debussy’s earliest orchestral compositions to secure a niche in the repertoire. Composed in the late 1890s, it dates from a turbulent and financially trying period in the young composer’s life before he had established himself as a major figure in French music. Biographically, it is associated with Debussy’s courtship of his first wife, Rosalie (Lili) Texier. Musically, the piece owes its genesis to the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.

Debussy’s original intent was to compose a work for violin and orchestra with Ysaÿe as soloist. By 1897, he had decided on a purely orchestral composition. Nocturnes continued to give him trouble, and he did not complete the score until 1899.

In private correspondence with friends, Debussy revealed more about the origin of the three mysterious, irresistible movements of Nocturnes. He told Henri Lerolle that walking in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne had been the impetus for Fêtes. He later published an explanation that links Nocturnes strongly to the impressionist movement in art.

Nuages renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. Fêtes gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains persistently the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. Sirènes depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, among the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.

Debussy’s evocative words do not set forth fully the subtle psychological states induced by, or perhaps narrated within, each movement. Nuages is music of contemplation, introspection and deep thought. The mood is passive and private. In contrast, Fêtes is public, active music, implying involvement and participation in the unidentified, universal celebration.

The finale, Sirènes, returns to the private sector. Debussy’s ravishing music lifts us effortlessly into an intoxicated state of complete surrender. The wordless women’s chorus is eerie in its offstage presence, there but not there, exercising power with no need to flex muscles. All three movements end quietly. A master of effective understatement, Debussy understood that dramatic power did not necessarily require fanfare and volume.

Conrad Tao’s Clang and Shudder (World Premiere)

World Premiere April 4, 2025; Jacksonville, Florida

“My first-ever composition was a simple eight-bar tune in C Major. I called it ‘Congratulations.’ I was three years old and could not spell the title correctly.

When dreaming up this new piano concerto, I was hearing the messy, spirited banging of, say, a toddler at a piano bench. I wanted to find a lyricism in this pre-consciousness.

Like many people, I will sometimes just watch endless animal videos online. Dogs love spring doorstops. Puppies seem to play them like instruments, driven by an elemental curiosity, excited by the feedback loop.

I was inspired by the almost-mythical world of white keys, of ‘C Major,’ this world that is so iconic to the piano specifically. I wanted to celebrate the sound of the instrument, treating the piano as the enormous resonating chamber it is, drawing attention to its ringing tones beyond just what keys are struck.

‘Wildness’ is the word I kept coming back to. I realized while working on this piece that this is important to me—preserving and making space for our unkempt excess, our messiness, our animal nature. Precision is about choosing the right points, carving out the right lanes, to guide our energy through. I understand this wildness as a basic fact of our being alive, as something to become conscious of, to relate honestly to, and to not simply deny.

In this concerto, the orchestra emerges out of the piano sound, responds, suggests, questions. The music clangs, shudders, howls, breathes, sings.”

Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

World Premiere May 29, 1913; Paris, France
33 Minutes

Igor Stravinsky’s landmark ballet The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, traverses the primitive energy of the spring season. In musical terms, primitivism means aggressive rhythms – and sometimes ringing sonorities. Rhythm is the major challenge in The Rite of Spring. It must be not only accurate, but also ritualistic.

The ballet scenario portrays a prehistoric ritual in which a virgin is sacrificed to the god of spring. Its premiere in Paris in 1913 prompted riots, not only because of the risqué subject matter but also because of the realistic costumes (burlap sacks instead of organza tutus) and the aural jolt of Stravinsky’s vigorous music. The orchestral score divides into two principal sections: Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice. Today, well more than a century after it was composed, Stravinsky’s ballet still has the power to shock. It is also brilliant and gorgeous music, surprisingly rich in Russian folk sources. Perhaps most important, it leaves no listener neutral, reminding us that we are thrillingly alive.

Nocturnes

Claude Debussy

Born August 22, 1862, in St-Germain-en-Laye, France · Died March 25, 1918, in Paris

Nocturnes was one of Debussy’s earliest orchestral compositions to secure a niche in the repertoire. Composed in the late 1890s, it dates from a turbulent and financially trying period in the young composer’s life, before he had established himself as a major figure in French music. Biographically, it is associated with Debussy’s courtship of his first wife, Rosalie (Lili) Texier, whom he married on October 19, 1899. Musically, the piece owes its genesis to the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.

Debussy’s original intent was to compose a work for violin and orchestra, with Ysaÿe as soloist. The earliest pre-echo of Nocturnes is from 1892, in a version called Trois scènes au crépuscule (Three scenes at dusk). In 1894, he abandoned that title, and much of the earlier music, in favor of the more abstract Nocturnes, with solo violin. By 1897, he had decided on a purely orchestral composition. Nocturnes continued to give him trouble, and he did not complete the score until 1899.

Camille Chevillard conducted the first two movements on December 9, 1900, in Paris (Sirènes could not be performed because no women’s chorus was available). Critical reception was mixed, but the composer Paul Dukas wrote an insightful and sympathetic review.

Debussy had to wait 10 months before he heard the entire work, again on the same concert series. By then, he was wrapped up in preparations for the première of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra. To supplement his income, he had also begun to write music criticism for the Revue blanche. The orchestral works for which he is justly celebrated, La mer, Images and the ballet Jeux, followed steadily over the next dozen years.

Inspiration from Paris’ most famous park

It is the Bois de Boulogne. A retreat with torches, evening, in the woods … I have seen from afar, through the trees, lights approaching, and the crowd running toward the path where the procession is going to pass. Then the horsemen of the Garde Républicaine, resplendent, their arms and helmets lit by the torches, and the bugles sounding their fanfare. After, all that fades and grows distant.

Not one generally to subscribe to programmatic explanations for his works, Debussy nevertheless published an explanation of his new orchestral work that links it strongly to the impressionist movement in art.

The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests. Nuages renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. Fêtes gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision) which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains persistently the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. Sirènes depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, among the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.

Musical psychology: private and public sectors

The incorporation of women’s chorus is associated with Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Both those works postdate Debussy’s Nocturnes by a dozen years or more. There is actually precedent in Debussy’s own music in his early orchestral suite, Printemps (1887).

Instrumentation: Debussy continued to revise the orchestration of Nocturnes until his death. In the original version, Nuages and Fêtes are scored for three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, two harps and strings. For the finale, Sirènes, he silenced the tuba and added the women’s chorus.

The Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky

Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, near. St. Petersburg · Died April 6, 1971, in New York City

In our judgmental and opinionated musical world, when we dislike a new composition, we are likely to express our disapproval by a tightening of the jaw during the performance and limited or halfhearted applause at the conclusion. If we really dislike it, we might say so to acquaintances at intermission, or get up and walk out of the performance in order to express our contempt. Booing, hissing and catcalls are bad form, and well-mannered audiences are highly unlikely to resort to such socially unacceptable behavior.

Igor Stravinsky: revolutionary and iconoclast

When Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) was premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on May 29, 1913, the Parisian audience rioted. According to Stravinsky’s biographer Eric Walter White:

Even during the orchestral introduction, mild protests against the music could be heard. When the curtain rose, the audience became exacerbated by [Vaslav] Nijinsky’s choreography as well as Stravinsky’s music, and protests and counter-protests multiplied. At times, the hubbub was so loud that the dancers could not hear the music they were supposed to be dancing to … To those present on the first night, the riot in the theatre was a traumatic experience.

To a generation of music-lovers that knows this score from Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the fuss is difficult to understand. Much of the brouhaha resulted from the subject matter. In his 1936 autobiography, Stravinsky recalled his thoughts as the idea for the ballet came to him.

I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du printemps. I must confess that this vision made a deep impression on me, and I at once described it to my friend, Nicholas Roerich, a painter who had specialized in pagan subjects. He welcomed my inspiration with enthusiasm and became my collaborator in this creation.

While The Rite of Spring has become one of Stravinsky’s most frequently performed orchestral scores, we may better understand the scandal it precipitated by thinking of it in its original context of the ballet. “Pictures of Pagan Russia” is its subtitle; this was controversial for 1913. The scandal attending the premiere helps us to understand the image of Stravinsky as iconoclast and revolutionary.

“Nature reborn”

The ballet score consists of two large parts, The Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice. There are eight dances in part one and six in part two, thus The Rite of Spring is basically a suite of 14 movements taking approximately 33 minutes in performance. Stravinsky later wrote, “What I was trying to convey was the surge of spring, the magnificent upsurge of nature reborn.” To do so, he enlisted the largest orchestra yet assembled, and surely the largest in any ballet pit. Even today, more than a century later, musicians refer to an orchestra in terms like “the size of the Rite‘s.”

Paradoxically, Stravinsky does not unleash the full power of this huge ensemble except for the climactic points in each part of the ballet. To the contrary, he emphasizes the breadth of color available to him with such a wide variety of instruments; in a very real sense, this work is the first concerto for orchestra as much as it is a bellwether work for the entire 20th century. The famous opening bassoon solo and the intertwined woodwinds that answer it before the atavistic “Dance of the Adolescents” breaks forth, are a fine example. Stravinsky actually succeeds in making some of this remarkable score sound like chamber music. In other places, he stages a veritable volume on the ears that can make the rafters resonate.

Color and pulse

Volumes have been written about the complexities of The Rite of Spring. The two key concepts to guide listeners hearing a live performance are color and pulse.

With respect to color, one marvels at Stravinsky’s command of this huge instrument called the orchestra. He was a brilliant colorist who learned his craft from another superb orchestrator, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Few compositions draw so comprehensively and effectively on the variety and combination of sounds of which the orchestra is capable.

With respect to pulse, the most noteworthy characteristic of The Rite of Spring is the complexity of its rhythms without any loss of forward momentum. We do not become so mired in intricacy that we lose track of the beat. Yet, the meter shifts constantly. As soon as we think we have established a steady pulse, Stravinsky throws off our sense of balance, as if to affirm nature’s supreme unpredictability. He is often at the precipice, but his music never forfeits control, and the impact is as visceral and thrilling in 2025 as it was more than 100 years ago.

Instrumentation: Stravinsky’s score calls for a colossal orchestra of quintuple woodwind (three flutes, two piccolos and alto flute), four oboes (one doubling English horn) and another English horn, piccolo clarinets in E and D, three clarinets in B-flat, and bass clarinet, four bassoons, two contrabassoons, eight horns, piccolo trumpet in D, four trumpets, bass trumpet in E-flat, three trombones, four tubas (two tenor and two bass), five timpani requiring two players, bass drum, guïro (a scraped gourd), cymbals, antique cymbals, gong, tambourine, triangle, timpano piccolo and strings.