Copland’s Clarinet Concerto Program Notes

To See the Sky: Exegesis for Orchestra (2023)

Joel Thompson

Born December 17, 1988 in the Bahamas

Thompson was born in the Bahamas to Jamaican parents who later moved to Atlanta.
He is a conductor, pianist, and educator in addition to being a composer.
His music emphasizes community and connection.

Joel Thompson might still technically be a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Music, but he already has established a substantial reputation as a composer. Born and based in Atlanta, he is best known for his choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed (2015), which won the 2018 American Prize for Choral Composition. Before matriculating in Yale’s doctoral program, Thompson earned degrees in Music and Choral Conducting from Atlanta’s Emory University. He has taught at Atlanta’s Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School and served as Director of Choral Studies at Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia from 2013 to 2015. He is currently in a five year residency as the Houston Grand Opera’s first ever full-time composer in residence. The Sphinx Organization, which champions diversity in the arts, awarded Thompson its Medal of Excellence in 2023. Upcoming season highlights include his orchestration of African Queens, which will be premiered in January 2026 with the Naples Philharmonic and Karen Slack. Also Iin early 2026, the New York Philharmonic will premiere a new orchestral arrangement of Frederick Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, featuring variations orchestrated by several composers, including Thompson.

Thompson’s title for To See the Sky is taken from a lyric in “Thunderclouds” by the French-American jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky.” In fact, Thompson’s three movements take their respective titles from that lyric, as his composer’s note states.

Dear Listener,

To See the Sky is an exegesis of my favorite line from one of my favorite songs from my favorite album by one of my favorite artists: Cécile McLorin Salvant.

The first movement, “Sometimes. . .,” tries to describe the oppressive circumstances that would lead to a weariness so heavy that one wouldn’t have the will to lift one’s eyes away from the ground.

“. . . you have to gaze into a well. . .” portrays the non-linearity and difficulty of the healing process and the deep introspection it continually requires.

The titular and final movement opens with an attempt “to see the sky” that fails but, after a brief look inward for the courage to try again, the music soars. Most of my compositions document my internal and external realities through the lends of various facets of my identity, but this third movement was an attempt to try something a little different: to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist for me – the feeling of healing, the realization of a more equitable future.

Writing this piece gave me the will to keep persisting/existing/dreaming, and I hope it inspires the same in those who need that encouragement too.

With gratitude,
jt

An exegesis is an explanation, interpretation, or critical analysis. Mr. Thompson’s very personal exegesis takes us on a journey whose three principal segments are linked by re-use and transformation of a motive introduced in the opening measures. His Caribbean roots surface in the work’s powerful rhythmic drive; his gift for melody overflows in a score rich in original ideas.

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (2^nd doubling alto flute, 3^rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3^rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (3^rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion [bass drum, hand clap, suspended cymbal, temple blocks, tam tam, crotales, maracas, djembe (a West African goblet-shaped drum), 3 tom toms, glockenspiel, snare drum, hi-hat, and Agogô, a west African multiple bell instrument], harp, and strings.

Clarinet Concerto

Aaron Copland

Born November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York | Died December 2, 1990 in Tarrytown, New York

Copland’s first music lessons were with his mother and sister
He later studied in Paris with the legendary Nadia Boulanger
Elements of jazz and folk music in his works give them an authentic American flavor

Imagine you’re an up-and-coming American composer with a strong sense of patriotic, specifically American music. A cataclysmic war has just ended and optimism reigns. One of the era’s musical icons – a big band jazz star – asks you to write a piece for him.

Aaron Copland composed his clarinet concerto in 1947 and 1948, in response to a commission from Benny Goodman (1909-1986), the great Chicago-born clarinetist. Goodman was a versatile musician who moved smoothly from the classical repertoire to jazz, and Copland’s concerto takes advantage of Goodman’s brilliant swing style. What surprises the listener in this work is the graceful transition from the first movement reverie to the perky finale.

Like Copland’s 1926 Piano Concerto, the Clarinet Concerto is in two movements that are played without a break. Copland places his slow movement first, establishing a mood of tender lyricism reminiscent of Appalachian Spring. The clarinet is a vocal soloist, singing forth with a huge, warm melodic line that remains intimate even in its forte moments. Graceful and dance-like, this movement inspired Jerome Robbins to choreograph the concerto as a ballet, The Pied Piper, shortly after its concert and radio premieres.

A solo cadenza links the first movement to the finale. Where the first movement emphasizes the soloist’s beauty of tone, the cadenza provides his first opportunity for overt display of technical prowess. Gradually gathering momentum with broken chords and dramatic scale passages, it signals a change of character in the music, introducing the irresistible pulsing energy of the finale.

Copland completed the first movement of the concerto in Rio de Janeiro during a 1947 tour to South America. Brazilian music had made a strong impression on him, and he incorporated a popular Brazilian theme into the finale. Latin rhythms suffuse it, adding to its jazzy, lighthearted feel. Ragtime, charleston, rhumba, and boogie-woogie all make brief appearances, demanding considerable flexibility from both soloist and ensemble. We may remember Benny Goodman primarily as a jazz artist, but it is worth remembering that Béla Bartók wrote Contrasts for him; Goodman spanned two worlds of music. Copland’s Clarinet Concerto is a tribute to Goodman’s genius, and a challenge to the performer who straddles the musical worlds embraced on its pages.

Instrumentation: The score calls for harp, piano, solo clarinet, and strings.

Symphony No. 5 in B-flat, Op.100

Serge Prokofiev

Born April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Ukraine, Russia | Died March 5, 1953 in Moscow

Prokofiev was a piano prodigy who began composing at age 5
He was also an accomplished chess player, and once defeated a future world champion
Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day in 1953
Ballet scores were his forte, but he considered his operas equally important

Happy you conducting American premiere my Fifth Symphony. Work very close to my heart. Sending sincere friendly greetings you and all members your magnificent orchestra.

–Telegram, Prokofiev to Serge Koussevitzky, 6 November 1945

‘Work very close to my heart.’ So consumed was Prokofiev by this symphony that he put off the celebrated film director Sergei Eisenstein, because he was so immersed in composing. “Now I’m busy with work on my Fifth Symphony, and my composition is flowing along in such a way that I can’t interrupt and switch over to [Eisenstein’s film] Ivan the Terrible. I’m sure you’ll understand me,” he wrote apologetically to Eisenstein on 31 July 1944. Prokofiev promised to devote himself to the film score the next month, when he would return to Moscow from his summer home, Ivanovo. By then, he had completed the symphony.

Just a few months later, Prokofiev was on the podium when the Fifth Symphony was first performed in Moscow on 13 January 1945. It proved to be his swan song as a conductor. Within four months, Europe and America were celebrating V-E day. Victory in the Pacific Theatre followed in August. Barely three months after the end of World War II, during a Soviet radio broadcast of an all-Prokofiev program on 4 November, 1945. Prokofiev said:

I wrote my Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1944 and I consider my work on this symphony very significant both because of the musical material put into it and because I returned to the symphonic form after a 16-year interval. The Fifth Symphony completes, as it were, a long period of my works. I conceived it as a symphony of the greatness of the human spirit.

Along with the Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, the Fifth Symphony has been one of Prokofiev’s most popular and enduring works. It is his only mature symphony to have caught the popular imagination.

Prokofiev is perhaps best known for his ballet scores (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella). Pianists admire his magnificent contribution to the solo keyboard literature. But he was an experienced orchestral composer, producing seven symphonies that span virtually his entire creative life: the earliest, the Classical Symphony, Op.25 (1916-17) was preceded by two juvenile symphonies and a number of other orchestral compositions. Nos. 2, 3, and 4 all date from the mid- to late 1920s. Then ensued the 16-year hiatus mentioned in the radio quotation above.

Soviet music and Prokofiev’s patriotism

His final three symphonies are all considered Soviet works because they were written after he had returned permanently to his homeland. During the Stalin years, Soviet music was under varying degrees of state supervision. For some composers, governmental restrictions proved stifling; others flourished artistically while suffering politically. Prokofiev’s late works, those from 1946 to 1953, were uneven – but the quality of his music during the war years was superb.

Despite the economic and circumstantial hardships of wartime, Prokofiev was especially productive from 1939 to 1945. He was at the peak of his composing powers, and he was still in good health. The Stalinist purges peaked in the late 1940s; the worst of that chilling period still lay in the future. Among the major works he completed during the war were the opera War and Peace, the ballet Cinderella, a string quartet, two piano sonatas, the flute sonata, five film scores and the Fifth Symphony. The latter represents the most epic side of his musical personality. It is the first overtly patriotic work not associated with theatre, film, voice, or some other programmatic medium. In the Fifth Symphony, Prokofiev’s admiration for the Russian people speaks for itself through music alone.

Influences: predecessors and contemporaries

At 45 minutes, the Fifth is the largest scale of Prokofiev’s seven symphonies. In it, the late romantic tradition of Borodin (rather than Tchaikovsky), and to some extent Bruckner, merges with that of his Soviet contemporary Shostakovich, whose influence is particularly audible in the emotional third movement. It is a highly melodic work, with a broad emotional spectrum that ranges from exuberant gamesmanship to heartfelt agony.

Despite the palpable “Russian-ness” of the music, Prokofiev eschews folk themes. He favors slower tempi, contributing to an aura of veiled tragedy that suffuses the symphony. The exceptions are the jaunty second movement scherzo, with its grotesque and fantastic elements, and the characteristic finale that begs to be choreographed. His bitter wit is most evident in these two movements, but the enduring message of this work is to be found in the intense drama of the first and third movements. He considered the Fifth Symphony his finest composition.

Instrumentation: The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, military drum, cymbals, harp, piano and strings.