Discover… Inspiration

Samuel Zyman, Encuentros

Zyman has been a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School since 1987 (as well as at Vanderbilt University for the last three years) and the composer of works performed widely, internationally. His more than seventy published compositions include chamber music, sonatas, symphonies, many concertos, vocal music, and a film score. Their variety is impressive, from wind ensembles to trombone octets. A native of Mexico City, he was educated first in Mexico, and then received graduate degrees from the Juilliard School. His American teachers of composition include David Diamond and Roger Sessions. The recipient of numerous honors, they include the Mozart Medal and both the Mexican Most Outstanding Composer of the year (1992), and the Medal of Merit in the Arts (2014).

Many of his works are manifestly in a rhythmically complex and chromatically dense twentieth-century academic style—after all he was a student of Sessions and Diamond. But, he is equally master of an innate lyricism. To add to his flexibility of expression, he occasionally enjoys infusing his compositions with a clear reference to traditional Mexican musical style. And that is clearly what Encuentros is all about.

Commissioned by the Mexican TV network, Televisa, Encuentros was part of the music for the Mexican Pavilion at the Seville World Fair of 1992. The charge to Zyman was to compose a work that was clearly “Mexican” in its incorporation of traditional musical elements, but which was also—in the words of the composer—to convey a sense of “modernity, progress, and optimism.” But not to be an example of “modern” musical style! And so it is. Driven with Zyman’s characteristic rhythmic verve—but using traditional Mexican syncopated dance rhythms as ostinatos, the orchestration is replete with colorful allusions to Mexican musical traditions. Whether Mariachi trumpets, marimbas, harp, or flute and tuba features, the infectious tapestry of colors propels it. Underlying it all are the ubiquitous traditional native instruments of the percussion section, including claves, guiro, maracas, and more. The energetic opening and closing sections feature a parade of musical ideas, and bookend a central section that an apt example of the composer’s gift for contemplative lyricism. It’s all an entertaining delight and complete evidence of the stylistic flexibility of an outstanding composer.

–Wm. E. Runyan
©2022 William E. Runyan

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, Op. 35

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s career stood in the very center of Russian musical life of the second half of the nineteenth century. His first career was in the Russian navy, but he soon garnered success in music. Known primarily for his fifteen operas, he was instrumental in the rising importance of that genre in Russia. In addition to his fame and influence as a composer, he was also head of the conservatory in St. Petersburg–his statue dominates the little park directly across the street from the conservatory and the famed Mariinsky Theatre. In the West, of course, we know him primarily for his symphonic overtures and the tone poem, Scheherazade. His ability as an orchestrator and teacher of orchestration is one of his many legacies–Igor Stravinsky was one of his students. In fact, much of the marvelous musical atmosphere that audiences adore in Stravinsky’s early ballets, the Rite of Spring, Firebird, and Petrouchka, lead directly back to Rimsky-Korsakov and the orchestral style of his operas. And it is of no small interest that there are sections in Debussy’s La Mer and Ravel’s Daphnis et Cloé that seem lifted right out of Scheherazade. A fascination with the exotic, with non-Western subject matter was a prime characteristic of Romanticism, and Russian music of the late nineteenth century is exemplary of this predilection.

Scheherazade, completed in 1888, is a musical depiction of the well-known story, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The eponymous heroine must entertain her bridegroom, the murderous sultan, with continuous intriguing tales in order to forestall the arrival of the executioner who had beheaded a thousand previous wives the morning after their successive marriages. While Rimsky-Korsakov more or less disclaimed his well-known reputation for his evocative musical orientalism, his abilities therein certainly created a triumph of exotic atmosphere in Scheherazade. The four movements–following their titles, which Rimsky-Korsakov later withdrew–depict specific stories of Scheherazade, the Sultana. We can follow loosely the narrative, for Scheherazade is represented by the elaborate, highly figured violin solo that constantly weaves in and out of the texture as the stories unfold. The composer makes ample use of other solo instruments throughout the suite, combined with a rich, colorful orchestral texture that carries it all. The last movement ties all the tales and stories together by juxtaposing the principal themes from the preceding movements in a smashing climax.

–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2015 William E. Runyan