Ravinia 2024 Issue 1

trombonist) with saxophonists Anthony Brax- ton, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn and pia- nists Muhal Richard Abrams, Vijay Iyer, and Evanston-born Myra Melford—all progressive artists expanding the frontiers of improvised music. Similarly, Sorey has partnered with ex- perimental musicians such as trombonist George E. Lewis, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, and flutist Claire Chase, of International Con- temporary Ensemble (ICE) fame, to explore the vast space between formal composition and free music. In an interview with Chase for BOMB magazine, Sorey described his fundamental ap- proach to music as a type of mobility: “For me, mobility represents not adhering to any particu- lar musical model or institution. Unlike hybrid- ity, mobility isn’t about fusion so much as the freedom to move between different models from moment to moment.” Born in Newark, NJ, Sorey attended Newark Arts High School and studied at the New Jer- sey Performing Arts Center Jazz for Teens. He entered William Paterson University as a clas- sical trombone major but later switched to jazz drums. He received a Master of Arts degree in composition fromWesleyan University, working closely with Anthony Braxton, and completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from Columbia University, where his principal faculty mentors were George E. Lewis and Fred Lerdahl, in 2017. His doctoral thesis composi- tion, Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine —a tribute to the singer, dancer, and actress Jose- phine Baker—was produced January 16 and 17, 2019, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by soprano Julia Bullock, Sorey, members of ICE, and director Peter Sellars. Another re- cent vocal work, Cycles of My Being about the reality of life for a Black man in America, was co-commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Car- negie Hall, and Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Lyric Unlimited. The cycle’s dedicatee, Lawrence Brownlee, and pianist Myra Huang gave the first Chicago performance during Black Histo- ry Month on February 22, 2018, at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Tyshawn Sorey Sorey received the prestigious MacArthur Fel- lowship (known unofficially as the “Genius Grant”) in 2017. His other accolades include the Doris Duke Impact Award and the United States Artists Fellowship, as well as residencies with Other Minds, JazzDanmark, Seattle Symphony, and Opera Philadelphia. After completing his doctorate, Sorey became an Assistant Professor of Music atWesleyanUniversity, where he found- ed the Ensemble for New Music. In Fall 2020, he joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty as Presidential Assistant Professor of Music. The pandemic did not slow Sorey’s creative output, only shifted it to new media. Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times (January 1, 2021) called him “The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year.” Re- cent accomplishments include his appointment as Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins Univer- sity this past fall and the selection of his compo- sition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) —written in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX—as a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music. –Program notes © 2024 Todd E. Sullivan FRANZ SCHUBERT Piano Sonata no. 24 in B-flat major, D. 960 It was the beginning of September 1828, and Schubert was seriously unwell. Thirty-one years old and in the throes of the tertiary stage of syphilis, he left the discomfort of urban Vienna for the discomfort of a tiny, damp, and poorly heated room in his brother’s house. He died in that miserable room just two months later. But first, he had one of the most stunning bursts of creative activity in human history. Before his health deteriorated to the point that composition became impossible, he completed a string of the greatest works he or anyone ever produced. This list likely includes the String Quintet in C major, Schwanengesang , and the final three piano sonatas. The qualifier of “like- ly” is necessary because of the paucity of reliable information about Schubert’s working life in 1828. He worked feverishly, in all senses; he lived in poverty and obscurity. None of these works were published until long after he died; many of them were entirely unknown for years. The gulf between these wretched circumstances and the power of the music that emerged from them is impossible to overstate. More than five years removed from his first bout with syphilis, Schubert had to have known—or, at the very least, strongly suspected—that he had little time left to live. But as his life contracted, his music expanded , in length and, more so, in vision. The proportions of these last works are immense; their harmonic language is daring, sometimes even frightening. He is constantly grappling with fate; he is deeply, eternally lonely. Each of these works is miraculous and endlessly interesting. But even in this staggering company, the Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960, stands out. It cannot be compared to the other music Schubert wrote in the last months of his life or, indeed, to any other music. The difference is not a question of quality: It is perfectly possible to prefer the String Quintet, or one of the other piano sona- tas, or the Winterreise of 1827, or one of Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Mozart’s assorted miracles. That is a matter of taste. But Schubert’s B-flat sonata is unique because it is the ultimate musical fare- well. There are moments of terror in this work, and moments of play. But its subject is leav- ing the world behind: the profound sadness of knowing you will never again see those you love. To listen to Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major is to be transported: it occupies the liminal space between life and death, and as you listen, you feel that you do as well. From the first notes, all the artifacts of the everyday are left behind; all that exists is this music. The sonata does not be- gin so much as emerge out of the silence that precedes it. A melody of absolute simplicity— it rises and then falls so gently, rhyming like a child’s poem—is underpinned by constant eighth notes, no fewer than forty of them, mov- ing with total regularity, evoking the eternal. This is Schubert, though; for him, things are rarely as simple or as unencumbered as they first seem to be. The eighth-note motion does eventually stop, and when it does, it is not at a cadence—a point of rest—but on a dominant chord. This chord is a question mark; the silence the eighth notes leave in their wake is a void, full of mystery and uncertainty. Whatever it is that one expects to follow this heavy, destabilizing silence, it is not the thing that actually happens: a trill in the lowest reach- es of the piano, played pianissimo and suggest- ing the minor mode. Only a few seconds long, and no louder than a murmur, this trill changes everything—not just what is to come, but the meaning of what we have already heard. The trill comes out of silence, and it leads to silence. But these silences are not mirror images: the second, in the wake of the trill, with its suggestion of menace, is ever so much fraught than the first. This second silence is followed by the resump- tion of the opening theme, and it has been ir- revocably altered by the trill. More precisely, it has been fully revealed: we have felt the fragility and glimpsed the horror that its serenity is ob- scuring, barely. For twenty minutes, the first movement pro- ceeds along this path. The beauty of the music is extreme and inexplicable, but it is also haunted; the specter of a terrible void is never far away. The trill returns often enough that it should grow less unsettling, but it does not. Schubert wants to leave the world at peace, but he remains petrified. If the first movement is poised between accep- tance and terror, the second movement has a RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 75