Biblical Torke

Synopsis

Religious music, like the religious experience itself, comes in all shapes, forms, moods, and colors.

On today’s date in the year 2002, for example, this setting of the Song of Isaiah had its premiere performance at the Milwaukee Art Museum during a concert by the Present Music ensemble. The composer of the new setting was a native of Milwaukee named Michael Torke, who writes:

“I have always considered that a central religious experience is one of uplifting joy, as opposed to other spiritual expressions of pleading, suffering, atonement, or wrath. It is that state of joy and thanksgiving I am trying to express.”

Song of Isaiah was commissioned for Present Music's 20th anniversary, and to honor the Archbishop Rembert Weakland. The piece is scored for a singer, clarinet, bass clarinet, string quintet, piano, vibraphone, and a percussionist who plays the rhythmic underpinning with a tambourine, claves, and in the center of the piece, a triangle.

“This spirited rhythm,” writes Torke, “embodies slower embedded forms that are etched out melodically by the clarinets in octaves, and also by the strings and piano in octaves. In essence, there are no climaxes, as I wish the music to be a meditation, though the feeling is quite lively. Nine sections of the piece serve as episodic variations, and explore different small chunks of text from the Book of Isaiah. The form is a mirror: the first and ninth sections relate, as do the second and eighth, and so on; the fifth section (using the triangle) is in the exact center.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Michael Torke (b. 1961) — Song of Isaiah (Present Music) innova 590

On This Day

Births

• 1881 - Russian composer Nikolai Miaskovsky, in the fortress of Novo-Georgiyevsk (now Modlin), Poland (Julian date: April 8);

Deaths

• 1869 - German song composer Karl Loewe, age 72, in Kiel;

Premieres

• 1910 - Ravel: "Ma Mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) for piano four-hands, in Paris, by two young female pianists, at the first concert of the newly-formed "Société musicale indépedante"; On the same program was the premiere of Gabriel Fauré's "Le Chanson d'Eve" with the composer at the piano;

• 1979 - George Perle: Concertino for Piano, Winds, and Timpani, by Morey Ritt and the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, Ralph Shapey conducting;

• 1983 - Thomas Oboe Lee: "Quartet on B-flat" for string quartet, at the Harvard Music Association in Beacon Hill, Mass., by the Manhattan String Quartet;

• 2001 - Danielpour: String Quartet, in Kansas City, Mo., by the American String Quartet;

• 2002 - Michael Torke: "Song of Isaiah"for voice and chamber ensemble, at the Milwaukee Art Museum by the Present Music Ensemble, with the composer conducting;

Others

• 1759 - Burial of Handel in Westminster Abbey, London;

• 1928 - In Paris, the first public demonstration of an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot called the "Ondes musicales"; The instrument later came to be called the "Ondes Martenot," and was included in scores by Milhaud, Messiaen, Jolivet, Ibert, Honegger, Florent Schmitt and other 20th century composers.