2003 Canadian Winds, Spring 2003, vol.1, no. 2 by Timothy Maloney
Reprinted with permission from the author

SPOTLIGHT ON CANADIAN REPERTOIRE

Oskar Morawetz’s Memorial to Martin Luther King

For Solo Cello and (Wind) Orchestra

by Timothy Maloney

“Don’t write a concerto, or a work with the usual form or content, or with the standard-sized orchestra.”[1]  This was the challenge from Mstislav Rostropovich to Oskar Morawetz in 1966 when the Russian cellist (later the conductor of Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra) asked the Czech-born, Canadian composer to write a new work which he hoped to premiere upon his return to Canada.  When Morawetz pressed him to explain more clearly what he wanted, Rostropovich replied that he would trust the composer’s imagination to work out all the details.[2]

Later the same year, the cellist was back and asking to see the new composition.  At that point, Morawetz had developed only a few sketches, none of which he considered worth pursuing. As more time passed, he worried about finding a workable solution to Rostropovich’s intriguing commission.  Then inspiration struck. 

In April, 1968, as  Morawetz watched television coverage of the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, the assassinated American civil-rights leader, “the idea suddenly struck me  to write for Rostropovich a work dedicated to the memory of King…[W]hen I saw on the screen King’s gravestone with the inscription of his favourite spiritual (‘Free at last; thank God almighty I am free at last!’)…I saw clearly in front of me the form, content, and orchestration of my composition.”[3]  It would depict the Freedom March in Memphis which King had helped organize and lead, the fatal gunshot, and his funeral march, which would be based on the spiritual whose words were engraved on his tombstone and which he had quoted at the end of his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington,. D.C. in 1963. 

As Morawetz saw it, “The complete exclusion of any string instruments in the orchestra would give the work a specially dignified and dramatic colour, and at the same time solve Rostropovich’s wish for an unusual orchestration.”[4]  The only impediment to starting work was that Morawetz  could find no-one in Toronto who knew the melody to the spiritual.  He eventually  telephoned the opera singer, Dorothy Maynor, in New York.  He had known her since 1949, when she sang several of his compositions in North America and Australia.  She was able to sing the spiritual for him over the phone, and he set right to work.  Three months later the composition was finished.

The world premiere was scheduled to take place in February 1970 with Rostropovich and members of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, but illness forced the cellist to cancel his entire North American tour that winter, so the work was eventually premiered by the Canadian cellist, Zara Nelsova, with the winds and percussion of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.  Nelsova and the MSO were featured on the first commercial disc of the work, released by Radio-Canada International (RCI 213-A).

On January 15, 1979, which would have been King’s fiftieth birthday, the Nelsova-MSO recording was broadcast on radio stations in thirty-six countries, including Argentina, Australia, China, Korea, and the Vatican, which itself broadcast the work several times throughout Europe.  It has been performed over forty times in the USA, Canada, and Europe, and is now in the repertoire of seventeen renowned cellists.[5]  Yo-Yo Ma has performed it extensively, including with the New York Philharmonic and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Canadian cellist, Shauna Rolston, has played it in Canada and the USA and recorded it with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (CBC SMCD-5105).

Such a wide international audience is not unknown to Oskar Morawetz, though it is to many other Canadian composers.  His works have been performed by many prominent musicians, including the pianists, Glenn Gould and Anton Kuerti; the singers, Maureen Forrester, Lois Marshall, Louis Quilico, and Jon Vickers; and the conductors, Karel Ancerl, Sir Adrian Boult, Raphael Kubelik, Zubin Mehta, and Seiji Ozawa, among others.  His orchestral music has been performed by more than 120 orchestras on five continents, and his compositions have appeared on Columbia, RCA Victor, and EMI recordings, as well as the Canadian Music Centre’s label, Centrediscs.[6]

Morawetz, who turned 86 on January 17 of this year, is a self-avowed traditionalist who taught music theory and composition at the University of Toronto 1946-82.  His idiom is a tonal, post-romantic one which he evolved alone through personal study of scores by some of the more conservative composers of the twentieth century (e.g., Bartók, Britten, Richard Strauss).  He was never attracted by avant-garde trends and has consistently maintained that “there has to be some kind of melodic line.”[7]  The numerous honours, prizes, and awards he has received, including the Order of Ontario, Order of Canada, and Junos for his Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra and From the Diary of Anne Frank, a Juno nomination for the Memorial to Martin Luther King, and two major awards from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) speak to the accessibility and impact of his music, and to the high regard in which it is held.

The Memorial to Martin Luther King is one of a number of works on the theme of death in Morawetz’s output.  These include the Sonata Tragica (1945) and Fantasy, Elegy and Toccata (1958) for piano; the Passacaglia on a Bach Chorale (1964), dedicated to John F. Kennedy, and reflections After a Tragedy (1969) for orchestra; the Symphony No. 1 (1951-53) and Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion (1965), the slow movements of which are both entitled Elegy; and From the Diary of Anne Frank (1970) for soprano and orchestra.

The Memorial to Martin Luther King is scored for basically double woodwinds, triple brass (though four horns and one tuba), timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and celesta.  By excluding any other strings from the accompanying ensemble, the composer has given the solo cello a unique instrumental voice against the colours of the woodwinds and brass, and virtually all the expressive potential, while imbuing the accompanying ensemble with the elements of power and drama.  (Morawetz is not the first composer to arrive at this solution:  for example, the French composer, Jacques Ibert, wrote a Concerto for Cello and Wind Instruments in 1926.)  Morawetz’s is a programmatic work (i.e., based on an extra-musical association) in a single movement, with four separate tempi in eight sections.  

The solo part is technically demanding and requires a cellist of professional calibre.  The wind ensemble writing, as might be discerned from the names mentioned above of some of the ensembles that have performed the work, requires at the minimum an accomplished group of university-level musicians.

The work begins Adagio pesante with strong, dissonant chords in the brass, accompanied by dramatic rolls in timpani and piano meant to convey “shock and dismay at the turn of events.”  A pedal B-flat which sounds throughout this section returns later to dominate the final three sections of the work (see Musical Example 1).

Musical Example 1:  First page of score to Oskar Morawetz’s Memorial to Martin Luther King, showing the dramatic opening scored for brass and percussion, including piano, with low bassoons.

The solo cello enters with a long, expressive melodic line which the composer has likened to a “sorrowful meditation.”  It is chromatic and meandering, at first exploring the lowest reaches of the cello range, later rising into the treble clef (see Musical Example 2).  Reduced  ensemble resources and a subdued tone in the accompaniment ensure dominance by the solo instrument.  Dark, low colours are scored in the winds while bass drum and timpani remain quietly insistent.  Brief chromatic interjections from woodwinds and brass complement the unsettled tone.

Musical Example 2:  The first eleven measures of the cello part in Morawetz's Memorial to Martin Luther King.

The next section, beginning at rehearsal number [11], depicts the so-called Freedom March undertaken by King and many of his followers in Memphis, Tennessee, on what was to be the last day of his life.  This Allegro marciale begins, in the composer’s words, with “ a nervous marching rhythm” in the piano.  The music here has a purposeful, outgoing quality.  A tense, rhythmic dialogue develops between cello and winds utilizing off-beat rhythms and a gradually rising solo line.

Growing steadily in dynamic and rhythmic intensity, the music approaches the climactic point with low trombones projecting menace and foreboding.  The fateful gunshot is rendered musically by bass drum, timpani, whip, and a tenor-drum rim-shot.  There follows a dramatic orchestral interlude, symphonic in scope, that develops material from the opening of the work and reaches a climax at [37].  The adagio tempo of the opening returns as this section subsides in a gradual diminuendo and fall in tessitura.

The cello re-enters with a second meditation based on linear material from the first one.  This section is a variation featuring different harmonies, orchestration, and the transformation of melodic and rhythmic ideas.  Through much of the episode, the solo instrument is accompanied only by woodwinds and pitched percussion (celesta, vibraphone, and bells) in a subdued expression of grief.

The following section, beginning at [47], portrays the funeral procession.  Winds and percussion intone a sombre, dirge-like setting of the spiritual, “Free At Last.”  Woodwinds and brass alternate phrases of the song antiphonally in a polytonal harmonization (see Musical Example 3), while the E-Major melody is juxtaposed throughout with the B-flat pedal-tone of the work’s opening (a tritone relationship), preventing consonant resolutions at the phrase endings and carrying forward the feelings of sorrow and distress which have characterized the composition to this point.

Musical Example 3:  Morawetz’s harmonization of the Spiritual, “Free At Last,” beginning at [47] in Memorial to Martin Luther King.

The lack of repose at the end of each phrase of the Spiritual gives opportunities for the cello to interpose restless, lamenting lines of its own.  Rather than joining the wind ensemble as it intones the phrases of the spiritual, the cello enters between each phrase, extending the cadences in a twentieth-century version of Baroque sighing motives to express the grief of the mourners.

A second ensemble interlude ensues at [54] in which brass and percussion develop fragments based on the last three notes (“free at last”) of the spiritual.  The ensemble rises to a peak of tension before subsiding on a softly sustained chord:  the pedal B-flat now expressed as a full harmony, Bb-Eb-Ab-C.  Over this hushed sonority, the cello plays an undulating line that rises from its lowest note up three-and-a-half octaves in a conceit similar to that used by Richard Strauss at the end of his tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, where the soul of the hero is depicted rising to heaven (see Musical Example 4).

Musical Example 4:  The final thirteen bars of cello solo, beginning at [58], during which it climbs 3½ octaves.

In the last few measures, the pedal-chord alternates between woodwinds and vibraphone while a grouping of flute, bells, and piano sustain pianissimo dissonances against it.  The high-pitched, ethereal colours of this combination bring to mind another Straussian felicity, the “rose motive” from Der Rosenkavalier.  The work concludes in an atmosphere of “peace and resignation.”

Upon close examination, one finds the fabric of the entire composition infused with elements of the spiritual.  For instance, the brass rhythm that opens the work (         ) virtually mirrors the most prominent rhythm of the spiritual, found at both its beginning and end (on the words, “Free At Last:”               ).  The major triad (Bb-D-F) played by the First Horn in bars 1-2 (see Musical Example 1 above) corresponds to the major triad that begins the spiritual.  The descending three-note group played by the First Trumpet (bars 2-3) (Gb-F-Eb), is an augmented version of the fourth bar, first phrase, of the spiritual.  Both orchestral interludes are based on prominent intervals in “Free At Last:”  the second one, beginning at [54], has already been discussed above.  The earlier one, portraying King’s “Freedom March,” develops the interval of the fifth in both open and filled-in forms.  The first cello entry employs the major triad referred to above, as well as “blue” notes, an integral part of the African-American spiritual tradition (see Musical Example 2 above for examples of the flat third, fifth, and seventh scale degrees, commonly known in jazz parlance as "blue" notes).

Beyond the evident use of the spiritual as the basis for the composition, Morawetz shows allegiance to no standard “school” or tradition of composition in this work.  Its harmonic vocabulary includes a complex amalgam of extended tertial, quartal, and whole-tone sonorities, often with dissonant, “colour” notes added.  The idiom is chromatic, though rooted in major-minor tonality, and seemingly derived from the advanced tonality of Reger, Strauss, and the post-Romantics.

There are no melodic themes employed in the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sonata-allegro structure.  Certain motives and intervals are recognizable throughout the work, and the method, if any, resembles that of the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.  In a reversal of the traditional process of disassembling melodies exposed at the outset of a movement and “developing” their constituent parts, he gradually “assembled” fragments exposed early in his symphonic movements into full-scale themes.  Here the full quotation of “Free At Last” late in the composition may be said to coalesce out of the various motives and intervals on which the composer based earlier parts of the work.

The linear element of the composition moves predominantly by step and small intervals.  The long, spun-out lines belong at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from the clear-cut phrasing of Classicism, more akin to Baroque fortspinnung (“spinning out”) or the long-breathed, early-Renaissance melodic style of Johannes Ockeghem.  Within these lines, motives are developed through sequential repetition, the gradual enlargement of intervals, and an often-rising tessitura.  As evinced by his linear writing, Morawetz’s compositional process seems concentrated along broad lines and large-scale musical form, both of which are related in this composition  to the program (i.e., the depiction of real-life events).

The sequence of eight sections is arranged to give maximum contrast and variety to the work:  high emotion and volume at the outset, a subdued solo lament, the march’s measured pace, the drama of the gunshot and ensuing orchestral outcry, a second solo episode, the quiet but unsettled spiritual, and the final orchestral section purging earlier emotion and drama before the serene, almost mystic, ending.

One music critic, Eugene Cramer, formerly the head of the Music Department at the University of Alberta, has described Morawetz’s Memorial to Martin Luther King as “one of the best contemporary works I have heard and which in time should rank with the Berg Violin Concerto as one of the monuments of 20^th-century music of its kind.”  Although its programmatic nature might be construed by some as naïve in comparison to the objective detachment exhibited in so much twentieth-century repertoire, the proof of this composition’s ability to move audiences is in the hearing.  A singular specimen in the Canadian  wind-ensemble literature, it has achieved the wide circulation and attention that many composers hope for but do not manage to achieve.  Since the institution of an official holiday in the USA to commemorate King’s achievements (the Monday nearest January 15, his birthday), and the plethora of public events surrounding the holiday, the likelihood is high that this work will receive many future performances.