HIGDON: blue cathedral
Jennifer Higdon was born December 31, 1962, in Brooklyn, New York, and currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She composed blue cathedral in 1999 on commission for the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute of Music. It was given its premiere by the Curtis Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Spano, on March 1, 2000, in Philadelphia. The work carries the inscription “in loving memory of Andrew Blue Higdon.” It calls for an orchestra of two flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboe and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, three percussionists (playing crotales, marimba, tam-tam, vibraphone, glockenspiel, bell tree, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbal, chimes, small triangle, large triangle, bass drum, and large tom-tom), harp, piano (doubling celesta), and strings. The hornists, trombonists, and tubist also play eight crystal glasses tuned by adding water (à la glass harmonica), and at the end of the work most of the orchestra’s musicians play approximately fifty Chinese bells (a.k.a. “Chinese Health Reflex Balls”).
Although she is one of the most widely performed of living American composers, Jennifer Higdon didn’t set her sights on being a composer until she was practically an adult. Born in Brooklyn, she grew up in Atlanta and in rural Tennessee in a counterculture family—both parents were visual artists—for whom “art happenings” and experimental film festivals were the norm. She thought she might become a writer and didn’t have any involvement with music until she started teaching herself to play the flute at the age of fifteen. A few years later she was a flute performance major at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She began a friendship with a young conducting teacher there, Robert Spano, who, as his own career blossomed, would become one of the influential figures championing her music in orchestral circles, both in live performances and recordings. From Bowling Green she moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she earned an artist’s diploma in flute.
By this time she had grown interested in composition and began studying the craft informally with the composer Jay Reise. Before long she gained admittance to the graduate program in composition at the University of Pennsylvania, where the faculty included not only Reise but also George Crumb, who would prove an inspiring influence on the developing composer as she earned her doctorate in composition. “With my background,” she told an interviewer, “I was at a disadvantage compared to the other Penn students, who’d been listening to Beethoven since age three.” But there was a flip side. “The sheer number of Beatles tunes I listened to helped me to realize the ability of music to communicate. My background wasn’t impoverished: It was a wealthy background. I have the ability to hear music like most people who didn’t grow up ‘classical.’ And I have complete joy in what I’m doing because it wasn’t squashed out of me.”
Today her dance card for commissions is very full, and at least one of her orchestral works, blue cathedral, seems destined to become a classic, having already been performed by more than 150 notable symphony orchestras since its premiere in 2000. She composed it as a 75th-anniversary tribute to the Curtis Institute, where she now teaches
Higdon’s teacher George Crumb has acknowledged specific qualities that go the heart of her music: its “rhythmic vitality, interesting coloration, and sensitivity to nuance and timbre.” These are indeed her musical fingerprints, but beyond what are essentially technical matters one also hears in her scores immediacy of contact, a genial and sincere desire to connect with the listener. “My philosophy is simple and basic,” she has said. “The music has to sing—it has to speak—it has to communicate. If it doesn’t, there’s no point.”
Although it was not her first symphonic score, blue cathedral (Higdon spells it all in lower case) represented a leap forward in her catalogue. “It feels different, like a breakthrough, but it’s hard to say why,” she told the Philadelphia music critic David Patrick Stearns. “Maybe it reached a new level of expression, a certain kind of rawness.” The piece traces its roots to a time of personal devastation and transformation, as she explained in a commentary that appeared with a recording of this work on the Telarc label:
I began writing this piece at a unique juncture in my life and found myself pondering the question of what makes a life. The recent death of my younger brother, Andrew Blue, made me reflect on the amazing journeys that we all make in our lives, crossing paths with so many individuals singularly and collectively, learning and growing each step of the way. This piece represents the expression of the individual and the group—our inner travels and the places our souls carry us, the lessons we learn, and the growth we experience. In tribute to my brother, I feature solos for the clarinet (the instrument he played) and the flute (the instrument I play). Because I am the older sibling, it is the flute that appears first in this dialogue. At the end of the work, the two instruments continue their dialogue, but it is the flute that drops out and the clarinet that continues on in the upward progressing journey.
This is a story that commemorates living and passing through places of knowledge and of sharing and of that song called life.
Notwithstanding the circumstances of its creation, blue cathedral is uplifting rather than mournful. It is to a dirge as a memorial celebration is to a funeral. Gentle tintinnabulation opens the piece, and then muted chords by pairs of violas and cellos, chords whose pastoral rhythms and parallel, open intervals evoke the all-American vocabulary of Copland. Over this the flute and clarinet enter with their duetting in a spirit of relaxed, intimate play; we know who they represent, but we have no clue about the extra-musical identity (if any) of the solo violin that soon joins them. Gradually other solo voices become prominent in the texture (“crossing paths with so many individuals singularly and collectively”), ushering us to several pages that seem beholden to Samuel Barber. Barber was considered retrograde in his day, and few developing composers took cues from him during his lifetime. But of Higdon’s predecessors, it is Barber—her Curtis Institute colleague, though separated by half a century—to whom she sometimes seems closest, and in these pages a music-lover may sense fleetingly some of the same wistfulness that inhabits such a classic as Knoxville: Summer of 1915.
Vigorous percussion energizes the middle of blue cathedral in an episode endowed with exuberant orchestral color, gradually infused by the sounds of the brass section and then the strings as well. The horns sing out a chorale and the rest of the orchestra soon joins them in a grand declamation. Suddenly, over the course of a single measure, the music recedes from fortissimo to pianissimo. The solo flute and clarinet reminisce about their earlier conversations (now with English horn adding its thoughts) over an eerie accompaniment of musical glasses (played by the erstwhile lower brass section) and violins playing sul tasto (bowed over the fingerboard). Muted violas and cellos return with the open intervals from the work’s beginning, and gradually the musicians not otherwise occupied begin to sound Chinese Health Reflex Balls, used in acupressure. In the closing measures we hear the piano, which has been prepared by inserting two screws at specific points along two relatively high strings. “The resulting sound,” Higdon notes in the score, “should be that of a clock, chiming in the distance.” The “piano-clock” strikes thirty-three times—once for each of her brother’s years.
In blue cathedral Higdon has transcended the specific, regrettable circumstances of her inspiration to achieve a short work—perhaps twelve minutes in performance—of exquisite balance and emotional precision. Why blue, and why a cathedral? “Blue” was her brother’s middle name, of course, but the reason ranges broader. The composer explains with a dreamlike image:
Blue—like the sky. Where all possibilities soar. Cathedrals—a place of thought, growth, spiritual expression, serving as a symbolic doorway into and out of this world. Cathedrals represent a place of beginnings, endings, solitude, fellowship, contemplation, knowledge and growth. As I was writing this piece, I found myself imagining a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky. Because the walls would be transparent, I saw the image of clouds and blueness permeating from the outside of this church. In my mind’s eye the listener would enter from the back of the sanctuary, floating along the corridor amongst giant crystal pillars, moving in a contemplative stance. The stained glass windows’ figures would start moving with song, singing a heavenly music. The listener would float down the aisle, slowly moving upward at first and then progressing at a quicker pace, rising towards an immense ceiling which would open to the sky. As this journey progressed, the speed of the traveler would increase, rushing forward and upward. I wanted to create the sensation of contemplation and quiet peace at the beginning, moving towards the feeling of celebration and ecstatic expansion of the soul, all the while singing along with that heavenly music.
—James M. Keller
More About the Music
Recordings: Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, on a collection titled Rainbow Body that also includes pieces by Barber, Copland, and Chris Theofanidis (Telarc) | Robert Spano conducting the Oberlin Conservatory Symphony Orchestra in a live concert at Carnegie Hall, along with works by Mozart and Bartók (Oberlin Music)
Reading: Jennifer Higdon’s Web site at jenniferhigdon.com.