Program Notes: Mackey Saxophone Concerto

AARON COPLAND
Quiet City 
BORN: November 14, 1900, in New York City, U.S. 
DIED: December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York, U.S. 
WORK COMPOSED: 1939
WORLD PREMIERED: January 28, 1941, with conductor Daniel Saidenberg and his Saidenberg Little Symphony in New York City. 

In 1939, Aaron Copland had completed his first two Hollywood film scores (for Of Mice and Men and Our Town) when he was commissioned to write incidental music for the play Quiet City by Irwin Shaw. He adapted some of it into a 10-minute orchestral composition designed to be performed independently of the play, but because the play was a flop (it didn’t live past its previews), Copland put the music aside.  

He was convinced of his work’s potential, however. Originally scored for a small ensemble of clarinets, saxophone, trumpet and piano, Copland had reorchestrated it with trumpet, English horn and string orchestra, borrowing the play’s name and some of its themes, adding his own musical brushstrokes of inspiration in New York City’s night life. His Quiet City finally premiered in 1941, and it has far outlived Shaw’s failed stage drama.  

The piece opens quietly with English horn and trumpet solos joined by restrained swells of strings, with the horn and trumpet taking up a musical dialogue that ascends slowly, joined by the rest of the orchestra to evoke a dream-like sense of loneliness and nostalgia that coalesces into a lush climax before both the trumpet and horn end the work like it begins, on a quiet note. 

The orchestra gives its premiere performance of Quiet City in this week’s concerts, with two of the Symphony’s own musicians serving as soloists: Principal Trumpet David Gordon and English Horn Stefan Farkas.

Leilani Polk © 2025 

STEVEN MACKEY 
Anemology: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra 
BORN: February 14, 1956, to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. 
WORK COMPOSED: 2025 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 18, 2025, with the Monterey Symphony conducted by Music Director Jayce Ogren and featuring Timothy McAllister as soloist. 

American composer Steven Mackey started out as a rock musician. A guitarist who discovered classical music as a teen, he says his life was changed by “a single note” while he was driving around Northern California listening to the second movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet: an unexpected unison E-flat he’s described as the most psychedelic rock music he’d ever heard. It changed the way he viewed classical music forever and shifted his musical direction to composition.  

At present, Mackey is a Professor of Music at Princeton University, part of the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music and director of the New Jersey Symphony’s Edward T. Cone Composition Institute; a composer of more than 80 works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance and opera, including his 2011 GRAMMY-winning Lonely Motel: Music from Slide; and winner of multiple awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award and so many others.  

Mackey has said his creative voice merges his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music, which finds him incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles. This season, he presents his new work and Seattle Symphony co-commission, Anemology: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra. In his Artist’s Statement, Mackey discusses how his rock vernacular informs his feelings about concertos and virtuosity, and how this, in turn, informs his latest composition: 

“Every musical esthetic, fashion, trend, tendency, practice, dogma, etc., exists on a pendulum that swings back and forth from era to era. Take the notion of virtuosity, for example. I grew up as a rock musician with what my kids call 'classic rock,' but 'It’s only rock and roll' to me, as the Stones put it. I learned to play guitar by stealing solos from recordings by Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Steve Howe, Carlos Santana — great virtuosos all. Holding the spotlight as a soloist with an ensemble was highly valued. The attributes of a guitar hero — speed, risk taking, intense expression and the cult of personality with a hint of demonic possession — are shared with the flashy virtuosi of the 19th century like Niccoló Paganini and Franz Liszt. In the decades that followed, virtuosity in general, and the extended guitar solos in particular, fell out of fashion. 'Punk' was an explicit rejection of that virtuosity.

“I was in my late teens when I first discovered classical music, and I felt right at home with foregrounded virtuosity in concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and others. In the 1960s, when Hendrix was burning the guitar, literally and figuratively, with his blazing virtuosity, the classical music that was being composed eschewed the virtuosity valued in the previous century. Ligeti’s Cello Concerto (1967) is the quintessential example, often referred to as an 'anti-concerto.'  

“As a composition student in the mid-1970s, I absorbed much of the prevailing esthetic, but I missed the anti-virtuosity memo. With Anemology, my Saxophone Concerto, I have now written 17 concertos. I regard composing works for soloist and orchestra as the best of both worlds, in that it offers the intimacy and intricacy of the soloist balanced by the variety and power of the orchestra.

“I like the process of getting to know a soloist, learning about their instrument and their personality in order to invent music that highlights their specialties and perhaps even expands their lexicon, knowing that they will spend months mastering their part. Equally gratifying is the process of creating a persona for the orchestra that is a worthy partner and/or adversary to the soloist but can be learned by an orchestra between Tuesday’s first rehearsal and Friday’s concert. 

“The relationships among the individual, the group and individuals from within the group can be explored to a variety of narrative ends. The soloist can be an underdog or unlikely hero pitted against a massive orchestra, establishing liaisons with individual members from the orchestra and acting as an intrepid guide leading the orchestra around tight corners and through vivid contrasts, or a shaman, connecting the orchestra to other spiritual planes. 

“I suppose in Anemology, the saxophone soloist is the wind, and the orchestra is the landscape, topography, scenery, etc., that is stirred and animated by its movement.” 

Read more about Mackey and the work’s inspirations HERE. 

Seattle Symphony © 2025

JOHN ADAMS
Harmonielehre 
BORN: February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts 
WORK COMPOSED: 1984–1985 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 21, 1985, in San Francisco, by the San Francisco Symphony; Edo de Waart conducting 

With so much of the orchestral repertory given over to great works of the past, it is often difficult for present-day composers to get noticed. One who has is John Adams. During the past four decades and more, this California-based musician has produced a substantial and varied body of work, much of it for orchestra. His compositions have brought their author a Pulitzer Prize and the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize (sometimes described as the “Nobel Prize for music”), and he has earned the distinction of being the most frequently performed living American composer. Even more impressive, his work has won over many listeners who normally approach new music with some skepticism.  

Adams broke early in his career from the arcane procedures for writing atonal music that characterized modernism in the 1950s and ’60s. Initially drawn to the techniques of a group of American outsiders whose style became known, by analogy with trends in painting and sculpture, as “minimalism,” Adams evolved steadily in during the 1980s and ’90s, developing an idiom that combined repeating motifs, rhythmic pulsation and static or slow-moving harmonies — all signature minimalist devices — with colorful orchestration, a wide range of expressive nuance, and a rich harmonic vocabulary. He thereby created what some commentators have described as a “post-minimalist” style, one that has proven complex, flexible and fertile. Its rhythmic vitality marks it as contemporary American; its harmonic language entails echoes of the Romantic era. 

That last trait is particularly evident in Harmonielehre, composed in the mid-1980s. Its title derives from a famous treatise of the same name by the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). In his late work, Schönberg became an apostle of the sort of atonal modernity that once alienated many listeners from new music. But his early compositions belong to the twilight of Romanticism, with its lush, expressive and sometimes tantalizingly ambiguous harmonic palette. It is that harmonic language, current around the start of the 20th century, that Adams set out to reclaim in Harmonielehre. “It is a large, three-movement work for orchestra that marries the developmental techniques of minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle Romanticism,” the composer has observed of this piece. “The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy and the young Schönberg are everywhere ...” 

The opening movement begins with pounding chords and pulsating figures in the classic minimalist manner before turning to more lyrical expression in a long central episode. A brief reprise of the opening material rounds off this initial portion of the work.  

Adams explains that he was intently studying the writings of Carl Jung at the time he composed Harmonielehre and was particularly impressed by the psychologist’s discussion of the legend of King Anfortas and his wound that will not heal. (Opera fans, especially in Seattle, will recall this tale in connection with Richard Wagner’s Parsifal.) The second movement captures the melancholy spirit of the Anfortas story.  

As for the finale, it derives, Adams explains, from a dream in which he imagined his infant daughter, then called “Quackie,” floating in the heavens while perched on the shoulders of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt. This movement opens, appropriately, with a cradle song but gathers energy and momentum as it builds to a climactic conclusion. 

Paul Schiavo © 2010, revised 2025