Commissioning new works is something every ensemble of certain renown is nolens volens doing today. But bringing recently commissioned works on tour takes the confidence in these compositions to a totally different level. After presenting, the night before, the Low Brass Concerto by Jennifer Higdon, a much more experienced composer, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti, introduced the Saturday night Carnegie Hall public to a work by Samuel Adams who is a current CSO Mead Composer-in-Residence and has just a few orchestral works bearing his signature.
many words of love takes its title from a verse in Wilhelm Müller’s poem Der Lindenbaum, famously set to music by Schubert in his Winterreise cycle. The poem talks about a man passing by a linden tree, haunted by reminiscences of a day when he carved in its bark many words of love: “Ich schnitt in seine Rinde/ so manches liebe Wort”. Adams’ intention was, according to interviews when the work had its première in Chicago, to bring a 21st-century connotation to the Romantic verse. It’s not just about the passing of youth and love, but it is “a pretty incredible allegory for what’s happening to the environment. What I’m trying to do sonically is amplify the sound of Schubert’s Wanderer inscribing many words of love into the tree,” he has declared.
The shriek opening the score might refer to acts of violence against nature while the expression of grief in the middle third of the work might invoke the original Schubertian thoughts. Not that Schubert’s simple, four bars melody was easily recognizable in Adams’ score. The composer used digital technology to transfigure it in myriad ways. The orchestral writing itself employed the full arsenal of contemporary composition techniques from modified pitches to timbral shifts. On top of everything, Adams utilized electronic effects, creating a hybrid between natural and artificial sounds by attaching small speakers to two snare drums and thus obtaining an overall atmospheric, rustling like buzz.