A member of the Chickasaw Nation, Jerod Tate has achieved national recognition for the unique artistic path he has followed in writing orchestral music, using instruments of European origin, but infused by the sounds and traditions of his Native heritage.  The Chickasaw, who currently number about 70,000, live in south-central Oklahoma, where they still observe many of their ancestral traditions and celebrate their annual harvest festival.

As explained on the composer’s website, “his middle name, Impichchaachaaha’, means ‘their high corncrib’ and is his inherited traditional Chickasaw house name.  A corncrib is a small hut used for the storage of corn and other vegetables.  In traditional Chickasaw culture, the corncrib was built high off the ground on stilts to keep its contents safe from foraging animals.”

Chokfi’ was commissioned by the Oklahoma Youth Orchestras who gave the first performance in May 2018.  The composer explains:

Chokfi’ (choke-fee) is the Chickasaw word for rabbit, who is an important trickster legend within Southeast American Indian cultures.

Inspired by a commission for youth orchestra I decided to create a character sketch that would be both fun and challenging for the kids.  Different string and percussion techniques and colors represent the complicated and diabolical personality of this rabbit person.

In honor of my Muscogee Creek friends, I have incorporated a popular tribal church hymn as the melodic and musical base.

In Russian schools, the highest grade a student can receive is a 5, to which, in exceptional cases, a + sign can be added.  Therefore, the incident that took place at a harmony examination at the Moscow Conservatory in 1887 can certainly be called unusual.  The committee, which included Piotr Tchaikovsky, had just heard a 14-year-old student named Sergei Rachmaninoff who had by far exceeded the requirements of the class.  In addition to the simple harmonic exercises called for, the boy played some original compositions he had written.  Professor Tchaikovsky took the examination book and added three more plus signs to the ‟5+” already there—one on top, one below, and one behind.

            ‟My fate as a composer was, as it were, officially sealed”—Rachmaninoff recalled many years later.  The youngster entered Sergei Taneyev’s class as a student of composition, and soon became the star of the conservatory, even though he had the equally brilliant Alexander Scriabin as one of his classmates.  The year Rachmaninoff graduated with the highest honors (1893), his one-act opera Aleko was performed in a double bill alongside Tchaikovsky’s Iolantha.  Having his work on the same program with the leading Russian composer, at the Bolshoi Theater no less, was enough to launch the 20-year-old’s career.  Rachmaninoff soon became the most prominent Russian musician of his generation, much sought after as a composer, pianist and conductor until his emigration from Russia in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917.

            The First Piano Concerto was Rachmaninoff’s first large-scale work, and the first composition he deemed worthy of an opus number.  It was written while the young man was still a student at the Conservatory, in 1890-91.  Rachmaninoff performed the first movement with the school orchestra in 1892 but, surprisingly, there is no evidence that he ever played the entire concerto again until he revised it in 1917, although others did so over the years.  In fact, in 1899 Rachmaninoff turned down an invitation to play the work in London as he thought it was not good enough.  (Henry Wood, the director of the Proms, disagreed and performed the work anyway with another pianist.)

            For his part, Rachmaninoff preferred to write two more concertos in 1900-01 and in 1909, his universally popular Second and Third.  Yet he did not forget about the First, and continued to entertain plans of revising it.  On April 12, 1908, he wrote to a friend:  ‟I have three pieces that frighten me:  the First Concerto, the Capriccio, and the First Symphony.  I should very much like to see all these in a corrected, decent form.”

            The Capriccio on Gypsy Themes is a weak and now entirely forgotten work, and the premiere of the First Symphony was a fiasco that left deep scars.  Rachmaninoff never touched these two works again.  He did eventually get around to revising the First Concerto, however.  The moment came 26 years after the original version, during the politically turbulent and artistically fallow year of 1917.  This revision, his last major undertaking before he left Russia for good at the end of the year, was rather extensive, involving recomposition of a large portion of the work, partial reorchestration and a great many changes of detail.  In the new version, the youthful energy of the 17-year-old is combined with the experience of a mature composer whose catalog had in the meantime reached Op. 39.  The writing, although clearly influenced by the concertos of Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Grieg, nevertheless bears the unmistakable stamp of Rachmaninoff’s own personality.  Virtuoso brilliance and lyrical expansiveness go hand in hand in this concerto.  Rachmaninoff is usually described as a conservative composer, yet innovation is not entirely absent, as in the changing meters of the last movement, introduced in the 1917 revision.

            Rachmaninoff hoped that in its revised form, the concerto might share in the success of his Second and Third Concertos.  As he later wrote in a letter to Alfred Swan, a musicologist and friend:  ‟I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now.  All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily.  And nobody pays any attention.  When I tell them in America that I will play the First Concerto they do not protest, but I can see by their faces that they would prefer the Second or Third.”  Still, as Rachmaninoff biographer Geoffrey Norris observed, ‟The First is a very different piece [from the Second or the Third]; the characteristic melodies, if less remarkable, are there, but they are combined with a youthful vivacity and impetuosity which were soon to be replaced by the more sombre melancholy and wistfulness of the later works.”

In discussions of Shostakovich’s works, the social-political context is often overemphasized at the expense of the music.  Certainly, Shostakovich was more strongly affected by the vagaries of history and politics than most composers, since he lived in a country where ‟Big Brother” was constantly watching everyone.  But there must be more to his work than politics, or else it would not have survived the Communist state in which it was born.

            The Tenth Symphony, thought to be closely connected to Stalin, is a case in point.  It is often asserted that the dictator’s death in March 1953 provided the main impetus for the composition, and the second movement, in particular, is a portrait of the deceased tyrant.  In her book, Shostakovich:  A Life Remembered (Princeton University Press, 1994), Elizabeth Wilson reveals, through a number of interviews with people who had been close to the composer, that the symphony dates, at least in part, from 1951, two years earlier than previously thought.  So how much of the work really owes its existence to the news of Stalin’s death?  Wilson also reports the findings of Manashyr Yakubov, the curator of the Shostakovich Archive, who examined the sketches of an unfinished violin sonata dating from 1946 and found that its themes are close or identical to those of the first movement of the Tenth Symphony.  Wilson concludes:  ‟This implies that Shostakovich had been mulling over this musical material for many years before it eventually got written down in finished form as the Tenth Symphony.”  Nevertheless, if the story reported by Wilson about Elmira Nazirova and the horn call in the third movement (see below) is true, the composition cannot have received its final form before 1953. 

            The longest movement in the Tenth Symphony is the first, which describes a huge arc from piano to pianissimo with a great fortissimo climax in the middle.  Two scherzos follow, one cruel and inhuman, and the other more relaxed, though still unsettling at times.  There is no independent slow movement, but the lengthy introduction to the finale almost grows into one.  The tone of the music lightens in the final Allegro, but it would probably be an exaggeration to speak of unmitigated joy and triumph.  Shostakovich modified the characters of each of the traditional symphonic movements to make them fit his personal emotional world, in which pain and joy, fear and laughter are inseparable.

            Many of Shostakovich’s orchestral and chamber works contain extended passages for one instrument only.  In the first movement of the Tenth Symphony alone, there are a good dozen such passages, where a wind instrument, or one of the string sections, carries a long, meandering melody, while the rest of the orchestra is either silent or plays a simple and sparse accompaniment.  These isolated, meditative lines are quite palpable symbols of loneliness.  In the course of the symphony, the number of such solos gradually decreases, as the work slowly abandons the meditative mood of the opening and embraces a more ‟communal” tone, as expressed by the full orchestral sound heard through much of the finale.

            The second movement is one of Shostakovich’s most brutal scherzos; some have heard it as a caricature of Stalin.  This diabolical movement has counterparts in such earlier Shostakovich works as the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies and the First Violin Concerto.  It is, in a way, the flip side of the serious first movement, equally tragic but also sarcastic in nature.  We need this crude joke, maybe, to exorcise our tragic feelings before moving on towards a more tranquil state of mind.

            The first step in that direction is made in the third-movement ‟Allegretto,” which is jovial and easy-going most of the time, though not impervious to dramatic disruptions.  At their first entrance, the woodwinds play Shostakovich’s musical monogram, the letters D-S-C-H (derived from the German transliteration of the composer’s name, Dmitri Schostakowitsch, played as the notes D – E-flat – C – B, or D-S-C-H; in German, ‟s,” or ‟es,” is the name of the note E-flat, and ‟h” is B-natural).  Shostakovich used this motif in several of his works (most extensively in the Eighth String Quartet).  His procedure can be likened to that of a Renaissance painter who creates a canvas with a large number of figures and includes a self-portrait in a conspicuous spot. 

            We must add, however, that it is not the notes alone that make this theme so personal:  they are all part of the C minor scale and a child could have written them down.  It is the poignant rhythm, the powerful orchestration and the development that are responsible for the special effect. 

            The personal nature of this movement is further enhanced by a revelation first published in Wilson’s book.  The resounding (and at first unaccompanied) horn call E-A-E-D-A is also a musical cipher, standing for the name Elmira.  Elmira Nazirova was an Azerbaijani pianist and composer who had studied with Shostakovich.  Wilson writes:

            During the summer months of 1953 Shostakovich carried on an intense (and probably largely one-sided) correspondence with her.  Although Nazirova undoubtedly served as his muse during the period of composition, it seems that it was a temporary obsession with her image that sustained Shostakovich’s inspiration, rather than a need to fuel a concrete physical relationship.

            What is the connection between Elmira and the horn motif?  Shostakovich combined the French and German systems to come up with musical equivalents of the name’s letters:  “E” is e, “L” is “la” (a), “MI” is e, “R” is “re” (d), and “A” is a.  This may seem contrived, but it is really nothing particularly new.  Renaissance composers (for example, Josquin Desprez) had already been fond of such subtle games.

            Once we know all this, the movement takes on an entirely new meaning.  The motifs of Shostakovich and Elmira are repeated unchanged throughout the entire movement, while the opening theme undergoes numerous transformations.  Two people in the middle of a turbulent world?  At any rate, the ending of the movement is highly symbolic:  the horn plays the Elmira theme one last time, with mute, and the flute and piccolo respond with “D-S-C-H” in soft staccato (short and separated) notes.

            Let us stop here for a moment.  What if we hadn’t been given all this personal information about Shostakovich and Elmira?  Isn’t the music supposed to stand on its own and be intelligible without any external explanations?

            Of course it is, and this symphony has been admired by musicians and audiences who had never heard of Elmira Nazirova.  But that horn call is so insistent that it is hard to believe it is not there for a specific reason, even if we don’t know what the reason is.  The Nazirova story is important because it tells us how the movement became what it is, in addition to revealing something personal about the composer. 

            The last movement begins with a slow unaccompanied solo for cellos and basses, just like the first movement did.  We seem to be back to the meditative opening of the symphony.  More extended instrumental solos follow (for oboe, flute, and bassoon).  The theme of the ‟Allegro” section is born gradually:  first we hear only an ascending perfect fifth, then a little melodic flourish is added, and suddenly the theme is there, with its rushing scales and excited accompaniment.  The joyful melody is interrupted by reminiscences of earlier movements:  music from the cruel second-movement scherzo crops up, followed by the ‟D-S-C-H” theme from the third movement.  The recapitulation is preceded by the last lengthy solo, for bassoon playing in its low register.  This solo is, however, playful rather than meditative, in keeping with the general character of the movement which becomes more and more exuberant to the end.  The last word belongs to “D-S-C-H,” proclaimed loudly by the brass and hammered out by the timpani as the symphony reaches its resounding conclusion.

            Called upon to provide some verbal commentary on his new work, Shostakovich, who had so often been forced to practice self-criticism in the past, now carried the exercise ad absurdum:  ‟Like my other works I wrote it very quickly.  That is probably more of a defect than a virtue because there is much that cannot be done well when one works so fast.”  What this statement was really trying to do was beat the critics at their own game of Shostakovich-bashing by coyly downplaying the work’s importance.  Critics swallowed the bait and duly castigated the work for its ‟pessimistic,” ‟individualistic” tendencies.  Musicians and audiences, on the other hand, took to the new symphony immediately, both in the Soviet Union and abroad.  It is, next to the Fifth and the First, the most frequently performed Shostakovich symphony.  There are well over 50 recordings, including a piano-duet version played by the composer and his friend and fellow composer, Mieczysław Weinberg.