An Interpretative Study and Critical Edition Process of Variations on Two Rows for Percussion and Strings, by Eleazar de Carvalho

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

This work consists of a critical edition of Eleazar de Carvalho’s Variations on Two Rows for Percussion and Strings, with historical background, analysis and interpretative study. This research was performed during my doctoral degree process at The City University of New York. The unpublished work, written in 1968, is the first Brazilian concerto for percussion. The cadenza of the concerto was written by the American percussionist Richard O’Donnell, who premiered it in 1969 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under direction of the composer.

Conductor, composer and pedagogue, Eleazar de Carvalho (1912-1996) is considered one of the most important Brazilian conductors. A Koussevitzky protégé (like Leonard Bernstein), Carvalho was a professor of conducting at the Berkshire Music Center – Tanglewood Festival from 1947 to 1962, as well a professor at The Juilliard School and Yale University. Seiji Ozawa, Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta, are among the many conductors who studied under Carvalho.

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INTRODUCTION

My first contact with Eleazar de Carvalho’s Variations on Two Rows for Percussion and Strings occurred in 1998. At that time, I was researching works for percussion by Brazilian composers for a catalogue that was funded under a Brazilian government grant,¹ and Carvalho’s widow, the pianist Sonia Muniz de Carvalho, provided me with the manuscript of the score and a copy of the percussion cadenza.

In 2000, I was recording as soloist the CD Brazilian Concertos for Percussion, by IPH Records. The original intention was to record the first three Brazilian concertos ever written for percussion;² however, I was forced to cancel the recording of Carvalho’s concerto because of uncertainties in the score. Nevertheless, I resolved either to recover the material of this piece or to produce a critical edition of this work.

The opportunity arose when I began doctoral studies in the United States under the auspices of a Fulbright/Capes Scholarship. A number of factors contributed decisively to the choice of this piece as my dissertation topic. First, a significant portion of the published material on Carvalho’s career is to be found in the United States, where he was active as a composer, a conductor, and teacher, and second, I had the opportunity to contact the American percussionist Richard O’Donnell, who provided me with a score of his original cadenza for the piece, as well as the audio recording of the premiere, and offered essential information about the percussion part.

This book has three main sections: (1) a concise biography of the composer; (2) the critical edition of Eleazar de Carvalho’s Variations on Two Rows for Percussion and Strings; and (3) a musical analysis and interpretative study of the piece.

The genre of the percussion concerto is a recent development. The first work in this genre is Darius Milhaud’s Concerto pour batterie et petit orchestre,³ written in Paris in 1929 as his Opus 109 and dedicated to Paul Collaer, a close friend and biographer of Milhaud.⁴ The concerto was premiered by the Pro Arte Orchestre, with Theo Coutelier as soloist and the composer as conductor in 1930 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.⁵ Brazilian music influenced Milhaud, who, from 1917 to 1919, served as a diplomat in Brazil.⁶ There, he was exposed to the music of composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos,⁷ who was famous for his extensive use of percussion instruments. This influence on Milhaud’s works can be seen in pieces such as Le Bouef sur le toit (1919), Saudades do Brasil (1920), and L’Homme et son Desir (1918). This last work calls for fifteen percussionists. American jazz also influenced Milhaud, who made his first trip to United States in 1922. His La Création du Monde (1923) is notable for being one of the first concert works significantly influenced by American jazz.⁸

Lasting approximately seven minutes, Milhaud’s percussion concerto employs a multiple percussion set similar to that used in the La Création du Monde. Both sets are inspired by the American jazz drum set, and Milhaud’s concerto includes a pedal bass drum. The work calls for multiple percussion instruments to be played by a single percussionist. Although it was a novelty, this multiple percussion set was already used by Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat in 1918, an important work in the development of percussion music.

About a decade after Milhaud’s concerto, Paul Creston’s 1940 Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra appeared, another work featuring the percussionist in the role of soloist. Orchestrette Classique premiered the concerto on April 29, 1940, at New York’s Carnegie Chamber Music Hall. Frederique Petrides conducted, and Ruth Stuber Jeanne was the soloist.⁹ It was Creston’s only work for percussion, written in a traditional three-movement concerto format.¹⁰ The second movement calls for a four-mallet technique, which contemporary critics referred to as a kind of novelty. The New York Times critics declared, A concertino for marimba and orchestra—at first blush, that might read like a manifestation of the silly season. But don’t laugh; it wasn’t.¹¹

Creston’s concerto was vital in promoting the marimba as a serious concert instrument. Although the concerto did not receive many performances in the two decades following its conception, after 1960 it became one of the most performed concertos for marimba, surpassed only by Concerto para Marimba e Orquestra by the Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro in 1986.¹²

In 1947, Milhaud, who was living in the United States at the time, wrote his Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone, Opus 278. American percussionist Jack Connor had commissioned the work, and he premiered it as soloist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann, on February 12, 1949. Milhaud believed that the marimba would not be well received as a soloist instrument.¹³ Thus, the commissioning process took a long time; Connor had to make great efforts to convince the composer to write the piece. The composer explored new instrumental sonorities; various passages call for the performer to play with hands (without mallets) or with the shaft of the mallet.

The Concerto pour percussion et orchestre (1958), by the French composer André Jolivet, was extremely well received by critics and aroused great interest within the percussion community. Jolivet studied with Edgard Varèse,¹⁴ an important composer for percussion and author of Ionisation (1931), a landmark work for percussion ensemble. Jolivet’s concerto is dedicated to Félix Passerone and has four movements; the piece calls for a large number of percussion instruments. As Gunther Schuller noted, "Jolivet’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra is a useful addition to the percussion repertory, the only other similar work of stature being Milhaud’s Concerto of 1930."¹⁵

In 1969, two decades after the premiere of Milhaud’s second concerto by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, this same orchestra premiered the first Brazilian concerto for percussion, Carvalho’s Variations on Two Rows for Percussion and Strings. Begun in 1968, Carvalho’s concerto was originated in an unusual manner. Acting as artistic director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (1963-68), the composer asked the orchestra’s percussionist, Richard O’Donnell, to write a cadenza for percussion. Carvalho then composed a concerto for percussion upon this cadenza. This process of composing a concerto around a cadenza can be viewed as not only unusual, but unique in the history of the cadenza’s role within a concerto.

The conductor and percussionist maintained a close professional relationship, having daily contact at the orchestra’s rehearsals. In addition, O’Donnell joined with the pianist Jocy de Oliveira, Carvalho’s first wife, to form a duo that had a regular concert agenda in the United States. In 1966, they expanded the agenda to include a Brazilian tour, performing in festivals of avant-garde music. O’Donnell recalls the beginning of the compositional process of the concerto:

He [Carvalho] asked me to write the cadenza and he told his idea writing this piece for two rows of strings and percussion. It was after we had gone to Brazil, in the summer of 1966 for an avant-garde music festival, and we had a lot of conversations about what is going on, what is music. I remember I was often mentioning Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is The Massage,¹⁶ and we talked a lot about the ideas of music that were being generated by Stockhausen, Xenakis and Berio. He knew these people, especially Xenakis and Berio; that is why Xenakis was there in Brazil for that festival.¹⁷

O’Donnell wrote a virtuosic cadenza for multiple percussion employing graphic and proportional notation like that found in Stockhausen’s Zyklus Nr. 9 (1959). He utilized an enormous set of percussion instruments; many were exotic for that time, and many were built by O’Donnell himself.

O’Donnell is a multifaceted artist whose career as a recognized virtuoso percussionist, composer, teacher, writer, and designer/builder of percussion and electronic instruments spans more than 45 years. O’Donnell attended the St. Louis Institute of Music and North Texas State University, and he is currently director of the Electronic Music Studio at Washington University, head of the Washington University Percussion Department, and music director of the New Music Circle. He performed for 43 years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, for most of that time as principal percussionist. Numerous