Entr’acte (2014)
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Run Time: Approx. 13 Minutes
In 2013, Caroline Shaw made history as the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, awarded for her groundbreaking vocal composition Partita for 8 Voices. A multifaceted artist—composer, vocalist, violinist, and producer—Shaw is also a member of the Grammy Award–winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, known for their adventurous and genre-defying performances.
Entr’acte started out as a string quartet, written specifically for the Brentano String Quartet, and was later reworked for full string orchestra. Upon hearing Brentano perform Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2, Shaw was inspired in particular by the group’s performance of the Minuet and Trio movement. Traditionally a lively dance in triple meter, the minuet and trio often provides an opportunity for levity within otherwise emotionally weighty works. These movements are usually lighthearted and playful, and can often shift agilely from one musical extreme to another.
Captivated by this quality, Shaw sought to capture and expand upon it in Entr’acte. The piece begins in a very recognizable classical style but quickly begins to veer off course. As Shaw describes, “I love the way some music (like the Minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.” True to this vision, Entr’acte moves through an expanse of musical states and textures, from whimsy to tender melancholy, and even embracing moments of awkward silence. Shaw exaggerates these sudden shifts in color and character, sometimes to the point of the grotesque, inviting the listener on a journey that is at once disorienting, humorous, and inviting.
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Run Time: Approx. 16 minutes
In 1947, American soprano Eleanor Steber approached star American composer Samuel Barber about writing a movement for her to perform with orchestra. For the commission, Barber turned to a text by American Writer James Agee, that recalled a summer evening from his childhood. In the poem, which would later become the prologue to Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” a young boy lies in the grass of his front yard in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. As twilight falls, he observes the world around him—the murmured conversations from porch rockers, the trees, the birds, the distant rumble of a streetcar. The memory is filled with contentment and childhood wonder, but also with sadness; Agee was recalling the last summer before his father died in a tragic car accident. Afterward, his family left Knoxville and never returned. It was a pivotal time in his life, and Knoxville became symbolic of the last of his childhood innocence before everything changed.
Barber felt a great connection to Agee’s text, saying, “I had always admired Mr. Agee’s writing, and this prose-poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home. I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both five. You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and the lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.” Agee’s story may have resonated with Barber even more deeply at that time, as his own father was gravely ill. Barber would later dedicate the work to him.
Steber, too, felt the text reflected her childhood memories of growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Upon reading the poem, she declared, “That is exactly my childhood!” Perhaps audience members who grew up in Alabama may also find their own childhood memories bubbling to the surface.
Berber’s composition is a work of stunning, visceral nostalgia, and one would be hard pressed to find a more perfect fitting of music and text. Agee’s prose conjures a vivid snapshot of the American south in the early 20th-century. As the young boy sits in the grass, he muses “It has become the time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently.” Barber sets the scene with a meandering folk-inspired melody played by the winds. Long chords in the strings evoke the thick warmth of summer air, while plucked strings and harp gently rock along with the porch-sitters in a swaying rhythmic pulse.
As the evening unfolds, shifts in the musical themes mirror the wandering attention of the child as he observes the surrounding flora, fauna, and machinery. The text itself has a distinct musicality, with descriptions of “garden hoses singing like violins,” and a horse and buggy producing a “hollow iron music on the asphalt.” At one point the boy is startled by “A streetcar raising its iron moan,” and the music responds with a surge of agitation. But as twilight deepens into night, the music softens once again. The boy watches his father readying the house for sleep: “Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, now he has coiled the hose.”
Eventually, the boy lays down in the backyard with his father, mother, uncle, and aunt. At first, he’s excited, but as he begins to contemplate the vastness of the universe and his place in it, he begins to feel alone, desolate, and unsure of who he is. “And who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying on quilts on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.” The feelings linger as he’s finally put to bed.
Symphony No. 4, “Romantic” (1878/1880)
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Run Time: Approx. 70 minutes
Anton Bruckner, born in 1824, was an Austrian composer and organist best known for his expansive symphonies as well as his choral and liturgical works. To fully appreciate Bruckner’s music, it’s important to consider two significant influences on his work.
First, Bruckner was an exceptional organist, and his work was greatly shaped by both the characteristics of the organ and by the church music that makes up much of the instrument’s repertoire.
Unlike other instruments, the organ is unable to naturally taper dynamics; dynamic shifts are therefore achieved mechanically by pushing in or releasing stops. As a result, organ music often features abrupt and dramatic changes in volume and character. This quality is unmistakably present in Bruckner’s orchestral writing. While he does take advantage of the orchestra’s ability to contour dynamics more fluidly, his music frequently shifts suddenly between moments of quiet introspection and overwhelming grandeur.
Bruckner’s writing for the brass section is particularly iconic, marked by bold, radiant chorales that burst forth with joyful abandon. When the brass enters in these towering climaxes—just as thrilling to play as they are to hear—it evokes the feeling of sitting in a great cathedral, reveling in the sonic power of an organ at full tilt.
The key element to consider when listening to Bruckner’s music is his deep adoration for his Austrian and German predecessors and contemporaries. He revered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Mozart, and most especially Wagner–and all their voices can be heard throughout his work. In the Fourth Symphony, however, it is perhaps Beethoven’s influence that stands out most clearly, particularly in the way Bruckner evokes elements of nature.
Given the subtitle “Romantic” by Bruckner himself, the Symphony opens with an expansive horn call. Long associated with the outdoors due to its origins as a hunting instrument, the horn carries a rich symbolic weight in orchestral music. It has often served as a signaling device—from ancient ritual instruments like the shofar, to the post horn announcing the arrival of the mail, or military bugle calls marking the beginning or end of the day. Throughout the symphony, Bruckner taps into all these associations, using the horn to conjure scenes of nature, the hunt, and to announce triumphant arrivals.
Bruckner describes the first movement as a sort of historical snapshot. “Medieval city–Daybreak–Morning calls sound from the city towers–the gates open–On proud horses the knights burst out into the open, the magic of nature envelops them–forest murmurs–bird song–and so the Romantic picture develops further…”
The second movement is a slow, mournful lament, carried by steady, plodding rhythms that give it the character of a funeral march. Yet even within this somber atmosphere, Bruckner cannot resist moments of transcendence: the music builds to a shimmering brass chorale before gently receding back into repose.
The third movement is a vivid evocation of the hunt, driven by bold horn calls that subtly nod to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. In the Finale, Bruckner brings the work full circle, returning to the noble horn calls of the first movement—now inverted into a descending figure, as if answering a question first posed at the symphony’s opening. The movement builds, culminating in an earth-shattering conclusion that transforms the symphony’s opening material into a mighty ending.
-Valerie Sly, 2025