Ascending Light, for Organ and Orchestra
Michael Gandolfi was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, on July 5, 1956, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was offered the commission to compose a work for organ and orchestra for the Boston Symphony Orchestra—the first work for organ and orchestra to be specifically commissioned by the BSO—in summer 2009. Most of the active stage of composition took place in 2014, and the completed score was ready by January 2015. The score is inscribed, “Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, with generous support provided by the Gomidas Organ Fund, in memory of Berj Zamkochian and commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.” The composer’s dedication is “in loving memory of my father.” The concerto was premiered by Andris Nelsons and the BSO with organist Olivier Latry on March 26, 2015, at Symphony Hall, Boston.
In addition to the solo organ, the score for Ascending Light calls for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: xylophone, glockenspiel, 2 sets of tubular bells, large and medium suspended cymbals, crash cymbals, tambourine, triangle, mark tree, ratchet, bass drum), harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
The impetus for this Boston Symphony Orchestra commission for Michael Gandolfi’s Ascending Light for organ and orchestra came originally from the Gomidas Organ Fund to honor of its founder, the late Armenian-American organist Berj Zamkochian (1929-2004), as well as to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Zamkochian, a major presence in the Boston music community, was also active worldwide as a soloist and for many years a faculty member of the New England Conservatory, where Michael Gandolfi is a longtime member of the composition faculty. While still in his 20s, Zamkochian gained the attention of BSO Music Director Charles Munch, who brought him to Symphony Hall as organ soloist in such works as the Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 (his recording of that work with the BSO is considered a classic) and the Poulenc Concerto for Organ, Timpani, and Strings. He performed in Symphony Hall’s erstwhile regular series of organ recitals and, following Munch’s departure, continued to appear with the BSO and Boston Pops for many years. Zamkochian established the Gomidas Organ Fund to mark the centenary of the great Armenian priest and composer Gomidas Vardapet (1869-1935). (Gomidas, or Komitas, was the name given to the monk Soghomon Soghomonian upon his ordination in 1894; “Vardapet” and “Vardabed” are transliterations designating the title for a class of Armenian priest.)
A teacher, composer, and musicologist, Gomidas is likely the single most important figure in the millennium-plus documented tradition of Armenian music. His efforts to catalogue Armenian folk music as well as the intricate system of church modes helped focus the cultural identity of a people that had largely come under Ottoman rule for centuries. In part because of this, he was one of the several hundred Armenian intellectuals and artists arrested in Constantinople in April 1915, an event marking the beginning of what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. (Following Gomidas’s arrest and a traumatic imprisonment in a deportation camp, his stature as an artist led to his being released and ultimately sent to Paris, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life in fragile mental and physical health. He died in October 1935, and his remains were reinterred in Yerevan the following year. ) Michael Gandolfi celebrates the lively and enduring foundation of modern Armenian culture represented by Gomidas and the other deported intellectuals in the majestic, energetic music at the beginning and end of Ascending Light. He also quotes specific Armenian church and folk music elsewhere in the piece.
Gandolfi’s embrace of these musical materials, so richly a part of Armenian culture, reflects a wide-ranging intellectual and artistic curiosity that is also on display in the composer’s other BSO commissions. Gandolfi has been associated with the BSO for nearly four decades, since he was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 1986 and earned a TMC commission for his orchestra work Transfigurations. He returned to Tanglewood frequently as a performer and joined the TMC composition faculty in 1997. In 2004 a BSO commission for the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra resulted in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, which was inspired by a vast Scottish garden designed by Charles Jencks and based on various subjects of exploration in modern science. (He later expanded this piece into an eleven-movement, seventy-minute work, premiered in its complete form by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.) His Plain Song, Fantastic Dances (2005), commissioned for, premiered, and recorded by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, incorporates Gregorian chant melody as a reference to St. Botolph, after whom the city of Boston is named. His orchestral commission Night Train to Perugia (2012), commissioned for the 75th anniversary of Tanglewood, is a short fantasia alluding tongue-in-cheek to an experiment done at the CERN Large Hadron Collider suggesting (mistakenly) that neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light. His BSO-commissioned In America for voices and orchestra was premiered at Tanglewood by the TMC Orchestra in 2018 under Gemma New’s direction. Commemorating the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, the piece is a response to Bernstein’s Songfest and takes a wide view of American culture via texts from many different sources, from Mark Twain to Cesar Chavez to Rosa Parks. More recently, he wrote a cantata for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Where can I go from your spirit, for baritone, soprano, and ensemble, which was premiered at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall in January 2022.
Among other science-based works is his Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman, for the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus (2010), with which, along with music director Robert Spano, he worked closely in recent years. Literature has figured strikingly in his work, from Shakespeare to Pinocchio to Boris Vian, as has visual art, especially the unexpected juxtapositions of the surrealists, the visual games of M.C. Escher, and the pattern dynamics of American minimalists.
Gandolfi’s inquisitiveness has expanded naturally into collaborative projects. He worked extensively with the late writer Dana Bonstrom, who provided texts and narrative scenarios for a variety of works, including the large-scale chorus-and-orchestra work Chesapeake: Summer of 1814, commemorating the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and The Queen and the Conjurer, based on Tarot cards. Gandolfi has also collaborated with the videographer Ean White in several multimedia projects, including video accompaniment for The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. He is offered commissions from all over the country, and in addition to the BSO and the Atlanta Symphony has worked frequently with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (which has released two CDs of his music) and his hometown ensemble, the nearly 100-year-old Melrose Symphony Orchestra, for which he has written several pieces. Current projects include a new piece for Boston’s Collage New Music to be premiered this season and a violin concerto for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra with the orchestra’s concertmaster, Michael Shih, as soloist.
Michael Gandolfi’s Ascending Light for organ and orchestra takes its title from that of an Armenian hymn, “Aravot lousaber,” upon which the last section of the piece is based. The work is in two movements: the first is an energetic, highly patterned series of exchanges between the orchestra and the organ titled “Vis Vitalis.” This translates as “vital force,” referring to the ancient philosophical idea of a non-physical substance that animates life; here, the “life force” of Armenia is its people, and in particular the artists and intellectuals deported or killed in Turkey in April 1915. The placement of two sets of tubular bells, flanking the timpani at the rear of the stage, echoes the visual motif of the Symphony Hall organ pipes; trumpet-and-trombone pairs on either side of the stage are a deliberate ceremonial gesture. The composer writes, “The passages of the first movement allow the organ to show many of its myriad guises. It is alternately leader, follower, virtuoso (replete with elaborate pedal-work), initiator of change, etc. At one moment, central in the first movement, the organ introduces motivic figures in sequence that quickly find their way into the orchestra only to become accompaniment for further elaboration by the organ, which elaboration is in turn added to the orchestra, etc., creating a complex web of accompaniment that rivals the organ’s next contribution.”
Various types of harmonic and metrical aural illusions heard throughout the piece are characteristic of Gandolfi’s music. For example, metrically the winds’ rising arpeggiated figure near the start of the piece can be heard as either groups of four notes (suggested by pitch) or groups of three (suggested by the insistent quarter-note rhythm of timpani). The composer uses this ambiguity to foreshadow changes in metrical and rhythmic perspective within the movement. Harmonies are based on triads (the basic chord of traditional tonal music), but evolve in unexpected ways, abetted by the metrical sleight-of-hand, use of harmonic pedal points, and the shift of material from foreground to accompaniment, like perspective fields in a Medieval landscape painting.
The first movement’s grand finish is connected to the second via a pedal note in the organ. The melody here is transcribed from recordings of a “Lullaby of Tigranakert,” which in its free, improvisatory flow contrasts with the intricate interlocking patterns of the first movement. As in the first movement, though, Gandolfi takes fragments of this primary tune to use in accompaniment patterns; a rising sixteenth-note figure, passed among orchestral sections, is especially persistent. The second of the three shorter variations is an organ solo; the longer fourth variation, “Grand variation: scherzo” is virtually a movement in itself. Upon its winding-down, the Reverie, a piccolo solo over chorale harmonies, leads us to the final section, “Aravot lousaber,” “Ascending light.” That hymn’s melody, first presented in simple chorale form, then combines with the music of the first movement in a joyous, vital, uplifting coda.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Michael Gandolfi on Ascending Light
I was first presented with this commission for a work for organ and orchestra in the summer of 2009, by Anthony Fogg, Artistic Administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He made it clear that it was the wish of the members of the Gomidas Organ Fund that I have complete artistic freedom in writing the piece: the work need not be conceived as a requiem for those who perished in the Armenian Genocide. However, it was immediately clear to me that I would not be able to compose this work in ignorance of this terribly tragic event.
I found an appealing and well-known Armenian lullaby, known as the lullaby of Tigranakert (Tigranakert was the ancient capital of Armenia). My research led to many recorded examples. I transcribed several, realizing that this would be a prominent feature of the piece at some point. After doing this I became interested in researching sacred Armenian music and found a choral work titled “Aravot Lousaber,”’ which translates as “Ascending Light.” The plaintive melody dates back several centuries, but a simple and elegant four-part harmonization was by the Armenian priest, musicologist, and composer known as Vartapet Komitas. (I learned only after completing the piece that Komitas is Gomidas, after whom the Gomidas Organ Fund is named—a fortuitous and remarkable synchronicity.) I then had two Armenian musical references that provided a superb balance: one of earthiness, one of heavenliness.
In fall 2014, after a long session of reading about the great number of intellectuals murdered at the outset of the Armenian Genocide, I found myself viewing portraits of a number of these victims, apparently taken in the prime of their lives. Suddenly a very powerful, almost defiant music emerged in my inner ear. This music was rich and full of life. It was a courageous music. The full form of the piece was suddenly made clear. The first movement would be a celebration of the vitality of life or “life force.” The second would move from the earthly to the heavenly. The finale would merge the transformation of the second movement with the life-force music of the first. I felt that the generally positive ethos of the piece would align with the vital and developing Armenian culture that has prevailed in spite of the horrors of 1915.
Once all of this was in place, the piece was written rather quickly. I was excited to write a work for the newly renovated organ at Boston’s Symphony Hall. I was also greatly aided by hearing Olivier Latry in recital in Montreal at the very early stages of writing. We met for several hours after his recital and he played through my transcription of the “Lullaby of Tigranakert.” He also generously revealed many features of organ-writing that proved most useful in the following weeks. He is a remarkable musician, with a great stage presence. In addition to Olivier, I sought counsel in writing for organ from Kathryn Salfelder, a fine DMA composition student of mine and an accomplished organist, as well as from organist and New England Conservatory faculty Tom Handel. I was also fortunate to have the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble, led by my friend and colleague Charles Peltz, read through the opening of the piece.
Michael Gandolfi
