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Essay in D: The Critics Cogitation About Titles

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Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward.

During an interview segment of a Making Music concert at Zankel Hall last week the composer George Crumb was asked whether the titles of the first and last movements of his Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) Vocalise (... for the Beginning of Time) and Sea-Nocturne (... for the End of Time) were meant to be as ominous as they sounded.

They're just poetic titles. Sometimes people take composers titles too seriously.
George Crumb-Composer

And whose fault is that? When listeners encounter these titles in their program books or on CD covers, its only natural that they conclude that the title is meant to tell them something about the nature of the work. But logical as that assumption is, it is often confounded these days.

A few weeks before the Crumb program, inapt titles were thick on the ground at a Da Capo Chamber Players concert. A shimmering but increasingly vehement work by Chen Yi seemed far too forceful to be called Happy Rain on a Spring Night. And Cloud Forest seemed far too misty a title for Conor Browns zesty, off-kilter work, with its strands of American and Turkish folk music.

At a recent concert by the Cassatt Quartet, Joan Tower offered some insight into how little a title can tell us about what a work actually means to a composer. She said that her first quartet was a struggle, and that she originally thought of calling it Nightmare. But thinking the title was too negative, she changed it to Night Fields and wrote a program note describing a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon, with waves of fast moving colors rolling over the fields to explain the fanciful new title. But the harmonically prickly writing at the works heart suggested that she had been right the first time.

Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward. Through much of classical musics history, the titles of secular instrumental works were usually just formal descriptions (symphony, quartet, concerto), and when titles were affixed (Moonlight, for example) they were usually a publishers idea. Publishers understood that titles, and the imagery they evoked, could help move copies; composers were in it for the art.

Even so, Baroque composers sometimes used titles to tell listeners what their works were about, and in the case of Vivaldis Four Seasons, four descriptive sonnets were translated into music phrase by phrase.

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