Program Notes

Today’s program features six rarely performed chamber works composed in a variety of styles spanning five centuries. Despite their differences, each piece was significantly influenced by music from the Baroque era (c.1590–1760). A defining feature of Baroque music is the use of counterpoint, which is the combination of two or more melodies that must interact with each other in very specific and prescribed ways. Other Baroque musical characteristics include improvisation, imitation between different musical parts, ornate melodies, driving rhythms and strictly controlled dissonances (pitches that clash harshly). The unique ways that Baroque musical elements are incorporated into each piece illuminate the myriad connections between past and present musical traditions.

The Quintet in C major by Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm sits at the stylistic transitional point between the Classical and Romantic eras. Recognized for his ability to masterfully blend unusual combinations of instruments, Neukomm’s Quintet is scored for harp, violin, viola, horn and flute. Full of unexpected interjections, sudden pauses and other clever musical surprises, the piece is reminiscent of the comic opera dialogues that were popular at the time. The structure and unpredictability in this quintet reflect the improvisatory stylus fantasticus (fantastic style) sonatas of the Baroque era, and the light musical humor is similar to C.P.E. Bach’s galant style.

At the height of his career, Matthias Weckmann was appointed organist at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg. The church housed the grandest organ in Europe, a stunning instrument with four keyboards, a pedalboard and 3,000 pipes. Weckmann’s Sonata à 4, No. 4 in A minor is a prime example of the stylus fantasticus. Described by the polymath Athanasius Kircher as “the most free and unrestrained method of composing,” pieces in this style should sound spontaneous and improvisatory. To heighten the sense of imaginative fantasy, Weckmann includes quirky rhythms, jaunty melodies, expressive dissonances and sophisticated imitative counterpoint.

Across his career, Ernest Bloch won many awards for his compositions and held prestigious faculty appointments at the University of California Berkeley and Mannes College of Music. His Concertino is full of lush harmonies and melancholic themes, and Bloch’s rich orchestral texture allows the solo viola and flute to soar above the string orchestra. The final movement contains particularly refined imitation between the soloists and the orchestra, a compositional device that Bloch derived from the imitative counterpoint of the Baroque era.

Although Johann Sebastian Bach is the most famous composer from his large musical family today, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was much more respected during the late 18th century. At a time when his father’s music was deemed old-fashioned, C.P.E. Bach developed a new galant style that was both forward thinking and still rooted in the ideals of his father’s generation. The result is music that is simultaneously easy to listen to and highly intellectual.

C.P.E. Bach was known to be witty, and many of his pieces contain delightful moments of musical humor, including the Sinfonia in G major. Throughout the piece, he incorporates unexpected and extreme dynamic contrasts, surprising dissonances and short musical ideas that rapidly bounce from one to the next. Listeners at the time found these characteristics to be quite charming and praised his innovative musical ideas. His sinfonias were so popular that bootleg copies were sold and distributed across Europe without his permission.

In the early 20th century, Alban Berg and his teacher Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tonality, which had been the definitive hierarchical organization of pitches that composers used for centuries. Their new atonal music was saturated with dissonances and written to ensure that no single pitch had musical superiority over any others. One of Berg’s first atonal works was the Kammerkonzert (Chamber Concerto), a large-scale work he wrote to celebrate Schoenberg’s 50th birthday. Berg arranged the second movement for a trio—the Adagio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano. An astute student of Baroque counterpoint, Berg paid careful attention to the ways the musical lines interact in this piece. Subtitled “Love,” the Adagio was an homage to Schoenberg’s late wife Mathilde. Berg quotes a love song from Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande and includes two musical themes in which letters of Mathilde’s name correspond to musical notes: A, H (the note B is called H in the German system), D, E.

Across the 16th century, English alchemists experimented with trying to turn lead into gold, create elixirs of youth and discover the secrets of the universe. In Alchymia, the British composer Thomas Adès takes the principles of transforming original materials into something new and applies it to his compositional practice. The piece weaves together four musical and theatrical moments of transformation stemming from London’s Elizabethan era (1558–1603), which Adès alters to create a work that is wholly original. Alchymia opens with a movement recalling the scene from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest when the sea transforms the king’s eyes into pearls. The second movement is inspired by the Tudor song “The Woods So Wild,” which William Byrd adapted into a virtuosic keyboard solo. The third is based on John Dowland’s poignant Lachrymae (Seven Tears), which was later arranged as a set of instrumental fantasias. Alchymia concludes with a set of variations on Frank Wedekind’s “Lautenlied” (Lute Song), which Alban Berg used in his opera Lulu.

– © 2026 Paula Maust

Dr. Paula Maust is the creator of Expanding the Music Theory Canon and Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. She performs extensively as a harpsichordist and organist in the Washington, D.C. region and curates programs about early modern women for her Baroque ensemble Musica Spira.