Instrumentation: Large orchestra
First Performance: Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst on May 18 and 20, 2017, Severance Hall, Cleveland
Commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director, with the generous support from the Young Composers Endowment Fund established by Jan R. and Daniel R. Lewis. Dedicated with gratitude to Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra, and with love to Wang Lu.
Duration: 22 minutes
Excerpt from the 2nd movement (from the premiere):
Topos is the largest-scale project I’ve yet undertaken, and one that owes the most to the past. It is a work that re-engages familiar yet constantly evolving “topics” from the vast repository of Western music. My interest in the histories and semiotics of musical gestures, genres, and types, along with their fixed and changing notions of meaning for composers and audiences across the centuries, became a focal point of the piece. While being conscious of allusion and intertextuality, I also aim for a totally new perspective on familiar subjects. Each movement is based on one or several related musical topics: representational tropes with special recurring characteristics that evoke scenery, psychological affect, natural and cultural phenomena, etc. The fluidity of meaning in these topics fascinates me. For example, horn calls were originally indicative of hunting, signaling, and fanfare but reemerged in the 19th century as symbols of nostalgia and even leave-taking.
In musicological research of the past few decades, “topic theory” is an area that has excited the understanding and interpretation of works that were once thought to be culturally neutral or expressively stagnant. As I’ve plunged into the seminal texts on the subject, my listening has continued to be reshaped by them. Every stray hunting call, open-landscaped pastoral drone, thunderous storm, and flowing stream has become even more magnified with semiotic meaning. This is especially so for works considered to belong to the dubious category of “absolute music.”
Topos opens with my idea of a shadowy ombra topic, traditionally associated with ghosts and the supernatural, and is paired with “night music,” a genre that itself spans everything from Chopin’s nocturnes to the unsettled moods and evocations of nocturnal birds and insects in Bartók’s own “night music.” Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”), a term with applications to both early Romantic literature and certain restless minor-key Classical-era musical works, is more about inner emotional turmoil, with a quite specific taxonomy of characteristics. I conflate it in the second movement with my reimagining of actual storm music (tempesta), revealing the overlap of both inner agitation and the terror of the outward sublime. Both are introduced by a “water” topic that flows ceaselessly in overlapping layers, becoming more dangerous and menacing. The third movement, “Speaking Love,” departs the most from a culturally prescribed musical topic, and is instead a rhapsodic fantasy in eleven verses of varying lengths on the topic of love, from timid whispers to passionate declarations, with passing allusions to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Berg’s Lyric Suite, among others. And the final “Wild Hunt” explores the huge range of expressive meaning that a simple hunting horn call (usually a pair in parallel motion “horn fifths”) can lead to, from nostalgia to triumph to everything in between. A particular sequence of allusions moves non-chronologically but diachronically through examples as varied as Mahler, Schumann, Haydn, Beethoven, and Ligeti – heard in both original and recomposed versions – revealing the topic in all its strangely complex and multi-dimensional manifestations.
The reason why these musical topics are both relatable and familiar is because they are part of our collective historical consciousness as listeners but also speak to shared human conditions. Thus they are open-ended and invite constant reinvention and commentary. My lasting gratitude goes to Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra for their invitation to do precisely that. This piece is dedicated with gratitude to them, and with love to my wife Wang Lu.
Anthony Cheung
March 2017