1988
for
Violin, cello and piano
Betsy Jolas
The Mannes Trio
1986 Chamber Music Competition
June 26, 1989
Betsy Jolas, born in Paris in 1926, is a French-American composer whose catalogue embraces chamber, orchestral and vocal music. She studied with Milhaud and Messiaen and taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Her early experience with the Dessoff Choirs helped shape a lasting interest in vocal music.
Betsy Jolas was born in Paris in 1926 and grew up between French and American cultural worlds. From 1940 to 1946 she lived in the United States, earning a degree at Bennington College and singing and accompanying with the Dessoff Choirs. That experience deepened her interest in early vocal music. Returning to Paris, she studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. She later assisted Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire and taught analysis and composition there. Her teaching also took her to Yale, Harvard, Berkeley and Mills College. Jolas’s catalogue includes chamber, orchestral and vocal music, as well as the opera Schliemann. Her commissions include Tales of a Summer Sea for Tanglewood and A Little Summer Suite for the Berlin Philharmonic.
If someone had told me in the sixties that I would one day write a piano trio, I would have probably laughed and dismissed the idea as absurd. This was a time indeed when composers still believed they could change things radically; remodel the orchestra, invent new instruments, new ensembles, and give up writing for such outdated combinations as string quartets, violin and piano duets, piano trios or quartets, to mention only a few of the nineteenth-century favorites. Yet the years went by and somehow our dream never came true. Today, thirty years later, we have to admit that orchestras are exactly as they were a century ago and that quartets, trios etc...are once again so popular that they are no longer content with playing Mozart and Beethoven and are actually requesting new works.
Thus, many of us have recently discovered that there is still a lot to say with such ensembles. I remember that one of the first steps of my thinking about the present “trio” was simply to picture the three instruments on stage. Clearly the mere sight of them was going to create a strong expectation of traditional trio music, which of course I had no desire to write. It therefore seemed to me most important to find ways to show from the very start and throughout the piece that I would not fulfill this expectation. Whether this apparently simple, yet most challenging, goal was attained or not, this first hearing of my “trio” should demonstrate better than a lengthy presentation.
Commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for the Mannes Trio, this work was completed in December 1988.
—Betsy Jolas
