1973
for
Flute (doubling Piccolo and Alto Flute), Clarinet (doubling Bass Clarinet), Violin (doubling Viola), Cello, Percussion and Piano
Donald Martino
Speculum Musicae
1972 Chamber Music Competition
Donald Martino composed instrumental and vocal music informed by his experience as a clarinetist. A teacher at several leading American institutions, he received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Notturno and the 1985 Friedheim Award for his String Quartet. He founded the publisher Dantalian in 1978.
Donald Martino was an American composer and clarinetist whose music includes solo, chamber, vocal and orchestral works. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, he began lessons on clarinet, saxophone and oboe at nine and started composing as a teenager. He studied at Syracuse and Princeton and later taught at Princeton, Yale, the New England Conservatory, Brandeis and Harvard. His honors included two Fulbright scholarships, three Guggenheim awards and the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Notturno. His String Quartet received the 1985 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. In 1978 he established Dantalian, a publishing company devoted to his music, helping bring his scores directly to performers and listeners.
Notturno, composed in 1973, was commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for Speculum Musicae who gave the premiere performance on May 15, 1973 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for The Performing Arts, New York City.
The work is cast in 10 sections plus coda. The sections group together into three larger sections which may be regarded as movements. The first and last movements—mixed in tempo and gesture—are almost spasmodic in character. The central movement is slow and gradual in its unfolding, although its climax is abruptly arrived at. While the terminal movements are, in fact, permutations of each other with respect to pitch-materials, their internal forms are perceived very differently. The first presents its sections (and its elements within sections) disjunctly so that one senses nine distinct and different “discussions” whereas the last, as though influenced by the structure that immediately precedes it, presents its parts more conjunctly than before so that the “discussions” now seem to be comparable.
Notturno is intended to evoke not the external sounds of the night but rather the feelings one might experience in the dark hours. One observer has described it as a “nocturnal theater of the soul.” I am pleased by that perception.
—Donald Martino
