November 14, 2026
Chris Brubeck: Rhythms of the Range (2026)
To date, classical and jazz musician and composer Chris Brubeck (b. 1952) has written music for voice, orchestra, band, concerti (including three for trombone), and chamber and solo music. He has also released nearly twenty CDs, dating back to his earliest release in 1974, Two Generations of Brubeck. He plays bass and trombone with the Brubeck Brothers Quartet and Triple Play and was also a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet for over 20 years. 2013 found Brubeck a Best Instrumental Composition Grammy finalist for the orchestral Ansel Adams: America, which he co-wrote with his father. His most recent work, Rhythms of the Range, presents a portrait of the American West as inspired by his father’s youthful days on his own father’s cattle ranch in central California. Though the settings and inspirations differ, Rhythms of the Range is similar to the other musical portraits on tonight’s program in that all three are programmatic; that is, they each describe a setting, express ideas, and tell stories without words.
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Although the word “rhapsody” has its origins in the ancient Greek term for one who recites epic poetry (a rhapsodist), it wasn’t until the 18th century that the word entered the musical vocabulary for the first time. A century later, the form finally gained a foothold when European composers such as Liszt, Bartók, and Vaughan Williams began exploring the folk music of their native lands. The rhapsody’s single-movement form, which is built on a number of sections loosely stitched together, lends itself particularly well to the fragmented Modernist aesthetic of the early 20th century, not to mention the hustle-and-bustle of the Jazz Age metropolis.
George Gershwin (1898–1937) was a musical border-crosser who excelled at both concert music and popular Broadway song, and though Rhapsody in Blue (1924) wasn’t the first work to successfully meld jazz and classical music, it, more than its predecessors, communicated a new dynamic range of moods and emotions heretofore unheard in the concert hall. Commissioned by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra for a concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” Gershwin’s rhapsody for piano and orchestra was originally composed for just two pianos. Whiteman’s orchestrator, composer Ferde Grofé (best-known for his Grand Canyon Suite), arranged the work into the repertoire staple that still graces countless concert halls around the world today.
Rhapsody in Blue is really too optimistic to be considered “the blues” per se; likewise, the role of the pianist doesn’t fit into the traditional concerto framework either, even though Whiteman had originally requested “a jazz concerto.” Perhaps the best way to describe it is in Gershwin’s own words as “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” As such, Rhapsody in Blue has a close relative in American novelist John Dos Passos’ great New York trilogy from the same period, U.S.A, which is a multivocal kaleidoscope of impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness fragments, found objects, overheard conversations, newsreels, and biographies that likewise work together, even when at odds, to encapsulate “our metropolitan madness.”
Edward Elgar: Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (1899)
Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was a self-taught musician and composer whose education consisted of local piano and violin lessons, as well as some more formal training during his brief forays into London in his early twenties. According to the composer, “my first music was learnt in the Cathedral . . . from books borrowed from the music library, when I was eight, nine or ten.” Between growing up in his father’s music shop, having access to Worcester Cathedral’s music library, and serving as assistant organist alongside his father at Saint George’s Church from the ages of 15 to 27, the young Elgar was able to piece together knowledge and skills enough to become a well-known musician and conductor around his local Worcestershire County.
It wasn’t until 1989, at forty-one years of age, that Elgar finally composed a work that received wider acclaim. The overnight recognition accorded his Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 is ironic because in it, Elgar wrote a very personal piece for the amusement of himself and his close friends in response to being overlooked by the broader public for years. Better known by its shorter title, the Enigma Variations premiered in London in June of 1899 under the baton of Hans Richter, conductor of the Vienna Opera. Richter spread the word and soon most of his European colleagues were including the Enigma Variations on their own concert programs.
Following the opening theme or “enigma” are fourteen variations which represent musical portraits dedicated to Elgar’s “friends pictured within.” The opening and closing variations represent the composer’s wife, Caroline Alice Elgar (“C.A.E.”), and Elgar himself (“E.D.U.”). In between the couple are gathered a varied group of authors, musicians, an architect, a publisher, and a classics scholar. In a letter to his close friend August Jaeger, whose variation is the work’s most beloved (“Nimrod”), Elgar wrote, “I’ve written the variations each one to represent the mood of the ‘party’—I’ve liked to imagine the ‘party’ writing the var: him (or her) self and have written what I think they wd. have written—if they were asses enough to compose. It’s a quaint idea & the result is amusing to those behind the scenes & won’t affect the hearer who ‘nose nuffin.’”
It wouldn’t be a proper enigma if people actually knew the work’s secret. It also wouldn’t be an enigma without enticing a variety of possible interpretations. It has been suggested, for example, that the enigma is Elgar as he saw himself in relation to his friends therein. Another possible reading comes from the composer himself: “Through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’ but is not played.” Some scholars have posited that the un-played tune might be the “Dies Irae,” “Auld Lang Syne,” or “Rule, Britanna!” Others have suggested that the answer lies in the melancholy theme in G minor at the opening of the work which the variations are based on. Indeed, Elgar suggested that the opening theme “explored . . . my sense of the loneliness of the artist.” Whater the case might be, the composer’s new-found recognition stemming from the Enigma Variations started off the most productive period of his career; the next decade saw the first four of the Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901-1907), the Symphony No. 1 (1908), the Violin Concerto (1910), and the Cello Concerto (1919), works that cemented the rural composer’s place as England’s most English of composers.
