James B. Wilson (*1988)
Microcosm (2024)
Commissioned by the Young Classical Artists Trust with support of the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust, and the Royal Philharmonic Society in memory of Colin Clark

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)
Nonet in F minor Op. 2 (1893)

I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo. Allegro – Trio
IV. Finale. Allegro vivace

Intermission

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Octet in F major D 803 (1824)

I. Adagio – Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro vivace – Trio
IV. Thema. Andante – Var. I–VII
V. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio
VI. Andante molto – Allegro – Andante molto – Allegro molto

Microcosm and Macrocosm
Chamber Music by Wilson, Coleridge-Taylor, and Schubert 

Jürgen Ostmann

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was only 18 when he wrote his Nonet Op. 2. Franz Schubert created his Octet a few weeks after his 27th birthday. And James B. Wilson, born in 1988, has not yet joined the composing “establishment.” It might look like a coincidence, but in a certain light, youthfulness and larger chamber ensembles seem a good fit: writing for such formations, a composer may draw upon a full and rich sound without encountering the financial and administrative obstacles often standing in the way of performing orchestral works. Psychologically, the ensemble size has advantages as well: historically associated with the “lighter” genres of serenade or divertimento, it neither has the string quartet’s sophisticated chip on its shoulder, nor is it trying to convey lofty messages to humanity at large, as symphonic music has done since Beethoven. This means fewer shackles for composers. And young musicians, such as the ones performing tonight, have a chance to prove their mettle in challenges different from those posed by a trio or quartet.

Painting a Small Canvas

Based in Bedfordshire, England, James B. Wilson hails from a family without a specific musical background. At the age of 14, his parents gave him a piano, following a teacher’s advice—and he became inseparable from the instrument. “I was fascinated by what it could do and create.” Even before taking formal composition lessons, he won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his teachers included Gary Carpenter and David Sawer, while Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in particular became an inspiring role model. He is currently the Young Classical Artists Trust Composer Fellow. Wilson often writes his multi–award winning works in response to current events or life experiences he shares with his audience—he considers himself a storyteller. The brief Microcosm, which had its world premiere only a week ago, therefore may not be entirely typical for him, as it was inspired mainly by the sonority of the instrumentation the work was written for.

“The brief for this commission was to open the concert of the wonderful YCAT musicians with a very short, celebratory work, a piece that would blaze into life and serve as a prelude to the program as a whole,” Wilson says. “My canvas was small, with the duration set at just two to three minutes. And yet as I sketched ideas, I kept hearing sounds of vitality and a restlessness that felt more a part of something larger and yet unseen. When I start working on a piece, I often employ a combination of ‘dreaming’ with my inner ear and creating improvisations on the piano. I’m searching for something. For Microcosm, what I found was a sonority that kept bubbling to the surface, which provided the piece with its idea and form. It became both the work’s endpoint and its culmination.

“With each piece I write, one of the most rewarding challenges is to discover the ensemble’s unique voice and spirit on its own terms—to unlock its potential in my mind so the music can flow naturally. Interestingly, in approaching this piece with its short runtime, I found that it naturally prioritizes groups of instrumental colors over the close individuality typical of chamber music. The aim is to evoke the expansiveness of what’s possible with this ensemble as a unit, all within a very compact frame.”

Rediscovering a Student Work

Born in Victorian London, the illegitimate son of a physician from Sierra Leone, West Africa, and a working-class Englishwoman, an artistic career was hardly preordained for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Yet at the age of eight, he was already performing as a violinist, and at 15 began his education at the Royal College of Music, where Charles Villiers Stanford accepted him into his composition class two year later and arranged for a scholarship. In 1898, he was employed by the same institution as a violin teacher, and later appointed professor of composition. His catalogue of works includes orchestral and chamber music, songs, stage works, and incidental music as well as several large-scale cantatas (including The Song of Hiawatha, based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem). Coleridge-Taylor was also a successful conductor, and if some sources are to be believed, his music’s originality moved the members of the orchestra now known as the New York Philharmonic to dub him the “African Mahler.” Alas, his meteoric career was cut tragically short when he died of pneumonia at the age of 37.

His paternal lineage became a subject of interest to Coleridge-Taylor especially during the last years of his life. He set texts by the Afro-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and wrote in a note on his Opus 59, a collection of piano pieces published as “24 Negro Melodies”: “What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvořák for the Bohemian and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies.”

Dvořák had been Coleridge-Taylor’s idol in his student years, and the Nonet was written during that time. It had its first performance at the Royal College of Music on July 5, 1894—and for the longest time, that was also its last. Sir George Grove, founding director of the conservatory and the editor of the famous musical encyclopedia, was among the listeners, and anecdote has it that he voiced his approval several times during the performance. The only part he disliked was the Andante: “He will never write a meaningful slow movement until he has fallen in love,” Grove is claimed to have remarked to his seatmate. The audience’s reaction was enthusiastic, but despite the great success, Coleridge-Taylor apparently never attempted to get the work into print, and it was only rediscovered and published in 1999.

The Nonet consists of the four common movements of the Classical and Romantic tradition, with the outer ones written in sonata form. In both cases, the development sections are kept relatively brief, as Coleridge-Taylor already begins transforming his themes in the exposition. Both movements are also decidedly contrapuntal, but this does not detract in any way from the immediate effect of the catchy melodies, which are presented in appealing, quickly alternating combinations of instruments. The Andante con moto is in ternary form, and in the scherzo, fast-moving pizzicati and the scurrying figures in the minor-key main sections make for a beautiful contrast with the lyrical, even sentimental melody and the piano arpeggios of the major-key trio.

Forging a Path

When composing his Octet in early 1824, Franz Schubert referred to a specific role model, yet one that also allowed him to take a different approach in his own writing—namely, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Septet Op. 20. A quarter-century after its creation, that work’s popularity had remained unbroken. It was available in countless arrangements, serving as a model to many composers of large-scale chamber music. Schubert joined their number, but he seems to have hewn closer to Beethoven’s intentions than his fellow composers, who tended to focus on the Septet’s serenade-like aspects. His famous and oft-quoted letter to a friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser, written on March 31 of that year, provides a clear idea of his goal: “I have done little new by way of lieder, but I have tried my hand at several instrumental things, for I have composed two quartets for violins, viola, and violoncello and an octet, and will write yet another quartetto, in fact in this way I hope to forge a path toward the full-scale symphony.”

Beethoven’s Septet and Schubert’s Octet share an astonishing number of features—beginning with the instrumentation, which Schubert expanded slightly by adding a second violin. In both works, the first and last movements open with a slow introduction of almost exactly the same number of measures, and both develop the main theme of the first movement from its introduction. Septet and Octet alike include a total of six movements, and their structure and sequence are nearly the same—Schubert merely swaps minuet and scherzo. Apart from Schubert’s admiration of Beethoven, however, these obvious similarities most likely had external reasons as well: the Octet was commissioned by Count Ferdinand Troyer, who is said to have specifically asked for a companion piece to Beethoven’s composition. The prominent role of the clarinet certainly goes back to Troyer as well—the Count was an excellent amateur clarinetist and performed in the piece’s premiere.

The most striking difference to Beethoven’s work, whose character tends toward the pleasing and agreeable, is the Octet’s serious, occasionally even somber atmosphere that is far removed from any traditional idea of a serenade. While one should remain skeptical of conflating biographical information with artistic output, a possible explanation for the work’s expressive content might be found in Schubert’s frame of mind when it was composed. We know it from the letter quoted above: “‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it never and nevermore,’ I may well sing again every day, for every night when I go to sleep, I hope never to wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief.”

Even more than Beethoven, Schubert also set great store by the Octet’s cyclical unity, creating various cross-references between movements. The syncopated rhythm introduced right away in the slow introduction to the first movement comes to link all its themes and is heard repeatedly throughout the work, particularly in the scherzo and minuet. Yet the musical characters are clearly delineated as well: in the outer movements, Schubert is at his most thorough implementing the highest compositional standards—as evidenced in the movements’ complex design and structure. As is so often the case in his works, the two slow movements are full of songful lyricism; the set of variations is based on a theme from Schubert’s 1815 singspiel Die Freunde von Salamanka. Finally, in the “dance” movements—scherzo and minuet—the composer for the most part follows genre conventions.

While many of Schubert’s instrumental works were not performed until long after his death, he had the opportunity to hear his Octet more than once: following a private performance in the year it was written, it was presented in public at the Vienna Musikverein in 1827. The critic of the Wiener Allgemeine Theaterzeitung found it “bright, agreeable, and interesting; if perhaps the listeners’ attention may have been stretched beyond the reasonable by its long duration.” Indeed, a performance of the Octet lasts just over an hour—one possible reason why two publishers rejected the piece during Schubert’s lifetime. Excerpts of the score were printed in 1853, but the first complete edition did not appear until 1875. Today, the Octet holds a central place in the chamber music repertoire. Despite its structural references and connections, it is a highly original work, towering far above many other compositions for similar combinations of instruments.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag


Jürgen Ostmann studied musicology and orchestral music (cello). He is a freelance music journalist and dramaturg based in Cologne and works for various concert halls, radio stations, orchestras, record labels, and music festivals.