TRANSCRIPT:
BRADLEY FULLER: Searching for, finding, and sharing joy—it’s a difficult thing when your city, state, and region are still reeling from a storm as devastating as Helene. But for the musicians and staff of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, embracing their hard-hit community with a message of hope and, ultimately, joy, was the clear path forward. Here’s Jessica Satava, executive director of the symphony:
JESSICA SATAVA: It was, like, no matter what, we have to play music this weekend. We have to find a way. And that was honestly the conversation between Lee and I and all the musicians as we started to hear from everybody and be in touch with everybody to check in. It was resoundingly we have to be together to play music this weekend.
It's amazing what people have done—the extraordinary lengths that my team on the staff, the board, the musicians—the lengths that people have gone to to get here for rehearsal. We had our first rehearsal last night. All week, my staff who have, you know, some of them have severe damage to their homes and moved into hotels. Some are without power. Everybody has been here this week to work toward getting this concert on stage.
And the musicians last night—some of them were coming from all over the region, many from Western North Carolina, lots from Georgia, lots from right here in Greenville who have suffered so much but would have done anything to get to the Peace Center to have rehearsal. To play some Beethoven together. And music is—there's no question—those listening today probably don't have to be convinced of the healing, inspirational, joyful power of music.
FULLER: Beyond ensuring that the show as planned would go on, another question emerged for those of the Greenville Symphony:
SATAVA: What can we offer to the community that is just open-hearted, free, everybody-come-on-out? What can we do? How can we make this work? And it became really clear right away that we could plug in a screen [laughs] outside at the amphitheater at the Peace Center and invite people to bring lawn chairs.
And again, the team has come together to make this happen in, you know, 24 hours. We said “Let's do it” and very shortly thereafter, everything was in motion to make it happen, you know, bringing in a screen from outside our county, all of the different technicians, our camera people, our sound engineer—it's just incredible what people have done, and again, all while dealing with their own very difficult conditions in their homes and with their families.
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is exactly the message for this moment: that we are all in this together. We're part of this universal human experience. It is possible to maintain hope and to feel joy even in the most difficult circumstances. The melodies of this symphony are so recognizable.
The choirs that are coming together—just that in and of itself is such a beautiful symbol and representation of what this work is. We have the Furman Singers, we have the Bob Jones University Chorale, we have the North Greenville University Concert Choir. And keep in mind that these universities have been shut down this week, right? They can't even have classes as normal. Many of the students have been sent home from the dorms because of the conditions on their campuses, but the students and the choral directors made it a priority to get here for this community experience. They wanted to be part of creating this for our community and adding this joyful resounding call to hope.
FULLER: Sharing more musical insights into this symphonic call to hope and the mind of its composer was the Greenville Symphony’s new Music Director Lee Mills.
LEE MILLS: Beethoven, from his very first symphony, he starts it in the wrong key. So he's kind of bending the rules along the whole time. Really famously, his Third Symphony, the Eroica—that's where we really start to see the doors bust open and he's kind of more free wheeled about how he’s going to do it. You have the Fifth Symphony that starts in a minor key and ends in a major key. He's kind of testing the waters the whole time.
And the Ninth Symphony, you know, it has this sort of new—I think it's a pretty new way of writing a symphony—where, instead of having each movement be its own separate sort of standalone thing that's in a collection, each movement leads into the other and creates this kind of thread through the whole thing. He's constantly developing—it’s really the same motif that we start the whole symphony off that gets developed and developed until it becomes the really famous Ode to Joy that everybody knows.
FULLER: And you were speaking about it and I’m playing a bit of the opening movement here now and these kind of open fifths and fourths—this kind of primordial, elemental sound. And you say that these intervals give shape to the whole work?
[excerpt of the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 plays]
MILLS: Yeah they do. What you hear now—it's just like very amorphous. There's not really a clear melody, but you've got these descending fifths and fourths, which are what kind of make up the entire—everything. You know, the second movement also starts with the exact same intervals
[second movement excerpt plays]
FULLER: Taking some shape there…
MILLS: Well the opening ones are octaves, but then, right when the violins come in that’s a fifth. A descending fifth.
FULLER: Still not the thirds and sixths that kind of clue you into major or minor.
MILLS: You get this big open feeling. It’s almost like he’s searching. You know, like we don’t know where we are. Things are coalescing a little bit.
FULLER: Searching, and then there's—there seems to be a lot of chaotic moments in this the symphony, too. And then we'll go to the third movement now, the slow movement:
[third movement excerpt plays]
MILLS: When the melody comes in here I'll stop talking so you can hear it, but it's the descending fourth again. Very similar interval.
[third movement excerpt continues]
MILLS: You've chosen a very slow recording.
FULLER: [lauhging] Yeah, well this is the Concertgebouw. I was thinking that. He’s really enjoying the slowness of a slow movement.
MILLS: Well you get that dahhhh, dahhh, dahhh, duhhhh [singing together]
The fifths and the fourths in music--they’re really the most basic, fundamental you can get. And that’s a natural phenomenon maybe we can talk about maybe later.
But then, all of this happens, and then when we finally get into the fourth movement Beethoven does this huge clashing cord and all this chaos and everything and it sounds like [exceprt of fourth movement plays] yeah!
But it's all these 5th and 4th again. Now they’re ascending though.
FULLER: Kind of been turned on its head.
MILLS: And you get [singing] BUMMM…BUMMMM…you get the same interval again, but now its backwards. So now we're like trying to search for the answer to all of these questions that have been coming. In my mind that's what this is.
FULLER Oh, yeah.
MILLS: We're starting with just like the cosmos and the universe, you know, in the first movement and trying to figure out the meaning of life. And that's kind of what the cellos here are asking.
And then when we finally get into the very famous melody –don't play it yet—but you know you've got this very famous melody, the “Ode to Joy” which we have this [singing] dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dahhh-dah-dah—that whole melody is constrained inside the fifth. It doesn't really go out. There's one, one place where it does: [singing] dah-dah-dohhh. But then we go back right. So the whole melody happens inside this interval of fifth, and I just find it really interesting. You can go ahead.
FULLER: Well I’ll get that in a minute, but I did want to say, though, what I think is interesting about the “Joy” theme is that the final line (if you say it's in four lines or whatever)—it's been turned into a hymn, too: “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” And so many people just want to sing, not the dah-dah-doh-DAHHH [sings melody in rhythm Beethoven intended]…you know, they want to hold the low note you mentioned. But it's almost like he's wanting to get off of it and the joy is kind of tripping over itself.
MILLS: Oh, totally, yeah.
FULLER: And I also think, too, as with this poem by Schiller and all, that this is a testament to humanity being the necessary part. I mean you have all this “noise” and the singer enters and says “Not these sounds.”
MILLS: Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's also, I think, the first time that we have this, where, in the fourth movement, there is a direct quote reference to each of the prior movements in the symphony. So it’s like no, this wasn’t the right one, no this wasn’t the right one
FULLER: Yeah, trying it out—“No, no.”
MILLS: You know, we get that in composers later. Everybody—composers that followed Beethoven-- had big shoes to fill. And so, you know, he just did everything. Like his imagination had no limits. And everybody kind of tried to figure out how to write meaningful symphonies after Beethoven because it wasn't okay anymore to just use the formula. You had to be creative and come up with something new, but like, how do you come up with something new better than this? Like, that's too much pressure!
FULLER: There were lots of answers, yeah.
MILLS: Brahms waited you know decades and decades before he could write his first symphony because he was completely paralyzed by fear of not being able to match up with that quality of Beethoven's writing.
FULLER: Yeah. And then Liszt says, “Oh, we’ll just do symphonic poems. Symphonies are kind of dead.”
MILLS: Yeah [laughing].
FULLER: Okay, here's a little tease of the instrumental theme of Ode to Joy, but let's get to the big “payoff” we've been calling it of the famous, famous part of the fourth movement here
[orchestra crescendos into choir loudly singing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium”]
I think everyone knows that right?
MILLS: Everybody knows, and, you know, compared to literally everything that's come before this moment, it's finally confident and triumphant and stable. Even when the instruments get this the first time through it starts, you know, so softly in the cellos, and it doesn't—it's almost tentatively trying, you know, and then we get this triumphant moment and it's like: yes, this is the answer!
And there's no questioning anymore. We're not dealing with these big, open intervals that don't define the key, you know—they're not major, they’re not minor. Finally we get this really bold statement—a melody—all this stuff that we really don't have a lot of so confidently until we get to this moment.
FULLER: Conductor Lee Mills, offering an overview of one of the works he’ll be conducting this weekend in his first time on the podium as Music Director of the Greenville Symphony: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. In addition to proceeding with its two previously scheduled concerts on Saturday, October 5th and Sunday, October 6th in Greenville’s Peace Concert Hall, there will be a live outdoor broadcast of the Sunday afternoon performance, open to the public, at Peace Center Pavilion.
More information at https://www.greenvillesymphony.org/.
The Greenville Symphony Orchestra and Peace Center are financial supporters of South Carolina Public Radio.
