Symphonic composition honors 50th anniversary of 'Silent Spring"

Silence has a special place in music. Rests are just as important as notes whether in complex rhythms, grand pauses or syncopation. John Cage's infamous 3'44" asks for no playing whatsoever and Franz Joseph Haydn's "Farewell Symphony" ends with the performers leaving the stage one by one, slowly muting the orchestra.

Composer Steven Stucky takes an approach similar to Haydn in his newest work, but the American composer's decrescendo was inspired by a far more troubling situation. Haydn wished to convince his princely employer to let his musicians return from his summer home to their families. Mr. Stucky wanted to capture the stark prophecy of "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson's seminal treatise on the staggering effects of chemical pollution on the environment.
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If you go

Pittsburgh Symphony

Manfred Honeck, conductor; Nikolaj Znaider, violin

Program: Stucky's "Silent Spring," Sibelius "Violin Concerto" and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique"

When: 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat.; 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown

Tickets: start at $20; 412-392-4900 or www.pittsburghsymphony.org
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Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to honor the book's 50th anniversary, Mr. Stucky's work of the same name musically captures the passion and courage of the Pittsburgh native, as well as the endgame she warned will take place if the industry practice of dumping chemicals such as DDT into water sources continued. "Silent Spring's" world premiere will take place this week conducted by PSO music director Manfred Honeck before the PSO takes it to New York City's Avery Fisher Hall late this month.

For Mr. Stucky, the PSO's composer-of-the-year, the destruction of nature and life could only be represented by silence. He gradually snuffs out all sound as the work ends.

"The last section of the piece is an ecstatic outpouring of sound and noise that you could think of as natural," he says. "Those voices gradually become subdued and fall silent. There is just one guy left at the end. It is a kind of "Farewell" symphony but on a much more dark emotional content. It ends not optimistically."

Not that Mr. Stucky's work is a blow-by-blow musical description of the book.

"I was delighted to be asked to create this musical tribute," he describes in program notes. "But I was perplexed, too: How to make a connection between her science and my music? I re-read 'Silent Spring,' and I reveled again in the distinctive mixture of hard science and eloquent lyricism that defines her voice. But how to make music about that?"

Rather than try to depict the toxic spray of DDT or the fluttering of the invasive gypsy moth, he opted for the emotional response to the bleak future that Carson laid out in the book published in 1962.

"I wasn't going to try to explain 'Silent Spring,' " says Mr. Stucky, 62, who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Second Concerto for Orchestra. "Reflecting the real world is not our job. It is making a translation between something like this and something interior. That is where music happens."

Mr. Stucky was a teenager when the controversy got heated between Carson and environmentalists and the chemical industry, but he remembers the furious debates and read the book. He may not have noticed then, but re-reading it today, he was just as inspired by Carson's writing as the message.

"I make allusions to the poetic side of Carson's writing," he says. "The reason people took this so seriously is that she was a great writer." He subtitled sections of the 21-minute composition with Rachel Carson titles: "The Sea Around Us" [actually another book by Carson], "The Lost Wood," "Rivers of Death" [chapter titles in "Silent Spring"]; and "Silent Spring."

These correspond to "watery music," an emotional chaccone (repeating bass line), a "demonic" scherzo, and a "harrowing ending" in which the musicians "one by one give up," he says.

Carson's "Silent Spring" ends with a pronouncement that the world has "two roads" in front of it, one that "ends in disaster" and the other that "offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our Earth." Mr. Stucky reflects that in the ending to his work, although he is adamant that composers "cannot control other people's reactions to it or even explain our own" and that he is "not a zealot on any side" of the environmental debate. But with the dire developments in the environment that many have pegged to pollutants, the conclusion of his piece clearly takes a stand.

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