Earth, air, fire and water may no longer satisfy the physicist, but Andrew Koehler argues that they still shape how we live in the world, and how composers have imagined it. The music director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia explores the theme at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, in the Dalton Theatre at Kalamazoo College. His list of candidate works grew so long that the concert has become the first volume of a planned trilogy.
Speaking with Cara Lieurance, who plays in the flute section and admits the program is a "doozy," Koehler says he did pare it back a little. He blames much of the difficulty on 20th-century writing, which seldom repeats its material the way earlier music does.
The concert opens with a prologue, "Le Cahos" from Les Élémens by Jean-Féry Rebel, a septuagenarian at the court of Louis XV. Rebel depicts the chaos before the elements separated by sounding every note of the scale at once, a cluster chord that anticipates the 20th century by some two hundred years. "It's just such an audacious thing," Koehler says, and he notes that the bewigged audiences of the day understood it. Oboist and Baroque specialist Dr. Luke Conklin suggested the work.
Air arrives in Icarus by the polymath Lera Auerbach, a piece Koehler hears as "as much requiem for Icarus as it is the actual sense of flight." Nathan Durham plays the score's theremin, an instrument whose voice Lieurance compares to a human one, minus the breathing.
Earth belongs to Béla Bartók's Dance Suite. Koehler recalls Bartók grumbling that he had made it as easy as he possibly could. Water comes from Morskie Oko (Eye of the Sea) by Zygmunt Noskowski, a portrait of a lake in the Tatra Mountains that Koehler has visited. It comes complete with echoing thunder and a shepherd's song after the storm. "I just don't know why it's not better known," he says.
Fire closes the afternoon with Igor Stravinsky's Firebird suite, which Koehler calls "the bit of red meat on the program." He points listeners to its Infernal Dance and its brazen trombone glissandi.
Tickets are $7 for the public and $3 for students. Kalamazoo College students get in free.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
