With only a rough outline of how the show would go, the Ether Game Brain Trust presented Back to the Drawing Board this week, a show about sketches. Browse below and bring your pencil and eraser. 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 'Pastoral' In late 1808, the Theater an der Wien was made available to Beethoven for a benefit concert.  Among the pieces premiered at that concert, on the night of December 22, 1808, was Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Sinfonia pastorale.  Each of the movements attempts to depict specific emotions evoked by the countryside. Beethoven was famous for using sketches to help with his composition process, a technique he passed on to his favorite pupil, composer Carl Czerny. Over ten-thousand pages of sketches and drafts survive, many of them referencing complete works that are still lost. The sketchbook for the Pastoral Symphony remains a gem of the collection of Beethoven’s surviving sketches, in that it is the most complete sketchbook. After his death, many of Beethoven’s sketchbooks were dismembered, and individual pages sold as souvenirs of his handwriting. Fifty-nine of the Pastoral pages remain intact in the British library, another twenty-nine are at a museum in Berlin. The last nine pages are either privately owned or still missing.  

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Three Latin American Sketches Copland’s Three Latin American Sketches is the last of a series of works inspired by a trip to Mexico in 1932. The work started as a single short composition titled Paisaje Mexicano, to which another movement, a Danza de Jalisco, was added when the piece was set to be performed at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Almost fifteen years later the piece was revised and a third movement, the Estribillo, was added before the work was performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1972. In writing about the piece, Copland says he chose the word “sketches” because he felt the tunes he used were folksy and snappy enough to be light concert material, but not light enough for a pops concert.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) D'un cahier d'esquisses As its title suggests, the music for this singular piano solo comes from Debussy’s musical sketch book, where he worked out and developed the unique tonal language and delicate sonorities that would later be most associated with musical Impressionism. This work was first published in a Parisian magazine in 1904, and Ravel was first to perform it for the public in 1910. Later a Belgian publisher acquired the rights to the piece and had the piano music orchestrated for film music. There is considerable evidence that Debussy originally intended this piece and two other well-known piano works, L’isle Joyeuse and Masques for a second “Suite Bergamasque.” The end of D’un Cahier flows seamlessly into the opening cadenza of L’isle Joyeuse, and uses similar rhythmic accompaniment.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) Hungarian Sketches These two pieces you just heard, the final two movements from the popular 1931 Hungarian Sketches concert piece, were each based on earlier piano pieces by Bartók. “Slightly Tipsy,” whose quick shifts in tempo and frequent hiccups create the sound of a wine-soaked orchestra, comes from his Three Burlesques piano suite. And “Swineherd’s Dance” comes from a set of children’s pieces. The former work has the flavors of a Hungarian folk song, while the latter is an arrangement of an actual Hungarian folk melody. Bartók spent a good portion of his career collecting, analyzing, and rearranging folk songs from his native Hungary—and in fact, this kind of folk song preservation, which Bartók referred to as “comparative musicology,” ended up morphing into the current academic field of Ethnomusicology. A man of many talents, he was.

Amy Beach (1867-1944) Four Sketches, Op. 15: Dreaming We just heard one of the four concert character pieces that Beach collected as her four sketches for piano. Alongside "Dreaming,” there is also “Autumn,” “Phantoms,” and the most popular, “Fireflies.” They represent a career as a concert pianist that Beach never had, or rather one that was cut short by her marriage to Boston physician Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885.  Before then, Beach was an impressive, even phenomenal musician. She mentally composed her first piano pieces at age four, later sitting at the piano and playing them fully-formed. She was 16 years old when she made her debut in Boston, playing Chopin’s “Rondo in E” and Ignaz Moscheles’s “Piano Concerto No. 2 in E-flat.” Social conventions of the time forced her to give up her concert career after her marriage; she devoted all her musical efforts to composing, and produced the “Gaelic Symphony” the most popular American symphony of the late 19th century. 

Frederick Delius (1865-1934) North Country Sketches Frederick Delius was born in Yorkshire, England, the son of a successful businessman in the wool trade. Although it was assumed that Frederick would follow in his father’s footsteps, Frederick showed no interest in wool, preferring instead to manage an Orange Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida. It was here where Delius began to seriously pursue his musical interests. Years later, he looked back at his youth in Yorkshire, the large northern county, in the work North Country Sketches. Nicknamed “God’s Own Country,” Yorkshire is known for its especially beautiful landscape, including the Yorkshire Moors, which are musically depicted in Delius’s sketches. 

Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) Southland Sketches (arr. Lara Downes) Gifted with a strong voice, Henry (sometimes Harry) T. Burleigh would be the baritone soloist at St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York for 52 years, during which time he composed over 250 vocal compositions, most of which are arrangements of spirituals. The sophistication of his music bridged African American folk music and classical art song, and had a lasting impact on bringing Black music into the concert hall. Works like his Southland Sketches provided a new context for the characteristically pentatonic melodies of his cultural heritage. His dedication to using folk music as a source of inspiration came from his four years of study at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where he was a copyist and music librarian for Antonin Dvorak, who encouraged Burleigh to mine the melodies from the American South. Burleigh in turn is credited with inspiring Dvorak to use American folk melodies for his New World Symphony. 

Augusta Read Thomas (b.1964) Prairie Sketches I New York born composer Augusta Read Thomas was musically educated at the Royal Music Academy in Britain; she also married fellow composer Bernard Rands in that country. Several of her major professional accomplishments occurred in the States, however. She became the longest serving composer in residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, serving under Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim. Thomas has been instrumental in fostering contemporary classical music, or new music, in the Chicago area. In 2003, she was commissioned by poet Suzann Zimmerman to set her poem Prairie Sketches to music. The piece was first performed by the Chicago Kinder Voices Children’s Chorus. Thomas includes an unusual directive in the score, that whenever possible, the piece should be performed in a highly resonant space, such as a church, hall or cathedral. With academic positions at various music schools throughout the country, Thomas started the Chicago Center Contemporary Composition in 2018 in a partnership with the University of Chicago. 

Gil Evans (1912-1988) Solea No one can doubt that Miles Davis was truly an innovator in the development of jazz. A true trailblazer, Davis was fascinated with blending various musical styles into his music. This was especially true with his album Sketches of Spain, a collection of tunes inspired by Spanish music on which he collaborated with fellow jazz great Gil Evans. In addition to original charts written for the album by Evans, the two created now-classic arrangements of the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and “Will O’ The Wisp” from Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Solea is a term taken from Flamenco music, and refers to one of the basic musical forms of the tradition.