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Tonight's performance by the Peabody Trio and baritone William Sharp represents something of a departure from the Chamber Music Society's usual programming. It combines piano trios and art songs by two masters of those forms, Franz Schubert and Charles Ives. As many in our audience know, Genevieve McGiffert, who died in 2007, was for many decades a vital force in the performing arts of our community. Even before settling in Williamsburg with her husband Michael, she was a nationally recognized and respected music educator, vocal coach, conductor, and opera director. Genevieve was a passionate promoter of the vocal arts and a gifted teacher of the art of song and singing. She directed the WilIiamsburg Choral Guild from 1993 to 1999, and in 1999 received the Alli Award from the Cultural Alliance of Hampton Roads. In 2000, she founded Art Song of Williamsburg, to bring to area audiences some of the finest professional artists of that genre. Her legacy continues with the Genevieve McGiffert Memorial Fund for the Musical Performing Arts at the Williamsburg Community Foundation. Our area is fortunate to have claimed her as a resident and musical arts activist. We dedicate tonight's program to her memory in honor of her many contributions to the musical life of this community.

A Yale footballer and insurance man, Charles Ives may have seemed an unlikely person to become one of the most innovative figures in the history of American classical music. Nevertheless, he ventured into uncharted regions of sound and music, and, in his works, many of the unprecedented and revolutionary elements adopted by younger twentieth-century composers were foreshadowed.

He was born in Danbury, Connecticut and received his early music education from his father, George Ives, a bandleader and music teacher who had a profound creative influence over his son. George Ives not only taught Charles the "rules" of music, but also taught him how to break them, for example, having Charles sing a song in one key while the piano accompaniment was being played in another. George would try to capture the tonal quality of church choirs singing out of tune, would explore the sounds of marching bands playing different pieces simultaneously, and tried to work out a system of microtones with 24 tones to the octave, inspiring similar arcane interests in his son.

Charles Ives began playing organ in a local church at the age of 12 and composing works for the local band at 14. He entered Yale and studied there with Horatio Parker, then the foremost academic composer in the United States, of whose conventional approach Ives eventually grew weary. After graduation he became a part-time organist and insurance clerk in New York City and later founded a highly successful insurance agency, only composing music as an avocation in general isolation from the classical music world. His rationale for pursuing such a business career was that "if [a composer} has a nice wife and some children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" His compositions---with integrated quotations from folk songs, hymns, marches, jazz and other popular music---are often works of enormous complexity that employ sharp dissonances, polytonal harmonics, polymetric constructions, and elements of serial writing. Ives scorned conventional composition for its repetitious form and the inefficiency of so many musicians playing the same notes, and he had little tolerance for pretty, soothing sounds. He wanted to "kick out the softy ears" and derided those who couldn't stand dissonance, shouting, "Stand up and use your ears like a man". His compositions include five symphonies and other orchestral music, choral, piano, organ, and chamber music, and many songs. After years of neglect, his music gradually came to the attention of other classical composers and musicians of the time and began being publicly performed in the 1930s. In 1947, Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony. The Piano Trio, on which he began work in 1904 and which he completed in 1911, is a perfect example of the musical characteristics that sets Ives apart from other composers. The first movement is the same 27 measures played three times, with the violin silent the first time through and the cello the second time through. There is much dissonance, and the parts do not always match up rhythmically. All three instruments join for the third repeat. The second movement employs polytonality and much contrast in timbre. It is built on many popular tunes of the day layered on top of each other. See how many tunes you can identify (It may not be as easy as picking out tunes from a medley on "My Music"). The third and final movement has lyrical and expressive melodies, but also sections of discord. It resolves quietly on the hymn tune "Rock of Ages".

Schubert composed over six hundred lieder, many in strophic form in which each stanza of the text is sung to the same music like a folksong (but often with slight variations) and some through-composed (durchkomponiert) in which new music is supplied for each stanza. The latter form is preferred for texts of a dramatic or narrative character in which the situation changes from stanza to stanza. Schubert was among the first composers of lieder to use the through-composed form, which has been almost universally adopted since by classical composers for lyrical songs. The six Heine songs being heard tonight range from strophic ("Das Fischermädchen") to a song with strophic outer verses ("Ihr Bilt") to those that are for the most part through-composed ("Der Atlas" and "Der Doppelgänger").

Some of Schubert's songs were collected into groups known as Liederkreis (song cycles) in which songs of related thought and character are joined into an artistic unity by a composer in a particular performance order. The thirteen songs of Schwanengesang (Swan Song) were assembled from two groups of songs Schubert left at his death, collected as a "song cycle" named by his publisher, and published posthumously. In the original manuscript thirteen songs were copied in standard performance order from texts by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) and Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), and the publisher appended an additional song with text by Johann Gabriel Seidl (1804-1875). The original text of the Heine songs is set forth in the program insert with English translations opposite.

Ives wrote a number of psalm settings, part-songs and verse settings for unison voices and orchestra. His many solo songs included songs set to verses from Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Whitman, and Kipling with a number of texts of his own creation. His songs for voice and piano vary from ballads to hymns, college songs, protest songs, and romantic songs. His liberation from rules is as evident in his songs as well as his instrumental music. In technique the songs range from highly complex with tone clusters, polytonality, and atonality to simple and straightforward. Ives didn't want his songs to be in the domain of trained singers exclusively, but rather limited his options by making many of them difficult to sing.

The four movements of Ives's Second Piano Sonata inspired by the writing of the New England Transcendentalists, were accordingly named Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts and Thoreau. The music of the song "Walden" was drawn from the last movement of the piano sonata and the text from Thoreau's Walden. "Charlie Rutlage" is a rollicking cowboy ballad. It starts with a simple diatonic tune accompanied by the piano in a boom-chick "Western" pattern after which considerable hell breaks loose. It has been described as "the greatest country-and-western number never to be performed at the Grand Ole Opry." "Down East" shows Ives's willingness to mix the simple with the complex. The first part is a dissonant, chromatic introduction to the diatonic second part, and the second part has references back to the chromatic and complex dissonance of the introduction.

Schubert's oeuvre for piano and strings comprises six compositions of which only two are piano trios, both written within a few weeks of each other in the late summer and autumn of 1827 possibly as diversions from the strenuous effort he was then putting into the song cycle, Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey). By contrast with the melancholy angst of the Friedrich Müller poems he was then setting to music, this B-flat trio is bright and lively. Robert Schumann said of it: "One glance at Schubert's Trio (Op. 99) and the troubles of our human existence disappear and all the world is fresh and bright again." Unlike the somewhat exalted style Beethoven adopted in his piano trios, this is a work of ingratiating intimacy, a manner that was to become generally characteristic of most piano trios for the remainder of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by those of Brahms and Dvorak.

The jaunty unison opening of the first movement brims over with good cheer. The cello opens the slow second movement with a bittersweet but not sorrowful melody soon taken up by the violin while the cello plays a contrasting theme. The piano takes over the original theme, and then all three instruments expostulate on it until it is restated in its original form by the violin and passed back to the cello. The movement ends with a restatement in a captivating duet by the two strings. The authorship of the Scherzo could not be mistaken. It is vintage Schubert. The Rondo (final movement) opens with one of those typical Schubert tunes in the violin that in less capable hands might have sounded banal but in the Presto coda one detects faint overtones of Rossini, then (as Beethoven loudly complained) à la mode in Vienna.

This trio was not published nor publicly performed until after Schubert's death. The only performance its composer heard was a private one in one of those "Schubertiade" evenings of sight-reading in the home of his friend and quondam patron Josef von Spaun.