Margaret Brouwer, one of America’s most distinguished composers, was Vincent K. and Edith H. Smith Chair in Composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1996 to 2008. She has been recognized with an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer Com- missioning/USA Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Ohio Council for the Arts Individual Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Cleveland Foundation, Gund Foundation, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, and John S. Knight Foundation; in 2015, she was honored by the Music Division of the New York Public Library with the creation of the Margaret Brouwer Collection.

Brouwer, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, earned degrees in violin at the Oberlin Conservatory and Michigan State University, and later played with the Fort Worth Symphony and Opera Orchestras and Dallas Symphony while also performing and recording with such popular artists as Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. She had composed throughout her career, but in 1984 she changed the direction of her career and began graduate studies in composition at Indiana University, where she was mentored by Donald Erb, Harvey Sollberger and Fred Fox. After completing her doctoral degree in 1988, she taught at Washington and Lee University and served as Composer-in-Residence with the Roanoke Symphony before being appointed to the CIM faculty in 1996. Brouwer has since composed prolifically for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voices and had her works performed by leading ensembles and soloists across America and internationally. Among the most prominent of her Northeast Ohio performances are the premieres of Mandala (2001, Cleveland Chamber Symphony), Symphony No. 1, “Lake Voices” (1997, Akron Symphony), the oratorio Voice of the Lake (2017, Blue Streak Ensemble, which she founded in 2011), Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers (2010, Cleveland Women’s Symphony for its 75th Anniversary Concert), The Lake (2019, tenor Brian Skoog and pianist John Simmons at Cleveland State University), and Lament (2002, Rocky River Chamber Music Society by clarinetist Franklin, bassoonist Lynnette, violinist Diane and percussionist Alex Cohen); in June 2001, the Cleveland Museum of Art presented a concert of Brouwer’s chamber music that included the premieres of Light and Under the Summer Tree. CityMusic Cleveland premiered and recorded Brouwer’s Concerto for Violin with soloist Michi Wiancko in 2007, and commissioned and premiered her first “children’s symphonic drama,” Daniel and Snakeman, in 2011. Recordings of her music appear on the Naxos, New World, CRI, Crystal, Centaur and Opus One labels.

Brouwer wrote of Justice March, commissioned by CityMusic Cleveland for its “Justice, Equality, Hope” season of 2021-2022, “In this work, I dream of a group of people who are oppressed or treated as second-class citizens coming together to march for equality. Gradually they gather from dif- ferent parts of the world and by the end of the first movement they are together in the same place and each telling her tale. Filled with hesitant energy, the group advances in March for Equality, pushing forward nervously but relentlessly with no stopping to rest. Finished marching in the last movement (Illusive Hope), they are hopeful but filled with questions. Did they achieve results? Will the struggle ever cease? They gather together quietly and hope for a better future.”

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Mozart arrived home in Vienna on June 4, 1789 from a trip to Berlin during which he received a commission for six string quartets and a half-dozen piano sonatas from the Prussian King, Frederick William II, nephew and successor of the immensely cultured Frederick the Great and an avid music lover and cellist of more than modest accomplishment. Mozart immediately set to work on the order, and sometime in July he completed the Quartet in D major (K. 575) and one of the piano sonatas (K. 576), but then suddenly stopped. (He finished only two more of the quartets for Frederick — K. 589 in May 1790 and K. 590 a month later.) His health was poor that summer, his finances worse, and his worry about Constanze, pregnant for the fifth time in seven years, acute. (In a sad letter written on July 12, 1789 to his fellow Freemason Michael Puchberg, he complained about “my unfortunate illness ... my wretched condition ... my poor sick wife.”) Most of what energy he could muster was channeled into preparing the revival of Figaro ordered by Emperor Joseph II for the end of August. That production was successful enough to inspire the commission for another opera from the Emperor, a musical tale whose libretto Lorenzo da Ponte based on a delicious wife-swapping scandal that had recently amused the Viennese, but before becoming immersed in the composition of Così fan tutte, Mozart undertook a chamber work for the Christmas concert that the Vienna Society of Musicians held every year to benefit the widows and orphans of its deceased members. Anton Stadler, principal clarinetist of the Imperial Court Orchestra and a friend and fellow Mason of the composer, was enlisted for the event, so Mozart decided to write a quintet for clarinet and strings. The work was completed on September 29th, and then put aside until the Society’s concert at the Hoftheater on December 22nd, when it was performed by Stadler, Mozart (as violist) and three Society members between the two parts of Vinzenz Righini’s cantata Apollo’s Birthday Festival. Mozart and Stadler played the piece again on April 9, 1790 at the Vienna residence of Count Johann Karl Hadik, Councillor to the Hungarian Exchequer and a gifted amateur painter, at which time the composer referred to it as “Stadler’s Quintet.”

Mozart harbored a special fondness for the graceful agility, liquid tone and ensemble amiability of the clarinet from the time that he first heard the instrument as a young boy during his tours, and later wrote for it whenever it was available. His greatest compositions for the instrument were inspired by the technical accomplishment and expressive playing of Stadler, for whom he wrote not only this Quintet, but also the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola (“Kegel- statt,” K. 498), the clarinet and basset horn parts in the vocal trios, the clarinet solos in the opera La Clemenza di Tito, the clarinet parts added to the second version of the G minor Symphony (K. 550), and the flawless Clarinet Concerto (K. 622), his last instrumental work, completed in October 1791, just two months before his death.

“If there is one work that sums up this unhappy year [of 1789], this must be it,” wrote H.C. Robbins Landon of the Clarinet Quintet. “Parts of it seem to reflect an aching despair, but the whole is clothed not in some violent minor key, but in a radiant A major. The music smiles through tears.” The work opens with a theme that is almost chaste in its purity and yet is, somehow, deeply intro- spective and immediately touching, music which possesses “a radiant, floating quality which is one of the marks of Mozart’s late style,” according to A. Hyatt King. As its initial punctuating arpeggios indicate, the clarinet’s role in the piece is not so much one of soloist in a miniature concerto (as is the wind instrument in the Horn Quintet, K. 407) as that of an equal partner to the string ensemble. The second theme, a limpid, sweetly chromatic melody such as could have been conceived by no other musician of the time, not even Joseph Haydn, is given first by the violin and then by the clarinet above a delicate syncopated string accompaniment. A reference to the suave main theme closes the exposition and serves as the gateway to the development section, which is largely concerned with permutations of the arpeggiated figures with which the clarinet made its entry in the opening measures. The recapitulation provides exquisite closure of the movement’s formal structure and emotional progression. The Larghetto has been called “the heart of Mozart’s chamber music,” and achieves a state of exalted sublimity that makes it the instrumental counterpart to Sarastro’s arias in The Magic Flute, which George Bernard Shaw once said were the only music fit to issue from the mouth of God. The Menuetto is fitted with two trios: the first, a somber minor-mode essay for strings alone, is perfectly balanced by the clarinet’s lilting, Ländler-like strains in the second. The variations-form finale is more subdued and pensive than virtuosic and flamboyant.

Florence B. Price was a musical pioneer — one of the first African-Amer- ican students to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music, the first African-American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra, the first winner of the composition contest sponsored by the progressive Wanamaker Foundation.

Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1887 into the prosperous and cultured family of a dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received her first piano lessons from her mother, a schoolteacher and singer; Florence first played in public when she was four. She later also took up organ and violin, and at age fourteen was admitted to the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, wrote her first string trio and a symphony (now lost), and graduated in 1907 with honors for both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate. She returned to Arkansas, where she taught at Arkadelphia Academy and Shorter College before being appointed music department chairman at Clark University in Atlanta in 1910. She returned to Little Rock two years later to marry attorney Thomas J. Price, and left class- room teaching to devote herself to raising two daughters, giving private instruction in violin, organ and piano, and composing.

In 1927, following racial unrest in Arkansas that included a lynching, the Price family moved to Chicago, where Florence studied composition, orchestration, organ, languages and liberal arts at various schools with several of the city’s leading musicians and teachers, and published four pieces for piano soon after settling there. She was also a frequent guest at the home of physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds, and became both friend and teacher to their gifted daughter, Margaret. In 1932, Price and Bonds (then just 19) won respectively first and second prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Composition Competition, Price for her Symphony in E minor and Piano Sonata and Bonds for her song Sea Ghost. The performance of Price’s Symphony on June 15, 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, was the first by a major American orchestra of a symphonic work by an African-American woman; the CSO repeated the performance at the Chicago World’s Fair later that year. She continued to compose prolifically — three more symphonies and two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber, piano and organ pieces, songs, spiritual arrangements, jingles for radio commercials — and received numerous performances, including her arrangement of the spiritual My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord that Marian Anderson used to close her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washing- ton, D.C. on April 9, 1939. Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3, 1953.

Price graduated from the New England Conservatory with honors in organ performance, and taught and performed on the instrument throughout her life. She was an active member of the Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and Chicago Club of Women Organists, and composed many works for her own public performances and worship services and for publication ranging from concert suites, fugues and passacaglias to short pieces such as Hour of Peace, Caprice, Little Pastorale and Adoration, one of her best-known organ compositions. Price published Adoration in 1951 with the Lorenz Company of Dayton, Ohio, and its hymn-like lyricism has transferred easily to many other instrumental media, from full orchestra to violin and piano to the arrangement for clarinet and strings heard at this concert.