CONCENTRIC PATHS
Saturday, August 11, 8pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
PROGRAM NOTES:
Rusty Air in Carolina (2006)
Mason Bates (b. 1977)
Born and raised in Virginia, Mason Bates studied composition in New York with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler before moving to the Bay Area, where he studies at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.
As his notes explain, Bates’ Rusty Air in Carolina was actually inspired by another music festival and was composed for another symphony orchestra. This performance by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music marks his first Festival appearance, Bates has written the following notes:
To begin with: I'm a Virginian. Many chide that it lies not far enough from the Mason-Dixon to be sufficiently Southern, but the air says something different: even in my home state, it has a texture to it—weighted not only with humidity but also with the persistent buzzing of insects.
A bit further down the coast is a wonderful music festival where I spent a summer as a teenager. Not only did the thick buzzing of cicadas and katydids always accompany the concerts at the festival in Brevard, South Carolina, but sometimes it was the music itself: I remember sitting on the porch of 100-year old Nan Burt and listening to the sounds of summer while she told stories from her long life. This venerable lady was introduced to me by a young conductor at the festival, Robert Moody, who would become a loyal collaborator. When he recently took the helm at the Winston-Salem Symphony, he asked if I might write him a new piece.
The work uses electronica to bring the white noise of the Southern summer into the concert hall, pairing these sounds with fluorescent orchestra textures. “Nan's Porch” begins at dusk, while the katydids make their chatter. Three orchestral clouds—each inhabiting a different harmony, register, and orchestration—hover in the dusk, at first independently but ultimately fusing together when the cicadas start their singing.
The climax of this movement sends us into “Katydid Country,” when the ambient opening evolves into bluesy, rhythmic figuration. The clicks of the katydids become an electronica beat track over which the orchestra, in a smaller, more chamber setting, riffs on a simple tune inspired by old-time blues. It is said that katydids are loudest at midnight, and as the work reaches its central point, the rhythmic katydid music at last finds its melody.
Soaring in the strings over the last breaths of the blues tune, this long-lined melody moves us into “Southern Midnight.” The three distinct textures from the opening return, each brought to life by a phrase of the melody. At the close of this lyrical section, we hover in that strange space between night and day, when only the singing of the first bird alerts us to the approaching dawn. But it is a hot, Southern dawn, both sparkling and heavy, with the air made rusty again by the buzzing cicadas (popularly called locusts). And on this note, this homage—partly to the almost mythical place so far from where I now live, partly to the very real friend who made it possible—finally brings itself to an end.
Many thanks to Marin Alsop and the musicians of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the musical treasures of living on the West Coast.
Not recorded
Concentric Paths, Op. 24 (2005)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
Thomas Adès' meteoric rise to international musical prominence in a period of barely a dozen years has been an astonishing phenomenon. He was twenty-two in 1993 when he gave his first public piano recital in London and there has been an unusual consensus among critics of his originality, musicality and importance. A conductor as well as a pianist of formidable talent, Adès is currently artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, music director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Britten Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.
Born in London, where he now lives, Adès' most obvious musical talent was initially as pianist. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music, and then went on to read music at King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1992 with a double-starred first. That same year, he became composer-in-residence with the Halle Orchestra (1993-5). His most performed work, Living Toys, was commissioned for the London Sinfonietta and its London premiere (under Oliver Knussen) prompted widespread critical interest and acclaim. The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music performed three of Adès’ works in the 2003 season, “ . . . but all shall be well,” Darknesse Visible and Concerto Conciso. The Festival performed his orchestral work Asyla in 2004 and his America, a Prophecy, Op. 19 last season.
Concentric Paths was a joint commission by the Berliner Festspiele and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, and was underwritten by Lenore and Bernard Greenberg. It was introduced in the Kammermusiksaal of the Berliner Festspiel on September 4, 2005, with Anthony Marwood as soloist and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. Adès has written the following program note:
This violin concerto has three movements, like most, but it is really more of a triptych, as the middle one is the largest. It is the “slow” movement, built from two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution. The outer movements too are circular in design, the first fast, with sheets of unstable harmony in different orbits, the third playful, at ease, with stabile cycles moving in harmony at different rates.
Not recorded
Symphony No. 8 (2005)
Philip Glass (b. 1937)
A guest composer at the 1990 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Philip Glass is credited as one of the originators of “minimalism,” the musical movement developed during the 1960s in reaction to what was perceived as the increasing intellectualization and emotional distance of existing contemporary music. Along with fellow composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Glass favored a return to the most fundamental, or “minimal” elements of music: basic triadic harmonies, slow, simple modulations and repetitive, ostinato rhythmic patterns, giving their works a meditative, almost mesmerizing quality. Glass comments, “The search for the unique can lead to strange places. Taboo—the things we’re not supposed to do—are often the most interesting. In my case, musical materials are found among ordinary things, such as sequences and cadences. All that I threw out in 1965 I’ve gradually brought in again, making it my own.”
Born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, Glass pursued a conventional musical career: studies at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and with Nadia Boulanger in France, until he met the Indian sitar-player Ravi Shankar in 1965. The experience of working with Shankar resulted in a radical rethinking of his own approach to composition, and after two years of travel to Africa and Asia, Glass returned to the United States to found the Philip Glass Ensemble, dedicated to performing his own music.
Glass’s first works were for the theater, culminating in his first opera, Einstein at the Beach, the first of a series of “portrait” operas including Satyagraha, Akhnaten and The Voyage, the latter commissioned in 1992 by the Metropolitan Opera to celebrate the voyage of Christopher Columbus. He has also written music for film, most recently a new score for the Jean Cocteau film Beauty and the Beast. Recent Cabrillo Festival performances include the West Coast premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 2 (2004) in 2005 and his scoring of the multi-media work shown at last year’s Festival. Glass has provided the following notes for his Symphony No. 8:
Symphony No. 8 represents a return, after a number of major works, to orchestral music in which the subject of the work is the language of music itself, as in the tradition of the 18th and 19th century symphonies. To elucidate briefly:
• Symphony No. 5 is an extended work for chorus, vocal soloists and
orchestra with texts drawn from the traditional religious and wisdom
traditions.
• Symphony No. 6 is based on a major poem, “Plutonian Ode,” by Allen
Ginsberg and was composed for soprano and orchestra.
• Symphony No. 7, “A Toltec Symphony,” is based on the indigenous traditions
of Mexico and includes extended passages for chorus.
• Symphony No. 8 contains no references or allusions to non-musical materials at all. However, its formal structure is quite unusual and is worth a brief comment. The three movements are markedly different from each other in length, texture and internal musical procedures.
he first movement is the longest of the three, almost twenty minutes in length. It begins with a statement of eight different “themes.” This series is then developed in whole or in part, recombined with various harmonies and melodic elements and culminates in a series of “stretto”-like passages producing a highly contrapuntal effect.
The second movement, about twelve minutes long, is in the form of a passacaglia with a series of melodic variations. The harmonic basis of the passacaglia is sixteen measures long, which allows for some extended, at times quite oblique, melodic embellishments.
The third movement, by comparison to the first two, is quite brief—a short seven minutes. However, what it lacks in length it makes up in density. The theme with its accompanying harmony is heard twice, and then is joined by a counter theme, also heard twice. An extended cadence serves as a coda to the third movement and the symphony itself.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Dennis Russell Davies for his invaluable help. There were countless questions and details relating to the actual notes I composed as well as matters of orchestration that he addressed and resolved in his usual dedicated and tireless fashion.
Also, I would like to commend my long-time music director and associate Michael Riesman, who was responsible for the final editing and mixing of the work. This was an especially challenging assignment considering the novelty and complexity of the music.
Finally, I am very fortunate to have had the premiere and first recording of Symphony No. 8 with the Bruckner Orchester Linz. This is an absolutely superb world-class ensemble. They have brought the highest standard and enthusiasm to my work. Many thanks to them.
Suggested recording:
Bruckner Orchester Linz, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies
Orange Mountain Music B000F1HQTW