RAISE THE ROOF
media sponsor:
Saturday, August 4, 8pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Tickets: $26-$39
Michael Daugherty: Raise the Roof (Steve Hearn, Timpani) (West Coast Premiere)
Michael Daugherty: Ghost Ranch (West Coast Premiere)
John Corigliano: Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (Amy Burton, soprano) (West Premiere)
A Saturday night to remember––with two American icons as our muses, two composers in the house, three west coast premieres, and two stellar soloists. The Festival’s own principal timpanist Steve Hearn comes center stage to Raise the Roof in an opening work by Michael Daugherty for timpani and orchestra. A showman by nature, Hearn will seize the opportunity in this tour de force work. A Festival favorite, Daugherty made a niche for himself in the music world by composing concert music inspired by American popular culture. Ghost Ranch takes its inspiration from artist Georgia O’Keeffe and the landscape of her home in the New Mexico desert. The work’s three movements, titled Bones, Above Clouds, and Black Rattle, take us on a musical journey into a stark terrain of extremes and contrasts. Pulitzer Prize, Grammy, and Academy Award-winning composer John Corigliano returns to the Festival for the west coast premiere of “Mr. Tambourine Man” a song cycle that uses the poetry of Bob Dylan’s songs as its text, but without any musical references to Dylan’s own folk classics. The lyrics of Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, and Chimes of Freedom, resonate as meaningfully now as they did in the 1960s, but with the new and powerful symphonic voice of Corigliano. Soprano Amy Burton starred in the work with solo piano on Broadway this year, and now makes her debut in the orchestral version as featured soloist.
(A Talkback Session with Marin Alsop, guest artists and composers follows the concert.)
Program Notes:
Raise the Roof (2003) (West Coast premiere)
Michael Daugherty (b. 1954)
The music of Michael Daugherty has been featured at many previous Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music concerts, beginning in 1995 with a performance of his Dead Elvis (1993). In 1998, the Festival performed two works, Metropolis Symphony (1988-93) and Motown Metal (1994), and Le Tombeau de Liberace (1996) the following year. Three works were performed in 2002: Bells for Stokowski (2001), Route 66 (1998) and UFO (1999), and two more in 2003, Rosa Parks Boulevard (2000) and the violin concerto Fire and Blood (2003). Many of these performances have been West Coast premieres, as was one of Daugherty’s most recent works, Time Machine.
Raise the Roof for timpani and orchestra was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for the opening of its Max Fisher Music Center. The world premiere was given by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Neëme Järvi, with Brian Jones, timpani, at Symphony Hall in Detroit, Michigan on October 16, 2003. Daugherty has written the following notes:
Raise the Roof brings the timpani into the orchestral foreground as the foundation of a grand acoustic construction. I have composed music that gives the timpanist the rare opportunity to play long expressive melodies and a tour de force cadenza. The timpanist uses a wide variety of performance techniques: extensive use of foot pedals for melodic tuning of the drums, placement of a cymbal upside down on the head of the lowest drum to play glissandi rolls, and striking the drums with regular mallets, wire brushes, maraca sticks and even bare hands.
Another compositional building block in Raise the Roof is a brooding theme reminiscent of a medieval plainchant, first heard in the timpani and the flutes and later in the strings and tuba. This theme is repeated and passed around in canons and fugues and other permutations throughout the orchestra to create elaborate patterns, as in a gothic cathedral.
I have also composed a lively, pulsating melody for the orchestra combining rock and latin rhythms. The music is a cascade of major and minor triads, like laying down bricks and stones to build up a “wall of sound.” Raise the Roof rises toward a crescendo of polyrhythms and dynamic contrasts, allowing the orchestra to construct a grand new space for performing music of the past, present, and future.
Not recorded
Ghost Ranch (2005) (West Coast premiere)
Michael Daugherty (b. 1954)
Michael Daugherty’s Ghost Ranch was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and introduced by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by its principal conductor, Marin Alsop, on February 8, 2006 in Poole, United Kingdom. Daugherty has written the following notes:
Ghost Ranch is inspired by the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1968). A rugged individualist who distanced herself from art critics and art historians, she lived for over forty years in her summer home known as Ghost Ranch, a desolate area 120 miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. O'Keeffe's paintings of this period reflect the vast Southwestern landscape, with its open sky, jagged canyons and bone-parched earth. Her art, like my music, hovers between realism and abstraction. Ghost Ranch is a musical journey into a stark terrain of extremes and contrasts.
I. Bone
On her daily walks around Ghost Ranch, O'Keeffe collected bleached animal bones scattered over the desert. She used these to create sculptures in her sparsely furnished adobe house, and depicted them as abstract objects in many of her paintings. In “Summer Days” (1936) and “From the Faraway Nearby” (1937), for example, animal skulls appear to float in a bright blue sky, and in “Pelvis III” (1944) O'Keeffe framed the vastness of the sky through the holes of a pelvis bone. In the first movement of Ghost Ranch, I recollect these bones with tapping, bone-like sounds: the string players tap their instruments col legno (using the wood of the bow) and play “snap pizzicato” (snapping the string against the fingerboard), punctuated by the dry polyrhythms of hollow woodblocks played by the percussion section. To evoke the distinct multiple layers of O'Keeffe's paintings, I divide the orchestra into three separate ensembles, each with its own tempo and tone color. Sweeping melodic lines are played by the brass and the strings, recalling the open blue skies and epic panoramas of the Southwestern terrain. Echoing O'Keeffe's lifelong search to create “the feeling of infinity on the horizon line,” the coda of this movement increasingly moves toward one pitch, simultaneously played by the three ensembles in different tempos.
II. Above Clouds
In O'Keeffe's paintings, “Sky Above Clouds I—IV”(1962-5), white clouds are geometrically set against a bright blue background, creating an abstract yet recognizable form. To recreate the “near and far, both in time and space” of O'Keeffe's masterpieces, I expand the listener's sense of acoustic space by spatially re-arranging the French horn section on the stage. It is possible to see as well as hear the sound of the solo horns, floating cloud-like over the rest of the orchestra. While I was composing this piece I also had some phrases in my ear that Anne Carson collected and put into a poem for me about swimming under a blue sky: “dazzle by...dazzle my...sometimes spinning ...sometimes cursing...true finger knows...unlocked...light...big blue one...must be grand enough...blue can drift...us evaporating...”
III. Black Rattle
Dressed in black, O'Keeffe would travel alone from Ghost Ranch in her Model T car to discover and paint new places. Often camping overnight, she was drawn to ominous landscapes such as the barren hills she called the "Black Place," where she endured terrifying lightning storms, wild animals and rattlesnakes in order to make her strange but beautiful paintings. The third movement suggests danger, beginning with woodwinds playing “bell in air,” barking like a pack of coyotes in the middle of the night. The lower strings and timpani pulsate with a menacing rhythm in 7/8 time, and a dark twisting melody is played by the English horn, bassoons and oboes, and later by the entire orchestra. Percussion instruments rattle, while the orchestra paints a bleak panorama. The slow, mysterious middle section evokes the feeling of walking slowly into blackness. In the last section, the opening serpentine melody (heard again in the bass clarinet and bassoon) is interrupted by dissonant brass echoes and ringing chimes. The movement concludes with a menacing rattle.
Not recorded
Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) (West Coast premiere)
John Corigliano (b. 1938)
John Corigliano should be no stranger to Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music audiences. His works have been represented on numerous programs and he was a composer-in-residence in 1998. Performances of his works at the Festival include the Symphony No. 1 in 1993, the Scherzo for Oboe and Percussion, Fanfares to Music, and Troubadours in 1994, Pied Piper for Flute and Orchestra in 1995, the Fantasia on an Ostinato, The Red Violin and Three Hallucinations in 1998 and the West Coast premiere of his Symphony No. 2 (2000) in 2002. He has written the following notes for Mr. Tambourine Man:
When Sylvia McNair asked me to write her a major song cycle for Carnegie Hall, she had only one request: to choose an American text. I have set only four poets in my adult compositional life: Stephen Spender, Richard Wilbur, Dylan Thomas (whose major works generated the oratorio A Dylan Thomas Trilogy) and William M. Hoffman, collaborator with me on, among other, shorter pieces, the opera The Ghosts of Versailles. Aside from asking Bill to create a new text, I had no ideas.
Except that I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts, and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard-and surprisingly well suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music.
I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art-crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work.
I chose seven poems for what became a thirty-five minute cycle. “A Prologue: Mr. Tambourine Man,” in a fantastic and exuberant manner, precedes five searching and reflective monologues that form the core of the piece; and “Epilogue: Forever Young” makes a kind of folk-song benediction after the cycle's close. Dramatically, the inner five songs trace a journey of emotional and civic maturation, from the innocence of “Clothes Line” through the beginnings of awareness of a wider world (“Blowin' in the Wind”), through the political fury of “Masters of War,” to a premonition of an apocalyptic future (“All Along the Watchtower”), culminating in a vision of a victory of ideas (“Chimes of Freedom”). Musically, each of the five songs introduces an accompanimental motive that becomes the principal motive of the next. The descending scale introduced in “Clothes Line” resurfaces as the passacaglia which shapes “Blowin' in the Wind.” The echoing pulse-notes of that song harden into the hammered ostinato under “Masters of War”; the stringent chords of that song's finale explode into the raucous accompaniment under “All Along the Watchtower”; and that song's repeated figures dissolve into the bell-sounds of “Chimes of Freedom.”
Thanks are due to Carnegie Hall; to Sylvia McNair, for her commitment as well as her luminous artistry; and to Mark Adamo, to whom Mr. Tambourine Man is warmly dedicated.
Not recorded