Sat.8.2 Triple Play
Saturday, August 2, 8:00pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Dorothy Chang: Strange Air (World Premiere/Women’s Philharmonic Commissioning Initiative)
Mason Bates: Liquid Interface (Mason Bates, electronica) (West Coast Premiere)
John Corigliano: Conjurer (Evelyn Glennie, percussionist) (West Coast Premiere)
PROGRAM NOTES:
Strange Air (2008) (World Premiere)
Dorothy Chang (b. 1970)
The music of composer Dorothy Chang reflects her musical interests
ranging from traditional Chinese to contemporary Western art music,
with a more recent interest in interdisciplinary works involving video,
still imagery and movement. Chang’s music has been commissioned and
performed by ensembles throughout North America and abroad, most
recently at the Summergarden Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, the Lontano Festival in London, and World Music Days in Hong
Kong. Born in Winfield, Illinois, Dorothy received degrees in
composition from the University of Michigan and the Indiana University
School of Music. Since 2003 she has served as Assistant Professor of
Music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British
Columbia.
Meet The Composer partnered with Marin
Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival for the inaugural premiere of the
Women’s Philharmonic Commissioning Initiative, Dorothy Chang’s Strange Air. The commission was made possible through the generosity of Bay Area resident Russ
Irwin, whose gift was matched by funds from a bequest from the Women’s
Philharmonic and additional funds from The James Irvine Foundation. The ongoing initiative is managed by America’s preeminent
commissioning organization, Meet The Composer, and overseen by a
steering committee involving composers Jennifer Higdon and Chen Yi,
conductor JoAnn Falletta, and former Womens’ Philharmonic board member
Mu’afrida Bell.
Composer Dorothy Chang has written the following program note for Strange Air:
Having moved to the Pacific Northwest five years ago, I am
especially taken with the beauty and intensity of its natural
environment. Coming from the predictably relentless hot summers and
snowy winters of the Midwest, I’m most fascinated by the
precipitousness of change and the volatility of the West Coast
environment. From my apartment window looking out at the horizon, the
wide span of ocean and sky is in constant flux as coastal winds push
the clouds and rain at sometimes astonishing speeds, revealing patches
of serene blue sky in between surging systems. From day to day and even
hour-to-hour, the panorama evolves and transforms in often spectacular
and unexpected ways. On one particularly bizarre February day, an
unseasonably sunny and balmy afternoon turned suddenly to rain, then
hail. Within three hours, the roads were covered with six inches of
snow.
Strange Air is inspired by this phenomenon, reflecting at times
the restlessness and turbulence, and other times the stillness and
fragility of this environment. The piece is in one continuous movement
with four sections presented in a series of tableaux, with contrast and
change creating a shifting mosaic of colors and textures. The work
opens with the introduction of two opposing fragments: a sparkling
motive of three held notes embellished with small surges of activity,
and a low, dark descending figure. These two ideas alternate, quickly
building in intensity and complexity with each repetition. The
introduction swells to a peak only to subside, unresolved,
transitioning to a soft lyrical section characterized by melodic
woodwind solos, slowly evolving harmonies and sparse shimmering
textures. As this slow section settles further and further into stasis,
rhythmic fragments of the following material emerge, evolving into a
driving ostinato which propels the music forward. As momentum builds to
a furious climax, themes from the preceding sections return, vibrantly
transformed. The final section revisits the melody and transparent
texture of the slow section with soft bells, distant chimes and string
glissandi floating higher and higher, gently fading away into stillness.
Not recorded
Liquid Interface (2006) (West Coast Premiere)
Mason Bates (b. 1977)
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Virginia, Mason Bates studied
composition in New York with John Corigliano, David Del Tedici 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. Last year the Festival performed
his Rusty Air in Carolina.
Liquid Interface was commissioned in 2006 by the National
Symphony Orchestra and introduced by the Orchestra under the direction
of Leonard Slatkin on February 22, 2007 at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C. Bates has written the following notes for Liquid Interface:
Water has influenced countless musical endeavors—La Mer and Siegfried's Rhine Journey
quickly come to mind—but it was only after living on Berlin's enormous
Lake Wannsee did I become consumed with a new take on the idea. Over
the course of barely two months, I watched this huge body of water
transform from an ice sheet thick enough to support sausage venders, to
a refreshing swimming destination heavy with humidity. If the play of
the waves inspired Debussy, then what about water in its variety of
forms?
Liquid Interface moves through all of them, inhabiting an
increasingly hotter world in each progressive movement. "Glaciers
Calving" opens with huge blocks of sound drifting slowly upwards
through the orchestra, finally cracking off in the upper register.
(Snippets of actual recordings of glaciers breaking into the Antarctic,
supplied by the adventurous radio journalist Daniel Grossman, appear at
the opening.) As the thaw continues, these sonic blocks melt into
aqueous, blurry figuration. The beats of the electronics evolve from
slow trip-hop into energetic drum 'n bass, and at the movement's climax
the orchestra blazes in turbulent figuration. The ensuing "Scherzo
Liquido" explores water on a micro-level: droplets splash from the
speakers in the form of a variety of nimble electronica beats, with the
orchestra swirling around them.
The temperature continues to rise as we move into "Crescent City,"
which examines the destructive force as water grows from the
small-scale to the enormous. This is illustrated in a theme and
variations form in which the opening melody, at first quiet and
lyrical, gradually accumulates a trail of echoing figuration behind it.
In a nod to New Orleans, which knows the power of water all too well,
the instruments trail the melody in a reimagination of Dixieland swing.
As the improvisatory sound of a dozen soloists begins to lose control,
verging into big-band territory, the electronics—silent in this
movement until now—enter in the form of a distant storm.
At the peak of the movement, with an enormous wake of figuration
swirling behind the soaring melody, the orchestra is buried in an
electronic hurricane of processed storm sounds. We are swept into the
muffled depths of the ocean. This water-covered world, which relaxes
into a kind of balmy, greenhouse paradise, is where we end the symphony
in "On the Wannsee." A simple, lazy tune bends in the strings above
ambient sounds recorded at a dock on Lake Wannsee. Gentle beats echo
quietly in the moist heat. At near pianissimo throughout, the melody
floats lazily upwards through the humidity and—at the work's
end—finally evaporates.
Many thanks to Marin Alsop and the musicians of the Cabrillo Festival
Orchestra, whose dedication and effort I most appreciate in bringing
this work to the West Coast.
Not recorded
Conjurer for percussionist and string orchestra (2007) (West Coast Premiere)
John Corigliano (b. 1938)
John Corigliano should be no stranger to Cabrillo Festival
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. Last season the Festival Orchestra performed Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man, settings of songs to texts by Bob Dylan.
Conjurer was given its world premiere on February 22, 2008 by
percussionist Evelyn Glennie with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Marin Alsop. Corigliano has written the following note for
Conjurer:
When asked to compose a percussion concerto, my only reaction was horror.
All I could see were problems. While I love using a percussion battery
in my orchestral writing, the very thing that makes it the perfect
accent to other orchestral sonorities makes it unsatisfactory when it
takes the spotlight in a concerto.
For starters, a percussionist plays dozens of instruments. Again, this
is wonderful if his role is to color an orchestral texture: but if he
(or she) is the main focus, it is terrible. The aural identity of the
player is lost amid the myriad bangs, crashes, and splashes of the
percussion arsenal. Only the visual element of one person playing all
these instruments ties them together.
In addition, most of the instruments have no pitch at all (or very
little), and don’t sustain a sound (like a violin or trumpet). As a
result, most percussion concerti I have heard sound like orchestral
pieces with an extra-large percussion section. The melodic interest
always rests with the orchestra, while the percussion plays
accompanying figures around it.
Of course, one could limit oneself to writing for keyboard percussion:
marimba or vibraphone, for example. Many concertos have been written
like this, and the combination of using an instrument with definite
pitches and restricting oneself to one instrument does focus the work
on a single soloist.
I thought of all of this as I sat down to discuss my writing a
percussion concerto. Obviously I had more than mixed views about this
project, but something about the challenge fascinated me, too.
Many of my works begin this way. I pose a problem and write a piece as
the solution. In this case, the problem is the following: How do I
write a concerto for a solo percussionist playing many different
instruments in which the soloist is always clearly the soloist (even
with your eyes closed), and how do I write a concerto in which there
are real melodies—and those melodies are introduced by the
percussionist, not the orchestra?
I. WOOD
The pitched wood instruments are the xylophone and marimba. To
supplement this, I constructed a “keyboard” of unpitched wooden
instruments (wood block, claves, log drum, etc.) ranging from high to
low and placed it in front of the marimba. The soloist could play
pitched notes on the marimba and then strike unpitched notes on the
wooden keyboard.
The initial cadenza starts with unpitched notes, but gradually pitched
notes enter and various motives are revealed as well as ideas based
upon the interval of a fifth. This interval will run through the entire
concerto as a unifying force.
After a climactic run, the orchestra enters, developing the 5th
interval into a rather puckish theme. Soloist and orchestra develop the
material and build to a climactic xylophone solo, and finally return to
the opening theme.
II. METAL
The cadenza is for chimes (tubular bells) accompanied by tam-tams and
suspended cymbals. It is loud and clangorous, with the motivic 5ths
clashing together. The movement itself, however, is soft and long
lined. The melody that will end the movement is introduced in the low
register of the vibraphone, and the movement develops to a dynamic
climax where the chimes return, and then subsides to a soft texture in
the lower strings as the struck/bowed vibraphone plays its melody.
III. SKIN
The skin cadenza features a “talking drum” accompanied by a kick drum.
The talking drum is played with the hands, and can change pitch as its
sides are squeezed. Strings connect the top and bottom skins, and
squeezing stretches them tighter—and raises the pitch. It provides a
lively conversation with a kick drum: a very dry small bass drum played
with a foot pedal and almost exclusively used as part of a jazz drum
set. This cadenza starts slowly, but builds to a loud and rhythmic
climax.
The movement then begins with the soloist and orchestra playing a
savage rhythmic figure that accelerates to a blinding speed. A central
section brings back the 5ths against a pedal timpanum that is played
with the hands in a “talking drum” style. The accelerando returns, and
leads to a wild and improvised cadenza using all the drums and a
virtuoso finish.
Once it was complete, it occurred to me that the piece’s
cadenza-into-movement form characterizes the soloist as a kind of
sorcerer. The effect in performance is that the soloist doesn’t so much
as introduce material as conjure it, as if by magic, from the three
disparate choirs: materials which the orchestra then shares and
develops; hence, the title Conjurer.
Not recorded
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