Sun.8.10 Music at the Mission: To the New World

Sunday, August 10, 4pm & 8pm Mission San Juan Bautista

Chiayu: Feng Nian Ji (Harvest Festival) (World Premiere)
Osvaldo Golijov: Last Round
Alla Borzova: To the New World (U.S. Premiere)
Avner Dorman: Variations Without a Theme (West Coast Premiere)

PROGRAM NOTES:

Feng Nian Ji (Harvest Festival) for orchestra (2008) (World Premiere)
Chiayu (b. 1975)

Taiwan-born composer Chiayu’s association with the Cabrillo Festival stems from her attendance at the Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop during the summer of 2006, which she describes as “a wonderful experience.” Feng Nian Ji (Harvest Festival) was inspired by that experience. Chiayu has written the following notes:

Feng Nian Ji is based on the traditional harvest festival of the Ami, Taiwan’s largest aboriginal tribe who live primarily along Taiwan’s east coast. The festival begins with the young men going out to fish. After they return to the village, the community dresses in traditional costumes and forms a circle, dancing to the chants of a village elder. This initiates a call-and-response performance where all the men of the village answer the elder’s chant. Toward the end of the festival, the women join the celebration, which culminates with their singing performance. This place of honor reflects the status of women in the Ami’s matriarchal society.
My piece begins with a loud and aggressive introduction representing the warrior style. This leads to the main section, which consists of alternating sub-sections of fast and slow tempo in an antiphonal (call-and-response) style. After the piece reaches its climax, a slow and peaceful section follows where melodies are heard in the higher registers, representing female singing. The piece concludes with a bombastic finale. It is a festive event, after all.

Not recorded

Last Round for string orchestra (1996)
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)

Osvaldo Golijov’s influences are wide and diverse, including his Rumanian mother and a father from the Ukraine. Born after the family had immigrated to Argentina, he grew up in a closely-knit Jewish household, where he was exposed to both Jewish liturgical music and local klezmer musicians. The influence on Last Round, however, is from his Argentinean background, specifically, Argentina’s national dance, the tango.

Last Round was composed in 1996, although, as Golijov notes, sketches for it appeared as early as 1991. It was commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Stefan Asbury, who introduced the piece on October 25, 1996 in Birmingham’s Adrian Boult Hall. Last Round can be performed either as a double string quartet with string bass, or as a string orchestra piece. The Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa introduced the latter version in 2000. Golijov has written the following notes for Last Round:

Astor Piazzolla, the last great tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him in 1992. He left us, in the words of the old tango, “without saying good-bye'” and that day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen.

The creation of that face had started a hundred years earlier from the unlikely combination of African rhythms underlying gauchos' couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar. As the years passed all converged towards the bandoneón: a small accordion-like instrument without keyboard that was invented in Germany in the 19th century to serve as a portable church organ and which, after finding its true home in the bordellos of Buenos Aires' slums in the 1920's, went back to Europe to conquer Paris high society in the 1930's. Since then it reigned as the essential instrument for any tango ensemble.

Piazzolla's bandoneón was able to condense all the symbols of tango. The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers (a simple C major scale on the bandoneón zigzags so much as to leave an inexperienced player's fingers tangled). The melancholy of the singer's voice was transposed to the breathing of the bandoneón's continuous opening and closing. The macho attitude of the tangueros was reflected in his pose on stage: standing upright, chest forward, right leg on a stool, the bandoneón on top of it, being by turns raised, battered, caressed.

I composed Last Round in 1996, prompted by Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman. They heard a sketch of the second movement, which I had written in 1991 upon hearing the news of Piazzolla's stroke, and encouraged me to finish it and write another movement to complement it. The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla's spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life).

The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneón. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song “My Beloved Buenos Aires”, composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930s). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.

Suggested recording:
Yiddishbbuk
St, Lawrence String Quartet, Ying Quartet with Mark Dresser, bass
EMI Classics B000066SFP

To the New World (2002) (US Premiere)
Alla Borzova (b. 1961)

To the New World was commissioned by the Renée B. Fisher Family Foundation, under the auspices of the Brooklyn College Foundation, Inc. The world premiere was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Belarus under the direction of Alexander Anissimov on April 26, 2007, at the Great Hall of the Belarussian Philharmonic Society. A concert reading by the Brooklyn College Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction took place on November 1, 2003, at the Whitman Hall of Brooklyn College, New York. Alla Borzova has written the following note about To the New World:

My composition is programmatic in nature. I have created a story about an imaginary ship that brings to the shores of the USA immigrants of various nationalities— Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, African, Latin American, and Chinese—during the waves of immigration that began in the mid-nineteenth century. There are several leitmotifs in the composition: the most important are (1) the “theme of immigration,” which first appears in the introductory Andante; (2) the tuba's calls, which sound like a ship's horn; (3) the “five-note call” in the brass section; and the (4) two “immigrant chords,” which are symbolic of the ups and downs of immigrant life (they are heard first in the high woodwinds, then in the low brass). I develop these leitmotifs in several contrapuntal “lyrical digressions,” which appear throughout the course of the piece.

The middle section—Allegro—consists of recollections of the ethnic music of the various immigrant groups: an Irish reel; the well-known German “Grossvater” melody (the only quotation in the piece), followed by a leisurely Ländler; allusions to a Klezmer tune and an Italian tarantella; and three episodes that call to mind the music of Africa (the “bell rhythm” played by two cowbells), Latin America, and China. Finally, there are a number of what might be called leit-timbres: solo violin and bodhran [a type of Irish drum] for the Irish music; French horns and trombone for the German melodies; solo clarinet and clarinet/violin duo for the Klezmer music; solo trombone and tambourine for the Italian tarantella; percussion instruments of African and Latin American origin for their respective episodes; and a low piccolo, in imitation of a Chinese flute, for the Chinese episode.

The mysterious Chinese episode represents the last “rest” in this journey; it is followed by a final “gathering” of all the previously heard national styles, each in its own tempo, timbre, and tonality. The gathering is itself followed by a jazz episode, which, as if to reflect the sounds that the immigrants on the ship hear from the American shore, is first heard from a distance, and then slowly gets louder and louder (as ship approaches the shore). After a jazz episode, the music quiets down, leaving the note D (the opening note of the piece) to grow. The introductory “theme of immigration” sounds again, now only in the strings, first in unison, then in octaves, and finally in double octaves, as if more and more people on the ship unite around the same thought: “ . . . happiness is possible but difficult” (Randall Jarrell), and the transformation from stranger to citizen is long and arduous. At the end, the “theme of immigration” leads into the two “chords of immigration,” followed by the cowbell’s “bell rhythm” from the African episode. This rhythm serves as a symbol of Time.

Not recorded

Variations Without a Theme (2001) (West Coast Premiere)
Avner Dorman (b. 1975)

Avner Dorman’s Variations Without a Theme was composed in Israel in 2001 and received its premiere on November 15, 2003 in Tel Aviv by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta. The US premiere was given on March 30, 2007 by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Asher Fisch at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Dorman has written the following notes for Variations Without a Theme:

Back in the summer of 2001, when I set out to compose Variations Without a Theme I decided on a specific challenge for myself as a composer. Since my early composing days I had studied the variations of the masters, such as Bach, Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Lutosławski, and was always very much taken by their ability to use very limited materials and create great masterpieces. I wanted to take on this challenge myself, but with a twist. Instead of using a lyrical theme as the basis of Variations, I decided to use some of the basic elements of music: the repetition of a note, an ornament, scales, and the half-step interval.

Since my musical taste covers a wide range of ‘styles’, I explored how these basic elements are used in various musical genres: jazz, middle-eastern music, avant-garde, Indian music, rock, and, of course, the Romantic symphonic tradition. For example, the opening part of Variations uses a short ornament based on half steps using the pitches E, E-flat, F and G-flat. This motive is similar to middle-eastern ornamentation, yet later in the piece, when it’s inverted and transposed it becomes one of Bach’s favorite motives, B-flat-A-C-B-natural (or in German, B-A-C-H). Later in the piece I used the inversion of these intervals (as major 7ths) to create a sound world much closer to that of Shostakovich and Schnittke.

The form of the piece is as follows:
Variation 1—The first variation opens with a wild thrust of oriental gestures in the woodwinds over a persistent repeated note. The short ornaments are used in a canon and gradually become falling oriental scales. During this opening variation, jazzy rhythmic elements slowly take over the simple repeated note of the accompaniment.
Variation 2—In this variation the bass continues the jazzy feel by playing a “walking bass” while the woodwinds continue to explore the opening ornaments only in a sparser version, adding silences in between the entries of the motives.
Variation 3—This variation is based exclusively on rising scales in the harp, celesta, woodwinds and solo strings.
Variation 4—In this variation, the repeated notes move to the foreground played
by the flutes, clarinets, and small bell-like instruments. In the background, the opening oriental gestures are played very slowly by the strings.
Variation 5—All the elements of the opening section come together, building up to the culmination of the first part of the piece.
Variation 6—This is the first of several slow variations. Based on ornaments and scales, it is ambient in nature, exploring different soundscapes of the orchestra.
Variation 7—The seventh variation is a flute cadenza. The original ornamental figure is used here by the flute, and as an echo effect in the orchestra.
Variation 8 (the tingly variation)—This variation is inspired by Bartók’s idea of “night music.” However, this night is in the city, not out in the country, so gradually the peaceful quiet becomes a haunting city night scene.
Variation 9—The ninth variation is the longest, most elaborate, and most passionate of the entire piece. The half step is inverted into a major seventh fall (in the trumpets) and begins an expressive section. In hindsight, I think that this variation is the one most influenced by the events that happened in the world as I was composing the piece (the Intifada in Israel, and later, 9/11) and has a doomsday feel to it.
Variation 10—Before the recapitulation, an almost tragic static variation recalls different sections of the piece, with solos in the piano and horn, and tutti recollections of earlier sections.
Variation 11—The recapitulation is a multi-partite fugue that brings together elements from all of the variations. The ending is expressive and energetic. All the musical realms come together, yet each preserves its identity.

Not recorded

Photo (clockwise beginning L): Mission San Juan Bautista (photo by r.r. jones); Chaiyu, Alla Borzova (photo by Denise Winters), and Avner Dorman.