Professional Documents
Culture Documents
New Music Seance 2008
New Music Seance 2008
New Music Seance 2008
a New Music
The candles are lit, and now it’s time for our Séance. Happy
holidays to one and all.
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Birds in Warped Time
Concert One, 1:00 PM
Percy Gr ainger
Shepherd’s Hey (1908)
Irish Tune from County Derry (1902)
Sarah Cahill, piano
Gr azyna Bacewicz
Stained Glass Window (1932)
Melodia (1946)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Meredith Monk
St. Petersburg Waltz (1993)
Sarah Cahill, piano
Somei Satoh
Birds in Warped Time II (1980)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Sarah Cahill, piano
§§§
Tan Dun
Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978-9)
I. Missing Moon, II. Staccato Beans,
III. Herdboy’s Song, VII. Floating Clouds,
VIII. Sunrain
Per Nørgård
Animals in Concert (1988)
I. Esperanza, A Hermit Crab Tango
II. Tortoise Tango: Without Jealousy
Eva-Maria Zimmerman, piano
Dylan Mattingly
Night #3 (2008)
Luciano Berio
Wasserklavier (1964)
Lois V Vierk
To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)
Steed Cowart
Blackberry Winter (2007)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano
Olivier Messiaen
Fantaisie for Violin & Piano (1933)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Deep River Dreams
Concert Two, 4:00 PM
Samuel Barber
Excursions, Op. 20 (1944)
I. Un poco allegro
II. In slow blues tempo
III. Allegretto
VII. Allegro molto
Olivier Messiaen
Eight Préludes (1929)
V. Les sons impalpables du rêve
VI. Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu
Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
MORTON FELDMAN
Piano Piece 1955
Piano Piece 1956, A & B
Sarah Cahill, piano
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Deep River, Op. 59, No. 10 (arr. ca. 1904)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Ingr am Marshall
Movement (Deep in My Heart) (2008)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano
Mamoru Fujieda
The Olive Branch Speaks (2008)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano
Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu
Lecture (Prof. Judith Tick), 7:00 PM Concert Three, 8:00 PM
This project has been made possible by the National Endowment for the
Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.
Alexander Scriabin
Five Preludes, Op. 74 (1914)
I. Douloreaux, déchirant, II. Très lent, contemplatif,
III. Allegro drammatico, IV. Lent, vague, indécis,
V. Fier, belliqueux
Dane Rudhyar
Pentagram No. 4 (The Human Way) (1926)
I. Pomp, II. Yearning
Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 4: Grave, No. 5: Lento
Henry Cowell
Tiger (1927)
Lou Harrison
Largo Ostinato to John Dobson (1937)
Sarah Cahill, piano
Johanna Beyer
Suite for Violin and Piano (1937)
I., II., III.
Henry Cowell
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945)
III. Ballade, IV. Jig
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
§§§
Johanna Beyer
Bees (date unknown)
Dissonant Counterpoint II (ca. 1934)
Gebrauchs-Musik III (1936)
Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 7: Intensivo, No. 9: Tranquillo
Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930)
Sarah Cahill, piano
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the prototype of the artist/priest/mystic. Along with this came their
version of emancipated dissonance.
In Rudhyar’s creationist myth of the origins of harmonic practice,
consonance was “tribal”—and therefore inferior—because it represented
the primitive expression of provincial habits. Dissonance, on the other
hand, was “universal” because it symbolized the inclusiveness of the
theosophical “Universal Brotherhood.” In effect, he equated social
emancipation with the emancipation of the total chromatic. Crawford
found that “contact with Rudhyar has given me quite a bit of freedom.” She
exercised that freedom by embracing harmonic dissonance, passionate
lyricism, and dark low-register chords that evoke Scriabin’s prototypical
famous “mystic chord” based on fourths. In November 1928 she praised
Rudhyar’s vision of the brotherhood of man, which “blends all as human
beings, despite slight exteriors which are discordant. To bring together in
harmony far-related objects is a glorious achievement.” By that time she
had embraced spirituality as a crucial component of her own aesthetic.
The following year she wrote of herself:
I like to wonder about things rather than know about
them. Do I really want peace? My tendency is toward
spiritual concept. I ‘feel’ it, my thought bends that way,
yet I see great beauty in other concepts.” (Diary, July 26, 1929)
The “wonder” and the “spiritual concept” found fuller expression in
sources beyond Theosophy. In her diaries from the late 1920s Crawford
quoted passages from Lao Tse’s Tao, sections of writings by the
transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and poetry by Walt Whitman.
(This eclectic combination of ideas may seem odd, but they had in fact
been linked in American intellectual life since the turn of the century.)
Henry Cowell was another composer who proved crucial to
Crawford’s development in more important ways. He too visited Djane Herz
as he criscrossed the country looking for audiences for his piano recitals
and fellow travelers in the avant garde. Crawford met Cowell in 1925. He
was twenty-eight years old, just at the threshold of a career as composer,
pianist, and leader of the ultra-modern wing of American composition.
One year earlier Cowell had founded his New Music Society, intended to
support concert series at which recent works would be played exclusively.
At his debut recital in Chicago on February 28, 1924, one critic described
him as a “pale young man, languid and blasé, quite at ease but indifferent
to surroundings,” who had come to Chicago to show its pianists “how to
crush all the keys at once.”
Cowell was so impressed by Crawford’s music that soon he invited
her to join the non-resident Board of Outside Advisors for the New Music
Society. In 1926 he included her in his lecture series on modern music
in San Francisco and Carmel, California, surveying music by “Goossens,
Honegger, Malipiero, Béla Bartók, Leo Ornstein, Ruth Crawford, Edgard
Varèse and other important modem composers, showing the trend which
is indicated by their music.”
Henry Cowell considered Ruth Crawford to be an amazing
discovery for two reasons. Not only was she a “completely natural
dissonant composer,” but she was also that minor miracle: a woman who
could actually write his kind of new music. He praised her Sonata for
Violin and Piano as “vital... with none of the undesirable sentimentality
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which often destroys the creative efforts of women composers.” For the
magazine Musicalia, he wrote, “Her work of deep beauty is at the level of
high accomplishment that men realize. She is the only female composer
that I know of, of which I can say this.” Cowell published Crawford’s four
piano preludes in the fifth issue of the New Music Quarterly in October
1928. This turned out to be the only music from her Chicago period that
was published in her lifetime. More than any other musician, not only
in the 1920s but throughout their enduring friendship, Henry Cowell
supported Ruth Crawford, the composer. All subsequent publications of
her music and the one recording of her work in her lifetime came under
his sponsorship or through the organizations which he had founded.
In 1929 Cowell changed Crawford’s musical and personal
destiny even more profoundly. He encouraged her to move to New York to
study with his former teacher, Charles Seeger. He arranged for lodgings
at the home of a patron-friend and Crawford risked everything to go.
Soon Charles Seeger’s discipline of “dissonant counterpoint” dislodged
Crawford’s harmony-based style. A new phase of her career began
and such famous works as Piano Study in Mixed Accents and String
Quartet 1931 (both finished in Berlin on a Guggenheim Fellowship) soon
followed. She and Charles married and had four children between 1932
and 1941. Their participation in modernist music waned; their priorities
shifted dramatically to American folk music (Pete Seeger, Charles’s son
from a previous marriage and Mike and Peggy Seeger formed the next
generation of this famous family of the American folk revival.) Although
Crawford’s own career as a composer got derailed by the priorities of
family, income-producing piano teaching, and perhaps most of all by
folk revival activities, she took on occasional composition pupils. Among
them was Johanna Beyer, who studied dissonant counterpoint with both
Cowell and then Crawford in the late 1930s. Thus the cycle of avant-garde
apprenticeships continued.
Techniques change to be sure, but the essence of “personality” (to
borrow a favorite term from Aaron Copland, who knew Crawford and later
regretted underrating her work) remains. No matter what the language
and techniques of Crawford’s compositions, we honor the spiritual
resonance of her music as one of the qualities which make it so compelling
today. Even the String Quartet 1931, praised as proto-serial now was more
appreciated in its own time for its expressive qualities. “Spiritual in spite
of method,” her friend Wallingford Riegger wrote of its slow movement in a
private note to her. Rudhyar, who believed Ruth Crawford had lost her way
by following Charles Seeger, just might have smiled.
Percy Gr ainger
Shepherd’s Hey (1908)
Irish Tune from County Derry (1902)
Grainger set numerous folk tunes from the British Isles and
various Scandinavian countries for classical ensembles,
often publishing multiple versions in different scorings for
each song. Shepherd’s Hey was collected by musicologist
Cecil Sharp when he heard the violinist of the Bidford
Morris Dancers play this tune in 1906 and it was there
that Grainger encountered the music. It became one of his
most-played compositions. Irish Tune from County Derry
was collected in the early 1850s by Miss Jane Ross of
New Town, Limavady, County Derry, but she neglected to
ask the name of the piece. Today it’s widely known as “A
Londonderry Air” or “Danny Boy.”
–Charles Amirkhanian
Gr azyna Bacewicz
Stained Glass Window (1932)
Melodia (1946)
Although Bacewicz’s later music turned more dramatic and
chromatic, the haunting strains of Stained Glass Window
hails from her earlier connection to French Impressionism
through the colored musical glass of her elder compatriot
Karol Szymanowski. Melodia (Song) employs modal
harmonies in a compressed three-movement setting,
complete with mini-cadenza at the end of the development.
–Charles Amirkhanian
Meredith Monk
St. Petersburg Waltz (1993)
St Petersburg Waltz is a piece for solo piano performed by
Nurit Tilles, a Monk associate since Do You Be (and also
featured on all of Steve Reich’s New Series albums). The
Waltz was written after Monk returned from a long journey
through Asia. “Oddly enough, being in Asia made me
think more than ever about my blood roots—my parents’
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Russian/Polish Jewish background. This Eastern lineage
is something I share with Nurit Tilles, whose parents were
Polish Jews. I wrote this piece especially for Nurit. As I
worked on it, I sensed my Russian grandfather in a very
strong way. St. Petersburg Waltz was inspired by the idea of
a place rather than the place itself.”
–Meredith Monk
Somei Satoh
Birds in Warped Time II (1980)
Birds in Warped Time II is Somei Satoh’s only work for
violin and piano to date. Here the violin is not overtly
imitating the kokyu (a bowed snake-skin fiddle used in
traditional Japanese music) but the wide vibratos spanning
a quarter-tone, the expressive, speech-like quality of the
embellishments along with the modal and pentatonic
melodic patterns all contribute to the unmistakably
Japanese atmosphere. The iridescent shimmering of the
piano provides an impressionistic backdrop through
subtly shifting tremolo figurations repeated in a minimalist
fashion.
–Margaret Leng Tan
Tan Dun
Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978-9)
I. Missing Moon, II. Staccato Beans,
III. Herdboy’s Song, VII. Floating Clouds,
VIII. Sunrain
Eight Memories in Watercolor was written when I left Hunan
to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
It was my opus one. The Cultural Revolution had just
ended, China just opened its doors, I was immersed in
studying Western classical and modern music, but I was
also homesick. I longed for the folksongs and savored the
memories of my childhood. Therefore, I wrote my first piano
work as a diary of longing. Many of the melodies are based
on my favorite folksongs from my childhood in Hunan.
–Tan Dun
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Per Nørgård
Animals in Concert (1988)
I. Esperanza, A Hermit Crab Tango
II. Tortoise Tango: Without Jealousy
“Tortoise Tango” and “Hermit Crab Tango” are movements of
the suite Animals in Concert, originally composed for piano.
The tortoise as tango dancer must presumably possess
certain rhythmic peculiarities, which I have chosen to
express by letting the tune of the tortoise shuffle broadly,
tripartite through the strict four-partite time of tango. The
situation is quite different as far as the Hermit Crab Tango
is concerned. It is a well-known fact that the hermit crab—
this soft animal—must run the gauntlet among the many
perils at the bottom of the sea when it must move house.
I have chosen to express the angers by a tango pattern—
sharp as a cactus—through which the tune, optimistic,
slips to its new shelter. I have borrowed the tune from
Hanne Methling’s Introduction. “I want to get through this
time,” she sings in the ecstatically ascending melody line—
and I believe that these words must correspond very well to
the mood of the hermit crab.
–Per Nørgård
Dylan Mattingly
Night #3 (2008)
Night #3 (“don’t the moon look good, mama”) is an eight
minute lullaby for solo piano, a lullaby for those nights
when old guitar strings or a slow fan blows in a fog-wind
down the bay, down through that moon somewhere up
above where your eyes can get, somewhere up above those
sweet gushing airplanes who look down on all us little
lights the same, who keep going going like that ocean (O
dreamwater in the dark!), like the freeway, like Shenendoah
being picked real slow, out past railroads and mountains
and gas stations that peek out of the dark like a reflection
of some long lost memory of Mediterranean stillness, like
the first notes of this piece (deep low black on the left of the
piano), when your bright light stays up staining the dark
outside by that tarped pool, until someone’s rainbow laugh
plugs in this lonesome night like the whole great amplifier
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of the world finally got switched on, and suddenly this
driving flying American black is playing an electric blues!
–Dylan Mattingly
Luciano Berio
Wasserklavier (1964)
Wasserklavier, water-piano in German, composed for the
Italian pianist Antonio Ballista, has an interesting history.
It was initially written for two pianos, and was soon after
reworked for one piano. Berio, dissatisfied after hearing
recordings of a famous European pianist’s recording of
short pieces by Brahms and Schubert, determined to
set things right, pianistically. This short, tonal, piece
incorporates motives from Brahms’s Op. 117 no. 2 together
with Schubert’s Op. 142 no. 1, with a prominent bass line
featuring repeated F’s. The ironic ending, however, could
only be written by the composer of Sinfonia.
–John Thow
Lois V Vierk
To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)
When it is calm the ocean is gentle and inviting. It can be
mysteriously majestic or humblingly powerful. Sometimes
it thrashes about frighteningly. The title of my piece was
inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem “Her Triumph.” Yeats’s
words say to me that the energy of life itself is untamed and
often wilder and more beautiful than what shows on the
surface.
The piece is played entirely inside the piano on
the strings. It is composed in three sections, beginning
percussively in the lowest register, adding “tremolos” and
“trills” (no pitches here are notated exactly). The music
moves to higher strings and develops tonally with plucked
string phrases and dynamic glissandos. It ends with a
flurry on the highest strings.
–Lois V Vierk
Steed Cowart
Blackberry Winter (2007)
In December 2007 an old friend, Daniel Wolf, an American
composer who lives in Germany, invited me to contribute a
composition to a collection of piano pieces he was hosting
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on his blogsite. The works were to have a winter theme in a
set called “A Winter Album.” I don’t know how music might
convey winter-ness without extra-musical references. I used
a title, Blackberry Winter, to make my piece seem wintery.
The expression “blackberry winter” is used in the South
to refer to a brief period of cold weather after spring has
already started to warm.
–Steed Cowart
Olivier Messiaen
In honor of the centenary of his birth on December 10, 1908
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Deep River Dreams
Program Notes, Concert Two
Samuel Barber
Excursions, Op. 20 (1944)
I. Un poco allegro
II. In slow blues tempo
III. Allegretto
VII. Allegro molto
Barber’s first piano composition amply demonstrates his
mastery of style and idiom. The composer has provided
a brief explanation for the title of the work: “these are
‘Excursions’ in small classical forms into regional American
idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their
source in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of
local instruments, are easily recognized.” As Barber implies,
these pieces are evocative, not imitative. The first movement
suggests jazz elements, the second is a convincing blues
piece. The beautiful third movement is a seamlessly flowing
arrangement of folksong material brilliantly scored for the
piano. The final movement brings to mind folk instruments
handled with virtuosity.
–Jeffrey Jacob
Olivier Messiaen
In honor of the centenary of his birth on December 10, 1908
Morton Feldman
Piano Piece 1955
Piano Piece 1956, A & B
These three brief pieces explore the entire range of the
keyboard with a variety of articulations and attacks and a
continuous juxtaposition of sound and silence. Piano Piece
1955 is marked “Slowly and quietly.” Piano Piece 1956A,
with a dedication “To Cynthia,” is marked “Slowly and
softly.” Feldman asks the pianist to depress certain keys
silently, creating subtle sympathetic resonances (in some
cases too subtle to be heard). Piano Piece 1956B also uses
sympathetic resonances, and while it is marked “Slow—soft
as possible,” Feldman has noted three pitches in the piece
which should be played “as loud as possible.”
–Sarah Cahill
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Deep River, Op. 59, No. 10 (arr. ca. 1904)
Although Coleridge-Taylor composed prolifically for violin,
the present work is derived from one of his piano solos
from the collection 24 Negro Melodies. The arrangement is
by the unjustly forgotten American violinist Maud Powell
(1867–1920), a brilliant performer who studied in 1884
with Joseph Joachim, and who concertized in nearly every
major American city and many smaller ones between 1885
and 1920 when she died. Like Coleridge-Taylor, she refused
to curtail her work and touring. After suffering a heart
attack brought on by exhaustion, she tried to honor further
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concert commitments and the music world was shocked to
learn of her death at 52.
While touring England in 1902 she met Edward
Elgar and young Samuel Coleridge-Taylor who later
dedicated his Violin Concerto to Powell. As there was little
modern repertory for the violin at a time when Powell was
the first American-born violinist to record 78rpms, she
often would arrange music for the combination of violin and
piano, as she did with Coleridge-Taylor’s Deep River.
Many of Powell’s recordings are being re-released on
Naxos compact discs, including her version of Deep River.
Her biography, Maud Powell—Pioneer American Violinist
by Karen A. Shaffer and Neva Garner Greenwood, with a
forward by Yehudi Menuhin, was released in 1988 by Iowa
State University Press.
Of this arrangement she later confessed in
contemplating the use of octaves, “Though they are
supposed to add volume of tone they sound hideous to me.
I have used them in certain passages of my arrangement of
Deep River but when I heard them played, promised myself
I would never repeat the experiment.”
The words of the spiritual derive from Zachariah,
Book 10: “And he shall pass through the sea with affliction,
and shall smite the waves in the sea, and all the deeps of
the river shall dry up: and the pride of Assyria shall be
brought down, and the scepter of Egypt shall depart away.”
Deep river,
My home is over Jordan.
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.
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Deep river,
My home is over Jordan.
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.
–Charles Amirkhanian
Ingr am Marshall
Movement (Deep in My Heart) (2008)
The famous civil rights “anthem” “We Shall Overcome” is
the basis for this music. The title Movement refers to that
struggle and to a piece of piano music by Debussy simply
called Mouvement. It too has its say in this music. The
music alternates between two textures: a continuous moto
perpetuo mostly written in an “inbal” or dove-tail style, and
a slow descending figure which stops the forward motion,
or, it could be argued, constitutes the real movement in the
piece.
–Ingram Marshall
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Cuzco, Peru, 1920s,” a photograph of a deceased child laid
out among flowers and candles on a bed, ready for burial.
There is a self-portait of Chambi which caught my eye
for its similarity
to a portrait of
Miguel Quispe.
Consequently, in
the sixth movement,
“Harawi de Chambi,”
the same harawi
melody from the
introduction is set
in the finale. I also
pay tribute to the
folk-influenced
music of Béla
Bartók by alluding
to his Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1922). “Folkloric
Musicians, Cuzco, Peru, 1934” is the inspiration for the
final movement, “Marinera.” It is in an enlivened marinera
style, a coastal dance popular among folk musicians
throughout Peru.
–Gabriela Lena Frank
Mamoru Fujieda
The Olive Branch Speaks (2008)
The Olive Branch Speaks is included in a series of Patterns
of Plants. The series is based on the melodic patterns
that are extracted from the data of slight changes of
electric potential found in living plants. The changes of
electric potential not only present the condition of the
living organism but also show the transformation of the
ecosystem surrounding the plants. In The Olive Branch
Speaks, written for Sarah Cahill, the data of olive plants,
which I take care of in my apartment, is used for the
composition. There are two small movements, which have
unique melodic patterns.
–Mamoru Fujieda
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Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu
Program Notes, Concert Three
Alexander Scriabin
Five Preludes, Op. 74 (1914)
I. Douloreaux, déchirant, II. Très lent, contemplatif,
III. Allegro drammatico, IV. Lent, vague, indécis,
V. Fier, belliqueux
The Five Preludes, Op. 74, among Scriabin’s last
compositions, distill his mature style into compressed
forms: the longest of these preludes is only 26 bars. The
writer/pianist Donald Garvelmann wrote: “Opus 74 is
psychologically jarring, shattering. All the sadness and
troubles of the world are encapsulated in these few pages.”
–Sarah Cahill
Dane Rudhyar
Pentagram No. 4 (The Human Way) (1926)
I. Pomp, II. Yearning
Originally entitled “The Human Way,” the five-movement
Pentagram No. 4 was written between 1924 and 1926, and
began as a work for two pianos. It remained in manuscript
until it was published in a version for solo piano in the
1970s. The first three Pentagrams, also published in the
1970s, are revised versions of earlier pieces by Rudhyar as
well. As a cycle, the four Pentagrams present a gradually
increasing subtlety and complexity in the use of harmony.
The fourth Pentagram in particular is unified structurally,
with motivic connections linking its various movements. In
the second movement, “Yearning,” the listener might notice
references to the famous yearning letimotif from the Prelude
to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
–Ronald Squibbs
Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 4: Grave, No. 5: Lento
The Preludes were written while Crawford was studying
with Djane Lavoie-Herz in Chicago. Judith Tick has noted
that Crawford shared Herz’s interests in “theosophy,
Eastern religious philosophy, 19th-Century American
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Transcendentalism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt
Whitman.” It was to Herz that Crawford dedicated, “with
deep love and gratitude to Djane,” her Nine Preludes. Herz
was also a leading proponent and interpreter of Scriabin,
whose harmonic and metric influence echo through
the Preludes (when Ruth Crawford brought them to her
teacher Charles Seeger, he called them “derivative” of
Scriabin). In 1927, Crawford wrote in her diary that Bach
“and Scriabin are to me by far the greatest spirits born
to music.” Compound meters, chromatic clusters, lyrical
dissonance, and unusual pedal effects are hallmarks of
these miniatures. Preludes Nos. 1–5 remained unpublished
until 1993.
–Sarah Cahill
Henry Cowell
Tiger (1927)
In an atonal, dissonant style, this is a set of variations on
two themes stated in the first few measures: one with small
intervals, the other with widely separated intervals. There
are many different kinds of clusters, some of which are
used silently to bring out high overtones, as are also some
small chords. The piece was originally inspired by William
Blake’s “The Tiger.”
–Sidney Cowell et al.
Lou Harrison
Largo Ostinato to John Dobson (1937)
Harrison often recycled material, and revisited compositions
after several decades. This piece was originally written
in 1937, and dedicated to his friend John Dobson, an
astronomer he met while attending San Francisco State
University in the mid-30s. Harrison revised it for piano in
1970, and orchestrated it to become the third movement of
his Third Symphony in 1982.
–Sarah Cahill
Johanna Beyer
Suite for Violin and Piano (1937)
I., II., III.
Described by the 1937 New York Herald-Tribune as
“experimental in form and modernistic in harmony,”
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Beyer’s brooding three-movement composition (one of
several solo or duo suites and sonatas she composed
during the 1930s) works like a study in three-against-four.
In the first movement the violin plays mostly in patterns
of four, while the piano plays three repeated single notes
or octaves in the left hand. In the second movement this
relationship is reversed: the violin plays mostly in three
throughout while the piano maintains the pulse in four.
A solo violin cadenza featuring double- and triple-stops
closes this brief middle movement. The third movement also
begins with a violin cadenza before the piano enters with
material from the opening of the piece. Here the low triplet
octaves of the piano return like the memory of a dream,
a relentlessly plodding motive reminiscent of increasingly
insistent knocks on a closed door. Principles of dissonant
counterpoint are evident throughout this short, tightly
organized work, and it is similar in its dark, ominous tone
to Beyer’s Movement for Two Pianos (1931).
–Amy C. Beal
Henry Cowell
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945)
III. Ballade, IV. Jig
About 1942 I came across William Walker’s Southern
Harmony, one of the handbooks of the singing schools that
flourished in post-Revolutionary America, and that may
still be found here and there in the South. This old book
circulated great numbers of the fine old modal British-
American ballad tunes, adapted to religious texts, and it
contained some fuguing tunes from earlier New England
“primitive” composers like Billings, Edson, Read and others.
The music is plain but fervent. The fuguing tunes rarely use
the modes, and they differ from Baroque in being extremely
condensed in length yet freer, and for each voice may have
a tune of its own although the voices (usually three) enter
one after another. They tend to stay closer to the tonic than
European music does, also.
I found myself wondering what turn music in the
United States might have taken if this widespread style
had not disappeared from the knowledge of sophisticated
musicians in this country who scorned anything that did
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not conform to the European standards for over a hundred
years.
It was not with the idea of imitation, but rather of
carrying forward into a more extended and modern form
some of the basic elements in this old religious music that
I began to write a series of pieces in two parts, the first a
hymn, the second a fuguing tune, often both modal; there
were for various combinations of instruments and voices.
Later on the idea grew in me to extend the fuguing tune
into sonata form by developing two themes. Such a work
would then logically find the basis for the other movements
in other types of traditional American music. The present
sonata is the result. The work was undertaken in 1944
at the suggestion of Joseph Szigeti who recorded it with
pianist Carlo Bussotti for Columbia Records.
–Henry Cowell
Johanna Beyer
Bees (date unknown)
Dissonant Counterpoint II (ca. 1934)
Gebrauchs-Musik III (1936)
Dissonant Counterpoint II and Gebrauchs-Musik III are
two suites of short movements, similar in style and
form. Both are highly dissonant, heterophonic, graceful,
subtle, highly pianistic, and beautiful pieces. They are
important early examples of the influential ideas of Charles
and Ruth Crawford Seeger, yet they also show Beyer’s
unusual tendency towards minimalist, single-minded
formal procedures, and reveal her intensely intimate style.
Dissonant Counterpoint uses formal “phrase structure”
techniques shared by Charles Seeger, while Gebrauchs-
Musik tends to be slightly freer, more lyrical, sedate, and
pensive. Bees is part of a large collection of pedagogical
pieces of Beyer’s, and she has written above the one-page
score: “The bees are so busy.”
–Sarah Cahill
Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 7: Intensivo, No. 9: Tranquillo
Prelude No. 9, inspired by Lao Tse, is one of several
23
Crawford works influenced by Taoist ideas. Henry Cowell
published Preludes Nos. 6–9 in his New Music Edition.
–Sarah Cahill
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Performer Biographies
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Kate Stenberg, violin
Violinist Kate Stenberg’s career as a soloist and chamber
musician has spanned a broad spectrum of styles with particular
emphasis on contemporary music. New Music Box described one of
her performances at a previous Séance as
“highly virtuosic and deeply communicative...
a startlingly powered interpretation, full of
character and presence.” She has performed
throughout the U.S. and Europe and
currently is most active as first violinist of
the Del Sol String Quartet, whose recent
accomplishments have won them two ASCAP
first prizes for Adventurous Programming
for Contemporary Music. She also plays
with the San Francisco Symphony, the San
Francisco Ballet Orchestra and the San
Francisco Contemporary Music Players and
was a founding member of Left Coast, a
San Francisco-based contemporary music
ensemble. As soloist, she has given world
and U.S. premieres of works by Ronald Jim Block
26
Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Swiss Pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann
maintains a career on two continents through
performances that are “breathtakingly
intense” (Der Bund, Switzerland) and “brilliant
and sensitive” (Berner Oberländer). Her solo
appearances include recitals as well as concerto
performances with major symphony orchestras
such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Winner of the prestigious Rotary International
Ambassadorial Scholarship, Zimmermann has
appeared at international festivals in Israel, the
US and Europe including the Festival Piano
Sven Wiederholt
en Saintonge in France, the Sommerfestspiele
Murten in Switzerland, the Yerba Buena International Music Festival
and the Other Minds Festival. Zimmermann has studied with many
distinguished musicians such as Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, Leonard
Hokanson and Dominique Merlet. She graduated with highest honors
from the Conservatory of Geneva.
Zimmermann is a musician of broad interests and in addition
to her solo appearances devotes herself to chamber music, lieder
recitals, and teaching. Her partnership in ChamberBridge with soprano
Lara Bruckmann includes both concertizing and the production of an
annual one-day festival celebrating the work and compositional lineage
of a selected 20th/21st-Century composer (2008 ChamberBridge:
Messiaen Illuminated). Other collaborations include projects with the
Del Sol String Quartet (Del Sol – Del Seoul: premieres of Korean women
composers in Seoul) and bass-baritone René Perler (Festival du Lied,
Fribourg, Switzerland). Zimmermann was a founding member of the
award winning Charmillon Piano Quartet. Many of her chamber music
and lieder recitals have been broadcasted in Swiss Radio DRS2 and
Radio de la Suisse Romande. As an educator, Zimmermann has been a
faculty member of the University of San Francisco and currently teaches
in the music program at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA, which
was founded by Sir Yehudi Menuhin.
Zimmermann spent her early childhood in Indonesia, where
her parents were Peace Corps workers. Being exposed to different
cultures and languages from very early on has greatly enhanced
her understanding of diverse styles of music and art. Zimmermann
currently lives in San Francisco where she pursues her career while
raising a family.
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Composer Biographies
The late Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–1969) began her
career as both a violinist and composer, studying music at the Warsaw
Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Warsaw. With a
scholarship from the great composer and pianist Paderewski, she moved
to France to study with Nadia Boulanger and violinist André Touret.
As a performer she won honorable mention in 1935 at the Wieniawski
Competition and pursued a career as a virtuoso soloist until 1953. She
was praised particularly for her exquisitely pure intonation, utmost
rhythmic precision and a perfect sense of musical form. Bacewicz wrote
prolifically for her instrument: six sonatas for violin and piano, four solo
violin sonatas, and seven violin concerti, as well as many miscellaneous
pieces such as Stained Glass Window and her serenely beautiful
Melodia. She also composed six symphonies, incidental music for film
and theatre, and a substantial body of miscellaneous orchestral and
chamber music, including seven string quartets.
Mamoru Fujieda (b. 1955) received his Ph.D. in music from the
University of California, San Diego in 1988. His composition teachers
have included Joji Yuasa and Morton Feldman, among others. Fujieda
is internationally recognized as one of music’s outstanding younger
30
composers. Working with artists such as John Zorn, Yuji Takahashi,
and Malcolm Goldstein, he composes music that emerges from his
fascination with the essentially collaborative formation of music.
Influenced by Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, he has been working
with alternative tuning systems based on just intonation, and in 1997
he founded Monophony Consort, an ensemble dedicated to music for
alterative tuning systems. His work also includes sound installations
that have incorporated living plants, diatomaceous earth, and aeolian
harps into their construction. Recordings of his work have been released
by Tzadik, ALM Records, Fontec, and the MAM label. He currently
serves as a professor of design at Kyushu University.
Although he was born in Australia and lived for a time in Europe, the
eminent composer and concert pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961)
lived the majority of his years in the United States, from 1917 until his
death. He was an inveterate experimenter attempting at one point to
build keyboard instruments to play continuous glissandi and scoring
works for percussion ensemble to imitate Indonesian gamelan music, not
to mention a plan to create an analog synthesizer. His most courageous
act of benevolence, hiring Henry Cowell as his music copyist and
thereby obtaining his release from San Quentin Prison in 1941, came
at a time when literally the entire music world, including those who had
benefited from Cowell’s tireless publishing and promotion of new music,
abandoned him for four years when he was incarcerated on allegations
of homosexual conduct.
Born in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Bay Area, Lou Harrison
(1914–2003) established himself as one of the most original and
important American composers of the 20th century. His studies were
with Howard Cooper, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Virgil
Thomson, and he resided on both the east and west coasts of the
United States during the course of his career. He helped introduce the
Indonesian gamelan to the United States and, with William Colvig,
constructed two large gamelans now in use at San Jose State University
and Mills College. Ned Rorem has said, “Lou Harrison’s compositions
demonstrate a variety of means and techniques. In general he is a
melodist. Rhythm has a significant place in his work, too. Harmony
is unimportant, although tonality is. He is one of the first American
composers to successfully create a workable marriage between Eastern
and Western forms.”
Dylan Mattingly (b. 1991) has been writing music for ten years, since
the moment he realized that there was music he wanted to hear which
just didn’t exist. Born in Oakland, California and influenced alike by
Olivier Messiaen, John Adams, and the gritty blues and folk music of
Alan Lomax’s recordings, Mattingly’s music has been performed around
the world, in cities such as Berlin, Sydney, and New York. He is the co-
director of Formerly Known as Classical, a local new music ensemble of
young musicians who perform works written only in their lifetimes, and
plays cello, bass, piano, guitar, and ukulele.
Born and currently based in New York, Meredith Monk (b. 1942) is a
composer, singer, director/choreographer, and creator of new opera,
music theatre works, films and installations. A graduate of Sarah
Lawrence College, Monk has created more than 60 music/theater/
dance and film works since 1964 and has been a recipient of numerous
awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and the prestigious
MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 1968 Monk founded The House, a
company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance,
and then formed the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble in 1978. A
pioneer in extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance,
Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and
movement, image and object, light and sound, in an effort to discover
and weave together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking
exploration of the voice as an instrument has expanded the boundaries
of musical composition itself.
In his youth a traditionalist from the mold of Carl Neilsen and Jean
Sibelius, Per Nørgård (b. 1932) has explored many compositional
techniques throughout his career. With an early interest in organic
development and the concept of metamorphosis, the 1960s led Nørgård
to experiment with collage, interference techniques and electronic
32
music. At this time, Nørgård developed his own serial procedure, the
infinity series, that generates melodies fractally and endlessly in multi-
layered polyphony reminiscent of the Renaissance prolation canon.
Upon viewing works by schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolph Wölfli (1864–
1930) in the 1980s, Nørgård adopted a more dramatic, spontaneous
style. This encounter prompted the composition of many of Nørgård’s
most popular works, including Wie ein Kind, performed at OM12. Even
in his Wölfli period, Nørgård did not completely abandon his earlier
compositional techniques. In subsequent work and today, Nørgård melds
his techniques into new forms.
Somei Satoh (b. 1947) was born in Sendai, Japan, and began his career
in 1969 with Tone Field, an experimental, mixed media group based in
Tokyo. He has gone on to write more than thirty compositions, including
works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, choral and electronic music,
theater pieces and music for traditional Japanese instruments. In one
of his most interesting projects held at a hot springs resort in Tochigi
Prefecture in 1981, Satoh placed eight speakers approximately one
kilometer apart on mountain tops overlooking a huge valley. As a man-
made fog rose from below, the music from the speakers combined with
laser beams and moved the clouds into various formations. A composer
of the post-war generation, Satoh’s hauntingly evocative musical
language is a curious fusion of Japanese timbral sensibilities with
19th-Century Romanticism and electronic technology. Satoh has truly
created an inimitable approach to contemporary Japanese music.
American composer Lois V Vierk (b. 1951) has spent most of her
career in New York City. Born outside of Chicago, Vierk studied at the
California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and Leonard
Stein, among others. Her interest then turned to gagaku (Japanese
court music), first in L.A. and then in Tokyo, where she studied
with Sukeyasu Shiba, a lead flutist of the Imperial Court Orchestra.
The gradual building of intensity in Vierk’s compositions are one
manifestation of gagaku’s influence on her music. She also composed
the gagaku work Silversword (1996), which was commissioned for
performance by an ensemble led by Shiba, with the premiere occurring
at Lincoln Center. Vierk has written many works for ensembles with
multiples of the same instrument, and her work often uses glissando
prominently and builds exponentially in level of activity.
34
Other Minds, Inc., is dedicated to the encouragement and
propagation of contemporary music in all its forms through
concerts, workshops and conferences that bring together artists
and audiences of diverse traditions, generations and cultural
backgrounds. By fostering cross-cultural exchange and creative
dialogue, and by encouraging exploration of areas in new music
seldom touched upon by mainstream music institutions, Other
Minds is committed to expanding and reshaping the definition of
what constitutes “serious music.”
Other Minds would like to thank the following individuals and institutions whose
generous support between July 1, 2008 and November 20, 2008 has helped
make our programs possible.
Alvin H. Baum, Jr., in honor of Jim Newman Vivian Perlis
Vic Bedoian Robert Potter, in honor of Henry Brant
Levon Der Bedrossian Jon Raskin
Charles Boone & Josefa Vaughan The Stone Family
Agnes Bourne & James Luebbers Marcia Tanner & Winsor Soule
Kenneth Bruckmeier Bronwyn Warren & James Petrillo
Gavin Bryars
Thomas & Kamala Buckner Anonymous
Anthony B. Creamer III Grants for the Arts
Tom Dambly & Debra Blondheim William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
John Duffy National Endowment for the Arts
J.B. Floyd & Pin-I Wu Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation
John Goodman & Kerry King WHH Foundation
Stephen B. Hahn & Mary Jane Beddow
Mel Henderson Calistoga Water
Jeffrey Hollingsworth DayDarmet Catering
Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund Diptyque Candles
Alden Jenks & Mikako Endo Krispy Kreme Doughnuts
Dan Joseph Honest Tea
Elizabeth Lauer Noah’s Bagels, Fillmore
Anne Le Baron Noah’s Bagels, California
Liz & Greg Lutz Pauline’s Pizza
Jeffry Mitchell Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Laurel Heights
Dan Murphy, in honor of Mike Bloomfield Rainbow Grocery
Jim Newman & Jane Ivory Semifreddi’s Bakery
© 2008 Other Minds
333 Valenci a Street, suite 303, sa n fr a ncisco, c a 94103
(415) 934-8134 / other minds@other minds.org
w w w.other minds.org / w w w.r adiom.org