Viente - Among Friends - Americana - Different Directions

 

VCME Program Notes 2007-2008 Season

Viente David Gunn - Conchoid of Nicomedes Q. What is the Conchoid of Nicomedes? A. Nicomedes was a Greek mathematician (280-210 BC) famous for his treatise On conchoid lines, which contains his discovery of the conchoid curve that he used to solve various mathematical problems, such as the trisection of angles. A conchoid - from Greek meaning "shell," as in the word conch - is a curve derived from a fixed point O, another curve, and a length d. For every line through O that intersects the given curve at A, the two points on the line that are d from A are on the conchoid. The Conchoid of Nicomedes describes a family of curves of one parameter. Q. And how does that relate to the eponymous piece on tonight's program? A. Er, it sort of doesn't. I just liked the rhythm of the phrase. Though, now that I think about it, the piece does contain enough curvy motifs to justify the "conchoid" part of the title. Further, the letters of the other three words can be rearranged to spell "meet one codfish," which reflects the piscine character of the penultimate theme. And themes this quartet has in abundance - nine of 'em, that run the gamut from whole-tone to polychromatic. (Monsieur Dodecaphony, however, opted to sit out this dance.) And don't think the comparatively somber theme no. 1 is a blueprint for the rest of the piece. No, the moment theme no. 2 is introduced, it's off to the races and Katy bar the door. Q. Who's Katy? A. Mrs. Nicomedes, whose conchlike demeanor purportedly inspired her hubby's invention, not to mention theme no. 9. Peter Hamlin - The Art of War I. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on. II. In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. III. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. IV. A clever fighter wins his battles by making no mistakes. V. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. This piece takes its title from a short treatise on military strategy by the ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu. Though Sun Tzu's work is about 2500 years old, it contains surprisingly durable advice and observations about war. Each movement of this piece is titled with an excerpt from The Art of War. The music is meant to provoke meditation on each quotation. This piece is dedicated to the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, with thanks for the commission and premiere! Peter Hamlin - Be Good, See you tomorrow. I love you. Over the summer, I read a New York Times article about a research parrott named Alex who had just died. According the researcher who worked with Alex, his last words, spoken to her the night before he died, were: "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you." Since I was playing my accordion quite a bit this summer, a little accordion tune is the first thing that came to me when I read this article, and I realized that the accordion would be a wonderful acoustic match with the woodwind trio. So I e-mailed Steve Klimowski and asked him if he could add another short tune to the program, and he said, "Sure." [Editor: Insert obligatory accordion joke here.] My accordion has a standard arrangement of reeds -- one at standard pitch, another at standard pitch but detuned slightly to create a vibrato effect called "musette," and one an octave below standard pitch. There are stops that feature each rank alone, or with octave doubling, or with the musette ranks played together for the musette effect, or with all three together for a nice big mass of accordion tone. I realized that the three instruments of the woodwind trio can replicate the same kind of orchestration, and that's what I'm playing with in this piece. David Lang - Press Release (adapted for bassoon 1992) I wrote Press Release in 1991 for Evan Ziporyn. When you compose for one person, you can't get all the colors that you'd have with an ensemble or orchestra, so you have to imagine some sort of interesting problem. I wanted to do something that was really rhythmic. The original idea behind this piece was that of a high melody alternating with a low bass line, so that you get a high pop and a low pop switching back and forth as fast as possible, and these two worlds coexist. I wanted the upper melody to be recognizable and the bottom bass line to be recognizable, to be a real bass line, a driving funk thing. In classical music, the bass is only there to support the melody, which is where the action is. But the bass line is the place where funk music really shines. Who has the best bass lines in the business? I am a big James Brown fan, and, I thought, if you want a bass line, you got to go to James. So I made the key changes sound like James Brown. Because of the way the bass clarinet works, I thought you'd have to press the keys down to make all the low notes, and you'd release the keys to make the high notes....Press Release. I was really proud of myself because I thought I had made this funny joke, and then of course Evan said, "You know, a lot of those high notes you play with all your fingers down, and a lot of those low notes you play with all your fingers up." But I didn't think it was worth it to change the title. -- David Lang Source: G. Schirmer, Inc. http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2420&State_2874=2&workId_2874=30051 Allen Shawn - Three Nightscapes "Three Nightscapes", written in the summer of 2006, was commissioned by the New Jersey ensemble Palisades Virtuosi, and was first performed by them in December of that year. Like "In Memory Of", which I wrote for the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble that same summer, "Nightscapes" was composed in memory of my mother, Cecille Shawn. The three Nightscapes share themes and materials. The outer movements, "Meditation" and "Remembrance," are reflective in tone, while the middle movement, "Dream," is a kind of agitated scherzo in which there are hints of jazz. Yet the feeling of remembering is maintained in this movement too. The formal world of "Three Nightscapes" is fluid. Each movement seems to unfold spontaneously. A theme heard prominently in the middle of the first movement returns to close the third, where it seems to drift off into space. --Allen Shawn Top of Page

Among Friends Joachim Horsley - Transparency This piece is a scherzo of sorts, inspired by the idea of“transparency,” specifically in the context of politics and business. It was written in Berlin, Germany in the summer of 2006. Dennis Báthory-Kitsz - New Granite A few days ago I was doing some business in town -- propane bill, electric bill, bank deposit, ash bucket, chocolate -- when I passed a former restaurant turned into a Veterans of Foreign Wars post. I'd never taken notice, until this time. Its granite monument had been extended with another panel. On its grim grey blankness were engraved two words: Iraq Afghanistan It was chilling. It was like the dogs of war had their mouths open, empty, hungry, salivating, waiting to be fed. I don't know how the VFW works, whether they always anticipate the dead. But there it was, a monument once again to folly and hubris, waiting patiently for the names of the fallen to erase its blankness. I hope it stays blank, but the image wouldn't leave. For all my anger over this war, I hadn't felt this, this whatever-it-is that sucks the life out of its surroundings with an artistic de-animation akin to death itself. The piece I had planned for the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, itself a lament, simply sputtered to a stop. It was overwhelmed by a sense of the disjointed but slow instrumental sounds, a kind of nonpop Albert Ayler Ghost, not classical in shape, but endlessly interwoven in simple shapes. -- Dennis Báthory-Kitsz Chan Ka Nin - Among Friends Chan Ka Nin wrote Among Friends in 1989 for his colleagues in the Amici trio, clarinetist Uoaquin Valdepenas, cellist David Hetherington and pianist Patricia Parr, who premiered it in 1989. In 1991 it won the prestigious Barlow International Chamber Music Compitition. Among Friends is a set of variations based on the opening three-note motive played by the clarinet. The variations are a virtuosic exposé exploiting the idiomatic characteristics of each instruments. The moods reflect, in the words of the composer, "the highs and lows of any human relationship. Friendship, like music, lasts only through the test of time". Mike Mower - Sonata for Piccolo & Piano When I was commissioned to write a sonata for piccolo and piano in 2002, I have to admit I was less than enthusiastic about the idea at first. There are only two instruments which can penetrate the fortissimo of the full orchestra - the triangle and the piccolo in its top register. Often referred to by musicians sitting nearby as the "AK47 of the Symphony Orchestra" or "The Screaming Twig", this smallest of all woodwind instruments hasn't enjoyed much good publicity to date. Why? Much of the past repertoire for solo piccolo has focused on the comedy aspect of this instrument, incorporating ear splitting shrieks and high bird like trills. All this is possible but there's much more to the piccolo than that. We all know about the power and razor-like possibilities of the top register but in its bottom register the piccolo can take on a charming woody, hollow and ethereal quality and the middle register can be commanding and assured without being overpowering but also sweet and lyrical. When writing the sonata I was very conscious of wanting to show the true potential of the piccolo whilst integrating an interesting piano part, but above all creating something which an audience might enjoy. I opted to use many jazz elements in the piece. The first movement is a brisk 12/8 feel with the piccolo playing at the bottom of its register whilst being agile and fluid. This progresses to a jazzy groove section where much of the swing is implied by piccolo key slaps and the tapping of piano fingers. The movement concludes with a re-working of the first section, only at the end is the piccolo allowed to rise into the stratosphere. Movement Two again concentrates on the lower end of the instrument with the piano taking the lead half way through in a quasi-improvised solo with lush jazz harmonies. The last movement is a fast "tour de force" for both instruments, the piano incorporates a walking bass line whilst the piccolo alternates with spiky phrases and flowing scalic passages. A lyrical break-down section leads back to the original feel -- Mike Mower Top of Page

Americana Charles Ives - Piano Trio According to Charles Ives' wife, the three movements of the piano trio are a reflection of Ives' college days at Yale. It was written between 1909-10 and significantly revised in 1914-15. It consists of three movements: 1) Moderato, 2) TSIAJ ("This scherzo is a joke"). 3) Presto, Moderato con moto. The first movement is the same 27 measures repeated three times, though the violin is silent for the first, the cello for the second, and all three instruments join for the third. The second movement, TSIAJ, employs polytonality, timbral contrast, and quotations from American folk tunes.American folk songs are intertwined throughout although often grotesquely altered with respect to rhythm, pitch, and harmony. Folk songs appearing in the scherzo include "My Old Kentucky Home," "Sailor's Hornpipe," "The Campbells are Coming," "Long, Long Ago," "Hold the Fort," and "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood," among many others. Drawing from his college days at Yale University, Ives also quotes a number of fraternity songs including the Delta Kappa Epsilon tune "A Band of Brothers in DKE," which appears prominently near the beginning of the movement. It is notable that one of his sketches for the movement includes the subtitle "Medley on the Campus Fence," referring to the songs popular among Yale students during his college years. And although the composer himself acknowledged that the entire movement was a "joke," it well characterizes the unique and novel musical world that only Ives had discovered. The lyricism of the final movement of the piano trio contrasts strongly with the montage of tunes in TSIAJ. Sweeping lyrical melodies alternate with lighter syncopated sections after the opening introduction and violin recitative. Nonetheless, Ives continues with his borrowing habits - quoting music that he had originally written for the Yale Glee Club (though it was rejected) in the lyrical violin-cello cannon in bars 91-125. The coda quotes Thomas Hastings' "Rock of Ages" in the cello, ending the movement with Ives' characteristic rooting in American folk and popular music. Thomas Read - Going On Going On, a 2007 VCME commission, is a trio for clarinet, violin and piano. I like to think of it as a succession of adventurous expeditions – journeys through five different territories. Technically speaking, Going On consists of varied passes through a "ground" in which from two to 14 durations, each of a different length are jointly and perpetually iterated. This foundational ground, for all its consistent and exact mechanism is, of course, meaningless in terms of purposeful expression. The automatically generated rhythms are constantly changing yet entirely static; the form is chaotic, but not indeterminate in the traditional way. And in the audible elaborations that regularly obscure the ground nothing is left to chance. Care is taken to, at least, create the illusion of a purposeful, expressive unfolding—a musical realization. Still, the result, in the present case, of trying to "give sense to the senseless" is often to attenuate expectancy. Instead of goal-directed progression the listener must deal with succession, with episodes whose possible meaning is only retrospectively comprehendible. Individual episodes are never repeated exactly. Some are revisited as extensive transformations. Exact repetition is confined to short figures and has only local significance. Sometimes traditional narrative moments coalesce and unreliable recollections of other music emerge, but are soon contradicted by other material. While the title of my trio is partly inspired by Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, the music echoes a comment in Malone: "there is a choice of images."   Top of Page

Different Directions Erik Nielsen - Cinque Amici Cinque Amici (Five Friends) is a piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano which I composed during late fall and early winter 2007-08. It is a work in five movements which uses so-called arch form in which the first and last movements use similar materials, the second and fourth movements are linked in the same way, and the middle movement stands alone. In addition, the first two and last two movements are connected in that there is no pause between them, further isolating the third movement. This is the identical scheme to the one that I used with my recent Quartet for Strings #2. The piece was a bit of an experiment in that I was working with the idea of creating much shorter movements than in the string quartet, with no movement to be longer than about four minutes. I was aiming to have the outer movements last about 90 seconds, the second and fourth to be about 2 1/2 minutes long and the middle movement to be about 4 minutes. I was able to stick with that schedule for the first two movements, but as usual with many composers, got a bit carried away as I went along, with the result that the final three movements are a bit longer than originally planned. The first movement uses staccato octaves alternating with runs of legato notes and the main theme is a rather bouncy tune first heard in clarinet. It's over after a single statement of each section with a short recapitulation of the opening to finish the movement. The second movement uses swing rhythm and a jazz-influenced bass line in piano and cello to create an atmosphere of playful exchange among the instruments, with a legato middle section of long-held chords. After a return to the original idea there is an accelerando and a frantic fast section. The swing idea attempts to re-assert control, but the frantic idea makes one last appearance to close the movement. The third movement uses alto flute and bass clarinet instead of their soprano cousins and after a dreamy, unfocussed-sounding introduction, moves to a lyrical center of the movement. After building to a climax the movement returns to the introductory motive followed by a lyrical coda. The fourth movement uses much of the same material as the second movement, but in a very different way. It consists mainly of duets which are in question-and-answer format, like conversations. In this movement, the piano often stands alone and spends much of its time interrupting in progressively ruder and ruder fashion until in the middle of the movement it takes over completely. Gradually, however, it loses its energy and the other instruments come to the fore with their gentler sounds. The opening idea returns and seems to close the movement, but the piano makes some low rumbling noises, accelerating the work into the final movement, which uses octave lines and much activity to produce an energetic finale with moments of lyricism interspersed. The title can be taken in a number of ways: first, the five instruments and/or players are friends. Or the five movements get along in some ways. Or the five lines of the musical staff work together to link our musical ideas through notation. Or there may be yet another meaning or meanings which are unknown to me but which others will figure out. If you do, let me know. Belinda Reynolds - Turns TURNS was commissioned by the California Professional Music Teachers Association and the Music Teachers National Association for its 2001 California State Convention. The work gets its title from the way the opening chords evolve into subsequent sections of the piece. For instance, one note may turn into the pivot point from which a new moment unfolds. Likewise, some melodic material turns into new chordal sections, thus giving a new perspective on the music. Special thanks goes to Esther Landau, Bruce Foster, and Yueh Chou of Citywinds for their invaluable input during the composing of this work. Notes by the composer Tim Woos - 3 Minute Break I started writing 3-Minute Break last summer at the New York Summer Music Festival. An early version of the piece was played there. I knew that the other pieces on the program would be dark, and I thought the audience would enjoy a "break". I've since revised the piece and expanded it, but kept its original character. I wrote is as a free-spirited, cartoonish kind of piece, with both polka and waltz rhythms. Notes by the composer Top of Page