VCME Program Notes 11-12

Remembrance of 9/11
(in program order)

Anthony Cornicello - Fractured Landscape, Suspended Song

I was teaching Computer Music when my wife frantically phoned. Her words were filled with grief, anger, and despair on September 11. I listened in disbelief. I was a little boy living in Brooklyn when the WTC was being built. My dad took me to the site of the future world's tallest building. At that point there was only a big hole in the ground. As an adult, I frequented the area, sitting at the fountain with Atlas holding up the world. When the Vermont Chamber Music Ensemble approached me about writing a work in response to the attacks, I was still overwhelmed with grief. For me, the piece needed to project a message of hope and understanding, in a time when hope and understanding were difficult concepts for me to grasp. As I began writing the work, my thoughts kept returning to current events. It became difficult to even think about writing. So I decided to write a piece about writing a piece after September 11. My work, a theatre-esque piece, is a chronicle of my own thoughts since the attack: disarray, confusion, followed by the eventual desire to return to work. The piece includes samples of eyewitness accounts, Hubert Parry's choral anthem, "I was glad when they said unto me", which makes use of the hopeful words of Psalm 112, "pray for the peace of Jerusalem," as well as Arabic chant, quoting the opening incantation of the Koran, as well as a passage instructing Islamic believers to "repel evil deeds with good deeds, and then you will find that he with whom you had enmity will become your friend." The writing of "Fractured Landscape, Suspended Song" was a catharsis for me as a composer, and I thank the Vermont Chamber Music Ensemble for the opportunity.
Notes by the composer

Belinda Reynolds - Dust

DUST was commissioned by the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble as part of their Winter "Coffee House" Concert to benefit the victims of the events of September 11, 2001. While no words can ever sufficiently encompass all the emotions and thoughts we all have surrounding this day, this short duo tries simply to create a musical offering for all of those lives affected by this moment. A special thanks goes to Steven Klimowski and Bonnie Thurber Klimowski for their input in the composition of this work. Other thanks go to The MacDowell Colony for their support of this project.
Notes by the composer

Allen Shawn - Dark Song

In order to respond to Steve Klimowski's request for a work reflecting upon the massacre that occurred in New York on September 11 of 2011, I had to first overcome a sense that, as a distant bystander to the events of that day, I didn't have a right to compose such a piece. When I did sit down to write, I thought about how such horror might have been experienced by one of its victims, and in turn by those close to that one person. I thought about the dark shadow the event cast over all of us. The bass clarinet and piano piece lasts five minutes; after the initial outburst in the piano, its chords and melodies are ritualized, circular and restrained.
Notes by the composer

Troy Peters - Lament

For me, the biggest feeling in the wake of 9/11 was numbness. The imediacy and impact of what happened were so powerful that I found myself exhausted for weeks. In the cello solo which opens Lament - 9/11/01, I tried to capture this sense of being emotionally lost. The cell9o mulls over its sorrow and doesn't know where to go with it, turning in circles. When the cello finally exhausts itself, the voice enters with a brief song of mourning to this text by Ab Al-ala Al-ma'arre, an 11th century Arab poet from what is now Syria:

The soul driven from the body
Mourns the memory it leaves
behind. A dove hit in flight sadly
turns its neck and sees its nest
destroyed.

notes by the composer

Thomas Read - A Watch in the Night

My trio, A WATCH IN THE NIGHT, was composed between Sept. 11 and November 11, 2001, especially for the VCME. The music comprises two contrasted, interlocked sections. The first unfolds three varied statements of a self-contained, singable melody. Scattered remnants of the melody propel the agitated beginning of the second section, raising the possibility of the melody's eventual restatement. Such an eventuality becomes increasingly impossible as the music, now utterly transformed, draws to a quiet, meditative close.

Two mottos are appended to the score:

In this world
we walk on the roof of Hell
gazing at flowers.
Kayabashi Issa

La memoria es raiz en la tiniebla.
(Memory is a root in the dark.)
Octavio Paz

David Gunn - faux pastiche

faux pastiche is a piece for New York City. It's a pasticcio of nine themes, six of which depict the mercurial activity of the burg. The other three - collapse, aftermath, and revivification - connote events of the last two-thirds of September 2001. The "collapse" theme is but two measures, representing a brief if daunting interlude in the city's collective continuum. So it really isn't a pastiche after all, but rather a "faux" pastiche.

Daniel Jessie - A Feary Tale

In conversations after the attack, I was most struck by the sense of confusion. We are benevolent, how can we be so hated? In truth, our generosity toward the world was often viewed as unwont influence - subtle imperialism. I felt a need to understand how something could seem so right and be seen as so wrong.

At the same time, I sensed a ponderous attitude taking hold in many minds outside New York City. Meanwhile, in The City itself, life was more cherished and civil. This piece is an attempt to put a lighter face on the gloomy, frightening reality of world society, hoping to help us all take a calmer view of our place within God's world.
Notes by the composer

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz - Fuliginous Quadrant

Composed ten weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, Fuliginous Quadrant extracts the abstract shape of unbearable, slow-motion television images that played over and over throughout the middle of that September. The flickering timing numbers of home videos are stretched across time as octave F's strike a heartbeat 337 times on the piano while the images themselves are pixelated with digital closeups and flash cuts, expressed as bursts of active conversation among violin, clarinet, cello and piano. The composition does not paint a scene but rather envelops the listener in a sonic analog of a single intake of breath and a silent plea for the images never to have existed.

Fuliginous Quadrant began as The Key of Locust, a nearly unplayable 1200-measure trio for violin, viola and cello written in early October; it evolved into a similarly unplayable quartet, and finally this version, first played by the Rode Pomp Ensemble in Ghent in 2005.
Notes by the composer

Alex Abele - Arise and Unite

This work is dedicated to the memory of those that died as a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks. While the dedication is concerned with those who have passed, the inspiration is from those who remain and remember. Arise and Unite is a reflection of the courage, strength of spirit, unity and resolve demonstrated by the American people and our friends worldwide.

The piece is based on two chords, a ninth chord, and an eleventh chord. These chords are played in succession in various voicings throughout the range of the piano followed by melodic echoes. The resulting sounds seek to honor the past and to inspire the future.
Notes by the composer

Don Jamison - Three Threshold Songs

Not only were the lives of thousands of people brought to an abrupt end on September 11, but those thousands were suddenly thrown into a state of existence that most were unprepared to meet. My Three Threshold Songs look at death from increasingly close up. In Spring and Fall (Gerard Manley Hopkins), young Margaret is saddened by falling leaves and the "leafmeal" they become. The narrator tells her, or maybe only thinks, that Margaret has realized that what she is seeing "is the blight man is born for," and that her sadness is for her own eventual fate - "It is Margaret you mourn for." In Emily Dickinson's The Sun Kept Setting, Setting, the narrator's own perceptions are strangely askew: the sun is setting, but it is noon; the dusk is dropping, but the only dew to be found is on her face; her feet are asleep, but her fingers are awake; she can't hear any of the sounds she thinks she is making. At last, she understands - without fear - that "'Tis dying I am doing." The narrator of the third song, I See You in the Spirit World (an adaptation of a meditative verse by Rudolf Steiner), is addressing someone who has recently died. She sends her love in the hope that it will "help you find the way through darkness to the spirit's light." According to Steiner, death is a birth into the spiritual world, and while the living can't serve as midwives to that birth, there are things we can do to help.
Notes by the composer

Erik Nielsen - We Must Always Have a Song

When Steven Klimowski approached me, along with a number of other composers, with the idea of writing a short piece for a special concert in memory of those killed on September 11, I quickly agreed. For a number of reasons I have written several memorial pieces in the past 10 years or so and I initially imagined this would be a similar sort of work. However, the more I thought about what I would compose, the less I felt I could write such a piece for this occasion. As hideous as the events of September 11 were, they are no more nor less tragic than the atrocities humans have been visiting on each other for thousands of years. In searching for what I could bring to this concert I was struck by a poem my friend David Budbill began appending to his correspondence after September 11. I realized after reading the poem that it said what I was feeling, namely that we need Art, now more than ever, not only to express more powerfully than any other way our sorrow, but also our hopes and strivings, our spirituality and our sense of beauty that persist despite pain, tragedy and injustice. And so I tried to write a simple piece that gives my sense of what is embodied in David's very wise and beautiful poem. - notes by the composer

What Issa Heard

Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.
I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,
since we will always have a suffering world,
we must also always have a song.

David Budbill

Notes by the composer

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VCME Program Notes
2011-2012 Season

Remembrance of 9/11
(in program order)

Troy Peters - Lament

A Soldier's Tale - The Crane Maiden

Erzébet

coming soon

VCME Program Notes 2011-2012 Season

Remembrance of 9/11 (in program order)

Troy Peters - Lament

A Soldier's Tale - The Crane Maiden

Erzébet

coming soon

VCME Program Notes
2011-2012 Season

Remembrance of 9/11
(in program order)