Sunday 10 March 2013 7.30Pm Bcmg.Org.Uk Sound Investment Tonight’S Programme
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25 YEARS Sunday 10 March 2013 7.30pm bcmg.org.uk Sound Investment Tonight’s programme Since 1992, BCMG has premiered more than Sunday 10 March 2013, 7.30pm 65 new works with the help of a wide range of CBSO Centre, Birmingham Share in individuals through Sound Investment. Sound Unit shares in each commission Conductor: Oliver Knussen music’s are priced at £150 and your donation can Baritone: Leigh Melrose * start from £15 per month. Thanks to match Mezzo-soprano: Lucy Schaufer ~ future funding from Arts Council England through our Catalyst award, we currently have three Special Offers available, including the chance to get your very first Sound Unit half Charles Ives Ruth Crawford Seeger Go to: price, for £75. Set for Theatre Orchestra Piano Study in Mixed Accents bcmg.org.uk/ Join Sound Investment now and share the Carl Ruggles Ruth Crawford Seeger soundinvestment excitement of bringing alive new pieces of Vox Clamans in Deserto ~ Three Songs ~ music from the leading composers of our time. call: Henry Cowell John Cage 0121 616 6523 By becoming a Sound Investor you can: 26 Simultaneous Mosaics The Wonderful Widow of or email: • attend rehearsals and premieres Eighteen Springs ~ • meet composers and performers Elliott Carter [email protected] • have your name listed in a new work’s Double Trio Joanna Lee score (UK premiere) Every Inch Of Many Effigies – Invest now in a new song by Gerald Barry, Six Courthouse Songs * and Crowd Out by David Lang, both to be Interval (BCMG/SaM Apprentice Composer-in- premiered in 2014. Residence / world premiere) Thank you to those Sound Investors who have taken advantage of our Catalyst special offers Charles Ives so far! General William Booth Enters into Heaven * Tonight’s concert is followed by a late-night, 35-minute Thumb ensemble performance starting at approximately 9.45pm. See page 22 for the four-page late-night programme. 3 Find out more about SaM’s Embedded programme: was as free as Ives’ was constrained – and yet BCMG/SaM’s www.soundandmusic.org/projects/embedded The American from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s they formed an unlikely but immensely powerful duo, Apprentice We are pleased to announce that Shiori Experimentalists hell-bent on bringing to public attention the new, Usui has been appointed as BCMG/SaM distinctly American, music that was emerging in Composer-in- Apprentice Composer-in-Residence for 2013. the immediate post-World War I period. One of the principal media through which that music reached Residency – Charles Ives was born in 1874, while John Cage its audience was Cowell’s serial publication New died as recently as 1992; they never met (though Music Quarterly. The first issue, the full score of an introduction they did correspond, albeit briefly, in the late 1940s). Ruggles’s orchestral work Men and Mountains, Yet despite the apparent discontinuities these facts appeared in October 1927. Ives, who had already Sound and Music’s vision is to create a world where suggest, there exists a surprisingly strong link not been signed up by Cowell as a subscriber to New new music and sound prospers, transforming lives, just between Ives and Cage, but also between them Music, was so impressed that he immediately Now in its fifth year, the Apprentice Composer-in- challenging expectations and celebrating the work and Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford took out another 25 subscriptions, and went on to Residence programme is a joint initiative between of its creators. SaM’s work includes composer and Seeger. (Parenthetically, Elliott Carter also has ties to become the de facto sponsor of the Quarterly for Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and artist support and development, partnerships with this group, but that’s another story.) over a decade. Sound and Music (SaM) as part of SaM’s Embedded a range of organisations, live events and audience As is well known, Charles Ives spent his Cowell, Ruggles, and Seeger had been artist development programme, funded by The development, touring, information and advice, working life in insurance: although he had studied friends since the late 1910s; indeed, Cowell later Leverhulme Trust. network building, and education. SaM champions music while at Yale University (1894-98) under reminisced about how ‘My visits to Ruggles were Embedded residencies offer composers the new music and the work of British composers and the distinguished New England School composer a weekly event for many years. I arrived the first opportunity to immerse themselves in the life of an artists, and seeks to ensure that they are at the Horatio Parker, the impecunious example set by thing in the morning. We looked at new chords, organisation, working closely with players, staff and heart of cultural life and enjoyed by many. his father, George Ives, seems to have convinced argued over where to include this note or that and audiences and collaborating for the development of Charles that ‘if [a man] has a nice wife and some fought over the best way to continue one melodic significant new work. Workshops and one-to-one nice children, how can he let [them] starve on his line or another.’ Carl Ruggles’ musical language time with players offer composers the opportunity dissonances.’ Accordingly, Ives’ compositions – not least as found in Vox Clamans in Deserto to develop their artistic practice. were mostly written, often in great haste yet (1923) – was heavily chromatic, and owed a good BCMG/SaM Apprentice Composer-in- paradoxically over long stretches of time, at deal to the technique of dissonant counterpoint Residence for 2012, Joanna Lee has seized the The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 evenings and weekends, and during holiday that Cowell and Seeger had been developing from opportunity to get involved in all aspects of our under the Will of the first Viscount Leverhulme. periods. However, after a major health scare in roughly 1915 onwards. Dissonant counterpoint work: attending rehearsals and concerts, working It is one of the largest all-subject providers of the late 1910s placed him on prolonged sick leave, was first described in print by Cowell in his 1930 closely with BCMG musicians, composers and research funding in the UK, distributing funds Ives decided to ‘clean house,’ self-publishing book New Musical Resources; Seeger’s much more conductors, participating in Learning work and of some £60 million every year. For further both the Second ‘Concord’ Piano Sonata and its expansive treatise on the subject is included in meeting with the team. She has especially valued information about the schemes that the associated book Essays Before a Sonata in 1921, his Studies in Musicology II: 1929-1979. Among the mentorship and support of Oliver Knussen Leverhulme Trust fund: www.leverhulme.ac.uk / and the volume of 114 Songs the following year. the subsequent exponents of the technique was throughout the project. www.twitter.com/LeverhulmeTrust Among those into whose hands these publications Ruth Crawford, who moved to New York in In her words ‘working with BCMG’s players eventually fell was Henry Cowell. 1929 – explicitly on Cowell’s recommendation – to and hearing my music performed by the ensemble Cowell was more than a generation younger study with Seeger. Her remarkable Piano Study and conducted by [mentor] Oliver Knussen in the than Ives, and different from him in almost every in Mixed Accents (1930) was an early exercise workshops and concerts has been a key highlight; way, having been brought up as a West Coast in what she and Seeger termed dissonation, while to have such brilliant musicians bring a score to life bohemian rather than as an East Coast WASP. the slightly later Three Songs represent its most so accurately and superbly, and to feel part of the Cowell’s musical studies, such as they were, had developed phase, in which (to quote Seeger) we find BCMG team has been such a privilege.’ taken place at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘a polyphony in which there is no relation between in roughly 1914-16, with Charles Seeger (the father the parts except mere proximity in time-space, of folk singers Pete, Peggy and Mike, and husband beginning and ending, within hearing of each other, – from 1932 – of Ruth Crawford). Cowell’s spirit at more or less the same time.’ Significantly, though, 4 5 Seeger also notes that ‘from an artistic point of performed on the body, rather than the keyboard, of view, a high degree of organization is necessary,’ the piano). Vox Clamans Double Trio the implication being that in order to achieve a Sadly, the momentum of the Cowell-Ives (2011) fully dissonated texture, there needed to be at a promotional machine was abruptly halted in 1936, in Deserto compositional level some equivalent of what was when Cowell was consigned to San Quentin prison (1923) later to be termed integral serialism. on a morals charge. After his release, in 1940, things Elliott Carter (1908 - 2012) Both the Piano Study in Mixed Accents and were never the same either personally – Ives and the Three Songs came to be published in New his wife kept something of a respectable distance Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) Brass instruments, especially the trumpet and Music Quarterly; so too were Charles Ives’ Set from Henry Cowell, even after the latter’s trombone, recently interested me for use in for Theatre Orchestra and his song General marriage – or professionally. Indeed, Cowell’s Parting at Morning chamber music because of their ability to play William Booth Enters into Heaven, the latter compositions – which before 1936 had often Robert Browning softly and use different kinds of mutes. Combining being included in Eighteen [recte Nineteen] Songs explored the furthest reaches of experimentalism – them with solo strings fascinated me so I wrote by Charles Ives, volume 9, number 2, of October became increasingly motivated from the late 1930s Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, the Double Trio.