NOTES encompassing view of humanity and cosmology, his fluid, improvisational style took inspiration from anything and everything: the inner workings of the human mind, a lover’s quarrel, a rose, wartime atrocities, and also music—indeed, many of his works bear musical titles, titles like Contrepoint de la Lumiere, Intégrale du Silence, La Flûte de Feu, Melodia-Melodio. Apropos of his interest in music, in one of his notebooks he writes, “Perhaps music is a utopian creation that proves the possibility of an orchestral harmonicity, a society of human beings.” In this new work for Ms. Nonken, entitled Le Pianiste, I chose three of Matta’s canvases as objects of contemplation from which to work, their titles: Les arpèges, Mi fa sol al mura, and Glisser du vent. In the resulting three pieces, the goal is not to attempt some kind of musical “translation” of Matta’s works, but to use them as a point of departure, formal, textural, technical, affectual, for making audible the energies they inspire in my own imagination.

—R.F.

Richard Beaudoin’s most recent works involve microtiming data from the acoustic microscope developed by Dr. Olivier Senn at the Hochschule, Lucerne, Switzerland. These works, called Études d’un prélude, pioneer a new compositional technique called photorealism. The Royal Academy of Music, London, is holding a research event devoted to these works in March 2010. Premieres and recordings of several of the works in the series are scheduled in Europe and America during the coming year. Beaudoin’s latest vocal work, Nach-Fragen, was premiered by Annette Dasch and Wolfram Rieger at the Wiener Konzerthaus, the Konzerthaus Dortmund, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in March 2009. He currently holds the position of lecturer on music at .

Chopin desséché is the first in a series of pieces inaugurating a new compositional process called photorealism. The source material is Martha Argerich’s 1975 recording of Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, op. 28, no. 4. The work uses microtiming data generated by the acoustic microscope at the Hochschule, Lucerne, Switzerland.

Black Wires is the fourth in the series of works inaugurating the photorealistic method. It takes its name from a passage describing a child’s view from out the window of a moving train in Nabokov’s 1948 story “First Love”:

The door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires—six thin black wires—were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marilyn Nonken is one of the most celebrated champions of the contemporary repertoire, known for performances that explore transcendent virtuosity and extremes of musical expression. She has been presented at such venues as , Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, the Guggenheim Museum, IRCAM, the Theâtre Bouffe du Nord, the ABC (Australia), , Kettle’s Yard, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Menil Collection, as well as at conservatories and universities around the world. Major composers who have written for her include , Pascal Dusapin, Michael Finnissy, Tristan Murail, and David Rakowski, and she has worked extensively with emerging Americans, including Drew Baker and Jason Eckardt. As a chamber musician, she plays with Ensemble 21 (the new music group of which she is artistic director and a co-founder) and the ELISION ensemble. She has also appeared with the Group for Contemporary Music, MusicNOW (Chicago Symphony), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Speculum Musicae, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Festival appearances include Résonances and Festival d’Automne (both in Paris); When Morty Met John, Making Music, and Works and Process (all in ); the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento); Musica Nova (Helsinki); Aspects des Musiques d’Aujourd-hui (Caën, France); Messiaen 2008 (Birmingham, England); New Music Days (Ostrava, Czech Republic); Musikhøst (Odense, Denmark); Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh), Piano Festival Northwest (Portland), and the William Kapell International Piano Festival and Competition.

Nonken has recorded for New World, Mode, Lovely Music, Albany, Metier, Divine Art, Innova, CRI, BMOP Sound, New Focus, Cairos, Tzadik, and Bridge. Solo discs include American Spiritual, a CD of works written for her, Morton Feldman: Triadic Memories, and Tristan Murail: The Complete Piano Music. Recent releases include portrait discs of Chris Dench, William Albright, and . Forthcoming CDs feature ’s La Chute d’Icare and Les Froissements des Ailes de Gabriel (with ELISION), Roger Reynolds’s The Angel of Death, Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (with Sarah Rothenberg), and solo piano works by emerging American David Laganella.

A student of new music pioneer David Burge at the Eastman School, Nonken received a doctoral degree in musicology from . Currently director of piano studies at ’s Steinhardt School, Nonken is a Steinway Artist. She lives in New York with her husband, theatre artist George Hunka, and their daughter Goldie Celeste. Noon Concert

Marilyn Nonken, piano

PROGRAM

Études David Rakowski F This * (No. 82, 2007) (b. 1958) Solid Goldie * (No. 90, 2009) Ménage à droit (No. 61, 2004) M’Aidez (No. 83, 2008) organum let open * (2009) Elizabeth Hoffman (b. 1961)

Le Pianiste (2008–09) Richard Festinger Les arpèges (b. 1948) Mi fa sol al mura Glisser du vent

Étude d’un prélude I – Chopin desséché * (2009) Richard Beaudoin (b. 1975)

Étude d’un prélude IV – Black Wires * (2009) Beaudoin

*world premiere

12:05 pm, Thursday, 12 November 2009 Room 115, Music Building

This concert is being recorded professionally for the university archive. Please remain seated during the music, remembering that distractions will be audible on the recording. Please deactivate cell phones, pagers, and wristwatches. Flash photography and audio and video recording are prohibited during the performance.

This performance is made possible in part by the generous support from the Joy S. Shinkoskey Series of Noon Concerts endowment. NOTES

David Rakowski is a failed trombonist and never was much of a pianist. He grew up in Vermont, where he played in community bands and in a mediocre rock band called the Silver Finger. He studied composition at the New England Conservatory, Tanglewood, and Princeton, where his teachers included Robert Ceely, John Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Peter Westergaard, Paul Lansky, and . He has written three symphonies, five concertos (one of them for Marilyn Nonken), three big wind ensemble pieces, and a substantial amount of chamber, vocal, and children’s music. His most widely traveled music is his soon-to-be-finished set of piano études, begun in 1988 and currently numbering 93, with seven to go. He has been recognized with the Rome Prize, the Barlow Prize, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as by the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, and several artist colonies. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice: in 1999 for Persistent Memory, commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and in 2002 for Ten of a Kind, commissioned by the U.S. Marine Band. His music is recorded on Bridge, BMOP/Sound CRI/New World, Innova, Albany, and Capstone and is published by CF Peters New York. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor, , and has also held faculty positions at Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, and the New England Conservatory. He lives in Massachusetts and Maine with his wife Beth Wiemann and two cats named Sunset and Camden.

Two of the piano études on this concert were written for Marilyn. F This began as a query to Marilyn about piano pieces that use only one note, which was relayed by her to me and by me to Ken Ueno. When we came up empty, Ken dared me to write the first one. F This is the result of the gauntlet thrown. The piece uses only the F below middle C, played normally, stopped, and plucked, with various pedal shadings and short rhythmic figures subjected to metric modulations. In the end, it turns into a piece about shifting piano colors. Naturally, the piece is dedicated to Marilyn and Ken.

Solid Goldie was a suggestion by Marilyn to celebrate the birth of her daughter, Goldie Celeste Hunka, and the figure G-C-H (G-C-B natural) for her initials is repeated endlessly on top of various processes—mostly of subtracting notes from successive iterations of accompaniment figures.

Ménage à droit is a right-hand étude that was written to cheer up Amy Briggs when she had tendonitis in her left hand. The title came from Rick Moody. In this piece, fast notes that decorate a slower line eventually morph into “jazzier” figures, and return. M’Aidez was requested by Nathanael May, and the title is a pun on his name (May Day = M’aidez). He had asked for an étude alternating what he called “undulatory,” stuck piano figures with arpeggio figures that escape.

—D.R.

Elizabeth Hoffman composes acoustic and electroacoustic music (the latter since the early 1990s and study with Bülent Arel at Stony Brook and with Diane Thome and Richard Karpen at the University of Washington). Hoffman currently is a faculty member at New York University (Faculty of Arts and Science [FAS]), where she founded and directs the Washington Square Computer Music Studio. Recognition for her electroacoustic music has come from the Bourges International Competition (France), the Prix Ars International Competition (Austria), Seattle Arts Commission grants, and a Jerome Foundation Sonic Circuits grant. Recent commissions and collaborative projects include work with New York performers such as the Glass Farm Ensemble, TimeTable Percussion, Ivan Goff, and Marilyn Nonken. Current projects include a new work for live electronics commissioned by clarinetist Arthur Campbell for release in 2010. Present interests center around tuning, timbre, harmony at the border of noise, and the use of technology to help performers and composers transcend the limits and restrictions of notation, and to generate unresolvable musical complexities. organum let open, written for Marilyn Nonken, uses with kind permission excerpts from George Hunka’s work, Organum I, which is part philosophy, part critical theory, and part poetry. The incipits, which appear in the musical score, were a provocation for me while composing the work, but they are also intended to participate in the performances of this piece—deliberately interrupting the pianist’s focus on the sheer musical sound notation, and urging constant self reflection regarding the nature of interpretation, performance, rationalism, subjectivity, embodiment, communication, individuality, freedom, and imagination. As the predominant expressive score indications, these phrases prompt the player’s interactions with the score, with the audience, and with the piano. Technically, this is a piece about resonance, timbre, texture, and recollection.

“Organum,” as a musical term, describes two lines in parallel contour. This piece explores the idea of layering more broadly, including by substituting chunks of a given layer atop new locations in some other layer or stratum. Thus there are frequent algorithmic NOTES

recombinations of a sort. Metaphorically perhaps, this piece addresses the nature of layered experience, as we allow parts of ourselves— the old along with newly acquired—to recombine. Text:

The performance takes place in the empty spaces between alternate interpretations:

A performer must somehow acknowledge multiple consciousnesses at once … they must feel the spaces and the silences in their bodies.

Beginnings are kaleidoscopic … just make the leap to being, trusting chance to contextualize … into a labyrinth of myth, and forest illusory.

… the disastrous failure of the project of the enlightenment

this cultural syntax, these vocabularies and appearances, deprive us of the possibilities of self definition, and the freedom bodied perception can provide.

Like a breath.

Elsewhere.

The disintegrating, the tender, the ever-dying human body …

The work of revolution and freedom… is done in movement approaching stillness, and … sound approaching silence.

Magic is a one-way street … The dream is two way …

As [words] are symbols … so are sounds. —E.H.

Richard Festinger’s music has been performed throughout the and in Europe and Asia. His works have been composed for numerous ensembles, including Parnassus, Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, City Winds, the Laurel Trio, the Left Coast Ensemble, Alter Ego, the Miroglio-Aprudo Duo, Washington Square, the Redwood Symphony, and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. His music has been performed by the New Millennium Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, Phantom Arts, Composers Inc., the Berkeley and Riverside Symphonies, the Empyrean Ensemble at UC Davis, and the Sun, Alexander, and Afiara String Quartets.

Festinger’s works have been commissioned by the Jerome, Fromm, Koussevitzky, Argosy, and Barlow Foundations, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Music Teachers National Association, the Hoff-Barthelson Music School, the Ross McKee Foundation, Volti, the Ringling College of Design, and the . He has received recording awards from the Aaron Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the American Composers Forum, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a resident artist at the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Cité Internationale des Arts, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco (Italy), the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, the Centre International des Récollets, House, the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. A recipient of the George Ladd Grand Prix de Paris, he has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference and the June in Buffalo Festival, and he has received both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Festinger earned a doctoral degree in composition at UC Berkeley. Founder of the acclaimed contemporary music ensemble Earplay, he has taught at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, at Dartmouth College, and, since 1990, as professor of music at San Francisco State University. His music is published by C.F. Peters and is recorded on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI, and CRS labels.

When the gifted young pianist Marilyn Nonken suggested that I compose a group of pieces related in some way to the visual arts, I gravitated very quickly to the work of the celebrated 20th-century Chilean painter Roberto Matta (1911–2002). The youngest of the original surrealists and a protégé of André Breton, Matta played a central role in the evolution of both European surrealism and American abstract expressionism. A visionary with an all-