Program Notes: Inspiration & Impact

CABRILLO FESTIVAL Program Notes: Inspiration & Impact Lola Montez Does the and she glides from the stage of sensory and expressive overload. Spider Dance (2016) overwhelmed with applause, At its premiere in March of 2012, the first third and smashed spiders, John Adams of the piece was largely a trope on the Opus (b. 1947) and radiant with parti-colored skirts, [World Premiere] 131 C# minor quartet’s scherzo and suffered smiles, graces, cobwebs and glory. from just this problem. After a moody opening of tremolo strings and fragments of the Ninth Commissioned by the musicians of the Cabrillo Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance was Symphony signal octave-dropping motive, Festival Orchestra in honor of Marin Alsop commissioned by members of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in celebration of Marin the solo quartet emerged as if out of a haze, The Irish-born actress and dancer Eliza Gilbert Alsop’s twenty five seasons as music director, playing the driving foursquare figures of that (1821—1861) achieved international fame and it is dedicated to her. scherzo material that almost immediately went under the name “Lola Montez, the Spanish through a series of strange permutations. Dancer.” After a controversial career on the —John Adams continent, including a sojourn in Bavaria This original opening never satisfied me. The where she become both the lover as well as clarity of the solo quartet’s role was often political advisor to King Ludwig, she returned Absolute Jest (2011) buried beneath the orchestral activity resulting in what sounded to me too much like “chatter.” to London, where she eloped with and married John Adams (b. 1947) the very young son of an aristocrat family. The And the necessity of slowing down Beethoven’s tempo of the Opus 131 scherzo in order to family, scandalized by the relationship, sued The idea for Absolute Jest was suggested by make certain orchestral passages negotiable her for bigamy, and she was forced to flee to a performance by Michael Tilson Thomas of detracted from it vividness and breathless the United States, eventually ending up in the Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, a piece that I’d known energy. Sierra foothills, performing for audiences of all my life but had never much paid attention gold miners. to until hearing Michael Tilson Thomas conduct Six months after the premiere I decided to it. Hearing this (and knowing that I was already This description of her famous “Spider Dance,” compose a different beginning to Absolute committed to composing something for the San appeared in the San Francisco Whig, June 3, Jest—a full 400 bars of completely new music, Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary) I 1853. replacing the “quadrangular” feel of the Opus was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky 131 scherzo with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that Up went the curtain, and on came Lola, had absorbed musical artifacts from the past launches the piece in what is to my ears a far fermenting the pit, agitating the gallery, and worked them into his own highly personal more satisfying fashion. and sensationising the dress circle. language. And the Spider Dance! The rolling 6/8 patterns recall the same Ninth Has not every son of Columbia witnessed But there the comparison pretty much ends. Symphony scherzo but also summon up other the Spider Dance? Stravinsky was apparently unfamiliar with the references—of the Hammerklavier Sonata, No? Well then…Lola comes in—sails in— Pergolesi and other Neapolitan tunes when of the Eighth Symphony and other archetypal flies in— arrayed in a costume to which Diaghilev brought them to him. I, on the other Beethoven motives that come and go like Joseph’s coat could never think of comparing. hand, had loved the Beethoven string quartets cameo appearances on a stage. She stands an instant full of fire, action since I was a teenager, and crafting something and abandon… out of fragments of Opus 131, Opus 135 The high-spirited triple-time scherzo to the She commences to dance and cobwebs and the Große Fuge (plus a few more familiar F major Opus 135 (Beethoven’s final work “tattoos” from his symphonic scherzos) was a in that medium) enters about a third of the entangle her ankles. totally spontaneous act for me. way through Absolute Jest and becomes the The myriads of spiders…begin to ‘colonise.’ dominant motivic material for the remainder “String quartet and orchestra” is admittedly a The spiders accumulate—hairy monsters of the piece, interrupted only by a brief slow repertoire black hole—is there a single work in with five clawed feelers and nimble shanks section that interweaves fragments of the that medium that is regularly heard? And there Große Fuge with the opening fugue theme —crawl and sprattle’ about the stage, are good reasons for why this is. The first is a of the C# minor quartet. A final furious coda invading the fringe of Milady’s petticoats, simple issue of furniture: the problem of placing features the solo string quartet charging ahead and taking such unwarranted liberties, four solo players in the “soloist” position but still at full speed over an extended orchestral that the spectator imagines in front of the podium (so that they can follow pedal based on the famous Waldstein Sonata an inextricable mass of cobwebs the conductor) is daunting. The inner players, harmonic progressions. and enraged spiders. the second violin and viola, are frequently lost to the audience both visually and aurally. Absolute Jest had elicited mixed responses It is Lola versus the spiders… from listeners on its first outing. Quite a few She stamps daylight But placement on the stage aside, the real reviewers assumed, perhaps because of its out of the last of the ten thousand, challenge is in marrying the highly charged title, that the piece was little more than a and does it with so much naivete, manner and sound of a string quartet to the backslapping joke. (One Chicago journalist was that we feel a sort of satisfaction at mass and less precise texture of the large offended and could only express disgust at the orchestra. Unless very skillfully handled by the triumph. abuse of Beethoven’s great music.) both composer and performers, the combining The picture winds up with Lola’s victory, of these two ensembles can result in a feeling There is nothing particularly new about one CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC CABRILLO FESTIVAL Program Notes: Inspiration & Impact composer internalizing the music of another involved in conducting and performing the through the sections of the orchestra. From and “making it his own.” Composers are drawn energetic and challenging new music that the here the work gradually builds to cataclysmic to another’s music to the point where they want festival is known for. Composing would on dimensions until the opening motive—and then to live in it, and that can happen in a variety the surface appear to be the musical activity the anthem—are rediscovered. The City ends in of fashions, whether it’s Brahms making most divorced from this kind of physical reality, a haze of uncertainty. I imagined a helicopter variations on themes by Handel or Haydn, which might be why I often find myself creating making a final pass over the city until it recedes Liszt arranging Wagner or Beethoven for piano, musical arguments inspired by movement. into the distance. Schoenberg crafting a concerto out of Monn or, more radically, Berio “deconstructing” In Spinning Music, these arguments involve We are a species suffering the pains of its Schubert. both the sensation of spinning outwards, in adolescence. Let us have the resolve, the which brass swells and dissonant circular compassion and the foresight to force our own But Absolute Jest is not a clone of Grand figures fling musical material outwards from evolution to a place of reason and harmony. Pianola Music or my Chamber Symphony. Of some imagined center, and the sensation —Kevin Puts course there are “winks,” some of them not of spinning inwards, where moments of entirely subtle, here and there in the piece. predominant harmony create whirlpools around The City was co-commissioned by the Baltimore But the act of composing the work (one that tonal centers. Motivic ideas seem to be in Symphony Orchestra in celebration of its took nearly a year of work) was the most orbit as they return at various points in time, 100th anniversary, by Carnegie Hall in honor extended experience in pure “invention” that transformed and re-contextualized with each of its 125th anniversary, and by the Cabrillo I’ve ever undertaken. Its creation was for me pass. Festival of Contemporary Music in honor of a thrilling lesson in counterpoint, in thematic Marin Alsop. It was premiered at the Music transformation and formal design. The “jest” The act of spinning has both been used for Center at Strathmore on April 14, 2016, by the of the title should be understood in terms of spiritual purposes, such as in the Sufi traditions Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its Latin meaning, “gesta:” doings, deeds, of physical meditation, or for the creation of Marin Alsop. exploits. I like to think of “jest” as indicating an fun and ecstasy—in this case I think of Santa Cruz’s famous Giant Dipper roller coaster. My exercising of one’s wit by means of imagination Not recorded and invention. goal in this piece is to evoke a feeling of both a —John Adams deepening into one’s self and an expansion into the outer world. Absolute Jest was commissioned by the San —Michael Kropf Francisco Symphony in celebration of its 100th anniversary.

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