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When you join one of our membership programs, you become a part of this singular and celebrated community. by Claudio Papapietro Photo of cellist Khari Joyner Become a member for as little as $250 Join with a gift starting at $1,250 and and receive exclusive benefits, including enjoy VIP privileges, including • Advance access to tickets through • All Association benefits Member Presales • Concierge ticket service by telephone • 50% discount on ticket purchases and email • Invitations to special • Invitations to behind-the-scenes events members-only gatherings • Access to master classes, performance previews, and rehearsal observations (212) 799-5000, ext. 303 [email protected] juilliard.edu iii The Juilliard School presents AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Friday, February 2, 2018, 7:30 Peter Jay Sharp Theater HANS Schnee, Ten Canons for Nine Instruments (2006–08) ABRAHAMSEN Canon 1a (b. 1952) Ruhig aber beweglich Canon 1b Fast immer zart und still Canon 2 Lustig spielend, aber nicht zu lustig, immer ein bisschen melancholisch Intermezzo 1 Canon 2b Lustig spielend, aber nicht zu lustig, immer ein bisschen melancholisch Canon 3a Ser langsam, schleppend und mit Trübsinn (im Tempo des “Tai Chi”) Canon 3b Ser langsam, schleppend und mit Trübsinn (im Tempo des “Tai Chi”) Intermezzo 2 (Program continues) Support for this performance is provided, in part, by the Muriel Gluck Production Fund. Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Cover photo by Hiroyuki Ito 1 Canon 4a (minore) (Homage à WAM) Stürmich, unruhig und nervös Canon 4b (maggiore) Ser stürmich, unruhig und nervös Intermezzo 3 Canon 5a (rectus) Einfach und kindlich Canon 5b (inversus) Einfach und kindlich Leerone Hakami, Violin Sofia Basile, Viola Yu Yu Liu, Cello Lorenzo Morrocchi, Flute Pablo O’Connell, Oboe Sunho Song, Clarinet Tyler Cunningham, Percussion Christopher Staknys, Piano 1 Irfan Tengku, Piano 2 Performed without intermission Performance time: approximately one hour 2 About Schnee By Matthew Mendez Though he began his musical career in the late 1960s, Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen has been one of the unlikely artistic success stories of recent years. Initially recognized at home as a leading representative of the Ny Enkelhed (New Simplicity) movement, whose objectivist, stripped-down sensibilities were a sort of analog to the ethos of early American minimalism, Abrahamsen began to secure an international reputation soon after that, as a catholic-minded figure aiming to bridge the cool, impartial frame of modernist construction and the richly associative aesthetic legacy of romanticism. Yet this early precocity came at a devastating price: by the end of the 1980s, Abrahamsen found himself mired in the first throes of a creative block (“I felt like a singer who had lost his voice”) that would last more or less unabated until 1998. At least in part, it was a redoubled embrace of the practice of recomposition (which Abrahamsen had already begun to investigate prior to the hiatus of the 1990s) that finally gave him the conviction to let go and break the silence. That is to say, Abrahamsen’s recourse to material borrowed from his previous works—though always overwritten, subtracted from, or otherwise radically altered, so that it never sounds like mere recycling—was a practical strategy for ensuring that he never again found himself paralyzed by ta blank sheet of paper. The past 20 years have thus seen the compositional faucet very much turned back on, and indeed, Abrahamsen’s 2013 voice-and-orchestra piece let me tell you has been one of the most celebrated of recent scores on the international scene. Wordsmith and critic Paul Griffiths calls Schnee “one of the first classics of 21st-century music.” It put the capstone on the composer's return to compositional fluency. Schnee was initially unveiled in 2006 as what became Canon 1a and 1b only. Right off the bat, though, Abrahamsen sensed that the music warranted inclusion in a broader, more multilayered formal scheme, and he proceeded to compose four more pairs of canons, in which each pair was to be perceived as more fleeting than the last, so that “time runs out, just as that of our lives runs ever faster to its end.” (Having said that, the slow Canon 3a and 3b became something of an aberration in this regard, as Abrahamsen himself admits.) However, the first, and longest, of all the pairs may still be performed separately, as AXIOM did during the 2016–17 season—an event that prompted founding director Jeffrey Milarsky to program Schnee in its entirety tonight. Snow and related winter imagery have been a longstanding source of fascination and inspiration for Abrahamsen, and Schnee (the German word for “snow”) stands at the very core of this tendency. Within the bounds of Abrahamsen’s poetic universe, newly fallen snow, on the one hand, and the blank canvas that had once immobilized him so, on the other, have been parallel phenomena. Both are basic, elemental objects that allow us to imagine something different—and in the case of snow, because it can utterly transform a familiar landscape in just a couple of minutes into something uncannily pure. Nor is it just a question of the visual: snow has its sonic dimension, too, and as Abrahamsen reminds us, it often “dampens all the usual noises.” Hence the preponderance 3 About Schnee By Matthew Mendez (Continued) of muted or upper-register effects in Schnee, and all manner of other forms of muffled sound production. Yet compared to earlier works—even ones in Abrahamsen’s snow family, like the darkly nostalgic 1978 septet Winternacht (Winter Night)—the composer observes that “somehow the music comes more down to its essence” in Schnee. Abrahamsen traces this distilled quality to an encounter with a set of canons by J.S. Bach, which he arranged in the early 1990s—a practice that often kept him busy during his creative fermata, and one that Abrahamsen came to view as a kind of “dialogue through which I find myself in aspects of another composer's music.” Since at least Igor Stravinsky’s day, however, the specific gesture of going back to Bach has been synonymous with a return to professed musical fundamentals, although in Abrahamsen’s hands, the move did take on a unique spin. In particular, he reimagined the Bach canons as if they were repetitive, proto-minimalist objets trouvés, probing the ambiguities of passing time. Given the nature of canonic imitation (repetition at a temporal remove), “depending on how one looks at these canons,” Abrahamsen points out, “the music stands still, or moves forwards or backwards.” Perceptual ambiguity is indeed one of Schnee’s key preoccupations. In composing the score, Abrahamsen took some of his bearings from stereoscopic optical illusions (so-called 3D posters), which use two nearly indistinguishable images to generate the sense of a third that, if one squints just the right way, will give the impression of depth. Correspondingly, the Schnee ensemble is divided spatially, into stereoscopic pairs: three strings plus piano and three woodwinds plus piano, with the percussionist at the center. With its arresting, almost unpitched string harmonics, marked “like an icy whisper,” Canon 1a features only the first group, and probes an insistent descending figure whose sound Abrahamsen likens to falling snow. By contrast, Canon 1b is for the whole ensemble; note the percussionist’s unorthodox mode of sound production—brushing a sheet of paper over a tabletop. It contains, in essence, the same music as Canon 1a, but with a new canonic layer now above it. Ultimately, Abrahamsen hopes the listener will be able to perceive the two canons additively, with “distant, unfocused ears,” so that the pair together can be imagined as somehow producing “a deeper, three-dimensional time” and, indeed, a third, unheard canon. In short, each canonic pair is to be listened to as a different iteration or perspective on a shared, imagined sound event—as products of the insight (reached during Abrahamsen’s years of transcribing) that “the way one says something also changes what one says.” Particularly if one selects a simple enough (“haiku-like”) original, “new things can come out from making a new version”—a revelation Abrahamsen claims only to have properly absorbed in his composing with Schnee. New things certainly arose with Canon 2a and 2b, whose starting point was Abrahamsen’s 1973 recorder ensemble piece Flowersongs, here repurposed—ironically?—for the frostier context. Not so much a transcription as, indeed, a wholesale recomposition, Canon 2a takes its 4 inspiration from the original’s wooden flute sonorities, which the breathy winds and muted piano emulate. Again Abrahamsen had precise snow images in mind—here, children “trying to catch the snow and sometimes the children are too slow and then they try to be fast to get it.” Unlike the first pair of canons, Canon 2a and 2b are separated by a brief but continuous Intermezzo, a composed-out detuning of the strings and winds. As a result, Abrahamsen postulates, Canon 2b also features a kind of stereoscopic hyper-tuning, since the pianos remain tempered in ordinary fashion. The overall effect is ostensibly designed to parallel the sensation of a deeper, three-dimensional time. With Canon 3a and 3b, time has come almost to a standstill. Both are marked “in Tai chi tempo”, and Abrahamsen claims their ambiance was prompted by the titular character’s castle in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, where everything has been frozen.